Angie did not blink at this story, even though she harboured her own private doubts. She was tempted for a fleeting moment to confess she had caught a glimpse of the ‘other’ von Gettner landscape painting in her mother’s studio back home. But now was not the time.
‘Adam Fox seems determined to take away everything my father has left me. In the end, I had no choice but to sign away the cottage; I desperately needed his money to keep going. But I have worked out a way to get it back.’
Angie searched her mother’s face. There was an unnerving calmness in the way she talked about all this, with no sign of anger or even agitation. It was as if she had run through these calculations over and over again and was merely reciting them.
‘I know what you are thinking, Angie,’ said Freya.
‘You do?’ she whispered.
‘You are afraid I have lost my mind.’
Her face must have given her away. Angie dropped her eyes in shame.
‘Listen, I do not blame you. In order to survive, I have been forced to do things and agree to things that look like madness. I may still have to do such things. But I am determined to win whatever the cost. I will get our cottage back. Our cottage, Angie. Ours. Given to us by my father.’
She smiled sadly. ‘Do you wonder why I am so afraid of Adam Fox?’
‘Maybe I understand a little better now,’ Angie said.
‘You will understand even more when I tell you the whole truth, my poor Angie.’
The room stilled. It was as if it had taken a deep breath and all the outside sounds – the birds, the distant hum and rattle of trains and traffic, the murmur of voices on the street – had been swallowed up in its bubble of silence.
‘There is a secret that Adam Fox and I have kept all these years . . .’
Freya closed her eyes, unable to look directly at her daughter as she unburdened herself of her life’s secret shame.
‘That secret is that Robbie was our son. My son. Your brother.’
Angie stared at her mother, uncomprehending at first. Her mind scrambled through a wild assortment of memories, each one a flash of her and Robbie – in the cottage garden, on the hotel lawn, in the hedge. She tried to recall the faces of her parents and of Adam Fox back then. How had they all kept this secret from her?
Freya was thinking too, but her memory was of a spring morning in 1904 when Angie was a toddler learning to walk among the blackboy grasses while her mother basked in the sunlight on the cottage veranda. Into this peaceful scene swam another image: his face, those restless brown eyes and lick of sandy hair, a spattering of freckles on the bridge of his nose. How she ached to hold him in her arms just once more. She knew this love was forbidden now, must be kept hidden. Promises had been made, negotiated in the best interests of all involved. A very civilised settlement, a gentlemen’s agreement, a secret buried.
Her son, Robbie! Her little boy that she had given away. Oh the pity of it!
Freya began to tell her story. ‘When my father died I was all alone. And Adam Fox came into my life. He saw my soul and my talent and my beauty so clearly. And he craved them so passionately I could not, I did not, resist. I loved him and he loved me. One day you will understand what I mean, my darling.
‘For nearly two years we were like this, behind Adelina’s back. We lived in a fool’s paradise, thinking we would never be found out. Such happy fools we were. And then it all came crashing down. When I fell pregnant, I knew I had few choices, none of them good. I was at the mercy of Adam Fox – and his wife. It was his idea to make it look like the baby was Adelina’s. It was obvious to Adam by then that she was never going to bear him a child; she was so fragile in mind and body. And I did not want to leave my home.
‘So arrangements were made. To save the marriage. To give Adam an heir and Adelina a child. To allow me to stay in my cottage where I could watch as my son was raised to wealth and position even if he could not have my name. All this as long as I agreed never to tell him the truth.
‘In the end it was simple. Adelina announced her pregnancy and was sent away to a private clinic in the Dandenongs. At around the same time, as far as my neighbours and the town gossips were concerned, I fell sick and went to stay with a relative in country Victoria. In fact, I was hidden away on a farm belonging to Adelina’s youngest aunt, a kind and sensible woman. When the time came, I went to the clinic, gave birth and surrendered my baby boy to his new parents. They named him Robbie and returned to Meadow Springs in triumph with their son. I stayed with Adelina’s aunt for another six weeks, then returned fully recovered from my long illness.
‘That was a very hard time. I was disowned by Adam, despised by Adelina. I had made this terrible pact with the devil and did not know what the future held. My son had been taken away and given to a woman who seemed incapable of loving anyone. Then Freddie proposed to me and we married soon afterwards. I admit the marriage was a refuge from my distress and loneliness. But I grew to love your father ever more truly as the years went on and I understood what a fine man he was.
‘So that I could cope with my loss it was suggested I should fall pregnant again as soon as possible. Your arrival was meant to help ease my grief over Robbie. I fell in love with you all for yourself, of course, and not as a replacement for my lost son. And the joy you brought to my life did heal my wounded heart.
‘As you grew up I was keen for you to have your half-brother as a playmate. Why should you miss out just because you were not Adam’s child? So I encouraged your friendship every summer when they stayed at the hotel. Adelina hated that. She had settled for the compromise of having me – her husband’s ex-lover – living next door to the hotel, though it chafed her like an iron collar. But your closeness to Robbie – that was too much! Now I look back . . . well, maybe she was right.’
Tears were now streaming freely down Angie’s face. ‘My God. This means I – I killed – I killed my . . .’
‘No!’ Freya barked, her face dark with rage. ‘You did no such thing. You were not to blame for what happened, Angie. We lied to you and Robbie. And we paid a terrible price for that lie. Your feelings for him – even your jealousy – that was perfectly natural. As was his love for you. Neither of you knew the truth. And that was our fault. What we did was monstrous. I am so sorry, Angie. I can only hope that one day you may be able to forgive me. Though I do not deserve it, I know that.’
Angie was sobbing uncontrollably now. Her mother let her cry until her eyes were red and dry. Her grief encompassed many losses: her brother’s death, thoughts of what might have been, and all the lonely days she had endured without him.
This rewriting of history cast everything in a new light. Angie realised she had barely known her mother. Like so many children, she had been in the easy habit of blaming her parents for everything. Knowing now of her mother’s suffering and the impossible choices she had been forced to make, she could not condemn her so quickly. What would she have done differently in the same circumstances?
She couldn’t even blame Freya for falling in love with Adam in the first place. Angie had tasted such love with Oskar. She still ached for his touch, his face, his voice even now. She could not find it in her heart to judge her mother harshly for that. But, oh, the terrible, terrible cost!
‘We cannot let Adam Fox hurt us anymore,’ said Freya. ‘We will get back our land and our cottage no matter what it takes.’
And so Freya laid out her plans for their future and Angie listened to her carefully.
CHAPTER 15
* * *
Adelina
Meadow Springs, January 1921
Everyone at the Palace was excited that Saturday but none more so than Adelina Fox.
It was not like her to spend more than a day or two at the hotel if she could help it, usually for her long treatments with Dr Liebermeister. In Adelina’s mind the Palace symbolised Adam’s infidelity and the failure of her marriage. She even told herself in her more desperate moments that he had loved this hotel long be
fore her; that the Palace was, in fact, the pretext for their marriage, as her inheritance had largely financed its construction to the tune of one hundred and twenty thousand pounds.
It pained her to admit that this folly inspired more passion in her husband than she ever had. He loved nothing more than to hold parties at the hotel with his loud and clever friends paying court to him, a spectacle that both intimidated and disgusted her. And then there was Adam’s affair with the woman next door and its ultimate disastrous consequence – that looked, in retrospect, like a punishment both for Adam’s weak-willed betrayal and her own weak-willed compliance. Adelina had many reasons to hate the Palace but her son’s death eclipsed them all.
Mr Hawthorne and Mr Carson were surprised when Mr Fox requested a room for his wife and a place reserved for her at dinner on Saturday night.
‘To what do we owe this rare honour, sir?’ Mr Hawthorne had asked, careful not to sound disrespectful or prying.
‘My wife’s curiosity,’ replied Adam Fox with an enigmatic smile.
The truth was that Adelina had insisted on being included in Adam’s inner circle for dinner. Her reason was straightforward. The Palace was playing host that week to one of the most famous men of the British Empire: the celebrated and prolific author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, whose brilliant detective Sherlock Holmes was a favourite of millions of readers worldwide and had made his creator a fortune.
But Adelina’s interest in meeting Sir Arthur was not literary; it was spiritual. The famous writer was currently on a lecture tour around Australia to spread the word about what he called the ‘great philosophy’ of Spiritualism; this had become his ‘highest purpose’ to which he had devoted the remainder of his life. Travelling with his wife and three children, Conan Doyle had been in Australia since the previous September giving public talks to packed halls and theatres in Perth, Melbourne and Sydney. He had decided on a sojourn in the beautiful Blue Mountains and booked a week’s stay for his family at the Palace.
‘You know, Sir Arthur lost his son and his brother, both to the Spanish flu,’ Adelina informed her husband over breakfast on the morning that Adam told her about Sir Arthur’s forthcoming visit. She was perusing the Sydney Morning Herald, which ran regular reports on the famous author’s visit. ‘His first wife died of tuberculosis. And he received news of his mother’s death just before last Christmas while still on tour here. Dear me, he’s certainly drunk his fill of grief! No wonder he understands the consolation that Spiritualism offers.’
Adelina had first heard about Spiritualism back in 1914, less than a month after Robbie’s death. Mrs Wells, the head housekeeper at the Palace, who was in every way an apparently sensible woman, immune to whimsy, had approached Adelina on the terrace one day after her therapy session with Dr Liebermeister.
‘I’m sorry to disturb you, Mrs Fox,’ said the white-haired housekeeper, bending down to where Adelina lay stretched out in a sun chair, wrapped in a thick cotton gown.
‘No, that’s fine, Mrs Wells.’ Adelina nodded in greeting. ‘How are you?’
Mrs Wells clutched in her hands a magazine, Harbinger of Light. ‘I have something here that may bring you, I hope, some small degree of comfort,’ she said earnestly. ‘Please feel free to keep it as long as you want. And, if you find it to be of any interest, I am happy to answer your questions.’
Adelina was touched. ‘Thank you. Thank you so much.’
Over the next few days, Adelina read the psychic magazine from cover to cover, and on her next visit to the Palace sought out Mrs Wells.
‘Have you ever been to a séance?’ she asked.
Mrs Wells had been to many séances. She told Adelina about the remarkable Mrs Foster Turner. Mrs Wells had recently attended a public meeting with the famous Australian medium at the Little Theatre in Castlereagh Street in Sydney. Under the guidance of the spirit of Mr W.T. Stead – the well-known English pressman and avowed Spiritualist who had drowned on the Titanic – Mrs Foster Turner had prophesied the war to come. In her deep, rich voice, she had proclaimed: ‘I want to warn you that before this year, 1914, has run its course, Europe will be deluged in blood. Millions of precious lives will be slaughtered, but Britain will emerge victorious.’
By the end of the year, it appeared that the medium’s prognostication was at least partly right. Adelina was intrigued. Finding an excuse to visit an old school friend in Sydney, she secretly met up with Mrs Wells and together they attended one of Mrs Foster Turner’s public meetings in the city. Here, for the first time, Adelina saw messages delivered from the spirits of the departed. The experience changed her.
In the privacy of her grief nearly a year after Robbie’s death, Adelina had found nothing to heal the gaping wound of his loss. Even the thought that her son had been spared the horrors of the bloodbath in Europe that now threatened to consume a generation of young men gave her no consolation. ‘Have you found peace, my love?’ she asked in her prayers, haunted by the idea that having died so suddenly and so young his spirit might not have found its resting place. She longed to hear his voice, but she also feared that her maternal grief questioned God’s will and her impulse towards Spiritualism contradicted her Christian faith.
Adelina struggled with the temptation to consult a medium for a private séance. Her husband and Dr Liebermeister thought it ill-advised. Not only did they have serious doubts about the credibility of séances, they were concerned at the harm they might do to Adelina in her weakened mental state. The therapist continued to administer regular bath treatments to help Mrs Fox with her melancholia. He did not want to risk having all his good work undone.
Adelina understood why Adam was protective. In the wake of the terrible toll of the Great War and the Spanish flu, millions of people had found comfort in Spiritualism’s promise of communion with, in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s own words, ‘the sound of a vanished voice and the touch of a vanished hand’. For the same reason, mediums and believers had also been savagely attacked by sceptics as charlatans exploiting the grief of a generation.
Not surprisingly, Conan Doyle’s Australian tour also attracted its share of hostility. ‘Listen to this!’ Adelina exclaimed as she read the Herald’s interview with Sir Arthur about his travels. ‘“I have been told that some Presbyterians actually prayed for my ship to sink before I arrived in Australia. This is akin to murder in my books if their rotten prayers had prevailed.”’
‘Quite right. That’s just not cricket!’ said Adam as he expertly dissected his morning kippers. He was surprised – and relieved – to see his wife so animated about their famous guest. It made a pleasant change. They had shared far too many breakfasts in silence these last few years.
‘I say we hold a dinner party at the Palace in his honour,’ suggested Adam. ‘Give him a proper send-off before he sails home. What do you think?’
‘I think it is a brilliant idea, my dear.’ Adelina beamed at him.
Her heart raced with excitement. Sir Arthur’s stay provided the opportunity she had dreamed of for the last seven years: the chance to attend a séance. Adam could hardly object if he was present. And there was the added reassurance of having one of the most respected spiritualists in the world in attendance.
On the first weekend of Sir Arthur’s stay, Fox went over to the Palace to greet his distinguished guest. The hotelier tracked him down in the billiard room, where he was racking up.
‘Fancy a game, Sir Arthur?’ asked Fox, introducing himself. ‘I hear you’re quite the player. Rumour has it you were a semi-finalist in the British Amateur Billiards Championship a few years back, is that so?’
Sir Arthur laughed. The tall, thickset Scotsman, grown stout in his early sixties and with his luxuriant moustache turned snowy white, seized the hotel owner by the hand and clapped him on the shoulder. ‘Well, this is indeed a pleasurrrre,’ he rumbled in his distinctive Anglo-Celtic burr with its resonant consonants and clipped vowels. He had nothing but praise for the Palace. ‘This is a little earrrrthly paradise you have
here, Mr Fox – the most rrrrestful spot we have found in our wanderrrrings.’
Over a friendly game of billiards – which Fox chivalrously lost – he invited Sir Arthur and Lady Doyle for a dinner later that week to be hosted in their honour. Sir Arthur was flattered and said he greatly looked forward to it.
Adam made plans for an intimate but impressive event. It wasn’t every day one had a guest like Conan Doyle. He rang several members of his usual coterie whom he hoped would amuse the great man. They included Freddie Lane and Fanny Durack, both Olympic gold medallist swimmers, and Hugh Ward, the comic actor now turned managing director of J.C. Williamson’s theatre company, and his clever musical wife, Grace. Fox knew that Mr Raymond Longford, Australia’s most celebrated film director, was staying at the Carrington Hotel in Katoomba while scouting locations in the Blue Mountains for his next film, so he also invited Longford and his partner, the much-loved film star Miss Lottie Lyell. They both enthusiastically agreed.
As plans for the evening were made, Adelina seized her chance.
‘Ask Sir Arthur to attend a séance after dinner,’ she suggested. ‘Your guests would find it fascinating. Mrs Wells knows a local medium in Springwood with an excellent reputation. We could hold it in the library. Sir Arthur would be deeply flattered to explain the whole thing to the company.’
Adelina had him snookered and she knew it. He might have his personal doubts about ‘table-rappers’ and ‘spookists’ but he could hardly question Sir Arthur’s credibility or deny him an opportunity to show off. Even so, he made a half-hearted attempt to dissuade her. ‘He’s been travelling all over Australia giving lectures and going to séances! He probably just wants a quiet night . . .’
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