Rosetta (2 page)

I did not start seeking my great-grandmother until I had become a mother myself, and known tragedy. My life was ruptured, ripped apart. I had a child who died. It was a cataclysm that broke all the natural laws of the universe. How could it be that I would not spend another precious moment with her, that I would never, ever see her navy eyes or feathery hair, the sweet bow of her mouth again? As impossible as the sun setting in the east or rising in the west, it was beyond my imagination.

I tried not to scan the faces of other little girls in parks, on trains, in cars, on streets. Knowing the quest was hopeless, I did my best to resist. Come nightfall, though, my resolve evaporated. In my dreams I searched for her. And I began to wonder, did Rosetta ever look for her child, too?

Much later, with the balm of my son and another daughter, my world settled. By then I was aware that my great-grandmother had lived a passionate, daring life. Yet all the while she hid her secret shame, the little girl she left behind.

I was torn. Despite my growing fascination with Rosetta, I wondered: could I come or even want to know a woman I half thought a kind of monster? Despite my struggle, I found Rosetta irresistible. I went in search of her.

 

It was in the garage of my brother, Michael, that I first saw the results of my father's labours; tangible evidence of Rosetta's life.

‘Here it is,' Michael said, running a protective hand over a brown cardboard filing box and three thick spiral binders, one black, one red and one blue.

‘I've photocopied the family tree, but don't take anything else away,' he instructed. ‘It can't be lost.'

She was his great-grandmother, too. But I did take it. I took everything.

When I arrived home I turned the contents out onto the smooth plane of my dining-room table and spread out what there was: a variety of ageing documents that had been assembled in shiny plastic sleeves, photocopies from the pages of old newspapers, the recollections of several people who knew Rosetta at first hand and a few short pieces of prose that Dad had written himself, typed up in pre-computer days on a machine that over-inked the e's and smudged the d's. Best of all was a folder of fading photographs and an intriguing bundle of handwritten letters, a number of them bearing crests and coronets. But would this trove be enough to re-create the woman whom I sought? I wasn't sure.

In the end, it didn't matter. Even with the gaps and the omissions, Rosetta became so real to me that not only could I picture her, I felt a kind of insistence, as if she were demanding to be brought back to life.

I did wonder if by embarking on this process of re-creation I might be guilty of committing a transgression. Though I made a promise to myself that I would not change any known facts, there was some anxiety. I asked myself if it would be wrong to
lay claim to what Rosetta thought, felt or said, as if these things were grounded in the pure reality of truth. But then I reflected, even were a hundred people to provide a hundred memories of my great-grandmother, would any one of them have really known the contents of her mind, her heart?

It was then that I became a conjurer, calling forth a phantom with the name Rosetta.

MELBOURNE, 1905

There is a sign on the first-floor entrance of 238 Swanston Street that reads ‘
Zeno the Magnificent
'; it is picked out in shimmering silver and gold. Rosetta, though her thoughts are whirling and she is out of breath, notes as she passes that it is not a gaudy thing, but a rather beautiful hand-painted arrangement of swirls and lines. A moment later the door opens – she wonders afterwards how he knew that she was there – and Rosetta steps inside.

She finds that she is looking at the great Zeno himself but, with a hot wave of shock, she realises that she has seen this man before.

In an instant images flood Rosetta's mind.

She is in a Carlton grocery on the corner of Lygon and Faraday streets. She sees herself struggling to keep hold of her three-year-old daughter, Frances, and the shopping; her long skirts tangle and the package of tea she carries goes flying. Then a handsome, dark, distinguished man with high cheekbones and faintly slanting eyes moves towards her and says, ‘Please, allow me.'

The shop, its sacks of sugar, flour and spices, fades. Other customers, the grocer, her own child dissolve into a blur. The sounds of people talking and the carriages in the street are hardly heard. For Rosetta, only she and this man remain.

Rosetta finds she cannot look away. It isn't just his foreign countenance that draws her, but the way that he regards her, with a stillness. There is something in his gaze that speaks of danger. And something else, a feeling that he sees not just who she is but the woman she could be.

Afterwards, Rosetta would sometimes catch a glimpse of him, perhaps in the distance, or disappearing around the corner of a Carlton street. Always, he was just out of reach. Except at night, when he came to her in dreams.

 

With a jolt she emerges from her reverie, becomes aware that Zeno is waiting. He is in possession of the same quality of stillness that she recalls. His almond eyes retain their frank appraisal. There is, however, something she has not noticed previously, some new quality. Though the room is dim, Zeno appears to have about him a faint luminosity.

Nothing seems quite real. Mysterious images appear to twist and hover before her eyes; on one wall she can make out paintings of a lion, a scorpion and a rearing bull. There are other pictures, too, of red suns and yellow stars and moons.

Rosetta takes her place opposite Zeno at a small, round table covered with a cloth of dull gold. The only other source of illumination, the flickering candle in the brass lantern that sits between them, casts shadows on his face, emphasising its planes and angles, shallow surfaces and smooth hollows. Next to the lantern is a bronze statuette, its exotic appearance echoing the man. There are also cards adorned with occult symbols, a chart of some kind and what looks like a human skull.

A strong aroma pervades the room. In one corner, Rosetta sees a number of long tapers in a lotus-patterned vase that burn
with an intense cinnamon perfume. Some other fragrance also imbues the air, more difficult to identify. It has a bitter note yet at the same time an intoxicating sweetness. Rosetta breathes deeply, feels her head begin to swim.

‘Mr Zeno, I think we may have encountered each other once before,' she begins.

‘That is true.' His voice is low and mesmerising. ‘Many times, in fact, over many years.'

‘No, I don't think …'

‘I know that it is so. I believe, Mrs Raphael, we knew each other long before we entered this life. In another time, in another place, perhaps in the Celestial Empire, or the Kingdom of Judaea, or in ancient Greece.'

As Zeno speaks, he weaves a spell. His words take flight, swirl about the room and make dreams seem real. Zeno has many ways to tell the future and see into the past. He reads palms, consults joss sticks, runs his hands over a client's scalp. Zeno is practised in the arcane art of phrenology. He searches for a skull's depressions and resistance, for the dips and furrows that he reads like an inner map. They tell him what may ail a man or what can cause a woman to feel wounded, sad or raw. For Rosetta, however, he need only hold her hand and sense the energy that flows from her to know what lies in store.

As Zeno clasps her, palm to palm, she feels both soothed and at the same time undeniably aroused. It is his gaze, his voice, but most of all that touch.

 

Afterwards, as she makes her way home to Carlton, Rosetta has the sensation that she is inhabiting a dream. Somehow she buys a ticket for the tram, takes her seat, alights at the correct stop. But Melbourne, the Melbourne that Rosetta knows, with its familiar grid of streets, its solid buildings and well-mannered parks, has disappeared. Images of more exotic lands dance before her eyes
and, in her ears, Zeno's alluring prophecies sing of adventure and desire.

That night Rosetta thinks over what has transpired. Away from the cinnamon-scented smoke, the suns and moons, she suspects that Zeno is not all he claims to be. She doesn't care. He is rendered all the more attractive because of his dishonesty. Zeno breaks rules. He is cloaked in danger. Rosetta thinks of little else but this man and the feeling of his hand pressed against her own. A white heat is coiling in her belly. She might do anything.

I find my family tree, the one my brother had copied, on an unprepossessing single sheet of paper at the very front of the blue binder. It begins in England, in the eighteenth century: the ‘Age of Enlightenment', they called it, even while thousands of hapless men, women and children were banished to a distant land and deprived of their liberty.

As I look at the straight, ruled lines, I imagine other, invisible links, a multitude of them that become a great tangle of interconnected vines. It strikes me then that, though this is just one family's history, it is also part of a greater narrative, always moving over time.

The document I hold in my hand is not elaborate but neat and workmanlike, setting out eight generations of births, deaths and marriages in small type. At the top is Reuben Rheuben, broker, of Whitechapel. Below him comes Rosetta's grandfather, my great, great, great-grandfather Abraham, who arrived in Hobart on the
Bengal Merchant
in 1828.

According to the original Session Papers I find, he'd been arrested for the theft of a sovereign and half a crown the year before and then tried before a judge in London's Old Bailey.

‘I followed him and collared him,' a Bow Street patrol officer testified.

‘I picked it up,' was all the young defendant replied. At just sixteen, transportation to Australia was the punishment for his small crime.

How was it for that poor boy, alone in the great London court, at the moment he was told he would be locked in a ship for months upon the seas, sailing for a place beyond the terror of his dreams? I can only speculate. What I do know is that his life changed dramatically. It took seven hard years to regain his freedom, a further four before he married a girl called Rosetta Marks (now I know from where the name Rosetta came). The couple had ten children, all listed in a row across the page, culminating with the youngest, Frances, and then, below her, Frances' own brood of nine. The name of Frances' first born, my great-grandmother, is written out in full – Rosetta Esther Sarah Solomon – together with some brief details.

At first it is difficult to glean a great deal about Rosetta from this impenetrable network of names and dates. And yet, as I look at the meagre facts set down on the page, I find that the other documents I have, the legal papers, newspaper reports and the half-remembered stories and memories that my father recorded, all begin, rather like magic, to fall into place.

MELBOURNE, 31 MAY 1899

Time unwinds much like a spool of flickering film, alive with vivid images.

It is my great-grandmother's wedding night. She is very young, just eighteen years old, with all the vanity that youth bestows together with its innocence. She stands, quite still, before a long,
sparkling mirror, examines herself, is pleased by what she sees. Tall, blessed with thick, dark-red hair, full breasts and creamy skin, she has a rare, strong beauty.

Rosetta is in Melbourne's Hotel Windsor, an establishment fabled for its luxury. It is a place in which any traveller would find comfort, but it is also more than that. Situated opposite the imposing classical facades of the Parliament of Victoria and the Treasury, the hotel is known to play host to those with wealth, power and influence. The very constitution of a new nation called Australia was drafted just the year before in one of its exclusive suites.

The serried rows of pediments that arc along the walls, the great stone sculptures of a reclining Peace and Plenty above the entrance and the soaring, cupola-capped twin towers; all these things invite comparison with a Renaissance palace. Rosetta is captivated by its grandeur and its elegance.

The room in which the mirror hangs envelops her with richness. Midnight-blue curtains embellished with golden tassels and thick braid caress the windows, while a chandelier of glittering crystal floods the scene with light. Together they give Rosetta the sensation that she is inhabiting a particularly opulent theatre, though she is unaware as to the part that she will be required to play or, indeed, what drama will unfold that night.

Competing with the heightened illumination are two small candles on a table covered by fine damask. The cloth shows evidence of the first supper she shared with Louis as a married woman – a single smear acquired when a fork of sliced mutton dropped from her unsteady hand, a scatter of breadcrumbs from the tearing of a soft white roll.

She has had little appetite, even though since the moment her mother, Frances (who everyone calls Fanny), woke her just after dawn, there has barely been time to eat. Indeed, there was such an urgency about her preparations that, following her bath, the usual languor with which she smoothed oil scented with almonds and oranges along her warm, receptive limbs had been replaced
with a brisk efficiency. Next, her dark auburn hair was elaborately dressed in an upswept pompadour. Finally, her complicated clothing was put on in layer after layer, until Rosetta felt herself almost extinguished beneath the weight of so much artifice.

This sense of unreality persisted. The ceremony had been followed by the wedding breakfast, though almost all the details escape her now. A perturbing sense of disconnection had accompanied her as she moved through the festivities, greeting her guests, thanking them for their gifts, listening to speeches and to toasts.

Rosetta felt as she did when, as a child, she had ridden high upon the rearing horse of a merry-go-round. She was unstable, had lost the fixed points that anchored her small world. As the carousel turned, familiar people, trees and houses had become formless, whirling by in a fast-moving, amorphous stream. This was how the day just past had seemed. Only a few, odd moments remain sharp. One was when she signed the marriage register. Rosetta remembers looking down and, as if seeing something belonging to quite a different woman, noting the gold band upon her finger, her trembling hand.

Now Rosetta is breathless. Beneath her gown she wears the unforgiving bones of whales and lacing that grips her tightly round the waist – but this is not the only cause. The knowledge that it is her wedding night, the first as Mrs Louis Raphael, is sufficient reason to make the hotel room and all its elaborate furnishings appear to sway. Or perhaps it is because she is unaccustomed to drinking champagne. Rosetta can taste it still, its syrupy sharpness. She swallows, wincing, has the sensation of a scratch inside her throat, decides it would be better to focus on what she sees before her in the gilt-edged frame instead.

Rosetta's wedding dress had been a sweeping, ivory-coloured confection. It had a scalloped collar that sat high upon her slender neck and narrow sleeves that concluded at her wrists with a foam of lace. Save for her hands and face, Rosetta had been completely covered. She was decorous, sedate.

The low-cut gown she wears now is significantly less demure. Above the bodice she is quite exposed, save for a wisp of pale-blue tulle about her shoulders and a pair of long suede gloves, grey and soft as pigeon's down. During their meal Rosetta had noted with satisfaction the way that Louis' eyes had been drawn to her uncovered upper arms, the wide spaced bones beneath her throat and the swelling smoothness below.

She is familiar with observation. Men first began to notice her at fourteen. Her sinuous form, though always discreetly attired, provoked attention. A slight turn of the head by a man passing by in his trap, a quick glance or a movement, was enough for her to realise she created awareness, enough to cause a flicker of excitement to lick at her within.

She enjoys this admiration, the sense of power it bestows. But, despite appearances, she is not worldly. Her sophistication is fragile, eggshell thin.

Rosetta is uninformed. Those things Fanny does with her children's father occur in darkness and in silence. She will not speak of them, not even to her eldest child.

 

Fanny, a careful mother, had other priorities. She made sure to tell Rosetta that appearance was of keen importance. But she also warned her daughter that the impression a person might choose to make contained the potential to be wreathed in deceit. ‘Not everyone you meet is who they seem to be,' she said, with an air of someone whose caution was based on personal experience.

In surging Victoria the most unlikely people might suddenly acquire undreamt-of wealth and, as a consequence, astounding transformations could be made. Fanny told her daughter stories of men such as Sir William Clarke, Australia's first baronet, who had built ‘Rupertswood', a palatial mansion equipped with a personal squad of soldiers and a private railway station. Sir William dominated what was deemed Victorian society, entertaining as lavishly
as an Eastern prince. But only the clever land speculation of his modest butcher father had enabled him to play the part of this Antipodean potentate.

Rosetta was aware, too, that although her grandfather, Abraham Rheuben, had arrived in wild Van Diemen's Land wearing manacles and chains, he had enjoyed a considerable rise in station. No longer the boy driven by his poverty to steal purses in the backstreets of Whitechapel, he became, despite this unpromising beginning, a wealthy ship owner, a coal and wood merchant and, most astonishing of all, a prominent justice of the peace and alderman.

Indeed, such was the former convict's renown that upon his death in 1876 Hobart's leading newspaper,
The Mercury
, described him as ‘one of our most respected citizens'. Rosetta had seen the newspaper clipping, for her mother kept it in a frame.

Having been born four years after he passed away, she never knew her grandfather. But her knowledge of his triumphant reinvention led her to feel proud of him.

Fanny's own feelings were more complex. She felt as if her daughter trod upon a precipice. A single misstep on her behalf, and all that Abraham Rheuben had attained – financial security, position and respect – could disappear. Above all, she must keep Rosetta from this fate.

Late at night beside the fire, her chocolate-coloured hair smooth in its tight knot, Fanny would murmur to her, ‘Only men can make their fortune. We women have but two currencies. Purity is paramount – you must live a life above reproach. But do not forget beauty, the way you present yourself to the world.' Fanny had observed more than one woman possessed of aspirations who had, by the careful cultivation of her attributes and the adoption of impeccable attire, entered into realms that she would otherwise have been denied.

What else had Rosetta's mother told her in the stillness of the night?

‘A woman is always vulnerable. She lives in danger. Marriage to a steady man provides the only real security. To take any other path is folly. Darling girl, it can only lead to grief.'

Her daughter listened carefully. She knew nothing of the way in which a less certain life could heighten every appetite, make the senses sing.