Rosetta

Headstrong and beautiful, in 1905 Rosetta escaped her safe Melbourne life, deserting her respectable husband and five-year-old daughter to run away with Zeno the Magnificent, a half-Chinese fortune teller and seducer of souls.

 

The pair reinvented themselves in London, where they beguiled European society and risked everything for a life of glamour and desire. Rosetta said she was American; Zeno claimed to be a brilliant Japanese professor. Together they attracted the patronage of famous writers, inventors and scientists, lords and ladies, dukes and duchesses.

 

Rosetta revelled in a life few women of her time would have dared to embrace, yet all the while she hid her secret shame: the daughter she had left behind.

 

This is the compelling story of Alexandra Joel's quest to uncover the truth about her scandalous great-grandmother, and the shocking century-old secret she would discover at the heart of her family.

COVER

ABOUT THE BOOK

TITLE PAGE

DEDICATION

EPIGRAPH

PART ONE: AUSTRALIA

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

PART TWO: EUROPE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

CHAPTER THIRTY

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

CHAPTER FORTY

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

PART THREE: AUSTRALIA

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

CHAPTER FIFTY

CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE

CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX

CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT

CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE

CHAPTER SIXTY

CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE

CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO

POSTSCRIPT

PROFESSOR CARL ZENO'S LIST OF PATRONS

BIBLIOGRAPHY

PICTURE SECTION

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

COPYRIGHT NOTICE

Rosetta stone

‘A key to some previously indecipherable mystery …'

Oxford English Dictionary

MELBOURNE, 1905

She is filled with anguish and uncertainty. Her future is opaque. The dreadful step she is contemplating torments her during endless troubled nights. The action she considers is both irrevocable and forbidden; the consequences grave. For a wife to leave her husband is, at best, unwise. But to leave her child? She is aware that condemnation will rain down upon her from all sides.

What will happen to her if she does this thing? How will her life unfold? And yet if she does nothing, stays exactly as she is, can she tolerate an eternity spent existing in a void? These questions gnaw at her until she feels she is quite mad.

It is in this turbulent condition Rosetta recalls that some time ago she heard of a talented fortune teller who could be found near Melbourne's mysterious Chinatown. It may well have been her aristocratic Irish friend, Lilian Pakenham, who told her – yes, that was it – during one of their intimate exchanges over cups of Lapsang Souchong tea.

‘There is a man,' Lilian had said, smoothing her yellow dress. ‘He is part Chinese but very handsome. He has special gifts …'

Momentarily, Rosetta closes her dark eyes. She cannot recall the seer's name – something exotic, she thinks, and vaguely improbable. It doesn't matter. She remembers the address; it is enough for now. She decides that if in one week's time she is no closer to a resolution she will seek the oriental fortune teller out.

Rosetta hopes this plan will afford her a measure of tranquillity. It does not. During the hours that follow, while she shops for bread and milk and cheese, returns home, attempts to write a letter to one of her younger sisters, her unrest seems only to increase.

She tries to sew. It is impossible; the needle slips. She pricks her finger, sees a bead of crimson blood and feels squeamish. Finally, she throws the child's dress and its unfinished hem onto a chair and starts to pace about the room. It seems unnaturally confining, as if the very walls, the timber beams and lintels are conspiring to trap and restrain. Surely this distress cannot be endured for another seven days.

Yet still Rosetta hesitates. She forces herself to be still, to think. The man will surely prove a charlatan; to seek his counsel is a foolish escapade. Rosetta resolves that she must remain exactly where she is. ‘It is the wisest course,' she thinks.

Slowly, she sits down again. She regards the small, crumpled dress that has been cast aside. Then, suddenly, Rosetta rises to her feet. She reaches for her coat and reticule, crams her beribboned hat onto her thick, bronze-coloured hair and flies out of the door.

Rosetta is not an invention. She lived. She created an extraordinary life, took risks, transcended all manner of circumstances that might have constrained her from inhabiting the world of international glamour and desire which she embraced and which in turn embraced her.

I see her, vividly alive, at twenty-five: an arresting beauty with thick chestnut hair and restless, toffee-coloured eyes. She has been married since the age of eighteen. Her husband is a respectable man of means. She is a mother, too. The year is 1905, the place is Melbourne, capital of gold-rush enriched Victoria, a thriving state in the new nation of Australia. All seems well.

But this is the year when – abruptly, scandalously – everything changes. Rosetta leaves, and not just her husband, though this is bad enough. No, she does something far worse than that. She abandons little Frances Catherine, aged just five; runs away with a man self-styled Zeno the Magnificent. Shockingly, Zeno is half Chinese. He is also a mesmerising schemer, a fortune teller and seducer of souls. With wit, charm and wile, Rosetta and Zeno first
enchant the inhabitants of Sydney. Next, with their sights set on more distant horizons and grander goals, they conquer British and European society. Princes, duchesses, lords and ladies – all find themselves helplessly beguiled.

There will be no more children for Rosetta. Yet, even after her triumphant return to Australia, she has no contact with her daughter. She never meets her granddaughter (my mother, Sybil), or her great-granddaughter – me. On 28 July 1958, just five days before my fifth birthday, Rosetta dies. But none of us, neither daughter, granddaughter nor great-granddaughter, is aware this has transpired.

 

I have always known that my great-grandmother did a dreadful thing. It must have been when I was very young that I was first told she deserted her only child. This alarming knowledge – some mothers simply choose to disappear – became a part of the child I was, my identity.

Where had my errant great-grandmother gone, and why?

No doubt even in the far-off 1950s, when children were not encouraged to be forthcoming but, rather, to know their place, many were braver than I was, asked more questions, demanded answers in response. I did not.

I don't believe it was simple timidity that caused my questions to remain unspoken; it had something more to do with the risk I sensed. I suppose that every family has its painful, bruised places to which one journeys at one's peril. Even as a child I understood the way in which a misplaced query might disturb these tender realms.

Abandonment by the one who gave you life; the loss is both vast and elemental. I knew, on some unconscious, visceral level, that beneath my grandmother's and mother's glamorous facades, behind their lacquered hairstyles and bright, carefully lipsticked mouths, lay the shadows of hurt and turmoil.

Words can be avoided, thoughts suppressed, but feelings work their way through the line and texture of one's being. None of us escaped though, not surprisingly, Rosetta's daughter, Frances, my Nana Billie, was the most deeply affected by her mother's flight. Billie was not an easy woman, being mercurial in mood and acutely sensitive to any act or comment that she perceived could be a slight. Even minor incidents were likely to evoke a furious response. Though tender-hearted, a kind of madness would erupt.

‘She'd get upset and throw cups and saucers,' my mother confessed one morning over tea.

‘At what?' I asked.

‘At me.'

A child has no trouble knowing damage when she lives with it each day.

 

Over the years my curiosity did not wane. It stayed hovering at the furthest edges of sentience, unsaid. The truth is, whether talked about or not, it would have made no difference. Nobody knew anything.

‘I wasn't even told her name,' I remember my mother saying not so very long ago while we sat together in the sterile comfort of her dentist's waiting room. A moment later, her own name was called.

‘Sybil? Sybil Joel?'

‘Yes.' And then she rose, was escorted by a nurse with a professional smile towards a gleaming, equipment-filled room that could be glimpsed behind a screen of synthetic plant life.

I followed but, despite the glare of the fluorescent lights, found that I'd become disorientated – the brief exchange had unsettled me. Names are quotidian, simple things yet have great power. When they are lost, that loss is beyond what can be calculated.

It was only after Billie's death, in 1988, that the first vital scrap of information was uncovered. Strangely, it was my father, Asher,
who made the initial discovery and even then it was by accident. In his seventies, after a life spent largely on the public stage (Dad was best known for the organisation of royal visits and other state occasions), he was seeking an activity that would provide meaning to his days. Perhaps it was because 1988 was the year Australia marked two centuries of European settlement. When he was younger, my father might have expected to mastermind the celebrations.

‘I need a challenge,' he proclaimed. This was a call to arms with which I was familiar, for he thrived on grand undertakings and intense activity, becoming melancholic when they ceased.

Dad's attention turned inward. He became absorbed by the private pursuit of family history, devoted to finding out all he could, not only about his ancestors, but almost anybody and anything connected to his rich past. It was only natural: my father had begun his career as a newspaperman back in the glory days of the 1920s and had lost neither his passion for unearthing facts nor for running what might prove a compelling tale to ground.

Evidence of his dedication to this new-found enterprise abounded. Files bulged with correspondence. Typists and research assistants came and went. Meanwhile my mother, all too aware of the enormous amount of time and attention her husband was devoting to this endeavour, began to grow peevish.

‘What about me?' she said to him one day, with an expression that made it clear she did not enjoy being overlooked. ‘I hardly know a thing about
my
family, and as for my grandmother, the one who took off – well, there's never been a trace.'

A secret story, waiting to be uncovered and disclosed; it was all that was required to pique Dad's curiosity.

 

My father had a special gleam in his eye, a buoyancy of step whenever he had come across a lead that might prove fruitful.
This must have been the way he looked on the day he announced to my mother, ‘I've got it.'

‘Got what?'

‘Billie's death certificate.' I suppose Dad's eagerness seemed at odds with the nature of his find. ‘I know her name!'

My mother, taken unawares, had been about to dial a number on the telephone. ‘Whose name? What?' She turned and looked quizzically at him, the fingers of her hand still poised mid-air.

‘Your grandmother's. She was called Rosetta. I'm going to find out more.'

And so Pandora's box was breached.

My father's small discovery re-ignited those old reporter's instincts honed so many years before. Galvanised, he sought out documents, found sources, looked in unexpected places. Startling details began to emerge.

I can recall the day he met me at the door of his office where, fired up with the exhilaration of the chase, he exclaimed, ‘Al, Rosetta's life was incredible. There's the makings of a book here. You should write it.'

It was a brief remark, but my father's excited words – part suggestion, part command – stayed with me long after he passed away. I could not tell if they would prove to be a legacy or a burden.