Authors: Kimberley Freeman
I typed in
Honeychurch-Black
.
I got hundreds of hits and my heart leaped. Was there that much written on them? But no, there was a Honeychurch-Black Agricultural Institute that published mostly science books, and every one of them had turned up on my list.
I tried excluding them and ended up with zero hits, so I tried again, adding new search terms instead.
Family. History. Australia. 1920s.
Eventually, with a bit of ingenuity and a lot of luck, I found a book called
Great Farming Families of Australian History
, published by the Honeychurch-Black Agricultural Institute.
The air-conditioning in the library was cranked so high my fingers were turning blue. I buttoned up my cardigan as I walked up the stairs to the book stacks. Swarms of students passed me, going up and down. The young women didn’t seem to be wearing much. Was I becoming an old lady? Perhaps I was just jealous that super-short cutoffs wouldn’t look good on me. The staircase echoed with their voices, but up among the stacks it was very quiet, the carpet absorbing any hushed sounds. I ran my fingers along spines until I found the book I was after.
I didn’t bother sitting back down. I stood right there between the shelves flicking through pages. Births, deaths, marriages . . . I moved from the 1800s to the 1920s with one flick. There they were. With photos. My heart pressed up against my ribs to see him. Samuel Honeychurch-Black. His soul in his eyes, black hair flopping over his forehead. Born 1906 at Curlew Station, outside Goulburn in regional New South Wales. Died at home in 1927 of pneumonia. His father also died of pneumonia at the same time. It made me sad to think that he lived only to twenty-one—but at least he got to have that passionate affair at the hotel. Flora Honeychurch-Black was born in 1901 at Curlew Station, married in 1927, and had four children. She died in 1989. I studied her picture. She was pale, like me. Not pretty. Again, like me. But there was something about her face: I saw goodness. Her brow was calm, but a tiny smile touched the corners of her lips. Her eyes were clear and intelligent. I compared her to her brother, who was dark and sad-looking.
But maybe I was projecting all this onto them. He died young; she didn’t. His letters made it clear that his sister had a strong sense of duty and dignity.
I held the book to my chest as I stood in the queue for the photocopier. I gazed out the narrow window and saw students milling about. I would have liked to finish my university course. I’d studied business communication, with an idea that I might work in a big firm somewhere, writing documents and correcting everybody’s grammar. The thought was laughable now. Me in a big business firm? Wearing power suits and meeting “key performance indicators”? It was well beyond me. The same illness that robbed Adam of his youth had robbed me of mine. All this time I had told myself it wasn’t too late to go back to university, that I might get there one day, but as I stood here surrounded by students and books and learning, my heart sped a little. I was nearly too late for everything.
For study, for husbands and children, for backpacking in exotic places. I was on track to die alone.
I steadied my breathing, told myself not to be an idiot. What Adam would have given still to be alive. I lifted my eyes, watched the elms bending in the wind, the sun shining on their leaves. I was like Flora, the sister who survived. I should be grateful and live my life gratefully.
That’s when it occurred to me: Flora’s children might still be alive. Or if not her children, then her grandchildren. They might be keen to see Samuel’s letters. A generation or two had passed. Nobody would be shocked anymore, surely. Also, they
might
know who Samuel’s lover was, and then I could solve the mystery, and share it with Tomas.
I flipped to the back page of the book, looking for names. I discovered that the book had been written by Graeme Dewhurst, who was the husband of one of Flora’s grandchildren. He’d thanked her in the acknowledgments: Terri-Anne Dewhurst. By the time I’d made my copies, I’d decided on a course of action.
I sat down at one of the computers and searched for the Web site of the Honeychurch-Black Agricultural Institute. I composed a message to Terri-Anne, in which I told her about the letters and offered to send them to her, and then sent the message to the institute’s inquiries address, asking them to forward it to Terri-Anne. I was hoping that if she called, she might be willing to talk or share memories.
Or maybe I would get the same kind of reception I’d received from Anton Fournier.
It didn’t matter. I hit Send. The letters were written by her great-uncle. They belonged with his family.
* * *
The wind changed in the night, turning and swirling in, cold and dry, from the south. I’d left my window open when I went to bed,
and the wind blew the curtain in wildly, rattling the rail and waking me up. I checked my phone: 3 a.m. I closed the window and lay for a while, expecting to drift back to sleep, but it seemed that my brain had decided it was the perfect time to obsess about all my problems. Around and around in my head they went. Mum. Dad. Tomas. My future. Anton Fournier. An hour passed.
I sat up, reached for my phone. In Denmark, it was probably a reasonable time of the day. I always waited for Tomas to contact me; I’d never been so bold as to contact him. Before I could think better of it, I tapped out a text message.
Can’t sleep. Thinking of you.
It whizzed off into the night. I waited, but nothing came in response. I obsessed a little longer, then got up and dressed. There was a whole collection of map books at the Evergreen Spa west wing library waiting for me.
I wasn’t prepared for the cold—that particular cold characteristic of the hours before dawn, when the world seems emptied out. The wind howled through the pines, whipping my hair into my face. The streetlight through the branches of the oaks along the main road created constantly shifting shadows. A few leaves loosened and streaked off down the road. My fingers were numb. I hurried towards the hotel, my head down, wishing I’d stayed in bed.
I let myself in and shut out the cold, caught my breath gratefully, then switched my torch on and headed up to the library.
The library report had given the location of the maps, so I carefully shone my torch on the tags inside the glass-fronted bookshelves until I found them. Three shelves of folio-sized books, bound in red leather. I opened the door, carefully pulled out the first one, and took it to one of the big oak desks.
As I turned the heavy pages, a squall rose outside, shaking the windows on the other side of the boards. If there weren’t so many
of these map books, I’d have taken them home where it was warm and I could switch on an electric light and make a pot of tea. Book after book, page upon crackling page of detailed maps, but no notes in margins, no love letters stashed between pages. It was just a set of books.
By the time dawn came I was beginning to feel despondent. I left the maps for the time being and went to the big drawers at the bottom of the shelves. Here was where the librarian had stacked old records, and it didn’t take me long to find a set of well-worn staff registers, dating back to the opening of the hotel in 1888. I plowed through the drawer until I found the one that covered Samuel’s stay. The binding had rotted away and pages were loose and falling out. I opened it and carefully ran my torch over a few of the pages. Names, dates, duties, pay rates. I put it aside to take home and pore over, and continued looking through the drawers. I soon found a leather-bound letter book, brimming with typewritten letters and swollen with age. Each letter had been pinned in, and all the pins were rusty. Every piece of correspondence was signed off
Yours faithfully, Miss Eugenia Zander, Manageress.
I looked closer, and realized they were all carbon copies. Miss Eugenia Zander had kept a copy of every letter she had sent.
I flicked forwards; the book ended in 1925. The next one in the drawer started in 1927. The only one I was really interested in—1926—was missing.
I had two choices: go through all the drawers one by one, or go home and look through the library report to see if correspondence for 1926 had been catalogued.
I chose to go home, reasoning that if I started pulling things out of drawers, I increased the chances that I’d mix it all up putting it back. Besides, my stomach was grumbling, and I fancied some toast and tea.
I shone the torch around and realized I’d left one of the map books out. As I picked it up off the desk to return it, my sleep-deprived, clumsy fingers let it slide out of my grip and it landed with a thud on the floor, pages splayed.
“Oh, no,” I sighed in the dark. I knew I’d bent pages; I just hoped I hadn’t damaged the spine. I crouched and picked it up carefully, and something slid out.
I sat back, looking at it. It was a portrait of a woman. Written across the top in faded ink, in handwriting I recognized from the love letters, was
My Violet
.
Samuel’s lover had a name.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
I
know I shouldn’t have, but I took the picture home, tucked inside the staff registry. My stash of stolen treasures from the Evergreen Spa was growing. I intended to take it all back, of course, eventually.
I made myself some breakfast while dawn struggled into the sky. It was a gray day. By the fluorescent glow of the kitchen light, I studied the portrait of Violet.
Violet.
I now knew for sure she was a staff member. In the portrait she wore a maid’s uniform. She was pretty, achingly so. A sweet, round face with a slightly pointed chin, wavy dark hair cut to her jaw, large eyes with long sweeping lashes. There was something familiar about her; perhaps she looked like a movie star of the time—they all seemed to have a similar look. The artist had been very good. He captured the light in her eyes and something—was it uncertainty?—around her brow. I wondered if Samuel had drawn this, but I could make out another signature at the bottom, though it had two thick lines struck through it. The first initial was a C or an E, and the surname Betts. Why was it struck through?
I turned to the staff register, careful not to soil it with the peanut butter from my toast. I knew the dates I was looking for, and was
delighted to find that an
Armstrong, V
had commenced work as a waitress in the autumn of 1926. My excitement built as I searched but failed to find anyone else with the initial V—it must have been her. And there was something unusual about her entries in the register: her name stopped appearing in July of that year, with no explanation. With other terminated employees, the register would include a date of termination and a reason (and some of the reasons were intriguing in themselves: “caught smoking for fifth time,” “too dull-witted,” “left to pursue the man who got her in trouble”). But in Violet Armstrong’s case, her name simply stopped appearing. She was paid her usual salary at the end of July, and after that . . . she disappeared from the record.
I finished my breakfast and turned to the library record, to see if a collection of letters from 1926 had been catalogued. It hadn’t. Curious.
I stuck Violet to my fridge with magnets, next to my photo of Adam and Anton. All my mysteries collected conveniently in one place. I was considering them when my phone rang. Tomas.
“Hello?”
“It was lovely to have a message from you. Why can’t you sleep?”
“Now I’m too excited. Guess what I found?” I told him everything with growing pride that I had solved the mystery (well, mostly) while he was away.
“So, they had a brief affair but never married? No happily ever after?” Tomas said.
“Not according to the book I read at the library yesterday. He was dead the following year, and she . . . I don’t know. There’s no record of what happened to her, but she stopped working at the Evergreen Spa that winter. Oh, and Tomas, she was so pretty. I’m going to take a photo and message it to you. I have one of Samuel and Flora, too.”
“You’ve done amazing things. Well done.”
“I have a few last parts of the mystery to solve.” I told him about the missing correspondence from that year. “I suppose I don’t really need it now to identify Violet, but it would be interesting to read it all the same.”
“You know, I seem to remember from when I first went into the west wing on my walk-through that an office off the foyer had some books and papers that the librarian missed. Perhaps you could check in there.”
“I will.”
“You can wait for me to get back if you like.”
My heart stopped. “Really? You’re coming back?”
“Sabrina’s cousins are here now, and some friends she works with. She’s showing signs of improvement every day. I don’t think I need to be here anymore.”
“Don’t you want to be there when she wakes up?”
“I’d love to be,” he chuckled, “but my employer expects me back at work as soon as I can be. Delays cost them a lot of money.”
I was secretly grateful that such practical matters could bring him back to me soon. “So, when . . . ?”
“I’ll be back next week.”
Next week. It was already Tuesday. Nearly Wednesday. “I will be really glad to see you,” I said, boldly.
“Really?”
“Yes.”
“You never call me or send me messages. I had started to think you’d gone off me.”
I blushed, despite the thousands of kilometers between us. “I didn’t realize I could,” I said, honestly. “I’m really not very good at this stuff.”
“Third date,” he said. “Next week.”
“I can’t wait,” I replied.
* * *
I dropped in on Lizzie on my way to work, to tell her that Tomas was on his way home. But she didn’t answer her door, and it wasn’t until I arrived at work half an hour later that I discovered why.
“Hey,” Penny said. “How is she?”
“Who?”
“Mrs. Tait,” she replied, her face echoing my confusion.
“What do you mean?”
“She went into hospital. I thought you must have known. It happened on the weekend.”
I felt like my blood dropped two degrees; people going into hospital was one of my least favorite things. “Hospital? Is she okay? I mean, obviously she’s not okay if she’s in hospital but—”