Rosewood Dreaming 11

Part 4


CALLING UP THE SPIRITS

 
I saw the beauty go,
the beauty that in a stream
flowed through the breadth of the land
like the fenceless foot of a dream.
 Mary Gilmore

Chapter 27


THINKING OF LEAVING


Anna has just finished high school. This will be her last carefree summer for a while, she thinks, as soon she will have to start earning her living.

On muggy December days she heads for the beach, where she often runs into Greta Stempel. Greta has grown into a tall, bronzed Amazon with long, strong limbs, who hikes or cycles everywhere. They have a favourite spot in common, a sandy cove protected by a headland from the ocean surf.

Cottages straggle around the little cove like sun-bleached shells, and there is a lazy, timeless atmosphere about the place, where local children while away the summer days floating like opaque jellyfish in the clean, clear water, buoyed up by black rings, the inflated inner tubes of car and tractor tyres.

Ashore, they build sand-castles or make sand-gardens with shells, seaweed, fanciful bits of driftwood, coloured glass the surf has sanded smooth. Mermaids, seahorses, lighthouses, schooners are moulded from wet sand and outlined with shells until the incoming tide licks the beach clean again.

Anna and Greta sit on the low dunes quilted with fleshy-leaved pig-face, drying off after their morning swim, twining quills of tough sea-grass round their fingers, making desultory conversation, musing aloud from time to time about their uncertain futures. They sense they are on the brink of exciting changes, and there are vibrations from elsewhere that confirm this feeling. They have heard of hippies and flower power, and Anna, in the absence of a gramophone, cruises the airwaves on the transistor at home, hoping to hear Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Simon and Garfunkel, Peter, Paul and Mary. She knows some of their songs by heart.
 
Most days when they meet up at the bay, they notice the familiar figure of Mr Dimitriev, an old Cossack who lives nearby, sitting on a hummock of sand, gazing out to sea. Sometimes he rocks back and forth and croons what sounds like a lament in his thin, cracked voice. At first Anna and Greta were intimidated by his ferocious appearance, the wizened body contradicted by his mane of hair, patriarchal beard and bushy eyebrows shading eyes like a falcon’s, focused on distant objects. However, they have since made his acquaintance.

When he is in the mood to speak, he tells them little anecdotes in halting English. Once he talked about the song they often hear him sing. It was about wild birds, he said, returning to their homeland. This was what he dreamed of, now that he was old. The spirit longed to say farewell to its dreaming-place, its earthly home; he wanted to touch his mother earth once more, before moving on.

Anna and Greta talk a lot about moving on. Moving on or staying: in small country towns, this is the dominant theme of the young. Greta wants to stay in Australia. She remembers little of Germany, other than the atmosphere of perpetual waiting and not belonging she associates with refugee camps. Besides, the East is closed, their former home is behind barbed wire. She won’t be staying on the farm, though, she’ll definitely be going to university.

Anna has vague ideas of getting to Europe, where she is hoping to study art. Despite her perverse attachment to Rosewood, her mental iconography is crowded with images from Europe, garnered from whatever art books she has access to. A prized reproduction of Gauguin’s self-portrait, the one with the apple and serpent, shrugged off by the artist as caricature, is taped to her wardrobe door at Rosewood. Anna is intrigued and disconcerted by it. She supposes the serpent symbolises self-knowledge, but the expression in the painter’s eyes is enigmatic, cold, almost sardonic, as if his perceptions had brought him no joy. Still, partly because of the challenge it seems to pose, she keeps the image where she can look at it and wonder.
 
For the time being, she will resist the strong undertow of Antipodean colours and images: the burnt-earth pigments and emaciated figures of Drysdale; the hallucinatory, bleached, heat-mirage images of Nolan; Margaret Olley’s opulent flowers and fruit, the eroticism of Boyd, the fleshy sensuousness of Dobell… These contain nothing of Rosewood’s dreaming anyway, although they are close enough to home for her to recognise, almost to reach out and touch. Europe, on the other hand, is all but inaccessible, out of the question in fact unless she can save a lot of money, so she is applying for jobs as a governess on remote properties to that end. The only worlds that matter to Anna are Rosewood, which she senses is doomed, and a distant Europe, which she perceives in some sense as a spiritual home.
 
‘I wonder how it feels to be so old and so far from home,’ she says one day to Greta, glancing toward Mr Dimitriev.
‘Perhaps he would not be alive if he had stayed,’ says Greta. ‘Stalin…’

‘Leaving a place you love must be a kind of death,’ says Anna. Mr Dimitriev rocks and croons on his cushion of sand, past caring. When you were old, it all became part of a fragile dream, evanescent as clouds, fleeting as wild white birds, migrating…

 Where are the sons of the Don?
 They’ve gone to the war.
 And the daughters of Rostov?
 Gone. Across the sea, across the sky,
 Where the blue-eyed geese fly,
 Never to return…

It was a Cossack lullaby his mother and his wife had sung. Now it is all that remains of his childhood, and of his children’s childhoods. And yet he thinks that inside his skull it is all there, child, boy, man. All in the shell of the old man, like a Russian nesting doll. Anna watches him, hunched on his sand-hummock, rocking to ease the ache of years…

Beneath the surface impression she gives of knowing what she wants, Anna is troubled. Perhaps she is confusing her passion for art with talent. She has no means of telling, and feels unsure of herself. There is nobody who would know the difference to whom she can show her secret attempts at drawing. She does not really want to leave Rosewood, nor does she think she can stay. She doesn’t feel equipped to survive in the world beyond Rosewood. Apart from the second-hand glimpses afforded by books of a world of art and of stories, a microcosmic universe in which she can feel safe, she has little notion of what the greater world is like. It is Terra Incognita. Terror incognita, too. Rosewood is a place apart, it hasn’t prepared her for future survival.

She thinks of her friend Linda’s fate with a shudder of revulsion. Tarring and feathering would be preferable to forced marriage. When Linda’s brothers found out about Richard, they made her an object of scorn and shame, and since she was by then, in their eyes, damaged merchandise, they hastily arranged a marriage to a young farmer from interstate, naturally a member of their sect, but one who lived too far away to entertain any suspicions or to have heard any rumours. Anna wonders what Linda is going through now, married to a stranger, forcibly separated from the object of her passion, and why Richard had escaped censure, while Linda was made to bear the brunt of her family’s outrage.

Lingering late at the cove one evening, Anna is startled by a vision, seemingly a trick of ambiguous light. Where Mr Dimitriev usually sits, she sees what she takes for an apparition: a tribal elder, the declining sun at his back, his aureole of grizzled hair silhouetted against the sea, his being displaced in time though not in place. The murmured, monotonous chant is like an incantation, an invocation to the spirits, not of a distant land but of this one. Anna has an uncanny sensation of time shifting underfoot, like sand. Drawn into a dreaming-web, she stands transfixed by images she suddenly has access to, and recognises as of this site.

The old man keeps his vigil, soul pointing toward the sea whence the invaders would come. The tall ships with the huge white wings are in the songlines, ghosts of his dreaming. He is keeping watch for their return. He must bear witness. Terrible changes would follow, the bones of his people would lament their land. The cry for the dead would be heard across the ti-tree swamps and wetlands.

Birds would plummet from the sky, the stands of bloodwood totter and fall. Animals would be stopped in their tracks as they fled, their hearts' blood staining the earth. His people would vanish from time-honoured hunting-grounds and fish-traps, their spirits returning as birds to the sites of the massacres, lamenting. All was written in the winds, the sands, the stars and sea-currents, the flight-paths of migratory birds, his veins.

A moan rises in the old man’s throat, a dirge. His spirit sings his homeland, marking the sacred places and secret signs it will recognise when it returns.
 
Fleeting but almost unbearably intense comes the realisation that Rosewood is part of an ancient, profound, complex web of dreaming centred on this site, an endless process going on here long before the Vances and long after them. For a brief interval of perfect clarity, Anna feels she is part of the pulse that gives this place its spirit. But then the sun goes down, the vision fades, and she is left with the swift passage into dusk then darkness, with only the sound of the sea on the rocks for company, and Venus glittering in an indigo sky.

Now, in the aftermath of luminous revelations, Anna feels chilled, and old in a way she cannot recall in her seventeen years. Her bones ache. She shivers under the casuarinas straggling at the roadside, and wonders how much longer her fragile cosmos can survive. It is vulnerable as an egg, she thinks, impermanent as sand, the everyday world she inhabits. Glimpses of what might lie beneath the surface only intensify her feeling that everything familiar is also precarious.

Apart from which, Jeannie will be furious with her for not being home by nightfall.


Chapter 28
 

TO SYBILLE HUDSON


Rosewood was fading. With Old Vance’s death, his dream had begun to disintegrate. He knew it had been a good dream, and he had known it could not survive without him. It was as if a god had opened his eyes for a brief space, and gazed upon the old man's promised land, and smiled before his eyes closed for ever.

Jeannie continued to dream of escape. Rosewood had become anathema to her, a green dungeon that had sapped her youth and strength, where now even the green was going as the land became locked in a cycle of drought. She could never become reconciled to remaining at Rosewood. She was gathering her strength to tear free of its web.

Now her thoughts were of the distant past, in its present form, and the near future. The distant past in its present form included her unresolved conflict with her mother, or rather with her mother’s silences, which had seemed more unnatural while she lived than the natural silence of the dead. Against the odds, as was her way, Jeannie attempted to bridge the abyss.


To Sybille Hudson
(25/03/1976)
 
Dear Mother,

 On the thirtieth anniversary of your death, I feel the need to speak to you.

I feel the need to ask and say so many things that have remained unspoken all these years, but most of all to speak, to break the web of silence that has kept us strangers to each other. Although we were close physically, there was so little contact. You never touched me to show affection, and I couldn’t speak to you. Invisible briars or brambles seemed to surround you, like a lady in a fairytale, under an evil spell. I always feared to pain you, to provoke you, and I feared your wrath.

You seemed so big, so stern, often forbidding, and at the same time I could sense the reservoir of misery in you. I was always afraid your pain and bitterness would spill over and drown us both, or lightning strike me from your stormy sky. I knew there was a force in you that you controlled by sheer will-power, and that if it escaped there’d be no telling what might happen.
 
So I have spent these thirty years playing hide-and-seek, sometimes hiding from you, sometimes seeking you. You always taught me to believe in an afterlife. I do believe in it, not as an act of faith, but because the dead whom I have loved stay with me. At times it even seems to me that the spirits of the living keep growing towards the spirits of the so-called dead, as if nothing could come between them. There is less to impede communication, in a way, when the everyday world doesn’t enter into it. There is no post office in that place where you’ve gone, but perhaps you can receive my thoughts.

I want you to know that now I understand what you went through. I understand what it is to be lonely, to live in a place you do not love, that saps your youth and strength relentlessly, and gives no joy. I look in the mirror now and I see your face looking back at me: the grimness that the years scored there, the sagging flesh, pigmented skin. The brilliant green eyes that won’t submit, nor falter in defeat.

It sounds trite to say, ‘wish you were here’, but I do. We could talk properly for the first time. I could tell you about Rosewood, and Jack, and the other things on my mind. But since you can’t be ‘here’, that’s why I’m writing. It is better than silence, don’t you think? Silence is a form of tyranny, I now believe. You kept silent because you were brought up to believe in the stiff upper lip. (I can’t even picture what that’s supposed to look like. All I can see in my mind is a Hitler moustache. So I think we should forget the stiff upper lip. It’s a bit of a swindle.) Anyway, I was saying. You were brought up to believe it was some kind of crime against society to scream and shriek your private agony. I don’t believe that any more. You should have told your fears and private sorrows, loud and clear. Someone might have heard you, might have helped.

What am I trying to say? You know it’s a funny thing, but I thought that when Old Harry died, his death would set me free. I hadn’t counted on my own habits of mind: another tyranny. And Jack’s goodness. You never met Jack or Old Harry, so you probably don’t know what I mean. You knew Jimmy though. When I lost you, it felt like losing him again. After that, nobody knew. But as I was saying.

Sometimes I wish Jack had more vices. Like Dad. The kids never understood what I was getting at when I used to say to them: You don’t know how lucky you are to have a father who isn’t violent or a drunkard. They just used to look at me as if I was daft, you know? Well, I’ve come to realise it would be easier to deal with a brute. You can at least hate him and despise him and resent him. And then do just as you damn well please. But it’s not like that with Jack.

It feels wrong to hurt such a gentle person, even though he may have unwittingly hurt me, what with his loyalty to the old man and his general lack of awareness about what women like us go through. But there isn’t a mean bone in his body. I was always afraid I didn’t really love him, but that’s not true. Maybe I didn’t once, but now I do, and I suppose that’s the trouble. We’re so different, chalk and cheese, that it’s a wonder to me we ever stuck it out. But some people don’t have much choice I guess.

I just want us to get out of this place for good, now that the jailer’s dead. I’m sick to death of looking at that bloody stove, hell’s furnace. Likewise the woodheap, and the axe. I’ve chopped my share of firewood. I want a different bed, a soft one. This cage with iron bars has had its day. I want a different house, my own, not an old man’s sarcophagus. I want to step into a bath and rinse off my old life, then put on fresh, new clothes and walk away, not looking back.

The kids have all managed to find their own feet. (You never met them either. Another sorrow.) All except Anna, that is, who’s gone bohemian. They say there’s one in every litter. None of the girls married farmers, and James, the only son, didn’t become one, so it can’t be in the blood.

The trouble is, Jack’s got this bee in his bonnet about wanting to stay. Father might be dead and gone, but his memory lingers on. Now Jack, who’s some years older than me, wants to wear himself out trying to keep the Rosewood flame alight. Talk about a snare and a delusion. It’s not as if it had been in the family for centuries. What’s thirty years in the history of a piece of land? (Well, it’s blood, sweat and tears to me, but you know what I mean.)

But now Jack has gone and planted a citrus orchard and an avenue of pine trees leading in from the road. Because he loves to inhale the scents of orange blossom and resin, he tells me. As if the scents of pine and orange blossom could save us from this hole! Not only that, he’s also restocking the pastures with beef cattle. He’s had a deck built onto the back of the house, in the shade of the poincianas, where he likes to sit and daydream and read. In other words, he intends to stay put.

I must confess that sometimes I’m afraid it might break Jack’s heart to leave Rosewood. I doubt that he’s ever even considered it, let alone suggested it, and then he’s been uprooted so many times, whenever Old Harry got itchy feet… Jack loves continuity. But continuity of what? Hardship? Uncertainty? This humdrum life we lead at Rosewood? I want out, as you once did. I know you pined for England. I don’t know where I want to be. Somewhere with Jack, away from this farm. Somewhere where you don’t have to break your back to live with dignity. I’ve always believed in travelling light…

But he will never come at my suggestions that we leave. He can’t stop me wishing for it, though. Years ago, when the kids were small and everything built up in me to the point where I simply couldn’t stand it, I used to grab a reaping-hook and mangle the lantana. I haven’t got the strength any more, and anyway poison was more effective. Now when I think I’m going crazy I write things. I write my thoughts.

I wrote something the other day. It’s for you too. Although your stations of the cross were really sheep-stations, I think you often felt as I do now. So here it is, my last will and testament (premature I hope), with a bit of poetic licence thrown in, because, you see, I don’t own anything, so the ‘my’ is only wishful thinking, as is escaping from Rosewood at this point. That’s something this precious Rosewood of theirs has taught me, and I guess you knew it too: life abounds in ironies. Anyway, here’s one of them:


 Woman Leaves her Land
 
Poison the well where three wild lime trees grow;
tear down the jasmine planted long ago;
sell all my cattle, shoot the blind white horse;
have the red guard dog and the black put down.
Tell my daughters, if they should return,
their mother doesn’t live here any more;
and tell my son, the one they call Don Juan,
his father has sold up and left the land…
Bury my heartache deep beside the creek;
Cast my unravelled curses to the wind…

A rumour shakes the palm fronds like a fever:
the mistress of these lands has lost her mind
and torn the bitter fairytale of years to shreds,
that nobody might question what they read.

*

This is my way of dealing with the silences. I wish I had discovered it sooner… Writing this, I felt as if a die once cast had been broken. It was strange, but I felt the choking grip of something loosen. Everything felt lighter, though I can’t explain why…

Odd that I’ve been writing lately to genealogical societies in England for information about you, which might put me in contact with members of your family, who are also my family. You could have answered all my questions easily, if you’d cared to, long ago, but I knew better than to ask.

That’s the hardest thing of all to come to terms with, mother. You knew so much of what I wished to know, and you kept silent. Even made me feel I mustn’t ask.

But so much lasts beyond the grave. Like love. Like pain. Like presences. Like silences. My kids know all about those too, thanks, I guess, partly to you. Or maybe thanks to your mother, the grandmother I never met. You see, you never really said, so I don’t know. I just try to make sense of things, as I hope my kids will.

One thing I’m sure of, though: things are never ‘safely in the past’. Believing that is the greatest delusion of all. As if you could put barbed-wire fences between past, present and future! If you tried, you’d only end up being torn to pieces. I remember someone telling me once, out on one of the stations where you slaved in the galleys when I was a kid, that for the Aboriginal people there’s no division between past and present. I don’t know if that’s true for them or not, but it makes you think, doesn’t it? We divide time up in certain ways, to suit our limited perceptions, or because of the time it takes for the earth to revolve around the sun, or whatever, but I don’t believe there’s such a thing as a separate, ‘true’ present and a separate, ‘true’ past, because they are forever unravelling and recombining, making form and sense, if you’re lucky, but shifting like the water in the sea. We think of time as a line, but what if it's more like a circle? It's a bit like believing the earth is flat, when in fact it's a sphere. We are enslaved, not by time, but by our own conventional perceptions of it, which are ultimately meaningless.
 
I hope this ‘letter’ reaches you, somehow, wherever you are. If you can, send me some sign that you have heard and understood. I miss you with unexpected fierceness and intensity.

 Your rebellious and loving daughter,

 Jeannie



Chapter 29


 THE DROUGHT


There had been many droughts at Rosewood, not to mention fires, and anarchic summer cyclones that were harbingers of floods to follow. But there had never been a drought like this one. Amid speculation about the climatic effects of El Nino, Jack cursed the perennial lack of cash that had prevented him from having a dam dug, or a second bore drilled. The water-table was so low that only a trickle of rusty sludge issued from the bore taps. The rain-water tanks had long since been emptied. The paddocks were bleached the colour of parchment, a tinder-box inviting fire.

Jeannie and Jack increased their overdraft to enable them to hand feed the cattle. A greater problem was obtaining sufficient water for them to drink. A water-tanker made the rounds of the district, but the farmers had to pay for every drop.

Anna phoned repeatedly from the city, wanting to come home, to help, but Jeannie resisted her pleas in her usual acerbic way: ‘No! You just stay put where you are. We haven’t even got water for ourselves, much less for you with your citified ways!’

Although Anna was left in no doubt that she would be not a help but a hindrance, nothing could ease the ache of impending loss she felt for a dying Rosewood.

Jack was over seventy. He had spent the years since Old Vance’s death building up the property, restocking, planting a citrus orchard on the slope behind the house, perhaps inspired by memories of George Vance’s orchard at Parramatta. The new beef herd had just reached maturity, so there was no more rigmarole of milking twice a day. His young orchard had been flourishing until the drought, the grafted trees about to bear their first fruit. And then the rains failed for the third consecutive season.

Birds perished from thirst as they flew, falling to earth like fragments of rainbow. Flocks of galahs, rosellas and white cockatoos fled east to the coast. Inland, to the west, the country’s heart was eaten out. Daily, Jeannie carried pails of precious water half a kilometre to the dry creek bed, where the desperate birds congregated in a bid to survive. But the water Jeannie could spare was never enough. Every day saw more bright-plumaged corpses in the dust. Badgered by Anna for details, Jeannie relayed grim descriptions by phone, at the same time warning her to keep away.

It was the first time in the more than three decades the Vances had lived at Rosewood that the creek had dried up completely. It had stopped running often enough, but always the deep waterholes where Lily’s boys had come yabbying had retained some water through the harshest droughts. No ibis fossicked in Rosewood’s withered paddocks. A cycle had been broken, a web of being destroyed.

Now Jeannie looked on, stricken with pity, as a gigantic eel, its presence ancient and hitherto unsuspected, went through its death throes in the dried, cracked mud in the depths of the big billabong. She knew she couldn’t save the eel. She sensed that something was dying with it. A spirit. Generations. Perhaps an entire way of life. A chill crept over her skin, through her flesh, there in the blinding heat on the creek bank, next to the three old lilly pilly trees. She had an impulse to sink to her haunches and send up a cry for the dead, the way she’d seen the Aboriginal women do once, in her childhood, on the far western sheep station her father managed. But she remained on her feet, paralysed by death’s magnitude, features skewed in a mask of grief.

She told Jack they must leave Rosewood while they still could. The cattle were starting to die. They would have to be sold, even though the sale would represent the undoing of years of painstaking work, and the price they would fetch on a market glutted with drought-stricken animals would be a joke.
 
The blind white horse would have to be shot. Jeannie couldn’t bear to watch him suffer, he was too old to endure another drought. And the dogs would have to go too. There would be no place for them, once Rosewood was sold. They could never settle down in a town after ranging the countryside all their lives, hunting and making a nuisance of themselves.

Jack was stunned at her words. His father’s spirit inhabited Rosewood, he could never let it go to strangers. But Jeannie was adamant. The land would take years to recover, their livelihood had been destroyed, and with it all their hopes of belated prosperity. They could not hope to survive in this hell-blasted place if they stayed.

Some of Jeannie’s fears remained unspoken: Jack’s age, his failing strength in the face of this latest ordeal. She wanted him alive. He deserved to end his days in peace. And so did she.

Rosewood was sold. First the cattle, then the dehydrated earth they had grazed. The blind white horse no longer paced the house-paddock’s fence like a spectre, the dogs were silenced. Jack and Jeannie moved far away to a town in Jack’s home state, taking only the few pieces of old Vance furniture and their personal chattels. None of their children had remained at Rosewood, having dispersed years before, in search of other opportunities and different lives. None of them was told about the sale until it had taken place.

In a distant city, a world she still found alien, Anna had a recurring dream that she was trying to telephone the farm. 391506. The black telephone rang and rang in her dream, but nobody answered.

The thread of an old lament, wordless at first, ran through her mind when her thoughts strayed to the fate of her childhood home. It was like an underwater snag in a fast-flowing creek, catching at things in the current, snarling the yabby-lines. Words rose to the surface like bubbles, assembled themselves in the shape of a song.

 Where are the daughters of Rosewood?
 Gone, never to return.
 Across the sea, across the sky,
 Where the blue-eyed geese fly…



Chapter 30


ROSEWOOD BURNING


Anna had not witnessed Rosewood’s final moments, but she had pieced together her own version of events from fragmentary accounts and speculation.

A matter of months after what proved to be her final, solitary visit, a fire had broken out one night and razed the farmhouse to the ground. Old Vance’s lifelong phobia about incendiary kerosene fridges seemed to have come to pass, except that, as nobody was living at Rosewood, the cause of the fire was a matter for conjecture. Since it had broken out late at night, nobody had been on hand to see or call the fire brigade, until the blaze became so fierce that neighbours on the new estate where Old Sam Payne had lived were troubled in their sleep by smoke, and raised the alarm.

A heat-warped container thought to have held methylated spirits, found in the smouldering ruins, seemed to point to arson, but as the house had not been insured by the new owner, there was no logical motive. Miss Fermor had reappeared, as if out of nowhere, and had been seen in the days preceding the fire, prowling the overgrown garden, stooping to peer among the weeds, poking about with her stick, gesticulating and muttering.

Nobody could communicate with Miss Fermor any longer. She was incredibly old, more than half demented, and full of spite. She had muttered to neighbours across the way about the demons at Rosewood, pointing with the stick she carried, part as support, part as weapon, and rolling her eyes, but they had taken no notice. What would a crazed old woman know?

Rosewood was deserted and derelict; even the town hooligans who had been through the house once or twice with their spray-cans kept away. It gave them the creeps. Rosewood’s mysterious field of force made trespassers so intensely conscious of being intruders, they could not stay. Not even Anna could feel comfortable there.

Rosewood was haunted, though not by demons. But she could readily imagine Miss Antoinette Fermor’s unstable mind, receptive to invisible presences, believing there were demons at large in the tangled garden at Rosewood. She could imagine the crazy old dame returning, armed with a can of meths, setting the whole place alight to burn like a torch as she brandished her stick and laughed wildly. ‘That’ll teach ye, ye varmints and creatures of Satan. Ye shall have no place to hide but in Hell!’

Anna imagined the gnarled, scrawny limbs jerking about like a marionette as the dry shell cracked and exploded and shattered, the rafters collapsed with their burden... the flames more brilliant than the bracts of bougainvillaea run wild that they consumed like paper, the palm fronds igniting, erupting in sprays and jets and fountains before drifting to earth as weightless wisps of soot. She could imagine, but there was no proof, and Antoinette Fermor had vanished again. Perhaps the fire had been accidental, perhaps an act of God, who could tell?

Had Jeannie not been far away at the time, the burning of Rosewood might just as easily have been her handiwork. It was somehow in keeping with her spirit, so quickly galled by constraint, too impulsive to distinguish between resistance and destruction. And Jeannie had come to hate everything Rosewood had stood for so intensely, that burning it to the ground would have been the least she’d have liked to do. Does the prisoner regret the loss of the jail?
 
Rosewood had been obliterated, yet Anna’s shocked grief was tinged with relief. Now no stranger could trespass in the house and garden she regarded so jealously as her family’s exclusive property. Nobody could comment on the shabby rooms, or fell the trees. No stranger’s hands or feet could now defile the empty sanctuary, and tormenting visions of her childhood home, Old Vance’s dream, lonesome, decaying, could be laid to rest.
 
It struck her as a particularly bitter irony that Old Vance, who had consigned to the flames almost all reminders of his earlier life, should now have the object of his passion consumed by fire: Rosewood, in which he had invested so much, if not all of himself. She was glad he could not know of it. Strange, too, that she should come to see fire as an agent of mercy, who as a child had wanted to preserve every scrap of the past, so as to learn and know and understand and remember things. She had come to feel differently now: that fire was preferable to neglect and decay.

Anna felt the kind of sorrow mingled with pity and relief that comes in response to the death of a loved one whose prolonged suffering finds release. Rosewood had released her from the need for further pilgrimage, and yet, as with a parent’s death, it was a conditional reprieve. Phoenix-like, the dream-image persisted, rising out of its own ashes.