Palace of Tears Read online

  Angie loved Mr Fox’s magnificent, absurd hotel. In fact, it was her one true great love. But ... today Angie was so cross, so fed up with everybody and everything, she would probably cheer if a wave of fire swept over the cliff and engulfed the Palace and all its guests.

  A sweltering summer’s day, January 1914: the charismatic and ruthless Adam Fox throws a lavish birthday party for his son and heir at his elegant clifftop hotel in the Blue Mountains. Everyone is invited except Angie, the girl from the cottage next door. The day will end in tragedy, a punishment for a family’s secrets and lies.

  In 2013, Fox’s granddaughter Lisa, seeks the truth about the past. Who is this Angie her mother speaks of: ‘the girl who broke all our hearts’? Why do locals call Fox’s hotel the ‘palace of tears’? Behind the grandeur and glamour of its famous guests and glittering parties, Lisa discovers a hidden history of passion and revenge, loyalty and love.

  A grand piano burns in the night, a seance promises death or forgiveness, a fire rages in a snowstorm, a painter’s final masterpiece inspires betrayal, a child is given away. With twist upon twist, this lush, strange mystery withholds its shocking truth to the very end.

  Julian Leatherdale’s first love was theatre. On graduation, he wrote lyrics for four satirical cabarets and a two-act musical. He discovered a passion for popular history as a staff writer, researcher and photo editor for Time-Life’s Australians At War series. He later researched and co-wrote two Film Australia–ABC documentaries Return to Sandakan and The Forgotten Force and was an image researcher at the State Library of New South Wales. He was the public relations manager for a hotel school in the Blue Mountains, where he lives with his wife and two children. Palace of Tears is his first novel.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organisations, places and incidents either are a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  First published in 2015

  Copyright © Julian Leatherdale 2015

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.

  Allen & Unwin

  83 Alexander Street

  Crows Nest NSW 2065

  Australia

  Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100

  Email: [email protected]

  Web: www.allenandunwin.com

  Cataloguing-in-Publication details are available from the National Library of Australia

  www.trove.nla.gov.au

  ISBN 978 1 76011 160 1

  Photograph page i: Hydro Majestic Hotel, New South Wales, c. 1938

  Internal and cover design by Kirby Armstrong

  Cover photograph: ©Ilina Simeonova/Trevillion Images

  Typeset by Bookhouse, Sydney

  For my mother, Helen

  CONTENTS

  PART 1 ANGIE

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  PART 2 ADELINA

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  PART 3 LAURA

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  EPILOGUE

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  CHAPTER 1

  * * *

  Angie

  Meadow Springs, January 1914

  The promise of fire was in the air that morning.

  Crouching inside the hedge, Angie could feel it in the dry, oven heat that pressed against the skin of her face. She could feel it in the beads of perspiration that bubbled on her forehead and the bracelets of moisture clamped around her wrists. She could hear it in the gushing of the hot, violent wind high in the branches of the gum trees overhead.

  Later, what she would remember most clearly was the shimmer down in the valley. Beyond the cottage garden and the cliff, she could see the familiar haze that hung over the gum forest and farmland. But the view from the garden had altered: behind its smoke-blue veil, the valley now rippled and flashed. An ancient seabed millions of years ago, it seemed to be flooded again with a bowl of bright silver water. It was an illusion of course, a trick of the heat and light. How beautiful, thought Angie. Beautiful but frightening. For on a day like this, she knew, a mirage was another portent of fire.

  Here, inside the giant photinia hedge between the cottage and the hotel was Angie’s favourite hiding place. It had been this way since she was small, her secret cave of coolness and red-green dappled light from which she could watch the world come and go. She shared this secret with no one. Except Robbie. She shared everything with Robbie.

  Angie was much taller now and had to squat low in the bed of leaf mulch underfoot, making sure to hitch up the hem of her expensive linen dress. How Freya would howl if she soiled that! She held her wide-brimmed summer hat in her lap to make sure it didn’t snag on the branches; she would repin it as soon as she came out of hiding.

  Through the glossy leaves, Angie spied on the preparations next door. There was her father, in his dungarees, wiping the sweat from his face with his red handkerchief. Freddie and three of his boys from stores had already pitched a big white marquee on the lawn and were now assembling trestle tables in its oblong of shade. Meanwhile Mr Carson and his team of waiters struggled to pin up paper streamers and coloured balloons, which were torn out of their hands by the hot gusts of wind roaring over the cliff edge. She laughed to herself to see poor chubby Benedict, painfully squeezed into his too-tight tunic and trousers, lose a race with a rogue balloon that bounced six times across the grass and then soared high over the valley, free from his beefy clutches.

  When would the guests arrive? she wondered as the hedge shuddered under another onslaught of wind. Overhead, a sulphur-crested cockatoo, blown off course, shrieked indignantly. This wind brought no relief, only blasts of more heat and clouds of dust and dead leaves.

  What a day to hold a party!

  The trestle tables were now covered in snowy-white damask, held down with pewter tablecloth weights in the shape of koalas and kangaroos. A gold sash festooned each chair. Mr Carson paced back and forth, overseeing his waiters as they painstakingly measured each table setting with their little rulers and laid out the Palace’s best silverware embossed with the hotel’s elaborately scrolled ‘P’. Mr Hawthorne, the general manager, emerged from his office to speak briefly with Mr Carson before hurrying away in that brisk, self-important way of his. There was no sign of Mr Fox. Or of Robbie and his governess.

  Angie counted the chairs. A formal sit-down lunch for eighty people at noon on one of the hottest days in Janu
ary. It was such a Mr Fox thing to do. She looked out to the shimmering valley again and sniffed the air. Nothing. Shielding her eyes, she scanned the horizon. Again, nothing. In her eleven years, Angie had already lived through two bad fire seasons. She knew the local wisdom: it was only a matter of time before this hotel on the cliff top would be destroyed by fire. Fox’s Folly, they called it. As if building a luxury hotel in the Australian bush was not insanity enough, what lunacy had possessed Adam Fox to choose this of all places, where, each summer, winds came rolling out of the valley and drove waves of flame up the gorges on either side?

  Angie loved Mr Fox’s magnificent, absurd hotel. In fact, it was her one true great love. But, to her secret shame, the idea of a fire, the grand commotion of it, also excited her. And if she was to be really honest, today Angie was so cross, so fed up with everybody and everything, she would probably cheer if a wave of fire swept over the cliff and engulfed the Palace and all its guests.

  A trickle of sweat ran from her hairline down past her ear and under the lacy edge of her collar. This wretched heat made her itch and squirm but it was not the reason for her temper that morning.

  No, that was something else entirely.

  She was furious with Robbie. It was a fury unlike anything she had ever felt, a knot of anger that had lodged in her chest and would not let her breathe freely. It pressed its fingers against her temples, making them throb and ache. The fact was that her so-called closest friend had invited nearly everyone in Meadow Springs to his thirteenth birthday party. Everyone, that is, except Angie. She was humiliated. And deeply hurt.

  ‘Weak. Just like his father,’ said Freya when she found out. Her mother’s outrage at Angie’s public snubbing only made her feel worse. Her mother had a gift for making anything that upset Angie into a drama about Freya.

  At first Freya had insisted it was a mistake. Maybe the invitation had been lost or overlooked. She asked her husband Freddie, the hotel’s storeman, to make discreet inquiries with the head housekeeper. Mrs Wells usually handled such matters. No invitation, came the reply. It seemed that all the staff and their families had been asked to attend. Except Angie and her mother. Poor Freddie stammered when he delivered the news to his wife and quickly made an excuse to withdraw to his storage sheds on the other side of the hedge.

  When it was clear that morning that no invitation was forthcoming, Freya had stormed about the cottage in one of her worst rages in memory. At such times, she reminded Angie of an avenging angel, her uncombed copper hair like a fiery halo about her pale face, her clenched fists raised as if to smite those who had offended her with lightning bolts of wrath. Angie knew better than to say anything; that would only stoke her mother’s self-righteous anger.

  ‘The nerve!’ cried Freya, still in her nightgown, as she paced the cottage veranda. The salmon-pink battlements and slate-grey dome of the Palace next door could be glimpsed through the trees, above the green barrier of the garden hedge. ‘Who do they think they are? Jumped-up pedlars! We were here first. This is our valley. Ours. And they have the nerve to come and build their ridiculous castle here and carry on like lords of the manor! How dare they!’

  Angie had heard this speech – or versions of it – many times before. She sincerely hoped that her mother’s shouting was being drowned out by the noisy wind in the gums.

  Freya paused for a moment then charged off into her daughter’s bedroom, and returned holding Angie’s linen summer dress with its high, ribbed collar and embroidered skirt. ‘Get dressed. You are going to Robbie’s party.’

  ‘But . . .’ The word escaped her mouth before she could stop herself.

  ‘But nothing!’ shouted Freya. ‘You have as much right to be there as anyone. You are his oldest friend. And the brightest and prettiest of these cow-faced mädchen! Why wouldn’t he want you there? I will not let that woman’ – she spat the word out – ‘humiliate us like this. I will not!’

  ‘That woman’ was Adelina, Adam Fox’s wife. The White Witch, Freya called her, much to Angie’s shocked delight. A woman of mystery, a distant and threatening figure. Stories about the Foxes circulated freely in Meadow Springs, which was hardly surprising given they were the richest family in the Blue Mountains and their hotel one of the most famous landmarks on the eastern seaboard. Angie had heard these stories many times throughout her childhood but still did not know which were to be believed and which were the stuff of gossip.

  Adam was the only son of Patrick Fox, Irish immigrant and fortune-seeker whose top-hat shop in the goldfields of Bendigo had led to a string of drapery stores in Melbourne. Adam took over running the family business at age twenty and guided it through the stormy seas of the 1890s depression. Even more ambitious than his father, Adam then sank his entire inheritance into a one-off venture in 1895: a palatial emporium, modelled on the grand Galeries Lafayette fashion store in Paris. It occupied a whole block in central Sydney and boasted chandeliers, marbled bathrooms and the city’s first electric escalator. A popular expression for someone with overweening confidence became ‘you’ve got more front than Fox’s’. With a flair for self-promotion, Adam emblazoned MR FOX HAS EVERYTHING YOU NEED on coaches, billboards, awnings and even a giant hot-air balloon tethered in Hyde Park. When the balloon came adrift in a high wind and wrapped itself around the flagpole of the department store of his major competitor, Fox lit an extra candle of thanks to the Holy Virgin in St Mary’s. Blessed by higher powers or not, his store was a gamble that paid off handsomely as Adam Fox’s became a household name.

  Everyone knew that his delicate young wife came from a rich, well-established Melbourne family. Rumour had it that her father, also a baron of commerce, only accepted Adam’s proposal of marriage when Old Man Fox sweetened the marital contract with a favourable secret commercial one. As it turned out, the marriage was an excellent investment in its own right. When Adelina inherited her father’s fortune four years later, Adam used it to build his great folly in 1900: the Palace. Despite the naysayers, the Palace proved a resounding financial success over the next ten years and Adam continued to expand and refurbish the hotel using loans secured against his wife’s substantial fortune.

  It was well known that Adelina, as pale and fragile as antique porcelain, had managed to bear Adam a son thirteen years ago before lapsing into a state of near chronic convalescence. She was rarely seen in public – usually shrouded in white and seated in a bath chair – and when the family visited the mountains in the summer she spent most of her time secluded at the Foxes’ private house in Meadow Springs. It was said that she struggled with deep melancholia after the birth of Robbie and that, in her weakened state of mind, she had become convinced her husband had married her only for her money and accused him of cruelty and disloyalty. Her one consolation was her son, whom she smothered with an overbearing, suffocating love. In her bedridden absence, it was the young governess, Miss Blunt, who became her eyes and ears, charged with vigilance over Robbie’s welfare every moment of his day.

  Adelina’s ongoing illness distressed Fox. Not just as a loving husband, so the local gossips insisted, but also as an entrepreneur. Fox’s hotel was founded on the reputation of its hydropathic spa, modelled on the famous health retreats of Europe. Here, guests paid handsome fees to take the healing waters from the local spring (actually imported in steel drums from Baden-Baden in Germany) and a remarkable variety of water cures under the care of a specialist doctor. These expensive health regimes even included the latest fad of ‘sun baths’, whereby ladies and gents were persuaded to lie naked in shallow sand pits, segregated from each other and protected from public view by screens, to be healed by the purifying rays of the sun. While Fox genuinely hoped for his wife’s recovery for her own sake, the failure of the Palace’s spa to find her a permanent cure was a persistent source of embarrassment.

  Whatever the truth of these stories, one thing became increasingly clear to Angie as she got older. The White Witch did not approve of the girl from the cottage as a playmate for her s
on. There was little doubt it was Adelina who had made sure Angie was not invited to Robbie’s thirteenth birthday party.

  This was a new and disturbing development. Despite her tearful pleading and threats, Adelina had failed for seven years to stop Robbie from seeking out Angie’s company during his summer vacations. With a flick of sandy blond hair hanging over restless brown eyes and an impish grin in a sharp-chinned, freckled face, Robbie Fox was a portrait in miniature of his father. He also had his father’s air of reckless Irish charm. He had found so many artful ways to manipulate and lie to his mother and governess that it made Angie think he would do a fine job of running his father’s business one day.

  Angie did not love Robbie Fox. That was ridiculous. He was just the skinny boy from next door who filled her summer holidays with adventures and pranks and games. He was the bush naturalist who caught yabbies and frogs from the creek and kept them in a glass tank in the garages. Who organised sports for the children of hotel guests – skittles and hoop races and leapfrog – and was always the captain at cricket. Who fell off the roof of the machinery shed trying to retrieve a cricket ball and sliced open his knee on the iron sheeting. Who got a belting from his father for the joke he played on Chef Muntz with a blue-tongue lizard, almost giving the poor man a seizure.

  He was just Robbie. But she planned to marry him anyway. And forgive him for not inviting her to his party.

  The canvas of the marquee flapped loudly with yet another gust of wind. Mr Carson and his waiters were now trimming the elaborate flower arrangements on each table: baskets of white and red blossoms tied with silk ribbon. Nearby, bottles of champagne chilled in steel buckets and rows of crystal flutes glinted in the sunlight. A band were setting up near the marquee and spent as much time swatting away flies and rescuing windblown sheet music as they did tuning their instruments.

  You cannot be serious?