Now Lisa tucked the plastic-wrapped package under her arm, closed and relocked the trunk, and went back upstairs. The blue light of evening had settled over the house and garden, and through the window she saw the half-sphere of the moon. In one week it would be the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year. The streets of Katoomba would be filled with people dressed as mythical beasts and monsters for the town’s popular Winter Magic Festival, a modern-day Neo-Druidic celebration. Ulrich would be in the mountains by then; maybe he would think it was fun.
She poured herself a glass of red and sat by the fire, then took out the manuscript and laid it on the coffee table. The pages had begun to yellow and the typewriter text had faded to a lighter shade of purplish-black.
‘The Castle of Ice’
For Brün and Peggy
Lisa started. A story for Brün. And Peggy? Who on earth was Peggy? She began to read:
Once upon a time, a young princess named Sparrow lived in a castle on a cliff above a great forest. From the giant blue-green blocks of its foundations to its finely carved finials and flagpoles, the castle was made entirely of ice. ‘What fool builds a castle out of ice?’ whispered the townsfolk. ‘One day a fire will melt it to the ground.’
Cursed by a terrible enchantment, the castle lacked all love and warmth. The king was old and his young queen dreamed of the day she would take a new husband. The old king so cherished his daughter that he had made her a pretty garden with a roof of ice and ice-carved trees and flowers and rabbits and squirrels. But Sparrow longed to feel the sun on her face and be among living creatures.
On the morning of her twelfth birthday, the princess was greeted in her garden by a handsome satin bowerbird who dropped a blue petal at her feet. ‘How did you get here?’ she gasped. The handsome bird then hopped away to the garden wall and tapped three times. A crack appeared and Princess Sparrow squeezed through the narrow space which closed up behind her.
Across the snow-blanketed ground she followed the trail of blue petals down the rocky precipice into the vast, whispering forest below. The Wald. Here, silver-white trees flowed like forked lightning up to the sky. Insects zinged and hummed in the sun’s warmth and parrots screeched in blurs of cochineal and Prussian blue.
In the midst of a grove of the lightning trees stood a cottage with a roof thatched from paperbark. An old blind woman stacked firewood at the door. She was the Witch of the Wald and her wisdom about this land and its animals was legendary.
‘Come live with me for one year and be my eyes and hands, and I will show you the secrets of the Wald. At the end of that year, you will be free to go. But you must make me one promise: you will not speak a word to anyone but me.’
The princess agreed and lived with the old blind woman. She collected kindling from windfall and chopped firewood for the stove. She fetched water from the small brown creek and trapped rabbits for their supper. She harvested greens from the garden and scared birds away from the fruit trees.
The old woman kept her promise. She showed Sparrow all the secrets of the Wald. The sleeping hollows of the snakes, their coils of muscled beauty in copper, chocolate and bronze. The basking spots of the lizards with their blue tongues, frilled collars and thorny skulls. The meeting places of the kookaburras, competing like sideshow spruikers with luminescent vests and raucous laughter. She taught Sparrow the secret language of these creatures and for months at a time Sparrow heard no human voice, only the voices of the forest.
And then one day, as Sparrow was fetching water at the creek, she saw the reflection of a young man, tall and handsome with hair the colour of sunlight and eyes the colour of sky. He spoke to her in a foreign tongue she did not understand. She pressed her finger to her lips to show him she must not speak. The young man took her in his arms and kissed her. They both heard the distant baying of hounds and the horns of the royal huntsmen who roamed the Wald looking for the princess. The young man kissed her again and fled. The princess never spoke a word of her secret love to the Witch of the Wald and she never broke her vow of silence.
She met her love by the creek every day and their silent passion grew stronger. The young man gave her a golden ring to make her his wife. She became big with child and gave birth to a daughter. With only one day left till her year with the witch expired, she left her swaddled infant with her husband and returned to prepare the witch’s supper. Tomorrow she would leave the Wald forever to begin a new life.
The following morning she went to the creek with her few possessions packed for the journey. Little did she know that the bowerbird followed her, dropping a trail of petals.
Overjoyed at the sight of her husband and baby, Sparrow called out ‘Over here, my loves!’
The witch stepped out from behind a tree and removed her cowl.
It was not the old blind woman under the cowl but Sparrow’s mother. ‘Your love has betrayed you!’ cried the cruel queen, revealing herself to be a powerful witch who years ago enchanted the king and his castle. ‘The Witch of the Wald was my wicked sister who lured you into her forest so you would take over my reign. She has paid for her treason!’
The queen’s guards dragged out the body of the dead witch and laid it before the grief-stricken princess.
‘And now let me show you the true face of your unnatural love!’ The Queen cast a spell on the handsome young man and the infant girl surrounded by her huntsmen. In the blink of an eye, father and child turned into a giant bear and baby cub, with eyes of blue and fur of golden-brown. The bear bellowed in anger, snatching up his cub and fleeing.
‘Please call off the hunters,’ the princess begged her mother.
‘Only if you surrender your child-cub to me and renounce your right to the throne,’ demanded the queen.
But it was already too late. The head huntsman raised his crossbow and the bolt pierced the giant bear’s heart. The princess cradled her husband’s head as he died.
In his own tongue Sparrow told the satin bowerbird to pluck out the eyes of the wicked queen who had killed his mistress and deceived him. She called to the crows and currawongs and commanded them to snatch hot coals from the cottage stove and drop them like petals along the winding paths of the Wald. The birds did her bidding and soon the entire ocean of trees was ablaze. As the flames roared over the snowy berg, the battlements and turrets of the magnificent castle gushed with tears. Then all the courtiers heard a crack like the fusillade of a thousand cannons. The giant blue-green blocks of the foundations split asunder and the castle came tumbling down, crushing all inside and drowning the rest in the deluge that flowed over the precipice. The blinded queen, her guards and huntsmen all perished.
With the queen’s spell broken by her death, the young cub was transformed back into a baby girl. The whispering forest came back to life too, reborn from the flood. The bear-prince’s spirit could still be heard, roaring in the woods, every winter. Within earshot of the mighty waterfall and by the banks of the new river that flowed through the Wald, Sparrow and her daughter made their home in the witch’s cottage, where they lived together happily ever after.
As Lisa turned over the final page, she found a black-and-white photo tucked between it and a sheet of plain cardboard. It was a photo of a young man looking out a window. His blond hair flared slightly in the strong sunlight that flooded the room behind him. There was no doubt who it was. Brün. Her mother’s German boyfriend. Her first love.
Lisa sat in the deafening quiet of her mother’s house, thunderstruck. This strange tale over which her mother had laboured with love for six years was unlike anything else Monika Fox had ever written. A universe away from the cosy, comic world of Kitty Koala and her furry friends. Why had Monika spent so much time crafting such a dark story with its barely disguised allegory of the Palace and her parents’ troubled marriage? What did it mean to her, this odd tale which she had finally found the courage to write in her late sixties? In her heart, Lisa knew exactly what this fable was: an act of public confession safely hidden behind
the veil of a fairytale. Such tales always told the truth.
Monika had always loved fairytales and fables, the stories of Aesop, the Brothers Grimm and Perrault. She had read them aloud to her children when they were small. Lisa recalled the name Bruin, the character of the brown bear in Reynard the Fox, a collection of French and German fairytales that Monika kept on the bookshelf in her study.
A pile of these treasured books from Monika’s own childhood had also turned up in the trunk with their well-thumbed pages, creased spines and handwritten messages in fountain pen over the frontispiece: With Love to My Clever Story-Teller, from Mama, Christmas 1941 and To the Girl Who Got Lost in The Woods And Was Found Again, Happy 8th Birthday Monz, January 1938.
So what to make of ‘The Castle of Ice’? The two sisters, the blind woman and the queen, were both powerful witches who acted in the role of ‘mother’ to the girl. They were clearly twin aspects of the one person, thought Lisa, a very dark portrait of Laura, the self-admiring beauty, married to an older man over whom she cast a spell.
But that was not the clue Lisa was interested in. At the heart of Monika’s strange fairytale was a vow of silence around a secret love and a pregnancy. This part of the story climaxed with the demand to surrender an illegitimate child, the result of an unnatural union between the princess and a bear. This Bruin is an outsider who does not belong in the Wald and must be banished or killed. The story was not only dedicated to Monika’s young German lover but she had even hidden a photo of him inside the manuscript.
And then there was the dedication: ‘For Brün and Peggy’. The child in the story was a little girl, a female bear cub that the queen demanded be given away. The ending saw this child and her mother reunited to live in the cottage ‘happily ever after’. Lisa felt a door fly open inside her mind. What else could this story mean? This had to be the story of Monika’s pregnancy to Brün. Her mother’s diary ended abruptly in August 1946. From that day on, Brün vanished, never to be mentioned again. Until this story.
‘For Brün and Peggy’. If Peggy was the little girl in the story who had to be given up, Monika was not alone in a generation of women who had been forced to surrender their babies. It would explain so much, Lisa thought, her mind racing ahead, desperate to piece the entire mystery together. Why her mother could not love Lisa and Tom properly. Why she could not risk exposing herself again to the pain of loss. Why the only children she could love were her distant readers.
Lisa sat back. Of course, the existence of Peggy, her half-sister who was now either dead or a woman in her sixties, was pure conjecture, based on an unpublished fairy story hidden in a trunk. But it had a ring of truth that Lisa felt reverberate in her bones and skin, in her heart and her head.
Who could she share this mad, half-guessed secret with? Her brother? Luke? Or was it finally the moment for her to confront Monika? To learn the truth before time ran out. Whatever the cost.
CHAPTER 29
* * *
Monika
Benedict Street Maternity Home, January 1947
She awoke to the squeak of shoes on linoleum and the smack of Dettol and bleach in her nostrils. Her left hand still clung to the white iron bedhead behind her. She remembered clutching it, like a drowning woman clutching a life buoy, as she began to drift into nothingness. Was it last night? Yesterday? When was it? She couldn’t recall exactly. Her eyelids fluttered open. The room was semi-dark, silent. A breeze knocked the blinds about, rippling through the tall, barred windows of the dorm. She felt its coolness, as welcome as a wet compress against her forehead.
It was going be a long, hot summer. When the brown-brick hostel grew too stifling and the breezes arrived, the sisters took the babies into the garden for some fresh air. They draped blankets and netting over the cribs in the shade of the giant pine trees. With the breeze lifting the gull-wings of their white caps, they patrolled the cribs to make sure no insects dropped onto their charges.
A tremendous throng of cicadas had gathered in the pines. They pulsed their mating thrum, falling in and out of rhythm with each other like the string section of a symphonic orchestra. How old was she the last time she’d heard this music? Five? Six? It was so easy to forget how loud and maddening this drone became, day after bloody day.
Monika had been unconscious for a long time. She moved her head to one side. Slow. Heavy, foggy. She wondered if any of the other girls were in the dorm today. The curtains were pulled shut on either side of her bed. She could not see or hear anyone. They came and went so often. Monika would be going home soon, they told her. Once the paperwork was done. What was that? A shadow flickering at the back of her mind. The ghost of her dream. Her memory.
The bush, hot and dry. Asgard Swamp. December 1937. Six weeks before her eighth birthday. A picnic near the big rock, pink granite and sandstone, shaded by gums. A rock with all the right footholds and finger holes for children to climb. A fort for playing cowboys and Indians, a hideout for bushies and bobbies, a castle for crusaders and Saracens. Perfect for battles, chasings, hide-and-seek. Her sister, Lottie, just turned nine, in plaits and a new dress. Her brother, Alan, four, still in dungarees. Their two best friends, Maggie Bosely and Dottie Wilson. And the adults: the two nannies, Meg and Joan; the housekeeper, Mrs Moxham, and the driver, Charlie Pyke.
Mama and Papa are away on a trip in Europe. They’ll be back before Christmas. ‘We’ll take you to Jervis Bay for the hols,’ Papa promised. Monika is still not impressed she didn’t get to fly in a giant Zeppelin like the one in the postcard.
After lunch, comes the big fight. Some stupid thing. Lottie demanding her sister’s favourite golliwog, Mr Allsorts. ‘I’ll tell Papa you bunged up his tennis racquet practising with rocks!’ ‘No, I didn’t. Liar!’ ‘You’re the liar!’
Monika running off through the long, scratchy grass, away from the rock, away from the fire trail. Hiding behind a pyramid of purple stone. Hearing the adults calling, calling. Voices growing more urgent and desperate. Running off again when Charlie comes too close. Breaking the buckle on one of her brand-new pair of white Mary Janes. Taking them off and tucking them into her pockets, with her socks balled up inside. Mama would kill her if she lost those. Don’t think about what she’d do to Monika for scaring the wits out of Mrs Moxham and poor Meg and Joan. ‘It’s all Lottie’s fault. For telling lies!’ That’s what she’d say. And they’d be so cross with Lottie for upsetting her.
Scrub, rocks, gum trees, the same scene everywhere she turns. She stops thinking about how cross she is with Lottie and starts looking for the way back. Not sure where the fire trail is. Voices have all died, drowned out by waves of cicada-drone. A party of painted skippers dances past her head. Ants are biting the soft flesh between her toes like hot needles and she picks them out urgently. Crushes them.
She realises this is not a game anymore. She’s really lost. She cups her mouth and calls, ‘Coo-ee!’ Waits. Silence. Calls again, louder this time, sounding a bit scared, even to herself. ‘Coo-ee!’ There is a cockatoo screech in the distance and the sound of the wind passing through the canopy. ‘Help! Charlie! Help!’ she screams. Her voice sounds puny and weak. Silence.
She begins to run, barefoot, through the scrub. She stumbles and twists her ankle. The dream speeds everything up, chops bits out. She is sitting on a low rock, out of breath, rubbing her ankle which begins to swell. Her hair is soaked. She takes off her straw hat and feels how damp it is. She is feeling sick from the heat. She is dirty, sticky with sweat. Her dress is torn. Her ankle is very sore. She is tempted to cry but tells herself, Don’t be a baby!
What time is it? She looks up at the sun to see how far it has slid down the sky. Uncle Mel tried to teach her the compass points and how to find directions by the sun. Put a stick in the ground. Mark the shortest shadow at midday. That’ll give you a line north–south: the shadow points south and the base of the stick north. And then you have to work out east and west. Easier when Mel explains it.
He’s not her real uncle, of cou
rse. His name is Melbourne Ward and he’s the son of Papa’s best friend, Mr Hugh Ward. He was an actor once like his father and then became the biggest collector of crabs in the whole world. Now he’s mostly collecting the skulls and bones of Aborigines, and masks and paintings and stuff. As long as Monika’s papa agrees, he plans to build a museum for his crabs and bones next door to the Palace. Her papa calls him ‘the Wild Man’ and says someone should put him in a museum. Even so, Monz likes spending time in the bush with Mel, who knows the names of all the flowers and animals. She wishes he was here now.
The dream speeds up again. Monika is feeling dizzy. Her lips are parched and her temples throb. It has not rained for weeks. She has to find water. Mel has told her to watch the birds. Birds always know where water is. She sees a flock of wild pigeons flying over the swamp grasses, dipping low as if ready to drink. She will follow the path of their flight. She walks but she is limping now as her ankle hurts.
At the top of the next rise, she turns left and staggers down a narrow trail. In the distance are cliffs, gold in the afternoon light. Monika stops and looks down into a sea of gum trees, lapping the great fractured ramparts of rock. Ridge piled up behind ridge. And then she smells it. The sting in her nostrils. Smoke. She looks to the horizon. A pillar of dark grey smoke is being pumped into the sky. It is a bushfire in the next valley. It is heading this way.
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