Chapter 9
Fiona
I pull the door open an hour later to find Jack waiting with a tray of coffees in one hand, a brown cardboard box in the other.
“Fi,” he says warmly as he leans forward to brush an innocent kiss against my cheek. “Aurelia told me you usually get a black
coffee. Hope that’s okay?”
“Perfect,” I lie. I’m still so anxious after the events of the morning, I need more caffeine like I need a hole in my head.
“Come in.”
I back hastily out of the way so that he can walk into the foyer. He looks around, eyes going wide.
“I reckon it’s been almost forty years since I was in this house. I forgot how imposing it is.”
“Imposing?” I repeat, looking around and trying to view it through fresh eyes. “That’s an interesting way to put it.”
“Not in a bad way. It’s just that rich crimson and the dark wood paneling and the stained glass . . . there’s a feel of historical
luxury here. It reminds me of beautiful old hotels I’ve stayed at from time to time, especially in Europe. Does it feel homey
to you?”
“No place has ever felt more like home to me than this one.”
Is that still true, even after this weird week? I’m not even sure anymore.
I lead Jack through to the kitchen, then retrieve some of the freshly washed plates from the pantry, along with some cutlery.
Jack opens the box to reveal an assortment of slices.
We talk easily for a while—catching up. I tell him about the girls’ university studies and he tells me about the vet practice he’s bought into in town.
When we’ve finished eating, his gaze drifts to the door at the back of the room—the one that opens out onto a landing, and then into the backyard.
“I remember when that garden looked like something that belonged at a British castle.”
“Well, my friend, it doesn’t anymore,” I laugh, and I push back my chair. “Want to take a look?”
We step out onto the landing together to survey it. This enormous space was once broken up into garden “rooms,” discrete,
enclosed pockets surrounded by formal hedges and roses. It was a wonderland for play and adventure when Jon and I were small—we
had this whole make-believe game where the backyard was a house of its own. One room featured a flowing fountain—that was
our kitchen. Another room had a wide, flat bed of creeping vines and flowers and a swinging chair in the middle—that was my
bedroom. There were hedges and roses everywhere, among a sea of ash and archer and birch trees, dogwoods, maples and oaks.
There are hardly any deciduous trees native to Australia, but in autumn, this yard was always awash with oranges and reds
and yellows. In spring, the roses and the camelias burst into bloom.
That English-style garden was highly impractical in this arid climate and it took a massive amount of work for Tad and his
gardeners to keep it alive and thriving. I’m not sure I blame Jon for letting it go like this. The cost to maintain the previous
garden over the course of that last drought would have been obscene.
Any plant that required regular watering is long dead, and plants that could endure the dry have survived too well so they’ve spread, meaning the structure and shape of the gardens are entirely gone. Some of the imported trees have
died and are reduced to skeletal forms, empty branches stretching out as if they were reaching for help as they perished.
Even so, there are trees everywhere, from sprawling oaks to palm trees and wattles, plus the inevitable gums—river red gum,
yellow box, ironbark. Some are young enough that they must have seeded somehow over the last ten years, but most of those
are in inconvenient spots. One is at least as tall as I am but it has sprouted right in the middle of a brick path. The wooden
seat on the swinging chair has rotted through, and the fountain is crushed beneath the fallen branches of a peppercorn tree.
Even the paths are looking worse for wear, uneven as the soil has moved over the years and as weeds have popped up between
the pavers.
“The house restoration is going to be tough, but the bones are good,” I tell Jack. “This yard is a whole other story.”
“What are you going to do with it? Will you restore it the way it was?”
“No,” I say, shaking my head. “I don’t want to spend money and waste water trying to keep plants alive here that won’t naturally
thrive with this climate. And the space also needs to be reverent, because . . .” I point to the cemetery, situated just before
the tall concrete wall that bounds this property and separates it from Jack’s family farm and the mirrored three hundred acres
on the other side. The graves are less than one hundred metres from the house, and through the chaos that is the rest of the
garden, I can see that the grass around them is wildly overgrown.
“I always wondered about the cemetery.”
“Do you want to brave the jungle and walk up there to have a look?”
“Sure,” he says. He steps from the small platform that hangs off the back of the house, down onto the brick path, then reaches back to offer me his hand.
The stairs are a little rickety but even so, I don’t need help navigating them.
I let him help me anyway, and while I do not hate the feel of his hand against mine, I let go the minute my feet hit the solid ground.
“People never visit to lay flowers up there?” he asks me as we start to gingerly make our way towards the back of the block,
around towering weeds and downed branches and thick grass.
“No, most of the Fowler family moved away by the 1930s for one reason or another.”
“The Fowler family built the house?”
“Yes, Flora and Charles.”
“Well, spill the beans. What was their story?”
“I don’t want to bore you,” I laugh weakly. “I tend to get too excited about this subject and . . .” I feel awkward enough
talking to Jack without boring him to death. Even Lucas, who worked with me at our consultancy, would sometimes visibly check
out while I was rabbiting on about this project or that.
“I wouldn’t have asked if I wasn’t interested.”
“I should warn you, when I start talking about this kind of history, most people’s eyes glaze over.”
“Maybe you’re just better at historical architecture than you are at assessing body language. I’m sure it’s fascinating.”
“It is,” I say. “But it’s not a pleasant story.”
“I do have some sense of that. My grandfather told me once that someone awful is buried here.”
“Yes, most people in town know that much,” I say. “It’s even worse than that, though. In 1860, Charles Fowler traveled from
England to Sydney to start a new life in the colony.
Gold had just been discovered here in Forbes and people were flocking to try their luck.
Within a few days of his arrival, he discovered a chunk of gold.
A big one. It wasn’t a nugget, rather a mass of gold encased in some quartz, but it weighed close to three hundred kilograms in total.
To this day, it’s still the biggest specimen of its kind found in this country. ”
“Wow. Talk about luck!”
“The payoff from the gold extracted from the specimen was life-changing, but Charles was determined to invest it wisely and
he was equally determined to keep busy. He opened a general store here in town, on Templar Street. That went well enough for
the first few years, but as I’m sure you know, the tens of thousands of people who came here looking for gold all left once
the discoveries started to dwindle. Charles had fallen in love with Flora Smythe, a farmer’s daughter, and exactly ten months
after their wedding their first son, Trevor, was born, and the babies just kept on coming after that. By 1870, Charles and
Flora had eleven children, and the general store was quieter than ever, so he decided to use some of his earnings from the
gold to buy some land to start farming. He selected the original plot of land here—the six hundred acres encompassing your
family’s farm, the Wilkinsons’ and this block—mostly because of the creek and the waterholes.”
Even in the longest droughts, that creek still has a trickle of water, and the waterholes have been a reliable source of water
for the original occupants of this land for tens of thousands of years.
“Charles had underestimated how difficult it would be to build his dream mansion all the way out here and the house took a
lot longer to finish than he’d anticipated. It was 1886 before the family were able to move in. By then, Trevor was twenty-four
years old and had just married a woman named Eileen. As a wedding gift, Charles decided to give Trevor a little under half
of the land so he could earn a living to support a potential family.”
“Did Trevor get my farm, or the Wilkinsons’?”
“The Wilkinsons’,” I tell Jack. My throat tightens. “It was a generous gift. Your family farm is beautiful, of course, but the Wilkinsons’ farm has the waterholes, and Charles thought that would make running stock on the land easier.”
“Was there no cemetery in town at the time? Is that why the family are buried here?” Jack asks as he lifts the remains of
a small gumtree off the path and pushes it off to the side to clear the way.
“No, the cemetery was already established in town. But Ezekiel was the youngest son and he died just after the family moved
in here. He was just six years old. Diphtheria, I believe. I assume poor Flora and Charles just wanted to keep him close.
They weren’t breaking any rules at the time and after that . . . I guess it made sense that they’d all be laid to rest together.”
We’ve reached the cemetery and there they are, right near the edge. Flora and Charles Fowler, resting beneath grand granite
headstones carved with their names and dates of birth. Their graves both have thick concrete caps across the top, each cracked
across the middle as the soil settled and shifted over the years.
“So these are all of the children?” Jack asks.
I point to a small grave, with a carved concrete angel on top. “That’s Ezekiel’s. The rest of the kids all survived to adulthood,
beating the odds at the time before childhood immunizations.”