Read Online Playing Beatie Bow by Ruth Park - Free Book Online

the family Bible, and to this she shook her head.
    ‘You’re never godless?’ asked Granny anxiously. After some thought Abigail understood she was asking about religion.
    ‘I don’t remember,’ she whispered.
    ‘Poor bairnie,’ said Granny. ‘Dovey, send Beatie to her when she comes from school, to speak to her of Scripture. It may bring the child’s memories back to her. Not to remember our Father in Heaven!’
    At the thought of her own father, Abigail’s eyes filled with genuine tears. Oh, what was he doing? Thinking her kidnapped or murdered, comforting her mother or blaming her for letting her go home alone?
    ‘Be brave, lass,’ said Granny. ‘You can do no less.’
    Abigail looked blurrily at the strong clear-cut features of the old woman. ‘All right for you,’ she thought; ‘you aren’t desperate like me.’
    While she lay there the sounds of the nineteenth-century Rocks rose up from out of the street, horses slipping and sliding on slimy cobbles, a refrain from a concertina, market cries: ‘Tripe, all ’ot and juicy! Cloes prarps! Windsor apples! Rag ’n’ bones, bring ’em out! China pears! Lamp oil, cheapest in town!’
    From somewhere near the water came the sweetly harsh summons of a bugle. ‘That’ll be the Dawes Point Battery,’ thought Abigail, marvelling. ‘Fancy – real live troops there, and muskets and drums! And all I’ve ever seen in my time are bits of old wall, and the cannons, and grass, and people sitting under the Bridge eating their lunches.’
    Disagreeable things happened to her. She had to use the chamber-pot, while Dovey bustled around tossing up her pillows and pulling the coverlet straight. Of course, it had to be done. Abigail realised that the lavatory, if there was one, would be a little shed at the bottom of the yard, with a can and a wooden seat with a hole in it. But even though Dovey was matter-of-fact about it, Abigail hated it.
    To keep her mind off her embarrassment she thought how much her mother would enjoy seeing Dovey. She was so like one of the Victorian china dolls that sold for huge prices at Magpies that Abigail wondered if the dolls’ faces hadn’t been modelled on those of real girls. She had a tiny chin with a dent in it, blue eyes that Abigail thought bulgy, and a little soft neck with circular wrinkles running around it.
    Her real name was Dorcas Tallisker, and she limped because when they were young Judah had run over the cliff with her in a trundle-cart and her thigh-bone had been broken. Sometimes it stiffened up, and then she had to walk with a stick; but the warm New South Wales weather had made the pain lessen.
    The Orkney isles are harsh country,’ she said, ‘for all there is such beauty there – the heather, and the wild birds crying, and the great craigs and the magic stones.’
    ‘Magic stones?’ asked Abigail.
    ‘Aye,’ said Dovey simply. ‘Built by dwarfies, ye ken, and even giants so they say, long before the Northmen came; for Orkney folk is half Scots and half Norwegian, so ’tis said. Ah, I would that I was there now, milking my wee cow Silky.’
    Sad of face, she helped Abigail back to bed and went away with the chamber-pot covered with a cloth. Soon she was back with a little brass shovel with a few red hot coals upon it. Abigail watched with interest as Dovey put sprigs of dried lavender on the coals and waved the resultant thin blue smoke about the room.
    ‘There now! You’re all sweet again.’
    ‘Can’t I have the window open?’ asked Abigail.
    Dovey was shocked. ‘But the spring air brings so many fluxes and congestions in the chest,’ she said. ‘And you’re still no’ yourself, ye ken, Abby.’
    So it was spring. But how? For when she had left home it was already lowering with winter. She recalled how Beatie, in her thin dress and shawl, had shuddered with cold.
    How could it be? Where had all the time gone?
    But she was unable to puzzle further, because footsteps came up the stairs. Dovey,