Read Online The Small Fortune of Dorothea Q by Sharon Maas - Free Book Online

made deaf by his lies! He walks among ye in many a beautiful guise, so let the words of your Lord stand guard over your heart! Let the sign of the cross be written in light above your heads as you go about your daily lives! Let the Holy Book accompany you on your journey through life…’
    He held up the enormous black Bible and pumped it as if gauging its weight, which Dorothea knew, was several pounds, for, under Pa’s eagle eye, she spent a part of each day strutting about the house with that very same Bible balanced on her head. A young lady must keep a straight back and a high head, Pa said, and the Bible must be her refuge at all times. Only thus could Satan be kept at bay.
    But that fly must be Satan, out to tempt her, for there it was again, tickling the nape of her neck, just beneath the hairline. She wrinkled her face and once again swung her pigtails, keeping her hands folded on her lap. The fly was not one bit bothered. There it was again.
    The game might have gone on all through the sermon but a smothered giggle and some shuffling behind her made Dorothea glance around. And at once she knew.
    It was those dreadful Quint brothers, most specifically, Freddy Quint, the youngest.
    There was not a time when Dorothea had not been aware of the Quint boys. They were an integral part of her childhood. Their jungle backyard swarmed with them, a horde of loud, rambunctious boys who claimed it as hunting territory. Dorothea had never stopped to count them; might as well count a cage full of monkeys, and anyway, throughout the years they had been heard rather than seen, their shrill boy-voices yelling blue murder above the backyard treetops or from the alley that linked their homes. Rumour had it there were eight of them.
    They lived in a big timber house in Lamaha Street, just a few yards down the alleyway from Dorothea’s own house in Waterloo Street. In fact, Dorothea’s upper-storey bedroom window at the back of the house overlooked the Quint backyard and, though you could not see what was going on beneath the treetops, you could certainly hear the yelling and the screaming from the wild games they played. True, as they grew older the yard grew quieter, but somehow their reputation as ‘mad’ and ‘wild’ remained. All boys. No girls. She’d known them all her life but never spoken a word to any of them, because Pa said they were bad company; but mostly because they were boys, and a van Dam girl never went near boys.
    When she had seen them, it was in the street, for they had claimed Waterloo Street – her street! – as part of their territory, Lamaha Street being far too busy for serious boy-action. Most afternoons the Quint boys came tearing around the corner, still in their St Stanislaus school uniforms, into the calm tree-shaded avenue outside the van Dam house, and converted it into bedlam. They would ride back and forth with no hands or perform circus tricks, swinging their lithe boy bodies over their saddles or handlebars, riding backwards or piling on five to a bike, and of course, racing each other up and down the street. They would weave through traffic as if it did not exist, ramming on the brakes till they squealed and rearing up to ride on one wheel, cowboys on thin iron horses.
    Dorothea could not tell one from another, not put names to all the faces, but Freddy, being the wildest of the bunch, had gained Pa’s attention when he, Pa, had caught him up the mango tree last year at the height of the season, with a bucket full of the plumpest mangoes. Pa had chased him away and lodged a formal complaint with his mother, that dark-haired Englishwoman, who had accepted it with an apology on behalf of her son, a dismissal along the lines of ‘boys will be boys’, and a gift; a basket of sweet, ripe, White Lady guavas from the Quints’ own backyard.
    Freddy Quint was the worst of the lot. He was the only one she could identify by name, him being the youngest and thus the smallest. The rest of them