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

seemed simply an amorphous blob of gangling animal maleness; she had not deigned to separate the whole into its separate fidgeting parts. She only knew they were dreadful, because Pa told her so. All of them were older than her; in fact quite a few years older, but Freddy seemed about her age, thirteen. Normally, they’d have met at primary school but Freddy had gone to the liberal private school in Camp Street whereas she, of course, had attended the Mission School in Croal Street. And now he, like all his brothers, was at the all-boys Saint Stansilaus College. Dorothea had attended the female pendant, the all-girls Catholic St Rose’s High School, until, a year ago, Pa had fallen out with the Sister Antony on a small (in his eyes, big) matter of doctrine. Since then Dorothea went to the Government School, Bishops’ High. Pa didn’t like Catholics anyway, and Bishops’ was just as strict. She was safe there, safe from the likes of Freddy Quint.
    But all this was mostly in the past. As the boys grew up, so had the neighbourhood gradually returned to its original state of leafy, sun-filtered serenity; one by one the Quint boys approached the more serious pursuits of manhood, and, occasionally, one or the other abandoned home for studies abroad. Only Freddy remained wild, and, to Dorothea, conspicuous. She had never been this close to him, never spoken to him.
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    N ow , she glanced behind her again, and frowned. He was up to no good, for sure. He sat immediately behind her, hands tucked demurely under his thighs. It was the broad grin across his face that gave him away, and the smothered giggles of his brothers at either side. All eight of them sat in the pew behind her, book-ended by their parents.
    The Quint boys were all tall and lanky, but that was the only resemblance between them. Otherwise, they were as unalike as a random handful of seashells, ranging in skin colour from almost-white through cinnamon to mahogany brown – Freddy being the darkest – and with hair colour and texture ranging between straight blonde to crinkly black. Freddy’s hair was a compromise; a mane of dark curls that hung over his forehead and down his neck, almost as long as a girl’s, over it a wide-brimmed straw hat which he wore constantly, even in church, even though it was by now worn-out and floppy and quite grimy.
    Dorothea wondered why Ma Quint didn’t insist on a better turnout for church; but Ma Quint was herself eccentric; ‘crazy’, was Pa’s word for her, as it was for almost anyone who wasn’t in his congregation. She was a dark-haired Englishwoman with a ‘reputation’; she’d broken all the rules, people whispered, though Dorothea had never quite understood which rules she’d broken. Together with her husband, a dark, tall, African man, she added a few more ingredients to the genetic stew that was British Guiana’s population. As, of course, had Dorothea’s own parents; Pa was white, a first-generation Englishman, and Mums was black, her own parents the children of emancipated slaves.
    Dorothea had often wondered what had brought her parents together; she couldn’t ask directly, of course, but finally she had got to the truth through Miss Percival, the gossipy best friend of Aunt Jemima, her mother’s equally gossipy sister. Giggling, Miss Percival had whispered to her during an unobserved moment at last year’s Easter Revival, held at their house.
    ‘Your father was a handsome man, above that dog collar!’ Miss Percival had said, ‘But most of all, he was white. Your mother was the most ambitious of the Williamson sisters. An unmarried spinster! Getting on in years. And proud. Only the best was good enough for Emily. She wanted a white man, and in the end she caught one.’
    Miss Percival giggled wildly at that and poked a finger into Dorothea’s chest.
    ‘You!’ she said. ‘You were on the way, and what would the world have said if Pastor van Dam had made of her a Fallen Woman?’
    Another wild