Playing Beatie Bow (23 page)

‘That was the smallpox year,’ said Abigail. ‘Oh, poor little Dovey, poor little baby. And Granny … she was the most wonderful woman. Isn’t it strange, Robert, even Granny thought that my importance, as the Stranger I mean, was to go back that day of the fire and save Dovey for Judah, so that their children would have two chances of perpetuating the Gift. But it was getting that little monster Gilbert out of the house as well that mattered. Yes, that was what the whole thing was about. I had to save Gibbie, so that he could continue the Bow family and the Gift.’

She pored over the Bible. ‘I suppose there were other children, daughters, perhaps, and some of them had the Gift, too. But whoever has kept the record just hasn’t bothered to put them down.’

‘I guess old lady Beatie just didn’t have time. She was a famous classics scholar and a perfect martinet as headmistress, so Justine says.’

‘The interesting thing is,’ said Abigail, ‘that you believe all I say.’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘First of all because it’s you telling me, and secondly because it wouldn’t occur to me not to. I mean, I had this sensation the moment I met you, that you were so familiar I knew all about you except that it had slipped my mind for a moment. I spent that whole night trying to remember what it was.’

‘I stayed awake, too,’ confessed Abigail. But when he asked her why she would not tell him.

He turned over the page. ‘There’s lots more room for the family to go on,’ he said, ‘and already painted. Funny, these flowers are wattle and Christmas bells. They must have been done after the Bows and Talliskers arrived here as immigrants.’

Abigail thought that perhaps Dovey had painted those flowers because entwined amongst them were sprigs of lavender, bog cotton and grass of Parnassus. Poor homesick Dovey, a wife for such a short while, a widow for only two years.

‘You would have liked Granny Tallisker,’ said Abigail. She sighed. ‘You won’t care for mine; she’s even worse than she used to be.’

She was silent, thinking of that old woman, Alice Tallisker, her infinite goodness and strength, and how she had said that the link between Abigail and the Talliskers and Bows was no stronger than the link between that family and Abigail. The theory she had had when wandering The Rocks four years before – that time was a great black vortex down which everything disappeared – no longer made sense to her. She saw now that it was a great river, always moving, always changing, but with the same water flowing between its banks from source to sea.

How on earth had ugly, tempestuous little Beatie managed to get as far as being headmistress of Fort Street High, the foremost school of its time?

‘I’ll find out how, some day,’ thought Abigail. ‘Maybe I helped a little, but I’ll tell Robert about that some other day.’

Her mother came into the kitchen. ‘What on earth are you kids doing?’

‘Just fooling around,’ said Robert. He was still shy with Kathy and Weyland. ‘Nothing much.’

‘Just playing Beatie Bow,’ said Abigail. She knew her mother did not understand, but that didn’t matter. Robert did.

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First published in Australia by Thomas Nelson Australia 1980

First published in Great Britain by Kestrel Books 1981

Published in Puffin Books 1982

This edition published by Penguin Group (Australia), 2010

Copyright © Ruth Park, 1980

The moral right of the author has been asserted

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ISBN: 978-1-74-253086-4