Playing Beatie Bow Popular Penguin by Park Ruth

Author:Park, Ruth [Park, Ruth]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780143204879
Publisher: Penguin Australia
Published: 2010-06-28T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 8

In a way, she felt as she had felt when her father went away and left her. Fright, anger and helplessness, the sense of being nobody who could make things happen. But then she had been only ten. Four years of schooling her face to be expressionless, her thoughts to be her private property, had not gone to waste.

After her first despair, she thought, ‘I won’t let them beat me. If that dress is hidden around the house I’ll find it. Or I’ll bribe Beatie, or coax Judah, into telling me where it is.’

She had learnt a lot about herself in this new rough world. Her own thoughts and conclusions of just a month before filled her with embarrassed astonishment when she reviewed them.

‘What a dummo I was! I knew as much about real life as poor little Natty.’

She stopped being silent and distraught and asked Granny if she could help in the house and the shop until whatever it was that she was fated to do as the Stranger was revealed.

Granny put her arms about her. Orkney folk were an undemonstrative people, as she had realised, and Granny’s action touched her. ‘My heart aches for you, Abby, but ’twill be worth it, for you as well as the rest of us. It is my duty to see the Gift handed on. I can do no other.’

Abigail nodded gravely. Granny’s eyes twinkled. ‘And if you are planning on finding your gown, hen, it’s nae guid. It’s where you’ll n’er look for it.’

‘Oh, damn you all!’ Abigail was furious.

‘Fair enough,’ said Granny, her eyes still twinkling.

Still, rather than maunder around with nothing to do, Abigail fitted herself into the household routine. She learnt to rake out the shop fire and carry the ash in pails to the ash-pit in the yard. Some of this ash was saved and sifted and used to make soap. Though many of the inhabitants of The Rocks washed themselves, during their rare personal ablutions, with the harsh lye soap, the Talliskers and Bows used it for laundry soap and never applied it to their skins.

‘You’d be as chapped as a frost-bitten potato in a week, lass,’ explained Granny. They all, even the men, used oatmeal in muslin bags with which to scrub themselves, and as the days went by Abigail noticed her own brown skin taking on the fineness that was characteristic of all the family’s complexions.

She scrubbed and dusted, washed and polished the lamp chimneys, and learnt how to set a wick so that the paraffin (which she called kerosene) burnt clear and without odour.

She did approach Beatie about the dress, but the girl said downrightly she had no idea where it was, and would not tell if she did.

‘But Beatie, if I could escape to my own time, maybe you could come with me, and go to school, and learn all you want, with no one to discourage you.’

A look of intense yearning passed over the younger girl’s face.

‘I’d sell my ten toes

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