The Philosopher's Daughters by Alison Booth

Author:Alison Booth
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: RedDoor Press
Published: 2019-11-21T11:03:38+00:00

Chapter 22

‘Rather Good at Cricket’

The Aboriginal batsman gave the ball a resounding thwack and drove it up into the air. Sarah clapped her hands as she watched it rise in an arc over Henry’s head, far beyond his reach, before descending into the lake beyond the boundary of the Port Darwin cricket field.

‘It’s a six!’ shouted one of the bystanders. ‘There’s no need to run!’

But the batsmen were already racing between the stumps as if their lives depended on it. Sarah laughed in sympathy. She’d been induced to learn the rules of cricket when she’d discovered that Henry played but she hadn’t found them easy. She glanced at Harriet, seated on a tartan rug by her side. Harriet disliked team sports but even she was looking amused. The batsmen continued running. The crowd began to cheer, stimulating the batsmen on to further runs. Eventually the two umpires forcibly restrained the runners and appeared to be endeavouring to impress upon them the rules of the game once more.

‘This is such fun,’ Sarah said. ‘I’m so glad the Richardsons brought us.’ She surveyed the scene: the picnickers lounging on rugs or deckchairs in the shade of the trees that encircled the ground, the grass with its balding pitch bearing testimony to many games, and people still splashing about in the lake, although the cricket ball had long since been found and restored to the bowler.

‘The Richardsons are very kind people,’ said Harriet. ‘Which is more than you can say of some of the others.’

‘Oh Hattie, don’t be so harsh.’ Then Sarah thought of her own initial reception, both here and in Sydney. The welcome of some of the people she and Henry had met had been guarded. The more self-important ones had been suspicious of people from the place they called Home. She had guessed they were anxious that they might be judged as provincial. So they criticised the outsider first and in doing so felt the stronger for it. She tried not to think of that; she still wanted to believe that all people were good. Even now, even after all she’d learned of Carruthers and his ilk.

‘Most of the people I’ve met at the Residency disapprove of me,’ Harriet said. ‘Not you, but me. I’m single and travelling on my own. They don’t like that, especially people like Mrs Jacobs.’

‘It’s just some of the wives. No one else cares.’

‘Maybe. But thank God you’re here, Sarah! You and Henry have endowed me with some respectability!’

‘You’ve never cared a fig for respectability,’ Sarah said. ‘And I hope respectability wasn’t all you missed about us, Hattie.’ She thought that Harriet seemed harder somehow and at the same time even more prickly, more inclined to take offence at the most harmless remarks. In the two days they’d spent together, Sarah had learned to think before opening her mouth, for sometimes an innocuous little comment would bring forth a strong reaction from Harriet.

As if she were a wounded animal, Henry had said last night, lashing out because she’d been hurt.

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