by Ruth Park
‘Justine had it at the top of the linen cupboard. It belonged to some old great-great aunt or such. She used to be headmistress at Fort Street School, you know the old building up near the Observatory that the National Trust has now?’
‘So she made it, the little stirrer!’ crowed Abigail. She beamed at Robert, who gaped at her.
‘She wasn’t any little stirrer; she was a perfect old tartar. Mother remembered her quite well; she was in an old ladies’ home or something. Mother was petrified with terror of her, she said.’
‘Old Miss Bow?’ Abigail laughed marvelling. ‘Who would have guessed it? I guess that’s how that kids’ game sprang up … terror lest Miss Beatie Bow would rise from the grave and give them all whatfor!’ She laughed. ‘Sorry, Robert. I must sound like a witch. But after we’ve looked at your family tree I’ll explain a bit.’ Her eyes twinkled as she smiled at him. ‘The rest I won’t tell you until we know each other lots better.’
‘That won’t be long if I’ve anything to say about it.’
‘Let’s go into the kitchen,’ she said. ‘Those two are fighting over re-decorating the unit. We’ve been through the red-plush loo seat phase, and I don’t want to be present as they pass into the birchwood and Scandinavian, with Lappish rugs. Besides, in there we can put this monster out flat on the table.’
Robert opened the enormous book and turned to one of the thick mended pages. Hand-painted violets and faded ribbons of lilac enclosed the family tree. Each name was in a little painted oval touched with gold paint. Some of it was in a fanciful Victorian hand with long looping tails, the ink bleached to a light brown. Some names were in a round, childish script, and at the bottom the names of Vincent and Natalie Crown were written in Justine’s favourite green biro.
Abigail fell upon it eagerly. ‘Your great-grandfather, Judah, where’s he?’
‘Hold on!’ said Robert. ‘I didn’t have a great-grandfather Judah. That’s just a family name. My great-grandfather was Samuel, I think.’
‘It couldn’t be,’ protested Abigail. ‘That was Trooper Bow’s name, their father, Beatie and Gibbie and Judah’s father.’
‘How on earth –? Never mind now – Gibbie! That was it. Gilbert. Look, here it is.’
His brown forefinger slid down the painted branches of the tree till it landed on Gilbert Samuel, b. 1863, d. 1933.
‘That’s not possible,’ cried Abigail. ‘He wasn’t supposed to live; he wasn’t long for this world. What’s Gibbie doing hanging around until he was – what is it? – seventy, mind you!’
Robert gazed at her, flabbergasted.
‘Then Judah must have drowned after all,’ she said slowly. ‘Where is he, Robert?’
Her finger went back to the curly Victorian writing. She found Judah Bow, b. 1855, d. 1874.
‘Oh, Robert, he was on the ship after all. He died at nineteen. It isn’t fair!’
‘Oh, Judah, oh, Judah,’ she sobbed. In a moment Robert had his arms around her. He tried to make sense of her choked mumbles, but all he could get was: ‘And when I saw you I was sure he had lived, and Dovey had had a baby, and you were descended from him. How do you look exactly like him then? Beastly little Gibbie! You’ve no idea how awful he was, always panting to join his mamma amongst the angels. He even had his funeral worked out.’ She raised her head and sniffed angrily. ‘It’s just him to put it all over everyone and live till seventy, little sneak.’
‘But if he hadn’t lived,’ Robert pointed out softly, ‘I wouldn’t have had him for a great-grandfather, and I wouldn’t be here listening to you.’
‘I loved him so much,’ wept Abigail. ‘Not horrible Gibbie, but Judah; and I knew he would be drowned and tried to warn him but I couldn’t get back … Oh, Robert, he died when he was nineteen, he never had a real life at all.’
‘Now then,’ said Robert, and there was in his voice the firmness of Judah Bow, who had been a man, with a man’s work and authority, at eighteen. ‘You’re going to calm down and tell me all about this: how you know things about my family I don’t know, why you’re crying about someone who died more than a century ago. You know you’re going to tell me sooner or later, don’t you? So why not sooner?’
He kissed away her tears. It seemed a very natural and accustomed thing to do. So, very simply and without embarrassment, Abigail told him what had happened four years before. He listened seriously.
‘Natalie has something to do with this, hasn’t she?’ he pondered. ‘Because, after all, she’s a Bow, and perhaps she has the Gift. And the crochet, because it came from the fingers of that Great-great-great-grandmother Alice from the Orkneys, was just enough to tip you over into the last century. She was right, you know: you were the Stranger of the Prophecy.’
‘But the rest of the Prophecy –’ cried Abigail. ‘I mean, it was Granny Tallisker herself who believed that one for death and one for barrenness meant Gibbie for death, because he was so frail, and one for barrenness meant Beatie, because she always said she wouldn’t get married no matter what. And instead it was Judah for death, and Dovey for barrenness. The Prophecy was right, but Granny had the wrong people.’
‘Dovey wasn’t barren,’ said Robert gently. ‘She’s the one called Dorcas, I presume? Look at the family tree again. She had a child, Judith, and it died with her, the same year as she and Granny died.’
‘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 f
ind 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
