Girl with the Golden Voice Read Online Free Page A

boy was clever, perhaps the cleverest of the lot, but he ended up in the town jail in Nyharuru, tripped up by his own financial trickery.
    Ten years before, when it was time to pick a new boy, she and Don fell out. Rafaella was proposing the unthinkable.
    â€˜What about Stephen Kamau’s eldest girl?’
    â€˜Girl? Never, Raf. You know it wouldn’t work out.’
    â€˜You know the one I mean? Rebecca. She sang at the wedding of Arabella and Joshua.’
    â€˜Oh, for sure, I know the one. Pretty thing.’
    â€˜Not pretty, dear. Beautiful, at eleven.’
    â€˜And at the end of five years, where then?’
    â€˜There’s not a boy to touch her for quickness. This one’s special, Don. Let’s take the risk.’
    Rebecca had gone to the city school, won their prizes, passed their examinations and won their hearts with her singing and then returned to the village.
    Rafaella never asked Rebecca why she turned down the chance to study in Australia. It troubled her that Don might have been right after all. What if they had helped to educate her out of her happiness? One day a self-assured and accomplished woman might suffer anger and frustration at the monotony of village life in Africa.
    Don had been dead six months. Her lover and friend had deserted her. The pain was as raw as ever. It was the middle of June and the long rains had just ended, leaving the meadow grass between the rondavels and Big House thick and rich. Rafaella was walking two of the dogs there as the twilight was closing into full darkness, her favourite time of day.
    In those days she didn’t travel far from Londiani. When she did, it was almost always to go a little further north, to the Coulson home, a large farmhouse in Gilgil, for a gathering of the witches. These strong, compassionate women had loved her through the agonies of denial, grief and anger. But nobody, nothing could shift that enduring, numbing sense of loss that made a mockery of so much of the joy that she and Don had shared. It was too private, too deep.
    But the girl! In the three-quarter darkness, the unmistakable voice, the rich soprano, enveloped her like an aura. Rafaella stopped to look across the line of trees. The tall Italian lady had aged well, hardly aged physically since her first days in Londiani. In the shadows you could see her silhouette. Her figure was slim with a narrow waist and her breasts full. She was vain about her appearance, felt guilty when she drew admiring glances from men of all ages. On a shallow mound at the far end the other silhouette stood, arms outstretched towards Longonot. The lyric was in a dialect that she did not recognise, the melody was poignant, powerful and defiant. The deep longing that reverberated from it took her by surprise, touched the essence of her grief and, on the instant, gave it new perspective. With no effort on her part, something inside her had shifted, a tension had been released. The sensation was exhilarating.
    The singing came to an end, the girl moved off but the spell held. The leaping and the snapping of the kelpie and the blue heeler interrupted the flow. The dogs were reminding her that it was past feeding time. She turned for home. At every step she expected the numbing heaviness to return.
    She fed the dogs and sat down with the family for dinner.
    After a time she became aware that Tom was watching her closely. She smiled down into her soup and waited for the questions. Tom held back. Perhaps he sensed that something new was going on in his grandmother’s head, something delicate that must not be disturbed. It was something good. Her eyes told him that. The hunted look, the tense weariness was gone. She was coming back to them.
    After three or four days she knew that the shift was real. A kind of distance had sprung up between her and the memory of Don. She was able to look back on their wonderful years together as an entity that was complete. The wound was healing to a scar.