Read When Time Fails (Silverman Saga Book 2) for Free Online Page B

“real” writing at the other side of the big wooden kitchen table. Beauty was amazing. She’d literally galloped through the Grade one and Grade two reading and writing syllabus. Now she was tearing through Grade three at a rate of knots, all thanks to what they now laughingly referred to as “Beauty’s bread”.
    The recipe i n Huisgenoo t had caught her attention: Tannie’s Health Loaf. It looked really delicious in the photograph. Annamari seldom made bread but she had needed to do something to ease her pain and frustration at the murder investigation that was going precisely nowhere. She’d smacked De Wet the day before, just for breaking a saucer. And it had probably been an accident. He’d looked at her with his big brown eyes, bewildered. She never hit her children. She knew the move to Steynspruit, and the loss of their grandparents and uncle had been traumatic for them. It had all just got too much. Kneading bread seemed a great solution.
    Then she got stuck. She couldn’t remember how much bran she had to add. She should have measured it out before she started mixing the dough but she’d never been the most methodical cook.
    ‘Beauty,’ she’d said to the girl who was sitting on Rosie’s old stool in the corner, peeling potatoes for supper, ‘just check the recipe for me, please. How much bran must I add? And perhaps you could measure it out for me?’
    She liked it when Beauty came into the kitchen in the afternoons to help Pretty prepare supper. She was good company, bright and cheerful. Someone to speak to because Pretty didn’t speak at all, except to acknowledge instructions. With Rosie now officially retired, the kitchen – the farmhouse – was hauntingly quiet until Thys brought De Wet home later, after they’d both finished school.
    Beauty didn’t move.
    ‘Just have a look at the recipe for me,’ Annamari said sharply. ‘My hands are dirty and I don’t want to get dough all over the magazine. There – it’s the one at the bottom of the page – Tannie’s Health Loaf. The ingredients are listed at the top.’
    Beauty glued her eyes to the floor. She seemed to shrink into the stool and her cheeks flushed.
    ‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered. ‘I can’t read.’
     
    ***
     
    That night Annamari had fumed at Thys. It was so wrong, she said, that a bright, pretty little thing like Beauty couldn’t read. She was thirteen years old, for heaven’s sake. It wasn’t as if she was stupid, or anything. It was just crazy, crazy that she hadn’t been sent to school. What had Pretty been thinking? What had Petrus been thinking? Petrus was a sensible man. Why hadn’t he made sure Beauty learned to read?
    She got even angrier when Thys reminded her that Pretty and Petrus had tried to send Beauty to school, but the school had refused to accept her because of her blue eyes and pale complexion.
    ‘Ja, well they should have sent her to the Coloured township so she could go to school there.’
    ‘And who would have taken care of her there? She may look Coloured but her family is black. Do you really think Pretty should have sent her child away, to strangers – just because of the way she looks? Made Beauty into another Sandra Laing?’
    Annamari stared at her husband, horrified. She remembered reading about Sandra Laing in the newspaper – about how she’d had white parents but was really Coloured and had been thrown out of her white school and then she’d run away with a kaffi r which just went to prove that she really wasn’t white after all.
    ‘It’s not the same,’ she said.
    ‘It’s exactly the same,’ Thys replied. ‘The race classification system is cruel sometimes. I’m sure things like Sandra Laing and Beauty go on a hell of a lot more than we realise. And it’s wrong... it’s wrong when children like Beauty are the victims. I mean, why couldn’t she have gone to school in the township? Well, things are going to change now, that’s for sure, so perhaps there won’t be