The Book of Secrets
Page 1
CONTENTS
Title Page
Preface
PART ONE
The House
PART TWO
Maria: Telling It 1953
PART THREE
Isabella 1812–20
PART FOUR
Annie 1838–55
PART FIVE
Maria 1898–1953
Also Available by Fiona Kidman
About the Author
Copyright
Preface
Norman McLeod was a real person, as were many of the people described as having accompanied him on his journeys. They really did undertake the migrations in the circumstances of the book. Beyond this, the work is fiction. All of the people on the Ramsey family tree are fictitious, and so are the family members of Eoghann MacKenzie. Any means of likeness to people, living or dead, in those contexts, are coincidental.
I thank my many informants who spent valuable hours with me; and several more who offered help but whom I was prevented from meeting because of time or distance. For very practical help, I am especially grateful to Warwick Flaus and his wife Janet Cameron, Wellington; John and Sherry MacPherson, Halifax, N.S., and Clinton and Jean MacPherson, Port Morien, N.S.
The people of Waipu set me on the book’s path many years ago, and during their lifetimes the late Misses Lang gave invaluable advice. All of them are remembered with affection and respect.
Thanks are due, too, to Marvin Wodinsky and other staff at the Canadian High Commission in Wellington; to very kind staff at both Public Archives in Halifax, N.S., and at the Beaton Institute, University College of Cape Breton; and also at the Gaelic College, St Ann’s, N.S., and the Alexander Turnbull Library in Wellington.
In 1985 I held the New Zealand Scholarship in Letters; it was essential to the writing of this book.
PART ONE
The House
one
Maria was old and the stairs were steep. There was a wind that evening, not a high one, but a persistent singing across the sea. The old timber creaked, the iron on the roof was almost rusted through; another winter or so and it would be through all over. Already she kept a large china bowl under the leak in the corner of her room.
The state of the roof did not unduly worry her. It would hold for another year or so and that would be long enough. Maria did not intend to live forever. But tonight she was tired, although she didn’t know why, for she had done little except walk to the gate to collect her deliveries after the grocer had left them. They had not spoken to each other, nor had they done so for more than fifty years. It was not the same grocer of course, they had come and gone. The gate was too far away for her to get a good look at them when they stopped, but she always knew when there was a new one. Sooner or later he would have to write a note in response to hers. This was how they did business, she and the men at the store. Each week she wrote a list of the things she needed, and the next week the goods were delivered.
But things had changed as the years passed. They no longer supplied calico, molasses was not always available, there was a shortage of wheat meal, or worse, they did not always know what her orders meant. Once she sent for a stone jar; they sent her back a curious flat bag called a hot water bottle. It took several weeks of notes to establish what this was all about. She nearly went to see the man at the gate but this seemed to be tempting fate.
Doing things this way had worked for so many years that it seemed unwise to alter the pattern. Besides, Maria did not know for sure whether they would allow her to speak with the grocer. Perhaps it no longer mattered what she did, or to whom she spoke, but there were other times when she could not be sure. The edges of the past blurred and fused with the present.
It actually frightened her to think that she might be able to walk through the grass and across the paddock, to open the gate and keep on walking along the dusty path that ran to the village, and into the shop itself, and that no one would stop her. Maybe they wouldn’t even notice.
When she was halfway up the ladder-like stairs, holding onto the slight rail as she went, one thickened hand after another, there was a smash below, the glass in a window breaking downstairs.
After that, there was a silence for a moment. But then a sound both delicate and biting followed, as if some of the glass had caught on the window ledge, hovered and balanced, then tinkled to the floor.
Voices called. Ma-ri-a … Ma-ri-aa. Young voices distilled on the night breeze.
Another window smashed.
Maria? It was a question on the wind now. Would she answer them? Mari-aa. Laughter.
Yes, they would notice if she walked down the road. They had not forgotten she was here.
The voices moved away.
Maria was panting with exertion as she reached the top of the stairs. She was not afraid. Fear had flown out the window long before the rocks came through. But if she was honest with herself, there was still anger. It was not just the climb which made her breath rasp.
Three. Three panes now. There were three gaping holes at the front of the house and there was no paper or sacking left to block them up. Why did they do it to her? Would they like to see her ride out of the window onto the old macrocarpa tree on a broomstick? Eh? Was that what they would like? Ah, that she could have flown.
She knew little about flight. But she knew there were aeroplanes. She did not keep in touch with the world and time passed without her always knowing what month, or even year it was, and for the most part she had shunned the newspapers which could have been brought to her house in the delivery van if she chose. But she had avoided seeking them out since the last ones had been used to reline the walls of her bedroom. They were still on her bedroom walls, yellow and brittle with age, the year 1897, the year the world had stopped. Or she had stopped being in the world. It was neither here nor there.
But every now and then one would arrive wrapped around her orders, and then secretly, as if in some perverse rite at which someone might catch her, she would scan each word, reading and re-reading the page and storing it under her bed to look at again some day.
So she had come to know one or two things that went on in the world.
And she had seen the plane overhead, she knew what they were.
Would she have flown if she could? Maria did not know for sure any more, and only vaguely recollected that once, of her own accord, she had made a decision to remain here.
Perhaps fate, and the Man, had decreed that she should be here. Though they were one and the same. Her kinsfolk would say it was God, but she knew better. She thought it was the devil, and to be afraid was pointless for she was committed to darkness and the devil. They were part of a logical process that would never end. There was no heaven.
Something brushed her face, and she almost dropped her candle. Ah — now she was frightened.
But it was a tiny trapped sparrow, more frightened than she was, that had flown in through one of the broken panes.
Ah, her voice soothed — there, there, hush little bird. Don’t be afraid — quiet now, quiet, you’ll beat yourself to death on the rafters. Poor little bird, what were you doing out so late? There now, don’t break yourself.
The sparrow clung to the ceiling beam, tottering as if stunned. She thought it would fall but it recovered itself, staring at her with tiny terrified eyes, its breast rising and falling, the feathers fluffed and trembling.
Well well. Nobody ever asks if they can come in here. Nothing comes for years and sooner or later there’s always something comes crashing through without asking.
— That being the case I suppose there’s no point in telling you to go. No doubt you’ll stay here as long as it’s convenient to you —
She put the candle on the dresser and climbed into
bed, then remembered that her hot water bottle was still downstairs. She shivered. It was a long way to go down again. It would be cold by now anyway, lying on the kitchen table, and she had banked the fire up for the night so that it would take a long time to heat more water. She would have to go cold. The blankets were so thin you could see the light through them when they hung on the line for their summer wash. They scratched against her chin.
The bird stirred on the rafter, stretched its wings and cheeped.
In spite of the wind, she slept. She dreamed.
PART TWO
Maria: Telling It 1953
two
I have lived alone in this house for a long time. I have not kept records. I do not have marks on the wall, or diaries, though I am the keeper of certain books which do not belong to me but have fallen into my hands. I have a suspicion that these things never happen entirely by chance, for among them is what I call the book of secrets. This was my grandmother’s way of telling it, the secrets of her life. They are secrets to which I am linked through being her kin, and we are bound by the common thread of my mother’s life. Once I would have dismissed this as being of no importance but now I can no longer ignore it, the binding together which it made. We all had a voice, a way of telling it.
I will come back to the secrets, for they haunt me always, but now it is time for me to tell it, for myself. I tell it aloud as I go, here in this house, though no one can hear me while my hands move across the page.
I am Maria McClure. I was born at Waipu, a coastal village in the northern part of New Zealand, in 1878, twelve years after the Man died. The birth took place in this same old house that I live in now, a board house of two storeys, near the river arm that comes in from the sea.
The house stands alone in a paddock. At the back are macrocarpa trees, and alongside of it a single stark, skeletal giant that has been stripped of its leaves by lightning. The great tree just died. It is not entirely safe, so close to the house, but no one would think to remove it. It stands there bleached white now as the years pass and sometimes in high winds I imagine that it will fall over but it never does.
I think it is about fifty-five years that I have been on my own. I live away from the society of people in the world.
I say in the world, though it is difficult to say much about what the world is like, or what it means to the people who have joined it. I doubt if there are many still alive of those whom I knew when I was forced to abandon their company.
There is only one, whom I dream of seeing, and she came later.
Is she alive out there in the world?
I have come a long way by snow and ice to this land of sunlight.
I? Maybe not I, but those I spoke of, the ones who came before.
I spoke of a Man. His name was Norman McLeod, whom the people also called Tormod. He led a group of men and women across the wide world from the Highlands of Scotland to Pictou in Nova Scotia to St Ann’s on Cape Breton Island to Australia to New Zealand. The journeying took thirty-five years, and longer for some. It was like Moses in the wilderness. It was done in the name of God.
He was born near Stoer Point in rugged Assynt, Sutherland County, Scotland, in 1780.
His parents lived by the parted rocks at Clachtoll in a house of stone and turf. His mother gave birth to him at harvest time when the barley was being gathered, by the light of a fire fuelled with bog fir. The slate grey Atlantic bore a rim of silver on its horizon, but close at hand the wild green sea pounded on the headland of streaming rocks. The machair grass tossed in the wind and a violence was on the land.
McLeod grew tall, and his eyes turned also to cool slate. He had black hair when the journeys began and a lean hard mouth in a thin face. My grandmother said it was a cruel mouth. Others, when they spoke of him, said that he was a caring man who did what he believed was right for the people who followed him. But across the breadth of the world they could not decide whether he really knew what was right for them or not. Now he has lain in the cemetery by the sea for close to ninety years and still, I’ll wager, there will be some who cannot agree. There is no doubt in my mind that he was proud, and that his pride led him to harsh ways. He thought that he knew better than all the Church of Scotland, believed that he had discovered a better path for his people to follow (indeed, you would think he had invented it) and that they were like children who would not know what was in their own best interests. I call that pride. I have been accused of the sin of pride myself, and look where it has landed me. I will shortly tell you.
One thing is for sure, that when the people in the community spoke of the Man, there was only one person to whom they were referring. Around these parts there are many strange names given to men — they are called the ‘Bear’ and ‘Prince’, ‘Captain’, ‘Red’, ‘the Black’, ‘the Strong One’ and other names to identify one from the other, but if anyone said ‘the Man’, then there was only one and it was him. Though he did call himself Norman, like the Apostle Paul of old. He thought of himself as one with Paul.
His people, who were also mine, were driven out of the north-west Highlands of Scotland by the terrible clearances of the crofters a hundred and fifty years back. The crofting people had occupied cottages and land owned by the lairds, since time immemorial. The lairds were like fathers to them, they would do pretty much anything that a laird wanted, including defend him and fight for him. They never thought that they would be evicted from their homes, but things changed after Culloden and Bonnie Prince Charlie. The lairds said they had been betrayed; they were hungry devils who wanted some reason to put the people off the land. That is how it has been told to me. They wanted to run sheep on the land, blackfaces they called them, and there was no room for men and women and children alongside of sheep. They wanted also to make money from the kelp industry. This was a cruel affair, for the people who worked it got killed in the freezing waters of the Atlantic. Oh, but it was very profitable though.
I know about these things because my grandmother told me of them, my grandmother Isabella MacQuarrie, the one they did say that I took after, a wild one, yes, they said it was her I might thank for my wild and wicked ways that have put me away inside this old house far from the sight of decent men and women and certainly of children for fifty-five years. Thanks to her, they say, I am called the witch of Waipu. They may think I do not know of this, but I know more than they think. I know things because I hear them come through the ground in the night, I press my ear to the ground and the word travels; the damp smell of the earth is a revelation. Thank God, I say, for one day I will be put in it for good and it is a fine thing to know I will go on hearing things down there. I am not afraid of being locked in that fastness, the earth is a warm blanket full of hum and carry on. And I can hear stories on the breeze at morning, in the crackle of crickets in the midday sun, and in the birdsong at evening. Ah the old woman is truly mad, she hears voices, they do well to shun me. No, I tell you it is them that are mad and do not know what is all around them, for I have learned many things, here in my board house by the sea, and I have been told things. For I have not always been alone.
I was banished to this house for the sin of fornication. I was a girl of just twenty years when I met Branco the road mender. At that time the north was full of dark men from Dalmatia, which from my random newspapers I now know as part of Yugoslavia. All the good British people (with whom the Scots were for better or worse lumped in) did not like the Dalmatians in their midst. They were great gum gatherers. That is, they dug out of the ground lumps of a clear hard substance called kauri gum, bright gold in colour though it was translucent. It was used for making varnishes and polishes and it was valuable. They called it poor man’s gold, although a man who was prepared to dig in mud and filth, and not give up on it too easily, could get rich with greater certainty than those who sought gold. That was what the Scots and English would do, not take it seriously, just go on digging for a bit when it suited them and not stick with it. But the Dalmatian, well, he would dig and
dig, and take his pickings to the trading post and get his money and go back to the fields and go at it again and again, and after a while he’d accumulate enough money to buy a farm and the others would have nothing, like as not drank it away. They got to believing that the Dallies were stealing from them; they certainly felt superior. And some of the Dallies looked round and saw that it was nothing but land hunger and greed, and nobody to service the landscape or do any of the dirty work, so they decided to do that as well, and get richer in the process. Branco was a workman but he planned to get rich, make no mistake about that.
I wonder sometimes if he ever did.
My dark and curly-headed foreigner had come in off the gumfields when I first met him. I saw him that first time one morning when I was shaking the crumbs off the tablecloth outside the house.
Only then I was still a girl, and I lived here with my mother who was a widow. My grandmother was not long dead and we often grieved for her. Well, that is partly true, for I was beside myself with sorrow for the old lady. I cannot tell you, even now, how much I loved the old woman. But I think my mother was weary of her. She needed her, but I do not think she ever liked her much. There were stories about my grandmother, about her early years. As I have said, there was much blamed on my grandmother for the way that I was when younger. I never saw any sign of impropriety about her, but piecing together here and there things that were told to me and things that I have found out since, here in this house, there was a kind of truth in it all.
She had spirit, she had a way of telling tales that made ordinary things shine, that I do know. She was nearly a hundred when she died, and that was another thing about her, that her life went on and on, which is not necessarily a good thing for the children. You can go at it, this business of living, for too long. That is what has happened to me, I suppose. When they decided that I should stay here in this house, they never imagined it carrying on like this year after year, they believed it would all be over soon — I don’t know how they thought it would be resolved, but you just know about people, they don’t conceive of a situation going on forever and outliving them. In their secret heart of hearts they would see this as outwitting them, and that is what people do not care for.