The Book of Secrets

by Fiona Kidman

  Through me, my grandmother found a new meaning to her own undone life, and what with my father dead and my mother seeming as if she too would perish in fevers and night sweats and vales of terrible tears, it was Isabella who stroked me to life and had me wet-nursed, so that slowly my survival was established, my eyes focused, the crying abated, and suddenly I was thriving and, they said of me, I was a beautiful bonny child.

  My mother reached the turning point of her illness, the moment of crisis, in the hours before dawn when I was two months. Afterwards she had no memory of my birth, or what had followed. She saw me only as a healthy child of whom she was mightily proud. I became her special weakness. And she called me Maria, a name that floats well on the breeze, whispers backwards and forwards from the macrocarpa trees in the night, climbs in and out of chimney stacks, roars up in flames from the fire on dark nights, maria maria marisabella mariann annisabellamaria yesyes. Our names blending, mothers and daughters all of us.

  To this house, then, haunted already by the past yet shining and more grand than many of the settlers’ houses, Branco returned, wishing to see me again.

  He knocked on the door one day in summer, just after Christmas. The brown-top grass that the settlers had brought in the hay in their mattresses was flowering. How that grass had taken hold. Nova Scotia had transplanted itself to the New Zealand soil so easily you wouldn’t believe it.

  When I heard the knock something turned over in my chest. I do not know why I was so suddenly unnerved, yet I had a strange premonition. I remember, as if it were yesterday, that I glanced around the kitchen in a desperate, scared kind of way, as if to imprint it upon my memory as it was; as if somehow I was about to lose it.

  My mother opened the door and Branco was standing there. He was holding out the tin pitcher in one hand. In the other he held a shilling.

  ‘Who are you?’ my mother asked, her voice peremptory. I had a quick vision of how she must appear to Branco. She was a plain woman with heavy jutting eyelids, a high red complexion and a receding chin. Yet she was imposing in the way she stood, above average in height and of a full-busted stoutness that went well with her stature. For a moment it looked as if she was towering over Branco.

  ‘It is the roadman, mother,’ I said, before he could speak. ‘No doubt he wants milk.’

  ‘And what do you know of him?’

  ‘Nothing,’ I said, and shivered. ‘He has been here before. I told you, mother, that I gave milk to a roadman. I do not think he speaks English or Gaelic,’ I added quickly, to establish that I had had no conversation with him.

  ‘How do you know that he is the roadman?’

  ‘We’ve passed him many times,’ I said, in such a reasonable way that she was calmed.

  But this too was a lie. I was guessing. I do not know why I had said this. I do not know how I knew. Even now.

  In the late autumn I saw him often.

  I took to walking. In the long evenings I would throw my cloak around my shoulders and leave the house. Across the paddocks lay a tributary of the sea we called the River, where the ferryboats plied their way backwards and forwards. I would walk to the River in order to watch them. My mother asked me where I was going and I would tell her to the ferryboats, mother, to the ferryboats.

  ‘Do you see a man there?’

  I laughed openly in her face. ‘A man? Mother, ask anyone, ask my Uncle Hector, he will tell you no, that I wave to the boats passing by, then turn and walk the other way.’

  Perhaps she did ask Black Hector, because for a time she left me in peace. Then she started asking again, ‘What takes you to the boats, Maria? It isn’t natural.’

  ‘Walk with me, mother,’ I would say, and one evening she did. But she had become so stout, addicted to butter and to cream mixed in her potatoes, that it proved too much for her and she had to rest a long while before she could return. We sat on the banks of the river as a boat laden with timber passed. The men aboard waved to us. I sat with modest downcast eyes, only raising my hand for a small acknowledgement. ‘Good evening, ma’am, a nice night for a walk,’ they called to my mother, and did not give me second glances.

  We made our way home as the shadows slid towards the edges of the earth. I bade her goodnight, took my candle, and climbed the stairs, a steep sharp incline up to my room under the roof.

  As I had expected, she did not ask to come again, and appeared to accept my nightly ‘taking of the air’, as she called it. She said that I looked well, and sometimes when I sat by the fire she would pause as she passed me and place a reflective hand upon my head. I had a good head of hair in those days, a light gold-brown and very thick. It was something else she was proud of, though she never said so for fear of making me vain.

  Branco liked my hair too. When I speak of shadows on the land I speak also of him. Branco merged with the trees and the fallen logs where the bush had been cleared, he slid in and out of that landscape as if he were one of the wild creatures that inhabited it. At first neither my uncle nor my mother, nor the ferryboat men, nor any of the people whom I met on my rambles were aware of his presence. And because I was able to turn aside each enquiry about my solitary walks, no one ever thought to ask how long it took me from the house to the riverbank, or back again. I understood guile without ever having been taught it. Perhaps Branco and I taught it to each other.

  I don’t know why I went with him. I wanted someone different from all the others, that’s the only thing I can tell you now. My mother believed in bad blood; that is an explanation I cannot accept. I think it went outside of us: the old people were breaking up, the changes had already begun.

  Though not for girls like me. We were expected to stay inside the community.

  I don’t know why it had to be me that broke away. They thought I was crazy. They think, still, that I am a witch too, and that is where the bad blood comes into it.

  But it began simply enough, with a man and a woman in a kind of innocence which turned to power over each other, and knowledge.

  I didn’t know much about men, but I felt I had been waiting to find out for a long time. I was very impatient. I think he was shocked. At first he thought I was mocking him, but as I insisted he grew bolder. He seemed to circle me, touching me as if I was fragile, but to every touch I responded with such vigour that he could do nothing but return my passion. So one thing led to another and it will come as no great surprise to say that I became, before long, what is known as a fallen woman. The nights of prowling around each other came to an end, my desire knew no bounds; I would walk to the riverbank and underneath my skirt I would wear no garments, the quicker to allow him into me when we snatched each other into the shadows. We didn’t say much and made no great noise of passion, for I had not thrown all caution to the winds, if only to protect myself for more meetings with him.

  And yet in a way we exchanged some feeling, something which I still think of as loving words and endearments. Sometimes I would catch a glimpse of his face in the evening light, looking at me in a curious kind of way, as if I was a strange creature whom he did not understand.

  Why should he have understood me?

  For I did not understand myself.

  At nights when I had returned to the house and was safely in bed I would try to think of the future. Up on the Braigh, the young men from Nova Scotia had cleared land. Now their sons were taking it over; already a whole generation of people had passed over the land since the migration. There were clear green fields where once there had been timber. The timber had made the newcomers rich already, as the logs were turned into ships (of which there were no finer builders in the country than the men from Nova Scotia) or shipped to Auckland and Wellington for the building of the new houses in the mushrooming towns. It would be a fine thing for my mother if I were to wed one of these young men, and no bad thing for me, if I were to admit it to myself. There had been one or two of them I had eyed in church when I was half grown. Unashamed, I mentioned them once to my grandmother.

  ‘Ah, t
he young Bear,’ she said. ‘You think you would like him? He’s got fine shoulders and a nice straight back. You could do worse. If you must consort with men.’ And there was a sudden bitterness which I did not recognise, around her eyes.

  ‘Mother.’ My own mother’s voice was as quick and sharp as a razor on a strop. ‘How dare you talk to the child like that?’

  Yet it was true, there were some handsome men in the congregation, and they were mostly such brawny big men, you could not help but notice them. In the years that followed, I did look at them, in spite of my seemingly downcast eyes. There was young Donald MacKenzie, and John Lachie John McGrath (meaning that he was John son of Lachie son of old John McGrath) and a whole crowd of the McKay boys, all of whom I’d been to school with, or at least their younger brothers and sisters, and all of them like family. I would have nothing to lose by joining up with any of them, and I was no bad catch myself. It wouldn’t be difficult. I was easy to look at, I baked bread, milked a cow with a quick wrist and firm fingers, and my mother could entertain without ever raising a hand to make a scone, for I did it all. As well, I would inherit a house and land of my own. Altogether I was considered a fine and quite remarkable young woman. I could have nearly anyone I chose. It seemed, those nights when I lay under the eaves and the stars glinted at me through the window and a skylight which I could almost touch, that all my destiny had been aimed towards such a marriage.

  And now I did not want it.

  As simple as that. As simple and as terrible. I loved the roadmender. I could think of nothing else and the rest of the world had ceased to exist.

  A kind of madness. When I was not with him I was exhausted, and ill with anxiety as well that I might be thwarted from seeing him. My mother no longer said that I looked well. Instead, she wore a strained and hunted look too.

  The winter closed in and passed. The nights were cool and that year a sea wind keened in across the land towards us, and the dark fell early. I had to arrange to take my walks before night; the ground was harder and less accommodating but still I went to him.

  The roadmender moved during the winter from a tent to a little hut deserted by timber workers long before. I met him there sometimes, but in order to reach his place I had to cross open ground. I would wait in the deepening shadows until night was closing in upon us, so that I was less likely to be seen. Then it would be dark when I left him.

  One night he was not waiting for me. Nor was he the following night.

  I was beside myself, not knowing what to do. On the third evening my mother said, as if carelessly, ‘Why bother to go out tonight? The weather’s still cool and you might catch a chill.’

  I said I would be quick. She watched me with troubled eyes as I pulled my cloak around me. The cloak was worn and ragged round the edges. It had been used too often as a blanket beneath my lover and me. I looked like a wild creature.

  The night, too, was wild as I hurried towards our meeting place. The wind that had fretted round for months was rising. I called Branco’s name, softly at first, then greatly daring, louder and louder.

  There was no reply, and I drew close to the shack where he had taken shelter. Throwing caution to the winds I gathered myself together and ran.

  In the evening light, the door hung open on its rusting hinges, banging forlornly backwards and forwards. The room was empty. There was no sign that I could detect at first of his few possessions. The straw mattress that we had lain upon had been ripped open and its contents were strewn over the floor. My foot caught in the pitcher he used, crumpled as if a boot had been placed on it.

  I looked around in disbelief, as if somehow I could make him materialise from the draughty corners of the room. There was a box on its side where he had kept a picture, a little daguerreotype of a woman with shining wings of black hair and a close and secret look on her narrow face, the woman I knew to be his mother. She was gone.

  I knelt on the floor and began to cry. I don’t know how long I stayed there but it was quite dark when I got to my feet. As I walked home the shadows were menacing and I was afraid; I felt I was being watched from behind every tree and log.

  When I entered the house my mother was sitting by the fire rocking, backwards and forwards, not looking up as I came in.

  ‘There is broth made. Sit down and eat some.’

  ‘I don’t want anything.’

  ‘You may not, but you’ll have it. You look like a scarecrow.’

  ‘That’s my business.’

  She had lumbered to her feet, and her voice was raised. She had never shouted at me before.

  ‘Pull yourself together, girl. Stop all of this.’

  ‘Stop what, mother?’ I knew she meant my tears which had started again, but there was nothing I could do now about that.

  ‘Everything. This unseemly crying and noise, this perversity, this … this man, this roadmender. You hear me?’

  ‘Oh aye, I hear you all right, mother.’

  ‘Or I tell you, the wrath of God will strike you dead.’

  Like a voice from some other place, I heard myself answer her. ‘He’s already killed me. I’m dead now.’

  ‘That’s enough. You’ll not take the name of the Lord in vain. No more of this wild talk.’

  I looked at her trying to unravel what she was saying. I felt so tired. The fire cast its flickering light on her. I thought she looked crazy, but then I knew that I was seeing myself reflected in her.

  ‘I cannot stop, mother, I cannot.’ I could hear myself again, bleak and piteous.

  She picked up the poker. I thought she was going to strike me. ‘You’ve heard of the five foolish virgins?’

  ‘What have they to do with me?’

  ‘Who knows? When the hour comes it might be too late.’

  ‘Mother, it is already too late.’

  There was a silence in the room. At last she said in a whisper, ‘Too late? You do not mean a word you say, lass. You don’t know what you mean.’

  I did not reply, steadfastly watching the fire. It is the heat in the room, I thought, the rising wind outside, the sound of a defiant heart beating, and hers, plodding its way towards eternity; we are locked into this room with madness and no way of escape. Her voice had become pleading. ‘Tell me you do not mean it, Maria, my beautiful girl. Tell me.’

  And to ease her pain which was overwhelming me I said, ‘I do not mean it, mother.’

  ‘Aye.’ She rocked backwards and forwards, not just the chair but her whole body. ‘Aye, that’s better. You, you’ve been touched by the hand of the Man, by Norman McLeod himself.’

  ‘He died before I was born,’ I said, sick of the old notions that were in conflict with anything that seemed important to me now, yet too weary to contradict her any more.

  ‘Yes, but don’t you remember all that I told you of it when you were a bairn?’

  ‘Tell me again,’ I said, already letting her words wash over me, and beginning to hope for hot milk when I went to bed.

  ‘We went to the window of his house and he lay there dying, Maria, and all the people were crying out and weeping. He spoke to us, though his strength was failing, and he scarce had voice enough left to say the words, and we who were younger remembered how we had followed him from St Ann’s across the sea, while our parents, the older ones, recalled the land before that, whence they had come with him.’

  ‘From Assynt in Sutherlandshire,’ I murmured.

  ‘Lochalsh and Harris,’ the rejoinder.

  ‘Applecross and Skye.’

  The names like a litany in the room. Almost shutting out the night. And her chanting on.

  ‘Then on to Nova Scotia, and from there to Australia, and the sicknesses, and the mad gold-diggers, and yet still we came, following him to the ends of the earth, forty years or near enough in the wilderness, like the men of old, but he had led us to a safe haven — well, we stood there remembering all of this, and he looked at me, and he said, “Annie McClure, you’re a good woman and bonnie, you must have patience
in your sorrow, you won’t be without a child forever.”’

  ‘And you were patient, mother.’

  ‘Aye, I was. We must all learn patience.’

  ‘And what happened?’ I said, turning away this new reproach.

  ‘When I was sure it was too late I found myself with child again, and I said to your father, “I know this time it will go well.”’

  ‘And I was the child?’

  ‘You were. And you had golden down on your head the day you were born.’

  ‘You remember that?’ I said cruelly, for her recollection was not quite as my grandmother had described the events of that day.

  She lifted her chin. ‘I was near to death on account of my age, you understand, and grieving for your father, dead and gone before the birth. I looked at your bonnie head, and it gave me the will to live.’

  I thought she had finished, but she looked at me and said, her voice now matter-of-fact: ‘So you see, Maria McClure, you are a child blessed by the Man, and you will not bring shame on this house consorting with vagabonds, and a Papist to boot.’

  Up, under the roof. The brief rain had stopped and the wind dropped, quickly, as it does here in the north. The stars shone out of a clean black sky, and the names, the names of the old places stalked through my dreams, the ghosts chanting from afar, Assynt, Stoer, Lochalsh, Applecross and Skye, Achiltibuie, Skye, Lochalsh, repeating and going on and on. Voices in my head, mother, it is a new world we have come to make but the old places going on and on …