The Book of Secrets

by Fiona Kidman

  I mentioned before a third grave in the cemetery but I try to pretend that it is not there for if anything makes me afraid it is this. But the fact is, a woman in the village has died in childbirth. How often one hears that phrase! It is none the less terrifying for its familiarity. Especially for women who are a long way from home, in rough cabins cut of the woods.

  Especially to me. I do not want to die. I have promised that I will not.

  10 May 1818

  The snow is gone. The sun has a little warmth. Duncan has turned some ground and I have planted grain.

  The rivers run clear. There are fish to be caught. It makes a change to our diet. I am learning to set nets. Trout, salmon, gaspereaux. When we sit down to food like this I feel as if we are lairds.

  ‘Don’t you feel as if we are in a castle of our own?’ I said to Duncan the other night. We were eating a fine plump salmon. He had a line of juice on his chin from eating too fast. He is like a wolf when he comes in from a day of cutting timber.

  He looked at me intently. ‘I would not live in one.’

  ‘Oh come,’ I said. ‘We don’t need to have airs and graces just for enjoying ourselves a little better.’

  ‘It would be immodest,’ he said.

  ‘That sounds like McLeod to me.’

  He sighed then. ‘You don’t like him do you?’

  ‘He’s all right,’ I said, ‘but you mark my words, he’ll have a grand house before long.’

  ‘I wish you’d come to his services, at least. The people who came on the ship with us will think we don’t care about them any more.’ He was folding his napkin and wiping his mouth in a very deliberate way, so that I knew he had steeled himself to say these things to me.

  ‘They might be head over heels in love with him, but I’m not. He’s not ordained, you know.’

  ‘You make too much of that.’ I could see it going through his head that this was the difference between us, that my family were of the Edinburgh Society, and perhaps he thinks that sooner or later I will show some high and mighty ways of my own.

  ‘I want Holy Baptism for our child,’ I said. ‘Who’ll do that for us, if we have been running after him who is not entitled to do it?’

  There was a silence. Then, a silly sleek smile on his salmon-flecked mouth. ‘You’re not having one of your jokes? It’s the truth now?’

  ‘Aye, it is.’

  Pushing the plate away, holding me, letting go of me, not knowing quite what to do, as if I were a piece of bone china he had grasped too eagerly.

  ‘Come along then, I’ll leave the table till morning,’ I said, inviting him to the bed.

  ‘No, don’t tempt me, you’re in no condition.’

  ‘It won’t hurt. I’m better now than I was when you didn’t know about it.’

  ‘You’re wanton, you’re a bad woman.’ His face full of nameless joy. And desire. I am full of power. I am sure that everything is going to be all right.

  20 May 1818

  I am watching the nets for we have lost salmon the last three days in a row. There are only remains left when I go to gather them. I have been told it will be the eels, evil-faced creatures with jagged yellow mouths, they flick to the surface, vanish, a whiplash of black slime. Some people eat them but I would have to be desperate.

  I sit on a large smooth boulder. I have been told that I must not take my eyes from the water if I am to see the eels at their work but I feel I must put all of this down. There is so little time to write a journal, so much to do in this new country, and some day I want to be able to tell the children what it was like. At the rate we are going we will soon live in a large house and they will be raised in comfort. It is easy to forget what one’s life was like a six month ago when it is in steady transition. So I write of the black slab table, the shining cloth, the rough floor, the pale mayflower at the door. Each is a symbol, one against the other, darkness and light, like our lives emerging out of one and moving on to another state. It cannot be an accident, not entirely coincidence, that at last I am to have a child, that I have conceived in this wilderness which is yet so full of hope.

  An hour has passed since I wrote that.

  The water mesmerises me. I had not meant to sit here so long…

  Well. A large salmon in the net, thrashing about. I should have gone straight to it, that was the whole point of this, but all of a sudden a large eel, it looked about the thickness of a man’s arm, and perhaps three feet long, although it was difficult to tell from the way it writhed and contorted in the river, it appeared as a dark streak and straight away it was at the salmon’s shining body. I could do nothing but sit and watch, not just because I was afraid to put my hands in the water to try and pull the net in, but also because I felt compelled to watch this spectacle. I have never seen humans eat so neat and at the same time so fast. First the eel nipped smartly at the head of the fish so that within seconds it was still and unresisting; then it began to devour the flesh. To my amazement, I saw that it disdained the skin, and so when it had eaten but a little way in, all of a sudden it turned the fish inside out, tearing its skin straight off as quick as a man in a hurry to take his clothes off, then nip nip and swallow and before long the backbone was exposed, without a single joint being broken and in minutes it was as clean as the bark of a spruce tree, and the eel had vanished back into the depths — I would like to say he waddled after consuming our dinner so rapidly, but not a bit of it, he looked very spry and on the lookout for another meal, and all that was left was the sad little bundle of skin and bone.

  It made me shiver. The sun went behind a cloud, there were suddenly long sable shadows on the ground beside me. I remembered that there had been a year — the one before we arrived I think it was, when the sun had not shone all year, they called it the year without a summer and the crops had failed. I am not superstitious, like Duncan’s people, or so I tell myself, but I did not like it. I felt afraid again, in a nameless way that I cannot describe. I got to my feet and my bones were very stiff.

  Behind me, in the woods, I heard a crash. And then something moving. At first I thought it was the branch of a tree fallen part way and shaken by a sudden wind, but the noise seemed to continue and move away.

  I wondered if I had been watched by a bear. I have not told Duncan about this, but I am determined to be more careful, and keep a good listening ear. I don’t know what I would do if I met a bear.

  22 May 1818

  It is raining. I would like to go out but the downpour is too steady, a permanent glaze of rain on the cabin window. I feel trapped inside.

  This is ridiculous I know, but I feel as if there is something out there. Something watching me.

  24 May 1818

  It has stopped raining outside but, in a contrary fashion, I have not wanted to go out. I asked Duncan last night about the Indians. There are not many in the area he tells me, but they are all called Micmacs. He assures me that they are not in the habit of hurting other people.

  25 May 1818

  Kate and Eoghann came to visit us last night. Duncan offered them some rum which he still enjoys, though he is so much more content, now that he knows of the child, that he is not so set upon drinking the stuff. But it keeps the cold out, he says, though I’d have to say that such an excuse does not hold quite so good now that winter’s past. Anyway, his offer of hospitality was turned down with an embarrassing firmness, and I saw our friends glance at each other as if he had done something rather dreadful, especially Eoghann who seemed very firm indeed.

  On an impulse, I asked after McLeod, and was not really surprised when they began to extol his virtues and loudly sing his praises. As if by accident, almost, they went on to say that he was gathering a group of people around him who were prepared to renounce the Devil and all his ways in the face of all the immorality in Pictou.

  I certainly felt then that I had been reproached.

  In the next breath they asked would we come to service next Sabbath for the baptism of their new baby boy. I was
on the point of saying something about McLeod’s lack of ordination, but I could feel a look from Duncan burning the side of my face. Of course there was nothing we could do but say yes.

  It is all a bit difficult, for Duncan has not been to see McLeod as he had asked. I think he would have gone, were it not for sharing with me, for the moment at least, the feeling that we can stand on our own feet. Now there is a feeling of confrontation in the air.

  They walked into Pictou on Sunday morning, a distance of nearly three miles.

  ‘I must see about getting you a horse,’ said Duncan.

  ‘There’re more important things. Walking is a good exercise for me. See how strong I am? I’ll get weak and fat if I start riding around everywhere.’

  ‘You do get tired sometimes,’ he said anxiously.

  They approached the waterfront and already a large group of people were gathered on the foreshore. The size of it surprised Isabella. It was almost like the communion days of old, back in the Highlands.

  Searching around the crowd for the sight of familiar faces she spotted Mary McLeod, the first time she had seen her for more than a year. In her arms she held another child, born as she had been about to leave Scotland. She looked more pale than ever.

  Isabella made her way over to speak to her and she raised haggard eyes, scarcely seeming to know her old friend at first.

  ‘How goes it with you, Mary?’ said Isabella, reaching out to take her by the hand.

  ‘Oh, well enough. I’m not impressed with sea travel.’

  ‘Was it a bad crossing?’

  ‘What is a good one? There were storms day after day, and I was ill near most of the time. So were the children. Look at this one, his name is Bunyan. Did you ever see anything sicklier?’ There was a hint of bitterness which Isabella had never detected in Mary before. ‘I tell you, I watched this child night and day, expecting him to die every minute of the way.’

  Privately, Isabella did not think that he looked a great deal better now. She thought of the hours she had spent with Mary on the edge of Loch Broom, and was sorry for her. She tried so hard to be the kind of wife McLeod desired, but there seemed little thanks for it, or, for that matter, little hope that she might ever achieve her ambition.

  Shortly after this, McLeod began to preach. Thinking on it afterwards, Isabella found it difficult to recapture his exact words. But they were very harsh, and critical of almost everyone in and around Pictou. He spoke against the Church of Scotland, harangued other ministers who were working in Nova Scotia already, and catalogued such a list of sins amongst the inhabitants of the town as she had never heard described before. Then he turned his attention to the congregation. He started with drunkenness and Isabella saw that Duncan was hot and uncomfortable, sweating in his best clothes. For a time it looked as if McLeod was going to pursue this line, but then he switched quite suddenly to the sin of adultery.

  A deep blush passed around the assembled people. They were not used to such matters being aired in public.

  ‘The two matters, drunkenness and adultery, inevitably will go hand in hand,’ thundered McLeod from a makeshift pulpit, constructed from a cabin trunk and two kitchen chairs up-ended on each other, ‘one thing leading to another. You have only to look at the example of Mr James McOnie down there lurking at the back of the congregation, trying not to show his face, although he is wont to show his more lewd and unseemly parts in circumstances beyond the ken of decent men and women. The name of the circumstance has to be identified however as that of the woman called Maude, who is fat and frowsy and a whore to boot, Mr McOnie, and what have you to say for yourself about that?’

  There was a loud cry from the back of the congregation and at first Isabella took it to be McOnie himself, but it was not. It was his wife, learning for the first time of these accusations against her husband. McOnie had fainted clean away.

  Isabella thought of her fish, turned inside out and with its bones stripped bare.

  It was a wonderful and terrible drama, and she could feel the excitement in the air, as if the Men had just spoken. Again she told herself that it was only one man, that it was McLeod. But she could see now why they were calling him the Man, on his own account, and why they flocked to hear him. It was a grand performance.

  Beside them, Kate and Eoghann’s baby stirred in its woollen shawl, reminding Isabella and Duncan that it was on account of him that they were here. An expectant hush passed through the congregation as McLeod announced that the MacKenzies had brought their child today for baptism. On being called to bring their child forth, Kate and Eoghann stood and made their way to the front with Isabella and Duncan following them, to stand beside them while the child was given the sacrament.

  Isabella looked up at McLeod perched on the cabin trunk, meeting his gaze. The right eye hovered to the side of her face as he cast his misdirected glance towards her. She wondered if it was as bad as she believed or if it was just her imagination which exaggerated his squint.

  When they were all standing ranged in front of him, he looked from one to the other.

  ‘Oh yes, the MacKenzies,’ he said, his voice tart. ‘Well, what is holy in the eye of one man may not be in another.’ He sniffed, as if savouring the scent of the salt-laden air.

  The four of them waited, their anticipation turning and growing to uneasiness.

  ‘I do not think you are worthy enough parents at the moment to have your child accepted for the sacrament,’ said McLeod softly, yet at the same time, loud enough for everyone in the congregation to hear.

  A shiver of shock passed through the MacKenzies. Isabella, standing a little to one side, saw but did not share it. A surge of anger and humiliation on her friends’ behalf flooded through her, but with it came little sense of surprise. It was what she might have expected from the now all-powerful figure of McLeod.

  ‘It is the child, man,’ cried out Eoghann in anguish. ‘I do not know what it is that we have done, but whatever it is the child has not. He is full of the innocence of the newborn.’

  ‘You must examine your hearts and see if they are truly pure, and when you have completed that exercise, remind yourself that the child depends upon its parents for spiritual guidance. The child can but fail in the circumstance it now finds itself in.’

  Kate opened her mouth to argue, but the magic of this unfolding drama was gripping the onlookers again and she felt herself caught in their stillness, aware of them listening, waiting for her to beg and plead, and so was silent.

  As they walked back between the rows Isabella remembered the child that had been refused baptism at Ullapool. There will always be someone who has to pay for what was done to McLeod, she thought. If that is God, full of vengeance, I am not sure that I want too much to do with Him.

  Beside Mary McLeod, John Luther, a sturdy toddler now, trudged up to his father who was dismounting from his pulpit. McLeod picked the child up and, holding him in his arms, popped a piece of molasses candy that he had taken from his pocket into his son’s mouth. The child sucked and smirked with glee at the onlookers, who were now reluctantly beginning to disperse.

  Without speaking to the MacQuarries, Eoghann and Kate walked away, bewildered and bowed. Eoghann carried his new son in his arms while Kate led Martha, their older child, by the hand. They did not look back. Isabella could tell by the tilt of Kate’s head and the hunch of her shoulders that she was crying.

  2 June 1818

  Duncan is unhappy. He thinks Kate and Eoghann’s child was refused baptism because it is we, who are their friends, who are unworthy. I have heard, however, that McLeod is refusing on a grand scale. I will not listen to Duncan. I have told him that the true reason that McLeod will not baptise children is because of not being ordained, and that he knows within his own sinful heart that it would be an abuse of the sacraments if he were to undertake baptisms. Look, I have pointed out, he cannot marry people — of which fact everyone is aware — because it is a legal matter, rather than one of religious conscience and principle.
McLeod mystifies the issues in order to confuse people.

  But Duncan sits, dour and quiet, and does not touch a drop of drink in the evenings. I wished he would stop, but now I almost wish he would start again. McLeod’s meddling has not brought about a desirable result. Duncan’s temper is stretched to breaking point.

  I am little better. Our hard-won peace seems to have melted like butter in the sun.

  I tell myself, when the child is born, it will be better. But that is still a five month away.

  And the woods, which I had grown to like, still feel unfriendly.

  5 June 1818

  If this goes on I think I will go mad. I have to get out of the cabin, yet I cannot escape a feeling of menace out there. I tell myself it is my condition and Duncan’s frame of mind but still there is this unease. I gathered wild strawberries today. In the wood nearby there was a crackling in the undergrowth. I wonder if I could learn to handle a musket? A bear’s muzzle fetches ten shillings.

  6 June 1818

  Truth is, something is going to happen, and I do not know what.

  seven

  Pictou, 20 June 1818

  To the Justice of the Peace in this County

  Sir,

  It is, as you enquire, properly reported to you that my wife Mrs Isabella MacQuarrie suffered grievous injuries at the hands of an unknown male assailant on June 10. I returned home from my work that evening to find her lying on the floor of our cabin in a most distressed state. She had sustained injuries, both cuts and bruising, to her throat and body. She was barely conscious when I arrived and throughout that night there were times when I believed she would die. Friendly neighbouring women have nursed my wife since then. There have been periods of delirium and high fevers. I cannot allow her to be interviewed about this incident at the present time, although I realise that it would be in the interest of catching the offender. As you said in your communication to me, the longer it is left the less hope there is of apprehending this foul creature.