The Book of Secrets

by Fiona Kidman

  But she begs me not to have anyone ask her about the matter and I am afraid, sir, that she will go off her head if anyone should come near her.

  My wife has since lost a child she was carrying at the time of this incident. It was our first, and we were much looking forward to the event. Her distress is heightened by this loss.

  Please do not ask me again about seeing her. Take my word for what has happened.

  No sir, of course my wife was not violated in the terrible manner you suggest.

  Yours etc.

  Duncan MacQuarrie, resident of this County.

  (Copy of a letter found by Maria McClure enclosed in her grandmother’s journal.)

  eight

  14 July 1818

  High summer, yes it is high summer indeed.

  He knows. He pretends it has not happened. Some days I do too. What else can I do? Other days it will not be put to one side. Let us re-examine the matter.

  Let us go back to that day in June. I say us, as if I am addressing a crowd. A crowded courtroom, perhaps. No, that will never be. I am actually addressing the record.

  So. It is a June day. I see the beautiful harbour as flat and blue as a man’s shirt when it is ironed, lying between the gentle hills. I am happy. Although the sun is bright, the night before has been cool. There are ashes in the grate, I kneel to sweep them up. My belly has started to swell, soon I can feel that it will be awkward to stoop so far.

  Then I hear that noise again, a scuffling in the leaves outside. I try to ignore it. Every day for a week now I have heard movement. I do not think it is the bear any more. There is too much stealth about it. A bear would not have guile. It would crash about more. A porcupine, I wonder. I am told there are plenty of those in the woods, and they would move more quietly through the undergrowth perhaps. So why does it stop, start, appear to move closer and then move away?

  That morning had been different. The movement was close to her, and out there, she heard a sneeze. An ordinary human sneeze.

  So it was true. All along she had known that it was a man.

  Isabella went to the door and called out. ‘Hullo, who is it? I know you’re there, you might as well come out.’

  There was a hesitation in the air, then all noise ceased. It had become so quiet that it seemed as if the birds might have stopped their singing too.

  ‘Are you lost? Do you need food?’ She tried to speak in a brave voice, but the silence was frightening.

  ‘Is it you Duncan?’ she heard herself say, and then suddenly she was aware of herself whimpering in the back of her throat.

  For she had seen him. A man in a heavy jacket and buckskin pants. He was swarthy, with sharp ferrety features, and not much taller than she was. He looked strong though, with long arms. She thought of apes, which she had never seen, but heard discussed in London. The man moved towards her and pulled his lips back in what she took to be a smile. His teeth were bad and stained with tobacco.

  ‘You’re hungry, are you?’ she ventured. What women think of, when all else fails, she explained to herself. Feed them, that is what men like. It is softening and kind to offer food. She reached for the bench. There was a pot of cold potato and some scones left over from supper.

  The man nodded. ‘Yes, I’ll eat,’ he said, and sat at the table without waiting a further invitation. He had an accent which at first she could not place.

  She began preparing the food, keeping one eye on the door. He was between her and it.

  I cannot be in danger. If it is only food he wants. Surely? He has no reason to harm me … But why had he watched me?

  ‘Are you from around these parts?’ she asked him.

  An indifferent smile hovered at the corner of his mouth. ‘You have rum.’

  It was a statement not a question. He reached out for the tankard and helped himself. There was plenty there. Duncan’s lately more abstemious ways were in this man’s favour. He threw down half a tankard, gargling it a little as he did. It was a disgusting sound. And she was aware of his smell. It was sour, rather like rotting vegetation.

  ‘Bon. Ver’ good,’ he said, and this time she recognised his guttural accent.

  ‘Were you born in France, or here?’

  ‘You ask too many questions. Get the food.’

  ‘Here, I should think. You’re a descendant. Was your father stationed here? At Louisberg, perhaps?’

  ‘The food.’ His tone was angry, as if she had trifled with him enough.

  ‘I haven’t got much. I’ll have to light the fire.’

  ‘No.’ He stood, seizing the food out of her hands and stuffing it into his mouth, then snatching more rum to wash it down.

  She moved to the door. His hand shot out, grabbed her arm; she pulled away, resisting him.

  ‘Why have you been watching me?’ she cried. At the door, two more men had appeared. They were both rough, looked like lumbermen. One was tall and red haired, the other an older man with rumpled greying hair. She tried to think whether she had seen the redhead in the village. She was sure, as she looked at him, that he was a Gael, though no one whom she knew, or could remember seeing before.

  ‘There’s food,’ said the first man, waving at the bench with his free hand, while with the other his thin tobacco-stained fingers still gripped her arm.

  ‘Not much,’ said the redhead, a note of contempt in his voice.

  ‘Please,’ said Isabella, turning to him, and appealing, ‘you’re one of my countrymen. I’m happy to give you food, but ask your friend to let go of me first.’

  ‘Let her go,’ he said. He was laughing, his mouth already crammed with scone.

  The Frenchman dropped her arm and she drew back into the corner. But the redhead’s hand was falling upon her. She could not take her eyes off his hands. They were stumpy and thick, white with feathers of red hair along the backs of them. His hand ripped her skirt in one sharp motion, splitting it from the bodice. She heard herself begin to wail, a thin high sound that she would go on making for an hour or more, even though her mouth was hit repeatedly to stop the noise.

  ‘I told you you’d like her,’ the redhead said to the others.

  She knew then that it was he who had watched her, not the Frenchman. ‘But she’s mine first.’

  ‘I am with child,’ she said quietly, as he closed in on her, forcing her legs apart. She tried to grip her ankles around each other, but one of the men flicked them apart as easily as slicing a twig, and then she was on the floor, the planks digging into her back as he entered her.

  That was the pain she was aware of at first, being bruised as she was pushed backwards and forwards on the boards, but then there was the tearing between her legs, the dry pain which increased as her terror and humiliation mounted.

  ‘Don’t fight me,’ he snarled, interrupting their rasping connection to spit in her. He came at her again but now she was raw, and a blaze of pain scorched her. She tried to muster spit in her own mouth to shoot in his face, but found herself as dry there as the rest of her. Her hatred and her cowering were beginning to tell on him, and he was losing heart for the act he started upon with such deliberation. It took him a long time to be done with her.

  His companions became impatient. They had drunk more rum as he panted and snorted on with what had become a chore. It occurred to her that if it were not for them he would abandon this mortal act.

  At last he was finished and his seed swelled out of her; it made it easier for the others. The Frenchman took her three times, lapping in this puddle, the swollen aching entrance that was all she could feel of her body. The rest was numb as if her sex was surrounded by a void.

  In the respite before the grey-haired man descended on her she felt a surge of strength returning and tried to push him away. His punishment was swift. First he stood and kicked her on the floor while he undid his belt. Then he knelt down and seized her by the throat, his thumbs pressing the breath out of her. He took her then while she was choking, the spittle running out of her mouth and blackness
filling her brain. She had become so limp that he had to hold her to him like a rag doll.

  ‘Tell that thee like it,’ he commanded. She had thought before that he was a north country Englishman, but he had spoken little. It was not that she cared what this motley bunch were, or where they came from, only that she could make sense enough of what they were saying to obey their commands and escape with her life. If there were point even to that.

  ‘G’arn wi’ thee, tell that you like it.’

  ‘I like it,’ she whispered, with all that there was left of her voice.

  ‘Ah, you would bein’ whore,’ he muttered and set to work on her again. He was quick, too quick for his own pleasure, and not pleased with his performance in sight of the other men either. He rewarded her with blows to her head. She could not cover it, nor see him either as her eyes closed up, and then she felt the snap of bones, ribs and an arm as unconsciousness blotted out the rest of what was done.

  Later, when the sky was darkening outside, she was roused by greater pain than any the men had inflicted on her. Struggling to remember what had happened, and feeling the board and the smell of new timber against her cheek, she touched the sticky mess on her body. There was dried blood all over her, but where she touched herself now, there was fresh blood. The pain was worse than she had thought possible. It was beyond endurance. Or so it seemed to her then.

  But she was still alive. She must have endured it after all. How unfortunate, how very unkind. Death would have been the better, the surer answer.

  There had been four sovereigns in the jar on the mantelpiece. They had been taken. Those, and a puncheon of rum would be enough to tempt robbers, it was agreed by the neighbours. But not enough, surely, to provoke such a beating?

  Isabella did not tell them all that had been taken. Neither did her husband.

  ‘How many?’

  Duncan stood at the door. He was on his way to the woods. More than a month had passed. Isabella sat by the fire, her left arm still in a sling, but otherwise outwardly as she had always been.

  She said nothing in response to his question. They had had this conversation before.

  ‘Tell me,’ he repeated, ‘how many?’ His face was working and she thought he might hit her. He had not done so yet, but so much boiled and seethed within him that she did not know what would happen from one day to the next.

  ‘Have you gone dumb? Did they take your tongue too?’

  She got up and crossed to the bench, so as to be seen to be doing something. She picked up a bowl with her good hand and awkwardly dropped a cup of flour into it, starting bread with an exaggerated care. He walked back to her.

  ‘You know what I mean. I want to know how many men there were that day.’

  ‘What difference does it make?’ she said, breaking her silence.

  He touched her shoulder, more gently than she expected. ‘Nothing can mend what happened, whether it was one or twenty. I need to know.’

  ‘And I need to forget.’

  ‘How many, Isabella?’

  ‘Two,’ she lied. She didn’t know where the lie came from; it was something that had sprung up when he had first found her bleeding on the floor. Dazed and half conscious she had nonetheless known that she must save him from knowing that which she knew. Or all that she knew. She had wondered many times since why this should be so. He was a man, and this thing had been done to her by men. Then she would think how much she loved her husband. She was confused, no longer knew what she ought to think. And every time she did think about it, it seemed sillier than the time before, that they should be bothering whether it was one man or ten who had done this damage. It was like some crazy ritual, something he could not force out of his head and in a kind of madness needed to keep adding to the horror and disgrace of it all, letting it hang there between the two of them, filling his mind with more and more pictures to pass his days.

  His shoulders bowed. ‘For the last time. I will never ask again.’

  She was tempted to tell him then, to lean against his strength. Afterwards she would wonder whether it was because she did not believe in it, thought that he would buckle before the truth. For the truth stuck in her throat and she said, ‘Two. There were two men.’ She turned back to the dough that she was mixing, trying to anchor the bowl with her injured arm.

  He straightened, walked back to the door, stopped again.

  ‘There were three tankards on the table that night,’ he said. His voice was flat. He walked out the door.

  He had known all the time.

  She stood at the bench for a long moment. Too long. For when she went to call him back, to ask him to help her or let them help each other, however it could be done, he was gone, and the woods were silent again.

  So that she was left alone with what felt like guilt, except that she could not decipher its cause, nor think of anything she had done which might cause her to feel this way.

  20 September 1818

  I often think of dying now. It will be winter soon. We see no one. Duncan sits drinking rum by the fire in the evenings.

  30 September 1818

  Last night Duncan sat by the fire (we have begun to burn coal, this is a new marvel here; once I would have delighted in it, so very modern) and he drank until he no longer recognised me. After that he came to our bed and for the first time in a three month or more, lay with me as my husband. Only it was like a stranger in my bed. It was like that morning in June. He staggered out at first light, without a word.

  She remembered as if it were a long time ago, though she thought it was only three weeks or so, the day they brought him home from the woods. She had been hanging out the washing. She could still see each garment, like a patch against the sky: the bright linen of their bed; the dark blue shirt that Duncan wore on Sundays; her camisole, delicate and cream though much mended, bought in London and the remnant of some other life she could no longer believe she had inhabited; and a bright plaid blanket, full of reds and yellows, that she was airing before the winter. The wind plucked them up and flipped them towards the sky. The wind was in the trees. She heard them sigh and creak. Yet their movement somehow gave her hope. She had been desperate for so long, so still within herself, that she was relieved when she felt some stirring within her, as if in some distant place in the heart there was an intimation that she might live again.

  So she listened to the trees, trying to read their message. Then she walked down to the river where Duncan had set a net that morning. They had had no fish for a long time; almost, she thought, as if the fish were shunning them too. But there was a fish that morning and she hauled the net up and dealt with it, a fine speckled-bellied trout. She took it to the cottage and placed it in the baking dish, banked up the fire to get the oven hot. There was a pan of milk set and she skimmed cream from the top. She thought she would bake apples in the oven alongside the trout. It was time they had a feast again.

  As she finished spooning the last of the cream into the bowl she felt dread descend on her like a hard hand. She stood upright and the first thing she feared was that the men were coming to get her again. She looked wildly around the room without seeing anything, as a blind person seeks when danger is near, sniffing the air like an animal, for she knew that she would smell them if they came near her again. She had thought that they would not come back, that they would be far away; perhaps to the south, in America or the West Indies, for she had decided that they were men off ships. She had even wondered if they were convicts, such a various group of vagabonds travelling together. Now, in panic, she thought they were returning and ran from one wall to another, clawing to find an escape while all the time the door stood open.

  She stood still again, certain that this time she would die. The air was fresh with the scent of spruce and she could smell nothing alien on the breeze. It was very cold, though. The fall that year had seemed like endless summer, but it was drawing to a close. The nights held a touch of frost. Isabella reached for her shawl and wrapped it round herself. She sat
down to wait for Duncan, but she didn’t think he would come.

  Soon she heard men’s voices. They were familiar voices, and she heard Eoghann call her name, then Grey Donald’s, and six more of them emerged out of the trees, carrying between them the body of her husband.

  She ran forward to meet them, big awkward men with nothing to say, Duncan’s clothes on his still body were soaking wet, his face already like marble and twice as cold when she reached out to touch it.

  Eoghann made tentatively to take her hand.

  ‘There was nothing we could do, Isabella. He was under the water too long before we could reach him.’

  ‘It was a logjam,’ said Grey Donald. ‘He went out to free it. His foot slipped and was caught between the logs. They rolled on, taking him with them, and he went down between them.’

  She could see then his lame foot which he had always tried to ignore. He had worked it so hard that it was almost as strong as his good one. He should have known though, she thought, it was never meant for jumping logs on fast-flowing rivers.

  Oh but he would have known. She knew that he did.

  So that the next day she walked through the green leaves of the woods with the men and a filigree of shadows fell around them as they carried the coffin to the cemetery.

  ‘We will look after him,’ said Eoghann, meaning that she did not need to walk so close beside them as they carried him. But she kept on walking in their midst with her hand on the wooden lid, and, looking at her face, they decided that it was best to leave her be, to let her do it in her own way.