The Book of Secrets

by Fiona Kidman

  All of this was to do with why she felt she must work harder than almost anyone else at school. And although nobody ever said so directly, she must not grow up like her mother and so worked harder still.

  Each evening the family gathered around the long table. They folded their hands and Fraser said grace before they began their meal. When they had finished, he read the Bible aloud.

  ‘Quite fluent,’ her mother sometimes said, and Annie could swear she raised her eyebrows at Duncan Cave, her half-brother who lolled at the end of the table and appeared not to take the slightest notice of what her father was saying.

  Annie hated it when they flicked comments like this from one to the other. She would see her father’s face burn dull crimson then as he was overtaken by bouts of speechlessness. Although Isabella had not said so in front of her, Annie could not avoid the knowledge, because somehow her mother managed skilfully to impart it, that it was she who had taught Fraser to read.

  Now it was time. The remains of their meal lay on the plates in front of them, threads of cold meat. Being Sunday, the meal had been prepared the day before so that Isabella would not be seen to have laboured on the Sabbath. It was a custom which she had come to find a great convenience.

  Duncan Cave had left more on his plate than anyone. He pushed it aside and stretched his long frame back in his chair, looking up towards the smoky ceiling. His young man’s face was thin and his eyes bright. A smile appeared to hover at the corner of his mouth.

  ‘Was the food not good enough for you?’ Fraser demanded.

  ‘There is gristle.’ Duncan Cave looked down the length of his finely turned nose. ‘It’s more tolerable when the meat is hot.’

  ‘It is more tolerable when the meat is hot,’ mimicked Hector from where he sat, close to his father. His admiration for Fraser was boundless, and he was quick to seize whatever opportunity presented itself to gain favour with him. Yet already Annie sensed that Hector was doomed to be less a man, in the sense that a man is implacable and unbending in the matter of his duty. Hector would falter and flounder and end up even less understanding of why he must do these duties, and even more determined, therefore, to perform them.

  Yet she loved him. It is as well he has me to understand him, she thought. For mother does not. But then who would understand her?

  For her mother, sitting at the opposite end of the table from her father, somehow both glittering and brooding at the same time, did not seem to understand anyone in the world except her club-footed son, Duncan Cave.

  ‘I will make you fannikineekins tomorrow,’ she said to him as he disdainfully turned the piece of offending grey gristle over on the plate.

  ‘It is just that I am tired of what meat looks like,’ said Duncan Cave, sighing.

  It was his stepfather’s turn to smile, at once amazed and supercilious.

  ‘May I have some fannikineekins too?’ said Annie timidly. For she really would have liked some but beyond this was afraid that someone might shout at someone else, and that by saying something she could stop them.

  ‘You. You played up in church today,’ said Hector.

  There was stillness around the table. ‘Did you now? Was it not much fun in the kirk today?’ said Isabella languidly.

  ‘Did the Man rabbit on a bit, eh?’ Duncan Cave asked. He looked around them. ‘Well tell us. Mother and I are dying to hear what hellfire and damnation he has in store for us this week.’

  ‘That is enough,’ shouted Fraser, banging his fist down on the table so that the milk jug hopped. ‘You,’ he said, turning to Annie, ‘you will rise at five each morning this week and chop wood for an hour before you begin your devotions.’

  ‘It will be dark,’ said Annie faintly.

  And oh, she was so afraid of the dark.

  ‘Quite so, you may have a lamp,’ said Fraser, as if to soften the punishment, although clearly it had not occurred to him until that moment that it would prove ineffective otherwise.

  And so much for Hector. So much for love. He scowled at the table-cloth now, pleased with himself on the one hand, but on the other afraid that he might have stirred up a bigger storm than he intended and that its fury might at any time round on him.

  On his side of the table, Duncan Cave seemed to lift his shoulder, certainly an eyebrow, as he looked at his mother. Annie studied the table-cloth, not daring to peek, supposing Isabella as aloof as always.

  In fact, Isabella had been studying her daughter’s face.

  ‘We shall read from the Book of Isaiah,’ intoned Fraser.

  ‘So we are on about the landlords of Scotland again?’ said Duncan Cave.

  ‘They robbed us. They were drunken and committed all manner of sins,’ shouted Fraser. ‘Can you not understand that, you … you worthless doodler?’

  ‘Yes, yes, I understand very well. I am interested,’ said his stepson.

  ‘Isaiah is so very political, that is all,’ said Isabella.

  Fraser’s hands were trembling as he opened the book and began to read. There was a mist in front of his eyes, curiously like tears, as if the heat in the room was affecting him. Sweat collected on his brow and ran in runnels down his forehead. It was hard to see when he was taunted like this. He swallowed, cleared his throat, and began to read: ‘For all the tables are full of vomit and filthiness, so that there is … no place clean.’

  Ah, this was better, he could cope with them now. He even paused, looked over the top of the book and around the table to make sure that his words were having the right effect. He saw with satisfaction that his wife was flinching, and that the child Annie was white and shaken. He avoided looking at Duncan Cave, as Annie had avoided her mother’s eye.

  To Annie’s surprise, Isabella stopped in her room that night when she came to check that she was in bed. Usually she glanced around and said a firm goodnight before she closed the door. But occasionally she would come in and sit by Annie and talk quietly with her; when she did this Annie would wonder why she was so afraid of her, for in truth, Isabella never raised her voice towards her, or punished her for things. If there had been things for which to punish her. Only Fraser had the capacity to discover evil doings in Annie. Annie desired only to be good, to be loved, to be like the McLeods. Or even to be better than the McLeod’s own children.

  But it was hard with a mother like hers. It was whispered amongst her friends at school that Isabella did not believe in God.

  Now, as Isabella sat beside her, staring intently into her child’s round face with its prominent eyes and somewhat failed chin, Annie dared to ask her, ‘Is it true, mother?’

  Is what true?’ Isabella stroked the top of Annie’s hand with an idle finger.

  ‘That you are a heathen? Well, that is what I have been told.’

  The magnetic finger paused. ‘By whom?’

  ‘Oh I can’t remember,’ said Annie hurriedly. The finger waited. ‘Margaret McCabe.’

  ‘Oh. Them.’ Isabella’s expression embraced an entire family. The finger resumed its gentle, hypnotic action. ‘Now do you think that I look like a heathen, eh?’

  ‘No. Because heathens are dark and don’t wear clothes. Heathens are savages.’

  ‘Then you’ve nothing to fear, have you?’

  ‘Not a witch either?’

  ‘And who told you that?’

  ‘No one, nobody told me that.’

  ‘Ah yes they did. Come on, dumpling.’ When it suited Isabella she was known to be an excellent cook, for which it was suspected that Fraser forgave her much. Although she remained lean and lithe herself, he and the children, with the exception of Duncan Cave, had a tendency to plumpness. In what passed for her better moods Isabella was wont to refer to them by whatever culinary inspiration came to mind, sometimes with a touch of malice that mostly went unnoticed. As she had intended, she provoked her daughter now.

  ‘I’m not fat.’

  ‘Maybe not fat, just a little round and fluffy, eh? That’s what mother’s dumplings are like. Now the truth, I wa
nt the truth, huh?’

  ‘Peggy McLeod.’

  ‘Hmm, I thought so. You believe everything Peggy McLeod tells you?’

  ‘She’s Reverend McLeod’s daughter. She’s my best friend.’

  ‘Oh yes, the minister’s daughter and his darling. D’you know, she can do no wrong that one. I’ll guarantee she gets no punishment from his high-and-mightiness.’

  ‘Are you, though?’ Annie, embarked now on this course, could not withdraw from it.

  ‘A witch? Has she seen me riding my broomstick? Casting spells? Tell her, yes I am a witch and I turn girls into curds on top of the milk, thick and yellow like fat blobs, and they melt and run away into the grass and fall down into the pits of hell where they sizzle, and never come back.’

  ‘Mother!’

  ‘You’re too scared to tell her, aren’t you?’

  ‘You wouldn’t want me to, would you?’

  ‘I don’t care,’ said her mother, and laughed.

  ‘I might tell father, though,’ said Annie.

  Her mother stood up and blew out the candle.

  ‘You must tell him whatever you choose,’ said Isabella, and her voice was cool and even as it moved away and then her footsteps faded on the stairs.

  They stopped outside Duncan Cave’s room.

  ‘Is it you?’ his voice called softly in answer to her knock.

  He was bent over his desk, a pen in his hand. Papers were spread around, and each of them was covered with delicate line drawings, pictures of plants in leaf and in flower. They lined the walls above his bed, and Isabella felt as if she was entering a garden, as if petals were showering down upon her and bushes were brushing her ankles, so accurate and exact were these drawings. She could have sworn that she felt the tremble of the air shifting the foliage.

  Duncan Cave held up the drawing that he was working on. It was of a rock covered with lichen.

  ‘What a thing,’ she exclaimed. For though she liked it, because he had done it, it was not like the more living vibrant plants that scattered the room.

  ‘It is the rock where Bunyan and I used to sit when we were lads,’ he said, his voice stretched and edgy. ‘He would like to see it again.’

  Her heart turned over heavily then. It hurt her to hear him speaking of himself and his friend as if their boyhood were long past, and yet she could see that this was how it must seem. Bunyan McLeod was dying and no one could save him from what was to come.

  She remembered the delicate baby whom Mary McLeod had nearly lost on the ship, and whom she had helped to nurse when he was small, only a little older than her own first child. They had been friends all their lives, and neither had had other friends. Now, at any hour, they would be parted.

  ‘Will you come and see him tomorrow?’ asked Duncan Cave.

  ‘Aye, if that’s what you want,’ she said, inwardly recoiling, for she did not like to visit the house of McLeod.

  ‘I should,’ said her son, who had the shape of a man but was still a boy. He is too young to bear so much, the mother thought. She put her arms around his shoulders where he sat, and he turned towards her, burying his face against her hip.

  When she had left him, she glided on down the passageway and paused at the next door. She hesitated and passed on. There was nothing to be said between her and Black Hector, who chose not to please her at all and would prefer to think that as Duncan Cave had another father, so he might have been borne by another mother, before she came along.

  Would that it had been so, was her own grim rejoinder when she thought of him in the darkest hour of the night. So she walked on, away from the one amongst her children who must work harder than all the others to please his father, because by odd chance he was also the one who did not have the protection of the McLeods. Whereas Annie, unprepossessing though she might be, was dutiful and kind, and a willing handmaiden to the ebullient Peggy McLeod, while Duncan Cave could do whatever he pleased simply because of his love, unrehearsed and without guile, for Bunyan who was dying. Hector had no such friends in the house of the Man.

  She would have sought a room of her own if there had been any left spare, but they were all taken up with these children of hers. In the room where she must lie down for the night, her husband lay waiting.

  As she sat on the edge of the bed he opened his mouth, issuing forth a belch stained with grease. Instinctively she moved down the bed an inch or so. His hand fell on her shoulder.

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘Nowhere. I am going nowhere.’ Have nowhere to go, she might have added, but she did not.

  She thought, as she had before, I have endured worse. And survived.

  Annie lay and felt the breath of the house and held her own for as long as she could, as if the act of breathing might cause some explosion of all the elements that mingled under the roof of her home. Then, where the moonlight struck the boards, she watched the floor with fascination, certain in her heart that the Devil would rise through it one night and seize her by․the ankle. Would he break open the floor with a mighty crash (she hoped so, for even then it might not be too late for someone to hear and save her, though who had ever been saved from the Devil when he was so poised to pounce?). Perhaps he would slide through the floor with stealth and presence like that of the Holy Ghost who, she was sure, could appear in a room like a breath of fog on a moor, like steam rising in the kitchen from a pot of potatoes.

  But though she watched and waited, in the end she slept.

  In the afternoon Peggy and Annie sliced and creamed their way across the ice, their skates whistling as they practised turns. It was an early snow and the lakes were solid already, and soon the bay would be as well. When she was flying over the ice like this Annie felt free and cleared of all responsibility. It was a heady, giddy feeling, like madness, as if there was a space behind her eyes. It was a harmless thing to do that no one complained about, skating across the ice, yet the very pleasure it gave made her doubt its lightness.

  Today, Peggy was hugging the importance of impending death to her like a treasure.

  ‘We are fortunate,’ said Peggy as they carried their skates home, ‘that we have several children in our family. It’s always useful to have more if any should die.’

  ‘I suppose it is,’ said Annie doubtfully

  ‘You haven’t really enough in yours,’ said Peggy.

  ‘No,’ said Annie humbly. ‘I can see that.’ Immediately her burdens became greater. ‘I shall make up for it when I’m grown,’ she said.

  ‘Oh yes. I shall make sure that I have plenty too. What will you call them?’

  ‘Oh, I hadn’t thought. Well, Fraser of course. And maybe Hector. And I will name one for its father.’

  ‘So what shall that be?’

  ‘Oh Peggy McLeod, how can I know that?’

  ‘You could marry one of my brothers.’

  Annie had already considered that and wondered about naming Edward, but the idea of an actual living person as a husband was embarrassing; besides she was afraid that it might seem like impertinence to suggest a McLeod for herself. But Edward was clever, and so good to look at she could have eaten him with jam whenever she sat across the table from him at the McLeods. His eyes seemed to rest kindly on her, unlike those of his six older brothers, whose glances were bold and sharp as they looked at each other, sly as they moved across their father’s face. They were said to run brandy from the island of St Pierre.

  As if reading her thoughts, Peggy said, ‘Edward is our second Edward you know. We had another one, but he died too.’

  Annie remembered the grave at Black Cove which bore the brief inscription, ‘Short spring, endless summer.’ It was a terse comment for someone as vocal as McLeod, and it occurred to her with surprise that it must be the work of Mrs McLeod. She hardly knew Mary McLeod, although she spent so much time in her home. Often the minister’s wife did not rise from her bed for days at a time, and when she did sit at table with them her face was like flour and her eyes fatigued. They roamed
across the tops of her children’s heads, and Annie could have sworn that she saw none of them. Her hands lay between her knees, the fingers threading themselves round and round each other, a ceaseless rhythmic motion contained in the circle of her lap.

  ‘Well I suppose you must have enough Edwards by now,’ said Annie, hoping that the subject of naming children was over.

  But Peggy was inexorable. ‘What would you call the girls?’

  ‘Eh?’ Annie was surprised. ‘Oh, I don’t suppose I shall have girls.’

  ‘You might. Somebody has to have them.’

  ‘Aye. But I think I will be having boys, you know.’

  ‘But if? What if?’

  Annie divined that Peggy was waiting for her to say, like any best friend, her own name Peggy, or Margaret.

  ‘Maria,’ she said, suddenly perverse. As soon as it was out she regretted it. But it was too late to take it back. ‘I would call a girl Maria.’

  She comforted herself with the thought that if she persisted with her goodness it was a problem she might not have to confront. Sons must certainly be her reward.

  So they made their way to the house on the knoll above Black Cove, where Bunyan McLeod lay dying.

  Bunyan was propped by a mountain of pillows. His high forehead shone like marble, and although he was barely twenty his hairline had receded. Within the recesses of his skull his eyes blazed, a dark unnatural colour, and yet Isabella who, as she had promised, was visiting him too, could not escape the thought that Bunyan, of all McLeod’s children, was the most like his father.

  ‘How are you today then, Bunyan?’ she asked quietly.

  ‘I am as well as can be expected, thank you, Mrs McIssac.’

  ‘How have you been passing the time?’

  ‘Oh I’ve plenty to think about, and Duncan tells me all that’s happening out there in the world, and what he thinks I cannot see in my head he draws for me. I am very fortunate.’