The Book of Secrets

by Fiona Kidman

  As if reading his thoughts, McLeod said, ‘Shall we pray, friend?’

  In a moment or so the two men were kneeling on their stockinged knees beside each other. ‘For what we are about to receive,’ McLeod began, and Eoghann knew that he was lost.

  After what seemed like an eternity of praying, for the health of the stock, for clement weather, for the sins of others, for the salvation of the wicked who had abused the Church of Scotland, for the denunciation of other clergy in Nova Scotia who were leading the people astray, for education and for good fishing, and a list of other bounty both actual and spiritual, the two men rose from their knees. Eoghann thought his had disintegrated on the hard floor and hobbled a step or two to ease himself, but McLeod stood straight up and drew his cloak around him without flinching.

  ‘Well, Eoghann,’ he said in an everyday manner. ‘It is all for the best, don’t you think? Your boy, I’m talking about.’ There was a touch of impatience in his manner, as if Eoghann was a little slow. ‘Even if he did not steal on this occasion, he will never be tempted to do so in the future. Wouldn’t you agree?’

  ‘Yes, Minister,’ replied Eoghann, so low he was barely audible. He opened the door for McLeod who swept past his host, barely glancing at him.

  But seeing Kate and Martha by the fire, he turned to them. ‘Good night, Mrs MacKenzie,’ he said. His voice was fulsome. Kate looked at Eoghann but he did not meet her eye.

  ‘Good night, Minister,’ said Kate, and closed the door behind him.

  McLeod preached a curious sermon on the Sunday following his visit to Eoghann. It was an exaltation, almost mystical in its allusions, to a good man amongst them, who for his meekness and gentle ways could expect an easy passage to heaven. Heads began to turn as slowly the congregation recognised that it was Eoghann to whom the sermon was directed.

  ‘But what if they had put Lewis in jail, or he had been whipped?’ Annie asked Hector as they walked home from church. They were a discreet distance behind her father and there were some last things that she wished to understand, for once and for all.

  ‘Oh I don’t know,’ said Hector, kicking out at an icy boulder. He was bored, and restless, and Martha MacKenzie wasn’t in church, although the last time he had seen her she had looked like a real old spinster and wasn’t fun to spy on any more. He had watched the elders in church and thought how long it was going to take him ever to climb the ladder. He looked ahead at their father’s stolid back and bent head, and reflected on how little piety seemed to have done for him.

  ‘But seeing he didn’t do it,’ persisted Annie.

  ‘Well they didn’t.’

  Brother and sister stopped in the snow, looking at each other.

  ‘They didn’t put him in jail. Or whip him,’ he said. ‘So it’s all right. There is nothing to worry about.’

  So the two of them trudged on, and Annie thought that there must be someone in whom you could place your trust, and for the moment it might as well be Hector.

  John and Murdoch McLeod had finished building a ship out of black birch. They named the ninety-ton barque the Maria.

  Now that it was done, their brother Donald, Norman’s second son, loaded it with timber cleared from the land of the settlers and set sail for Scotland.

  McLeod seemed careless of all that had gone before in the months just past, and as near to a state of happiness as he cared to admit when the ship departed.

  It did not return. Donald did not send back silver or gold or pounds. In St Ann’s they heard that he had sold the ship, but after that nobody knew where he had gone. For the time being he had vanished from the face of the earth.

  fifteen

  There was famine over the island for the crops had failed. A blight had ruined the potatoes for the third year in a row, while wheat fly attacked the grain. There was no seed to replant; the stored potatoes were soggy black piles of foul-smelling muck that killed the cattle if it was fed to them. Most of the beasts had been slaughtered anyway, to tide the islanders over for food. There was almost nothing left. It was a creeping malaise that had caught up with them, spreading from west to east across the island. At St Ann’s they said it could not happen, but it had. McLeod decreed it the fault of indolent and idle people in the rest of Cape Breton, who were more interested in baccy and toddy than they were in tending the fields, but before long he could not say that, for it had overtaken them all. When the famine did catch up with St Ann’s, some said that it must be God’s punishment for pride. McLeod still had his followers but only the most faithful were above cynicism when they spoke of him.

  It was now several years since Isabella’s first premonition of the hunger that was to befall them. She remembered the strange dark green spots on the leaves of the potatoes that year, and how quickly they had turned purplish-black, how disgusting the potatoes tasted. She had known there was something amiss, but apart from her comment to Kate she had dared not speak; if it had spread then, she knew that the trouble would be attributed to her. There must always be someone to blame. It stopped people from being so afraid. She had already seen how they looked at her when things went wrong.

  At the ports there was panic as the people scrambled for food. Thirty thousand Scots now crammed Cape Breton Island and few had brought any resources of their own. Farmers began signing away their lands in 1848, hundreds of acres at a time, for a bag of meal that would last only a month or so. Some were becoming sceptical about the blight ever lifting as their bellies crawled, as if with maggots, and their children walked around miserable with distended stomachs. Often they had running diarrhoea although there was nothing inside them.

  A few had noticed that the blight appeared worse during tides of unseasonable weather, months of dampness and higher heat than was normal, but if there was an association between the two nobody knew what to do about it. Or were too tired. Or hungry.

  As the famine moved relentlessly towards St Ann’s, Isabella laid in stores of food to last them for as long as possible. She picked wild rosehips after the frosts and dried them across the veranda of the house, hoping to stop the scurvy in winter, and went searching for wild yellow cloudberries on the edge of the bogs to make bakeapple jam. Though what use is this, she wondered, as she brought the fruit to boil with the last of her sugar, for who will eat jam if there is no bread to spread it on? She began to feel helpless for the first time.

  When the pigs were slaughtered that fall she guarded their heads in a way that she had not done before, to make head cheese. One hog’s head, one hog’s tongue, salt, pepper and sage; at least if you had the pig to begin with, it was cheap. She cleaned and scraped the head, covering it and the tongue with salted water, simmering them until the meat fell from the bone. Then she drained and seasoned the meat before packing it into bowls.

  She was helped from time to time as she worked by her daughter Annie, serious and grown up. Such a responsible young woman, people said. But when Annie was not in the kitchen with Isabella she was ensconced in the sitting-room knitting, and talking to Francis McClure. She had acquired a range of knitting patterns from Peggy McLeod with whom, after a break of some years, she had resumed a friendship. She had also been introduced to Francis McClure by Peggy.

  He was a heavy young man, not unlike Fraser McIssac in his appearance, only he wore a thick, full dark moustache over his heavy upper lip. And his eyes, blue and narrow, sparkled a great deal. The young woman spoke in a quiet restrained way and showed him her patterns, of which he appeared to approve inordinately.

  It rankled with Isabella that there was another mouth to feed.

  ‘Your drawings are quite remarkable,’ Isabella said to her first son.

  ‘You’re biased in my favour, mother.’

  ‘But they are. Oh what a big success you would have made in London, Duncan.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Well, I have been there. They recognise quality in that city. What if I were to write to your uncle Marcus and send him some of your drawings to be looked at
by … by the Academy, or one of the famous painters there? What if he were to send for you?’

  ‘Mother, you don’t know that he is alive even.’

  ‘If he saw your drawings …’

  ‘He would reply to your letters? How many have you sent that have gone unanswered in twenty years or more?’

  ‘Something must have happened to him. Some accident befallen him.’

  He touched her arm gently where it lay on the edge of the table, turned her hand over, dirty under the nails where she had been digging for roots.

  ‘What would I draw in London?’

  She sighed.

  ‘I know you’re trying to tell me something,’ he said. ‘You don’t have to explain. There is not enough food to go round here.’

  ‘We’ll find enough.’

  But it was not true. Fraser thought she had not heard him speak to Duncan Cave the night before, when her back was turned, but she had. ‘It is all I can do to feed my own children,’ he had said, ‘without catering for layabouts who are not mine.’

  ‘Don’t go,’ she said now. ‘I want you here. What would my life be if it were not for you?’

  He gripped her hand hard. ‘Come away with me, then. There’s nothing here for you.’

  The thought of going somewhere, anywhere, was tempting.

  ‘How can I?’ she said dully.

  ‘Why can’t you?’ He turned her hand over in his. ‘Think of the things you’ve done when you wanted to.’

  ‘There’s Annie. How can I leave her?’

  ‘Ah, Annie.’ His voice could not disguise his ambivalence.

  ‘People think I’m unfeeling. I do not always know what I feel these days, but I feel something. Besides, I’m getting old. I’d be a millstone for you.’

  ‘No, not you. Away from here, you’d do all manner of things. We could go to Boston.’

  ‘Let me know where you end up, and maybe I’ll come.’

  He looked at her in the lamplight, and speaking levelly said, ‘Yes, mother, I will tell you where I am.’

  In the morning he was gone. She sat for a long time wondering whether she could be bothered to look for food again. Noah brought a mouse in. He, at least, still had a full belly. He looked at her, not understanding that she would not share it with him. ‘It may not be long before I do,’ she said to him, and scooped him into her arms. ‘Fat old cat, there is still you.’

  Kate had caught sight of her face unawares in a glass and been aghast. She had not looked at herself for years. It was bad enough to feel the seams of flesh on her face. She could see her hands mottled and disfigured and had no reason to think her face would be better, but still it came as a surprise. Some days she thought she would die before evening.

  ‘Are you ill, mother?’ Martha would say with solicitude.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Kate answered each time, and it was the truth. Pain moved through her like a hot poker but never seemed to settle in one place for long, so that she wondered if she was imagining it. She wanted to hide her discomfort from Martha who, it seemed to her, worried about her out of all proportion to other interests in her life. Whereas once she had feared that Martha would marry too soon, or unwisely, now it caused her regret that she had not married at all. Although there were times when she secretly wondered if marriage was a good idea for anyone, if there might not be too much potential for disappointment.

  At nights she woke from dreams she could not recall, remembering only that they had imposed some great dread upon her, and reached out her hand to find Eoghann’s friendly one. In the darkness there was only the emptiness they had imposed on each other years before.

  Sometimes when they were at the table she would look at her husband covertly, to see if there might be any way to shift from their mutual exile. Now he was an elder of the church, always engrossed in the attacks that were brought against it and against McLeod by the clergy beyond St Ann’s who called on him frequently, and in public now, to prove his ministry. Eoghann’s face had become harder, more weathered, the mouth thinner and the lines about it were more deeply etched. His eyes were bright and cool. He rarely looked directly at her, and if he did it was in an appraising, distasteful way, as if she was someone he had to put up with.

  On a spring day, perhaps when she had been thinking of Lewis who had worked now for a long time in a lumber camp to the south without returning to St Ann’s, Kate disappeared into the woods.

  ‘She’s a grown woman,’ said Eoghann, when Martha told him that she was gone. ‘What am I supposed to do about it?’

  ‘Look for her,’ said Martha.

  ‘I am due at the church.’

  ‘Please, at least allow Ewan to look for her. She’s not well.’

  ‘It’s in her mind,’ he said. ‘Oh do what you wish. But remember, your mother once appeared to have some wisdom. You could be losing yours even before you have properly come to it. Don’t look for sympathy when you go off your head.’

  They found her sitting on a log in the woods. She was less than a mile away though she believed she had travelled much further.

  ‘What were you looking for?’ Martha asked her when she had brought her back home.

  ‘A way out,’ said Kate.

  ‘A way out of what?’

  ‘A way out of here. To find the church.’

  ‘You know where the church is.’

  ‘Not that one, not McLeod’s. I have heard. Hear, you know. Once Isabella. Isabella told me once. There is another one.’ Her hands shook, and her lower jaw had become convulsive as she sat and stared at the fire. She stayed like that from that moment on, moving only when eating and sleeping made it necessary.

  She ate greedily when food was placed in front of her and grew fat; when the food was not put there fast enough, she cried like a baby.

  A traveller stopped at their house one evening and asked for shelter. He was tall, his face smooth and closely shaven, and there was an air of languor in his brown eyes. His hands were well manicured and he placed the tips of his fingers neatly together when he spoke. He had read books and even met the abominable but entertaining Mr Charles Dickens on his visit to Halifax the previous year. Martha was fascinated. Eoghann was doubtful at first, and shocked by the presence in his house of a man who had read novels, but as it was Saturday night said he would have to stay until Monday; they could not provide food to take with him on Sunday. That was no trouble, their guest responded. He was a widower, lately a clerk of Sydney Mines until the death of his wife, and he was looking for a change. He had not found one yet and there was no hurry. In fact he would welcome the opportunity to accompany such a pleasant host to the church next morning.

  Later, when Alexander McWhirtle had been there for a month, he declared himself willing to relieve Eoghann of the responsibility of his unmarried daughter. He would even, he said, for a consideration be prepared to live with Martha in the cottage vacated by a cowman on Eoghann’s land, so that Martha could attend to her mother.

  Often Martha felt as if she had twice as many children as anyone else she knew, for she bore one each year for the following three; her mother cried louder than any of them as the food on the farm began to dwindle, and Eoghann regretted the proliferation of mouths which the widower had inflicted on him.

  ‘The situation is grave,’ said Fraser over their meal. Isabella looked at their plates. Considering what was before them, she felt it to be an understatement. Each person had a helping of suet to take the edge off their appetites.

  ‘If we can last until the spring I can catch fish. I was good at that,’ she said, turning to Annie.

  ‘Annie would drop them,’ laughed Francis McClure.

  ‘Oh I would not!’ They gazed at each other as if oblivious to food. It was as well for Annie that they were half starving, Isabella thought with some malice. It had done her appearance the world of good. At the same time she determined to give less if she could to Francis. She found him disagreeable. Even Hector, sitting on the other side of him to Annie, appealed
more, morose and even uglier in his temper than usual, no doubt because his attentions had been refused by yet another young woman.

  ‘I was not speaking of the food situation,’ said Fraser, rubbing his stomach. It had occurred to Isabella frequently of late that he did not seem to be losing weight at all. ‘The Minister is getting a very hard time of it from those fanatics and fugitives that roam this island.’

  ‘Oh you mean those poor clerics! What have they done this time?’

  ‘It is not a laughing matter. It is in the papers now, the things they are accusing McLeod of.’

  ‘Well what does he say of them? What names does he call people who oppose him? Suckers and swindlers, was the last I heard. Tipplers and tavern-hunters. Bankrupts and bigamists. Which of those are you, Mr McClure?’ she said, turning to Francis.

  ‘He does not oppose Mr McLeod,’ said Annie swiftly.

  Francis beamed proudly back.

  Ah, the conversation is so deadly dull here, Isabella reflected. If only Duncan Cave were here.

  ‘Have some more suet pudding,’ she said to Fraser. He looked purple. ‘I have saved you some.’

  He gave one of his customary hiccupping burps. ‘I have had sufficient. Thank you.’

  ‘You’re fortunate. Did someone feed you at Baddeck today?’

  ‘I had a good lunch there, yes, that is so. At the house of Mr and Mrs Finchwilly.’

  ‘Willyfinch, eh? What did the old skinflint have in his larder to spare?’

  ‘You are mistaken. They are a most generous couple.’

  ‘Really. I could have sworn they took meanness as a challenge. But forgive me, I am always misunderstanding people.’