The Book of Secrets

by Fiona Kidman

  ‘I had suckling pig, roast very tender,’ said Fraser, indignant, and before he could stop himself.

  ‘Suckling pig, you do not say so, Fraser McIssac. Suckling pig. They killed that for you?’

  ‘You do not understand,’ he shouted, the veins in his throat knotting. ‘That is what I said to him, that is a great sacrifice, but he said no, not at all, it be drooned in the brook.’

  Isabella looked around the table. If one of them would laugh. If only just one of them would laugh. But they all stared at their plates, and now she could see that Francis McClure had remembered that he was hungry. She was afforded a momentary pleasure that there was nothing left to offer him.

  ‘I think the Master has had enough,’ ruminated Fraser, subsiding from his rage and unaware that he had said anything amusing. It was clear that he was unusually intent upon imparting some piece of information.

  ‘So what will he do about it this time? Who is he planning to take to court now?’

  ‘He is planning to emigrate.’

  He paused and looked around him, enjoying the greatest effect he had had on the conversation of his family in years.

  ‘Where would he emigrate to?’ said Isabella, trying to conceal the tautness in her voice.

  ‘Australia, I do believe. He has had a letter from Donald.’

  ‘Donald has turned up? Now there is a swindler for you. How long is it? Eight years?’

  ‘He says the climate is very good there in Australia. He’s spoken favourably of the prospects for farming.’

  ‘McLeod would go on his own? At his age?’

  ‘Oh no, he is talking of everyone in St Ann’s going. He is planning that a ship be built to take us.’

  As if to appease her for his indulgences, he slaughtered a thin cow the following week. When Isabella had fed herself, with stealth she fed Noah.

  His lower jaw chattered uncontrollably at the sight of the meat. His yellow eyes gleamed, as if it were all her doing, that she had invented meat especially for him. His affection overwhelmed her. I am buying him off, she thought, but it didn’t matter. She knew he would eat her if he could, so long as there was enough of her left over to continue serving his needs and comfort.

  He stretched, reached out his paw to her. His tongue was hanging out of his sweet whiskery little mouth. She could not resist him. She leaned down and touched the tip of his tongue with her own.

  The spring came and she ruptured the ice, brought out eels from the river. Such delicacies, such riches, she thought as she stewed them in her largest pot. And remembered, not for the first time, how they could strip a creature to the bone.

  Standing alone at the bench, she pressed her hands over her ears as if to shut out an old voice, or voices. The trembling fractured ice she had broken that day, and the dark water above which she had perched herself, had opened something up again, something that would never go away. The smell of the fish nauseated her. She had sworn once that she would never eat eels. Now it seemed that she must, or die.

  ‘I do not want to be alone,’ she said, looking wildly round the kitchen and gripping the table for support. Annie appeared in the doorway. ‘Are you all right, mother?’ she asked.

  ‘I am perfectly all right,’ said Isabella. ‘Why don’t you go and entertain your young man?’

  When it was time for Annie to marry Francis McClure, Fraser McIssac traded some last thin beasts and seemed not displeased, perhaps enjoying the prospect of long relief from feeding his daughter. From the sale of the beasts he gave her money so that she could purchase a quarter bolt of white cotton, sprigged with tiny blue flowers, for sheets and nightdresses; some white calico for aprons; a pot; a tripod; and a hanging lamp.

  Isabella gave her her aunt’s silver candle-sticks and a white linen table-cloth.

  ‘It is all I have,’ she said.

  ‘It is enough,’ said Annie, turning the objects over in her hands. ‘Thank you.’

  And might have said more, but did not.

  sixteen

  At the bitter hour of their leaving, those who were to stay behind stood on the hillsides and wept.

  The Margaret lay trim and ready in the bay, the Highland Lass anchored close by. This would be the first ship to sail. Her prow was carved in a fair and smiling likeness of Peggy McLeod, for whom McLeod had named the vessel.

  There was little time to waste. October was upon them, and if they were to leave this year, it could be put off no longer. Delays had arisen and the ice was due to close in over the bay. The ships had already been on the stocks for more than twelve months, complete and ready to sail, but unable to be launched for lack of funds to purchase gear and fittings. During that time McLeod had often called together the three hundred people who had declared themselves willing to emigrate with him. Although most of them had land to sell, no one wanted to buy it, or was able to, after the famine.

  McLeod had appeared supremely unconcerned. ‘The Lord will provide,’ he purred whenever he was tackled.

  Which, in the middle of 1851, he did. Or a fair likeness of Him, according to McLeod, in the shape of a businessman from the south who offered to buy the McLeod house and property for three thousand dollars. This started a wave of buying throughout the district.

  So the passengers carried as many of their possessions on board the ship as there was room for. Those, and food — potatoes shredded and evaporated in birch-bark wrappers, dried codfish, pickled meats, and bread made without yeast.

  Then Mary McLeod fell ill; they waited for her to recover, and reloaded the ship. Now the time had really come. For until this moment there had been an understandable element of procrastination, of fear in the face of the unknown.

  Isabella was among those who watched from the hillside. Annie and Francis were boarding the ship that late autumn day, the brilliant red and gold leaves of the Nova Scotia woods already dusted with the first hint of frost. Close by her stood Fraser and Hector.

  ‘Don’t you wish to go?’ Fraser had asked her.

  The kitchen had been steamy and fogged over with an atmosphere of homeliness the night he enquired. He sat in the chair opposite her in an uncommon display of companionship. She had held her hands around her mug of tea as if it was a crystal ball in which she saw her freedom. At last, when he goes and I am left, I will be free of the shadow of McLeod. Then she looked across the fireplace at her husband, and wondered whether freedom existed anywhere.

  ‘Our daughter is going,’ he said, breaking into her silence. ‘And no doubt our son is thinking of it too.’

  She could have said, but my son will be here, on this continent, but stayed silent.

  She stroked the cat instead. Although he was old his coat was still full of crackling and fiery sparks.

  ‘You’re more interested in that creature than you are in our future,’ said Fraser, so angrily that in order to avoid his outburst, she began to compose a reply in her head.

  ‘There are others, besides those who are going on the first ships, who are talking of going if it is all a success,’ she said. ‘They say they will build more ships. Can’t we try a little caution and see how things proceed?’

  He appeared ready to remonstrate; she would have to be more convincing than this.

  ‘After all, what if our children don’t find it to their liking, and want to come back? There will be nothing left for them to return to. Or if we got to the other side of the world, and there was nothing there for any of us, we would simply be a burden to them at our age. But if we are here, minding what we have, we are insuring a safe passage for all of us sooner or later. If it is meant to be.’

  She must have sounded full of sweet reason, because for once he nodded attentively and seemed pleased with what she had said.

  And yet she knew that he had not banished the idea from his mind.

  Closer towards the waterfront, John Munro, who ran the trading post, stood watching the passengers taking their place, his face inscrutable. Of all McLeod’s friends who had ceased to call him tha
t, Munro was the one who had seemed indestructible in his loyalty.

  And might still have been, had not McLeod rounded on him too, describing him as a brandy smuggler, and bringing a boycott down on his warehouse in the midst of the famine so that Munro’s fortunes were in a state of collapse. In vain he had written letters to the paper explaining that McLeod’s sons did exactly that of which he now stood accused, but McLeod had mocked him. The money-lenders will trump up any excuse for their greed, he claimed.

  And that, Isabella reflected, has as much to do with why these ships are leaving here and tearing families apart as any number of things which McLeod may claim to be the reason. While people had fared worse on account of the boycott than they might otherwise have done, McLeod made intercessions to the government on their behalf for rations. But it was clear to many, when they looked back on that time, that if they had stood by Munro their plight might not have been so bad.

  So there were those who were for Munro, and those who were for McLeod, and all things became much clearer. It was a question of who should have absolute power. It had always been so. Only now, Munro wore the face of the clergy. One person must stand, eventually, for all that McLeod opposed. Because Munro was the strongest, had stayed the longest, it had to be him.

  Now she saw Annie taking her place behind the ship’s rail, for her daughter had been one of the first aboard earlier in the morning. Annie, her married Annie who obviously felt so much more respectable now that she was not so clearly aligned with her mother. She had had a child which did not survive its early birth in that first year of marriage, and Isabella had held her daughter as she wept. The next one will be better, it was for the best, this one was not meant, I am not the first to whom this has happened, Annie had said to her mother. Isabella, with her arms around her and liking the feel of her for the first time that she could remember, wondered if there might be depths to Annie that she had not plumbed.

  And would not, she supposed. For Annie’s face had closed again, and now she was standing beside Francis McClure, ready to go to Australia.

  On the other side of her stood Peggy. And beside Peggy was Hugh Anderson, whom everyone, except McLeod, knew was her lover.

  Mary Fraser’s parents stood agonising whether to board the ship or not, for Mary had vanished that morning and travelled by fast horse to Boularderie to be married to the man she loved, in order to escape the migration. Now they put their feet tentatively on the gangplank. ‘Will you forgive me?’ their daughter said, standing by the ship with her new husband. ‘Oh aye,’ her mother had said, ‘it is all right, yes, this is your home, now I must go to mine.’ But it made no sense at this minute, they had no idea why they were leaving.

  Donald and Catherine McGregor.

  Roderick ‘Og’ McKay and Jessie and their babies.

  John ‘Ruadh’ McKay and his wife Ann and their twelve children.

  And Kenneth Dingwall, who had stayed constant to McLeod since the days of Pictou, and grown thin and held together by his skin.

  Mary, McLeod’s daughter who had finally been allowed to take a husband, Roderick Ross, and their children. And five of McLeod’s sons, all of them except Donald, who was already in Australia.

  Kate and Eoghann’s daughter Martha, and Alexander McWhirtle her husband, Martha walking away from her mother as one in a dream, or a nightmare.

  And more of them by the score, until in all there were close to one hundred and forty aboard.

  And the sky and hills streamed round them in the blue swimming light, and beneath them the sea.

  Then Mary, McLeod’s wife, who had knitted jerseys to take to her husband when he was young, and walked in the snow to meet him.

  And at last, there was McLeod.

  Who that morning had ceded his church to the new Free Presbyterian Church of Nova Scotia. It had not been in the church itself that he had preached his last sermon, but on the hillside overlooking Black Cove. Boats carrying well-wishers were dotted around the bay. He had stood with his back to the hill, his face radiant, like an apostle of old as he traced their wanderings up until this point.

  McLeod with his hair streaming in the wind.

  McLeod with his voice lifted.

  McLeod.

  Tormod.

  His name on every lip.

  McLeod, like Moses.

  He put up his arms. ‘I have chosen that we gather here on the hillside where I can see all your faces and the harbour for the last time. For thirty-one years we have lived together as one community, one people, one beating heart. One hundred and forty of us are now taking to the high seas to answer God’s call, to go on a pilgrimage twelve thousand miles away. My son Donald, known to you all, will meet us in Australia and guide us to new and profitable holdings of land. There we will found a new community. How can we continue to live as one if we are scattered across the world? I trust that that which we find will be a fitting home, so that we may all be together once more. God has been with us in all our wanderings. Through the troubles and trials of the old country. And he has saved us twice from shipwreck. He has rescued us already from seeming despair in our present venture. I know with a conviction beyond all earthly doubts that we are following His will, crossing the sea.

  ‘Those of you who remain must resist the devilish temptations that provoke the soul of man, you must remain pure in heart and in all your actions, and if you do not, you must expect the terrible judgement which befalls man when he crosses the great divide.

  ‘Remember the godly ancestors, the men and women who held converse with God. Follow their examples and rest assured that neither principalities nor powers will overcome you.’

  Kate MacKenzie, who had not spoken for nearly a year, suddenly cried out, ‘Oh Dhia nan gras mailler rin, merciful God be with us!’ and fell to the grass.

  McLeod’s own tears, which they had believed impossible, whipped away from his face on the wind. ‘Goodbye friend and foe. Goodbye to the house of God. May we be protected until we build Him a new house. Blessings with all those here and His people everywhere.’

  Shaken by his rhetoric, a wailing rose from those who were assembled, an ancient litany of sorrow, soaring above the hillside. It seemed that everyone wanted to go, that there was no one left behind who did not think, now, that the migration was a splendid idea. Isabella found herself snuffling into her handkerchief, and turned her head away so that John Munro would not see. But she caught his eye, and saw that it was watering too. She was astonished at them both, and almost smiled.

  ‘Beannachd, farewell!’ they called, but already, even as the anchor lifted and the bell tolled, the plans to build more ships were crystallising.

  The gangway lifted, the mainsail unfurled, and the Margaret moved from her moorings. Those on board and on land sought each other’s face.

  ‘Return return return we never cha tille cha tille cha tille me tuilleadh, in peace nor war return we never.’

  Through the sea of faces, Annie saw her mother, clutching her scrawny cat. Isabella, dry-eyed now, sought her daughter and wondered if she could have loved her better.

  ‘I’ll be on the next ship,’ said Hector, turning to his father.

  Fraser nodded, his hands gnarled round the top of the stick he had taken to leaning on in the past year, his eyes towards the ship skimming away into the distance.

  Too late for Martha to see, Eoghann at last took his wife by the hand and led her shuffling and staring away from the water’s edge.

  Isabella and Fraser walked beside them, but apart from each other. Isabella felt still and alone. It is all too late, for all of us who are left, she said inside herself. McLeod has gone, and his damage is left behind him.

  The weather remained good, and by tropical waters, by St Jago in the Cape Verde Islands, and by Cape Town, the Margaret made her way to Adelaide in Australia. The old rules still held, yet as the warmth soaked through them an air of gaiety began to steal through the prayers. When McLeod retired to bed at nights a fiddle would appear, or the piob m
ohr would be played in wild abandon as the ship glided on across the equator.

  Annie and Francis walked on the deck, arm in arm, although with an air of careful reticence. Married couples were expected to set examples of restraint to the single, she reminded him.

  ‘Annie. Annie, you’re sure you still care for me?’

  ‘But Francis, how silly you are, why should you think I would not?’

  ‘You’re strange, you turn away from me. No, don’t say otherwise, it’s true, I have seen you.’

  ‘Nonsense, it is just the motion of the ship and the closeness of the people; it is nothing, you fret too much …’

  Donald McLeod was not waiting to meet them. Nor was there land to be had in Adelaide.

  A letter, yes, there was that.

  It was from Donald, who wrote that he had gone on to Melbourne.

  seventeen

  Mcleod led a group inland to explore the territory beyond Adelaide. His five sons were included in the party. The sun beat down relentlessly, a sun of such heat as they had never experienced. On the dry branches of dead trees birds sat and gasped for water; the blue-grey spikes of strange plants were dotted against the red earth.

  ‘I think we have gone far enough,’ John McKay said when they had travelled for two days. ‘This heat is not for the likes of us.’

  ‘You don’t care for this landscape, then?’ McLeod asked them.

  ‘These parched and barren lands won’t grow much grass. There’s no water. How many rivers and streams have we seen? Hardly a one. It won’t suit me, friend,’ said John McKay, appearing to speak for all of them except John Fraser who poked away at a patch of soil a distance from them.

  Because there was nothing else that he could think of for them to do, John McKay asked McLeod, ‘Why don’t we join your son in Melbourne? I heard at the port that it is an easy and safe journey around the coastline.’