The Book of Secrets

by Fiona Kidman

  The watchers.

  How afraid they must be, that they must deny her the comfort and company of a little animal!

  Dreaming, she recalled her grandmother talking of her black-and-white cat in far-away Nova Scotia. She had laughed when she told Maria of it, her near-toothless gums revealed shrunken and naked, as she shook with mirth, remembering how the old people had been afraid of Noah. Then, with a gleam in her eye, she had raised a saucer of cream to her lips and sucked it with greedy smacking, satisfying the insatiable longing of the old for rich food as she lapped like a cat.

  ‘D’you think I’m a witch, then?’ she had demanded of the child.

  Maria had shaken her head, not knowing what to say.

  ‘Come on, little pumpkin, tell me, don’t be afraid.’

  ‘Yes, grandmother,’ Maria had whispered, and Isabella had touched her head with love.

  ‘Yes, yes. Come and I’ll tell you the secrets.’

  But Isabella was old. She would start on one thing and then her story would trail away. When Maria was very small she had told her of the migrations, the great movements from country to country, and of storms at sea, but now she would begin to tell of fairy people who dwelled in caves and in the woods. Only nothing much seemed to happen, and if Annie caught her speaking to the child in such a way she would put her mother to bed and leave her there for a day or so.

  ‘It’s only a joke, Annie,’ Isabella would complain, but her daughter would bang the butter pats together with extra vigour, or take the mats outside and have a real session beating them. If she was particularly displeased she would give her mother plates of thin gruel while she and Maria ate rich-smelling baked meats, wild pork, or a sweet fillet of beef from a steer freshly killed by Hector on his farm. Annie watched her daughter then with a special cold, clear eye when she was administering what she described as a ‘drop of sense’ to her mother, to make sure that she did not conceal any tidbits.

  So, in time, Isabella spoke no more of witches and fairies. She sat for days in silence, turning her catechism over in her hands as if to please her daughter. When there was nothing else to do she even rehearsed Maria in hers, so she might get meats and sweet dishes too. Then Annie would make custard for her, and Isabella would sit for hours afterwards, silent and preoccupied. Maria thought she was reliving the secrets, but really she was counting the hours until she might ask for more custard with some reasonable hope that Annie would give it to her.

  Hector’s land was adjacent to Annie’s homestead. Long before, after the death of Francis McClure, he had absorbed her land into his. In return for the land he had guaranteed them a good living. He had kept his word, though he had told Annie that their mother should not be indulged nor be a law unto herself. ‘We have,’ he pronounced, ‘come a long way to begin a new life, we must bring only that which is good into it. Our mother is a cross, no life is perfect, some suffering must be endured, but not too much.’

  Hector festered with boils in middle age. Rose anointed them with ointments but nothing worked. Isabella was disdainful of his wife, the New Zealand-born daughter of a Liverpudlian butcher, and Rose in turn was afraid of her mother-in-law and avoided her whenever she could.

  ‘Who does she think she is?’ Hector would rage at what he believed was his mother’s superior attitude, although in truth he had been surprised at himself for his hasty marriage in Auckland after he had arrived on the Gertrude. With hindsight, it was not quite the union he imagined himself entering into in Nova Scotia, but a change of latitudes did strange things to a man. Rose was, he comforted himself, of good British stock, and one of the hardest workers he had ever met. When first he knew her, he could put his hands, fingertip to fingertip, right around her waist, and she had curly dark hair which covered very small ears.

  ‘It is atrocious, the way our mother speaks to Rose,’ he fumed, both to his wife and to Annie. ‘I don’t know why you don’t stand up to her,’ he would say, addressing Rose. Then proudly, he would add to Annie, ‘It is not as if she is not a woman of spirit, my wife, you know.’

  Rose always looked away, and said even less, terrified that she might be forced to meet with Isabella. ‘It is not suitable for our sons to visit that woman,’ she told Hector.

  On a rare occasion when Rose was forced to visit the house when Annie was ill and Isabella bedridden, Isabella enquired with a certain amount of relish after the state of Hector’s health. Learning that he was indisposed as usual, she whispered that sow-thistle — or puha as she now called it since she had come to New Zealand — might usefully be included in the poultices which Rose made for him.

  On the way home Rose hesitated and wondered, She could not bear her own curiosity. She gathered the plants and that night pressed them through a sieve before applying them to Hector’s fierce pustules. By the week’s end, they were gone.

  ‘I have a miracle come on me,’ Hector said that Sunday, and gave thanks. Fearing that he might too thoroughly proclaim the poultices to be the work of God alone, and afraid that Isabella, laughing at both of them, might get to him with the truth first, Rose confessed the source of her remedy.

  Hector railed bitterly against the works of the Devil then, and wore no more poultices. His boils came thicker than before; he swore, again before God, that this was his mother’s work performed out of malice, and did not speak to her again. Isabella smiled if the subject of his cures was raised in her presence, and was heard to say that she wished that she truly possessed such powers. Then she left the matter alone. Three of Hector’s boils broke as he carried her coffin down Cemetery Road and the skin rubbed raw on his shoulders and neck, so that even stronger men might have been expected to cry or put their burden down, or hand it to someone else. But Hector walked on, his face red and suffused, until his mother was safely in the ground.

  His boils cleared then, and he told Annie that the poison in his system had been put to rest with their mother and that was a good place for it, too.

  Sitting looking out over the land which linked the family even in their fiercest divisions, Maria thought of Isabella and wondered who Hector was really concerned about now. Was he watching her, or in his heart did he still watch Isabella? What would Isabella have made of me now, Maria wondered. She touched her dress where it was tight across her stomach. Taking up scissors, she began to make some alterations.

  She was about to turn from the window when she saw what looked like a cloud dissolving in the sky above, but as she watched it erupted and fanned out, growing darker by the second, and she saw that it was smoke; it looked as if there was about to be a burn-off.

  So they were going to have them again this year; this year of our Lord 1898, going on into April, or so she calculated. It seemed important that she measure the passing of time, though she was uncertain where it was all going, or what it meant; soon, she was sure, her mother would come back and tell her. Like Isabella waiting for custard, she would be forgiven if she sat quietly and waited.

  In the meantime, for today at least, there were the fires to watch. She thought they might not have had them this year, for the farmers had become uncertain of their value and some said that they did more harm than good. It was a quick way to clear land when the settlers first arrived. After months of felling trees, the men set fire amongst the stumps and those trees that were left standing. The fires raged like storms across the land and whole stands of bush fell before them. Clouds of smoke hung in the air for weeks and billowed across the ocean, so that ships far out at sea claimed to have had their way lit back to land by the glow in the sky.

  After the fires died and the earth cooled the farmers laid seed amongst the cinders and a long time afterwards the grey land would turn to green, pale scarfs of colour at first, turning deep and lush in time so that cattle could graze and fatten on it. Those who were against the burn-offs said they robbed the soil of fertility and that it would be short-lived riches, and that the shipbuilders were growing restive as they found it harder and harder to get timber for their t
rade. Logs were having to be brought from far inland, pushing up their costs. Some years there would be fires and others there would not. Spring was usually the time of the fires, but this was to be a year of fires and fires were to be late. Who but a fool would burn now?

  The sky erupted, flames shooting up and exploding like scarlet dahlia petals against the bright sunlight. Maria saw that the seat of the fire would be close by Hector McIssac’s homestead.

  It had now gone eight by the black clock in the front room, but already the house was hot and she knew it was not the heat of the sun. The fires were sweeping down the fenceline within sight of the house, where green nikau and a stand of kauri grew.

  She cried out in horror; this was the retreat she had known all her life, the trees where she had hidden her secrets from adult gaze when she was a child, talked to God when she was growing up and addressed him like a lover when she knew no better. Where, in secret consultation, she and Isabella before the latter grew infirm had noted growing things and the complex and intricate nature of ferns and leaves in their adopted land, had listened to birds that sang with different voices. They had tracked butterflies, and once discovered a swarm of wild bees near the edge of the cleared land, residing in a hollow log. It was Isabella who had gathered wild honey, and all the long summer they had feasted on it like kings. Even Annie had been pleased.

  And now the fire was eating into the heart of the trees. Before her eyes Maria saw the largest kauri become a pillar of flame, a vast torch poking upwards into the sky. Exploding branches hurtled to the ground, the sound whistling through the air and punctuated by bangs like gunshots. Above the fire birds were shooting upwards trying to escape the holocaust; caught in the down-draught, they were sucked back into the fire. The sun was getting brighter, and against the light the fires paled to apricot with a touch of blue, then coloured up again as the smoke rose so high that the sun was nearly blotted out and the day became dark. A wind sprang up, lashing Maria’s face at the open window where she stood crying, hot cinders raining about her. One landed on the curtain and smouldered there before she tweaked it with her fingers. So this was the hell that had been made for her! Soon the Devil would claim her; she should submit to the flames and be consumed by them, and that was how it ought to be.

  Coming towards her now across the paddocks, through the dry grasses, the brown top and rye from Nova Scotia that had come with the people in their mattresses and spread throughout Waipu, the tongues of fire snaked their way towards the house.

  She opened the windows wide, holding them apart at arm’s length so that the flames could reach her more easily. Below her she saw men wielding sacks, beating their way across the paddocks. They were calling, panicking, as the fire raced out of control towards her, threatening them all. Beyond, more men had formed human chains to the river and buckets were being passed from hand to hand. Just when there seemed to be no hope of containing the flames, there came a sudden wind change and the fire whipped away in the direction it had been intended to take; turning inwards on itself it began to die almost as fast as it had sprung up.

  Maria pulled the windows shut as the men stood easy in the blackened paddock, but there were some who looked upwards, even as they fought the fire. That, they said, was how they would always remember the witch, with her arms stretched out like some unholy cross and her shameless belly pointed towards the flames.

  Maria lay down on the couch in the front room. It was cooler there and the windows faced away from the destruction of the bush. It was very quiet. No birds sang. The crickets were silent. The wind had dropped, and she felt totally alone.

  What had brought her to this solitary state in a house of hewn timber with a sharp pitched roof, full of devils and ghosts and with her mother’s possessions around her? Ringed and almost consumed by fire, why was she shunned by all who had ever known her?

  She touched her stomach. Like one of the wild birds trying to fight its way free, she felt the movement of the child under her hand.

  I will tell my mother when she comes, Maria thought. She will understand this, she will put her hand there and stroke my hair and call me her bonnie lass and forgive me. That night, by candle-light, Maria pulled open a trunk in her mother’s room. A forbidden place, it housed her grandmother’s things. ‘One day we will have to get rid of grandmother’s things,’ Annie had said, but noting the look of reproach in Maria’s eyes, she had done nothing.

  What were grandmother’s things? Dusty books that looked like ledgers, and bundles of letters tied up with pieces of black ribbon and twine. The shadows were raking the walls as she opened one of the books. It was not a ledger but a notebook full of close handwriting. A journal; the journal of Isabella Ramsey turned Isabella MacQuarrie turned Isabella McIssac. The letters were in her writing too; they had been sent back to her from England by the daughter of one Louise Ramsey to whom they were written, after her death in a fall at the hunt more than forty years before.

  Opening the first book Maria stared at the words. The handwriting was a beautiful copperplate. The candle wavered, dangerously close to the curtain.

  I have been betrayed by my own people.

  She watched the candle, thinking how easy it would be to let it burn at the end of this day of fire.

  ‘Mother, where are you?’ Her voice was reedy and thin in the quiet house.

  She moved the candle and picked up the book again. It was on top of the pile, though there appeared not to be any special order. I have been betrayed by my own people. Here, then, were the secrets, the mysterious answers.

  nineteen

  Mcleod had died one yellow afternoon and the world carried on. True, some would become emotional recalling his last days when he lay by his window and blessed them as they visited. In the final hour he called aloud, ‘Children, children, look to yourselves, the world is mad.’

  He was buried beside Mary in the cemetery by the sea. The settlers had cleared land there soon after their arrival, so that those who died could lie close to the ocean, a reminder of all the oceans they had crossed in life. The day that he was carried down the long white road to the cemetery, Angus Finn stepped forward to relieve the McLean men who were taking their turn at carrying the coffin.

  ‘Let me give you a hand,’ Angus had said.

  The McLeans stopped, their feet puffing up dust around them in the tracks they had made, and Murdoch, a tall bony young man, sweating with the effort and strain of it on a hot March day, looked across at Angus whose father had turned his back on McLeod in Nova Scotia twenty years before. His eyes blazed. ‘Do you think I would let you touch this coffin?’

  Angus shrugged, an elaborate gesture of contempt. ‘All right then, you can take him to hell yourself,’ he said and turned away.

  Those of the onlookers who expected him to be struck down were disappointed.

  But there were changes. The divisions at St Ann’s began to repeat themselves. Angus Finn had spoken for those newly liberated from the shadows of McLeod. An iron railing like a palisade was placed around the graves of McLeod and Mary to keep them safe inside. Others said it was to stop McLeod from getting out.

  Looking around them now, many found it difficult to percieve a world quite as mad as it had been described by McLeod. They worked and prospered; on Sundays they did go to church, but there were cows to be milked afterwards and cream to be set, there was dinner to be cooked — for dinner did not keep in summer heat — and if there was a boat to be loaded with stock before a tide, all was done. In Auckland not everyone subscribed to the same beliefs and shipping companies were impatient of delays. The Nova Scotians may have experienced a thrill of fear as they challenged the past, but there were some things best kept to themselves. It quickly became clear to them that to set themselves apart from the world in matters of trade was self-defeating.

  Annie, for her part, belonged among those who would never forsake McLeod. Neither could many of the other women. They sat carding wool together, calling their gatherings ‘the frolicking’
, and there, in a comfortable way, they cogitated on the sin of the world. There wasn’t much they could do about it, they supposed, and the men of course had a finer appreciation of sin than they did. But in talk new rules imperceptibly emerged, relating to prosperity and its temptations.

  Godliness brought its own rewards and married well with wealth. There were plenty of opportunites for their daughters’ virtues to extend to new horizons. They could see that the young women would become comfortable matrons without the hardships they had suffered, and given that they avoided cards and Catholics, kept chaste, and made sure their children learned the catechism, they could make a most equitable peace with the Lord. It was even conceivable that the old people might all enjoy more comfortable old ages as well. Money and land, and dutiful wives, offered themselves as simple solutions to the restlessness of their sons.

  In moments of perversity Annie sighed and asked why God had been so unkind to her. ‘It’s a hard land,’ she would sigh, wiping her face and knotting her strong eyebrows in a gesture of resignation. Her concerns varied in those days. ‘Are you afraid of the Maori, Annie?’ her friends asked her one afternoon when the wool was flying through their hands and they were replete and buttery after she had fed them. Hers was a popular house, spacious, quiet and free of children. Not that they said this.

  ‘Oh I never see any to be afraid of,’ said Annie carelessly. She slipped more fleece amongst the bent wire teeth of her carding tool and watched the action of her hands with satisfaction, for she was faster than any of them. Yet she felt their eyes on her and was uncomfortable. She reached up with an instinctive touch to her white niched cap, as if reclaiming her respectability. She wore the cap like a badge, the mark of a married woman. ‘Maybe Martha does.’