The Book of Secrets

by Fiona Kidman

  The hole in the window is jagged. To enter or leave by that hole is tempting the worst kind of tearing and disablement, a terrible aftermath of scarring in its wake. She will encourage the bird, with great gentleness, to take the proper path.

  Sparks still spat and hissed where once the bush had stood.

  This, the book of secrets. Maria’s hand on the yellowed page of Isabella’s journal.

  I have been betrayed by my own people.

  The front room, where Maria had passed her days since her mother’s departure, smelled of smoke.

  ‘Aren’t I the one who should leave the house?’ she had said to Annie and Hector before they went.

  ‘And where would you go?’ Hector had asked her.

  ‘There must be somewhere,’ she had said, casting around. ‘Somewhere in the bush, perhaps there’s a cottage, some place I could stay.’

  She could see the idea had some appeal, may even have occurred to her uncle. ‘It’s understandable that you should wish to hide your condition,’ he said stiffly.

  ‘So you’ll consider it? You’d look for somewhere?’

  ‘There is afterwards to be considered, when the child is taken away. You would have to come back.’

  ‘It’s my child.’ She was overwhelmed by this new knowledge and oddly excited as well. A child, and her own. ‘You can’t take it away,’ she said.

  ‘Of course it will be taken,’ said Hector as if she was simple. ‘It will be illegitimate.’ His tongue trembled around the word. Maria saw his Adam’s apple convulsively at work in his throat.

  She thought, I must be careful. All of this is so new, so unexpected. I knew so little of what I was doing, but now that it is done I must work through it, one step at a time. She cast her eyes towards the floor.

  ‘I wouldn’t have to come back,’ she said, adopting a meek tone. ‘I could go away for good.’

  Annie sagged, almost falling.

  ‘Not too far away, mother, somewhere that you could reach me … if you wished.’ She had been going to say ‘me and the child’, but she restrained herself.

  ‘I would never want to see you again.’

  ‘You don’t mean that? Mother?’

  Annie looked down the garden, to where the last tomatoes were splitting their skins and the vine turning black as the frost melted in the morning sun.

  ‘Your mother needs rest and care,’ Hector said smoothly. ‘She will find it at my house. She can hardly be expected to receive it under this roof with you. She can stay with us until a place is found for you.’

  ‘Are you ill, mother?’

  ‘Of course she is,’ said Hector, as if Annie had lost the power of speech. ‘She is heartsick. It wouldn’t surprise me if you were the death of her.’

  It was true that Annie did look poorly, her face puffy and swollen and her body trembling from head to foot.

  ‘It is as well, then,’ said Maria. ‘I would rather be on my own.’

  After they had gone, she took kindling from the box beside the fireplace and set the fire in the stove. Although the sun had come up outside the room was still very cold. As it took on a glow she realised that she was very hungry too. She opened the flour barrel, taking out flour to begin the dough for scones. Her next move was unclear but she was not going to do anything on an empty stomach. She realised how important food had become to her of late. It crossed her mind that she might die.

  Perhaps that was what was expected of her, that she die by her own hand? A proper penance, no half-measures; severed limbs and a broken body. That was the price of sin. She looked at the rafters, and then at the narrow ladder-like stairwell that led to the upstairs rooms, and she thought that it would be easy enough. There was cord in the kitchen cupboards, or sheets which could be torn into strips. She shivered, not so much from fear of killing herself, but rather that she might fail. Her mother had once told her in hushed tones of a man in Pictou, before her time it was, but her grandmother had been there so she’d been told — not that Isabella ever told her herself — who had only been half hung in a public execution, a bungled job, he choked in front of everybody and his face was as blue as cornflowers before they got it over. It was no way to go, not even for a common criminal.

  But something joyous was welling inside her, pushing aside these uglier visions. She was not going to die. She would not give up her child. The thought was stunning.

  Not that it solved anything. An image of Branco swam before her. His child too, even if her feelings towards him had changed. And the thought surfaced: he could help me. It wouldn’t be perfect, it is not what I want now for myself, but together we could make this baby safe, which is all that matters.

  The grass was brown and yellow in the autumn light, there were hawthorn berries colouring up on hedges planted round the cleared paddocks and the air smelled sweet and clean after her long month indoors. Wasps blundered around and near her, groggy in the cooler atmosphere, tumbling towards their deaths. At first her legs felt shaky from misuse, but she was so overjoyed to be abroad again that soon she began to run. Across the paddocks she sped. The river surged past her and her feet felt as if she was flying. There was not a soul in sight. The startled birds rose in a flock beside her and she believed she was as free. For a moment she forgot why she was running across the paddocks, or if she did remember it seemed like a lie, it had nothing to do with her and she was afraid of it. She was a young girl without a care in the world. Down the rough track which had been worn by their feet, and now she could see that it was overgrown and hardly existed at all. Round the corner to where his shack had stood.

  It had gone, and in its place was a pile of ashes. She stood stock-still, not believing for a moment that she was in the right place. A slight breeze flattened the tops of the grass and caught a small eddy of the black ash sending it skyward then dropping it again onto the smoky bed. Standing in Maria’s path were Hector and his sons. A little behind them stood two more men. Five men, fanning out and barring her path. Across the distance which separated them William McIssac caught her eye and looked away.

  She was of course grateful to them. The thought of asking Branco for help had been a fleeting one. He seemed like a dream, a phantom who had played some part in the events which had overtaken her but was without form or substance.

  She reconsidered this now with a certain grim amusement. As the last two months had passed, it had become increasingly clear that she could not have dreamed him up. The evidence against this was too real, too increasingly tangible. But that she preferred to be without him, to be on her own, was still the truth and she had been relieved by her relatives of the need to consider his return.

  Except that she was never alone. The shadows of the watchers haunted her from the trees.

  And now the trees were burnt. Everywhere she turned, it seemed there was fire, so much had been destroyed. They would destroy her if she let them. Alone in a house ringed by fire. A funeral pyre, perhaps. Her rations had been small the past week. Maybe they thought that one way or another they could make the child go away. But the child moved, it was alive.

  Still, when all else failed, they would take the child. Fine words, to say that she would keep it, but she knew how hard she would have to fight. They would do what they believed was best for her. And then what? The punishment would not end there. She would be shunned forever. At nights she dreamed of her resistance, but when she was awake she could imagine little action that would be effective against them.

  Now, her hand lying on the book.

  What drove me mad? Do you know, I don’t know any more. Was it the wild men in the woods? Men? What men? I don’t think there were any men. They were figments …

  Isabella, grandmother. What did you know all those years?

  (undated)

  A letter from the caves (near Pictou)

  Love and all its ways have deserted me, or I have deserted them. I do not expect ever to leave this cave in which I now live with my child. In the absence of response from my beloved
sister, or of any opportunity perhaps ever to communicate with her again, I write letters to myself. I dwell on the nature of love, and the feeling I have for men. I ask myself, if I am the rib of man, why does he inflict so much pain upon me? Doesn’t he, therefore, suffer it too? It is not merely that I have been left alone, but that in the presence of man I had insufficient dialogue that satisfied me. I was never sufficiently held in thrall. And as for man’s most base desires, I can feel only outrage. I think I have been dealt a sorry hand. Body and soul, I am a poor vessel for the aspirations of man. A return to the world would demand too great a compromise. Could it be that I ask too much of myself?

  My child weeps in the corner of the cave. Some would say, he’s bawling his head off, but it is that, and something else, as if in infant sleep he has woken crying from a dream. What can one so young dream about? His tiny ribs surely cannot encompass woman. I wonder, could it be that he is both man and woman in one body? For that matter, am I? What kind of woman lives in caves, eating birds and berries? I am happy in this cave. If I were taken away from it, I would leave part of myself in it.

  Grandmother, a message from the grave. There are caves in the hills behind Waipu. I have heard tell of them. They are full of stalagmites and stalactites and glow-worms which shine like a million candles. They are little explored, being both a place of enchantment and one of fear. All these things that befell you, and I never knew. I really am like you, grandmother. I have been exploring too, and ended up in a cave.

  No wonder, Maria thought, that the people, Annie and the women, had sought to keep her apart from Isabella. No wonder they would have had her take her grandmother for a fool.

  In her mind’s eye she tried to envisage the rugged terrain that led to the caves beyond Waipu. The difficulties to be encountered were another potent reason that the caves were so little visited.

  Deep in these thoughts she did not hear the footsteps outside. When she was roused by banging on the door, her first thought was to refuse to open it. Her uncle’s voice called out to her.

  ‘Open up, Maria McClure.’

  ‘Why should I? Did my mother send you?’

  ‘She did not.’

  ‘I am waiting for her to come back. I will not see you unless you bring her.’

  ‘Your mother will never return.’

  In the night, fraught with smoke and the aftermath of fire, she detected an elegaic quality which filled her with foreboding. She unbolted the door and pulled it open, half expecting to see several men come to get her.

  But Hector stood by himself on the doorstep, a heavy coat, more like a cloak, wrapped around him as if he were one of the Men of old.

  ‘I do not wish to see you,’ she said.

  ‘Yes. Better to hide your face in shame, I agree.’

  He stepped inside, closing the door behind him.

  ‘Where is my mother?’

  ‘She is dead.’

  ‘No … Another trick …?’

  But straight away, she knew it was true. His eyes bored into her, red-rimmed with smoke and exertion and the day’s fires.

  ‘When?’

  ‘Last evening.’

  ‘But why? How, Uncle Hector?’

  ‘Her heart. Broken. She said it was broken before she died.’

  I must keep calm, she warned herself. I must not let him see into me. Aloud, she said, ‘That is nonsense. People die of disease. Or of age. Not of broken hearts.’

  ‘Believe what you wish.’ He lifted his shoulders, dismissing her comment.

  ‘Had she been ill for long?’ Maria whispered, faltering in spite of herself.

  ‘Since the day she left here.’

  ‘I would have tended her.’

  ‘You.’ His manner was full of contempt. ‘Much good you could have done. You killed her.’

  ‘You’ve been burning fires all day. As if nothing had happened.’

  ‘Your mother was beyond earthly help, there was work to be done.’

  ‘When will she be buried?’

  ‘It is already done.’

  Maria sat down suddenly, her body determined to betray her.

  ‘You couldn’t do that.’

  ‘But we have. She was buried at sundown. It was agreed that the sooner she was taken to her rest the better for all.’ He paused with heavy significance. ‘In the circumstances. Your condition is known of round here.’ He looked at her. Her clothing gaped across her bulging stomach, and her ankles were swollen. No wonder she was unable to stand up properly. ‘Your condition was further advanced than we suspected. You could have informed us of that, at least.’

  ‘I didn’t …’ Her voice trailed away. They would never believe that she had not known, that she had undertaken a season of delight in innocence. As if the pleasure conferred knowledge. So, she was a liar too. Not that it mattered. She was not totally alone. She tried to shut out his insistent words.

  ‘God will wipe away our tears and there will be no more death, nor sorrow nor pain.’ Hector was intoning, turned biblical in his phrases now that he had accomplished his task.

  ‘Did my mother … did she have a word for me, uncle?’

  ‘None.’

  ‘Nothing at all?’

  ‘What word would a dying woman have for the likes of you?’

  ‘She was my mother. She loved me.’

  ‘She did not. She despised you.’

  Maria wanted to argue with him, to try to prise an admission from him that her mother had not spoken harshly of her at the hour of her death, but his face was so set, so certain, that she began to believe him. I will never know, she thought with despair.

  ‘I will go away from here,’ she said dully.

  ‘You will stay.’

  ‘Surely that’s for me to decide now?’

  ‘Count yourself fortunate that you are left with a roof over your head.’

  Her heart hammered in her chest as she tried to assimilate each new piece of information that her uncle was offering. She endeavoured to look him in the eye, to meet his pale hard gaze. For a moment she detected in it something akin to excitement, as if all this activity and the crowding in of events had taken him out of himself, made the blood race a little. His gaze flickered away. Perhaps he guessed at what she could see?

  ‘So I am a property owner,’ she said.

  ‘To an extent,’ he admitted.

  ‘What do you mean? Either one is a property owner or not.’

  ‘Before your mother’s death we discussed your future. She agreed with me that you were not fit to take possession of the land around you and try to administer it. Your age is against you of course, and you have shown no signs of a mature outlook, such as your mother enjoyed at the time that your father, God rest his soul, departed this world. At the same time, having brought you into this miserable life, there was a responsibility for your welfare which she recognised. Accordingly, she made the land the house stands on into my name, and the house into yours.’

  ‘But that’s monstrous. Did you have a lawyer witness that?’

  ‘A lawyer? Young woman, it is neither here nor there to a lawyer. Any lawyer would recognise that we have acted in your best interests.’

  ‘My best … oh uncle. You do not know what you’re saying. I will see a lawyer myself in Auckland. I am leaving for there in the morning.’

  ‘I have told you, you will not.’

  ‘And I have told you, it is not your decision now.’

  ‘You will be prevented from leaving.’

  ‘How can you prevent me?’

  ‘You will not cross my land.’

  He smiled at last and her thoughts turned to the kindly uncle on whose knee she had once sat when she was a child. ‘Poor little bairn,’ he had murmured then, ‘nothing but a poor fatherless little bairn, hush don’t fear, you have uncle to care for you, pretty child.’ Hector and his wife had no daughters.

  ‘You understand,’ he was saying, his voice as soft as velour, ‘in order to leave the house, you must cross land which
is mine. That is not allowed.’

  ‘I see,’ she said, as if she really did. ‘Uncle, I am trying very hard to understand your attitude towards me. I’m finding it very difficult. I’m offering to leave here. I can hardly expect you to be pleased with what’s happened to me, nor am I pleased with the situation myself. There, you see I’m not without regret or penitence. But I’m prepared to be responsible for what’s happened, now that I’m on my own. Don’t think I’m without sorrow for my mother. I have hardly had time to comprehend what you’ve told me. But now she’s gone, I don’t wish to stay here. You speak of my best interests … I tell you, that for all of us it is better if I go.’

  ‘And even if you crossed the land, then you must consider who would take you away from here. By the boats? I hardly think so,’ he said, almost as if she had not spoken at all. ‘Food will be placed regularly. You will not go without. The compensation for the land which was your mother’s is the price it will cost to keep you, Maria McClure … When your confinement is due, place a white cloth at the window and a midwife will attend you.’ He smiled in a melancholy way. ‘I am as your father now, Maria, heaven preserve and keep me.’

  ‘Tell me, tell me why you’re doing it,’ she cried out. ‘Oh please tell me why you won’t let me go.’

  ‘Rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft. And stubbornness is as iniquity and idolatry. Samuel I, chapter fifteen, verse twenty-three. I recommend it to you, Maria.’

  ‘Witchcraft? You think I’m a witch? Oh I don’t believe this, you call yourself a Christian. You cannot believe that?’

  He opened the door to take his leave. Against the night his coat was like the burnt trees as he turned away from her; an obdurate back, no quarter given. Above him the new moon hung like a crystal. I must not look at it through the glass, thought Maria, but already it was too late, for she knew no luck in the world was going to save her.

  ‘Uncle,’ she called piteously down the path after him.

  He paused but did not turn back to her. ‘What is it?’

  ‘Did she say nothing at all? Not even my name?’