The Book of Secrets

by Fiona Kidman

  She went upstairs then, but her heart was beating rapidly.

  In the upper room she leaned her face against the glass. A corner of iron on the roof had worked loose in the storm; it rattled and shook above her. What will I do about that, she wondered. I have no ladder to get up there. It is easier to think of that than what is down below.

  She could not tear herself away from the window. Night after night she had looked through the same pane of glass. She knew the stars, every one it seemed, although occasionally they surprised her. Sometimes they fell from the sky, shooting down so fast she half expected them to whistle past her, but there was no sound and they never seemed to touch the earth at all in the end. Another time, one had trailed across the sky for many weeks and she had wondered if the earth was on a collision course with the moon or the sun, but that too had gone away, a shining fan of starlight that she missed when it vanished from the heavens. Tonight there were no stars, just the raging wind and the sound of the river below the house, and in the light of the sullen moon shining from behind the irresolute clouds, the gleaming filaments of toi-tois that stood along the river bank. I must get rid of him, she decided. Viewing the immensity of the night sky and the dark storm, she decided also to make scones.

  She turned to face her mirror, and in spite of herself and her determination, was drawn to look at herself. She touched her hair and a strand of it fell, snaking down nearly to her waist. She drew her fingers across her skin and it felt polished and firm. What could the young man see that made him start and blush the way he did? Sometimes she had pretended to herself that she could not remember her age, that she had lost track of the years, but it was a lie. She was nearly thirty-seven years old.

  Her thoughts embarrassed her. Besides, there was too much that she knew.

  She took the blanket which was folded over the foot of the bed, shook it out and returned down the narrow stairs.

  Her footstep was silent. She startled him with his back to her, only the towel around his waist. But this time his discomfiture was momentary.

  ‘You never really left, did you?’ he said, pulling the blanket around himself.

  ‘What do you mean?’ she said, as she lifted the kettle. She would have liked to give him a good rub down, his skin was so goose-pimply.

  He scratched the inner calf of one leg with the toe of his other foot. ‘You were banished, weren’t you?’

  ‘If that’s what they told you.’

  ‘Why did they?’

  ‘I can’t remember. Oh, it doesn’t make much difference, does it? Whatever they say, the choice is mine now. I could walk out of here if I wanted to. At least I think so. They can’t watch me forever. It sounds as if poor old Hector doesn’t get much of a chance these days. Unless they pickled his eyeballs and put them in a glass jar on a fence post.’ She saw his expression then. ‘Ha, don’t speak ill of the dead, eh? … You’re easily shocked.’

  ‘No. No, I’m not. You surprise me, that’s all.’

  ‘Do I now? Well, I surprise myself too. I’ve spoken more words to you in the last half hour than I’ve spoken to any human being in — oh I don’t know — how long has it been? What year is it?’

  ‘1914.’

  ‘Ah, yes, so it is.’

  ‘Don’t you really know.’

  She was sure he would recognise her craftiness for what it was. ‘I was just making sure. Sixteen years or thereabouts.’

  ‘It’s a long time.’

  ‘Aye. But I could have worse company than my own, and the birds, and the rustle of the grasses in summer, and the falling of leaves and the rising of the wind in winter. And the odd wild creature that saunters in on me. Like yourself. Not that it’s ever been human before.’

  Maria lifted down mugs and filled them with tea.

  ‘You’re not like I thought.’ He looked larger, more rakish now, his light brown hair drying out in a wavy tangle and the blanket around him like a cloak.

  She resisted the temptation to ask him just what it was he had expected. I am being too easily drawn, she sensed. He was avoiding an explanation of himself as he began to adopt a comfortable attitude, sitting beside her fire, drinking tea. She turned uncertainly to the bench.

  Taking her largest basin from the cupboard she opened the flour bin and measured out three cups. ‘Why are you here?’ Her hands kneaded butter into the flour, dough collecting under her fingernails. She had never cooked for a man, nor watched her mother do so either, for that matter. Something women did for men in spite of themselves, she suspected.

  Jamie hesitated. She was aware of the old house and the rainy night pressing in on them. The winds might have blown from off the Highlands, through the brown machair grass that bent beside the Atlantic, or through the elegant grey branches of the birch trees stripped in winter on the coast of Nova Scotia. Across the world, the winds and the voices tramped. We are alone, trapped at the end of our destiny at the bottom of the world.

  ‘Why, cousin Jamie, why are you here?’

  He had to answer her now. But he lifted his head, turning it this way and that, as if fearing attack on open ground.

  ‘They would have me go to war.’

  ‘War? What war is that?’

  ‘You do not know?’

  ‘Tell me of it.’

  He shook his head, disbelieving. ‘You have heard of the Boer War?’

  This time she was ashamed to admit her ignorance, but she straightened her shoulders and said with a touch of defiance, ‘I have not heard of it.’

  ‘It was in Africa.’

  ‘Africa. That is the way we came.’ He stared at her without comprehending. ‘The way our people came, by Cape Town, which is at the end of Africa. Nice country, I’ve heard, though very dry.’

  ‘I don’t know much about that journey,’ he said.

  ‘Oh but you must, the old people always tell of it, of how they came here.’

  He turned a shoulder up, a puzzled gesture. ‘We don’t listen to the old people so much now. There are other things happening in the world.’

  ‘So it seems. So … what is this war in Africa?’

  ‘No, that’s the one my father went to, and his brother. This is another war in another place. What I’m trying to tell you … since the Boer War they’re patriotic here. Everyone goes to war for the sake of the country.’ He saw her pause for a moment at the bench, as if sensing his uncertainty. He hurried on. ‘Oh it’s right enough, I suppose, we must defend our beliefs. The values of the old country.’

  ‘Like Culloden?’

  ‘Culloden? Now that is an old war.’

  ‘But is it like that? Are those the things you’re fighting for?’

  He told her then of the war sweeping Europe, of the press across France, seemingly to England’s borders. All the time he talked to her, he was watching her strong hands at work in the dough, moulding it, dividing it into squares, and her back, very straight, held against him. The war, he said, had already been in progress for many months, for they were now into September, and the German troops had come close to Paris. All able-bodied young men were being called upon to serve, although the ones who worked on the land were exempt so far, unless they chose to go.

  ‘And are you not on the land?’ she asked, closing the oven.

  He shook his head. ‘My two brothers are on the farm. I’d begun studying medicine.’

  ‘You had chosen that? Why?’

  ‘I’d rather heal than kill.’

  ‘Ah. So you don’t want to go to this … this war?’

  He looked miserable, as if she had seen through him and might disapprove.

  ‘I see. I do see.’ She sat down on the chair opposite him.

  And to his relief he felt that she did see, although he did not understand why he should think this of an odd reclusive and uninformed woman, such as Maria was.

  ‘So you stood up to them,’ she said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And what do they say about that?’

  Although he smi
led, he appeared to mock her when he replied. ‘They said I was like you.’

  ‘They did?’ It seemed very hot in the room. She felt threatened by the fire and the noise of the storm. And yet she was amused, enlivened by a memory of the past. ‘Wild? Rebellious?’ she asked.

  ‘Aye, and headstrong.’

  Suddenly they were both laughing.

  ‘Did no one teach you better ways?’

  ‘That’s exactly what they said. You see, I’ve never done what they wanted. Studying medicine costs money. I was to have gone into the timber trade. But that’s not what I wanted, so I’ve worked my way through university, loading cargo on the wharves down south at Port Chalmers, and in Auckland in the holidays. Then this war came. I stayed away from home, but word was sent that my mother was ill. I can tell you, she recovered fast enough when I got back, or at first she did. Then my father started on at me about joining up. They’ll let me finish my degree father, I said to him. I’m so nearly finished, and then, think if I did go, how much more use I’d be in the war.’

  ‘Did you believe that?’

  ‘Yes, in the beginning, because it was the truth. But all he could see was the shame of my staying at home, and I began to question why it mattered so much. I came to the conclusion that it was just his pride.’

  ‘I know about pride.’

  ‘You know what I mean about him, then?’

  ‘Oh aye, but pride has its merits too. It’s knowing when to stop that’s important. What happened then, did you give in?’

  ‘Aye. My mother fell to vapours again and in a weak moment … well, I enlisted.’

  ‘So now you have to go?’

  His voice was grim. ‘It means I am a deserter. I can be arrested and taken away.’

  ‘What makes you think I would harbour you?’

  The rain outside had stopped and the air held an unnatural stillness, marking the passage of the storm down the island.

  ‘If we are alike, as they say, I thought, maybe you’d help me.’

  There was a pause in the conversation. ‘So you are William’s son,’ she said idly, as if picking up the conversation somewhere else, and although he had already told her this. ‘What of Neil?’

  ‘Neil and his wife are childless. I am William’s youngest son. The dispossessed.’ As she raised her eyebrows in puzzlement, he added: ‘The landless one. Not that it matters, I wouldn’t make a farmer’s shovel. Do you know my father?’

  She shook her head and knelt to gather scones from the oven. It seemed that all her life was concentrated in small actions. She needed time to think. It was clear that he must stay the night, but in the morning she would make him go. She must for her own sake. What became of him was neither here nor there, if he went in the morning. If he stayed longer, she might desire his company. She could see that this might be possible, though she had thought that it was not. She had stayed a long time, guarding the grave of her child under the japonica bush; there was no other constancy, no known way that she could change her life now. She did not want anyone to come in and change it for her.

  She spread the humped brown scones with red jelly. No mountain ash or cloudberries here, but there were japonica apples to collect from the bush, which did as well. Everything in her life had an order, a way of doing things, each act marked the progression of her life; she knew, more than this young man could ever know, what day it was and where the moon would be each quarter and what the state of the grass would be outside from one season to the next. She could call up birds and milk a cow and pull its calf (for there was a cow that ranged free from the herd that cropped at her boundary). Quietness was the only peace she sought and already Jamie’s voice filled her house. Her ears were having difficulty in coping with the sound of him in the room. Beside the fire, he seemed to fill all the spaces which she protected. Air and clean space around her, that was what she wanted. And no, she did not want to touch or be touched by another human being, not ever again in her life.

  Some nights, towards daybreak, she thought her daughter spoke to her; when she did, she answered back and told her the old tales, stories of men and women who set sail across the seas, who built log cabins and toiled in snow and embarked again towards heat and open plains. She heard her voice in the river and on the wind that stole over the hummocky hill across the way and rustled in the toi-toi answering her, and this was all the conversation she needed. She did not want those voices stilled by the presence of another.

  She watched him eat, found herself savouring the pleasure it gave her and wished that it did not. ‘Are you afraid to die, then?’ she asked Jamie.

  He stopped, put the food carefully back on the plate. ‘I am afraid to die a pointless death,’ he said at last. ‘Does that make me a coward?’

  She considered this. As she reflected, he noted the poise of her head, and it was as if he had always known her, for everything about her was familiar too.

  ‘I can’t see that it does,’ she said at last. ‘There’s a difference between you and me, isn’t there? You see,’ she said, hurrying on, ‘I have expected to die more than once. And then, I have been twice accused of causing death. In that I am sure that I have more experience than you.’

  ‘They can’t really believe that of you,’ he exclaimed. ‘It’s like witches, and burning at the stake.’

  ‘Oh I call up storms, and make milk curdle, and cause the crops to fail, you don’t know.’ She was on the verge of laughter again.

  ‘But that’s what they do say.’ Immediately he wanted to bite the words back and he lowered his eyes.

  ‘Of me? Of course they would. It was what the old people said of witches.’

  ‘Did you? Kill those people?’ He attempted a little bravado to cover what had been said, for he had believed she had been using a figure of speech. He saw a stoniness then behind her eyes, and faltered. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean …’

  He thought she might not speak to him again.

  ‘Did I kill them? I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Don’t think I haven’t asked myself. For a long time I questioned every day. But then I began to think that my mother would have died anyway, remembering the times when she had been ill before she left me. Maybe I make excuses for myself, but I cannot believe it was altogether my doing. And as for the child, I believe, oh I believe …’

  But she stopped, for she had been going to say what she believed, that the child still lived on. She could see that that would not do at all, and besides, it was clear from his expression that this was something of which he was not aware.

  ‘It is true,’ she said with an effort, after more time had passed. ‘I had a child. The father was gone and I was unwed. They didn’t tell you that?’

  His face was red. ‘We don’t talk about such matters. We wouldn’t be told.’

  ‘No, I can see that. Ah well, we’ve talked, what more do you want of me? Isn’t this enough?’ I will not encourage him, she was thinking, he will have to say for himself what it is that he wants.

  ‘Shelter me for a few days.’ He was urgent again, and she could see that he might be a forceful man in his prime. ‘They’d never think of looking for me here. Then, in a little while, I can slip off and make my own way.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘Plead my cause, make them understand that I would be more use to them as a doctor than a soldier.’ He faltered. ‘I’m not sure, some simply refuse to go, but I don’t know whether that’s what I want to do or not. Maybe I would go on a hospital ship if they’d let me, at least it would be of some use. But I need time. Just to think, to work it out in my head, you understand?’

  ‘We’ll bank the fire tonight and you can sleep by it. We’ll see how things look in the morning.’

  ‘I’ll fix your roof.’

  ‘You heard it, then?’

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘I said … we shall see.’

  As she began to ascend the stair, he called after her. ‘Wasn’t it enough just to punish you? Why are they still afraid of you?’
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  She turned and considered him. She smiled slightly but her eyes were grave. ‘Because of the pleasure,’ she said. ‘At the time, I enjoyed my sins. You do understand, don’t you?’

  In the morning, while he mended the roof, she watched the paddocks with increasing anxiety. She believed it impossible for anyone to come close to the house without her knowing, so acute was her hearing and so well trained her eyesight to any movement amongst grass or trees. Still, she was uneasy.

  When he came down from the roof, she said, ‘I think you should stay inside a day or so. The hammering on the iron may have carried.’

  ‘I’m sure there was nobody around, I could see clear across to the Centre and the Lion of Scotland.’

  ‘What is the Lion of Scotland?’

  ‘The new monument. Don’t you know about that, either?’

  He is just a boy really, she thought, encountering his clear gaze.

  ‘What is it there for?’ she asked.

  ‘The migrations. The ships. McLeod.’

  ‘Oh, so they remember a little of it?’

  ‘Yes, of course they do.’ He was half exasperated. ‘But the community’s changing. I told you, people think of other things too, the world beyond. Waipu’s too small for all of us now.’

  Or too large if it is all the world you know, Maria thought as she undid her hair in front of the mirror that night. It shone in the candle-light. She had washed it that afternoon, and afterwards she had sat in the sun with it hanging to her waist as it dried. Inside, the young man had fixed cupboards and a loose board on the stair, pretending that he was not looking at her but she knew that he was.

  ‘What do they think of McLeod now?’ Maria asked Jamie on the third night that he sat before her fireplace.

  ‘My father speaks of him as if he were God Himself.’

  ‘And you?’

  ‘I think he was more like a devil.’

  ‘A youthful view?’

  ‘Not just the young people. You must know that. What about our grandmother, cousin? The one they called Isabella?’

  ‘Isabella?’ She was startled. ‘My grandmother. Oh well. I think maybe she had the measure of him better than most. In the end.’