The Book of Secrets

by Fiona Kidman

  His face filled with thunder, and then subsided. She wanted to laugh but touched her husband’s arm, indicating that he should speak.

  ‘I say we go with Norman,’ said Duncan then.

  ‘Aye. Aye. We go with him.’

  The captain turned an ugly face on McLeod. ‘If we ever do make land, Mister McLeod, the minute you set foot on it, you may expect they’ll be arrestin’ you and clappin’ on the irons. I’ll see to that.’

  But by morning, as McLeod had predicted, a fair wind from the east sprang up while the sea remained gentle. The ship, set on a good course, flew across the waves towards America. All the men aboard helped to man the pumps, which could not be left for a moment if the sea was to be kept at bay.

  On the last day of August but one, Kate MacKenzie who had become Isabella’s friend, woke her early in the morning. Duncan was already at the pumps. Kate whispered to her, for all around them others still slept.

  ‘I couldn’t sleep,’ she said quietly, ‘so at dawn I went up onto the deck. Isabella, I swear I could smell land.’

  ‘Land?’ echoed Isabella, incredulous. She had almost forgotten that it existed. But Kate nodded her head with such conviction that she got up and followed her outside.

  Kate stood on the deck and pointed, her red flag of hair gleaming in the light mist. And sure enough, it was not just the salt-laden air that they could smell, but a new scent of fresh pine forests. They peered at the horizon and there against it was a dark smudge.

  In a few moments they were joined by Duncan, and Kate’s husband Eoghann, and McLeod and the captain. They turned to each other, overcome with joy but also scared, both of losing the bonds which they had formed with each other on the voyage, and of the new life ahead. They reached out and held hands uncertainly, only McLeod and the captain standing apart.

  ‘Well, McLeod,’ the captain said, with as near a show of grace as they had seen on the voyage, ‘I must say it is true. You’re a better seaman than I gave you credit for.’

  McLeod shook his head, haughty. ‘Not at all. It was the Lord’s doing. To Him be the praise.’ Then he relented, ‘Come, we’ll be friends.’ He offered his hand, which after a moment’s hesitation the captain accepted.

  They all turned back to watch the coastline growing larger and clearer until in late morning the ship sailed smoothly into the harbour at Pictou.

  six

  Journal of Isabella MacQuarrie, 21 April 1818

  I wish that I could write to someone but there is only myself now. Nobody replies any more. To send my letters would be like sending them in a hollow log. Only the mice and the birds will find them … I’m alone. Duncan has gone to the woods to fell timber. We have a cabin that was left by lumber men last summer. I am thankful to God that we had somewhere to shelter.

  McLeod rode past this morning. He was followed by a retinue of admirers. He has become almost like God Himself in this community. Everyone wishes to be his neighbour but they cannot all get land alongside of him. Personally, I am glad we do not live near him. I have been his neighbour once.

  Duncan is not as happy as I expected. He wants to be close to the Man. Even the people who live here already, the ones who came before us, are flocking to hear him preach.

  I would like to tell them, but I do not think that they would listen to me, that he is only a man.

  Not that I have anything against men.

  I am glad enough to be with Duncan. He is a good man and we’ve kept each other together body and soul all this long winter since our landing. We are kind to each other. I know the fierce side of his nature but it is not directed towards me. I am not sorry to have left Ullapool in his company. I think I am with child. I feel that I ought to know more about this subject. I always presented myself as a woman of the world. Yet out here, alone in the woods, it seems as if I know nothing.

  I think the child is two, maybe three months along the way. I will have a talk with Kate. She will know what is what. I should have taken more notice but then it has been a long time since my marriage to Duncan, and nothing has come of anything. My breasts tingle, are painful. I do not always want him to touch me but he takes rejection so hard. At least he is not like McLeod who, I suspect, takes his way without kindness or respect for Mary. From what she used to say to me.

  McLeod tells us that Mary is on her way to Nova Scotia …

  How bright the sun is here, and yet it is very cold. In the shade there are still great lumps of snow. I hear them fizz as the sun strikes further in each day. By mid-morning the air is hissing and crackling. I am afraid to walk far around here, for there are abysses of water, small lakes quite unmarked and unknown to the stranger, which are still covered by ice, but it is thin and would not bear my weight if I were to stand unexpectedly upon it. I think the end would come very fast as the cold water closed over.

  There is a strong smell in the air too, the sour sharp scent of vegetation which has been sealed over for the winter and is now uncovered. The old grass is a sickly yellow.

  I hear a strange hooting. Yes, it must be, it is the spring peepers. Ross MacKay told me they would be out and about on the 21st day of April. I did not believe him, but he is exactly right. I have yet to see these little frogs, but I hear them, their voices grow louder by the moment, even as I write.

  This is a different landscape to Scotland. Well, what did I expect? But the harbour of Pictou is not as jagged and broken as the shores of home.

  Home?

  No, I tell myself. This is home.

  There are low banks sloping down to the sea and the narrow harbour entrance. The water is crowded still with drift ice, but it is receding. There is a bar at the harbour entrance which ships must navigate with care.

  Already at the water’s edge, on a small knoll rising above the shoreline, a cemetery has been laid. In the distance I can see it marked out by the clean-limbed birch and the shining spruce trees. It is the trees that tell me this is home. I can live with those trees.

  There are three fresh graves in the cemetery. An old man died of a fever the week before last. It took six men more than a day to chip a hole for his coffin in the earth, but since then I hear it is getting easier. Last week, Samuel, a timber worker, was killed …

  At first when they had found Samuel, the men thought he had been mauled by a bear; with supernatural strength he had pushed aside the tree and crawled some distance before he died. From his injuries it looked as if he had been torn apart, and bears were what they thought of first, out in the woods.

  ‘Is there a gun handy? Has anyone brought one today?’ said Grey Donald, kneeling by Samuel’s body. He had taken his coat off and covered him, and in the brisk air he was shivering, and looking over his shoulder, as if the bear was waiting to pounce from behind a tree.

  ‘You can save yourself the trouble,’ said Duncan. He leaned against a trunk, and closed his eyes. At home, it would be different. There would be a scent of herbs in the air and trees in flower. Not many perhaps, not where he had lived, but from where he was standing now, under this dark shadowy tree, it looked like, oh it was so hard to remember already, but spring, and the scent of heather, and a breeze blowing across from the Summer Isles … The trees would be friendly.

  ‘We have to find that bear now, while the scent of blood is on him. Otherwise, he’ll get someone else tomorrow, you’ll see.’

  ‘It is not a bear,’ said Duncan.

  ‘Aye, then what is it?’

  ‘Did you not hear the crash?’

  ‘What crash was that?’ Donald’s voice held a touch of aggression.

  It is only because he does not want to be told what he already suspects. Who can blame him? Who wants to know the truth, out here in the woods? It is easier to be able to shoot something than stop it falling out of the skies at a moment when it is least expected. Duncan ran his hand over the smooth grey bark of the tree he was standing beside.

  ‘See the blood on the ground? See where it leads?’

  Grey Donald nodded his hea
d, which had been grey since he was a child. ‘Aye.’

  ‘It was the tree he was cutting.’

  So they followed the trail back to where the tree lay and they could see that it was already rotten at its core, so that it would have been impossible to tell which way it was going to fall. The leaves were sagging as the life drained out of what was left of it.

  ‘He was a good axeman,’ said Donald angrily, a part of him still trying to refute the fact of the fallen tree.

  ‘He was too.’

  ‘Better than all of us.’ A knot of men had gathered around them now. Donald turned to them for confirmation of what he had said. They nodded, shifting uneasily.

  ‘Best get him back then,’ said Duncan. ‘You might as well take your coat, Donald, more use to you than him. Who wants pneumonia?’

  Not home, just back, that is where we are taking him, he thought, as they loaded Samuel’s body onto a sling made of branches and a canvas bag meant for carrying tools. It felt as if he and Samuel were alone in the woods together.

  ‘His missus’ll take on,’ remarked Harry. Harry was an Englishman who had joined up with the Highlanders. They did not know where he came from, and did not ask; he was simply one of the men from the waterfront who came along with them one morning and stayed. That was how it was in Pictou, you never knew who you would be working alongside from one day to the next.

  Duncan felt a profound sense of irritation with the small nuggety man walking alongside of him, jabbering. What did he think Samuel’s wife would feel? They all knew that she would ‘take on’ as they drew nearer to the settlement, each and every one of them was trying to undo the knot of fear in their gut, praying that the man in front would take it on himself to knock at the door and summon her outside.

  And who would hold the children back from her skirts while she looked down on his dead face?

  The men broke open a puncheon of rum after that, and some of them went home the worse for wear, Duncan amongst them. Isabella had never seen him drunk before. It was not the way of Highland men, unless they were drunkards and layabouts who were outside the pale of ordinary men. Besides, there had not been money for strong drink.

  In Pictou it was different. Rum was being run from the West Indies and it flowed like water. Every family had it on the table, and Isabella had tried it more than once. In the winter, it seemed as if there was nothing like it to warm one. It was cheap too, and for a day’s work and a return of five shillings, a family could buy enough to last a month. In spite of hardships, already many families were of the opinion that the living was easier than in Scotland, though it was said that it had been even better ten years ago, and that the last few seasons had been hard.

  But spring was bringing close to them the danger that lurked in the woods. It was not just Samuel’s accident. The snows were melting and the rivers rising. The lumber was floated on the fast-moving waters, down the rivers, to catch the ships at the port. When the logs jammed the men raced across them to free them, and if they were not sure-footed, they fell between them to their deaths.

  ‘… How preoccupied I am with dark waters. But how can I be otherwise? Duncan is not sure-footed, that is the trouble.

  ‘He says, “Give me a couple of seasons and there will be enough money for good land, this is the only way to do it, to raise the money fast. There has to be a reason for us coming all this way.” When he says this, there is an edge of bitterness in his voice which I do not like. I think he is sadder about our move than I am. But he was closer to his family than I was to mine. I say to him, write them and tell them to come too. He says that he will, but I know that he will not until he has something to show for it, and so he pushes on in all kinds of conditions in order to make our fortunes.

  ‘For those who work in danger, it is little wonder that they turn to rum for comfort, and to blot out fear of what they do.

  ‘Truth is, they would rather it had been a bear that ate poor Samuel.’

  Isabella was shaking mats outside the cabin one morning early in May when McLeod stopped on the path outside.

  He was riding an excellent horse, at least sixteen hands, and still his feet appeared low in the stirrup. The animal flared its nostrils and pawed the ground. She let the mat she was holding fall, and for an instant a thread of excitement passed through her. It was a long time since she and McLeod had been face to face with each other, and alone at that.

  ‘They say there’ll be snow again before it’s really summer,’ she remarked as he sat there looking down at her.

  ‘Aye, I’ve heard that, Mistress MacQuarrie.’

  ‘D’you wish to come in?’ she asked, noting the edge of danger in his voice and beginning to wish him away from her.

  ‘No. Thank you, Ma’am,’ he added, as an afterthought.

  How strange it is, here in the woods, far from our beginnings, as if it were only yesterday that I was wiping up beneath his son, and my home was next door to his, and the fishing boats were tied up at the back door. How odd that he was beholden to me, that I was in charge of my life, in a small way the lives of those around me. Certainly I was beholden to no one, and free to make choices. It is not like that any more.

  For now it appeared he was the one in charge.

  ‘Would you tell your husband that I should like him to call upon me, at his convenience.’

  ‘Why would you ask him to do that?’

  ‘There is a private matter which I would like to discuss with him.’

  ‘But I am his wife. Surely you could give me a message for him, that he may know why you wish to see him?’ She saw that the cast of his right eye was more pronounced than before, as if he had been reading a great deal and it was strained.

  ‘I hope you’ll get settled on a piece of land as soon as possible, Mrs MacQuarrie. I am sure it would be the best for both of you.’

  ‘Thank you for your concern. But I’m sure we can work something out.’

  He put his head up a trifle then. It irked her, the way he was adopting a superior attitude; it was as if he were treating her and Duncan like children who needed guidance. She suspected that he had come to give Duncan a piece of his mind over something and it was on the tip of her tongue to tell him that he had no right to do this, that he was only a lay preacher, but there was something about him that made her keep silence.

  After he had gone she put the mats back in the cabin and stoked the fire, trying to put him out of her mind. In the town of Pictou she knew that he was attracting such vast hordes of people each Sunday that the local minister had thrown up his hands in despair and gone to preach somewhere else. Things were much the same as they had always been, only now it was not enough to do as one chose for oneself, you had to be totally for him or you were no one.

  ‘But it is not fair,’ she said, speaking aloud. ‘If Duncan drinks too much that is a problem that is between him and me. McLeod cannot understand that Duncan is afraid of the depths below.’ Fleetingly, she wondered if in truth it was simply that McLeod had no imagination at all, while Duncan had a great deal too much.

  And McLeod’s eye had been cold as he looked at her. As if she were in some way responsible for Duncan rolling down the path. She had wanted to say, ‘Look you, McLeod,’ (for she would not bow and scrape and call him Mister, he owed her a small favour or two which in itself was something he probably found intolerable), ‘my husband is working hard and prayer is not enough to keep the Devil at bay in the woods.’

  It passed through her mind that she and McLeod could become enemies. She was shaken by this thought. If anyone had asked her until then she would simply have said, ‘McLeod? Why, he and I are old friends.’ It would have been God’s truth, in spite of many hesitations about the depth and meaning of that friendship, but now she was not so sure.

  When Duncan lay down beside her that night they had buried Samuel, he dropped off into a deep sleep, snoring and snorting like a pig at trough and clutching her with an abandon which shocked and excited her at the same time, not that it h
ad come to anything before unconsciousness overtook him. She had lain beside him wide-eyed, not wanting to disturb him. The lamp was still burning, but she thought she would leave it on a while, and then she must have dropped off to sleep herself, for when next she opened her eyes it was to feel Duncan beside her heaving in a different and terrible way, and she heard him racked with sobs.

  ‘Why?’ she said at last, touching his face. His tears seeped through her fingers. She wanted to weep herself, though she did not really know why.

  He shuddered and then lay still. ‘We are all lost,’ he said, and in the flickering lamplight his face looked gaunt and sad and truly desolate.

  ‘I’m with you,’ she said.

  ‘Don’t ever leave me, don’t ever die without me.’

  ‘I’m not going to die,’ she answered him. ‘Not for a long time yet.’

  ‘There would be nothing,’ he said. ‘Nothing without you.’ The shadows were shot with dusty orange-red light. His tears looked like blood.

  7 May 1818

  Is McLeod so busy with God that he is unaware of the daily terror and dangers that lurk in the woods?

  He has such a way of turning everything to his advantage.

  He is putting on weight since he arrived here, a fact that had not escaped me, although it is not much commented on. But Kate, who is much more diligent about attending the services than I am, tells me that last Sunday his coat would not button around him. He tried to pull it together, suddenly feeling the cold, and it would not meet at the front. Some were hiding their faces a little, not daring to laugh though much tempted. He puffed and spluttered a little and then remarked, ‘I am so full of the Holy Ghost that my coat will not button on me.’

  Nor are the advantages which he is accumulating ones which simply serve his pride. Although he has done a fair bit of work building a cabin, McLeod is taking a lot of time from the men round about, especially those who came with him on the Frances Ann, getting them to do labouring work on his account in return for his preaching, and a little teaching of the children. Well, he is right to watch out for me, for I’ll have none of that as far as Duncan is concerned.