The Book of Secrets (24 page)

P.S. Be sure to sleep on a good hard bed the next time you are with child. Some prescribe opium for miscarriage. I am against it. On no account have relations with your husband while you are carrying.

I
n the morning
Maria
thinks
that
the
bird
has
flown
away.
She
opens
her
eyes,
hoping
that
it
will
still
be
there,
peering
at
her
from
some
corner
of
the
room
with
its
dark
sharp
eyes.
She
planned
to
give
it
crumbs
from
her
toast
for
its
breakfast.
But
at
dawn
the
birds
outside
begin
their
morning
oratory
and
she
hears
a
stirring
in
the
room,
as
if
the
bird,
guided
by
them,
is
preparing
to
take
its
leave,
finding
its
way
back
by
the
way
it
has
come.
She
looks
around
and
the
room
seems
empty
except
for
the
curling
newspapers
on
the
walls
and the
old
dresser
that
has
stood
in
its
place
for
a
hundred
years,
the
cracked
pitcher
in
the
bowl,
the
disintegrating
crochet
work,
and
a
tiny
yellowish
picture
of
a
man
and
a
woman,
tacked
above
her
bed.
Even
now,
this
morning,
she
reaches
up
and
touches
the
face
of
the
young
woman.
In
all
the
wide
world
she
does
not
know
where
the
young
woman
is.
She
is
her
talisman
still.
Some
day
she
thinks
the
young
woman
will
come.

There
is
a
humming
in
the
air.
She
cannot
place
the
sound
though
it
grows
and
swells
around
her.
It
is
a
pretty
sound
but
it
holds
a
touch
of
menace
too.
She
turns
uneasily
in
the
bed.
‘I
am
not
afraid,’
she
says
to
herself.
‘Nothing
can
frighten
me
any
more.
’
Later,
she
says,
‘I
am
too
old
to
be
frightened,
it
doesn
’t
matter
what
happens
to
me
now.’
Only
she
wants
to
know
what
it
is.
‘It
will
be
all
right
if
I
know,’
she
murmurs
aloud.
Her
fingers
curl
over
the
edge
of
the
blanket,
holding
it
tightly
against
her
chin.
After
a
while
she
falls
asleep
again,
although
it
is
not
like
her
to
sleep
late
into
the
morning.

When
she
awakes
the
bird
is
sitting
perched
on
the
pillow
beside
her.
She
reaches
out
to
touch
it,
but
it
hops
out
of
reach,
flies
up
to
the
rafters
again,
sits
and
stretches
its
wings
and
delivers
a
white
turd
on
the
floor
beneath.

The morning began with milky streaks in the sky, turning to marbled cirrus clouds, then the light changed to rose pink and glowed. It was perfect weather, almost as warm as a summer’s day.

Watching from her window, Maria wondered if later she would be allowed to sit in the sun and soak up its warmth or if she would be watched. This was how it was each day. Alone in the house, she was aware that there were always people close by. It was as though they were afraid she might break loose and inflict some terrible damage if she walked past certain perimeters that had been laid down for her.

The young woman thought that they were probably out there watching her now. Well, they wouldn’t have much to watch today; she could not run very far.

She began to wash herself at the bowl, massaging the soap over her tightening stomach. The skin felt as if it would split, and at its base there were purple marks like lashes developing. She did not know what these marks were and wondered if the child was preparing to break its way out through these angry-looking welts, or if the welts were in fact the mark of God. Or Satan.

They said Satan had taken her soul. Her uncle Hector has said she was a witch.

So be it. She had danced at night with the Devil, and she was made of fairy air which was rising inside of her now. Last night a cat had stalked by and she had called out to it. For a moment that cat had paused, sniffed the wind, and made as if to go inside with her. Beyond, in the dark places where she could not see, where bush still pressed against the edge of the farm, something, or someone, called it back.

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.