The Book of Secrets (34 page)

But Isabella had told her more than once to make her choices, and she has chosen to know the secrets.

‘I wish I’d known her,’ Jamie was saving. ‘My father never spoke of her. He didn’t seem to know her at all.’

‘Well. She was very old,’ she said by way of excuse. She saw his look. ‘It was not a close family.’

‘I remember you. In church,’ he said. ‘You were my family then.’ He traced the line of her collarbone with his finger, touched it with the tip of his tongue.

‘You were nothing but a baby.’ Her voice was sharper than she intended.

He paused. ‘Still, I remember you.’

In her mind she explored the edges of her treachery.

Every evening Maria and Jamie heated the copper and poured warm water over each other as they knelt in the tin tub. Tonight, when they had towelled themselves dry, she sent him ahead of her upstairs, and when he had gone she freshly ironed his clothes and took them up to the room with her, laying them beside the bed.

‘Why are you doing that?’ he asked.

She shrugged. ‘There’s a restless feeling in the air. You should be thinking of going soon.’

‘You’re tired of me?’

‘I could never be that.’

‘Are we being watched?’

‘I don’t know. There’s nothing I can tell for sure. But when you’ve been watched for as long as I was, you get a feeling for it. I might be wrong. But it’s an instinct I’ve had since you first came, and it’s getting stronger.’

She touched his face. ‘I’ve had other things on my mind since then. It’s difficult to know what is happening.’

He drew her into the bed. ‘We can stay together.’

‘No. They wouldn’t let us. And you’ve got your future to think of.’

‘I can’t see it coming to much now.’

She shook her head and drew the candle towards them, close to her own face. ‘Look at me, Jamie. Soon I’ll be old. I’ve nothing to take into the world with you. It’s too late. And you, you’d fade away and die here with me. In the end. Look at you, you’re fading from lack of sunlight already.’

‘I’m not ready to go.’

This is no cave, she reflected, but a palace he has, he will never have better than this.

‘I’m not going,’ he said, apparently decided.

‘You must. I am telling you to leave.’ They stared at each other, both implacable.

‘Then I must show you,’ she said at last. She got out of bed and went to the dresser, pulling open the drawer which held Isabella’s journals. She found the one she sought and handed it to him. ‘I’m going downstairs for a while,’ she said.

At the door she looked back at him. ‘Forgive me,’ she said.

Downstairs, she sat and dozed by the fire.

Hector and Rose have had a child, a boy named William. He is my first grandchild, as was pointed out with increasing excitement as the time of Rose’s confinement came closer. Naturally, when the hour arrived I was sent for, and I did help the midwife with various small services. Annie was there with sleeves rolled up, making a great show of pleasure and chattering about the fact that ‘at least one member of the family was getting things right’, meaning successful childbirth.

Anyway, all of our help was superfluous, as the child slipped in to the world with very little trouble, and Rose, smiling a Madonna-like smile, held the baby up, waiting for us to praise her accomplishment. Which I duly did, in the presence of the others.

At last Rose and the boy and I were left on our own in the room. The general opinion was that I had been overcome with emotion and needed time to study the child in peace.

‘He is a handsome child,’ I said reiterating my applause. I paused, summoning up my most dramatic effect. Then I said: ‘I wonder what Francis will think of him.’

It was cruel, but then those who know me would not be surprised
how irresistible I found the situation. And she has been so uppity with me, this Rose.

The colour drained out of her face. ‘Who told you?’ she whispered at last.

It was something of a guess but I was not really surprised that it landed on the mark. McLeod and I do not like each other much better than we ever have, but old age and mutual solitariness sometimes draw us together, and when he is out riding — which he is able to do less and less these days — he stops by my door, enquiring with a civility after my health, and in return, I give him a mug of tea and a bannock cake. He is a lonely fellow since Mary died, though he won’t admit it. He tells me this and that when he is passing, and sometimes offers a little information which he thinks I would be the better for hearing. The subject of Rose has come up, told to me as a pastoral matter though not pursued, for Rose is outside the old community, and Hector’s problem.

Besides, it was not much McLeod told me — a whisper of yellow skirt in a barn door and Francis hurrying down the road. But I had felt in my bones that he was right.

Well, I think it is all a bit of a joke.

Toward midnight, he joined her by the fire.

‘William is my brother. Or near enough.’ Maria’s voice was dull.

‘I know.’ He touched the nape of her neck. ‘Come back upstairs,’ he said. ‘The fire’s nearly out.’ When she did not move, he took her hand, pulling her roughly to her feet. ‘Come with me,’ he said.

As if in a trance, she followed him up the stairs. When she was in bed, beside him again, she said, ‘You will go, won’t you?’

Wearily, he replied that he would.

They did not sleep for the rest of the night, but lay talking. They talked of love and kissed each other a great deal. Afterwards, she would think that there were things she could have asked him about the world beyond. When he left she would know little more than when he came, but as she lay beside him it seemed unimportant; there would never be time for this again. There would be no more lovers.

‘Tell me about the old people again,’ he said once during the night, thinking of what he had read.

So she lay on her back, a little apart from him, and told him of the dark abysses under the Nova Scotia ice, where a person might fall and never be seen again, especially if they ventured forth upon it when the spring thaw was coming; and about the way the moss smelled, coming up for air when the melting was finally over. She spoke of the wild strawberries that grew there in summer, and the sweet maple syrup that was collected under the trees; the way the rocks were worn smooth by the sea, and the way it was a harsh land, but beautiful too. Then she recited the names of the ships again, and the families that had travelled on them, and it was as if she had been there herself.

‘It will be lost,’ he said, ‘in time it will all be lost,’ and his voice was full of desolation.

Around four in the morning he held her closely for the last time.

‘Will you be safe?’ he asked.

‘As safe as I’ve ever been.’

The last thing she asked him before he left was what he had decided to do about the war. It was a subject which had not been raised again since the beginning.

‘I’m not going to war,’ he said. ‘They’ll have to take me there by force.’

The stars going out were as she imagined snowflakes when they were falling and melting before they touched the ground.

‘That is the bravest decision,’ she said. ‘That is what courage is about.’

Which was more than she thought she would ever regain when he slipped out of bed and pulled on his clothes. She wanted to go to the door with him, but he asked her to stay in the bed, not to leave it until he had gone. At the door, he looked at her once more. ‘You must always sleep in that bed,’ he said. ‘It’s more comfortable … Besides, you are in charge here now.’

As if he knew how the other women had occupied the shadows in the room.

When she heard the creak of the back door she got out of bed and went to the window to watch his shadow flicker against the macrocarpa tree, then dart towards the river. Long after, she would think that that was her mistake, not to have done just as he asked. For her own shadow had loomed against the window.

Now the dawn had broken and what she feared might happen to
her was true. She could hear voices no longer, and calling to her daughter, there was no reply.

Outside, in the raw thin light, the grass smelled faintly astringent under the cool dew. The japonica flowers shone like blood. She stripped off all her clothes, shivering violently as she lay down on the wet grass, tearing up handfuls of it and washing her body, her breasts and between her legs.

Back inside the house, she went up the narrow stairs to the bed and lay down. She had taken her necklace from the dresser of the old room as she passed through it, but now as she clutched it she was uncertain of its power. Her belly was full of pain and she knew that she was about to bleed.

For a week she lay there, barely moving, and when her foremothers spoke she did not answer them. All she heard was a new, quietly insistent voice asking her over and over again, ‘What have you done to Jamie, your cousin?’ And another would respond, ‘What has she done to her cousin, who is also her brother’s child?’

She turned her face to the wall, ‘I don’t want to hear you, it doesn’t have to be true,’ she said aloud.

And asked herself again, and a hundred times, why she had shown him the journal.

M
aria lay
on
the feather mattress throughout a week of fog and indifferent weather. The mists cleared at last and the sun shone again. She got up then and cleared the room of all traces of its joint possession, making up the bed with clean sheets and putting a clean nightdress under the pillow. Outside it was truly spring. Her plum tree was flowering and the cow waited with swollen udders at the gate.

When she had fresh milk, she separated the cream to make butter, and set loaves of bread. In the evening she made up the fire and took up her knitting again, threading grey wool on her needles to knit a man’s jersey.

One morning late in the summer that followed she was tying back tomatoes at the back of the house. She could not decide what to do with all the fruit; the vine was breaking with its weight and the skins splitting in the sun as they ripened before her eyes.

She did not hear William’s approach. It was several months since she had last seen him and when she looked up and saw him standing beside her, the air seemed very still, only the shrill cicadas reminding her of life about them.

A
ra
ra
te
ki-te
ki-te
,
they cried, across the hot quiet day,
a
ra
ra
te
ki-te.

William’s gaze was unfriendly, his eyes bitter and narrow as he stood beside her.

‘Well?’ she said. She could barely restrain her glance, raking his face for traces of Jamie. There was little she recognised, and yet there was about him what in other circumstances might have been a comfortable warmth. He was a big solid man, with creases deeply folded down his cheeks and under his chin. His hands were blunt and worn.

‘His ship was sunk at sea.’

The back of her hand flew to her mouth as she stifled a small sharp cry.

‘So it does move you?’

‘He is lost?’ Then she tried to recover herself, although on reflection she could not see that it made much difference. The whole scene had a slow inevitability about it, as if it had all been played before. ‘If you mean your son, he called here once,’ she said, taking up the twine again to tie up another vine.

‘You sheltered him.’

‘If that’s what you think.’

‘I know. I know what you did, Maria McClure.’

Her fingers felt numb. She pulled the knot too tight and the string bit through the stem of the vine, so that the upper half of it toppled over. Why am I doing this, she wondered. A caterpillar crawled lazily along the leaf, arching its back in ripples that reached from end to end. She flicked it to the ground with her thumb and forefinger and its green innards exploded in a small pulpy heap.

‘So you sent him to war,’ she said.

‘Aye, we did.’

She looked him up and down then with what she hoped he would read as contempt. Yet what she saw did not really stir contempt in her, only a deep pity which for the moment must take the place of grief. A sort of cousin, a kind of brother. Who else knew? Or would she carry the secrets to her own grave? She scanned him covertly as she knelt to collect up a handful of tendrils that were escaping her trellis. His eyes were the colour of Black Doris plums with the same opaqueness extending over the pupils. A thicket of black hairs grew in his nose and ears. She might have liked this stranger. What friends they could have been! But instead, they were talking about Jamie.

She straightened up and put her scissors in her pocket. ‘I might have known you would catch him. It made me ill at the time, thinking of you baiting traps, as if he was a rat instead of a man. Your own son. Dead eh? You must be proud.’

His face collapsed inwards. ‘You think I wanted him dead? Listen to me, witch, the boat that he would have sailed on, except for your meddling, arrived at its destination safe and sound. You are the guilty one.’

‘I see. So that is what you’ve really come to tell me.’ She dug both hands in the pocket of her apron so that he would not see them shaking.

Above their heads swam the relentless sun, and a flock of gulls
wheeling towards the sea. The centre from one of her sunflowers suddenly fell, a pile of brown seeds scattering, covering the earth below. Everything is collapsing and dying, things so ripe and pretty and deathly, she thought.

‘You have other sons,’ she commented, knowing this was so.

His mouth hardened so much it all but disappeared. ‘They have gone to take his place. There is no one left on the farm but me,’ he answered.

He took three or four steps down the path, stopped and turned back. ‘My father knew you for a murdering woman. It is not true, I said to him, you are too hard on her. But he was not hard enough. They burned people like you at the stake once, and even that would be too good for you.’

She raised her eyes to his, but he shrank as if her gaze might have some evil effect. ‘You’ve got no remorse, have you? You do not care. The third killing, Maria McClure.’

He walked away.
A ra
a ra
te
ki-te
ki-te.
The air was fretful with the insects’ clamour and an approaching summer storm.

My brother. More or less. She was sure it should have mattered more. After this war abroad they would never be the same. McLeod had called upon them to take care of each other, to keep out the world’s madness; he could not prevent what happened inside.

I am what happens when people get lost. It seems that I cannot make new paths. I have tried that, and failed. But I am a reminder. A conscience, perhaps? What kind of fate is that?

In
the
morning
she
thinks
she
hears
another
stone.
She
believes
it
is
the
next
morning,
though
suddenly,
after
all
these
years,
she
is
really
losing
track
of
time.
The
night
is
without
shape,
she
cannot
remember
what
has
taken
place.
The
house
is
very
cold,
and
she
realises
that
there
are
holes
downstairs
letting
in
the
wind.
Yes,
it
is
so
very
cold.
Though
the
wind
is
not
as
high
as
she
expected,
as
if
the
storm
had
veered
away
to
the
south,
missing
Waipu.

But
the
air
is
keen
as
if
there
is
a
frost
outside.
The
bird
is
still
on
its
perch,
its
feathers
ruffled.
Perhaps
it
has
had
enough
too?

Painfully
she
gets
out
of
bed,
talking
aloud
to
the
bird.
It
does
not
budge,
but
opens
one
eye,
bright
still
but
bad-tempered.

Her
voice
is
doubtful.

‘Perhaps
you
should
stay
there
after
all.
I
don’t
know
what
to
do
with
you.
It’s
no
good
staying
here.
’

The
sparrow
does
not
move.
She
sighs.

‘
I’ll
feed
you
though.
You
know
that?’

Her
hands
feel
clumsy
as
she
crumbles
a
piece
of
bread
from
the
tray
beside
her.
She
throws
the
crumbs
into
the
middle
of
the
floor,
half
expecting
the
bird
to
refuse.

But
it
stretches
its
wings,
turns
its
head
from
side
to
side,
then
flies
down
to
the
bread.
It
thrusts
its
head
backwards
and
forwards
at
her
with
rapid
darting
motions,
as
if
inviting
a
dispute.

‘It’ll
do
you
no
good,’
she
says.
‘Sooner
or
later,
you
have
to
take
a
chance
again.’