The Book of Secrets (8 page)

While Mary McLeod was on her knees praying for constancy in her way of life, her husband was pursuing other ends. There was general enthusiasm in Ullapool for his teaching methods, and it was said that the children had acquired ‘ever so much book learning in the shortest possible time’. The parents of some of the older children were heard to say with pride that at the rate they were learning, they wouldn’t have to stay at school much longer; at which McLeod, in his turn, rebuked them sternly with the advice that while they might have learned like monkeys to read and write, he still had much work to do on their spiritual concerns and that would take a great deal longer. As for the parents themselves, there was much that needed doing for their spiritual welfare too; in all honesty, he could not see how they could expect their children’s godliness to grow and mature if they did not look to their own.

These pronouncements were greeted with some astonishment by the local people at first, for as a rule most of them attended church on the Sabbath when the town minister, Dr Ross, was preaching.

‘Come and join me and my friends next Sabbath day, and hear the true word of God,’ McLeod exhorted them instead.

It had already been noticed since McLeod’s arrival that the population did swell each Sunday. The visitors were people from the north, come to hear McLeod preach his own sermons.

‘What do you think about Mr McLeod and his preaching?’ a parishioner asked Dr Ross after his sermon one Sunday morning. The congregation had been very small that day, while across on the other side of town the overflow from McLeod’s gathering could be seen spilling down the hill towards the sea, and cramming the street corners.

Ross was a small man with a plume of silver hair and a lean handsome face. He smiled. ‘It is a phenomenon that will soon pass, you mark my words,’ he responded with easy assurance.

‘Dr Ross is nothing but a heathen libertarian,’ thundered McLeod.

‘Is it true,’ whispered Mary McLeod, one evening later in the
week, ‘that you have offended Dr Ross and he is threatening to close down the school if you do not stop preaching on a Sunday?’

‘Its nothing,’ said McLeod. They were sitting at dinner. He took a piece of fried bread and used it to scoop the last of his fish into his mouth. Beside him, John Luther grizzled and pulled at his coat tail, hanging over the edge of the chair. He took the child on his knee and rocked him, reached over and took a morsel of bread his wife was toying with on her plate, and fed it to his son. The boy smiled and was still.

‘You worry too much,’ said McLeod, dismissing her question.

‘But what of John’s baptism? Who will do that?’

‘Do not question me, Mary. It is unseemly of you.’

When his wife related this incident to Isabella, the younger woman was full of indignation.

‘It’s not good enough, Mary!’ she cried. ‘You should stand up to him. The way he’s going on, Dr Ross is bound to close him down. I mean, can you blame him for being angry? There were only three people in church on Sunday.’

‘And were you amongst them?’

Isabella shifted uncomfortably. ‘You know I was listening to Mr McLeod.’

‘And you are different from all the others who go?’

There was a silence between them. ‘You’re not married to him,’ said Mary, finally. ‘You do not know to what lengths he will go.’

Isabella looked away out the window. Her friend’s eyes followed her. When she looked back, Mary had taken to rocking quietly in her chair. Under her hands the baby she was carrying fluttered, turned restlessly inside her. It is as well not to try and read her, Isabella thought.

After she had gone, Mary sat looking out to sea. It is all right for Isabella, she told herself. She is young, and she has always had enough to eat, so that her strength is not sapped. It’s all right for her to have fallen under his spell, she has other chances and will get over it. I am too tired already to fight with him.

The following week McLeod announced to his wife that John Luther would have to be baptised at Loch Carron.

‘But that’s forty miles away!’

‘We have walked further before.’

‘But now?’

‘I’ll carry the child,’ said McLeod. ‘You will have no need to concern yourself about that.’

‘Can’t we wait for the summer?’

‘We’ve waited too long already.’

‘Then can you not appeal to Dr Ross? It is not the child who has offended him?’

‘My dear Mary, do you not understand?’ He spoke with a certain solicitude, as if she might be incapable of grasping what he was saying.

And indeed she did not understand him, but dared not tell him so.

McLeod explained seemingly with great patience, but there was an underlying agitation in his manner. ‘Dr Ross is a man of the worst temper, to begin with, but that is not the point. We are talking of our son’s baptism, the future of his immortal soul. The man who ministers such a sacrament must be worthy of that responsibility. Allow me to inform you, my dear wife, that last Sunday when Ross preached, he took the text “Ye are the salt of the earth” and all he had to say was about how salt is procured and processed. And the Sunday before that, the learned doctor preached on “Ye are the light of the world” and what did he talk about? Why, the planetary system! Hercules and Herschel and Neptune and Newton were the topics and personalities under discussion. But of sinners and the Saviour, he spoke not a word. There now,’ and his voice had assumed a note of positive triumph, ‘surely you can understand that. Well don’t you, Mary?’

‘No,’ she said, but not to him. It was Isabella whom she told of difficulty in coming to terms with her husband’s philosophical scruples.

Privately, Isabella wondered how Mary would stand the journey to Loch Carron. The skin of her face was softy pleated around the mouth and her colour very pale. The small pulse in her throat throbbed constantly. She had seen it as Mary lay in bed, some days too tired to get up and attend to John.

‘What would I do without you?’ she said on days such as this, putting her thin hand on Isabella’s arm.

‘It will get better, you’ll see,’ Isabella had said, but sometimes she wondered if it would. It was not so much the state of Mary’s physical
condition that bothered her, although it was clear that she was not strong, but rather her total disinclination to oppose McLeod, whatever he said even though his suggestions were often difficult to the point of impossibility. Or that was how it appeared to her.

Although when she had first come to Ullapool Mary had demonstrated a clear sharp brain if called upon to do so, lately it appeared that this required too much effort. More and more often if there were details about the housekeeping which involved McLeod, or extra bills to be paid, she would ask Isabella to tell him. McLeod would receive the information in silence, but he would invariably act upon it.

One morning as she made her way down Shore Street, Isabella realised with sudden shocked clarity that Mary would really like her to take over responsibility for McLeod. That she should be as a wife was beyond consideration, yet the day-to-day running of their lives, and perhaps even the matter of intellectual transaction, was something she appeared to be suggesting could best be attended to by Isabella.

‘It will not be like that,’ said Isabella with a grim force that made her almost speak aloud. ‘She will not take me over and hand me to him on a plate.’

Besides there were things Mary did not know of her and McLeod. The meeting on the moor would seem to have sealed their relationship into a cool and distant mould which McLeod, for his part, would be unlikely to alter. She wondered at times why he had accepted her presence so readily in the house at all, but considering its great convenience to himself, it would seem that he must be an opportunist as well as a dictator. It might even be that he had already mapped out her position as a retainer, growing older and more spinsterly before his eyes as the years passed; in that, he would achieve his ascendancy over her.

‘I have to get away from her,’ she said to her mother.

‘Away? Where would you go?’ Lately Mrs Ramsey had been enjoying a great deal of bad health. Isabella thought savagely as she plumped yet more pillows that her mother was almost in competition for her attention with Mary McLeod.

‘I could go to London,’ said Isabella, suddenly desperate to be away. ‘I could stay with Louise.’

‘Louise has plenty to do without looking after her unmarried sister-in-law,’ said Mrs Ramsey.

‘I could help Louise. You know I could. Besides, perhaps I could meet a husband of my own this time.’ Isabella hoped that her mother would not recognise her low cunning for what it was.

‘Oh dear, I think it may be too late for that,’ Mrs Ramsey tutted. ‘And besides, who would look after me? No, it is out of the question. And,’ as if reading Isabella’s mind, ‘I shall tell your father so, so please do not speak of it to him.’

Mrs Ramsey was playing a hand which Isabella found unbeatable. It was clear that her father would not entertain the thought of her leaving him on his own with his wife if she was not well disposed to the idea.

Sitting in the McLeod’s small front room that faced the sea, Dr Ross sipped his tea, his finger crooked, and between each sip he smiled delicately at Mary, oozing kindly concern as if she were about to be struck by illness.

‘Mr McLeod, I have a proposition for you.’

‘Oh aye, Dr Ross?’ McLeod tapped his fingers on the arm of his chair and waited.

‘You might show a little interest.’

‘It is you that is putting the proposition, Dr Ross.’

‘You’re a prickly fellow to be sure. What does one do with him Mrs McLeod?’ Receiving no support from this quarter, he hurried on. ‘Mr McLeod, you have stirred up quite a following in the district. I know your heart’s very much in it, you’re a man of principle, sir, and I would not like to be seen to complain of such a man.’

‘Yet you do.’

‘I must confess it is not an easy position you place me in. But look, problems are there to be solved. It is part of your duty as a schoolmaster to attend my sermons. But I’m not strictly convinced that that is necessary on every occasion. Let us say, if you were to attend mine but once a month, put in an appearance if you like, then I think we could consider the matter settled. What do you say?’

‘I say that if you were more strict in the discipline of those whose interests you claim to represent, then this situation might never have arisen in the first place. But that is the crux of the matter is it not, the scab that infests the whole Church of Scotland?’

‘You refuse my request then?’

‘Sir, if you have finished your tea you must excuse us, we have our devotions to attend to and the evening grows late.’

Vexed beyond endurance, Dr Ross cut the schoolmaster’s salary.

When the McLeods finally set out for Loch Carron with their child in the spring they were already penniless. Before they left McLeod had stocked up with fish, smoked and dried, and flour, brought to him by his followers; outside was a huge pile of firewood, gathered off the moor. At least when they returned they would be comfortable, he told Mary, while he dealt with the problem of Dr Ross. Instead, they found a summons nailed to the door, issued in the name of Dr Ross, for the theft of the firewood from parish property.

‘They will starve to death,’ said Mrs Ramsey with what could only be construed as a note of satisfaction. She had been gravely embarrassed by the behaviour of her former protégé; entertaining Dr Ross to tea, she could not escape the thought that he might hold her responsible for introducing such an audacious and troublesome element into the parish.

‘He did not steal the firewood, mother,’ said Isabella hotly.

‘Indeed, and whose side are you on? Although that should be obvious, the amount of time you spend with that rather sad little wife of his.’

‘It’s not a matter of sides, it’s unjust, everyone knows it is. If you ask me, Dr Ross has done more to enhance Mr McLeod’s reputation than to damage it.’

‘But he has no job now, and he has to go to court in Dingwall. What will he do about that? And I hear he is very much in debt.’

‘Let the magistrate decide what will happen to Mr McLeod. It is none of our business.’

‘Well, I would have thought it was yours,’ said her mother with a keener look than usual. She was sitting at the window, in her old place, as if the excitement of conflict had restored her spirits.

‘At least that foolish fellow from the hills seems to have given up hanging around here. I suppose that is something to be thankful for.’ She snapped her thread with pleasure. ‘You know the one I mean?’

‘I know,’ said Isabella.

‘Yes, I thought you’d remember. What was his name?’ Her needle was poised over a cross-stitch.

‘It is neither here nor there.’

‘But you said you remembered him.’

‘MacQuarrie, mother, his name was MacQuarrie.’

‘Ah yes, Duncan was it not? Yes, Duncan MacQuarrie.’ she smiled, pleased with herself.

After the court case in Dingwall, when McLeod had been cleared of the charge against him, Isabella helped Mary to pack what was left of their belongings into two small trunks. Holding Donald, the new baby, as they waited for the carriage that was to take the McLeods away, Mary said, ‘I cannot believe I will ever be so happy again, as I have been here on Shore Street.’

‘So you have been happy?’

‘But of course. Did you think I was not?’

‘I’m sure you’ll find things even better in Wick.’

‘Oh you think so? With Norman away on the fishing boats again? It’s not much of a life, you know.’

‘He says he’ll pay off the debts, Mary. I’m sure it will be better for you and the children than not knowing where the money is coming from.’

‘It was my dream, this place.’ She looked around the bare rooms.

‘There will be other houses.’

‘But where will they be? What’s going to become of us? Perhaps I’ll never see you again.’

‘I’m sure you will.’ Isabella felt a small knot of fascination inside her as she wondered whether it would prove to be so; and if it did not, what the rest of her life would be like: if she were never to see McLeod again.