The Book of Secrets (17 page)

To Annie’s surprise, Isabella stopped in her room that night when she came to check that she was in bed. Usually she glanced around and said a firm goodnight before she closed the door. But occasionally she would come in and sit by Annie and talk quietly with her; when she did this Annie would wonder why she was so afraid of her, for in truth, Isabella never raised her voice towards her, or punished her for things. If there had been things for which to punish her. Only Fraser had the capacity to discover evil doings in Annie. Annie desired only to be good, to be loved, to be like the McLeods. Or even to be better than the McLeod’s own children.

But it was hard with a mother like hers. It was whispered amongst her friends at school that Isabella did not believe in God.

Now, as Isabella sat beside her, staring intently into her child’s round face with its prominent eyes and somewhat failed chin, Annie dared to ask her, ‘Is it true, mother?’

Is what true?’ Isabella stroked the top of Annie’s hand with an idle finger.

‘That you are a heathen? Well, that is what I have been told.’

The magnetic finger paused. ‘By whom?’

‘Oh I can’t remember,’ said Annie hurriedly. The finger waited. ‘Margaret McCabe.’

‘Oh. Them.’ Isabella’s expression embraced an entire family. The finger resumed its gentle, hypnotic action. ‘Now do you think that I look like a heathen, eh?’

‘No. Because heathens are dark and don’t wear clothes. Heathens are savages.’

‘Then you’ve nothing to fear, have you?’

‘Not a witch either?’

‘And who told you that?’

‘No one, nobody told me that.’

‘Ah yes they did. Come on, dumpling.’ When it suited Isabella she was known to be an excellent cook, for which it was suspected that Fraser forgave her much. Although she remained lean and lithe herself, he and the children, with the exception of Duncan Cave, had a tendency to plumpness. In what passed for her better moods Isabella was wont to refer to them by whatever culinary inspiration came to mind, sometimes with a touch of malice that mostly went unnoticed. As she had intended, she provoked her daughter now.

‘I’m not fat.’

‘Maybe not fat, just a little round and fluffy, eh? That’s what mother’s dumplings are like. Now the truth, I want the truth, huh?’

‘Peggy McLeod.’

‘Hmm, I thought so. You believe everything Peggy McLeod tells you?’

‘She’s Reverend McLeod’s daughter. She’s my best friend.’

‘Oh yes, the minister’s daughter and his darling. D’you know, she can do no wrong that one. I’ll guarantee she gets no punishment from his high-and-mightiness.’

‘Are you, though?’ Annie, embarked now on this course, could not withdraw from it.

‘A witch? Has she seen me riding my broomstick? Casting spells? Tell her, yes I am a witch and I turn girls into curds on top of the milk, thick and yellow like fat blobs, and they melt and run away into the grass and fall down into the pits of hell where they sizzle, and never come back.’

‘Mother!’

‘You’re too scared to tell her, aren’t you?’

‘You wouldn’t want me to, would you?’

‘I don’t care,’ said her mother, and laughed.

‘I might tell father, though,’ said Annie.

Her mother stood up and blew out the candle.

‘You must tell him whatever you choose,’ said Isabella, and her voice was cool and even as it moved away and then her footsteps faded on the stairs.

They stopped outside Duncan Cave’s room.

‘Is it you?’ his voice called softly in answer to her knock.

He was bent over his desk, a pen in his hand. Papers were spread around, and each of them was covered with delicate line drawings,
pictures of plants in leaf and in flower. They lined the walls above his bed, and Isabella felt as if she was entering a garden, as if petals were showering down upon her and bushes were brushing her ankles, so accurate and exact were these drawings. She could have sworn that she felt the tremble of the air shifting the foliage.

Duncan Cave held up the drawing that he was working on. It was of a rock covered with lichen.

‘What a thing,’ she exclaimed. For though she liked it, because he had done it, it was not like the more living vibrant plants that scattered the room.

‘It is the rock where Bunyan and I used to sit when we were lads,’ he said, his voice stretched and edgy. ‘He would like to see it again.’

Her heart turned over heavily then. It hurt her to hear him speaking of himself and his friend as if their boyhood were long past, and yet she could see that this was how it must seem. Bunyan McLeod was dying and no one could save him from what was to come.

She remembered the delicate baby whom Mary McLeod had nearly lost on the ship, and whom she had helped to nurse when he was small, only a little older than her own first child. They had been friends all their lives, and neither had had other friends. Now, at any hour, they would be parted.

‘Will you come and see him tomorrow?’ asked Duncan Cave.

‘Aye, if that’s what you want,’ she said, inwardly recoiling, for she did not like to visit the house of McLeod.

‘I should,’ said her son, who had the shape of a man but was still a boy. He is too young to bear so much, the mother thought. She put her arms around his shoulders where he sat, and he turned towards her, burying his face against her hip.

When she had left him, she glided on down the passageway and paused at the next door. She hesitated and passed on. There was nothing to be said between her and Black Hector, who chose not to please her at all and would prefer to think that as Duncan Cave had another father, so he might have been borne by another mother, before she came along.

Would that it had been so, was her own grim rejoinder when she thought of him in the darkest hour of the night. So she walked on, away from the one amongst her children who must work harder than all the others to please his father, because by odd chance he was also
the one who did not have the protection of the McLeods. Whereas Annie, unprepossessing though she might be, was dutiful and kind, and a willing handmaiden to the ebullient Peggy McLeod, while Duncan Cave could do whatever he pleased simply because of his love, unrehearsed and without guile, for Bunyan who was dying. Hector had no such friends in the house of the Man.

She would have sought a room of her own if there had been any left spare, but they were all taken up with these children of hers. In the room where she must lie down for the night, her husband lay waiting.

As she sat on the edge of the bed he opened his mouth, issuing forth a belch stained with grease. Instinctively she moved down the bed an inch or so. His hand fell on her shoulder.

‘Where are you going?’

‘Nowhere. I am going nowhere.’ Have nowhere to go, she might have added, but she did not.

She thought, as she had before, I have endured worse. And survived.

Annie lay and felt the breath of the house and held her own for as long as she could, as if the act of breathing might cause some explosion of all the elements that mingled under the roof of her home. Then, where the moonlight struck the boards, she watched the floor with fascination, certain in her heart that the Devil would rise through it one night and seize her by․the ankle. Would he break open the floor with a mighty crash (she hoped so, for even then it might not be too late for someone to hear and save her, though who had ever been saved from the Devil when he was so poised to pounce?). Perhaps he would slide through the floor with stealth and presence like that of the Holy Ghost who, she was sure, could appear in a room like a breath of fog on a moor, like steam rising in the kitchen from a pot of potatoes.

But though she watched and waited, in the end she slept.

In the afternoon Peggy and Annie sliced and creamed their way across the ice, their skates whistling as they practised turns. It was an early snow and the lakes were solid already, and soon the bay would be as well. When she was flying over the ice like this Annie felt free and cleared of all responsibility. It was a heady, giddy feeling, like madness, as if there was a space behind her eyes. It was a harmless thing to do
that no one complained about, skating across the ice, yet the very pleasure it gave made her doubt its lightness.

Today, Peggy was hugging the importance of impending death to her like a treasure.

‘We are fortunate,’ said Peggy as they carried their skates home, ‘that we have several children in our family. It’s always useful to have more if any should die.’

‘I suppose it is,’ said Annie doubtfully

‘You haven’t really enough in yours,’ said Peggy.

‘No,’ said Annie humbly. ‘I can see that.’ Immediately her burdens became greater. ‘I shall make up for it when I’m grown,’ she said.

‘Oh yes. I shall make sure that I have plenty too. What will you call them?’

‘Oh, I hadn’t thought. Well, Fraser of course. And maybe Hector. And I will name one for its father.’

‘So what shall that be?’

‘Oh Peggy McLeod, how can I know that?’

‘You could marry one of my brothers.’

Annie had already considered that and wondered about naming Edward, but the idea of an actual living person as a husband was embarrassing; besides she was afraid that it might seem like impertinence to suggest a McLeod for herself. But Edward was clever, and so good to look at she could have eaten him with jam whenever she sat across the table from him at the McLeods. His eyes seemed to rest kindly on her, unlike those of his six older brothers, whose glances were bold and sharp as they looked at each other, sly as they moved across their father’s face. They were said to run brandy from the island of St Pierre.

As if reading her thoughts, Peggy said, ‘Edward is our second Edward you know. We had another one, but he died too.’

Annie remembered the grave at Black Cove which bore the brief inscription, ‘Short spring, endless summer.’ It was a terse comment for someone as vocal as McLeod, and it occurred to her with surprise that it must be the work of Mrs McLeod. She hardly knew Mary McLeod, although she spent so much time in her home. Often the minister’s wife did not rise from her bed for days at a time, and when she did sit at table with them her face was like flour and her eyes fatigued. They roamed across the tops of her children’s heads, and Annie could have sworn that she saw none of them. Her hands lay
between her knees, the fingers threading themselves round and round each other, a ceaseless rhythmic motion contained in the circle of her lap.

‘Well I suppose you must have enough Edwards by now,’ said Annie, hoping that the subject of naming children was over.

But Peggy was inexorable. ‘What would you call the girls?’

‘Eh?’ Annie was surprised. ‘Oh, I don’t suppose I shall have girls.’

‘You might. Somebody has to have them.’

‘Aye. But I think I will be having boys, you know.’

‘But if? What if?’

Annie divined that Peggy was waiting for her to say, like any best friend, her own name Peggy, or Margaret.

‘Maria,’ she said, suddenly perverse. As soon as it was out she regretted it. But it was too late to take it back. ‘I would call a girl Maria.’

She comforted herself with the thought that if she persisted with her goodness it was a problem she might not have to confront. Sons must certainly be her reward.

So they made their way to the house on the knoll above Black Cove, where Bunyan McLeod lay dying.

Bunyan was propped by a mountain of pillows. His high forehead shone like marble, and although he was barely twenty his hairline had receded. Within the recesses of his skull his eyes blazed, a dark unnatural colour, and yet Isabella who, as she had promised, was visiting him too, could not escape the thought that Bunyan, of all McLeod’s children, was the most like his father.

‘How are you today then, Bunyan?’ she asked quietly.

‘I am as well as can be expected, thank you, Mrs McIssac.’

‘How have you been passing the time?’

‘Oh I’ve plenty to think about, and Duncan tells me all that’s happening out there in the world, and what he thinks I cannot see in my head he draws for me. I am very fortunate.’

‘I am glad that you are …’ But for the moment Isabella could think of nothing to say. Had she meant to say happy? Or to agree that he was fortunate? Neither would do, and yet it seemed that Bunyan would find either acceptable.

It occurred to her then that although Bunyan knew he would die, he was experiencing the stars and the clouds, the woods, the lakes
and the sea as they were told of to him by Duncan, and that her son already knew more than she had learned in a lifetime. Somewhere in the last bitter years she had thrown away hard-won knowledge and a spirit of adventure, vamping up her manner with toughness and a quick and cynical tongue.

The woman wanted to possess this young man, as if what he knew could change her; owning him, she might extract what he knew.

‘I am excited by what I will find,’ said Bunyan.

‘What if there is nothing?’ she blurted out before she could stop herself.

He smiled. ‘Well, at least I shall know.’

‘What does your father say?’

But he was tired again and turned his head away, his eyelids drooping.

Behind her stood Mary, whom she had not seen in a long time. She was surprised to register that she was looking better and calmer than she had for some years, though noted the slight oddness of her appearance, with a headscarf knotted under her chin like the women of old when they appeared in church.

‘You’re managing, then?’ she said, when they had withdrawn to the room next door.

Mary nodded. ‘But I must. Who else will, if I don’t?’

‘You’ve changed, Mary.’

‘Have I? Oh, I don’t know about that. Perhaps I am just more myself.’

She is still strange, thought Isabella, and remembered the times when Mary had been alone over the years. For it was in those times, when McLeod had ridden into the wilderness to preach his word, or the happy year when he had gone to New York State to be ordained so that he could marry people and legally represent himself to the Governor in Halifax as a minister, that Mary had had small brief summers of her own, seeming to keep well and strong and manage her children as she never did when her husband was home.