The Book of Secrets (16 page)

‘You don’t know what’s happened to me.’

There was an impenetrable silence. ‘As you are coming with me,’ he said, after a time, ‘it would be best to put it out of your mind, whatever it was.’

So she followed him into the sodden afternoon. He helped her mount the horse, holding the baby then passing him up to her. She wondered, as she had done once before long ago, if they would be friends like this again. But whereas in Ullapool she might still have entertained that possibility, here in this country, where he had become so powerful in such a short time and her own life had fallen into chaos with equal speed, it seemed unlikely.

As the horse plodded on they did not speak and she had time to reflect. He had told her to put things out of her mind. She glanced from side to side and told herself she could see no ghosts.

‘Well there seems to be plenty to be done around here in return for my keep,’ Isabella wrote in her journal that night, ‘but what did I ever expect? At least for tonight I have come in for a little cosseting and nobody has reproached me. A little while ago Mary came into my room here and clucked over Duncan Cave.

“‘What will you do, Isabella?” she asked me, and I saw that she was asking, what was I going to do about my whole future, which was at least more than McLeod had done, who simply assumes that
I will follow wherever they go. And having left the caves, what else can I do? I did say to Mary that I had thought of writing to my parents for my fare home, although, in truth, it was a thought which had just struck me out of the blue, that instant. I suppose it is a possibility, but there is no guarantee that they would want me back and therefore no compulsion for them to send the money. I am not even sure that I want to go back, or that if I did it would ever be my home again.

‘On the other hand, I do not wish to stay with the McLeods for the rest of my life, that is a decision I came to a long time ago, in another country. This evening, McLeod roared throughout evening prayer, back on form, as if today had never been. My eyes were supposed to be closed, but I looked around me from beneath lowered lids, catching sight of Kenneth Dingwall, a young man who already looks old, and very suspicious of anyone who comes within a ten foot of McLeod. He has a cool, sour eye and watches everyone.

‘As for the other man, McIssac, he is a heavy sweating fellow, a bit overweight, and pompous. McLeod suggested, all sweetness and light, that I should teach this fellow to read, which brought him down a peg; indeed, I could have sworn he glanced at me with positive dislike between a prayer or two.

‘I think McLeod must have observed more of this than he let on, for when he had completed his delivery, he glanced from Fraser McIssac to myself and said, “How good it is that you two have met.”

‘His manner could not have been more pleasant, and yet I shuddered.

‘After dinner, I saw him speak quietly to the man, obviously telling him to do some task for which he was not prepared, for he scowled deeply. Later I saw him sitting on the step polishing his boots, with a great deal of spit to help them along.

‘I feel strangely calm and sensible, as if the events of the past year or more are over, and as a sober and industrious widow faced with the plain facts of my situation I can see that I must do whatever is best for this child sleeping beside me.

‘Cape Breton Island, eh?

‘Well, I expect we will make something of it.

‘Could it be that McLeod now sees all his debts repaid to me?’

Wild flowers and twigs and bits of ribbon and recipes for succotash and forach fell from Isabella’s journal. But the place where it opened
with ease each time Maria McClure picked it up in her house in Waipu was marked not by Isabella but by Maria herself. It was sticky with tea and grains of sugar and pieces of biscuit from all the times that she had opened it and read it, sitting at her kitchen table or lying in bed reading last thing at night when she had her evening snack, sometimes leaving the yellowed pages open and face down on the coverlet while she slept.

The next entry, written at St Ann’s, Cape Breton Island, was in a hand that pressed hard into the pages with angry flourishes, the hand of Isabella McIssac: ‘So that is the price of my keep. In the end, it was I who was in McLeod’s debt. When we sat at table today, after this wretched marriage had taken place, I could have sworn there was complacence in his eyes. As if he had buttoned himself up for once and all. I have been betrayed by my own people, or those, who in the absence of all others, I have come to think of as mine.’

F
or as long
as Annie McIssac could remember, the house and the church on the knoll overlooking the inlet of Black Cove had been the centre of her life. The house was that of McLeod, where the Man lived and ruled.

He ruled the church too. It seemed vast to Annie, a huge edifice sixty feet long and forty feet wide, with walls twenty feet high. From the ground level there were four entrances, and inside the church two stairways led to galleries built round three sides of the building. There was seating for twelve hundred people, and it was never enough for the congregation. Or the audience, as Annie’s mother once called it, but then her mother, Isabella McIssac, was known for outrageous utterances. It was a source of great shame to Annie, who knew that to be liked and well thought of, and to get on at school in the master’s schoolroom, one must behave well in and towards the church at all times.

Yet what her mother said could not be denied altogether, for the church did slope towards the front of the auditorium. The light from the six arched windows was designed to fall so as to make a pool of brilliance around the central character. And plain though the furnishings were, the finish of the church showed the care of the master craftsmen who had worked in St Ann’s learning their skills over the years, in particular building ships. Now they had brought them to bear on this building. There was magnificence in its arches.

The church towered even above the three-storeyed mansion which stood beside it. It looked like the house of a wealthy man, although passersby might have found it paradoxical that high on the front of the building, set in a circle of glass, a cross proclaimed that this was the house of a clergyman. In Nova Scotia, and particularly Cape Breton Island, clergymen were not prosperous as a rule. Indeed, the clergy who had been sent there by the Edinburgh Bible Society were known to lead lives that were harsh and difficult in the extreme.

‘It is their awn faults,’ McLeod’s voice clanged from the pulpit, for the principal actor was in full flight this very minute, caught in a
vortex of light, a wry sunbeam turning his mane of thick white hair to an illuminated gold crest. He swaggered, he strutted, he leaned over the edge of the pulpit like an eagle arching over its prey, dazzling them with the sound of his voice. Only it never seemed to stop.

Tormod
Macleoid
.
As in the Gaelic which he now spoke. He styled himself with one word, one name, like Paul, the Apostle of old. McLeod. Annie’s mother Isabella referred to him with a reckless flourishing carelessness which shocked her daughter.

‘It is certainly the fault of these foolish young men,’ cried the Man, which was what his congregation called him, as he fulminated on about the pathetic young clergy from Scotland. ‘I have said it more than once …’

Indeed, he had said it more than a hundred times. And not blushed a single time that he should repeat himself in such a fashion.

‘They are pawns in the Church of Scotland’s
grr-aand
de-signs
. De
-signs
,
and stup-
id
women who put their noses into the business of men. For,
yes
Lord
,
it is known indeed that it is women, and especially Mrs McKay from the Edinburgh Bible Society, who are behind all of this, despatching witless young men to do their
duty
in the colonies, yes, and unsettling and dismaying the whole community of men who live on this island, with the exception of ourselves, my good friends, and now let us pray, saying, Our Father …’

But it was not over yet.

Sitting inside the church beside her father, Annie was wrapped in a cocoon, as the voice of McLeod rolled over her. If McLeod said that people were stupid then there could be no question but that it was so. She was eight years old and the world was full of absolutes.

Just sometimes, the light that streamed through the windows would change and the pattern and shapes of things would seem to shift, and Annie would be overcome by some pale intimation that goodness and purity might not always hold. On the other side of her sat her brother, little Black Hector, so named because he had been born with a shock of jet-black curls, although they had long since turned to a thatch of rather mousy brown hair. He was a heavy, thickset boy, with long arms that would be powerful like his father’s. When he spoke his voice was ragged around the edges, breaking already, although he was just thirteen. The two of them formed a strong and solid phalanx; she was a wisp, like a dragonfly caught between them, whom they must hold together.

She had sat still for more than two hours that morning and her bones were invaded with a cramp that she dared not admit. Whenever her attention wandered she fixed her eyes on the elders at the front, in their black suits with their silk hats beside them on the pew, and recited their names inside her head: John Munro, Squire Donald McLeod, Norman McDonald and a dozen others whose faces were as familiar as the church itself. These were the men who governed the church. Their presence restored her sense of security, her belief that nothing ever changed. That, and the bodies of these two males between whom she sat, her father and her brother.

Really, her world was complete. There could be no doubt that she was safe.

She felt herself drifting, yet at the same time her heart soared with glowing certainty that when she was older she would be a faithful worker for the church, who would come and clean it twice a week and sew altar linen. She promised herself to read an extra chapter of the Bible over and above the two to which she had already committed herself each day. The air seemed green. It was as if she was swimming under the water of St Ann’s Bay. A wave broke over her head. Oh it is lovely, she exclaimed inside herself. It is what heaven must be like. I am so happy.

She pushed her knees together, pushing herself a little straighter on the seat, and without thinking, lifted her hands out of her lap and put the palms against each other, the fingers pointed upwards to form a steeple like that of the church itself.

On either side, two hands descended on hers, prising them apart with a vice-like grip upon her wrists, and the faces of her father and brother glowered down at her.

Annie knew that she must not cry for if she did she would incur even greater wrath the next day. Perhaps not today, not when they had finished here, for it was Sunday, and chastisement was a duty to be performed with other tasks on other days; but sooner or later it would happen and either it would be painful or so arduous that she would wish herself dead before it was done.

The edge of safety shimmered and dissolved around her.

It is unfair, her heart cried out, and she was almost swallowed up by the injustice of it all. If only mother were here. But it was cruel precisely because mother was
not
there.

And it was no good complaining about it, not to anyone. Not to
her father, who would pretend he had not heard, or to her friend Peggy McLeod whom she loved like a sister and was the daughter of the Man, because she might tell her father; or even to God, who did not seem to bother Himself about the doings of her mother. That was the hardest part of all, that her mother got away with it, with not coming to church, while Annie went and had to endure for the sake of them all, and for everything.

The McIssacs lived further down the inlet from the McLeods in a small plain house which Fraser had built soon after the arrival of the Highlanders from Pictou. It was white and square and without adornment, like the other houses in the neighbourhood. The central room was the kitchen, where in a large stone fireplace flames consumed log after log throughout the winter. A spinning-wheel stood in the corner of the room, and down the middle ran a long table, so that in its appearance the kitchen too was much like those of other people who lived at St Ann’s.

Yet there was a certain difference about it. Annie could never work out exactly what it was. Rather than anything specific, it was an accumulation of small things. The curtains at the window dyed brighter colours than those of their neighbours; a picture on the wall of men and women congregating together in elegant dresses with frills around the hem, twirling parasols and smiling up at gentlemen, which had once been given to her mother by Aunt Louise from London, who was now thought to be dead; a shawl thrown over a chair with a casual flourish, as if to make it appear more sumptuous than it really was; a fur rug on the floor.

All of this was to do with why she felt she must work harder than almost anyone else at school. And although nobody ever said so directly, she must not grow up like her mother and so worked harder still.

Each evening the family gathered around the long table. They folded their hands and Fraser said grace before they began their meal. When they had finished, he read the Bible aloud.

‘Quite fluent,’ her mother sometimes said, and Annie could swear she raised her eyebrows at Duncan Cave, her half-brother who lolled at the end of the table and appeared not to take the slightest notice of what her father was saying.

Annie hated it when they flicked comments like this from one to
the other. She would see her father’s face burn dull crimson then as he was overtaken by bouts of speechlessness. Although Isabella had not said so in front of her, Annie could not avoid the knowledge, because somehow her mother managed skilfully to impart it, that it was she who had taught Fraser to read.

Now it was time. The remains of their meal lay on the plates in front of them, threads of cold meat. Being Sunday, the meal had been prepared the day before so that Isabella would not be seen to have laboured on the Sabbath. It was a custom which she had come to find a great convenience.

Duncan Cave had left more on his plate than anyone. He pushed it aside and stretched his long frame back in his chair, looking up towards the smoky ceiling. His young man’s face was thin and his eyes bright. A smile appeared to hover at the corner of his mouth.

‘Was the food not good enough for you?’ Fraser demanded.

‘There is gristle.’ Duncan Cave looked down the length of his finely turned nose. ‘It’s more tolerable when the meat is hot.’

‘It is more tolerable when the meat is hot,’ mimicked Hector from where he sat, close to his father. His admiration for Fraser was boundless, and he was quick to seize whatever opportunity presented itself to gain favour with him. Yet already Annie sensed that Hector was doomed to be less a man, in the sense that a man is implacable and unbending in the matter of his duty. Hector would falter and flounder and end up even less understanding of why he must do these duties, and even more determined, therefore, to perform them.

Yet she loved him. It is as well he has me to understand him, she thought. For mother does not. But then who would understand her?

For her mother, sitting at the opposite end of the table from her father, somehow both glittering and brooding at the same time, did not seem to understand anyone in the world except her club-footed son, Duncan Cave.

‘I will make you fannikineekins tomorrow,’ she said to him as he disdainfully turned the piece of offending grey gristle over on the plate.

‘It is just that I am tired of what meat looks like,’ said Duncan Cave, sighing.

It was his stepfather’s turn to smile, at once amazed and supercilious.

‘May I have some fannikineekins too?’ said Annie timidly. For
she really would have liked some but beyond this was afraid that someone might shout at someone else, and that by saying something she could stop them.

‘You. You played up in church today,’ said Hector.

There was stillness around the table. ‘Did you now? Was it not much fun in the kirk today?’ said Isabella languidly.

‘Did the Man rabbit on a bit, eh?’ Duncan Cave asked. He looked around them. ‘Well tell us. Mother and I are dying to hear what hellfire and damnation he has in store for us this week.’

‘That is enough,’ shouted Fraser, banging his fist down on the table so that the milk jug hopped. ‘You,’ he said, turning to Annie, ‘you will rise at five each morning this week and chop wood for an hour before you begin your devotions.’

‘It will be dark,’ said Annie faintly.

And oh, she was so afraid of the dark.

‘Quite so, you may have a lamp,’ said Fraser, as if to soften the punishment, although clearly it had not occurred to him until that moment that it would prove ineffective otherwise.

And so much for Hector. So much for love. He scowled at the table-cloth now, pleased with himself on the one hand, but on the other afraid that he might have stirred up a bigger storm than he intended and that its fury might at any time round on him.

On his side of the table, Duncan Cave seemed to lift his shoulder, certainly an eyebrow, as he looked at his mother. Annie studied the table-cloth, not daring to peek, supposing Isabella as aloof as always.

In fact, Isabella had been studying her daughter’s face.

‘We shall read from the Book of Isaiah,’ intoned Fraser.

‘So we are on about the landlords of Scotland again?’ said Duncan Cave.

‘They robbed us. They were drunken and committed all manner of sins,’ shouted Fraser. ‘Can you not understand that, you … you worthless doodler?’

‘Yes, yes, I understand very well. I am interested,’ said his stepson.

‘Isaiah is so very political, that is all,’ said Isabella.

Fraser’s hands were trembling as he opened the book and began to read. There was a mist in front of his eyes, curiously like tears, as if the heat in the room was affecting him. Sweat collected on his brow and ran in runnels down his forehead. It was hard to see when he was taunted like this. He swallowed, cleared his throat, and began
to read: ‘For all the tables are full of vomit and filthiness, so that there is …
no
place
clean
.’

Ah, this was better, he could cope with them now. He even paused, looked over the top of the book and around the table to make sure that his words were having the right effect. He saw with satisfaction that his wife was flinching, and that the child Annie was white and shaken. He avoided looking at Duncan Cave, as Annie had avoided her mother’s eye.