The Book of Secrets (5 page)

I did not reply, steadfastly watching the fire. It is the heat in the room, I thought, the rising wind outside, the sound of a defiant heart beating, and hers, plodding its way towards eternity; we are locked into this room with madness and no way of escape. Her voice had become pleading. ‘Tell me you do not mean it, Maria, my beautiful girl. Tell me.’

And to ease her pain which was overwhelming me I said, ‘I do not mean it, mother.’

‘Aye.’ She rocked backwards and forwards, not just the chair but her whole body. ‘Aye, that’s better. You, you’ve been touched by the hand of the Man, by Norman McLeod himself.’

‘He died before I was born,’ I said, sick of the old notions that were in conflict with anything that seemed important to me now, yet too weary to contradict her any more.

‘Yes, but don’t you remember all that I told you of it when you were a bairn?’

‘Tell me again,’ I said, already letting her words wash over me, and beginning to hope for hot milk when I went to bed.

‘We went to the window of his house and he lay there dying, Maria, and all the people were crying out and weeping. He spoke to us, though his strength was failing, and he scarce had voice enough left to say the words, and we who were younger remembered how we had followed him from St Ann’s across the sea, while our parents, the older ones, recalled the land before that, whence they had come with him.’

‘From Assynt in Sutherlandshire,’ I murmured.

‘Lochalsh and Harris,’ the rejoinder.

‘Applecross and Skye.’

The names like a litany in the room. Almost shutting out the night. And her chanting on.

‘Then on to Nova Scotia, and from there to Australia, and the sicknesses, and the mad gold-diggers, and yet still we came, following him to the ends of the earth, forty years or near enough in the wilderness, like the men of old, but he had led us to a safe haven — well, we stood there remembering all of this, and he looked at me, and he said, “Annie McClure, you’re a good woman and bonnie, you
must have patience in your sorrow, you won’t be without a child forever.”’

‘And you were patient, mother.’

‘Aye, I was. We must all learn patience.’

‘And what happened?’ I said, turning away this new reproach.

‘When I was sure it was too late I found myself with child again, and I said to your father, “I know this time it will go well.”’

‘And I was the child?’

‘You were. And you had golden down on your head the day you were born.’

‘You remember that?’ I said cruelly, for her recollection was not quite as my grandmother had described the events of that day.

She lifted her chin. ‘I was near to death on account of my age, you understand, and grieving for your father, dead and gone before the birth. I looked at your bonnie head, and it gave me the will to live.’

I thought she had finished, but she looked at me and said, her voice now matter-of-fact: ‘So you see, Maria McClure, you are a child blessed by the Man, and you will not bring shame on this house consorting with vagabonds, and a Papist to boot.’

Up, under the roof. The brief rain had stopped and the wind dropped, quickly, as it does here in the north. The stars shone out of a clean black sky, and the names, the names of the old places stalked through my dreams, the ghosts chanting from afar, Assynt, Stoer, Lochalsh, Applecross and Skye, Achiltibuie, Skye, Lochalsh, repeating and going on and on. Voices in my head, mother, it is a new world we have come to make but the old places going on and on …

In the morning I thought what a daft way she had of talking me round.

For nothing had changed from the night before. Branco was not there.

I stood outside, emptying the crumbs, flicking the table-cloth at the sky. The same place, the same sky, the same cloth. For a moment there was darkness, followed by white light. I had a strong temptation to eye the sun.

What had changed was me. I was different.

I thought of my grandmother, and wished she were here.

‘
H
e’s a good-looking young man,’ observed Mrs Ramsey. She peered out the window and observed with approval the carriage passing the window. The light shone on the waves across Loch Broom, and a wind splintered and diffused the bright colours of the day. High summer does not last long in Ullapool. Each day that the sun shines is a celebration.

Mrs Ramsey’s hands rested on the cloth she was sewing.

‘I said …’

‘He’s good-looking. I heard you,’ said her daughter.

‘But don’t you agree, Isabella?’

‘He’s married. See, he has a wife.’

‘What’s that got to do with it?’ Mrs Ramsey flounced.

‘Everything and nothing.’ Isabella straightened her back and, taking the scissors, snipped her thread with elaborate care.

‘Really, Isabella. I don’t know what’s got into you. You act as if … as if …’ Words failed her.

‘Yes, mother?’

Muriel Ramsey was a plump woman who had the remnants of good looks under her fat. She tended to wheeze from being laced too tight. She wore life like a continual cross. The rot had probably set in long before, but of late her husband had concluded that the state of her disposition was due to the disappointment of a daughter whom so far no one had offered to marry, despite her being considered handsome enough.

Mrs Ramsey said that this was not so at all; that she was more than satisfied with the status of her sons’ wives, who were delightful young women, and that she had beautiful grandchildren — what more could a woman desire? So although in private she complained, and needled Isabella incessantly, in public she was heard to state that how her daughter chose to spend her life was neither here nor there.

Isabella regarded her mother now with calm amusement. People said she had strange eyes. To look directly into them, they appeared
to be blue, yet when she turned her head, in some lights they appeared astonishingly dark and the blue would be seen to be flecked with brown. She had a lean profile, and some said that her nose was a trifle too long, but Mrs Ramsey knew, all the same, that her daughter had been admired during her season in London.

‘As if you are after every man that passes beneath your nose,’ said Mrs Ramsey, lying broadly. Her daughter frequently appeared amused by her attempts to interest her in new partners, and the mother wished now to disguise her true intent.

‘The good-looking ones need to be a little more accessible than Mr McLeod,’ said Isabella, making light of the matter.

The carriage had stopped on the cobblestones, two doors along from them.

‘They have a child,’ observed Isabella.

‘Don’t stare,’ said Mrs Ramsey, although no one from the outside could have seen them watching from behind the lace curtains. She thought secretly that Isabella’s eyes were so bright and sharp that people would know they were being observed, however much they hid. ‘What does the wife look like?’ she asked. ‘Has she a nice bonnet?’

‘Oh my word no, it is, well, hardly a bonnet at all.’

‘What d’you mean? A bonnet must be a bonnet. Is it fanciful?’

‘Just the opposite. It is rather a pathetic little thing. A head covering, really. There is nothing elegant about Mrs McLeod.’

‘Poor things. I’ve heard there’s been a great deal of poverty in the north,’ Mrs Ramsey remarked.

‘Yes. I’ve heard that too.’ Isabella continued to watch the McLeods.

‘Well, they have a nice house to come to now, and the garden is looking a picture. All that book learning has been an asset to that young man. He must be quite a go-ahead fellow from all I’ve heard. With so many brains let’s hope he’s amusing.’

‘I think you’ll be disappointed, mother. I’ve heard that Mr McLeod is not the slightest bit amusing.’

‘Oh dear. These Scots never are, are they?’

It may have been nearer to the truth than any other consideration that it was the matter of the Scots temperament which disappointed Mrs Ramsey, who was from the south. She had hoped that her husband might settle in London after their marriage but he had insisted on returning to his native Scotland, first to Edinburgh and
then to Inverness, of which neither town had ever amused her particularly, and they seemed to be getting smaller and colder as they progressed northwards. Now, here in Ullapool, in the
north-west
of the Scottish Highlands, it felt as if they could moulder here forever and it would be neither here nor there to her husband.

Still, it was a comfortable enough living on the edge of Loch Broom, as a supervisor’s wife. Mr Ramsey worked for the British Fishing Company, which had set up an establishment for the catching and processing of herring, said to be the best in the world. There were nearly a hundred houses in the village. The Ramsey’s was one of the finest, with a panoramic view of the sea. It stood at the western end of Shore Street — Sraid-a-Chladaich-An-Iar — in a row of solid whitewashed houses with blue slate roofs stretching out along a green point, hard to the edge of the loch, built so closely to the water that on a clear day when a skin of light lay easily on the sea, the reflection of the houses could be seen. Beyond lay the Summer Isles.

The village was not short of amenities, for the company had built a pier, and there were two large stores, one to the right and one to the left of it. Up Point Street was the inn, named The Arch on account of the gateway to the courtyard, built high to accommodate coaches. Within the township there was a constant bustle, unlike the desolate and exhausted atmosphere of other villages in the north-west.

Altogether, though the routine of Ullapool was dull as far as Mrs Ramsey was concerned, she enjoyed the fruits of her husband’s labours. She had some importance of her own. It was she who had been the moving light, amongst her friends, in obtaining the services of a schoolmaster. While living in Edinburgh her husband had become a member of the Edinburgh Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. It was first and foremost an organisation for gentlemen but then her husband was a gentleman, at least in a minor way, one subject on which they could both agree, although Mrs Ramsey had never stopped to consider his position in relation to that of others. The belief that he was any kind of gentleman had been a great comfort to her in their northward migration. And he was sober, industrious and reliable, and took a little religion seriously. Mrs Ramsey was glad that he did not go to extremes over it, that would have been unmanageable. But his associations with the Edinburgh Society had certainly proved a great advantage when they settled in Ullapool.

The Highlands were in a joyless state of transition when they
arrived and the settlers from the south were anxious to ensure a more comfortable situation for themselves than that of their neighbours. Poverty was all around them and seemed to rap at the doors of the town. It was better to ignore it if they could. Here, in this safe haven, where shining silver crossed the wharves in return for silver of a tougher kind, it was possible to think of other things. The Company’s money built sturdy houses for the new inhabitants, they put up a church, built roads around the village and applied for assistance from the Edinburgh Society in order to obtain their school. They had seventy pounds a year to offer the schoolmaster, a good sum, and only twenty pounds less than the minister earned.

Isabella had queried the use of the Society’s funds. ‘Don’t you think it would be better to try and improve the lot of the labourers round here?’ she said.

‘Whatever are you talking about, Isabella?’ Mrs Ramsey had asked the question with genuine astonishment.

‘We could teach the children here ourselves.’

‘But why should we?’

‘Do you know that a man can work day in and day out hereabouts and earn a pound a year?’ Isabella asked her.

Mrs Ramsey flinched. The cause of her daughter’s problem, her single state, was all too clear to her. The girl thought that she had the head of a man. Mrs Ramsey sighed beneath her whalebones.

She noticed that her daughter still stared towards the road where the schoolmaster and his wife were unloading their possessions beside their new house.

‘At least he is young,’ Mrs Ramsey said, with fading hope.

‘He is hardly a boy, mother,’ said Isabella. ‘He is thirty-four years old.’

Mrs Ramsey was threading a needle. She paused. ‘It was old to qualify, I grant you.’

‘Qualify at what? He is nothing more than a stickit minister.’

Because Mrs Ramsey already knew this and did not want to dwell upon the implications — after all, she and the Society had worked hard to bring Mr McLeod here — she did not reply. Nor did she ask Isabella how she knew so much about the teacher. She had not discussed these matters with her, and it disturbed her, the extent of Isabella’s knowledge.

Her daughter turned back to the room and picked up her sewing.
Presently she said, ‘He has an interesting face.’ Again, her mother did not think of asking how she could have observed this at such a distance. She did wonder afterwards, but by then it was the middle of the night when her indigestion was troubling her. She rolled over in bed and wished she had not eaten so much gooseberry fool at supper.

Isabella had a strange penchant for travelling unaccompanied. She rode well, and at first would set out into the countryside with escorts whom she soon left far behind. Later she went alone. She had moved much further afield than her mother suspected.

Once Mrs Ramsey’s sister in London had been taken ill, and she had hurried to her side, leaving Isabella in charge of the housekeeping for her father. At that time, he was totally engrossed in the supervision of the Company’s best catch in years, and Isabella was free to spend her time as she chose.

Leaving their maid enough orders to ensure that the house ran smoothly, she had taken herself, day after day and sometimes by night, to the moors in the north. She had travelled by Lochinver to Stoer Point, to Gairloch, and even to Applecross in the south.

The women of Ullapool had looked askance at these disappearances, and among themselves sympathised with Mrs Ramsey at her daughter’s strange behaviour. Yet they said nothing. In this respect Isabella was her own most influential ally, for she was adept at helping the women with their smaller children, and until the advent of the schoolmaster, teaching the older ones. She was spirited, they said, but being a young woman of certain breeding, she was unlikely to come to harm.

She met Duncan MacQuarrie on the Ullapool waterfront soon after she had gone to the town to live. He had been looking for work, but the Company was full up. She was twirling her parasol as if to shade her eyes from the glare, although it was not so great that she needed to bother. The point of the parasol had almost caught the eye of a man who stood, hands in his pockets, looking disconsolately towards the pier.

‘Will y’be careful what you do with that thing?’ he snapped at her.

Isabella put the parasol down and looked over the perpetrator of this insolence. It was beside the point that she herself considered the parasol a rather foolish toy which she had only brought to hide
her face from the stares of the fisherman whom she had not yet learned to greet. She was not used to being addressed in such a fashion.

‘I do not know you,’ she said in her most haughty southern tones, acquired in London.

The man was heavily built although his skin hung too loosely on him for the size of his frame, and he wore more than a week’s stubble. At first she thought he was an older man, a tramp from the hills, but as he looked at her, not cowed at all, she thought that he was much younger, maybe not past twenty-five or thereabouts, but lean and hungry and maybe very tired as well.

‘I am Duncan MacQuarrie,’ he replied. ‘And your name, madam?’

She told him, attempting to give it with a flourish, though her voice faltered.

He spat on the ground then. ‘Ramsey from the Company?’

‘Yes.’

He turned as if to walk away.

‘I’m sorry if you can’t get work,’ she said, the first thing that came into her head.

He turned back, his expression bitter. ‘He’s been talking about me?’

‘My father? No. I guessed. From the look of you.’

‘So you say.’

It was her turn to be angry. ‘You do not know my father. He would tell you that he had better things to do than discuss the Company with me.’

The man regarded her with a hint of interest. ‘What good would it do to discuss it with you?’

‘It could be run better. They’d get a better return on their money if labour was structured differently.’

‘What d’you mean?’

‘They import too much labour. The cost is too high, bringing it up here from the south.’

‘You mean we starving devils from the hills would take anything he offered us?’

‘No, that’s not what I said at all. He could pay more local labour the same wages without the outlay. For one thing, there’s people already housed here that the Company’s not drawing on.’

‘If you could call it housing. Have you seen how the people live
here? Eh? No. Well that’s something you should see.’

‘You’re defeated before you begin.’

‘Defeat. You make me sick, your kind. Ah, and to think you nearly fooled me. For a moment I thought you might have seen the face of the people out there. How could you? How could I have thought that?’

‘I’m talking about business,’ said Isabella.

‘I dare say it’s as entertaining a thought as getting a husband.’

‘I beg your pardon?’ The colour on her cheeks was high. ‘That is hardly your affair.’

‘Maybe not. But it lies heavily on your mind, I can tell by the look of you.’

‘You don’t …’ She had almost been trapped into saying that he did not understand.

‘For a moment there, I thought you might have a heart.’

His eyes rested on her, his lip lifted.

‘How dare you

‘Easily. I’m just an ignorant peasant with nothing to lose. You can report me to your father if you wish. It makes no difference. I owe him nothing and I’ll be gone within the hour.’

He started to move away.

‘Wait.’ She saw that he limped.