The Book of Secrets (19 page)

There were rumours about that Isabella McIssac had taken a black-and-white cat for a lover, and wore the milk teeth of her children banded round her neck, beneath the collar of her dress.

O
ne season passed
into another, chasing each other, as golden rod faded, snow fell, banked and melted away and sweet spring skies unfolded, followed by another high summer and the ripening blueberries, an unfaltering procession of the years.

Hector McIssac was fifteen. His face wore a dark fuzz of beard in the mornings which made him proud and embarrassed at the same time. McLeod decreed that beards not be worn in St Ann’s and so by the time he left for school he was clean-shaven. But he knew he had dark hair on other secret parts of him, growing in fine strands still, straight along his body. His private dream was of when it would curl along his back and shoulders as it did on his father.

At school, which young men often attended until they were eighteen or even more if they chose — for the Man set great store by a good education — he often glanced sideways at Miss Martha MacKenzie, the sister of his best friend Lewis. He wondered if she could see how old he looked.

Of course she was a grown woman, an old maid in fact, and was only at the school helping with the small children and observing how a classroom was run in preparation for becoming a schoolma’am over at Sydney Mines.

Her being unmarried, and so old, he couldn’t even admit to anyone that he thought her pretty, but the truth was that her hair reminded him of nasturtiums, and he could not help but notice that the skin of her arched throat was the colour of cream, and he would have liked to bite it.

‘Why is she to be a teacher instead of getting married?’ he asked Lewis.

‘Oh she was good at Greek and algebra,’ Lewis explained seriously. ‘But she had more trouble with the New Testament.’ He added this as if it excused her cleverness a little.

‘Is it because she is a woman?’

‘Aye, she cannot be expected to understand such profound
matters, Mr McLeod has told my mother. But as she is set on teaching awhile, he has said she can learn about the infants in the schoolroom.’

‘It is philosophy that confounds females rather than language,’ said Hector. ‘That is what the Master says.’ He flipped an apple core into the lake and watched it float.

‘Oh aye, he says Martha would be better off married, but who would have her now? She is twenty-six.’

‘It is all her own fault,’ said Hector, not wishing to pursue the subject of Martha with his friend, who sometimes saw through him when others did not.

‘He is unbiddable in his ways,’ sighed Isabella to Kate MacKenzie, speaking of Hector.

‘Oh he is just a boy,’ said Kate, who had brought up two sons before Lewis, the one she had not expected to have and had grumbled about when he was born, but had grown soft over as he grew older.

Eoghann muttered at times that she treated Lewis like a girl, but she took scant notice. Her husband was so much a man of the church these days that he had little time to attend to family matters and it was mostly left to her to bring up their last-born.

‘Well, Hector is like his father,’ said Isabella. ‘You would not think I was in charge of him at all, he is so malicious.’

‘Isn’t that how you like it best? You have said before he is his father’s son,’ Kate reminded her gently. For although she had tried to understand, she had not always approved of the way Isabella conducted her family’s business.

‘Have you heard the news of Donald McLeod then?’ said Isabella abruptly, sensing the reproof.

‘Aye. Would you trust Donald McLeod with your fortune?’

Kate shrugged. ‘The ship is not built yet.’

‘It may not be, but my husband is talking of putting money into it.’

‘So is mine. There is nothing you can do that will stop it. Unless you have some secret power that I do not.’

‘Oh, I’ve none of that where Fraser McIssac is concerned. But I don’t know that there will be fortunes here for the taking for much longer.’

‘What d’you mean?’

‘Haven’t you seen the colour of the potatoes this year?’

‘They’re not at their best, but what has that to do with it? They’ll be better next year. Perhaps there is too much fat.’

For some women were becoming complacent. You could see it in their eyes.

Kate was uneasy all the same. Sometimes Isabella knew too much about things which she did not. ‘Norman McDonald would have had something to say about Donald’s scheme.’

‘But Norman McDonald is gone.’

‘Well he had had enough. And now McLeod has fallen out with the Squire too.’

The women glanced at each other, and looked away again.

Presently, Kate asked, ‘Is Annie doing all right at school then?’

‘Annie? Oh, as far as I know. You know how it is, she spends most of her time with the McLeods.’

‘She seems a good girl,’ was all that Kate said, unsure whether more was required.

In the night, at McLeod’s house, Annie heard a man scream. He screamed from some deep and terrible inner torment, and his scream rang on for a minute of more.

She sat bolt upright, and knew that the Devil had visited someone.

Peggy stirred beside her in the bed.

‘He is coming out of a dream,’ she murmured and fell back to her own dreaming.

Annie lay awake, trembling until morning.

‘Who was it?’ she asked Peggy as they brushed their hair before the mirror.

Peggy’s eyes flickered and the light in them cooled.

‘Who was what?’ she said, looking away.

At breakfast, everyone seemed as they always did, gathered around the board. Annie tried to examine the faces of the brothers, of McLeod, but she could read nothing in the expression of any one of them. Only Mary, Peggy’s older sister and not favoured by her father as Peggy was, looked drawn and smudged.

But it was a man she had heard in the night.

It was Kenneth Dingwall who followed Annie’s eyes with his own. He smiled a quiet, sly smile. The tailor who served McLeod and answered his every need saw also every gesture and glance that passed
in the presence of his master. He raised his plate of porridge to his mouth and a small slick of it escaped and dripped down his chin, shiny and coated with milk. He put the plate down and rubbed his chin with the back of his hand.

Lately, Martha had seen that McLeod watched Annie in the schoolroom. It troubled her, for the child was one of the quietest and best behaved there. She noticed how often he called on her, and how she flinched when she could not answer, for work as she might, she was an average student who found it difficult to do better than pass the halfway mark.

She sat near Isaac, youngest son of McLeod’s oldest friend, the mystic-natured Squire Donald McLeod who had followed him from Scotland and whom McLeod no longer considered to be his friend. Isaac could answer anything he was asked, but however often he put up his hand to answer now, McLeod ignored him. Seeing Annie’s discomfiture Isaac had more than once leaned over to whisper an answer to her, feeling it wasted if it was not of use to someone.

‘Why are your parents not friends any more?’ she asked him during a lunch break, made bold by his kindness, although he was much older.

‘It is because my brother and Mary McLeod are in love, and he thinks my father is helping them to meet.’

‘But what is the matter with being in love?’ cried Annie, indignant for the cause of romance and suddenly angry that her friend had not confided this family secret to her.

‘There is nothing wrong with love, I am sure,’ said Isaac, ‘but it matters much with whom you are in love. And our master does not permit love within his family. Haven’t you noticed that none of his sons has married anyone?’

He leaned over and whispered in her ear, ‘They love brandy and money more than they love women.’

Stung, Annie had pulled away. For a week she had pretended that Isaac did not sit near to her, and turned her eyes away when he whispered.

But one afternoon McLeod had called on her, and would ask no one else for the answer she could not provide.

‘It is a simple matter, surely, for you to tell me, in the words of St Matthew, Annie McIssac, what has the Son of man come to save?’

In the silence that followed, McLeod cast his eyes around the room.

Seeing Annie’s stricken face, Isaac leaned over and muttered the answer, that which is lost.

Annie herself looked lost. ‘Who? What?’ she whispered piteously.

‘Did I hear you ask someone for the answer to that question?’ said McLeod. His tone was ominous.

She did not reply.

‘Will you not answer me?’

Annie’s head hung lower.

‘Answer me, young woman.’

Isaac, grown frightened, looked from McLeod to Annie and back again. He had never heard McLeod refer to a pupil as a woman before. The girls were simply girls or children. Now he saw that Annie could well become a woman and that McLeod, who had whipped many boys before but never a girl, was about to strike her.

‘Come … out … here.’ His face was taut and strained to the point where the threads of veins in his temples looked about to burst. The room was very still.

Annie stood up and advanced towards McLeod with her hand outstretched.

‘I am ready,’ she said when she reached the desk.

Isaac could not decide in the seconds which flashed past him whether she believed McLeod would pull back at the last, or whether she expected to be hit. He glanced down the long benches which lined the schoolroom, to Hector McIssac who was now staring out the window as if nothing were happening at the front of the room. Looking back to Annie and McLeod, Isaac could see that the schoolmaster was committed to his course of action, and perhaps too, that he wished to hit Annie harder than he had ever hit anyone before.

In the far corner of the room, standing at her post, Martha MacKenzie had become frozen like a tree in winter. A small cry escaped from her and her hand flew up to her beautiful creamy throat.

Unable to stop himself, Isaac leapt from his seat, throwing himself across the short distance that separated him from McLeod and Annie as the cane was raised. Reaching up, he tore at the rod in McLeod’s hand, but McLeod anticipated this even as he flew at him, and hung onto the cane; his arms had not lost their strength even though the
boy was young and so full of rage that he held on like a grim terrier. A furious see-sawing began, backwards and forwards across the room.

‘You will pay for this, pay for it, d’you hear me, boy?’ shouted McLeod.

Above his voice, Isaac was making a sound like a screaming seagull, a boy’s voice of high terror yet exulting in his own magical and
newfound
strength. Behind them, Annie stood with her hands in front of her mouth.

Suddenly the rod whipped out of McLeod’s hand and Isaac was holding it aloft before he brought it down on his knee, snapping it in two. He threw the pieces at McLeod’s feet.

‘You will pay for that,’ McLeod repeated, but now his voice was like cracking ice.

‘Not in this room,’ said Isaac. ‘I’ve done with you forever.’

When he had gone and Annie had taken her place again, McLeod resumed his lesson.

‘What has the Son of man come to save, Miss McIssac?’

‘That which is lost,’ whispered Annie.

Martha MacKenzie looked as if she were about to faint. When school was out she approached McLeod.

‘Minister, may I have a word?’

He turned stony eyes on her. ‘What is it?’

‘When I was a pupil here it was not your policy to whip the girls. Has that changed, pray tell me?’

‘I will tell you nothing. You are not here to question me.’

‘But I wish to know. If I am to be a schoolma’am, I need to know what is done in classrooms nowadays.’

‘You will not find out here.’

‘I do not understand.’

‘I would trouble you not to return, Miss MacKenzie.’

She lifted her chin. ‘It would seem that your classroom is emptying fast, Minister. No doubt the more liberal schoolhouses of Mr Munroe, and people like him, are filling. But that is your problem, sir.’

She lifted her skirt as she stepped out the door.

‘You should have let him give it to you,’ said Hector as they made their way home. ‘He’ll blame somebody. Probably me,’ he added, gloomily kicking a stone.

‘I would have let him,’ said Annie. ‘I wanted him to hit me.’
Annie learned to milk cows. It was women’s work which she knew Isabella disliked almost more than any other chore. It made her hands red and sore and the skin round her fingernails often split, causing large, ugly sores. If she became the family milker, Annie figured, she might be seen as more diligent and worthy, and her mother might become more amenable. Or take more notice of her, a treacherous inner voice suggested. She pushed the thought aside. She did not need Isabella’s approval. It would be enough if the community of St Ann’s saw her as a young woman beyond reproach.

Or if, indeed, the family of McLeod would again see her thus, it would be sufficient.

She sat at the stool then, with her faced pressed against the flanks of the cows. She hobbled each animal the way Isabella did, with one leg lashed up against a tree so that it could not kick the pail, and squeezed and pulled until milk appeared. At first it seemed impossible that the animals would ever yield to her. They shifted restlessly as she squeezed harder, their bloated udders giving up an occasional drop because it was impossible for them to hold it back entirely.

‘Stroke it down, stroke it down,’ said Isabella behind her. ‘Look,’ and she made a circle of her thumb and forefinger, and drawing the other fingers in towards the base of the palm, flexed gently, making a fist. ‘Remember she’s female, it hurts her to begin with, letting down the milk, go gentle, that’s right, and she won’t be able to hold back. Ah, that’s better. Your fingers are a little short for the old girl with her big fat teats, but she’s one of the easiest, once you know how to start her.’

Annie felt her face burn at the mention of women’s functions but it was like her mother, what she must expect from her. Soon the milk did begin to flow, and though her hands became as raw as her mother’s had been it got easier each day. She clenched and released in steady rhythms. The milk pulsed like a vein down the length of the teat and the cows stood more at ease.