The Book of Secrets (25 page)

In the meantime, for today at least, there were the fires to watch. She thought they might not have had them this year, for the farmers had become uncertain of their value and some said that they did more harm than good. It was a quick way to clear land when the settlers first arrived. After months of felling trees, the men set fire amongst the stumps and those trees that were left standing. The fires raged like storms across the land and whole stands of bush fell before them. Clouds of smoke hung in the air for weeks and billowed across the ocean, so that ships far out at sea claimed to have had their way lit back to land by the glow in the sky.

After the fires died and the earth cooled the farmers laid seed
amongst the cinders and a long time afterwards the grey land would turn to green, pale scarfs of colour at first, turning deep and lush in time so that cattle could graze and fatten on it. Those who were against the burn-offs said they robbed the soil of fertility and that it would be short-lived riches, and that the shipbuilders were growing restive as they found it harder and harder to get timber for their trade. Logs were having to be brought from far inland, pushing up their costs. Some years there would be fires and others there would not. Spring was usually the time of the fires, but this was to be a year of fires and fires were to be late. Who but a fool would burn now?

The sky erupted, flames shooting up and exploding like scarlet dahlia petals against the bright sunlight. Maria saw that the seat of the fire would be close by Hector McIssac’s homestead.

It had now gone eight by the black clock in the front room, but already the house was hot and she knew it was not the heat of the sun. The fires were sweeping down the fenceline within sight of the house, where green nikau and a stand of kauri grew.

She cried out in horror; this was the retreat she had known all her life, the trees where she had hidden her secrets from adult gaze when she was a child, talked to God when she was growing up and addressed him like a lover when she knew no better. Where, in secret consultation, she and Isabella before the latter grew infirm had noted growing things and the complex and intricate nature of ferns and leaves in their adopted land, had listened to birds that sang with different voices. They had tracked butterflies, and once discovered a swarm of wild bees near the edge of the cleared land, residing in a hollow log. It was Isabella who had gathered wild honey, and all the long summer they had feasted on it like kings. Even Annie had been pleased.

And now the fire was eating into the heart of the trees. Before her eyes Maria saw the largest kauri become a pillar of flame, a vast torch poking upwards into the sky. Exploding branches hurtled to the ground, the sound whistling through the air and punctuated by bangs like gunshots. Above the fire birds were shooting upwards trying to escape the holocaust; caught in the down-draught, they were sucked back into the fire. The sun was getting brighter, and against the light the fires paled to apricot with a touch of blue, then coloured up again as the smoke rose so high that the sun was nearly blotted out and the day became dark. A wind sprang up, lashing
Maria’s face at the open window where she stood crying, hot cinders raining about her. One landed on the curtain and smouldered there before she tweaked it with her fingers. So this was the hell that had been made for her! Soon the Devil would claim her; she should submit to the flames and be consumed by them, and that was how it ought to be.

Coming towards her now across the paddocks, through the dry grasses, the brown top and rye from Nova Scotia that had come with the people in their mattresses and spread throughout Waipu, the tongues of fire snaked their way towards the house.

She opened the windows wide, holding them apart at arm’s length so that the flames could reach her more easily. Below her she saw men wielding sacks, beating their way across the paddocks. They were calling, panicking, as the fire raced out of control towards her, threatening them all. Beyond, more men had formed human chains to the river and buckets were being passed from hand to hand. Just when there seemed to be no hope of containing the flames, there came a sudden wind change and the fire whipped away in the direction it had been intended to take; turning inwards on itself it began to die almost as fast as it had sprung up.

Maria pulled the windows shut as the men stood easy in the blackened paddock, but there were some who looked upwards, even as they fought the fire. That, they said, was how they would always remember the witch, with her arms stretched out like some unholy cross and her shameless belly pointed towards the flames.

Maria lay down on the couch in the front room. It was cooler there and the windows faced away from the destruction of the bush. It was very quiet. No birds sang. The crickets were silent. The wind had dropped, and she felt totally alone.

What had brought her to this solitary state in a house of hewn timber with a sharp pitched roof, full of devils and ghosts and with her mother’s possessions around her? Ringed and almost consumed by fire, why was she shunned by all who had ever known her?

She touched her stomach. Like one of the wild birds trying to fight its way free, she felt the movement of the child under her hand.

I will tell my mother when she comes, Maria thought. She will understand this, she will put her hand there and stroke my hair and call me her bonnie lass and forgive me.
That night, by candle-light, Maria pulled open a trunk in her mother’s room. A forbidden place, it housed her grandmother’s things. ‘One day we will have to get rid of grandmother’s things,’ Annie had said, but noting the look of reproach in Maria’s eyes, she had done nothing.

What
were
grandmother’s things? Dusty books that looked like ledgers, and bundles of letters tied up with pieces of black ribbon and twine. The shadows were raking the walls as she opened one of the books. It was not a ledger but a notebook full of close handwriting. A journal; the journal of Isabella Ramsey turned Isabella MacQuarrie turned Isabella McIssac. The letters were in her writing too; they had been sent back to her from England by the daughter of one Louise Ramsey to whom they were written, after her death in a fall at the hunt more than forty years before.

Opening the first book Maria stared at the words. The handwriting was a beautiful copperplate. The candle wavered, dangerously close to the curtain.

I
have
been
betrayed
by
my
own
people.

She watched the candle, thinking how easy it would be to let it burn at the end of this day of fire.

‘Mother, where are you?’ Her voice was reedy and thin in the quiet house.

She moved the candle and picked up the book again. It was on top of the pile, though there appeared not to be any special order.
I
have
been
betrayed
by
my
own
people.
Here, then, were the secrets, the mysterious answers.

M
cleod
had died
one yellow afternoon and the world carried on. True, some would become emotional recalling his last days when he lay by his window and blessed them as they visited. In the final hour he called aloud, ‘Children, children, look to yourselves, the world is mad.’

He was buried beside Mary in the cemetery by the sea. The settlers had cleared land there soon after their arrival, so that those who died could lie close to the ocean, a reminder of all the oceans they had crossed in life. The day that he was carried down the long white road to the cemetery, Angus Finn stepped forward to relieve the McLean men who were taking their turn at carrying the coffin.

‘Let me give you a hand,’ Angus had said.

The McLeans stopped, their feet puffing up dust around them in the tracks they had made, and Murdoch, a tall bony young man, sweating with the effort and strain of it on a hot March day, looked across at Angus whose father had turned his back on McLeod in Nova Scotia twenty years before. His eyes blazed. ‘Do you think I would let you touch this coffin?’

Angus shrugged, an elaborate gesture of contempt. ‘All right then, you can take him to hell yourself,’ he said and turned away.

Those of the onlookers who expected him to be struck down were disappointed.

But there were changes. The divisions at St Ann’s began to repeat themselves. Angus Finn had spoken for those newly liberated from the shadows of McLeod. An iron railing like a palisade was placed around the graves of McLeod and Mary to keep them safe inside. Others said it was to stop McLeod from getting out.

Looking around them now, many found it difficult to percieve a world quite as mad as it had been described by McLeod. They worked and prospered; on Sundays they did go to church, but there were cows to be milked afterwards and cream to be set, there was dinner to be cooked — for dinner did not keep in summer heat — and if there was a boat to be loaded with stock before a tide, all was done. In Auckland not everyone subscribed to the same beliefs and shipping
companies were impatient of delays. The Nova Scotians may have experienced a thrill of fear as they challenged the past, but there were some things best kept to themselves. It quickly became clear to them that to set themselves apart from the world in matters of trade was self-defeating.

Annie, for her part, belonged among those who would never forsake McLeod. Neither could many of the other women. They sat carding wool together, calling their gatherings ‘the frolicking’, and there, in a comfortable way, they cogitated on the sin of the world. There wasn’t much they could do about it, they supposed, and the men of course had a finer appreciation of sin than they did. But in talk new rules imperceptibly emerged, relating to prosperity and its temptations.

Godliness brought its own rewards and married well with wealth. There were plenty of opportunites for their daughters’ virtues to extend to new horizons. They could see that the young women would become comfortable matrons without the hardships they had suffered, and given that they avoided cards and Catholics, kept chaste, and made sure their children learned the catechism, they could make a most equitable peace with the Lord. It was even conceivable that the old people might all enjoy more comfortable old ages as well. Money and land, and dutiful wives, offered themselves as simple solutions to the restlessness of their sons.

In moments of perversity Annie sighed and asked why God had been so unkind to her. ‘It’s a hard land,’ she would sigh, wiping her face and knotting her strong eyebrows in a gesture of resignation. Her concerns varied in those days. ‘Are you afraid of the Maori, Annie?’ her friends asked her one afternoon when the wool was flying through their hands and they were replete and buttery after she had fed them. Hers was a popular house, spacious, quiet and free of children. Not that they said this.

‘Oh I never see any to be afraid of,’ said Annie carelessly. She slipped more fleece amongst the bent wire teeth of her carding tool and watched the action of her hands with satisfaction, for she was faster than any of them. Yet she felt their eyes on her and was uncomfortable. She reached up with an instinctive touch to her white niched cap, as if reclaiming her respectability. She wore the cap like a badge, the mark of a married woman. ‘Maybe Martha does.’

Her eyes flicked across the room to where Martha McWhirtle sat
in a corner. The afternoon sun had been making her guest even drowsier than she usually was. It was rare for Martha to join them, for there was little respite between the annual bouts of childbirth which had continued since her arrival in New Zealand, and when she did come she was quiet and abandoned, for the most part, to private thoughts. Her once magnificent hair straggled from under her cap, rusty-coloured and streaked with grey.

‘Yes Martha, tell us what you have heard,’ they said, turning to her now. ‘Is it true that people are building tunnels at Omaha down to the river banks in order to escape the natives when they attack? Should we be afraid?’

‘I’ve heard that people are doing that. They can’t have much to do with their time,’ said Martha, forced to rouse herself from a reverie. The tearing of the cards and the whirring of the spinning wheels dropped away. ‘The Maori seem perfectly friendly to me.’

‘Well you would know better than we do,’ said Annie briskly and wondered why she had addressed Martha, for she guessed what she might say before she had spoken.

But it was too late to retrieve the situation, for Martha looked around them thoughtfully and said, ‘Duncan Cave has told me that the Maori were given small change in return for their land. They were swindled by Busby. I think they have cause to be annoyed.’

‘What do you mean? We have paid for our land.’ Annie’s voice was sharp. Her afternoon, her lovely day which she had planned with such care, was not going well. She always regretted inviting Martha McWhirtle and had not expected her to come.

‘I was not suggesting you did not. It was Busby I was referring to.’ Martha picked up a fleece and began winding it around a card with unusual determination. ‘Forty pounds in gold, sixty blankets, ten coats, ten black trousers, twenty-five white pairs, four cloaks, five pieces for gowns, fifteen handkerchiefs, three hakimana …’

‘What is that?’

‘Guns,’ said Martha without altering her inflection. ‘Twenty hoes, fifteen iron pots, some axes, some bags of shot, and a bit of tobacco. That is as much as I can remember. But that is about all there was.’

‘It is a fortune,’ said an outraged voice from the back of the room.

‘It depends on what it is
required to purchase.’

‘I have never heard such nonsense,’ said Annie. Her tone was bitter. ‘That is what I would expect of that fellow.’

Everyone in the room knew that she meant her half-brother, and that she would not refer to him again by name if she could avoid it.

‘It is not Duncan who has told me of it. It is Riria, who is his friend and has come to assist me with the children. She is a great help. I don’t know how I ever managed without her,’ said Martha, looking around them with a mild gaze. ‘Now at least I can go visiting from time to time. It is nice for me, don’t you agree?’

But the thought of the stranger who at this very moment was caring for Martha’s children was too much for the other women to contemplate. They frowned, and fumbled amongst the wool, turning back to their work.

‘Of course,’ said Martha, continuing in her contemplative fashion, ‘it is neither here nor there to us, we have no land.’

‘I am sorry for you Martha,’ said Annie, and knew she had gone too far. The older woman was not without friends, especially those who remembered her in the schoolroom when they were children.

‘Alexander is not inclined to own land, that is how it is,’ responded Martha, as if the conversation was quite natural. ‘But there, he is talking of going to the Coromandel soon. He has always had a mind to gather gold, and often wishes we had stayed in Australia. So it is just as well that we have accumulated so little. Except children.’ She smiled in a rueful way and was silent again.

‘How sorry my mother will be,’ exclaimed Annie, flickering delicately with pleasure and wishing to end the conversation there.

But soon her friends began to leave and in her raging heart she could hear them talking about what they had heard, imagining themselves safely out of earshot. She vowed to tell Hector about it at the next opportunity, and ask him what he would do about Duncan Cave, whom they also called Duncan Clubby, raised like Lazarus by their disreputable mother when she had thought him gone forever.

When she had recovered herself, she realised that at least the diversion had saved the women from asking after Francis, and maybe that it had all been for the best. For Francis had compromised Annie with the reality of change long before the death of McLeod. She had often felt compelled to stay silent when sinful ways were discussed. Francis, stout and comfortable, had filled their house with tobacco smoke and a beery breath. And there were other matters which gave rise to sideways looks and extra cups of tea; these she preferred not to contemplate.

In the end, the problem of Duncan Cave had not been with them for long. His reappearance was short-lived and when he died he was easier to cope with in the grave than he had been out of it. The same was true of Francis, though his departure took much longer. Time and death would enhance both men’s images and Annie would take her place with those who reviewed the effects of sin.

When Isabella had been accounted for as well, there was only Maria to contend with in the battle for moral superiority.

Until the dark man from the diggings swept away all the edifices which she had so carefully built around her daughter.

Maria dreamed of her mother. The air outside was acrid with the smell of ash and burnt vegetation. Here and there a lick of fire erupted amongst the stumps of the broken trees. A watcher slipped towards it and wielding his wet sack disappeared into the shadows.

In Maria’s dreams she saw her mother as she thought she might have been as a young woman, dark with a touch of stateliness in spite of her rounded shape. She could smell milk on her as she sat on a stool in a barn in Nova Scotia, her face against the flanks of a warm and restless cow, her hands stripping and pulsing, her dreams as yet unrealised. What did her mother dream of in those days? And had the dreams come true?

She opened her eyes for a moment, wondering where she was. It was the same bedroom that she had slept in all her life. What was the sound outside? Snow banking against the roof? But it was the wind and the sound of the trees shaking, and the earth in pain from the blight of fire. She called to her mother but no one came. She did not believe that Annie would not come to her, that they would stop her from coming now, after a day of mortal danger.

She thought she heard a voice but it did not answer hers, was some other person who watched in the night.

Sleeping, dozing, waking for periods, gradually becoming conscious as another milky dawn crept under the curtain, she relived her last meeting with her mother.

‘You’re very fancy to be going to church, young lady.’ Annie’s voice was sharp.

‘It’s only a bit of ribbon on my hat.’ Maria studied her reflection in the mirror. The ribbon was pale blue. She had considered
something brighter, but it seemed unwise to draw too much attention to herself. Besides, the blue was cunningly bright against her straw-gold hair and her blue eyes that held a hint of green. ‘Just like your grandmother,’ Annie had remarked more than once, noting those shifting, elusive colours that were neither one thing nor another. She said it as though it tainted her admiration for Maria.

‘Only a bit of ribbon. D’you know what the Man would have said to that?’

‘McLeod? Ah mother, McLeod’s long gone, you don’t want to be dwelling on that forever.’

Annie’s face grew dark and Maria thought that she really believed he was listening, that he could hear her.

‘Let the Devil take McLeod.’

Her mother’s hand flicked out and Maria turned quickly away, narrowly avoiding the blow. But the warning was there. Annie had never struck Maria. Remembering this, Maria was afraid. It was not just what she had said, but all that had gone between them in recent weeks. Her mother was stretched to a state of almost unendurable tension.

Maria wanted to soften the moment. ‘I’m sorry, Mother. I didn’t mean it. Truly.’

‘He turned many a woman out of the kirk for her vanity.’

‘I know.’

‘What makes you think you’re better than the old people?’

Stung then, she retorted, ‘Perhaps you’d like me to shave my head?’

The two women exchanged despairing looks.

‘Don’t be cruel, Maria.’ It was Annie who broke first. ‘I’m old. You hurt me too much with talk like that. Oh your hair, that anyone should touch one strand of it.’ She could not resist touching it, running her fingers through it, and Maria, knowing she had won, stood allowing the privilege. ‘Don’t ever say that to me, not in jest, or anger. Heh, it’s so beautiful, such fine lovely hair, why d’you need ribbons and bows when you’ve got a crown like that to wear on your head? Eh? Eh, tell me, bonnie girl?’

Maria smiled at her mother then, through a tangle of starry brown lashes. ‘There, mother, it’s a wee bit of ribbon really.’

‘Oh. Oh you. Well go along. I can’t say anything.’

‘Come on then, we’ll be late.’

‘Aye, and keen for kirk too, ah that’s better, yes.’

The congregation had settled and the minister ascended into his pulpit. Light filtered through the tall tree outside, through the ungarnished windows, as the chamber echoed with the responses of the congregation. In the pew across the aisle sat her Uncle Hector, and behind him his sons and their new wives. The Minister, Kenneth Falconer, was a young man with an ascetic face, filling in for a year while Aeneas Morrison, a disciple in McLeod’s footsteps, was visiting his mother in Nova Scotia. Some said that it was this young man, however, who had a visage like McLeod’s and that his sermons were full of fire that reminded them of the past. His frequent sharp remarks appeared to be aimed at members of the congregation, striking to the very heart and causing blushes of shame such as had not been seen or felt for thirty years. The old people nodded their heads and glanced sideways at each other. There was a certain half-forgotten malice in the air. The church had been fuller each Sunday than it had for years.