The Book of Secrets Read Online Free PDF

creature whom he did not understand.
    Why should he have understood me?
    For I did not understand myself.

    At nights when I had returned to the house and was safely in bed Iwould try to think of the future. Up on the Braigh, the young men from Nova Scotia had cleared land. Now their sons were taking it over; already a whole generation of people had passed over the land since the migration. There were clear green fields where once there had been timber. The timber had made the newcomers rich already, as the logs were turned into ships (of which there were no finer builders in the country than the men from Nova Scotia) or shipped to Auckland and Wellington for the building of the new houses in the mushrooming towns. It would be a fine thing for my mother if I were to wed one of these young men, and no bad thing for me, if I were to admit it to myself. There had been one or two of them I had eyed in church when I was half grown. Unashamed, I mentioned them once to my grandmother.
    ‘Ah, the young Bear,’ she said. ‘You think you would like him? He’s got fine shoulders and a nice straight back. You could do worse. If you must consort with men.’ And there was a sudden bitterness which I did not recognise, around her eyes.
    ‘Mother.’ My own mother’s voice was as quick and sharp as a razor on a strop. ‘How dare you talk to the child like that?’
    Yet it was true, there were some handsome men in the congregation, and they were mostly such brawny big men, you could not help but notice them. In the years that followed, I did look at them, in spite of my seemingly downcast eyes. There was young Donald MacKenzie, and John Lachie John McGrath (meaning that he was John son of Lachie son of old John McGrath) and a whole crowd of the McKay boys, all of whom I’d been to school with, or at least their younger brothers and sisters, and all of them like family. I would have nothing to lose by joining up with any of them, and I was no bad catch myself. It wouldn’t be difficult. I was easy to look at, I baked bread, milked a cow with a quick wrist and firm fingers, and my mother could entertain without ever raising a hand to make a scone, for I did it all. As well, I would inherit a house and land of my own. Altogether I was considered a fine and quite remarkable young woman. I could have nearly anyone I chose. It seemed, those nights when I lay under the eaves and the stars glinted at me through the window and a skylight which I could almost touch, that all my destiny had been aimed towards such a marriage.
    And now I did not want it.
    As simple as that. As simple and as terrible. I loved the roadmender. I could think of nothing else and the rest of the world had ceased to exist.
    A kind of madness. When I was not with him I was exhausted, and ill with anxiety as well that I might be thwarted from seeing him. My mother no longer said that I looked well. Instead, she wore a strained and hunted look too.
    The winter closed in and passed. The nights were cool and that year a sea wind keened in across the land towards us, and the dark fell early. I had to arrange to take my walks before night; the ground was harder and less accommodating but still I went to him.
    The roadmender moved during the winter from a tent to a little hut deserted by timber workers long before. I met him there sometimes, but in order to reach his place I had to cross open ground. I would wait in the deepening shadows until night was closing in upon us, so that I was less likely to be seen. Then it would be dark when I left him.
    One night he was not waiting for me. Nor was he the following night.
    I was beside myself, not knowing what to do. On the third evening my mother said, as if carelessly, ‘Why bother to go out tonight? The weather’s still cool and you might catch a chill.’
    I said I would be quick. She watched me with troubled eyes as I pulled my cloak around me. The cloak was worn and ragged round the edges. It had been used too often as a