You’re sitting quite still now, little bird. We just watch each other. And the wind’s rising, can you hear it? See the tree moving out there? How that tree’s grown. Maybe you should try the elements in the morning. Brave it, you know? What d’you think? It’s good that you rest, but not for too long. We might hypnotise each other. That’s what I think McLeod did to people. Aye, he hypnotised them. It must have been that. And me? I didn’t think I was under his spell but perhaps I was all along … never moving … fixed by the Man’s dead eye … Hmmm, sooner or later one of us will die if we just keep sitting looking at each other, little bird. One, or both of us. Do you mind dying?

Some do, some don’t.

Fear’s a strange thing. You can be afraid of all sorts of things. The wrath of God, other people’s way of looking at things, of Maori and Dalmatians, of distance and separation, and yes, certainly, of death itself. But these are as nothing, these are conquerable fears, if one is not afraid of oneself. If one observes a certain truth in dealing with one’s own conscience.

 

She had time now to read the journals, all the time in the world. At first she went over them often, but after a while they were printed in her head and she returned to them without opening the books.

The accounts of her mother’s life, as seen through Isabella’s eyes, appalled her. She thought over and again of the tall big-busted woman with the plain face, all jutting eyelids and high colour, understanding too late how alone she had been. How she had pursued the notion that somebody might eventually love her. No wonder she felt betrayed by her daughter.

Sometimes she almost hated the grandmother who had cast such a long shadow. And whom she was like.

Then she would go back to the journals again, read the words as they were written on the page.

New Year has been and gone. What a pleasant occasion it was! In this house by the sunlit sea I feel as if I have lived in New Zealand forever. Such things that I can grow here, vegetables, and a profusion of flowers. Plenty of fruit to be had too. The beach beyond is known as the Cove, a shining strip of sand where the boats pass by. It is a place of wild open space, and a good deal of skulduggery goes on, which I find most entertaining. What quantities of rum are smuggled ashore! I wonder if anyone has told McLeod.

As well, there is cattle loading on a regular basis; I dish out a mug of tea to the men now and then, and in return we have a bit of a chat.

In the village the women meet, but nowadays I would just as soon leave the frolicking to Annie. It relieves me of having to see her, anyway.

Though of course I do visit her from time to time. She and her husband are very busy making money these days and to some extent prosperity takes her mind off herself. I try to avoid going when my son-in-law is there. He is a boring man, given to drink and womanising. It is hard to tell whether my poor religious ninny of a daughter is aware of these failings. Francis is so puffed up with his own prowess in the sport of catching girls in barns that he acts with that terrible complacency which fools the innocent and ignorant.

Poor Annie. I did not do well enough by her. But there, she was her father’s child, a solemn creature in love with images of McLeod and his scriptural fantasies. I thought coming here we might make up for some of the failures of the past. I expected too much from both of us. She enjoys misery and I persist in enjoying myself.

Still, she is more agreeable than Hector. He’s one to look out for, to fear. As punishing as McLeod, without his brains. I think he would like to make trouble for Duncan Cave, denies brotherhood with him, and is out to spread a foul rumour or two. He is no different from when he was a boy. I wish he had stayed in Nova Scotia. He is the only thing that really bothers me here.

Duncan Cave is strong now, more than a match for Hector. He works the scows that ply the coastline. I can see the boats passing from my kitchen window, and sometimes he runs his shirt up from the ropes so that I know he is aboard. For the most part he lives in Auckland and has found compatible friends. He has been introduced to botanists and other naturalists who have put his drawing talent to good use, both in his spare time and while at work on the scows, where he has an opportunity to observe coastal plant life and crustaceans in their habitat. He draws them for these researchers and is getting quite a name for himself. He is so happy.

Oh yes, Hector will have to work hard to harm him. And I have heard that Hector has a little trouble of his own on its way. He has a new wife called Rose, and they do not treat each other kindly.

Well, I should not enjoy his problems so.

No, I must deny that I do, I am simply a harmless old woman. I am batty, I live by the sea, I make plants grow. It is indeed a wonderful life.

On a night of sudden spring storm when the wind funnelled into the sky and the macrocarpa lashed at the window, Maria was disturbed by a knock at her door. She had been dozing by the fire, her knitting fallen from her lap. That year she had shorn two sheep which had appeared at her kitchen door and stayed a season. All the wool had been spun, and a large pile of it was looped around two kitchen chairs.

At first she thought the knocking was a branch come loose, banging against the side of the house. But in a lull in the storm there was another clear rapping and a man’s voice calling, though it was whipped away by the wind rising again.

She put her knitting down, afraid now, her hand on her chest.

‘Go away.’ She listened to the sound of her own voice. She often spoke aloud to herself, but she had been outside the society of other human beings for so long that she did not know how it would sound in their ears or even if she would be understood.

‘It is better for you to go away, whoever you are.’

‘Please, I want to come in. I won’t harm you,’ called the person outside. It was the voice of a young man.

‘You don’t frighten me,’ she lied. ‘It is you who should be concerned. I’m the witch of Waipu, don’t you know? Are you a stranger, or mad, that you come here this dark wet night?’

‘I am your cousin, Jamie McIssac, and I must see you.’

She opened the door a fraction then. It was never locked, in the way of the people.

On her doorstep stood a young man dripping water in rivulets from heavy oilskins. She judged him not more than twenty, his hair plastered to his skull making him almost babyish in his appearance. His eyes were luminous in the light, and startled wide, terrified of something beyond or behind him.

‘Please.’

‘Well. All right, then, drowned rat. The winds are sweeping high and rough over Bream Tail tonight by the sound of it. But be quick about your business.’

She shut the door behind him and motioned him to the fire. With the door closed he seemed more at ease and she saw his glance flick around the room, inquisitive and darting, in spite of whatever it was that had driven him there.

‘Cousin, then. Whose child are you?’ Her voice was coming out quite normally. It didn’t sound strange, or if it did, he appeared not to notice.

‘Second cousin,’ he said, as he began to untie the strings of his oilskins. ‘I’m sorry about the mess.’ He stood awkwardly away from the rug.

‘It will dry. I do not know my second cousins.’

‘The son of William McIssac and grandson of Hector.’

‘Hector. Hmph. That devil. What’s he been up to?’

The boy looked shocked. ‘He’s long dead.’

‘Eh? Well, fancy that. I suppose he would be. It makes no difference. I can do without the McIssacs. I’ve nothing to say to any of them.’

‘Neither have I, cousin.’ Again the young man’s eyes widened, as if he expected to be followed into the house.

They took stock of each other. The woman stood her distance in the shadow of the lamp by the long kauri table. She was taller than average, with fair hair turning grey bundled up behind the ears. It was very thick as if it had not been cut for a long time, or ever, and might fall at a whim. Her skin was very fine and slightly olive, as if she spent time outdoors. She was solid and well built; a slight thickening around her waist suggested that she was no longer young, and under her chin there was a tell-tale crêpiness. Otherwise she was ageless. Only her hands, large-boned and raw-knuckled, suggested any hardship.

The young man’s teeth began to chatter as he considered his surroundings and the woman opposite him.

‘I’ll put a log on. There, you’d better get stripped down and a blanket about you.’ He blushed and she smiled. ‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘I’m old.’

But with a sense of shock she guessed that was not how he viewed her. It was so long since she had seen herself reflected in anyone else’s eyes.

‘Go on,’ she said firmly, hoping not to give herself away. ‘It’s all right, I’ll get a blanket and start a mug of tea while you’re at it. But you’ve nothing to worry about. I’ve seen a man’s body before. A grown man’s, and you’re not more than a slip of a boy.’

‘I’m twenty-three.’

‘Are you now? A great age, yes. The way you’re shivering I’d have put you at half that. Not so brave now that you’re actually here alone with Maria the witch.’

She filled the iron kettle and placed it on the hob, passing close to him as she did. ‘I’ve got my back turned.’

‘I don’t know much about you, cousin. I was a child when you started living here by yourself.’

‘So how is it then, that you come running to me when you’re in trouble?’

Her bluntness unsettled him. ‘I did not say I was in trouble.’

‘You did not, but it’s written all over you. Jamie McIssac, I am going now to get another blanket from my room, and while I am doing that you had better decide what you want with me, for I’m not standing round making small talk. You have a minute or so to think about it. Or else you can go.’

‘If I do not?’

She turned at the foot of the stairs and looked at him, observing his thin chest which he had stripped. Again she smiled. ‘You would threaten me?’

The wind howled, and beyond she thought she could hear the sea beating. The night was turning to a gale. He dropped his eyes, bright and clear in an otherwise quite ordinary face. Yet the way he held his head and moved were uncomfortably familiar, though she could not identify his appearance exactly with that of anyone she had known. Except, perhaps, her own reflection. She shivered in her turn and hoped he would not notice.

‘No, of course I would not,’ he was saying. ‘I meant what I said. You have nothing to fear from me.’

She went upstairs then, but her heart was beating rapidly.

In the upper room she leaned her face against the glass. A corner of iron on the roof had worked loose in the storm; it rattled and shook above her. What will I do about that, she wondered. I have no ladder to get up there. It is easier to think of that than what is down below.

She could not tear herself away from the window. Night after night she had looked through the same pane of glass. She knew the stars, every one it seemed, although occasionally they surprised her. Sometimes they fell from the sky, shooting down so fast she half expected them to whistle past her, but there was no sound and they never seemed to touch the earth at all in the end. Another time, one had trailed across the sky for many weeks and she had wondered if the earth was on a collision course with the moon or the sun, but that too had gone away, a shining fan of starlight that she missed when it vanished from the heavens. Tonight there were no stars, just the raging wind and the sound of the river below the house, and in the light of the sullen moon shining from behind the irresolute clouds, the gleaming filaments of toi-tois that stood along the river bank. I must get rid of him, she decided. Viewing the immensity of the night sky and the dark storm, she decided also to make scones.

She turned to face her mirror, and in spite of herself and her determination, was drawn to look at herself. She touched her hair and a strand of it fell, snaking down nearly to her waist. She drew her fingers across her skin and it felt polished and firm. What could the young man see that made him start and blush the way he did? Sometimes she had pretended to herself that she could not remember her age, that she had lost track of the years, but it was a lie. She was nearly thirty-seven years old.

Her thoughts embarrassed her. Besides, there was too much that she knew.

She took the blanket which was folded over the foot of the bed, shook it out and returned down the narrow stairs.

Her footstep was silent. She startled him with his back to her, only the towel around his waist. But this time his discomfiture was momentary.

‘You never really left, did you?’ he said, pulling the blanket around himself.

‘What do you mean?’ she said, as she lifted the kettle. She would have liked to give him a good rub down, his skin was so goose-pimply.

He scratched the inner calf of one leg with the toe of his other foot. ‘You were banished, weren’t you?’

‘If that’s what they told you.’

‘Why did they?’

‘I can’t remember. Oh, it doesn’t make much difference, does it? Whatever they say, the choice is mine now. I could walk out of here if I wanted to. At least I think so. They can’t watch me forever. It sounds as if poor old Hector doesn’t get much of a chance these days. Unless they pickled his eyeballs and put them in a glass jar on a fence post.’ She saw his expression then. ‘Ha, don’t speak ill of the dead, eh? … You’re easily shocked.’

‘No. No, I’m not. You surprise me, that’s all.’

‘Do I now? Well, I surprise myself too. I’ve spoken more words to you in the last half hour than I’ve spoken to any human being in — oh I don’t know — how long has it been? What year is it?’

‘1914.’

‘Ah, yes, so it is.’

‘Don’t you really know.’

She was sure he would recognise her craftiness for what it was. ‘I was just making sure. Sixteen years or thereabouts.’

‘It’s a long time.’

‘Aye. But I could have worse company than my own, and the birds, and the rustle of the grasses in summer, and the falling of leaves and the rising of the wind in winter. And the odd wild creature that saunters in on me. Like yourself. Not that it’s ever been human before.’

Maria lifted down mugs and filled them with tea.

‘You’re not like I thought.’ He looked larger, more rakish now, his light brown hair drying out in a wavy tangle and the blanket around him like a cloak.

She resisted the temptation to ask him just what it was he had expected. I am being too easily drawn, she sensed. He was avoiding an explanation of himself as he began to adopt a comfortable attitude, sitting beside her fire, drinking tea. She turned uncertainly to the bench.

Taking her largest basin from the cupboard she opened the flour bin and measured out three cups. ‘Why are you here?’ Her hands kneaded butter into the flour, dough collecting under her fingernails. She had never cooked for a man, nor watched her mother do so either, for that matter. Something women did for men in spite of themselves, she suspected.

Jamie hesitated. She was aware of the old house and the rainy night pressing in on them. The winds might have blown from off the Highlands, through the brown machair grass that bent beside the Atlantic, or through the elegant grey branches of the birch trees stripped in winter on the coast of Nova Scotia. Across the world, the winds and the voices tramped. We are alone, trapped at the end of our destiny at the bottom of the world.

‘Why, cousin Jamie, why are you here?’

He had to answer her now. But he lifted his head, turning it this way and that, as if fearing attack on open ground.

‘They would have me go to war.’

‘War? What war is that?’

‘You do not know?’

‘Tell me of it.’

He shook his head, disbelieving. ‘You have heard of the Boer War?’

This time she was ashamed to admit her ignorance, but she straightened her shoulders and said with a touch of defiance, ‘I have not heard of it.’

‘It was in Africa.’

‘Africa. That is the way we came.’ He stared at her without comprehending. ‘The way our people came, by Cape Town, which is at the end of Africa. Nice country, I’ve heard, though very dry.’

‘I don’t know much about that journey,’ he said.

‘Oh but you must, the old people always tell of it, of how they came here.’

He turned a shoulder up, a puzzled gesture. ‘We don’t listen to the old people so much now. There are other things happening in the world.’

‘So it seems. So … what is this war in Africa?’

‘No, that’s the one my father went to, and his brother. This is another war in another place. What I’m trying to tell you … since the Boer War they’re patriotic here. Everyone goes to war for the sake of the country.’ He saw her pause for a moment at the bench, as if sensing his uncertainty. He hurried on. ‘Oh it’s right enough, I suppose, we must defend our beliefs. The values of the old country.’

‘Like Culloden?’

‘Culloden? Now that is an old war.’

‘But is it like that? Are those the things you’re fighting for?’

He told her then of the war sweeping Europe, of the press across France, seemingly to England’s borders. All the time he talked to her, he was watching her strong hands at work in the dough, moulding it, dividing it into squares, and her back, very straight, held against him. The war, he said, had already been in progress for many months, for they were now into September, and the German troops had come close to Paris. All able-bodied young men were being called upon to serve, although the ones who worked on the land were exempt so far, unless they chose to go.

‘And are you not on the land?’ she asked, closing the oven.

He shook his head. ‘My two brothers are on the farm. I’d begun studying medicine.’

‘You had chosen that? Why?’

‘I’d rather heal than kill.’

‘Ah. So you don’t want to go to this … this war?’

He looked miserable, as if she had seen through him and might disapprove.

‘I see. I do see.’ She sat down on the chair opposite him.

And to his relief he felt that she did see, although he did not understand why he should think this of an odd reclusive and uninformed woman, such as Maria was.

‘So you stood up to them,’ she said.

‘Yes.’

‘And what do they say about that?’

Although he smiled, he appeared to mock her when he replied. ‘They said I was like you.’

‘They did?’ It seemed very hot in the room. She felt threatened by the fire and the noise of the storm. And yet she was amused, enlivened by a memory of the past. ‘Wild? Rebellious?’ she asked.

‘Aye, and headstrong.’

Suddenly they were both laughing.

‘Did no one teach you better ways?’

‘That’s exactly what they said. You see, I’ve never done what they wanted. Studying medicine costs money. I was to have gone into the timber trade. But that’s not what I wanted, so I’ve worked my way through university, loading cargo on the wharves down south at Port Chalmers, and in Auckland in the holidays. Then this war came. I stayed away from home, but word was sent that my mother was ill. I can tell you, she recovered fast enough when I got back, or at first she did. Then my father started on at me about joining up. They’ll let me finish my degree father, I said to him. I’m so nearly finished, and then, think if I did go, how much more use I’d be in the war.’

‘Did you believe that?’

‘Yes, in the beginning, because it was the truth. But all he could see was the shame of my staying at home, and I began to question why it mattered so much. I came to the conclusion that it was just his pride.’

‘I know about pride.’

‘You know what I mean about him, then?’

‘Oh aye, but pride has its merits too. It’s knowing when to stop that’s important. What happened then, did you give in?’

‘Aye. My mother fell to vapours again and in a weak moment … well, I enlisted.’

‘So now you have to go?’

His voice was grim. ‘It means I am a deserter. I can be arrested and taken away.’

‘What makes you think I would harbour you?’

The rain outside had stopped and the air held an unnatural stillness, marking the passage of the storm down the island.

‘If we are alike, as they say, I thought, maybe you’d help me.’

There was a pause in the conversation. ‘So you are William’s son,’ she said idly, as if picking up the conversation somewhere else, and although he had already told her this. ‘What of Neil?’

‘Neil and his wife are childless. I am William’s youngest son. The dispossessed.’ As she raised her eyebrows in puzzlement, he added: ‘The landless one. Not that it matters, I wouldn’t make a farmer’s shovel. Do you know my father?’

She shook her head and knelt to gather scones from the oven. It seemed that all her life was concentrated in small actions. She needed time to think. It was clear that he must stay the night, but in the morning she would make him go. She must for her own sake. What became of him was neither here nor there, if he went in the morning. If he stayed longer, she might desire his company. She could see that this might be possible, though she had thought that it was not. She had stayed a long time, guarding the grave of her child under the japonica bush; there was no other constancy, no known way that she could change her life now. She did not want anyone to come in and change it for her.

She spread the humped brown scones with red jelly. No mountain ash or cloudberries here, but there were japonica apples to collect from the bush, which did as well. Everything in her life had an order, a way of doing things, each act marked the progression of her life; she knew, more than this young man could ever know, what day it was and where the moon would be each quarter and what the state of the grass would be outside from one season to the next. She could call up birds and milk a cow and pull its calf (for there was a cow that ranged free from the herd that cropped at her boundary). Quietness was the only peace she sought and already Jamie’s voice filled her house. Her ears were having difficulty in coping with the sound of him in the room. Beside the fire, he seemed to fill all the spaces which she protected. Air and clean space around her, that was what she wanted. And no, she did not want to touch or be touched by another human being, not ever again in her life.

Some nights, towards daybreak, she thought her daughter spoke to her; when she did, she answered back and told her the old tales, stories of men and women who set sail across the seas, who built log cabins and toiled in snow and embarked again towards heat and open plains. She heard her voice in the river and on the wind that stole over the hummocky hill across the way and rustled in the toi-toi answering her, and this was all the conversation she needed. She did not want those voices stilled by the presence of another.

She watched him eat, found herself savouring the pleasure it gave her and wished that it did not. ‘Are you afraid to die, then?’ she asked Jamie.

He stopped, put the food carefully back on the plate. ‘I am afraid to die a pointless death,’ he said at last. ‘Does that make me a coward?’

She considered this. As she reflected, he noted the poise of her head, and it was as if he had always known her, for everything about her was familiar too.

‘I can’t see that it does,’ she said at last. ‘There’s a difference between you and me, isn’t there? You see,’ she said, hurrying on, ‘I have expected to die more than once. And then, I have been twice accused of causing death. In that I am sure that I have more experience than you.’

‘They can’t really believe that of you,’ he exclaimed. ‘It’s like witches, and burning at the stake.’

‘Oh I call up storms, and make milk curdle, and cause the crops to fail, you don’t know.’ She was on the verge of laughter again.

‘But that’s what they do say.’ Immediately he wanted to bite the words back and he lowered his eyes.

‘Of me? Of course they would. It was what the old people said of witches.’

‘Did you? Kill those people?’ He attempted a little bravado to cover what had been said, for he had believed she had been using a figure of speech. He saw a stoniness then behind her eyes, and faltered. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean …’

He thought she might not speak to him again.

‘Did I kill them? I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Don’t think I haven’t asked myself. For a long time I questioned every day. But then I began to think that my mother would have died anyway, remembering the times when she had been ill before she left me. Maybe I make excuses for myself, but I cannot believe it was altogether my doing. And as for the child, I believe, oh I believe …’

But she stopped, for she had been going to say what she believed, that the child still lived on. She could see that that would not do at all, and besides, it was clear from his expression that this was something of which he was not aware.

‘It is true,’ she said with an effort, after more time had passed. ‘I had a child. The father was gone and I was unwed. They didn’t tell you that?’

His face was red. ‘We don’t talk about such matters. We wouldn’t be told.’

‘No, I can see that. Ah well, we’ve talked, what more do you want of me? Isn’t this enough?’ I will not encourage him, she was thinking, he will have to say for himself what it is that he wants.

‘Shelter me for a few days.’ He was urgent again, and she could see that he might be a forceful man in his prime. ‘They’d never think of looking for me here. Then, in a little while, I can slip off and make my own way.’

‘And then?’

‘Plead my cause, make them understand that I would be more use to them as a doctor than a soldier.’ He faltered. ‘I’m not sure, some simply refuse to go, but I don’t know whether that’s what I want to do or not. Maybe I would go on a hospital ship if they’d let me, at least it would be of some use. But I need time. Just to think, to work it out in my head, you understand?’

‘We’ll bank the fire tonight and you can sleep by it. We’ll see how things look in the morning.’

‘I’ll fix your roof.’

‘You heard it, then?’

‘Aye.’

‘I said … we shall see.’

As she began to ascend the stair, he called after her. ‘Wasn’t it enough just to punish you? Why are they still afraid of you?’

She turned and considered him. She smiled slightly but her eyes were grave. ‘Because of the pleasure,’ she said. ‘At the time, I enjoyed my sins. You do understand, don’t you?’

In the morning, while he mended the roof, she watched the paddocks with increasing anxiety. She believed it impossible for anyone to come close to the house without her knowing, so acute was her hearing and so well trained her eyesight to any movement amongst grass or trees. Still, she was uneasy.

When he came down from the roof, she said, ‘I think you should stay inside a day or so. The hammering on the iron may have carried.’

‘I’m sure there was nobody around, I could see clear across to the Centre and the Lion of Scotland.’

‘What is the Lion of Scotland?’

‘The new monument. Don’t you know about that, either?’

He is just a boy really, she thought, encountering his clear gaze.

‘What is it there for?’ she asked.

‘The migrations. The ships. McLeod.’

‘Oh, so they remember a little of it?’

‘Yes, of course they do.’ He was half exasperated. ‘But the community’s changing. I told you, people think of other things too, the world beyond. Waipu’s too small for all of us now.’

Or too large if it is all the world you know, Maria thought as she undid her hair in front of the mirror that night. It shone in the candle-light. She had washed it that afternoon, and afterwards she had sat in the sun with it hanging to her waist as it dried. Inside, the young man had fixed cupboards and a loose board on the stair, pretending that he was not looking at her but she knew that he was.

‘What do they think of McLeod now?’ Maria asked Jamie on the third night that he sat before her fireplace.

‘My father speaks of him as if he were God Himself.’

‘And you?’

‘I think he was more like a devil.’

‘A youthful view?’

‘Not just the young people. You must know that. What about our grandmother, cousin? The one they called Isabella?’

‘Isabella?’ She was startled. ‘My grandmother. Oh well. I think maybe she had the measure of him better than most. In the end.’

‘But did she like him?’

‘Like? Oh I wouldn’t have said that. One didn’t like McLeod. No, it was my mother, your great-aunt, who was enthralled. Or so it seemed to me. Though it could be, the poor creature, that there was naught much else for her.’

He looked at her curiously. Often she appeared to talk more to herself than to him, yet he suspected there was always a point to what she said.

‘We should be going up, it’s late. I’ve made up the bed in mother’s room for you.’

‘You have? Why don’t you sleep in there yourself?’ He had observed in his explorations of the house that it was a large and much more comfortable bed than the one she slept in, with a deep feather mattress and fat plumped-up pillows. The upstairs portion of the house unnerved him, lined as it was with darkly ageing newspapers. Faded pink and blue crocheted mats hung like abandoned cobwebs on the dressers. He thought it looked like the inside of a mad castle, or Miss Haversham’s house, although Maria, even in her long and unfashionable clothes, did not fit this image. He hesitated at the thought of sleeping up there, and besides, he was unsure as to whether she really wanted him to go up, or if she was merely being polite.

‘It’s never seemed like my bed to sleep in,’ she said. And it was true. Isabella had slept there, and after her death Annie had returned to the bed she had vacated on her mother’s behalf. Maria’s room was screened off from the second room, small and narrow under the steep roof which had seemed large when it was built, but never quite big enough for three women living alongside one another. When Isabella died and Annie moved back into the main bedroom, Maria felt she had made great progress in having the second room all to herself. Later, alone in the house, she dusted the larger room and polished the arched bed-ends which stood as high as her shoulder. Once a year, she turned the mattress. But when she had finished these tasks she pulled the door behind her each time with a sigh of relief. She felt like an intruder in the room and it occurred to her that while there were voices she still listened to and for, Annie’s was one she did not wish to hear again. It would be bad enough for her reproaches to be repeated; even worse would be the constant expressions of her love, more pathetic and misjudged than her anger. More demanding, too, of an answer, and Maria knew of no answers across the years as to why love had so failed them, why love appeared always to have failed her mother.

It was better that she did not sleep in the room.

‘I’m sure my mother would have given you the best bed in the house,’ Maria said. ‘Come on, I’ve aired the blankets for you, didn’t you see them on the windowsill today? It’s a waste for the bed to stand empty.’

In the dark she lay awake, her eyes as dry and crisp as crackling, and through the wall she could hear him breathe, the deep even breathing of a young man sleeping. She touched herself deeply between her legs and at first was ashamed to find herself wet, and then, hearing him call out in his sleep, went to work on herself with a steady intimate hand, and when she had done, began to weep for the first time in many years.

It came to her then that she was different from the women who had gone before her. They had been made afraid, and denied choice through circumstances and violation, and what had happened to them had made them turn away from accepting themselves as they were. Nor had she ever made a choice of her own, acting always blindly and without thought. She was not certain, even now, what it was she wanted. Feeling the matter to be beyond resolution, she fell into an uneasy sleep.

At daybreak it was not the voice of her child she heard, but the young man’s, as if taking up from some point where she had been in the night. She swung her feet onto the floor and sat on the edge of the bed for a moment or so. Hesitating a little longer, she unfastened the teeth from around her neck. After that, she got up and stole to the door of his room. It was ajar and she pushed it gently open.

He was still asleep. Crossing the floor on her bare feet she sat on the bed beside him, at first afraid to touch him, but then as he appeared racked by his dream she put her hand on his shoulder.

Immediately he opened his eyes and saw her on the bed. He put his arm about her and pulled her towards him, with his free hand opening her nightdress. Her breasts were large and tight, with pain around the nipples. She cried out as he fastened his mouth on her breast but as he sucked her the pain began to dissolve and she could hardly wait for him to start the other one; she wished he could have fitted them both in his mouth at once, it was so pleasurable. He is like my child after all, she thought.

But he was drawing her into the hot nest of the bed and it was clear that he was more than a child. He moved aside in the bed for her but immediately she had lain down he was untwining her knees with his own so that she was spread beneath him. She turned this way and that for a moment as if resisting.

He drew back, asking her without words what it was that she wanted and whether he was to be allowed to proceed. She touched her breast with a gesture of anguish, where his mouth had been, and then placed her fingertips on his face. I am in charge here, she thought; he is, at least, allowing me a decision. But it is hopeless, the decision is already made. I am like a ripe peach, all soft fur and ready to yield.

He moved in towards her.

Outside, the morning was alight and the room was flooded with sun. Maria was shaken by the light and the fragile sound of her own voice.

‘Don’t leave me,’ he said every time when, of necessity, she left the bed.

They had been there for days; she felt blurred with exhaustion and at times her legs would hardly hold her up when she did walk across the room. They ate scantily of the remains of food in the house and slept fitfully. She had never slept in a bed with anyone before, except when she was a small child, with Isabella. Now she was becoming afraid of empty space beside her.

She thought of herself as a cave. There were those other caves in the history of her people, the dark caves where people had hidden, and the caves in the hills beyond Waipu, where the glow-worms shone, and she thought that now she was the shining place that would provide a haven.

‘What do you dream of?’ he asked her one morning.

‘That I am walking around the room with my head just below the ceiling. It is like flying or floating, or something of both. That is what witches do, you know, they ride the air.’

He laughed. ‘It must be nice. I wish that I could do that.’

‘Tell me then, what do you dream of?’

He looked sideways at her on the pillow, and his eyes clouded over. She remembered him calling out in his sleep.

‘I dream that I am already dead,’ he said.

Sooner or later, Maria knew that she would have to get up and go outside. If she missed collecting her groceries someone would be bound to seek her out. Besides, the fire had not been lit for several days, and the absence of smoke might invite attention from beyond.

When at last she did get up, late one afternoon, she all but crawled around in the kitchen preparing food then dressed to go out to collect firewood. She felt light-headed and giddy.

Outside, the yard was full of the navy light of evening. The paddocks lay still and dark green, and several cows had come over the hill in front of the house, grazing against the skyline. One of them shook its head, appeared to prick up its ears. Along the track a fine eddy of white dust stirred and hung on the air. It is nothing, she told herself, the cow has heard the bull roar in the distance, it is the wind that throws up the dust. There is no one near. Brown ducks marched in formation towards the river, flopped over the bank, and dropped into the water. That’s not unusual either, she decided, it is evening and they are going downstream to wait out the night. The river looked the same as ever.

She picked up the axe, and lifted it above her head, bringing it down over and again with strong, steady strokes, cleaving the wood. When a pile lay at her feet, she gathered it up and looked around. The hairs along her arms prickled. She put the wood down again, and took a few steps away from the house, thinking that she would walk up the hill and survey the landscape as far as she could.

She had a swift vision then, of a nameless army whose faces she could not imagine, sweeping over and down the hill towards the house to scoop up Jamie and take him away before she could save him.

So I am guarding the house, she thought, is that it? She knew it was so, and that she would not risk leaving him alone. He had committed himself to her care, and it was clear that she could not forsake him, nor turn her back upon him for a moment.

For what would become of her, if she were left on her own again?

Although she knew she would come to that. But not yet. She was not ready.

‘Will you tell me about Isabella, our grandmother?’ he asked.

‘Why do you want to know so much?’

‘She’s a legend.’

‘Oh, she was just an old woman,’ she said quickly, wishing to change the subject. Too quickly.

‘You don’t want me to know about her,’ he said, and for the first time there was a tension between them.

‘I’m sorry.’ She spoke rapidly, wishing to dispel it. ‘It’s true, I loved her in such a way that everyone else was excluded. Not that it mattered, because no one else could be bothered with her very much. She loved me so much, in return, as if I were a light seen after a long time of darkness. We were at each other’s centre.’

She fell silent, and watching her, Jamie left her alone. For her memory was printing the words of Isabella’s journal before her as surely as if the page were open in her lap.

1878

Annie is with child again and that no-good husband of hers has up and died on her, so she is moaning and carrying on that she won’t manage. The truth being, I suppose, that she will not. So I am to move in with her.

Perhaps I am too hard on her. I always have been. If it is not too late, maybe this is a final chance for us to make something of each other. And I am an old woman, I might as well put what’s left of my life to some useful purpose. Who knows, this child might survive and be the miracle I thought would never happen, the granddaughter I have in idle and most indulgent moments dreamed of having.

For what is there in this life, if we have no links with past or present? In this community where the ghosts of our ancestors walk with the living, I seem set to be singularly alone. For circumstance denies me connection with Hector’s family, and what good would come of it anyway, knowing what I do? And remembrance of my other son desolates me, and teases me with the mysteries of his life … I have waited a long time for something that may never happen, a child who might never be born. But if it was, oh how I should love that child.

Finally Maria broke the silence. Something inside her ached, as if her bones were betraying her. ‘After grandmother died there seemed to be nothing. People thought it was odd. She had become so ugly. And cantankerous. But never to me. They couldn’t understand why I loved someone who was, in the end, so grotesque.’

‘I heard she had always been bad-tempered.’

‘No, that’s not so. Maybe disappointed.’

‘Why was that?’

‘Oh, who can say? Many things. The death of Duncan Cave I suppose.’

‘Who was that?’

‘An uncle.’

‘I never heard of him.’

‘Maybe that’s not surprising. I think she had conceived images of love, but they were difficult to realise.’ She knew he wanted her to tell him of the mysterious uncle, but how could she do that without telling him of the journals, the secrets that rustled inside this house?

‘You were certainly close to her,’ he said.

‘Closer than I’ve been to anyone,’ said Maria, and saw him wince. He is so young, she thought again, wanting to have me all to himself; that is the way I was.

She put her hand on his face, leaving it to rest there. She wondered how true it was, what she had said to him. How well had she really known Isabella; how much had she been intended to know? Isabella might have said that finding out was not the same as knowing. Had she thought the secrets of her life would be useful to Maria? Perhaps she had forgotten, with age, what it was she was leaving behind. There were things which now, at this moment, Maria would have preferred not to know.

But Isabella had told her more than once to make her choices, and she has chosen to know the secrets.

‘I wish I’d known her,’ Jamie was saving. ‘My father never spoke of her. He didn’t seem to know her at all.’

‘Well. She was very old,’ she said by way of excuse. She saw his look. ‘It was not a close family.’

‘I remember you. In church,’ he said. ‘You were my family then.’ He traced the line of her collarbone with his finger, touched it with the tip of his tongue.

‘You were nothing but a baby.’ Her voice was sharper than she intended.

He paused. ‘Still, I remember you.’

In her mind she explored the edges of her treachery.

Every evening Maria and Jamie heated the copper and poured warm water over each other as they knelt in the tin tub. Tonight, when they had towelled themselves dry, she sent him ahead of her upstairs, and when he had gone she freshly ironed his clothes and took them up to the room with her, laying them beside the bed.

‘Why are you doing that?’ he asked.

She shrugged. ‘There’s a restless feeling in the air. You should be thinking of going soon.’

‘You’re tired of me?’

‘I could never be that.’

‘Are we being watched?’

‘I don’t know. There’s nothing I can tell for sure. But when you’ve been watched for as long as I was, you get a feeling for it. I might be wrong. But it’s an instinct I’ve had since you first came, and it’s getting stronger.’

She touched his face. ‘I’ve had other things on my mind since then. It’s difficult to know what is happening.’

He drew her into the bed. ‘We can stay together.’

‘No. They wouldn’t let us. And you’ve got your future to think of.’

‘I can’t see it coming to much now.’

She shook her head and drew the candle towards them, close to her own face. ‘Look at me, Jamie. Soon I’ll be old. I’ve nothing to take into the world with you. It’s too late. And you, you’d fade away and die here with me. In the end. Look at you, you’re fading from lack of sunlight already.’

‘I’m not ready to go.’

This is no cave, she reflected, but a palace he has, he will never have better than this.

‘I’m not going,’ he said, apparently decided.

‘You must. I am telling you to leave.’ They stared at each other, both implacable.

‘Then I must show you,’ she said at last. She got out of bed and went to the dresser, pulling open the drawer which held Isabella’s journals. She found the one she sought and handed it to him. ‘I’m going downstairs for a while,’ she said.

At the door she looked back at him. ‘Forgive me,’ she said.

Downstairs, she sat and dozed by the fire.

1865

Hector and Rose have had a child, a boy named William. He is my first grandchild, as was pointed out with increasing excitement as the time of Rose’s confinement came closer. Naturally, when the hour arrived I was sent for, and I did help the midwife with various small services. Annie was there with sleeves rolled up, making a great show of pleasure and chattering about the fact that ‘at least one member of the family was getting things right’, meaning successful childbirth.

Anyway, all of our help was superfluous, as the child slipped in to the world with very little trouble, and Rose, smiling a Madonna-like smile, held the baby up, waiting for us to praise her accomplishment. Which I duly did, in the presence of the others.

At last Rose and the boy and I were left on our own in the room. The general opinion was that I had been overcome with emotion and needed time to study the child in peace.

‘He is a handsome child,’ I said reiterating my applause. I paused, summoning up my most dramatic effect. Then I said: ‘I wonder what Francis will think of him.’

It was cruel, but then those who know me would not be surprised how irresistible I found the situation. And she has been so uppity with me, this Rose.

The colour drained out of her face. ‘Who told you?’ she whispered at last.

It was something of a guess but I was not really surprised that it landed on the mark. McLeod and I do not like each other much better than we ever have, but old age and mutual solitariness sometimes draw us together, and when he is out riding — which he is able to do less and less these days — he stops by my door, enquiring with a civility after my health, and in return, I give him a mug of tea and a bannock cake. He is a lonely fellow since Mary died, though he won’t admit it. He tells me this and that when he is passing, and sometimes offers a little information which he thinks I would be the better for hearing. The subject of Rose has come up, told to me as a pastoral matter though not pursued, for Rose is outside the old community, and Hector’s problem.

Besides, it was not much McLeod told me — a whisper of yellow skirt in a barn door and Francis hurrying down the road. But I had felt in my bones that he was right.

Well, I think it is all a bit of a joke.

Toward midnight, he joined her by the fire.

‘William is my brother. Or near enough.’ Maria’s voice was dull.

‘I know.’ He touched the nape of her neck. ‘Come back upstairs,’ he said. ‘The fire’s nearly out.’ When she did not move, he took her hand, pulling her roughly to her feet. ‘Come with me,’ he said.

As if in a trance, she followed him up the stairs. When she was in bed, beside him again, she said, ‘You will go, won’t you?’

Wearily, he replied that he would.

They did not sleep for the rest of the night, but lay talking. They talked of love and kissed each other a great deal. Afterwards, she would think that there were things she could have asked him about the world beyond. When he left she would know little more than when he came, but as she lay beside him it seemed unimportant; there would never be time for this again. There would be no more lovers.

‘Tell me about the old people again,’ he said once during the night, thinking of what he had read.

So she lay on her back, a little apart from him, and told him of the dark abysses under the Nova Scotia ice, where a person might fall and never be seen again, especially if they ventured forth upon it when the spring thaw was coming; and about the way the moss smelled, coming up for air when the melting was finally over. She spoke of the wild strawberries that grew there in summer, and the sweet maple syrup that was collected under the trees; the way the rocks were worn smooth by the sea, and the way it was a harsh land, but beautiful too. Then she recited the names of the ships again, and the families that had travelled on them, and it was as if she had been there herself.

‘It will be lost,’ he said, ‘in time it will all be lost,’ and his voice was full of desolation.

Around four in the morning he held her closely for the last time.

‘Will you be safe?’ he asked.

‘As safe as I’ve ever been.’

The last thing she asked him before he left was what he had decided to do about the war. It was a subject which had not been raised again since the beginning.

‘I’m not going to war,’ he said. ‘They’ll have to take me there by force.’

The stars going out were as she imagined snowflakes when they were falling and melting before they touched the ground.

‘That is the bravest decision,’ she said. ‘That is what courage is about.’

Which was more than she thought she would ever regain when he slipped out of bed and pulled on his clothes. She wanted to go to the door with him, but he asked her to stay in the bed, not to leave it until he had gone. At the door, he looked at her once more. ‘You must always sleep in that bed,’ he said. ‘It’s more comfortable … Besides, you are in charge here now.’

As if he knew how the other women had occupied the shadows in the room.

When she heard the creak of the back door she got out of bed and went to the window to watch his shadow flicker against the macrocarpa tree, then dart towards the river. Long after, she would think that that was her mistake, not to have done just as he asked. For her own shadow had loomed against the window.

Now the dawn had broken and what she feared might happen to her was true. She could hear voices no longer, and calling to her daughter, there was no reply.

Outside, in the raw thin light, the grass smelled faintly astringent under the cool dew. The japonica flowers shone like blood. She stripped off all her clothes, shivering violently as she lay down on the wet grass, tearing up handfuls of it and washing her body, her breasts and between her legs.

Back inside the house, she went up the narrow stairs to the bed and lay down. She had taken her necklace from the dresser of the old room as she passed through it, but now as she clutched it she was uncertain of its power. Her belly was full of pain and she knew that she was about to bleed.

For a week she lay there, barely moving, and when her foremothers spoke she did not answer them. All she heard was a new, quietly insistent voice asking her over and over again, ‘What have you done to Jamie, your cousin?’ And another would respond, ‘What has she done to her cousin, who is also her brother’s child?’

She turned her face to the wall, ‘I don’t want to hear you, it doesn’t have to be true,’ she said aloud.

And asked herself again, and a hundred times, why she had shown him the journal.