Free The Book of Secrets by Fiona Kidman

knitting into jerseys for him, and then when the winter was over she would collect up the jerseys and walk a hundred and forty miles to see him? No wonder she looks old already.
    I do care for her very much, and since they have been here everyone has gone out of their way to make her life as comfortable as possible. All, that is, except McLeod himself, who seems quite oblivious to mortal needs. Still, she has a wooden rocking chair by the window and a small rug on the floor, and in the bedroom a big brass bed with a sparkling fresh coverlet, and she tells me that all of this is a great luxury.
    I try not to think too much of my own affairs. I have not seen Duncan MacQuarrie for a long time. Sometimes I catch McLeod’s eyes resting on me, but mostly his manner is very cold and I am most correct when I have occasion to speak to him. In the meantime, he and Mary spend a good deal of time on their knees in the bedroom.
    She has told me that she often prays that they will so please God that they be allowed to preserve their present way of life, though it worries her that McLeod might get to know of this and think she ispraying for material things. Must confess, I get a little tired of this, but she is very kind in her nature and it is true that she does have a good mind when she is not too weary to apply it to the detail of the moment. At her best, I find her a thoroughly good companion …

    While Mary McLeod was on her knees praying for constancy in her way of life, her husband was pursuing other ends. There was general enthusiasm in Ullapool for his teaching methods, and it was said that the children had acquired ‘ever so much book learning in the shortest possible time’. The parents of some of the older children were heard to say with pride that at the rate they were learning, they wouldn’t have to stay at school much longer; at which McLeod, in his turn, rebuked them sternly with the advice that while they might have learned like monkeys to read and write, he still had much work to do on their spiritual concerns and that would take a great deal longer. As for the parents themselves, there was much that needed doing for their spiritual welfare too; in all honesty, he could not see how they could expect their children’s godliness to grow and mature if they did not look to their own.
    These pronouncements were greeted with some astonishment by the local people at first, for as a rule most of them attended church on the Sabbath when the town minister, Dr Ross, was preaching.
    ‘Come and join me and my friends next Sabbath day, and hear the true word of God,’ McLeod exhorted them instead.
    It had already been noticed since McLeod’s arrival that the population did swell each Sunday. The visitors were people from the north, come to hear McLeod preach his own sermons.
    ‘What do you think about Mr McLeod and his preaching?’ a parishioner asked Dr Ross after his sermon one Sunday morning. The congregation had been very small that day, while across on the other side of town the overflow from McLeod’s gathering could be seen spilling down the hill towards the sea, and cramming the street corners.
    Ross was a small man with a plume of silver hair and a lean handsome face. He smiled. ‘It is a phenomenon that will soon pass, you mark my words,’ he responded with easy assurance.
    ‘Dr Ross is nothing but a heathen libertarian,’ thundered McLeod.
    ‘Is it true,’ whispered Mary McLeod, one evening later in theweek, ‘that you have offended Dr Ross and he is threatening to close down the school if you do not stop preaching on a Sunday?’
    ‘Its nothing,’ said McLeod. They were sitting at dinner. He took a piece of fried bread and used it to scoop the last of his fish into his mouth. Beside him, John Luther grizzled and pulled at his coat tail, hanging over the edge of the chair. He took the child on his knee and rocked him, reached over and took a morsel of bread his wife was toying with on her plate, and fed