Silence of Stone Page 10

  I nod, pleased with how quickly she learns.

  I have gorged on bread. On the island there was no bread after the hard biscuit was gone, and no grain, just a few seeds Marguerite could boil into a thin gruel. Nothing to grind for flour. I can stand for hours now rubbing my fingertips through flour, sometimes silky, sometimes coarse, redolent of wheat, barley, oats, and rye.

  I cannot get enough bread, and when I manage to save a few coins, I hurry to the baker’s. I was there before dawn this morning, and even before I was out his door, I began tearing off chunks of the warm loaf and stuffing them into my mouth. The whole loaf was gone by the time I returned to the garret, and now I have nothing.

  The striped cat was there, just outside the window. I reached out to her, slowly, but she turned and ran, bouncing away on her pirate’s leg.

  I looked in the iron pot, but it was empty. I had no food to offer her, not even a scrap of stew or a bit of old cheese. She is starving.

  I walk in circles. I cannot sit.

  The iron pot. Why did I bring it back? Before the Franciscan came – probing, prodding, poking at me with questions as sharp as a pointed beak – I used it, and the pot was only a pot. Now I cannot touch it without remembering the island. The pot held everything: water, stewed rabbit, deer, duck, gull, and seal, fish and mussels and whelks, eggs, the rendered fat from seals and whales, gruel and berries, weasel, wolf, and mink, leaves and roots, seaweed and the inner bark of birch and willow boiled for broth. Dry bones, shells, and strips of hide boiled until the water remained clear. Everything.

  In the early summer, Marguerite and Damienne gorged on half a dozen different kinds of seabirds and their eggs. Fish became more plentiful and easier to catch.

  Marguerite reached her arms to the sky: manna from heaven. God in his mercy.

  The whales followed, the sea exploding with their spray. Damienne, believing them to be monsters, shuddered each time their broad backs and tails breached the water. Marguerite could only hope that one of the huge beasts would strand itself upon the rocks.

  Marguerite had milk and Michella thrived. Damienne would sit with her in the warm sun and sing lullabies.

  I close my eyes and hear the soft notes of the old woman’s voice:Chut, petite bébé, je t’aime, je t’aime. I hear a baby’s coos and babbles, and I smile. Then I hear wails fade to whimpers fade to silence.

  I would weep, but Marguerite shed all of our tears. There are none left for me. I reach for the dagger and make small cuts along my wrist. A voice counts:un, deux, trois, quartre, cinq.

  I dab at the blood with the black hem of my skirt, already crusted with mud.

  The days lengthened, then began to shorten again. Marguerite and Damienne kept a fire burning near the harbour. Now and again they saw white sails in the distance.

  Surely, Marguerite thought, the sailors and fishermen saw their smoke. Why would they not come near? She began to wonder if the fishermen believed the fires were kindled by Indians – or by demons – set to lure them to their deaths.

  With every ship that passed and did not stop, Damienne’s face grew more haggard, her shoulders more stooped. Marguerite could not set aside her concern that tragedy had befallen the colony, that Indians had killed the colonists, or that the ships had sunk and her uncle was dead. She convinced herself, again and again, and tried her best to convince Damienne that, were he alive, Roberval would come for them.

  Foolish girl. Le cœur noir de Roberval.

  “Oui,” I answer, “foolish to trust Roberval’s black heart.”

  Still, Marguerite hoped, and she prayed that a ship would come: Have mercy on me, and hear my prayer.

  Foolish hope, foolish prayers. Chuckling laughter, muffled pounding.

  I pull my hands from my ears. Someone is knocking. I crack open the door, and there is Isabelle, her small fist still raised. I have forgotten the girls.

  “Madame de Roberval–”

  “Go, I’ll be down in a moment.” I slam the door in her face, then smooth my skirts and wind my hair into a tight chignon at the back of my neck. I have given no thought as to what I will teach them today. But it matters little what they know – and what they do not. Their lives will not be of their own choosing. And the more money their fathers have for dowries, the less choice they will have.

  Choice. Roberval gave her none. But Marguerite took it. She chose, and for three months, she loved boldly and outrageously. Love. She gave it, and she took it. Until Michel scorned her.

  L’amour. Le désir. La demoiselle déshonorante. La putain misérable.

  “Stop!” I scream. “She was not a whore.”

  The voices follow me down the stairs : Le comportement scandaleux. La perversité. Murderer.

  I stop on the last stair. “She was not a murderer. Nor am I.”

  La culpabilité. Grievous sin. Debts must be paid. I lean against the wall to catch my breath. “She meant only to save her baby,” I gasp. “And she paid her debt. Marguerite paid.”

  When I enter the room, the girls’ heads are bowed. Only Isabelle looks up, her face eager. She does not yet know what lies ahead. She does not yet know that she will be given no choice, that she is far too intelligent ever to be happy with what her father and her husband will choose for her.

  I tell the girls to continue practising their darning. Isabelle screws up her face. Instead of picking up her needle and yarn and her frayed stocking with its knots and lumps, she comes forward and tugs on my hand. Her face is alarmed when she sees the angry scabs, and I pull my sleeve down over my wrist.

  “Madame de Roberval,” she says, “for last night’s lesson, Papa read from the Bible about Abraham and Isaac…about obedience to God.” She hesitates and chooses her words carefully. “Abraham was going to kill his own son,” she says incredulously.

  When Isabelle speaks again, her voice is soft, as if she is telling me a secret. “I asked Papa why God would want that, but he shushed me. He told me to listen…and then I would understand. Do you understand?”

  “Understand what?”

  “Why God would ask you to do something bad.”

  I try not to hear the low growls:L’obéissance. Obedientia. God’s will. Km-mm-mm.

  “We must obey God,” I say carefully, “as you would obey your father. And do whatever he asks of you.”

  “Even if God asks you to kill someone?”

  “Even then.”

  “But what if he doesn’t stop you?”

  “Even then, Isabelle.”

  Putting a finger to her chin, she looks up and to the side, face puzzled. “But how do you know the voice you hear is not the Devil pretending to be God?”

  The voices hum:La voix de Dieu, la voix du Diable. Km-mm-mm. Kek-kek-kek. Murderer. Grievous sin. Impardonnable.

  “One just knows,” I hear myself say. “Get your stocking, Isabelle. You should practise.”

  “But–”

  “Go!”

  Pouting, she turns away.

  I want to grab her shoulders and spin her around. I want to say: How we know, Isabelle, is that God never speaks. It was Abraham who stopped his hand from killing his son. Not God.

  “There was food in the summer: seabirds and eggs, fish, berries, mussels,” I say, answering questions I have answered before. “Huge fish moved into the streams. Marguerite used the spear. They smoked and dried the flesh. She found a small whale washed up on shore.” I am out of breath from having said so much.

  “What about the child? How did you care for the child?”

  “Marguerite had milk, at least through the summer. She wrapped the baby in rabbit skins, in the white pelts of seals.”

  “Not unlike les sauvages,” Thevet says thoughtfully. He raises a finger and stares upward. “As to the treatment of babies, they are clever. They wrap them up in four or five marten skins sewn together, then tie them to a plank with a hole through it.” He uses his hands and his quill to draw in the air, as if he has seen all this himself. “Between the legs is a sort of s
pout made of soft bark where the infant can make water without soiling its body or the furs.” He looks at me – his audience – and smiles. “Clever,non ?”

  His thoughts circle back to Marguerite. “If you had food,” he says, “why did the old woman die?” He cannot bring himself to say her name.

  “They had food for the summer, but it was more than a year before the Breton ship came to the island.”

  “I understand that. But what happened that fall?” The monk understands nothing.

  “Too much. Not enough.” I ball my hands into fists. My nails dig into my palms. I push them in harder. It is a pain I know how to feel.

  Thevet gives an irritated snap of his thick fingers, as if to bring me back from someplace distant. “Do not speak to me in riddles,” he says. “What happened?”

  “They baptised the baby.”

  “And what did you use for holy water, for consecrated oil and salt?”

  “The sea and seal oil. All blessed by God.”

  “And the baptismal name?” he asks, ignoring my sarcasm.

  I stare down at my hands and hear his annoyed sigh.

  “When did the old bawd die?”

  “Damienne,” I say loudly, “died on the fourth day of November in 1543.” Scrape of stone upon stone. “Four hundred and eighty days after Roberval left them.”

  “How?” He does not look up from his scribbling.

  “She slipped and fell from a cliff.” I release myself to float above, gliding on raven’s wings. I fix my eyes on the candles and quills so I will not see the images that come in my dreams. White bone. Eye to bloody sky.

  I read the words he has written:Damienne, November, cliff, baptised.

  With every ship that passed and did not stop, Damienne’s eyes grew more distant, peering in, not out, and more faded, as if her soul were slowly leaking away. Both of them knew that after October no ship would come until spring, and perhaps not even then.

  Was this to be their life? Michella’s life? Only the three of them? Forever?

  They had stores of food from the summer’s bounty: smoked fish and berries, dried meat and rendered fat. But as the days grew shorter and colder, Damienne withered, her skin thin and jaundiced, stretched like parchment over knobby bones and swollen joints. She continued to help Marguerite with Michella, but the child no longer brought smiles.

  Damienne stopped singing, and talking – except to herself.

  After the birth of Michella, Damienne’s sightings of demons had diminished, but as the days shortened she began seeing them everywhere: in the crevices of cliffs, behind rocks and trees, floating in the depths of dark pools. Like Michel, Damienne began mumbling about the Devil and death.

  They will come for us, she would mutter, and the ravens will clean the flesh from our bones and pick out our eyes. She looked at Marguerite and snarled, Your desire, your sin, your guilt.

  Damienne’s eyes, like Michel’s, took on a strange glint that made Marguerite afraid to leave Michella alone with her.

  “What was the old woman doing up on the cliffs?”

  From above, I watch my mouth move. “Picking berries.”

  “In November?”

  “Oui.”

  There were no berries on the cliffs. The sun was setting when Marguerite saw Damienne fall. Or jump. Black silhouette against red sky. Too late. Too late. Damienne plummeted to the rocks and trees below before Marguerite could take three steps toward the bottom of the cliffs. The old woman’s face was smashed beyond all recognition. But in my dreams, Damienne’s skirts balloon out, and she drifts like a feather. Her face glows and her lips move, but I cannot hear her words as I scramble toward her, each step mired in mud, branches tangling around my ankles and tripping me. I hear only mocking voices: Grievous sin, impardonnable. La culpabilité. And then:Un cadeau, un cadeau, un cadeau. A gift, a gift, a gift.

  I am always too late to catch her.

  Staring toward the bloody sky, her dead eye accuses me.Non,non, I say in the dream, Marguerite’s sin. It was Marguerite, not me.

  I float now, watching. “She left Marguerite alone with the baby,” I hear myself say to the monk.

  Too agitated to sit, I pace, my fingers drumming, drumming, drumming against my thigh.

  Marguerite had seen what she should not have seen, and she stood, unmoving. Lot’s wife. A pillar of salt. She wasn’t sad or frightened. She was furious. And envious. Had she not had Michella, she would have gone up on the cliff and thrown herself down beside Damienne.

  Marguerite and Michella. Alone. No voice but her own.

  The blood-red sky darkened to black, and the trees and rocks bled into the sea. The sun rose on a world drained of all colour – a white disk in a white sky over a white sea.

  For days Marguerite heard nothing, as if she were surrounded by dense fog that muffled all sound. She refused to fashion a shroud or to search for a burial crypt. She would not read her New Testament over the corpse, nor would she pray or weep. She allowed the broken body to lie until it was no longer Damienne, until the accusing eye had been picked out and the carcass resembled a half-frozen seal washed up on shore, the flesh grey and cold. She left the body and the blood for the ravens,un cadeau, a gift.

  Kek-kek-kek. La nourriture pour les corbeaux. Pruk-pruk-pruk.

  “And why should the ravens not eat?” I look at my fingers, raven’s claws. I am one of them now, dressed all in black.

  My head hums with the sound of maggots gnawing. I rub my wrist and am surprised to touch scabbed flesh. Who has done this to me? Who has hurt me?

  I collapse onto the bench and pull a blanket around me, the scratchy wool a comfort. The spider still labours among the logs, diligent, persistent, even though she has had her supper: Damienne’s maggots.

  Grievous sin. Impardonnable. La culpabilité.

  “Non,” I answer. “Marguerite’s sin, not mine.”

  The spider stitches one strand to another, setting her snare. She is still hungry, but I will not give her Michella’s butterflies. Michella should have had butterflies, with wings of sapphires and emeralds set in gold filigree. I hear an infant’s whimpers fade to silence.

  Late November. Wind. Freezing rain. Snow. The stored food gone.

  Marguerite had nothing but a few scrawny rabbits, gulls, and partridge, berries she’d gathered and dried, mussels and whelks, and a few fish she could hook or spear. Ignoring her own hunger and struggling not to swallow, Marguerite chewed bits of meat to make them soft, then tried to feed them to Michella, but the infant’s summer plumpness waned as surely as the daylight. Marguerite’s breasts flattened, and though Michella sucked and sucked, she howled her hunger until her own wailing wore her out and finally, she slept.

  December. Only dried berries, a few fish and mussels, boiled seaweed and bark. Breasts flat, no longer containing even a drop of milk.

  Marguerite held her New Testament over Michella and wept. She prayed: Out of the depths I have cried to thee, O Lord. How long? How long? Have mercy upon us. Help us, help us, help us.

  Or let us die.

  She considered, and prayed, then considered again. Marguerite set her mind on the Virgin and Child, on how she would do anything to save her baby. Anything. Finally, feeling as if she were no longer in her own body, she watched herself use Michel’s dagger to cut pieces from the frozen carcass that was no longer Damienne. Marguerite closed her eyes when she saw herself place the flesh into the black pot, boil it, and offer the broth and softened pieces to Michella.

  La culpabilité. Grievous sin. Impardonnable.

  “Marguerite’s sin. Not mine.”

  Michella swallowed, but she grew thinner and thinner until she was a tiny skeleton, her green eyes huge and staring, her bones as light and fragile as a bird’s. She no longer howled, only whimpered, then slept, silently.

  Le silence. La pénitence. Debts must be paid. Kmmm-mm.

  “Marguerite’s debt, not mine.”

  One morning Marguerite could not wake her. Michella: gift f
rom God. God had reclaimed her.

  God had found Marguerite unworthy.

  Marguerite could hardly stand beneath the weight of her grief and her guilt. She washed Michella, kissed her face, then wrapped the small body in the white fur of a seal to keep her warm. As the sun set and the sky became a rose to match the colour of Michella’s perfect lips, Marguerite rolled the rocks away from the crevice where she had placed Michel, now only bones, his fingers and toes gone. She touched his grinning mouth, his cheeks, the empty eyes, then laid Michella beside him.

  She could not bear to think of weasels and mink gnawing on her baby’s little bird bones. She crawled in beside Michella to protect her. Marguerite lay down beside her baby and her husband.

  Forgive me, O Lord, she prayed. Forgive me. I meant only to save Michella.

  A psalm came to her, and she murmured into the dark: Hear, O Lord, my prayer, and let my cry come to thee. Turn not thy face away from me…For my days are vanished like smoke, and my bones are grown dry like fuel for the fire…I am become like a pelican of the wilderness. I am like a night raven in the house.

  It was I who awoke in the morning to the raucous calls of ravens interwoven with voices and laughter: Quork-quork-quork. The grace and mercy of God. Kek-kek-kek. Saved by our grace, not God’s. Kmmm-mm.

  The voices mocked, but they also spoke sweetly, their breath scented with cinnamon and cloves: Marguerite is dead, but you must live, Marguerite. Her sin, not yours. Saved by our grace.

  I stood, looked upon Michel and Michella and Marguerite, then rolled the rocks into place to seal their crypt. I walked away from them all. I walked away from her grievous sin.

  God had turned his back to Marguerite. I turned my back to God.

  “O Lord, our Lord, how admirable is thy name in the whole earth. For thy magnificence is elevated above the heavens…” The girls stand in a row at the front of the room, reciting in Latin, their words mumbled and garbled. Isabelle’s is the only voice that rings out, her words clear and confident. Though she is the youngest, the other girls follow her lead. Isabelle, even with her lisp, is the only one who can pronounce the Latin correctly.