Silence of Stone Page 6

  Other voices join in a mocking chorus:My strength. My deliverer. Kek-kek-kek. Km-mm-mm.

  “My strength,” I mutter. Thevet looks up from his quills, his broad pig’s forehead furrowed. I study my clasped hands.

  How long, O Lord? How long? Saved by our grace, not God’s.

  Over the next few days Damienne, who refused to venture more than a hundred paces from the shelters, began grumbling incessantly. She had an endless stream of laments. The salt meat is nearly gone, she fretted, and we have only tasteless rabbit, stringy partridge, fish, and hard bread. No wine, no cheese, no nuts of any kind. And the few berries I’ve found are hard and sour. And probably poisonous, she added.

  She complained about sleeping on the hard ground and about the bugs that descended whenever the wind stilled. Their droning whine and stinging bites sometimes drove them all into the stifling heat of the canvas shelters, faces and hands covered with angry red welts.

  Damienne gasped and trembled at every loud noise, and although they’d heard in the night only the quavering calls of the black and white birds, the sighing wind, and the rhythmic slap of waves, Damienne spoke often of her terror of wild animals and monsters, demons and les sauvages.

  But Michel and I have walked all over the island and seen no sign of demons or Indians, Marguerite insisted, annoyed that Damienne’s chatter brought to mind fears she had worked to banish. Marguerite had willed herself to trust what Michel had said: her uncle had called this place the Isle of Demons only to frighten them, and he would not allow his beloved cousin to die.

  For her and for Michel, now convinced of Roberval’s imminent return, their abandonment became the great adventure. They began to think of themselves as Adam and Eve in the garden. The skies remained a crystalline blue; golden grasses and white daisies bowed and danced in a gentle wind. Michel played his citre under the open sky, the soft notes of love songs blending with the piping of grey and white birds and the soughing trees.

  And they loved. Marguerite and Michel loved within the canvas shelter and on the soft dry mosses; they loved in the broad meadows where the wind dried their sweat-slicked bodies. There was no one but Damienne to see or to hear, and they loved openly and wildly, sometimes pretending they were deer.

  They were ravenous for each other. They could not love enough, and no part of Marguerite remained untouched by Michel’s tongue, and she tasted him, salt and berries. She breathed in the grassy fragrance of his skin together with the scents of sweet mosses and pungent fir.

  In the rain pocking on the window, I hear drumming on canvas. I feel Michel’s smooth belly against her back, his fingers teasing nipples thirsty for the touch of his tongue, his hardness against her. Strong hands grasp her hips and pull her to him. Her back arches as he enters from behind. Later, standing, her soft skin scrapes against hard rock, not caring, because her legs are wrapped around his waist, his mouth is on her neck as he plunges into the greedy hollow within.

  I close my eyes and recall sitting astride, breasts bared to the sun’s lecherous eye, breath coming in gasps, crying out to the taffeta clouds above. My eyes flutter open.

  The Franciscan is staring at me, his face pinched, his hands folded over his cock. He picks up a quill and dips it into black ink. “And that is when your young man built the canvas shelter?”

  “He built two. But the wind was the serpent.”

  “The serpent?”

  “The serpent in the garden.”

  Thevet arches a thick eyebrow. “And you, no doubt, were the temptress.” He comes around the desk to stand before me, too close. I can smell the stale wool of his cassock, his sour skin.

  He lays a hand upon my shoulder. “How long did you and your lover live in the canvas shelters?” His hot fingers caress my neck.

  I sweep his hand from my shoulder.

  He steps back. His bulbous eyes travel slowly over my breasts. He nods in affirmation. “Oui, the temptress,” he says. “Eve in the garden.”

  Thevet returns to his seat behind the desk and lays his folded hands upon the papers. “How long, Marguerite, did you and your lover live in the shelters?”

  I hear winds howling, ravaging, battering. “A fortnight,” I say, “until the winds became too strong.”

  The canvas could not withstand such adversarial winds, winds so fierce Marguerite could hardly walk against them. It was then that she knew why the small twisted spruce bent away from the sea.

  “What did you do then?”

  “Her husband had discovered a cave. They retreated to that.”

  “Not husband, Marguerite. You had joined yourselves in a libidinous and illegitimate union.”

  The cat dangles in the noose, legs kicking. I reach to twist her neck, just like a rabbit’s. Then I see her green eyes: terror, rage. Eyes like his. But unlike Michel, she fights to live. She claws and scratches. I cannot kill her.

  I grab the dagger and slide the tip beneath the leather thong. The noose snaps open, and she is gone. I pull down the snare and throw the leather scraps to the street below. I put out a piece of cheese I was saving for my supper. I will go hungry.

  The scratches on my hands burn.

  The girls are practising making letters. Squeak of chalk on slate, like the scrape of stone upon stone, pale lines on a smoke-darkened wall, keeping count.

  How long, O Lord? How long? For my days are vanished like smoke.

  I dreamed last night of the cave, of a white bear. I could hear the huff-huff-huff and smell the stink of rotting seal. I crouched under a ledge. Though the entrance was too small for the bear, I was terrified. A shaggy paw snaked in. I pulled a burning brand from the fire and touched the yellow flame to white fur. The enraged howl woke me. The odour of singed fur lingered.

  “What happened to your hands?” Isabelle asks.

  I fold them together to hide the scratches. “Rabbits,” I say. “For supper.”

  She cocks her head momentarily and then with a shrug of her small shoulders dismisses her curiosity. Something is puzzling Isabelle far more than the scratches on my hands.

  “Do you believe God cares what we eat?” she asks. “Papa says that on certain days we can only eat fish. He says that’s what God wants.” Her nose wrinkles. “I don’t like fish.”

  I think of fish: raw, burnt, half-rotten, slimy and stinking. Marguerite ate it all, every scrap. She sucked the bones and ate the heads, the skin, the tails, the fins, sometimes gagging and trying not to chew – and never considered whether she liked it or not.

  I want to tell Isabelle that God doesn’t give a damn if we eat at all – or if we starve. Instead I say, “You must obey your papa. It is not for us to understand what God demands of us.”

  “Papa says that sometimes he is testing us.”

  I clench my teeth to hold back what Monsieur Lafrenière would surely consider blasphemy: What kind of father tests his most loving and obedient children – and then condemns those who fail?

  Marguerite believed that God tests the righteous, and after several weeks on the island she concluded that, like Job, she was being tested. I hear again her prayers:Be thou unto me a God, a protector, and a house of refuge…They were hungry and thirsty…And they cried to the Lord in their tribulation, and he delivered them out of their distresses.

  And when she grew more afraid and more desperate:Have mercy on me, O Lord, for I am weak…Turn to me, O Lord, and deliver my soul. O save me for thy mercy’s sake.

  But he did not deliver them out of their distresses. He did not save them. And if God was testing Marguerite, if God found her faith wanting, then God is a fool.

  Isabelle leans closer. Her perfect lips whisper, “But if God loves us, like Papa says, why is he so mean? Why does he make us eat fish?” She takes a shuddering breath. “Why did he let Mama die?”

  Isabelle returns to her bench and picks up her slate.

  After they moved to the cave, Marguerite no longer felt like Eve in the garden. She began thinking more about Job and a faith tested. She picked
up a sharp stone and began cutting lines into red granite walls not yet blackened by soot.

  We must not forget the sabbath, she said, or the saints’ days.

  She read her New Testament daily. And she prayed. Marguerite implored God to send a ship, any ship. And every day, without fail, Michel built a fire on the beach, adding green boughs so that grey smoke billowed heavenward.

  No ship came. Only the wind.

  Wind and rain flail against the window. The Franciscan pours wine, dark and red, liquid rubies in the candlelight. I stare into a small flame and think of Isabelle’s rosy lips, her skin like creamy silk. I hear an infant’s whimper, then only the moan and clatter of wind and rain.

  The cheese was gone this morning. I put out a small bone, a scrap of rabbit still attached.

  Thevet rattles a paper. “Where was the cave?”

  “Near the centre of the island.”

  “How big was it?”

  “About two body lengths’ long. Not quite as wide.” Hardly big enough for the three of them to lie down at the same time. A second, sloping chamber toward the back where Marguerite could keep her trunk.

  “There was one small area high enough for a person to stand, but they built the fire there, so the smoke could escape.”

  The Franciscan scribbles down my words. I do not bother explaining that Michel took the poles from the shelters, and with the precious few nails they had, he blocked one entrance and made the other more narrow to keep out the wind and cold.

  “What did you eat?”

  “Rabbits, partridge, fish, mussels, berries, gulls.” Michel fashioned a small net from twine. He used offal for bait then hid behind rocks and waited: ten throws for every gull caught. The gulls became wary, screaming their fear and rage. Then fifty throws for every gull caught.

  “Seal?”

  I nod. Michel tried to shoot the seals that basked on the rocks, but even when his aim was true, their grey forms slipped from the smooth surface and sank before he could retrieve them. Later, much later, Marguerite and Damienne ate whatever stinking carcass washed up on shore.

  The monk sits back and makes a tent with his fingers, his lecturing pose. “Oui,” he says, “I know from my own travels to Terra Neuve–”

  “Nova,” I say. “Terra Nova…Terre Neuve.”

  Thevet sucks his teeth, annoyed at being interrupted, and corrected. “As I was saying,” he continues, “this country is inhabited by barbarians clothed in wild animal skins. Intractable, ungracious, and unapproachable, unless by force…as those who go there to fish for cod will attest. They live almost exclusively on fish, especially seals, whose flesh is very good and delicate to them. Or so I’ve been told by Cartier.”

  I smell tallow and think of a dead seal wedged between rocks, rancid, rotten, the meat already slimy. Marguerite had to fight off ravens and gulls.

  The monk blathers on, not hearing how the rhythm of his words ill-fits the rain’s drumming. “They make a certain oil from the fat of this fish, which, after being melted, has a reddish colour.” He lifts his chalice and sips dramatically. “They drink it with their meals as we here would drink wine or water. And they make coats and clothing from its skin.”

  Lecture finished for now, he considers me. “But you were there for more than two years, alone for nearly a year.” His forehead creases. “How did you survive?”

  Thin white lines on smoke-blackened walls: eight hundred and thirty-two. Scrape of stone upon stone. I hear them then:How long, O Lord? How long? For my days are vanished like smoke, and my bones are grown dry like fuel for the fire.

  “She also ate roots, seaweed. Bark.”

  “How could you possibly survive on that?”

  I taste salty bitter herbs. And blood. Sharp edges of bark cut the tongue. “She didn’t.”

  The voices intertwine gracefully within the wind and rain:Grievous sin. La culpabilité. Impardonnable. Kek-kek-kek. Saved by our grace, not God’s.

  His eyes are slits, like the eyes of a serpent feigning sleep. “What do you mean?” he says.

  “Marguerite died. I lived.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Of course not.”

  He clutches the gold cross that lies nestled against his breast. When he finally speaks, his voice is tight, as if my hands are squeezing his throat. “Roberval knew, and you have said yourself that the island is well populated with demons. Were you seduced by the Devil? Did he grant you life in exchange for your soul?”

  Thevet holds out the cross like a shield. His voice rises in accusation. “Is that how you survived? By witchcraft? Is that how you sought revenge against your uncle?”

  I touch the blade of the dagger and imagine slicing his face and watching blood drip from his trembling chin onto his papers.

  “Christ expelled seven demons from Mary Magdalene,” he says quickly. “How many do you harbour, Marguerite? How many?”

  If my lips were not stone, I would smile. “If I had those powers,Père, would I be sitting here with you?”

  He shrinks back into his chair. “The Devil works in mysterious ways.”

  “I thought that was God.” I sit among the trees’ welcoming embrace. Their trunks and branches are like silver threads sewn into the black satin of night. Water drips from new leaves. I clutch shards of broken pottery, bits of clay painted with pale blue forget-me-nots. I found the shards in a rubbish heap. I had to chase away the pig rooting for turnip scrapings and rotten cabbage.

  Marguerite would have used the shards as chess pieces. Bored and restless, she meticulously lined up small stones to form a chessboard on the broad flat rock beside the cave. She searched for coloured and distinctive stones and then made them into kings, queens, knights, bishops, rooks, and pawns. Michel teased and called her foolish, but he smiled, and in the long twilight between their meagre evening meal and nightfall, he allowed her to teach him how to play.

  A large clay bowl. Who would be so careless as to break it? Marguerite would have traded her pearl ring for such a bowl. She would have traded her ring for the shards.

  Rose silk. An ebony feather, a pearl ring. The scent of moss.

  I lift my nose and sniff. I am eighty miles from the sea, but I can still smell salt, can still hear waves pummelling rock, a relentless wearing away. And then I hear it, a citre, the simple elegant notes of a pavane straining to rise above the sea’s bleak howl. While Michel played, Marguerite danced around the fire, her movements slow and graceful, the wind billowing her skirts, her chestnut curls falling thick and loose. She’d stopped wearing the snood by now and simply tied her hair back with a satin ribbon. When she danced, she let her hair fall loose, and Michel looked upon her with admiration and desire.

  As more and more weeks passed and no ship came, Michel stopped playing the citre. No longer smiling indulgently, he began to chastise Marguerite when she asked him to play. He kicked at her chessboard, grinding the pieces under his boots. And he no longer cared how hard she worked – or if the work was proper for a lady. He began to scoff when she prayed.

  I stretch out my legs and rub my arms for warmth. There was hardly room in the cramped cave for all of them to lie down. With Damienne so near, Michel and Marguerite were circumspect, confining their love-making to the woods and open meadows. Even then, Michel was far less free in his attentions, his once-buoyant spirits weighed down, melancholy and angry humours growing within. Marguerite tried to flirt and tease, stroking his chest and untying the lacings of his shirt. She ran her fingers through his beard, an unkempt tangled mass, no longer a neatly trimmed triangle. Michel swept her hands away and stared at the roiling sea.

  Too late in the year, he said. Roberval has gone on to Charlesbourg Royal. He cannot send a ship until spring. How can we survive until spring?

  Now it was Marguerite’s turn to offer assurances. The viceroy was angry and wanted to punish me, she acknowledged. But he is my protector. I am his ward, his beloved cousin. He will come. You will see.

  And, she added bri
ghtly, at least there are no demons, no Indians. She lifted her hands to cup Michel’s cheeks, but then dropped them to her sides, alarmed by the dark anger she saw.

  Marguerite never lost faith in Roberval’s intention to rescue her, but when more weeks passed and he did not send a ship, she began to fear for his life, anxious that the ships had foundered and that her uncle had drowned.

  Never could she have imagined his hardness of heart. Never could she have imagined that he wanted her to die.

  Le bâtard meurtrier.

  “Oui,” I agree, “murderous bastard.”

  I think of the Queen of Navarre. You can do nothing, she said. Roberval is viceroy, the law in New France. You must leave it to God to punish him.

  Leave it to God. Km-mm-mm.

  Would that I had the powers of a witch. I would have killed him at the first opportunity.

  Debts must be paid.

  I nod.Oui, debts must be paid.

  My dark soul would have traveled at night when my body was asleep. To Paris, to the Church of the Innocents. I would have used Michel’s dagger to slit his throat. I run a finger along the sharp edge of the pottery shard and imagine blue forget-me-nots floating in a pool of scarlet.

  If I did not do it, why can I see it all so clearly: Roberval, his ice-blue eyes wide with terror, a gaping grin from ear to ear, blood covering my hands, dripping through my fingers? Why do the scents of blood and salt lace my dreams?

  Dawn: grey ashy wool. I wake hunched, my back against a tree, my cloak wrapped around my shoulders and knees. My hand has released the shards to the ground. Legs stiff, I rise awkwardly. The cloak’s hem carries barbed seeds, and I begin to pick them off. Then stop. I will carry them back to Nontron and scatter them in gardens. Can wild unruly things live in such tamed places, within the security of rock walls? I drop the hem of my cloak, pick up the shards, and pull the rough wool closer in.

  Wool. Crouched in the cave, Marguerite opened her trunk and considered the creamy satin and rose silk. She wanted to slide the rich fabrics between her fingertips and feel the soft silk and smooth satin on her cheeks, but she dared not touch them now with her rough hands and ragged nails. She looked at the costly gowns, then she wished for wool, of any colour, and a spinning wheel and loom, so she could make warm cloaks and sturdy breeches. Her thin chemise and cotton gowns had become tattered, her white linen cuffs filthy and fraying. She’d stopped wearing her stiffened stomacher only days after they were abandoned. Here on the island it seemed a foolish contrivance, especially when Damienne or Michel had to lace it tight every morning and then loosen it at night.