Silence of Stone (13 page)

Using the sabre, the axe, and Michel's dagger, they stripped the seal of its heavy white fur, cut the body into pieces and carried them into the cave. Their stomachs rumbled as they watched and smelled the roasting meat, fat dripping and sizzling in the fire. Unable to wait for the dark meat to cook fully, Marguerite and Damienne ate until they were glutted and drowsy.

Eyes heavy, Marguerite stared into the fire, not quite believing their good fortune. She rubbed her swollen belly and murmured psalms of praise: I will love thee, O Lord, my strength. The Lord is my firmament, my refuge, and my deliverer. My God is my helper, and in him will I put my trust…And they cried to the Lord in their tribulation, and he delivered them out of their distresses.

Marguerite praised and thanked God, but believed it was Michel who had brought her – and the baby – this gift of food. Her love for him, and her grief, grew larger.

She slept then, but fitfully. Marguerite fretted, anxious for the dawn, fearing the seals would be gone before morning. Then she worried that the baby would come too soon, that she would be too weak to hunt. She put her hands on her belly and whispered, Wait, child. Wait. Let me hunt, let me find food.

Marguerite agonized over how they could preserve the meat. They had no salt. How could they dry it and yet keep the wolves away? She wondered how she could tan the heavy white furs to make cloaks and boots.

Très inquiète. Km-mm-mm.

“
Oui
,” I answer. “She worried. Always she worried.”

Marguerite was granted nearly a fortnight to kill seals. She and Damienne ate as much as they could, then they rendered the fat, saving the oil in the seals' own stomachs and bladders. They cut the meat into thin strips they could dry outside during the day. At dusk they laboured to move everything into the cave to keep it away from the wolves, foxes, and weasels.

Then, crystallizing out of white fog, the white bears came. Enormous and ferocious.

I hear again the
huff-huff-huff
just outside the cave and see a huge white paw snaking in between the rocks and pulling at the wooden barriers. I tell the spider about the bears and about Marguerite's terror.
Lifting her front legs, she captures my words and wraps them tightly in her silky thread, confining the memories – and the fear – within her web.

Isabelle leaves her bench and sidles closer. She shows me her slate, the letters neat and carefully formed. She has drawn a small bird in the corner. Each foot has five crooked toes. “Do you think God is too busy sometimes?” she asks.

“Too busy?”

“Papa says that maybe God was so busy with the king's wars that he couldn't hear my prayers for Mama.” Her voice is small and quiet, words lisped through the gap in her front teeth. “And that's why she died.” Isabelle waits, wanting an affirmation – or a denial. There is anger within her, but a great sorrow beneath.

How long, O Lord, wilt thou forget me? How long? Deaf to her prayers.

She sighs loudly, then tucks her slate under her arm and returns to her bench. She knows her letters are well-formed and that I have no answer.

“The Indians there live almost exclusively on fish, especially seals, whose flesh is very good and delicate to them,” says the Franciscan. “And they make an oil from the fat, which, when melted, is a reddish colour.
They drink it with their meals as we would drink wine or water. They make coats and clothing from its skin.”

Has Thevet forgotten already that he told me all of this only three days ago?

“The seals,” he says, “tell me more about the seals.”

“They brought the bears.”

“Bears!” Thevet sits up in his chair. “What kind of bears?”

“Huge white ones.” Bears larger than any animal Marguerite had ever seen, and all the more terrifying because they rose up suddenly where only moments before there had been only white fog, snow, and ice. There was ferocity in their small black eyes, a savagery she could see whenever a bear attacked a seal, smashing its head with a single swipe of an enormous paw.

White on white on white. Scarlet blood the only colour. And then
kek-kek-kek, pruk-pruk-pruk.
Ebony wings iridescent with a violet sheen.

I look behind the monk and see a shaggy paw poke out from between the stones. The long yellow claws nearly touch his head. Then the paw is withdrawn, replaced by a white snout.
Huff-huffhuff
. I smell the stink of rancid seal meat.

“With your lover dead, how did you protect yourselves?”

“Marguerite killed four in one day. With a musket.”

“Four! In one day?” He scribbles furiously.

L'idiot
, filling his costly paper with nonsense. No
one could kill four bears in one day. Thirteen steps to load and shoot an arquebus, a fire-steel at hand to light the fuse, the powder unreliable. One shot, no time to reload and fire before the bear smashes your skull as easily as a seal's.

In the dark, their eyes shining a silvery blue, Marguerite shot at them, but only to keep them away from the cave. Marguerite and Damienne were forced to dry whatever seal meat they could, and to smoke it, within the cave, even during the day. After the bears came, Marguerite went outside only for water and wood. Damienne would venture out only to relieve herself, and then she would not go far. The old woman not only feared the bears, she had also begun to see demons in every shadow.

Thevet sits back and studies me, wary now of a woman who can kill bears. “Great with child, but hunting bears.” He shakes his head, incredulous.

“They ate them,” I say, enlarging upon my story. “The meat was tough and tasted of fish. They used the furs for blankets.”

He writes more slowly now, perhaps uncertain he can believe me. “And when was the infant born?”

“The tenth day of April in 1543. Two hundred and seventy-two days after Roberval left them.” Damienne's hands fluttering with every scream. Alertness dimming, fading, brought back to herself by pain. Agonizing pain ripping through her belly. Blood.

“Girl or boy.”

“It does not matter.” I rub the cut on my wrist,
nearly healed now, but I can still make it hurt. I watch his mouth move, but hear only the buzzing within my head. Finally, I hear him. Then wish for deafness.

“Of course it matters,” he says. “He, or she, was the grandchild of nobles.”

Outside the window, dogs begin fighting. Low growls and yips. I think of wolves, copper eyes and flash of teeth, and hear them lurking just beyond the door, the swish of tails against wood, click of nails on stone.

The Franciscan flinches at each snarl, but persists in his questions. “Tell me more about the child. How did you manage to bear the child alone?”

“She was not alone. Her servant Damienne was there…
oui
, Damienne.” I say the name twice to make him think of her, twice to annoy him. I say it again. “Damienne was there.”

Thevet runs his tongue over his teeth, but refrains from calling her names.

Damienne, almost no help at all, her moans and whines as pitiful and fearful as the dogs' outside.

“Marguerite had been eating seal meat,” I say. “She was strong.”

Thevet pounces on the word seal, and I sit and listen – for a third time – to what the monk has already told me. “The Indians of Terre Neuve live almost exclusively on seals,” he says importantly, as if imparting new knowledge. “They make a reddish oil from the fat.” He stops and blinks, perhaps remembering now that he was asking about the baby, not seals. “Were you within the cave?”

I nod. Dark walls. Smoke. Flames reaching high, receding, a sacred rite as old as Eve.

“Was it painful?”

I know what the Franciscan wants to hear: Eve banished from the garden to bear her children in pain because of her sin of disobedience.

“Would it not be sin if it were not?” My words are brittle.

Marguerite's thoughts were broken threads, weaving in and out of pain and fear, ends fraying, wet with blood. She floated above, watching and listening, and heard voices that were neither hers nor Damienne's, one weak and rasping like Michel's, another low and harsh like Roberval's. Their words accused her:
Lascivious coquette. Le désir. Scandal. Whore. Punished. Le bâtard misérable. Le bâtard, le bâtard, le bâtard.

Non
,
non
,
non
, she screamed, my baby is not a bastard! In defiance, she pushed the child out – a howling infant, her face screwed up in rage at having been born in such a place. Marguerite used Michel's dagger to cut the cord. The voices stilled.

“Marguerite pushed until her
womb
was empty.” “Stop!” Thevet's hand jerks and papers spill to the floor. The monk pretends outrage that I would say such a word aloud in his presence. He gathers the papers, then sits and glares until his breathing slows.

“Boy or girl?” he says pointedly. “You must tell me, Marguerite. He, or she, was the grandchild of nobles.”

“Perhaps not,
Père
. Perhaps everything I've told
you is wrong. Perhaps Marguerite coupled with one of the prisoners, a murderer, and gave birth to a bastard.”

“You are shameless,” he hisses. “Just like the Whore of Babylon with your carnal abominations, your insatiable desires.”

Les abominations charnelles. Kek-kek-kek. Les désirs insatiables.

I touch the blade of Michel's dagger. If I could cut the cords that bind my throat, I would laugh in his face. The Franciscan has no idea how insatiable I am, how much I hunger for blood.

Thevet considers me, his yellow-brown eyes filled with disdain. He shakes his head slowly, pretending at pity. “Even after all these years, and Roberval's punishment, you remain unrepentant for all you have done.”

La culpabilité. Huff-huff-huff. Grievous sin. Kek-kek-kek. Impardonnable.
The voices are tangled, tripping one upon the other:
La contrition et la pénitence. Km-mm-mm. Le bâtard, le bâtard, le bâtard.

“What was the child's name, Marguerite? We will stay here until you tell me.”

I put my hands over my ears. I will not give him contrition. I will not give him penitence. And I will not give him a name.

The Franciscan picks up a knife and sharpens a quill with quick angry strokes. He throws the quill down. He has cut off the nib and spoiled it. He picks up another.

Marguerite called her Michella: gift from God.
She put the infant to her breast and prayed there would be enough milk. She and Damienne had not prepared for a baby. They had not believed it possible that Marguerite could birth a living child – or that the child could survive its birth. They now marvelled at this miracle, at Michella's beauty and her strength, the satiny smoothness of her skin, the vigour with which she sucked, fighting to live.

Marguerite refused to remember that she had ever tried to poison this child, that she had ever wished her baby dead. She now set her mind upon the Holy Virgin and her child, knowing she would do anything to save Michella. Anything.

Damienne tore up their tattered undershifts for rags. After a few weeks, when the seals and bears were gone and the snow had melted away from the bogs, the old woman found the courage to venture forth to collect moss that she dried in the warm sun.

Michella revived their hope and their faith.

Be thou unto me a God, a protector, and a house of refuge, to save me. Have mercy upon us…mercy upon us…mercy upon us. Kek-kek-kek.

I hear Michella's whimpers, loud then soft. I feel pain in the centre of my chest. I press the wound at my wrist, then hear the whispers:
Être indulgent, c'est mourir.

“
Oui
,” I answer quietly, talking down into my lap. “To be soft is to die.”

The monk does not look up from his quill and his knife.

With the thawing of the ice and the arrival of
warm weather, Marguerite was convinced, now more than ever, that Roberval would finally send a ship. When he looked upon Michella, he would forgive them.