Silence of Stone (2 page)

Roberval. L'amour. Debts must be paid.
Silky lapis whispers, echoing as if my narrow room were fifty fathoms across and the walls steep cliffs instead of oak boards.

I sit, staring into the cold hearth. The Franciscan's
questions have rekindled images and memories I believed extinguished long ago. This morning while I was teaching, the monk arrived at the scrivener's door. He read to me the order from the king, dated the twenty-fifth day of March in the year of Our Lord 1560. The order states that Marguerite de la Roque de Roberval is to meet with André Thevet, cosmographer for King François II, each day for a fortnight, the sabbath and saints' days excepted, to tell him all that she knows about Terre Nova, Canada, and New France.

I corrected his Latin. Terra, I said, Terra Nova. And then told him I was not the Marguerite he wanted.

My words carried no meaning for André Thevet, and I have little choice but to obey the king's order. The Franciscan has agreed to meet with me late in the day so I can spend the mornings in the school downstairs.

I taught the girls this morning. They practised forming letters, their chubby fingers clutching thick chunks of chalk, laboriously drawing wobbly lines on roof-slates. Heads bowed, they worked in silence. All except Isabelle. She made bold strokes, her letters a simple task she finished quickly. She placed herself near me then and chattered, lisping through the gap in her front teeth. Her lips are rosy pink and well-defined against creamy skin, and the new teeth coming in look monstrous in her small mouth. Isabelle is the youngest student. She has been at the school for only a month. When her father first made inquiries he asked nothing about needlework or
etiquette or religion, but he considered carefully my terse answers to his questions about French and Latin, ciphering and reading, as if weighing my responses against the hushed rumours he'd heard. Monsieur Lafrenière studied me as if he might know– or wish to know – Marguerite's secrets.

I accepted Isabelle into the school anyway. She reminds me of Marguerite: the same candid gaze, unruly curls, saucy tilt of the head. Her fingers are often stained with black ink, as if she practises her letters at home, on paper.

Hers is the only name I know.

The voices erupt:
La culpabilité. Grievous sin. Impardonnable.

I put my hands over my ears but cannot stop the tormenting din or the cascade of images: ice-blue eyes, a finger upon the string of a citre, an ebony feather.

Marguerite was just sixteen, and an orphan, when her older cousin, Jean-François de la Roque, Sieur de Roberval, became her guardian. Her lineage was noble, but her father had been among the poorest of the nobility. Roberval had money. He bought clothes to display Marguerite's beauty: a rose silk gown sewn with pearls and cut low and square to expose her breasts, stiffened petticoats to make the gown's rustling skirts cascade from her narrow waist, black brocade slippers embroidered with gold thread and slashed so that puffs of rose silk peeked through.

She was enchanted by the handsome Roberval and even more so by the life he offered. Though a
distant cousin, he encouraged Marguerite to call him Uncle. He entertained her with stories about King François, his boyhood friend, and introduced her at court, where even the king's wandering gaze lingered appreciatively upon her. Marguerite curtsied and smiled and kissed a thousand gloved hands.

I touch rough fingertips to my cheeks, then trace my lips and recall plump softness where I now feel only dry parchment.

Grievous sin. Debts must be paid.

“She meant only to save her baby,” I answer. “She was punished. She paid.”

When Roberval told Marguerite that the king had appointed him Viceroy of New France, she was thrilled and proud to be a Roberval – until he told her that he planned an expedition to Canada and that she would accompany him. In that instant, her pride turned to horror. She'd heard the stories of Canada that circled at court: the wilderness was dreary, cold, and dangerous; Jacques Cartier's men had been attacked and killed by Indians; the explorer Giovanni Verrazzano had been eaten by cannibals. Marguerite could not believe it possible that having only just discovered the pleasures of the court and the delights of her own beauty she would be forced to leave Paris and go to that dreadful wasteland, a frigid land of no cities, no books, no learned conversation. No silks, no pearls, no music. Only monsters and Indians.

The yellow flame of the candle lengthens, too tall and bright for wet fingertips to snuff.

On the sixteenth day of April in 1542, Marguerite –
together with a few noblemen, 16 soldiers, 73 murderers and thieves, seven cows and one bull, eight horses, 35 sheep, 33 goats, and four pigs – stepped aboard the
Vallentyne
.

She saw him at once. Only a few years older than she, he wore a soldier's doublet. His grin startled her. Marguerite returned a coy nod. Though he carried an arquebus, it pleased her to see that his hand cradled a citre, inlaid with ivory and precious metals, far more gracefully than the musket. Michel looked at her and smiled again. His long finger, the nail square and perfect, plucked a single string.

The citre's thrum rings through my head. And through my body.
Le désir.
I close my eyes and my skin remembers. The length of him pressed against her. Fingers fumbling with the lacings of a bodice, the straps of a codpiece. Touch of lips to breast, hand to thighs, her hand on him, the first time she had ever touched a man.

My back arches and I gasp.

The Franciscan hunches forward, hovering like a gluttonous gull over offal. He considers his scattered papers and quills. “What did you use for shelter?” he asks.

Thevet may believe his question innocuous, but it pokes like a sharp beak at my spare flesh.

I clear the gravel from my throat. “She lived at first in a canvas hut.”

“She?” He looks at me sideways, one eye squinting.

“Marguerite.”

“But you are Marguerite.”

“I told you,
Père.
I am not the Marguerite you want.”

“Stop being difficult.”

I watch his mouth move and hear only the clacking of a yellow beak.

“The king has ordered you to answer my questions.” The monk folds his arms over his chest: broad charcoal wings. “Again, what did you use for shelter…Marguerite?”

I hear wind shrieking, claws ripping canvas. “They built huts from the damaged sails Roberval left with them.”

“They?”

“Marguerite, her husband, and Damienne, her servant.”

“So you will persist in this?” Scowling, he picks up a white quill. “I have heard about this
Damienne
.” His lips pucker as if the name itself tastes sour.

“Damienne was a good woman. She loved Marguerite.” I see again her broad smile and round fleshy cheeks, then I blink and see bleeding gums and sharp cheekbones beneath skin as pale and thin as vellum.

“The old bawd. Encouraging such wanton and shameless behaviour…carnal abominations.” Thevet takes a sip of wine to wash the foulness from his mouth, then he dips the quill into black ink and begins to scribble.

The king's cosmographer has traveled all the way from Paris to ask his questions. Three hundred miles of rutted muddy roads. Four of the king's soldiers came with the monk to protect him from brigands – and from the zealous adherents of the new religion who abound in Angoulême, so much so that the Catholic chapel in Nontron is little used. We – André Thevet and the one he believes to be Marguerite de Roberval – sit within that chapel, in a small chamber that smells of dank stone and smouldering wood. Faggots hiss and sputter but do not relieve the chill, and the hearth and narrow window offer little light, even in the lengthening days of April.

The Franciscan has lit all four candles on the desk.

He grips the quill so tightly it makes grooves in his fat fingers. “In your desperate state,” he says, “did you not accept help from demons?” Thevet softens his eyes, as if he intends sympathy, but their sharp red edges tell me that this is the question that intrigues him most. He taps the nib against the paper: tap-tap-tap.

I turn away and hear in his tapping the raven's
kek-kek-kek
. I nod to acknowledge the warning, but I already know: this man cannot be trusted. I slip my hand within the folds of my skirt to touch the blade of the dagger I carry. It was his dagger, Marguerite's husband's. I trace the dark vein in the mother-of-pearl handle.

The monk awaits my answer, hoping he can call me
hérétique.
But Marguerite was not a heretic. She
kept her faith. And I am not a heretic. I am an apostate. I turned my back to God. But not before God turned his back to me.

The Franciscan looks at me with bulbous eyes, yellow-brown marbles in a pasty face. “Aristotle was sceptical that demons exist,” he says, “but I have evidence. Mariners have told me that when they passed near the Isle of Demons they heard human voices making a great noise…until they offered prayers and invoked the holy name of Jesus. Then, little by little, the din died away.”

The pen quivers above the paper. Thevet wants to hear of hideous forms, lascivious beings who growled and screeched, their breath sulfuric in her nostrils. He believes that Marguerite had to trade away her soul to be rescued from the island. He wants to hear me say it.

“Demons did come to her sometimes,” I say cautiously, “mostly when she was alone.”

“What did they look like?”

I hear them then, a papery rustling that grows louder:
forty days and forty nights in the wilderness.
An explosion of laughter, then a low growl:
That is nothing, Lord. Nothing.
A long hiss, then ravens' chatter:
quork-quork-quork, pruk-pruk-pruk, kmmm-mm. Eight hundred and thirty-two days, eight hundred and thirty-two nights. Alone for three hundred and twenty, Lord. Would you not accept help from the Devil then?

“They were black and horrid,” I say, “some huge, others small, but always with red eyes.”

Not true. There was no Devil but Roberval, no demons. Only the voices: rose, azure, topaz; diaphanous and warm on my shoulders and neck; their breath sweet with cinnamon and cloves. The voices. And the ravens. They have been my companions for more than sixteen years. They are my conversation: taunting, accusing, provoking, comforting. Whispering and wailing, laughing and haranguing, they argue with me and with each other. Neither demon nor angel.

Thevet salivates in anticipation, his lips wet and shiny. “What did they say?” His tongue darts out.

“Nothing. They made only dreadful noises, howling and screeching.”

It is easy to lie to the Franciscan. He is credulous, too eager to hear fantastic stories, especially about demons.

“When she prayed,
Père
, or read her New Testament, they went away.”

Père.
The word grates. I do not believe in his, or God's, paternal affection.

“New Testament!” The monk's doughy face folds easily into another scowl. Now that he can scold, he can hide his trembling eagerness. “Just like a Huguenot, possessing a New Testament, in French,” he says. “Reading for yourself, not trusting the Church fathers.”

I study the floor to see how one piece of slate is fitted one to the other, no crack wide enough for a wolf's paw or bear's muzzle. Wide enough only for the whispers.

Though the Franciscan is agitated about the new
religion and what he imagines Marguerite believed, he is also careful. Traveling from Paris to Nontron, he has ventured into the stronghold of the Huguenots. And he is not a brave man.

He is also annoyed that he did not learn Marguerite's story years ago from Roberval, whom the monk claims as a great friend.
Mon grand ami,
he has said.

André Thevet huffs like a great white bear, puffed with his own importance and power. In his bluster, he reminds me once again that he is cosmographer for François II and chaplain for the queen-mother, Catherine de Medici. The pompous buffoon is too swelled with himself and his own words to hear anyone else, and I am now certain that I need not divulge Marguerite's secrets, not to an ignorant monk who calls her wanton and shameless, who wishes only to chastise. Thevet would have her play the Magdalene,
la putain repentante
, the penitent whore.

L'idiot.
Marguerite's sin had naught to do with her sex.

The candles smoke and drip great pools of stinking tallow. The gorge rises in my throat at the odour of putrid flesh roasting. I look behind the monk's bland face and see a rotting seal wedged in a crevice, eyes hollow, picked by ravens. I smell rancid grease dripping into flames and taste slimy flesh on my tongue.

N'oubliez pas, do not forget. Grievous sin. Impardonnable. Remember, but do not tell. Do not tell.

The voices mingle with the monk's blather about Huguenots. I put my hands to my ears and rock back and forth. “
Non
,” I say, “I will not. Stop. Stop.”