Silence of Stone (9 page)

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.