Silence of Stone
Page 3
Roberval hired a servant for Marguerite, an older widow from Normandy. Damienne was plump and cheerful and garrulous, and she delighted in her charge:une belle demoiselle whom she could dress like a doll and fuss and fret over. Never having known a mother, Marguerite came to love Damienne’s chatter and her solicitous ministrations.
When Roberval began consulting Marguerite about his business ventures and investments, as if he esteemed her opinion, as if he valued her education, especially her knowledge of Latin, she revelled in his attentions.
La vanité. La fille naïve. La coquette.
I hear their contempt. Despite the smouldering fire, I breathe in the arid essence of silk and taffeta and books. The fragrance of wet earth and new grass drifts in through the open window. The fresh scent growing from winter’s decay brings a shudder. April. The season when Roberval’s ships left La Rochelle for New France.
I burrow deeper into my blanket and stare into the small flame, the remembering unbearable now, far, far worse than the cut on my wrist.
I will myself to sleep, to forget.
I feel a presence, a soul nearby. I look up and see iridescent green eyes staring at me through the open window. A striped face, a tattered ear. I creep toward the window, but the cat is wary. It turns and flees, agile despite a stiff back leg that gives it a bouncing gait, like a pirate with a wooden leg.
I go to the drawer for a leather cord, stretch it out to its full length, then twist and tie a knot. I set the snare in the narrow space between my garret and the next. If I had a bit of meat or cheese, I would lay bait. The cat is thin and rangy. Still, I am hungry. I am always hungry.
The girls are practising embroidery, their fingers clumsy. My own eyes are gritty from passing thread through the eyes of their needles, over and over again. I keep my sleeve pulled down to cover my wrist.
The girls bend their heads over their hoops. All except Isabelle. She is plaiting a scarlet thread into her dark hair. “Madame de Roberval,” she says, “look at me.Je suis belle, non ?”
“Your father does not pay for you to play. How can you help your mother if you do not learn to work?”
Her grin disappears. “Mama is dead.”
“All the more reason to work hard.” I pick up her hoop and turn it over. The back of the cloth is a welter of tangles and knots.
Isabelle pouts. “I hate embroidery. My fingers are poked full of holes.”
“We must often do what is hateful to us.” I look at my hands. Instead of smooth ovals, I see nails ragged and bleeding from scraping for mussels. Dry bones. A dead gull, flesh gone. Sucking on the tips of white feathers, my belly cavernous and hollow. My hands and feet are suddenly numb with cold.
Isabelle gives a saucy flick of her curls, then begins to remove the red thread, perhaps glad the day is nearly at an end and there will be no more embroidery for her today. Yet she lingers after the other girls are gone. She steps close, touches her fingertips to my hand, and offers a tentative contrite smile.
My lips cannot soften to return it.
Isabelle turns and runs out the door. I hear her happy exclamation: “Papa!” And imagine Monsieur Lafrenière in his black doublet and plain white cuffs. Unlike the other fathers, he wears no rings, no jewels on his cap, no family crest on his chest.
Yet Isabelle has paper, quills, and ink.
Opposite the window a small square of ochre light moves slowly across the wall. I watch how the stones wrinkle the light.
The Franciscan shuffles papers, pretending that he has no need to apologize for his ludicrous accusation that I hired someone to kill Roberval. He is the cosmographer for King François II, the chaplain for Catherine de’ Medici. He will apologize for nothing.
My wool sleeve catches on the wound at my wrist. The cut itches.
Thevet sighs. “It is to be regretted that Roberval’s colony failed. It would have brought the king immortal honour – and the grace of God – to have rescued these barbarous people from ignorance and brought them to the Church.”
He leans forward, his face a mask of concern. “Tell me everything,” he says quietly, as if we were conspirators. “Start at the beginning. Tell me about Canada.”
There is a long silence while I try to compose an answer. Thevet toys with his quills, trying not to show his impatience. He cannot wait long. “That great mariner, Jacques Cartier, is one of my best friends,” he says. “He has told me much.”
I suspect the monk is lying. Cartier was discerning, determined, and to the young Marguerite, handsome and courageous. Never would such a man be a great friend to the imbecile who sits before me.
I am content to listen to the guttering candles, but Thevet rushes to fill the quiet. “The Hochelaga Indians are the ones best known to the French. Indeed, Cartier brought two of them to the king. In their religion they have no other method or ceremony of worshipping or praying to their god than to contemplate the new moon.”
I stare into the ochre light and see a tall man standing amidst fog. He is dressed in hides, his sleek hair pulled up in a knot. Tethered to the knot, and the same colour as his hair, an ebony feather turns in the wind and brushes his cheek. I hear a feather’s rasp, but it is only the monk smoothing his quill.
Thevet burbles on, “The Indians were well treated by the French.” He raises a finger for emphasis. “And for this very reason they claimed that their god, who had told them the bearded foreigners had killed their men, was a liar.”
Whose god is a liar? I shout in my head.
“Marguerite was obedient,” I say out loud. “She went with her uncle. But she learned nothing of Canada. She knew only the Isle of Demons.”
He does not hear my bitterness.
When Roberval insisted that Marguerite and Damienne go with him to New France, Damienne put her hands to her face, her mouth and eyes a triangle of round O’s. Ships disappear, she worried aloud, never to be seen again. Dragons and monsters abound in those lands,les sauvages.
Marguerite was terrified. She protested and argued, wept and pleaded, but Roberval was adamant.
For how long? she asked.
Roberval would give her no answer, saying only that he would make his fortune in New France.
But how long? Marguerite persisted. A year? Two? Five? A lifetime?
“You seem to forget, Marguerite, that it was your own scandalous behaviour that placed you on the Isle of Demons,” the monk says, “and by God’s grace that you survived. Quite miraculously, I would say.”
Laughter flows from the stones:How long, O Lord? How long wilt thou forget me? How long wilt thou turn thy face from me? Km-mm-mm. Saved by our grace, not God’s.
“Marguerite obeyed,” I repeat, shutting out the voices, “but she missed the…” I search for a word. “Amenities of the court.”
“Ah, a spoiled coquette even then.”
“Non, Marguerite was not a coquette. She craved learned conversation, talk of books and ideas.”
“Books and ideas?” Thevet scoffs. “The Queen of Navarre poisoned you, and many others, with talk of new ideas, talk of the new religion. Thanks be to God that King Henri dealt firmly with all of that.”
All of that. The Franciscan blathers on about heretics, as if all of that is of little consequence. An inconvenience. Men hanging from the ramparts at Amboise. Burnings.La Chambre Ardente, King Henri’s Burning Chamber. All for a God who does not hear them, a God who does not answer.
How long, O Lord? How long? My bones are grown dry.
Marguerite prayed that her uncle would change his mind. When he did not, she screwed up her courage, because she believed that her uncle loved her, that he insisted on her accompanying him to Canada because he could not bear to be so long without her.
Jacques Cartier, her uncle’s second-in-command, set sail from La Rochelle in May 1541, but Roberval was forced to delay his departure. He could find no one willing to go with him. Men would go to Terre Neuve to fish – but they wanted to return again to France when the season ended.
Finally, after a year’s delay, King François agreed to release two hundred felons from prison, upon pain of death if they returned to France. Roberval, using all his considerable charm, succeeded in persuading a dozen impoverished noblemen to venture forth, promising they would make their fortunes in New France.
On the sixteenth day of April in 1542, Marguerite and a trembling Damienne, together with noblemen and soldiers and the freed murderers and thieves, boarded the Vallentyne, the Sainte-Anne, and the Lèchefraye.
The Franciscan is finished with heretics for now. “Did you know him before you left France?” he asks. “Or did you meet him aboard ship?”
“Who?”
“Your lover,” he says impatiently.
“She did not know him in France. He boarded the Vallentyne with her…before the murderers and thieves.” I see their sallow pockmarked faces, sneers filled with dark stubby teeth and bleeding gums. But I can also see Michel’s mischievous grin and the gold flecks in his eyes that promised love.
“A nobleman?”
“Oui.”
“What happened on the voyage to anger Roberval?”
I shrug a shoulder against my neck. “They courted.” Dark beard tickling her skin, fingers dancing across the tops of her breasts. Her mouth on his, tongues exploring.
“Your uncle would not have objected to mere courting. Obviously there was more,” he insists. “There was sin, Marguerite, grievous sin…for which you must beg God’s forgiveness.” Thevet’s lip curls as if he is disgusted by the thought of bodies and desire.
Spit gathers in my mouth. I would send it flying onto his curled lip if I could. Marguerite sinned, but not with Michel. They merely loved. As if one can love, merely.
“Marguerite paid dearly for her sins.”
Thevet does not hear. He stands and points at me, as if to emphasize the importance of his suppositions. “Perhaps you believed yourself to be a savage. Among the savages, girls are not scorned for having served young men before they are married.” His tongue flicks out and lingers at the corner of his mouth, and I know that he only pretends at his disgust for desire.
“I understand from Cartier that there are even certain lodges where they meet, the men to know the women.” He smoothes his cassock, his hand hovering over his crotch. He watches to see if I am looking.
I turn away and try to forget what he has made me see. I hear worms in the graveyard outside, gnawing at the newly dead.
“They were married,” I say.
He snorts. “A hand-fast marriage…a marriage for peasants, not nobles.”
The Franciscan sits down and riffles through his notes. “Roberval’s records are incomplete. Pages are missing. But it appears there were only seven noblemen aboard the Vallentyne: Roberval himself, La Salle, de Velleneuve, La Brosse, de Longueval, de Mire, de Lespinay.” He lifts an eyebrow. “Which one did you choose for your sin?”
“Their love was not a sin.”
“Putain! Even now you would show no contrition?” His bulbous eyes bulge even more. “Roberval was right to punish you.”
“He could have married them,” I say quietly. “They would have been the first married couple in his colony.”
“But you and your lover had sinned. Roberval had to set an example to the other colonists.”
“To murderers and thieves?”
“Precisely. There was an obvious need for Roberval’s strict discipline.”
I hear the leather biting into flesh, and the screams. I see flayed backs. A man dangles from the yardarm, legs kicking, then still. The stink of his bowels fills the room.
I rub my wounded wrist. “Roberval had no need to set an example. He wanted Marguerite to die.”
Thevet flinches. “Preposterous! Non, it was with terrible sadness that he punished you. He told me so himself.”
I laugh out loud, unable to reconcile the ice-blue eyes with sorrow. “Why do you think,Père, that all records of Marguerite have vanished?”
His hands flutter. “Records are often incomplete, pages missing.”
My voice is weary of talking, and I am weary of Thevet. I have said far too much already, but I must say one thing more. “It was Roberval who destroyed the records.”
“To what end?”
“To hide the identity of Marguerite’s husband.”
“Why would he do that?”
“Because he feared that her husband’s family would bring a suit against him.”
“But Roberval was viceroy. He was the law.”
“They are nobles. They could have brought a petition to King François.”
His tawny eyes pull away from me, and I know he is struggling to solve the puzzle. What family in France, he is asking himself, is so powerful they would dare to bring a petition against Roberval to King François?
I offer Thevet these parting words: “None of the men on your list was Marguerite’s husband.”
The noose dangles empty. The striped cat is shrewd. I re-set the snare, then wrap myself in a blanket and sit near the fire, fingers drumming, drumming, drumming against my thigh. The Franciscan’s questions have breathed life into small dusty carcasses that had lain amidst ashes and rotting earth. Words, memories, images buzz like so many dung-covered flies, a humming din in my head:La belle fille. Innocente. L’amour, le désir. Pearly bones. Dead eye to bloody sky. La culpabilité. Grievous sin. Impardonnable. Km-mm-mm.
A spider weaves her web among faggots stacked near the hearth. Her legs move gracefully, embroidering one silky strand to another, and I listen for the song as her legs pluck each delicate string – a simple melody, like one of Michel’s chansons. The spider is ravenous for small creatures, but meticulous and patient in setting her snare, and I decide to release to her the buzzing winged beasts hovering in my head. She will catch them and bind them, then eat them at her leisure, and they will be gone from me.
My first offering is a slender blue damselfly, wings like silver gossamer. “L’amour,” I say quietly.
La putain. La meurtrière. Murderer. Le sang rouge.
“L’amour,” I shout out loud to silence the other voices.
In their first few days at sea, Marguerite and Damienne walked about on deck, bored and fretful, wary of the wind and waves. Though familiar with the stink of pigs and chickens, Marguerite now proclaimed the odours offensive, and she walked with a lavender-scented handkerchief pressed to her nose. To keep her hair from tangling in the wind, she confined her chestnut curls within a fine mesh snood sewn with pearls, and she scurried below when she thought the salt wind and sea spray too harsh on her skin. Amused by Marguerite’s pretensions, Damienne encouraged them nonetheless, suspecting that a certain young nobleman, who seemed to contrive for his path to cross theirs, might find them charming.
Marguerite had known men who were far more handsome, her uncle among them, but Michel’s face, unblemished by pox and with pointed dark beard neatly trimmed, pleased her. His grin, which came easily and often, transformed his somewhat ordinary comeliness into a portrait that made the articulate Marguerite stumble on her words.
He’d trained only briefly as a soldier, and though neither lazy nor profligate, he carefully explained, he had found himself ill-suited to the military life, a life of discipline and obedience. His family, like Marguerite’s, was noble but poor.
Michel thumped a fist to his heart. But I will make a new fortune in New France, he proclaimed, Roberval has promised us that. Gold and precious jewels lying upon the ground for the taking, the viceroy says.
But les sauvages, Damienne whispered. What about them?
Michel waved a hand, dismissing her concerns. There are many soldiers among us, he said, with guns. The Indians will not be a problem. And when they see what civilization and religion can offer them, they will soon become our allies.
&nbs
p; Marguerite seized upon Michel’s enthusiasm. He gave her hope that Canada would be neither as dreadful nor as dangerous as she imagined. He became a delightfully pleasant distraction from her fears and worries.
Nevertheless, Marguerite remained mindful of her station as ward of the viceroy, and she tried not to linger overly long in Michel’s company. Yet she found herself inexorably drawn to his good cheer and conversation. Though she read her New Testament and prayed daily, and liked to think of her heart as pious and devout, she also recognized within herself a fluttery yearning that could not be denied, a yearning that made her cheeks colour whenever she saw Michel.
Damienne’s smile was indulgent. He may be poor, but he is a nobleman, the old widow reasoned. Your uncle did not object to young men’s attentions when you were at court. Why would he do so now?
I run my thumb along the sharp blade of the dagger. How naive they had been. Why, indeed, would Roberval object? I place the point in my palm, but resist pushing it through.
Michel, who knew even less about sailing than he did about soldiering, did little work aboard ship. With felons at his disposal, Roberval could hardly assign a nobleman to the galley or to feed the livestock or to dispatch manure and the contents of chamber pots into the sea.
Idle, and perhaps to the viceroy’s eyes useless, Michel began coming to their cabin to play his citre for Marguerite and Damienne. He was not a skilled musician, but Marguerite cared little about that. She was enthralled. She danced within the narrow confines of the cramped and airless cabin and imagined herself back at court, lustrous pearls at her throat, colourful silks and taffetas rustling. The music reminded her of the Queen of Narvarre from whom she’d learned about Erasmus and Thomas à Kempis. She and the queen had enjoyed talking long into the night, sometimes singing psalms together. It had been thrilling – this clandestine talk that skirted closely upon heresy – and made Marguerite eager to discuss theology and philosophy with Michel. She was surprised, and just a little chagrined, to find him neither knowledgeable about nor interested in books and ideas.