Silence of Stone

by Annamarie Beckel

  “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 Then the paw is withdrawn, replaced by a white snout.Huff-huffhuff.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.

  But could she forgive her uncle for Michel’s death? Marguerite saw again the hopelessness and desperation in Michel’s face. Why did he not fight to live? Even to see his daughter, to protect her?

  The knife clicks, then scrapes, a repeated whisper: le bâtard misérable, le bâtard misérable.

  “Non, not a bastard,” I answer.

  Thevet looks up. “So the child was not a bastard.”

  “Non, it was not.”

  I stand to leave.

  “We are not yet done.”

  “I am done. You have asked, and I have told you: Marguerite birthed a child. The child lived.”

  “But the name…what was the name?”

  I turn away and open the door to face the wolves. Michella, Michella, Michella, I say to them in my head. They snarl, then scatter.

  It is nearly dawn and I have not slept. Yet, I have dreamed. In the glowing embers, I see his face, ravaged by pox, mouth filled with dark rotted stubs. The stench of his black breath still hangs in the air.

  He came to me weeks ago, or perhaps it was months, or years. Perhaps he never came at all, except in my dreams.

  Marguerite had seen him flogged aboard the Vallentyne. A felon released to Roberval for his colony, the man survived Charlesbourg Royal and returned to France a free man. He managed, somehow, to find me, the woman he believed to be Marguerite. He accosted me in the schoolroom downstairs, just after the girls had left, as if he had been waiting and watching just outside the scrivener’s shop. I protested but could not dissuade him from his conviction that I was Marguerite. When I tried to leave, he followed me up the stairs, hopping along behind me on his good leg and using his stiff leg like a crutch. Hop-scrape, hop-scrape. I stopped on the stairs so he would not force his way into my room.

  There was no gold or silver or precious jewels in New France, the man said bitterly, and when winter came and food was scarce, Roberval had us flogged for being hungry…or for lechery or buggery or bestiality. The man laughed darkly. He punished us for sins only the viceroy himself could imagine.

  The man shrugged his shoulders over and over again and winced as if the wounds on his back still bled and burned. He spat the name when he told me that Roberval had hanged six of the colonists. For disobedience, he said. Their bodies hung for days as a warning to us all.

  When I stared into his scarred face, I could see their legs kicking, their bodies stiff and swaying, turning black in the wind and cold.

  The man leaned close and whispered, his breath rank and his spittle spraying my cheek. I was there, he said, when he put you ashore. He folded his hands delicately under his chin. And the cowardly noblemen and soldiers stood aside, he said, like faint-hearted ladies. He dropped his hands to his crotch and cupped it in imitation of the hapless nobles. Or men with no balls, he hissed.

  How you must hate your uncle, he continued. He cocked his head and gave me a sidelong look before he spoke again. Roberval is often in Paris, at court, the cousin of King Henri’s whore. He put his hands to his chest as if he were fondling breasts and gave me a lecherous grin.

  He extended his grimy hand and rubbed his thumb against his first two fingers. For very little, he said, I could make your uncle pay for what he did…to all of us.

  I did not trust him. He would take my money and do nothing. Yet I remember an open palm, coins gleaming, gold and silver. Did I give him money?

  I have no gold or silver.

  I can see so clearly the ice-blue eyes and the gaping wound beneath the square jaw. I can hear the rush of air from the severed windpipe and see scarlet blood dripping from the blade of Michel’s dagger.

  I raise a hand to my nose. My fingers smell as if I have been butchering a seal.

  Did I only will it so? Can willing something make it happen?

  Isabelle hums to herself as she studies a Latin grammar. The book is precious, our only copy, and she is not permitted to touch it. I turn the vellum pages for her. Isabelle is too young to learn Latin, and yet I am oddly pleased that she is eager to learn the language of scholars.

  “Amo, amas, amant,” she reads, then looks to me for affirmation. I nod.

  I watch Isabelle’s lips, so like Michel’s, and Michella’s. Her skin is soft, translucent and glowing. I want to lean close and bury my face in her dark curls.

  Before her birth, Michella had fed gluttonously on seal meat and fat. She was born plump and white, like a seal pup, and just as loud, bawling and mewling for her mother’s milk. Marguerite too had fed heavily on seals – Michel’s gift to them – so that her breasts filled with sweet milk that was rich with fat.

  She and Damienne had managed to preserve enough seal meat and oil to remain within the cave – and safe from bears – for several weeks after Michella’s birth, until after the seals and bears were gone. When open water appeared near shore, masses of ducks and geese descended. Hordes of seabirds nested on the rocky ledges on the western side of the island, setting up a terrible wonderful din. Even the clumsy Damienne could catch the birds with the twine net. Marguerite and Damienne were awed by the abundance.

  Marguerite, her mouth craving something green and fresh, bound Michella to her chest with cloth torn from undershifts and went out to collect new shoots and leaves not yet unfurled. With bellies no longer painful with hunger, she and Damienne could stand and marvel at the enormous islands of ice that floated past: azure and green and aquamarine. The craggy islands appeared and then were gone within days. Marguerite and Damienne marvelled, but they prayed to see white sails, not mountains of ice. Marguerite prayed in both French and Latin.

  La grâce de Dieu. Misericordia Deus.

  God remained silent in both French and Latin.Le silence. Silentium.

  I hear chuckling laughter, an infant’s whimpers, then only Isabelle softly repeating the Latin words.

  With the sea ice gone, and with it the wolves and fearsome bears, Marguerite and Damienne resumed building fires on the rocky beach near the harbour, piling them high with green boughs.

  Roberval will come for us now, Marguerite assured Damienne, again and again. The old woman only nodded, and Marguerite said nothing about her fear that something dreadful had happened to her uncle and the ships.

  Even if Roberval himself cannot come for us, she told Damienne, someone will. Surely.

  Under bright daylight and with Michella at her breast, Marguerite read her New Testament and prayed. She continued marking the cave wall for each passing day, renewing the marks that had been blackened by smoke.

  Her face serious, Isabelle nods for me to turn the page, unmindful of her beautiful lips murmuring words that are strange and foreign on her tongue. “Esse, celere, ferre.”

  I want to lean in close and sniff her cheek. It would smell of violets and grass.

  “Habere,” she whispers.

  Habere. To have, to hold.

  Marguerite gazed in amazement at the child she held in her arms. How had this wondrous creature come to her? The greedy mouth at her breast was a source of both comfort and tortuous memory. Freed from the cave’s darkness, the sun warm on her face, and her belly no longer screaming its hunger, Marguerite could remember love. She felt an empty ache that she had not felt for months, and she began to long for the Michel she’d known aboard ship and in their first few days on the island – Michel in the garden. She wanted to show him the baby she was certain now he would adore. She envisioned his dazzling smile, the golden flecks in his eyes. She yearned to make love in the grassy meadows, under the benevolent sun, a warm wind caressing them. The baby sucked, and Marguerite recalled his mouth on her breast, his hands on her hips, pulling her to him. She remembered, then she hugged Michella to her chest and wept.

  “Exspecto
,” Isabelle says, “to expect, anticipate, hope for.” She bows her head, then looks up at me through dark lashes. “Papa says I must hope for a wealthy husband, that I must be sinless…and hope. What do you hope for, Madame de Roberval?”

  Her question startles me. Hope. What do I hope for?

  “Nihilum,” I answer. “I hope for nothing.”

  Isabelle’s smooth brow furrows. Her grey eyes hold questions she does not know how to ask. She is too young. Like Marguerite, she cannot understand how someone can hope for nothing.

  Marguerite was out collecting eggs from the nests of seabirds, Michella bound to her chest, when broad white sails came into view. Thinking at first that her eyes, and her mind, were deceiving her, she stood and watched. Then, heart pounding wildly, she ran down to the harbour and threw wood and green boughs onto the fire to build it as high as she could. Thick smoke billowed heavenward, carrying with it her most fervent prayers: My hope is in my God…O save me for thy mercy’s sake…The Lord is my firmament, my refuge, and my deliverer…My deliverer, my deliverer, my deliverer…For thy mercy’s sake, save us, save us, save us.

  Marguerite jumped up and down, flailing her arms, then hurried to the cave. She gave Michella to Damienne, grabbed her rose silk gown from the trunk, and ran back down to the harbour. She tied the gown to a stout stick and waved it in wide arcs. She waved her pink flag until her arms and shoulders ached and she could no longer hold the stick aloft.

  The ship came closer. Marguerite could see from its flags that it was not Roberval’s, nor even a French ship. It was Portuguese. The ship passed by slowly, then sailed away.

  Shoulders shaking with her sobs, Marguerite stared at the receding sails through a blur of tears. Why had God offered hope only to snatch it away? She slumped down to the rocks. Why?

  She sat until long after the sun had set, shredding the silk gown. As her fingers worked, she tried to set her thoughts upon Job, God’s beloved but tested servant. Job’s trials were designed by the Devil, not God.

  Marguerite released the fluttering strips of silk to the wind.

  “Nihilum,” Isabelle repeats. “Nothing.”