“For I will behold thy heavens,” they drone, “the works of thy fingers, the moon and the stars which thou hast founded. What is man that thou art mindful of him?”
The voices taunt:What is man that thou art mindful of him? Le silence. Km-mm-mm. How long, O Lord? How long?
I turn my back and try to ignore both the voices and the psalm.
“Thou hast made him a little less than the angels, thou hast crowned him with glory and honour.”
Finished now, the girls shuffle to the shelf to pick up their embroidery hoops, needles, and thread. I hear small sighs and the rustle of skirts sliding onto benches.
Isabelle tugs at my hand. “Madame de Roberval,” she says, “have you ever seen an angel?”
“An angel?” I want to laugh out loud, but cannot. “Non,” I say. “Never.”
“Papa says Mama’s an angel now, that she’s in heaven. I would like to see her. Where do you think heaven is?”
“I don’t know.”
“My baby brother killed her.” Isabelle speaks with the bluntness of children. “He was born dead. Never baptised. Do you think he’s in heaven with her?”
“I know nothing of heaven, Isabelle. Go get your hoops and needles.”
“Papa says he is.” She stands on tiptoe and cups her hand to her mouth as if she would tell me a secret. She wants me to lean down. And I do – though I have no wish to know her secrets – or her father’s. “I hope not,” she confesses, “because I hate him.” Her forehead creases in worry. “Does that make me wicked?”
Grievous sin. La perversité. Impardonnable.
I take a deep breath. “Non, you are not wicked. No matter what you wish for.”
The Franciscan looks up from his papers. “Why did you not bury the old woman?”
Pourquoi? Why? La culpabilité.
I put my hands over my ears and stare into the flame of a candle. I see porcelain skin, rosebud lips, two tiny pearl teeth.
“Put your hands down and tell me why you did not bury her.”
I drop my hands into my lap. “Marguerite saved all her strength for the baby.”
“So you just left her for the animals?”
“The flesh was no longer Damienne’s.”
La perversité. Grievous sin.
“So her bones lie there yet?” He looks at me as if I were a leper.
“Non, they do not.” Scattered by wolves and foxes. Ravens.
He shakes his head as if he will never understand. That is true. He will not.
“What happened after the old woman died?” he says finally.
“No food. Marguerite had no milk. The baby starved.” Whimpers gone to silence. Bones fragile as a robin’s.
“When?”
“The sixth day of December. Five hundred and twelve days after Roberval left them.” Scrape of stone upon stone.
“Did you bury the child?”
“Marguerite buried the baby beside its father.”
“How did you survive the winter if you had no food?”
“She didn’t.”
He stares at me, his mouth twitching. “What do you mean?”
“Marguerite died.”
“Died?”
“She died. I lived.”
“Impossible,” he whispers. His eyes, no longer cold hard marble, are bright and soft with fear. “Is it demons that make you say such strange things?” he asks. “Did you make promises to the Devil?”
I hear them then, the papery rustling that grows louder:Eight hundred and thirty-two days and nights. Alone for three hundred and twenty. Why? Pourquoi? Kek-kek-kek. Quork-quork-quork.
“Non, Père, no promises to the Devil, no demons.”
Her sin, not yours. Saved by our grace, not God’s.
“They are not uncommon in those heathen lands.” He speaks slowly, trying to calm himself. “The Indians are often tormented by evil spirits.” He pauses, then gestures deliberately as if trying to explain something difficult to a child. His own words comfort him. “When I used to travel in their country, les sauvages would come and throw themselves into my arms, shouting, ‘the evil spirit is beating and tormenting me. Help me, I beg of you.’”
I sit, hands folded in my lap, and do not move.
“And immediately,” he continues, “I would seize them and recite the Gospel of Saint John, which invariably delivered them from the evil spirit.” He nods. “I performed this most holy and Catholic act more than one hundred times.”
Thevet picks up a quill and tries to still his fingers’ trembling, but the feather quivers in his hand. “I could do the same for you, Marguerite. There is no shame. Christ himself removed seven demons from Mary Magdalene and she became holy.” He opens a Bible and begins reciting in Latin: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word–”
I spring forward and bare my teeth. “Non, Père,” I say. “I am not tormented by demons. I am tormented by you.”
He shrinks back, spittle gathering on his lips.
Alone for three hundred and twenty days and nights. Kek-kek-kek. Grievous sin. Debts must be paid.
He continues reciting, his voice shaking: “And the Word was God…In him was life–”
I slam his Bible closed. “There are no demons within me.” I stretch out my hand and hold my palm over a candle. “The debts are paid,” I say softly. “She paid them.”
The monk stares, his face terrified and confused. He slaps my hand away from the flame. “You are mad,” he croaks.
Quork-quork-quork, kek-kek-kek.
I sit back on my bench and rub a thumb over my reddened palm.
He slowly crosses himself, forehead to heart, left shoulder to right, then takes a deep hiccupping breath. “I have made inquiries,” he says cautiously, “and no one saw you for nearly a fortnight after the Feast of the Epiphany.” Suspicion curls his upper lip. “The same time Roberval was killed.”
I smile at the irony he does not see. “The Epiphany is a time for revelation,Père, not concealment.” I clasp my hands to cover my palm. “No one in Nontron ever sees me. Not really.”
“Do not speak to me in riddles.” He pulls at his beard. “I have learned that for nearly a fortnight you were not here to teach the girls.”
“I was ill. Confined to my garret.”
“Ill?” he says. “With what?”
“Pox.”
“Your face bears no scars.” The Franciscan takes another stuttering breath to tamp down his fear. “You survived for twenty-seven months on the Isle of Demons, nearly a year alone.” His mouth pulls to one side. “Traveling to Paris? Killing your uncle? That would have been as nothing to you.”
“Au contraire, Père, it would have been some-thing…a great pleasure. Had I done it.”
The air is warm and wet, and I have left the window open. Earlier I placed a bit of raw fish on the sill – the tail and some skin cleaned of scales. Foolish to share my food with the cat. Yet I hope she will come.
I consider my palm and wonder if I should prick the blister.
I do not remember illness. Nor do I remember the Feast of the Epiphany or traveling rutted snowy roads or the crowded streets of Paris. Scores of times in my dreams I have hid in the shadows, then leapt out and slit his throat. But if I had awaken and felt his sticky blood on my hands, would I not recall that particular satisfaction?
A deep chuckling:an instrument of justice…or of murder?
“Justice, not murder. But it was not I.”
La vengeance. Debts must be paid.
“Oui, but it was not I who extracted payment.”
La vengeance. La justice. Le meurtre.
“There are many who wished him dead.” I think of the pockmarked man. “Perhaps one of Roberval’s own colonists was the murderer.”
Did he visit me? Or was that only a dream? I see the glint of gold and silver, hear the clink-clink-clink of coins.
La vengeance. La meurtrière. Murderer. La culpabilité.
Did I give him money to
kill Roberval?
Perhaps. But I know that the voices cannot always be trusted. It was they who woke me from death with their whispers and their laughter, they who called me to life so they could taunt and harass – and make me remember: N’oubliez pas. When I stood and walked away from the crypt, they followed after me: swirls of sapphire, ruby, emerald, and onyx. Carrying the sweet scent of spices, they wrapped themselves about my shoulders, tangled themselves in my hair, and clung to my ears. N’oubliez pas. Do not forget. Saved by our grace, not God’s. Her sin, not yours.
I did not fear them. What could they do? I was not afraid of dying. I was not afraid of God, and so I feared nothing.
Sometimes, on frigid moonless nights, I could see the voices in the sky: azure, jade, and amber, shimmering veiled dancers on an ebony stage sprinkled with diamonds. I could hear their rustling whispers: teasing, accusing, comforting, duplicitous. I would shout to the black sky, answering their taunts and rebukes.
When I walked away from Marguerite and her sin, I had no fear of the sea’s ravenous white-toothed maw or the fierce red-clawed winds. Let them rage against me. I did not care.
At night, from the entrance of the cave, I saw wolves’ copper eyes and heard their susurrant movements through intertwined branches. Their howls and yips pierced the black crepe of night like silver needles, but I was not afraid. I went out and walked among them. They recognized a kindred savagery in my eyes and kept a wary distance.
I was not afraid of the ravens. Marguerite had shunned them. Birds of death, she had called them, omens of evil. I welcomed them and acknowledged them as confederates. Like me, they feared nothing and mocked everything. I learned their irreverent language of croaks, murmurs, and chuckles:quorkquork-quork, pruk-pruk-pruk, kmm-mm-mm, cark-cark-cark, kek-kek-kek. In a voice as raspy as theirs, I answered.
Even now – should I wish to do so – I could tell Marguerite’s story more easily and truthfully in the language of ravens than in the tangled and treacherous words of men.
I hear a soft thud. The cat has jumped up on the windowsill. Trying to subdue the wildness in my eyes, I will her to stay. She surveys the room: the small table, the hearth, the black pot, the narrow bed, then finally, my face. Black slits widen in serpentine eyes. She snatches the bit of fish and leaps away, before I can stand, and long before I can put my fingers into her ragged fur, soft and matted, wet from the rain.
I light a beeswax candle to ward off the dark.
Scrape of stone upon stone. Each morning I added to the lines Marguerite had drawn, but I no longer cared what day it was, and every day, except when the fierce winds and snow forced me to stay within the cave, I walked, following the ravens wherever they led, though I would not go near to the cliff from which Damienne had fallen.
In the company of ravens, I walked the island: end to end, perimeter, heights and depths, sometimes trudging over windswept rock, sometimes through pockets of deep snow. I counted the strides: one hundred and fifty-six from the cave to the nearest fresh water, eight hundred and four from the cave to the inlet where Michel had built the canvas shelters, nine hundred and fourteen from the cave to the harbour, nine hundred and eighty-two from the summit to the sea.
When the sea froze, I walked across hills and valleys of rafted ice, the sharp edges slicing into the soles of Michel’s boots. Four hundred and twelve strides from my island to the next.
I found nothing but more rocks and trees, snow and ice.
All the while I walked, the ravens played in the snow, bathing, diving into it, tossing beakfuls onto glossy black feathers and then shaking it off again. They mocked the snow and ice and the sleet-filled wind. They mocked hunger. They would snap their bills, fly high into the air and spiral down, sometimes alone, sometimes in pairs, spiralling around each other. Always they chattered, to each other and to me:quork-quork-quork, pruk-pruk-pruk, kek-kekkek. I learned their names: Kyree, Prikoo, Karkae, Quakaa, Konkaree. I could not discern who was female and who was male, and they would not say. Curiously, that pleased me.
On clear days the sun warmed the flat stone beside the entrance of the cave. From that broad red rock, Marguerite had kept watch on the harbour, waiting for a ship with white sails. I kept watch, but I waited for nothing.
I would sit beneath the sun’s unblinking eye and consider the changing blues and greens of the ice and the sea. I studied the ochre, grey, and pink of the solid rock lining the harbour and of the high stone cliffs beside me, patterned like an artist’s oils with curious patches of mottled black and bright green. I listened to the melody of the ice hissing and cracking and booming.
I was queen of all I surveyed: Queen of the Isle of Demons, my only subjects the chittering sparrows and screeching gulls, the silent rabbits and mice. The ravens and the voices would never bend to my will. They were my companions, not my subjects, and they set up a constant babble, intermingling, interrupting, so that I sometimes longed for the silence Marguerite had known.
I did not fear, but neither did I welcome, Damienne’s visits. She came to me often, nearly every night for several weeks. Still gaunt, face skeletal, she came and sat too near to the fire, as if in death she could not warm herself. She moved her mouth in a mumble, as if she too were listening to the voices, and arguing. Her eyes accused when she showed me the bloody wounds on her calves.
Be gone from here, I said. I am not her.
Sin, Marguerite, grievous sin, she hissed.
Again and again I repeated the same words: Marguerite meant only to feed Michella, whom you loved, and she paid for what she did. I am not her.
Sin, Marguerite, grievous sin.
Her sin, not mine.
You did not bury my bones. Naked, they click and rattle in the wind. You let the ravens dance upon them. Damienne shivered then and put her hands into the fire, but her flesh did not burn.
The voices on my shoulders whispered:Leapt. Le suicide. Impardonnable.
What about your sin, Damienne? I said, the voices giving me courage. You didn’t fall. You leapt.
They pushed me.
Who?
The demons.
There are no demons.
Sin, Marguerite, grievous sin.
She is dead. I am not her.
I hear the voices now:Grievous sin. La perversité. Impardonnable. Debts must be paid.
“Her sin, not mine,” I answer. “I am not her.”
I light another candle and search for a bit of cheese to place on the windowsill, but can find nothing. Nothing but the ebony feather. I cradle it in my hands and remember. That memory is mine, not Marguerite’s, and it is the only one I choose.
I was not afraid of dying, and yet I fought to live. The powder had become useless, so I no longer bothered to carry the heavy musket with me. I could not shoot the few deer I saw, but managed to net some partridge and gulls and to snare a rabbit now and again. I chopped holes in the ice of the ponds and caught fish. Sometimes I was so hungry I ate the fish raw: scales, bones, entrails, everything. I boiled old bones again and again until the water stayed clear, and then I boiled pieces of hide and seaweed. I stripped the inner bark from trees, the buds from their branches, pulled up dead brown grasses to simmer into a broth. I dug through snow to find the few berries I’d missed the previous fall. I dug for roots, using the axe and the dagger, but the earth was frozen and unforgiving.
I sucked on hardened globs of resin I pried from the bark of trees. I even sucked on small stones and shells just to have something in my mouth. But I did not return to the carcass that was not Damienne.
I began to see that everything was true. And not true. All of it mattered. None of it mattered. The ravens, my hunger, the wind and the sea, the snow, the dreams and the apparitions, the rocks and the trees. The voices. All of it was my life. All of it was my death. No angels. No demons. Only the spirits of that place,les esprits de cet endroit. Neither good nor evil.
The ravens led me to carrion: a seal carcass, its rotting halted by snow and ice; bones of deer, not yet
picked clean; fish heads; the scattered shells of mussels, whelks, and crabs. Heads tilted, the ravens studied me with discerning black eyes, then flashed white eyelids and allowed me eat beside them, picking and grubbing, murmuring and mumbling. Km-mm-mm. Kek-kek-kek.
I followed them everywhere, except to the place where the bones that were not Damienne lay.
One morning, after a full moon, several weeks after Michella’s death, or perhaps a month, maybe two – I cannot recall and it does not matter – the ravens led me to the rock summit behind the cave. A crevice about three paces in length and breadth had been swept clean of snow and ice. A large packet, wrapped in hide and covered by a thin layer of new snow, lay within the crevice.
I thought at first the packet was of my own imagining. I glanced back at the ravens. They flashed white eyelids and shifted quietly on bare rock, spreading and shaking black feathers then settling them again.Km-mm-mm.
I knelt down and brushed away the snow. On top of the packet lay a small pouch of rose silk tied with a fine thread. I sat back on my heels, stunned: rose silk from Marguerite’s dress. Somewhere on the island was a man, or a woman! An Indian…or un esprit. I scanned the fresh snow, but there were no tracks but my own and the ravens’.
Fingers fumbling, I untied the thread binding the silk and smoothed the wrinkled cloth. In the centre of the silk square lay dried shavings that smelled of bark and leaves and earth. Tea? Medicine? Poison?
I set the shavings aside and reached for Michel’s dagger, then stopped, deciding instead to untie the larger bindings carefully. I unfolded the dark hide, the inner side a lustrous white fur. A thick plait of sweet-smelling grass lay atop sheets of thin bark. I lifted the bark sheets and saw strips of dried meat, smoked fish, and a small basket filled with a mixture of fat and dried berries. The stitching on the bark basket was evenly spaced, meticulous. A flowing pattern of flowers, leaves, and vines had been etched along the edge. Who had taken such care with this basket? Who had left this gift?
Un cadeau, un cadeau. Km-mm-mm.
I did not know if the words came from the voices or the ravens, did not know if I was dreaming. I did not care. I tore chunks from the greasy smoked fish and stuffed them into my mouth. Even before I could swallow the fish, I bit into the tough meat, ripped off a thin strip, then chewed and chewed, spit dripping down my chin, my teeth and jaws aching with the effort. I dipped my fingers into the berries and fat and scooped the mixture into my mouth. I could not stop myself from eating. I did not care that the food might be poisoned.
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