Silence of Stone (4 page)

Non.
I forget much, but I would not forget three hundred miles of mud and biting winds nor that final satisfying image: ice-blue eyes filled with white-hot terror.

I did not kill him. But I wish I had.

The Franciscan suspects I may have hired someone. How foolish. I have little money, only the few coins I collect for teaching the girls and the small pension the Queen of Navarre arranged for me. Not nearly enough to hire an assassin. Unless? Unless he hated Roberval as much as I do. He'd do it then for the sheer pleasure of the doing.

Do I know such a man?

I wake, panting, his wrathful eyes boring into me. I feel burning in the centre of my chest. Think. Think. He is dead now. But in the darkness, I see his face, white as alabaster and just as cold and hard. The perfectly sculpted lips curve in a cruel smile.

I light a candle from embers in the hearth. The candles are beeswax, costly, but I cannot abide the stink of tallow. I use them sparingly.

I feel a sharp pain at my wrist. I pull back my bloody sleeve and see a cut, as if a white bear's claw had sliced across my arm. I have no memory of injury.

Debts must be paid. La culpabilité. La pénitence.

“She paid,” I answer. “She paid.”

I cannot keep my teeth from chattering. I wrap the wool blanket tightly around me. On the island cold crept into my bones and resolutely will not be dislodged.

Twenty-seven months on the Isle of Demons. Roberval never returned. Only two months after he arrived in Canada, he sent two ships back to La Rochelle for more provisions. Little more than a year after he founded his wretched colony at Charlesbourg Royal, those who survived the winter returned to France. The ships must have passed by the island, but not one of them stopped. Not one.

Twenty-seven months. Not a shipwreck, not an accident. Punished. Left to die.

It was only by chance that a ship stopped at the island. The Breton fishermen wanted fresh water. Not Marguerite.

How my arrival back in France must have startled Roberval. Startled, but never worried. He had his position as Viceroy of New France to protect him, as well as his friend, King François I, and his cousin, Diane de Poitiers, King Henri's mistress.

And now he is dead. Murdered at the Church of the Innocents. For sixteen years I have longed for this. But now I know: his death changes nothing.

God's little irony.

I put my hands to my cheeks and allow myself a small memory: ivory skin, bold lips, eyes the colour of new grass. Marguerite had no memory of her mother's face, not even a portrait, for her mother had died when she was born. With grave sorrow pulling down his words, Marguerite's father told her that she resembled her mother, that she was beautiful in the same way: wild and wilful, strong-minded and strong-bodied, beguiling but guileless.

Her family owned a small
château
but could afford no servants. Marguerite laboured like a maid of all work: cooking and washing dishes and clothes, spinning and weaving, tending sheep and clipping their wool, growing vegetables, hauling wood and water, milking goats, butchering chickens and pigs, rendering fat and making cheese.

L'orpheline misérable.

“
Non.
” I shake my head. “
Non
, she was not a miserable orphan. She had her father, and he loved her. She was not unhappy.”

A man of good intentions and sympathetic to the new religion, Marguerite's father attended to her education himself. Though it was costly, he did not stint on books, paper and quills, or on lamp oil and candles, so that she could read and study during the long dark evenings. He discussed with her ideas about philosophy and religion, entrusting to her an expensive copy of the New Testament.

I brush my fingers across the tooled leather cover, lift the pages with my thumb, and listen as they
flutter closed again, whispering God's secrets.

Once I nearly boiled the cover for broth.

Marguerite learned psalms and prayers, singing them in both Latin and French. Her father, fostering in her a piety well beyond her years, helped to create in Marguerite a fractious alliance of scepticism and devotion, obstinacy and obedience, pragmatism and romance: a young girl at war with herself, headstrong and heartstrong.

La tête forte. Le cœur fort. But not strong enough for the island. Être indulgent, c'est mourir.

“
Oui,
” I say. “To be soft is to die.”

When she was just sixteen, her father died suddenly, of no cause a country doctor could discern, though neighbours whispered that he had died of a grief he could no longer bear. Roberval became Marguerite's guardian. He dressed elegantly, and Marguerite was ashamed at first of her peasant roughness and poverty. But Roberval disdained neither her clothes nor her calloused hands and ragged nails. Instead he bought creamy silk gloves to cover her hands until they softened, until the nails grew smooth and oval from disuse.

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.