Silence of Stone by Annamarie Beckel Page A

child?
    â€œHopelessness does not kill,” Thevet protests.“How did he die?”
    L’homme faible. Weak. Weak. Weak. Km-mm-mm.
    â€œOh, but it does,
Père
, it does.”
    â€œBut you lived. Damienne lived.”
    L’homme faible. Kek-kek-kek. L’homme faible.
    â€œHer husband was a good man, but weak. He lost hope, and then the angels came.”
    â€œAngels?” The Franciscan’s face brightens.
    â€œ
Oui
, angels.”

    My belly is hollow, and blood pulses across that painful emptiness. I am carrying a brace of rabbits, gutted but not yet skinned. The fur is soft in my hand as I run up the stairs, two at a time, and into the garret. I cannot wait. I rip the skin from the meat and bite into cold grey flesh. I chew until I can close my eyes and breathe. I swallow, then bite again. I look up and see the striped cat. She does not move. She is watching me from the open window. I see now what she sees: my teeth sunk into raw meat, eyes savage.
    I pull the rabbit away from my mouth. The cat turns and flees.
    I set the rabbits aside and kindle a fire in the hearth. I will use the iron pot, cook the rabbits into a stew, and put the stew on a plate with bread.

    I sit by the fire, my hunger satisfied for now. I haveeven left a small portion of stew outside the window. Now and again I turn from the hearth to see if the cat has come back. Why do I care? She is scrawny and ugly, her ear tattered, and she would bite me if she could. There is no mercy in her green eyes.
    But I have seen her distended belly, and I worry. She is starving. She might eat them. I cannot let her eat them. And so I keep watch.
    The spider spins, patient and painstaking in her weaving. She listens more attentively than the Franciscan, and I decide to offer her something beautifu: a butterfly. The spider is sated now, so the butterfly is safe. I see the flash of iridescent wings.
    Marguerite began wearing Michel’s clothes. She tied his breeches with hemp rope below her swollen belly and tugged his soldier’s thick doublet onto her shoulders and across her chest. She held the cloth to her nose and breathed in the scent of his skin – salt and berries – still lingering beneath the stink of sweat and fear. She pulled on his long wool stockings and stuffed dry grass into his boots to make them fit.
    She willed herself to forget what he had become and to remember only what he had been. Marguerite began to think of Michel with love and tenderness, recalling how he had spoken with joyful expectation about children –
our many, many children
– and how she would teach them letters and numbers, teach them with books brought from France. It was as if she could carry him gently within her, shaping him to fit within the spaces in her heart the way she had shaped his clothes to fit her body. She couldremember now how he’d held her close, how he’d touched her with his fingertips and tongue. She could close her eyes and see his smile. She could see love now, and not anger and despair, in the golden flecks of his jade eyes.
    L’amour. L’espoir. La fille naïve.
    â€œ
Oui
,” I answer. “She was foolish to love, foolish to hope.”
    The spider lifts a leg, testing the air. Perhaps she too hears the voices. I direct my question to her. “But what else could she do?”
    One morning, about ten days after she had buried Michel, Marguerite emerged from the cave to see the ice beyond the large islands littered with dark spots. Sabre in hand, she walked slowly down to the harbour and across the ice, approaching cautiously. As she crept closer, the crying bleats became deafening, and the spots resolved into seals – scores of small white pups accompanied by grey adults whose dark markings meandered across their shoulders and backs.
    Her stride ungainly, Marguerite had to stretch across a narrow vein of open water to reach the floe upon which they rested. Though the seals