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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.
    â€œMarguerite 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 atriangle 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?
    â€œYou 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.
    â€œMarguerite obeyed,” I repeat, shutting out the voices, “but she missed the…” I search for a word. “Amenities of the court.”
    â€œAh, a spoiled coquette even then.”
    â€œ
Non
, Marguerite was not a coquette. She craved learned conversation, talk of books and ideas.”
    â€œBooks 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 atAmboise. 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.
    Marguerite felt reprieved, as if God, at long last, had listened and intervened. She hoped desperately, and prayed with renewed fervour, that Roberval would choose not to go at all.
    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,