The Survivor Read Online Free PDF Page A

that sprang to his mind, Magwés appeared, and oddly enough seemed to smile at him. He tried to rid his mind of the image, fearing it would throw him into black despair again, but no, it would not go.
    The old man set to heating the remains of their stew. Sorrel had eaten at the Robins’, but having worked into the evening, she admitted that she would like a bite, were it readily available.
    Coming across on a Robin’s ship, she had picked up some English from the other passengers, so she and Thomas were able to begin a broken conversation. He just could not take his eyes off her. As she sat sipping her soup, he observed her fingers, already roughening from the weeks in domestic service here. The way she held her spoon and her delicate gestures: all marks of table manners she must have picked up in the household of the French master to whom she had been sold. Her slight shoulders betokened a fragile frame, perpetually hunched as though in fear of beating. How he wanted to touch her, to reassure her, to help her truly relax.
    Little by little, Sorrel did relax, unwinding enough to question him. Where did he live? How did he live? Under the enormous power of her two large eyes, Thomas found his own reticence disappearing. He rambled on about his cabin, careful not to reveal its whereabouts; he told her about the new site for his prospective farmhouse; he told her about his brook and the refreshment it would bring to any farm animals he managed to acquire, and even, yes why not, inspired by her, a puppy. He told her how his brook wound down out of the dark hills of the interior. Yes, he did consider it now as his property. And then how his brook widened at its mouth to fall in great, red shelves of rock into the bay. He told her of his compartment in the hillside where he’d buried his tools, of his birchbark roof, and of his cedar bed built of saplings strapped together. They talked until her eyes drooped, and indeed, so caught up he had been in her presence that he had ignored his own drowsiness.
    M. Blanquart had long since retired and now was breathing heavily on his top bunk. By common consent, they retired, but not before she had leaned over and kissed him on the cheek.
    That set his mind churning. What indeed were those sorry circumstances in which Marc must have found her? Thomas guessed only too easily: she must have sold her body on the street, and probably for so little. He dismissed the thought. It means nothing, absolutely nothing, he said to himself. We all fall on hard times, and we all do what we can to survive. With the exhausting trip and his fight to survive on a shelf of rock the night before, he fell quickly asleep.
    ***
    Thomas awoke to find the sun already high. He had slept long and felt deeply refreshed. But opening his eyes to such unfamiliar surroundings, he wondered where he was. An empty cabin? He lay back thinking. He retraced his footsteps, beginning with the night under the canoe, and then, the meeting with M. Huard, and finding no work hereabouts — ah yes, Marc’s father, and Sorrel! He sat bolt upright. Where was everybody?
    He listened. No sound, save for a far-off saw, and in another direction, someone chopping wood. And of course, the perennial village dogs. He relaxed. The silence reminded him of his own cabin. But something was missing. The brook, the gurgling, that always kept him company. He got up, stretched, and then his eyes went to the workbench by a window he had not absorbed the night before. On shelves above it, half-carved shapes of tiny ships sat among odds and ends of small twine for the rigging, and pieces of roots shaped into small animals and birds. But where were all the tools? Only two — admittedly sharp — knives, to do all this? None of the chisels and fine instruments he’d seen in the carpenter’s shop on board ship, nor in the cabinet-maker’s on shore. A real artist, M. Blanquart, he decided. In his old age, too. So much the better.
    But then, how much