Prologue

The winding sheet that Burchard’s wife wrapped around his corpse was slightly off white. It was impossible to tell from a distance what sort of cloth it was. A count of Burchard’s status could easily have had a shroud woven from calico or fine Indian cotton. His wife might have had an exquisite damask prepared in one of the mills around Rheims. But, of course, there was Burchard’s reputation for thrift, well, tight-fistedness was how the peasants talked of it, and his shroud was already so famous by the time of his death that everyone for miles around knew it was not fashioned from cambric or hemp. It was not dyed with the shells of sea snails nor with indigo or woad (the woad’s cross-like flower so fitting for a funeral). It was not fabricated from merino wool nor, for that matter, the cheaper English wool, carded extra fine and woven expertly. No, it was not. It might have been woven by an old peasant woman, one of Burchard’s serfs, famous for her skill at transforming simple flax into elegant linen, but it wasn’t that either. And it was certainly not silk, spun from a hundred, hundred cocoons. The fibre of the magic shroud was retted from the least noble of all weeds — the stinging nettle.

We are nowhere, northern Ontario. The baby’s arms are fat and reaching up to grab. He’s ravenous, digs his sharp nails into my breast while he suckles, seems more animal than human. I pull his hand away and nibble the snags off his fingernails. There are aspects of this I can’t stand. The sun emerges each morning, makes its slow arc through the sky and drops, like poetry, orange and lively, over the horizon, only to emerge somewhere else, for some other eyes to ponder. I’ve narrowed my field of vision to this, haven’t I? I’ve chosen it. Well, in any event, chosen something.

My days are simple. I tend the mediocre garden, I weave, or try to, I feed and clean the boy and myself, and I wait. Sometimes, while the boy sleeps in the cabin, I make my way over to the pit, and I stare into the unnatural blue of its water, azure not found anywhere else on earth but here, and I imagine what the descent must have been like, what baubles of gold and glimmering carbuncles were discovered lodged in the deep earth there. In my mind’s eye, I watch the miners coming, marching along the curve of the distant hill, mattocks like shadows on their backs, and from this imaginary perspective, I see them as dwarfs tramping a steady path to work, into the sunless cool of the underground. I am mesmerized by the water-filled chute, its artificial vortex that works a sort of vertigo on my nerves, by the dead blue liquid and by the banality of each day as it comes and goes. I stare down with the look of a failed clairvoyant, seeking sight. I stare until the little boy distracts me with his plaintive squeak, his chirrup, his bleat and his needs. I am an unnatural mother but I go to him, automatically.