Strong as Death (Catherine LeVendeur) (3 page)

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Authors: Sharan Newman

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“I think she is, Edgar,” Abelard said calmly. “That was the rest of the dream.”
“What do you mean?” he asked.
“She dreamt that she woke up and you were there,” Abelard said. “She knew then that she was safe. If you go with her, Edgar, if you both take your petition to Saint James, I believe with all my heart that you will return, that
three
of you will return.”
Edgar sank back onto the rushes, his mouth open. He had planned to go no farther than Saint-Marcellus, bid farewell to his old master and return to Paris. He remembered that it was while on a mission for Master Abelard at the abbey of Saint-Denis that he had first met Catherine, three years before. At that point his life had been thrown into a box, shaken and tossed out like dice on a table.
He still didn’t know which side wquld come up.
“Very well, Master,” he said. “Catherine and I will make arrangements to visit Saint James. When we return, we will tell you if we succeeded.”
Abelard sighed. “It won’t be necessary, my children. I will know the answer long before that.”
 
That evening in Paris, Catherine’s father sat alone by the fire. Hubert LeVendeur, merchant, was achingly tired. He held a bowl of broth in his hands and tried to remember when he hadn’t had this sense of total exhaustion and despair.
He couldn’t.
He wished Catherine would come home. He missed her. He was even getting used to Edgar. Not quite enough to miss him, but enough to feel content that his daughter had chosen to marry this odd foreigner, who said he was English but came from even farther north. Hubert knew almost nothing about Scotland except that trade was poor there. If Edgar had insisted on taking Catherine back to that horrid land, Hubert would have forbidden the match, no matter what. He was glad it hadn’t come to that.
This restless desire for pilgrimage on Catherine’s part frightened him more than he dared consider. She thought she was expiating the sin of leaving the convent for marriage. Hubert feared she was in danger of falling into her mother’s belief that if she prayed long enough, all consequences of her sins would vanish. But his poor wife, Madeleine, had driven herself into some sad world where no amount of prayer brought forgiveness or comfort. If that happened to Catherine, Hubert thought it would kill him.
But what if the sin were not Catherine’s? Hubert feared that the fault was really in him. Perhaps it was punishment for his sin that was being visited on his best-beloved daughter. And what could he do? He knew that there was no forgiveness without true contrition and that he wasn’t sorry he had been born a Jew, or that after his forced conversion in childhood, he had found the way secretly back to the faith of his fathers. He sipped and grimaced; while he was brooding; his broth had gone cold. All he tasted was the congealed grease along the rim of the bowl.
Someone was pounding at the door.
Ullo, the serving boy, appeared a moment later, accompanied by a man still muffled in his cloak.
“Is there any soup left for me?” the man asked as he unwound his scarf. “There’s nothing so bone-chilling as a Paris spring. I’m half frozen.”
“Solomon!” Hubert jumped up to greet his nephew, his mood lightening at the sight of him. No, Hubert could never repent finding his family again.
“What are you doing back so early?” he asked as soon as Solomon had settled himself on the stool opposite him.
“What do you mean, Uncle?” Solomon answered. “I’ve been gone for four months, over those damned Pyrenees twice in snows up to my waist.”
“So long?” Hubert said. Catherine and Edgar had left barely three weeks ago and it seemed much longer. “And was the trip successful?”
Solomon finished his broth and put the bowl on the hearth. He rubbed his forehead, then ran his fingers through his black curls. Hubert knew the gesture.
“What went wrong?” he asked.
“Nothing,” Solomon said. “Everything. I have the pearls and spices for Saint-Denis.”
“I see,” Hubert said. “So, then. What’s her name?”
Solomon stared at him, then laughed long and hard. “Aristotle, Uncle,” he said finally. “Her name is Aristotle. I’ve become trapped in the snares of the stars. I only wish it had been a woman’s arms instead.”
Hubert stared at his nephew in disbelief. “What are you talking about?” he asked. “You don’t mean that pagan nonsense that says our lives are decided by the motions of the planets, do you? I thought you had more sense.”
Solomon didn’t take offense. He knew how odd it sounded. “It’s more than that, Uncle,” he said slowly. “There are people working in Provence and Spain—Christians, Jews, Moslems, sometimes even together—deciphering and translating books of lost knowledge. The heavens are only a small part of it. Uncle, don’t you ever wonder why we are here, why our lives have unfolded in a certain way?”
“I know why,” Hubert answered. “It is as the Almighty One decrees.”
Solomon exhaled in irritation. “Of course, but don’t you want to know the pattern, how our lives fit into the web of the universe?”
Hubert looked at his nephew in bewilderment. Who was this young man? Solomon had never questioned the universe before. Something more had happened to him than he was telling. Despite his protestations, Hubert suspected that there was a woman behind all this.
“Do I look like a rabbi, Solomon?” he asked. “How can I know why? I saw my mother and sisters slaughtered. And yet I was raised with love by those who should have been my enemies. I pass my life suspended between two worlds, waiting for the thread that holds me to be cut, dropping me into the abyss. Why? If I wondered such a thing, I would go as mad as my poor Madeleine. It’s not my business to question my Creator, whose mind is as far above mine as mine is above an insect’s.”
Solomon ladled himself more broth from the pot next to the fire. He inhaled the steam with relish.
“I grant you that we can’t understand the mind of the Lord,” he said, “but we were given the power to reason and question. There must be a purpose to everything. What if, along with the Oral Law, other clues were left by Him to enable us to piece together the
schema
of His plan for us? Or even merely to approach Him more closely? What if that is what we were meant to do?”
Hubert emptied his cold broth back into the pot. “What if the Archangel Michael were to appear in this room and tell you that you’re a blithering fool?” he grunted. “That’s the sort of nonsense Catherine used to spout. You’ve been listening to her and those street philosophers too long.”
Solomon only laughed. “Perhaps,” he said. “Or perhaps I’ve been infected with the poetry of the south.”
“That, I could believe,” Hubert said. “Especially if there were a perfume to it and a feminine voice reciting it.”
Solomon sighed. “Only in a perfect world, Uncle, and I have given up ever finding that.”
Hubert didn’t answer. He had never even tried to hunt for such a thing as a perfect world. Security was the most he ever hoped for.
Solomon finished his broth and yawned. “Can you give me a bed for the night?” he asked. “I would have gone to Aunt Johannah on the Île but I didn’t want her to know I’d been traveling on the Sabbath.”
“Always wise,” Hubert agreed. “If you’ll help me, we’ll set up a bed here where it’s warm. Ullo will give you sheets and quilts.”
“Thank you, Uncle,” Solomon said. “You are good to your mad relatives.”
“I have to be,” Hubert sighed. “I seem to have no other kind.”
 
Catherine tried not to cry as she said good-bye to Abelard, but she failed completely. He smiled at her grief, hugged her gently and kissed her forehead.
“We should rejoice that I will soon be going home,” he said. “As for you, my child, you will always be a daughter of the Paraclete and so one of mine. Promise me that you will be a friend and sister to my son and that you will do what you are able to comfort Héloïse after my death.”
He spoke so calmly. Catherine could only sniff and nod.
Abelard turned to Edgar, who was not sure of his own ability to restrain tears. In the master’s eyes there was a flash of the wicked look he had always had before he set about demolishing the one debating him. Edgar braced himself. Abelard grinned at him.
“To you I leave a much harder task,” he said. “Into your keeping I give this daughter of the Paraclete. I witnessed your wedding with some trepidation, but now I am sure that this is what God planned for you both. He rarely gives those He loves the easy path. But follow it with her and haye faith.”
Edgar put his arm around Catherine, who sobbed damply onto his tunic. “Thank you, Master,” he said. “I don’t think I’m able to do anything else.”
Abelard placed his hands on their heads, giving them his
blessing. “And now, I would like to speak with my son alone,” he told them.
They left Astrolabe with his father. Edgar sat Catherine down on a bench outside the priory door. “
Carissima
,” he said gently, “could you please wipe your nose on your handkerchief instead of my sleeve?”
She sniffled, but complied. “I’m not crying just for myself,” she explained, “but for Mother Héloïse and Astrolabe and all the things that went wrong for them.”
“We don’t know that things went wrong, just because they didn’t happen the way we think they should have,” Edgar answered. “The master as much as told us that himself. Catherine, can’t you believe that, for our sake, too?”
Catherine’s noisy tears began to quiet. Edgar said no more, but held her in the cool spring afternoon until she stirred in his arms and looked up into his eyes.
“We will go to see Saint James,” she said firmly. “If he cannot give us a living child, then I will accept our fate. Perhaps being given you is as much as I’ve a right to ask for.”
He had no answer for that. She did know how to embarrass him.
“Very well,” he said after a pause. “We shall go to Compostela. And before you say it, I already know. We’ll start from Lyon, not from Vézelay or Orléans. Heaven forbid we should take the easiest route through gentle, vine-laden country. We can pass by Cluny first. Perhaps someone there is making up a party to go on pilgrimage. My only condition is that we take horses with us to carry our packs and, if necessary, ourselves. Therefore, we’ll need your father’s help. He’ll have to know what we’re doing in any case. I want you to survive the journey and it will be much harder without supplies from him. After that, I refuse to worry.”
Catherine smiled. “You’re right,
carissime
, and practical, as usual. That must be why Saint James told me not to leave you behind.”
 
Gaucher ran his hands through his white hair. Rufus watched sourly, wishing it would all fall out through his old friend’s fingers.
He reflected grimly that he might get his wish if Gaucher tugged at his curls much more.
“I tell you, it’s not a joke,” Gaucher said for the third time. “Either one of you is trying to frighten me into giving up the journey, or—”
“Why would we do that, Gaucher?” Norbert interrupted testily. “We’ve suffered your snoring for forty years. We can endure a bit longer.”
“Saint Lucie’s limpid eyeballs!” Gaucher roared. “Are you all too far in your dotage to see what’s happening here? Someone wants to kill me! Look at this!”
Gaucher held out his drinking cup. He had left it on the table at the hostel where they had stopped the previous night. This morning he had come down to find it filled with dung.
The other three men were not impressed.
“Odd way to commit murder, Gaucher,” Hugh observed. “Unless the dung is poisoned.”
“And the murderer knows your tastes,” Rufus added.
Norbert sniffed. “Smells like pig shit to me,” he said. “First the offering in your tunic, now this. Perhaps there’s a sow somewhere in love with you.”
Rufus laughed. “Any piglet on your property with a gold streak in its tail? We’ve warned you, Gaucher, that one day you’d go too far with your livestock.”
Gaucher threw the cup across the room, where it shattered, splattering the contents against the wall. “I’m going out to buy a new cup,” he announced. “When I return, I’m leaving this place. You may come with me or not, as you wish.”
He stalked out.
Hugh ignored the stench and reached for a pitcher of beer. He carefully checked inside his wooden cup before he poured.
“Don’t bother, Hugh,” Rufus said. “You can’t tell the difference anymore.”
Rufus stretched contentedly on the bench. He was in rare form this morning. He picked up his own mug and took a long swallow. Something cold and furry brushed his lips. He lowered the cup and looked in. He gagged and sprayed beer all over the table.
Floating in the milky dregs was a dead mouse.
Norbert sighed. He had hoped they had left this sort of foolishness behind with the other vices of youth. Of course, Rufus showed no sign of giving up any of his vices. Gaucher probably hadn’t even considered it. This wasn’t the pilgrimage Norbert had planned. What point was there in traveling a thousand miles to ask for remission of one’s sins if the sins came along? Or even worse, if their sins were pursuing them, knowing, perhaps, of the other, less holy reason for their journey?

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