The Sharp Hook of Love (28 page)

A sweet ache filled me as I watched him suckle. The midwife pulled the covers over my washed body, but for the first time since arriving at that chilly château I did not feel cold. Abelard's sister Denise entered the room, a cup of broth in her hands, her eyes covetous. She held out her arms, beseeching. I lowered my head; my hair fell over his greedy face. When I looked up again, Denise had gone. I felt a pang. Should I have offered him to her?
Surely she had seen that he was hungry. But not, it seemed, as hungry as she.

When I'd first met Denise, a woman with soft eyes and an ample body, her gaze had fallen to my belly and lingered there, with longing, I thought. I resisted the impulse to cover myself with my hands. Dagobert, Abelard's younger brother, introduced me in French as his brother's “friend,” then spoke in a language I did not comprehend to the thin, pinch-faced woman beside him giving me sullen looks and wringing her hands.

“My wife, Elona, speaks Breton only. Pierre writes that you are talented with languages. Perhaps you can learn from her, and she from you?”

I kissed her stiff cheek in greeting and she pushed me away, then shouted something unintelligible.

“Silence!” Dagobert said, and she closed her small mouth, apparently knowing one word of French, at least.

I did not need words to comprehend. I could easily guess the questions that Abelard's sister-in-law might ask. What was I to Abelard? Contempt curled her lip. In her eyes, I was nothing more than a whore, and now I stood to interfere in her life, a stranger come to disrupt her home. Her glances at Denise spelled resentment, as well. If not for my exhaustion, I might have fled that dismal scene all the way back to Paris.

Why
had
Abelard sent me here, to live amid unhappiness? It could not bode well for our child. Why had I agreed to come, knowing nothing of the situation?

Such was my trust in my
speciälis
that I had done his bidding in spite of my concerns. Although I had already entertained fantasies of returning to Paris and begging Agnes or even my new friend Queen Adelaide for help, I knew that I would not do so. Abelard had decided the best course of action for us, and I would comply, desiring his happiness more than my own.

The autumn of my arrival had slipped quickly into winter, in which a succession of blizzards trapped us all in the house. Elona's scornful demeanor chilled me more than any snowstorm, however. At last I learned some Breton and could comprehend some of her outbursts. Elona not only resented me as another mouth to feed—repudiated by her husband, Denise had returned to the castle only one month before my arrival—but she feared losing her title as lady of le Pallet to me. Would Abelard come after me to reclaim his birthright, taking command of le Pallet and its income?

My only comfort came from Abelard's letters promising to join me upon the end of my lying-in period. For me, that day could not arrive quickly enough. Every moment without my love felt like an eternity. Here I could do nothing to protect him from my uncle's wrath.

“My brother will come to no harm as long as you are with us,” Dagobert said when, before dinner one day, I mentioned my fears for Abelard's safety. “We Bretons avenge our own. If your uncle injures our brother, who knows what we might do to you?”

Is it any wonder that I wrestled daily with the demons of doubt? But then, when despair made me gnash my teeth, a letter from him would arrive.

Any single day I am forced to spend without you,

Sweet love, seems like three decades.

A day without your face rising like the sun over me,

Goes by without sun or the gift of its light.

Even as his words of love consoled me, however, they also increased my longing for him. Why must I endure the travails of pregnancy without him to comfort me? And what of the joys we could not share? Abelard never felt our baby kick against my
womb. He never saw my body ripen, or my hair thicken and shine. When I awoke in the night hungering for arugula, I wanted his fingers to feed it to me.

Most of all, I needed his laughter. Until our child's birth, life at le Pallet held no joy for me. As my stomach grew, so did the resentment in Elona's eyes whenever she glanced my way. In the town with her, I noticed whispers and laughter following us, and the lewd stares of vendors. I came to learn that the word she spoke under her breath did, indeed, mean “whore.” The whole world despised me, it seemed, for loving Abelard.

I thought nothing of others' opinions, but wanted only my beloved's presence even more keenly after the baby's birth. Our beautiful son, whom I named Pierre Astralabe, offered some new delight every day. Abelard did not witness the time when first, under my tickling fingers, our boy laughed, a sound more delightful than the music of angels. He could not note the alertness of his gaze at an age when, Denise said, most infants stare blankly, as though the world were made of shadows. He did not cheer, as did I, when our son first lifted his head and pushed his chest up from the bed, determined, it seemed, to crawl.

Declining a wet nurse—when Abelard came for us, I would need to feed our boy—I kept little Astralabe close under the cloying eye of Denise, who could not forbear offering advice on every aspect of his upbringing. I should not suckle him whenever he cried, but ought to let him learn to comfort himself. I ought to hand him over to her even when he protested, or he would always be diffident with strangers. I smiled and thanked her and clutched him to myself.

When my confinement had ended, Astralabe changed so completely in his temperament that I wondered if demons had stolen him in the night and replaced my happy child with an evil one. Where had his laughter gone? Now he screamed, clenching his
little fists until they turned white, his face empurpled with rage. Denise tried to help by making funny faces and, at times, holding him in her arms, which increased his shrieks. For three days he cried, only stopping sporadically to nurse until, at nightfall, he would drink deeply from my breast, and exhausted, we would both fall asleep.

This is how Abelard found me after riding through the gates and crossing the drawbridge to the château of le Pallet that August afternoon: weeping, imploring, praying, walking with our babe in my arms, pleading for peace, for even one moment's worth of silence, rocking to and fro, patting his back, rubbing his head, thinking for one moment of dropping him into a well, of stuffing a washcloth into his mouth, of finding some way to silence the screams of this formerly delightful child. Having discovered the power crying gave him over me, he now refused to stop.

“Have I come at an inauspicious hour?” Abelard said as he entered my chambers. “Perhaps I should return—in a few years.”

That I heard him at all was miraculous, for our son had redoubled his wails. I stopped pacing the floor and turned to Abelard, my heart lifting like a sail at the sight of his comical grimace, his starry eyes, his arms open wide to my leaping embrace. How long the months had been without my Abelard! He hardly seemed real. If not for the crying child in my arms, I might have thought myself in a dream.

“I am glad that
someone
is happy to see me,” he said as I kissed him and Astralabe's screams intensified.

“I do not know what is causing him to cry.” I held him out as if Abelard might know the answer. “I have consulted the healer, the midwife, and the priest, but no one knows how to placate him.”

“Shh.” Abelard bounced our infant so vigorously in his outstretched hands that I feared he might drop him. “Son, be quiet!”

Astralabe continued to shriek.

I took him and pulled him to my breast, where, mercifully, he nursed. Abelard's eyes bulged at the sight of my bosom and he reached for my free breast, but I pushed his hand away. Being suckled day and night, I did not desire to be touched there even by Abelard.

“I am jealous of an infant,” he said with a grin.

I moved to the bed and lay with Astralabe close beside me, still feeding. Abelard lay down also and slid his arm around my waist. I closed my eyes, relishing his embrace. As he pulled himself more closely to me, his arousal prodded my thigh. I sighed and relaxed into him, my Abelard, beside me at last, his kisses moistening my neck and throat and his hands in my hair, his sonorant voice murmuring, “Beautiful mother, excellent wife.” My blood stirred in spite of my fatigue. I settled our sleeping son in his cradle, then returned to Abelard's kisses and caresses. He stroked my belly, my thighs, my back, my buttocks. He lifted my skirt and pressed his skin against mine. Blood thrummed in my ears and throbbed between my legs. His breath smelled sweet, like aniseed, over the animal scent of him rising, enfolding, immersing me in heat like the sultriest of nights. My sighs mingled with his resonant moans—and then Astralabe awoke and erupted, again, in cries.

Abelard cursed. “What in God's name is wrong with him? I thought you said he was a cheerful child.”

Indeed, I said, he had been so until the previous Monday.

Abelard laughed. “On that very day, I left Paris to journey here. The little rascal knew I was coming for his mother.”

You are not being fair to me, but have changed your ways, and so trust is not secure anywhere.

—HELOISE TO ABELARD

A
lthough Abelard's family had fed me well—if resentfully—my months in Brittany had whetted my hunger for discussions such as my beloved and I had shared. Dagobert had little to say to any woman, it seemed. Elona gave me mostly hateful looks, even when I spoke Breton to her. Denise, on the other hand, paid too much attention to me, inquiring so often and so solicitously that I avoided her. Then, after Astralabe's birth, she showed an interest in him that I thought strange, even unnatural. One day I'd walked into my bedchamber to find his cradle empty—and discovered her napping with him on her own bed. When I'd reached out for him, she had awakened and refused, at first, to hand him to me.

Now that Abelard had come, everyone's behavior had changed. Denise followed him about as a hen does its chicks. Elona listened with alacrity, hanging on every word, as he and Dagobert conversed. Dagobert spoke more words at dinner on Abelard's second day than I had heard from him in a year's time, telling of his villeins' laziness and their quarrels; describing each
of his crops and his successes or failures with them; and complaining of the unseasonably warm and dry spring.

“Father talked of digging a new well in the southern meadow,” Abelard said.

“But he never did so, did he?” Dagobert pursed his lips.

“No, but I always thought he should. I would have done so—”

“If you had not given up your lands.”

“Yes.”

Dagobert said something to his wife in Breton; I recognized the words
brother
and
lord
. Denise spoke rapidly in her garbled tongue, her eyes snapping with demands. Abelard lifted his hands in a shrug and, smiling, began a reply, but she interrupted, raising her voice. Soon the two of them were shouting.

Dagobert leapt to his feet, waving his arms. “This is treachery!” he cried in French. “What other man would even consider taking back what he had freely given, and to his own brother?”

Abelard stood, as well. “What other man would deny his brother such a small favor, when that brother has relinquished everything to him?”

“A small favor? Ha! Let us petition the duke. He will decide who would inherit our father's lands, income, and title—one of his own sons or the illegitimate child you would have Elona bring up for you.”

At these words, I felt a tightening around my heart. Elona, bring up Abelard's son?

“That ‘illegitimate child' is your nephew,” Abelard snarled. “And why shouldn't he inherit our father's estate? He could surely do as good a job as either of your sons. Had you heard? Three months of age and he already speaks!”

Denise, sitting beside Abelard, smiled and nodded. Although I did not believe her, she'd claimed to teach Astralabe to say
Maman
—to her, not to me.

“Listen to you, so proud of your seed!” Dagobert folded his arms across his chest. “But you always thought yourself superior to the rest of us.” He pointed a finger at Abelard. “You are too good for le Pallet, too good for Brittany, your home—too good for your own family. You and your soft, scholarly hands, always with your face in a book, indulged by our father and pampered by our mother as if you were Christ himself.”

“Papa and Maman loved all of us,” Abelard said, frowning.

“It did not seem so to me. You never had to do a hard day's work, while I sweated in the fields with the villeins and had to practice swordsmanship until I thought my arm would fall off—and why? Because you wanted nothing to do with your birthright. You turned up your nose at all our father offered.”

“Because I was born a philosopher.”