The Sharp Hook of Love (34 page)

His words resonated, having struck a chord my thoughts had played.

“A babe in your arms would still the tongues wagging about you now. Nothing makes a women more respectable than motherhood.”

“Then—you will help me to bring him home?”

Uncle laughed. “That is between you and your husband—your husband! Soon all of Paris will know of your marriage, anyway. I see no harm the babe could do at that point. I, of course, will pretend to have known about it all along.” He rubbed his palms together. “An illegitimate child will give me the perfect excuse for revenge against that traitor.”

“Uncle,” I said, standing. “Do not lay a hand on Abelard.”

“By God's head, why not? What has he ever done for you—or for me?”

“He has spoken on your behalf to Bishop Guibert. You may become the next cantor. Isn't that what you want?”

“He swore to make me a deacon! His promises are as empty as his heart.”

I averted my gaze from his challenging eyes.

“How quickly you have forgotten all Petrus's wrongdoings. What did he care about your reputation? What thought did he give to your future, to your plans to become abbess at Fontevraud?”

“I never wanted to be an abbess. The scheme was yours, not mine.”

“Had you an idea of your own, I would have listened to it, although God knows what it might have been. Unable to marry, no inheritance—how did you expect to live? On whose income?”

“I would like to open my own school for girls. Now that the Church has forbidden oblates, where will girls learn to read and write?”

“And do you think Bishop Guibert and William of Champeaux and Abbot Suger would approve of this school? The very idea of thinking women makes them quake. Now, I am beginning to see why.” He peered at me from under knitted brows. “And you have set a bad example for your scholars by fornicating with your teacher.”

Seeing me flinch, he increased his attack.

“You hadn't considered that effect, had you? Heh-heh. The consequences of your actions go far beyond your own constricted world—far beyond it! And now your babe, too, is harmed. He forced you to leave the boy in Brittany, you say? What will he do next? He must be stopped.” Uncle rubbed his hands together. “And I know exactly how it must be done.”

“If you touch even one hair on his head, I will tell Guibert of your sins.” My voice shook but I glared in defiance, thinking only to save Abelard from disgrace.

“
My
sins?” Uncle's face reddened.

“Yes. I will tell him how you drink to excess every night, a flagon or even two of wine that you steal from the Church . . .”

“Steal? First you call me a liar, and now a thief?” He leapt up, kicking aside the bench, and lunged across the table at me, then grasped both my arms and shook me with such violence that I feared my neck might snap. “I see the disdain in your eyes. You think yourself better than I—I, who could destroy you—destroy you!”

“As you did my mother?” With a mighty effort I wrested myself free from his grip—then had to restrain myself from attacking him. He was the reason for my misery all these years, the cause of my abandonment, perhaps the cause of my mother's death. Hadn't Petronille said she died of a broken heart?

“You cared nothing for Maman,” I said. “You thought only of your reputation—which, should you lay even one hand on Abelard, I will quickly destroy.”

“Impudent
chienne
!” My uncle's smiting hand swatted me to the floor. I lay still, my ears ringing from the blow, curling up to protect myself.

“This is how you repay me for all my kindnesses?” Grasping the collar of my tunic, he lifted me up like a rag doll and bared his teeth. “Not even your mother dared to utter threats against me. But she knew, yes, how the sight of blood only quickens my own.” He drew out his blade.

“You would not kill your own flesh and blood.”

“You are half kin to me, true, but what is in the other half of you? A piteous leper? A common highwayman? Or even Satan himself?” He turned the knife so that it reflected light into my eyes. “Perhaps I will cut out your tongue. You would tell no tales against me then.”

I remained limp against his arm, not daring to struggle for fear of the blade. I must live, not for my own sake, but for
that of my son, who needed his mother.
Dear Lord, help me to think.

Then it came to me, how to defeat my uncle—using not my strength, which could never prevail against his, but my cunning. My words.

I looked him in the eyes. They flickered with uncertainty. I seized the moment God had given to me.

“Canon Fulbert!” I barely heard Jean's cry. “
Non, non!
I implore you to stop!”

I lifted my chin. “I am the daughter of Robert of Arbrissel.”

His grin sent a shiver through my very bones.

“I know,” he said.

Pity me, for I am truly constrained by love for you.

—HELOISE TO ABELARD

M
y horse wandered like a ship without moorings. In the saddle, I struggled to keep my eyes from closing. Sleep had eluded me these past two nights, or, rather, I had eluded sleep. To sleep was to dream of Argenteuil, and I would not enter that dreary place any sooner than necessary.

“We have not much farther to go,” said Jean, riding up beside me and taking my horse's reins. “I see the chapel spire in the distance.”

I closed my eyes. Argenteuil. “I have slowed our journey. You will not arrive home before my uncle tonight.”

“I serve Canon Fulbert no longer.”

“No longer?” I sat up, alert. “But you have been with him for so many years.”

“His drinking has pushed him too far. He may shout at me and beat me all he wishes. I allow it for my own reasons—but for him to harm a delicate young woman?
Non
. This I cannot abide.” His jaw ticced.

“Jean, you have served my uncle too well to abandon him now. He needs you.” He needed Jean's influence in my favor, I wanted to say, especially now that he had turned me out of his house.

Yes, you are Robert's daughter—the product of an unholy alliance,
Uncle had said.
An abbot and his abbess
? He spat on the floor.
Filthy—filthy! Even more so than a teacher and his student
. Sin, he said, was in my blood.
You defile my house. Let your husband care for you, as he ought to do
.

When, an hour later, I appeared on Abelard's doorstep with Jean and my bags, Abelard tried to send me back. “This could not have occurred at a worse time,” he said, pacing from one side of his
chambre
to the other, and back again. “Guibert has heard the rumors of our marriage. I met with him today. ‘She lives with her uncle, as always,' I said. But what will happen when he finds out that you have come here?”

“Uncle threatened to tell him about us, Abelard. If he does so, it will not matter where I am living.”

His shoulders slumped. “If that happens, Guibert will remove me from my position. He said, ‘A man cannot devote himself both to scholarship and the duties of the marital bed—as you should know, given your own students' complaints against you.' Ha! He has been waiting for months to make that insult.”

When Abelard swore that he had not married me or anyone else, Guibert suggested Abelard end the rumors by taking a public vow of celibacy.

“A public vow, in the cathedral before all! By God, am I a respected scholar or a brainless monk?”

“Next he shall command you to become a eunuch and sing in the choir.” Was I to pity him now?

“No, he shall forget me in a day or two, when some other, more pressing issue demands his attention. Unless, that is, he hears that we are living together.” Abelard covered his face with his hands.

Perhaps the time had come to establish me in my own home, I suggested. Then I could bring Astralabe from le Pallet and begin
the life that we had planned. But Abelard shook his head: The time was too soon. Because of Roger, the rumors about the two of us had not diminished, but had grown. Months must pass—five or six, he said—before Paris turned its watchful eye away from us again.

“Six months? No, Abelard, I cannot wait that long for our son.”

“Then do as I say.” He revealed his plan: I must enter the convent.

“Fontevraud? But it is far from Paris—so far from you. I do not want to be separated from you again.”

“Not Fontevraud,
non
. I want you closer to me than that.” He pulled me close and kissed me. “Didn't God say, ‘It is not good that man should be alone'?”

“I will be alone no matter where I go, if I go without you.”

“And I will hunger for you constantly. But you need only be there for a short while.” I would live in the abbey as a secular canoness, not taking the veil, free to depart whenever I chose. “Your going to Argenteuil may convince Bishop Guibert that I spoke the truth and quell the malicious talk about the two of us.”

“And my uncle? What will he think?”

Abelard put his arms around me. He pulled me close and kissed my cheek, then held me for a long time. “Fulbert cannot harm you there. Please go, heart of my heart, flesh of my flesh, soul of my soul.”

“And you?” I pulled back to search his troubled eyes. “What will he do to you for sending me away?” Showing him the bruises my uncle had made in seizing my arm, I told of his threats.

Abelard cursed, and his eyes filled with tears. “This is all the more reason why you must do as I ask, sweetest.” His voice trembled. “Do not worry yourself about me—
I
have Jean as my guard. But if you remain, and Fulbert touches you again, I won't need to call anyone. I shall kill your uncle myself.”

So, agreeing that Argenteuil offered the most practical refuge for the time being, we arranged a place for me in that
donjon
to which I had vowed never to return. Now, as Jean and I approached its stone walls and high chapel tower, bells tolled like a dirge heralding death, or my arrival. My stomach churned.

The silent faces of the sisters, their lips sealed with suffering; the seep of water in the walls' crevices and its dripping, when it rained, from the ceiling; the chill emanating from the stones to permeate my skin; the faces, lined and exhausted, of the nuns who worked in the fields; my own constant fatigue from being awakened throughout the night for prayer: Was this how God intended his creatures to live—in deprivation and hunger, silence and cold?

I had argued until I'd depleted my store of words. But where else could I go? I knew no relatives, not even my own brother, with whom I could seek refuge, nor any friends except Agnes. Her father, along with Etienne, had fallen from the king's favor since the monk Suger had been appointed the royal chaplain. The brothers from Garlande could not involve themselves now in any dispute with the bishop of Paris or take any risk of scandal.

I have never believed in the climate as a sign of anything, yet the banging of the heavens by Jove's bolt seemed appropriate as we passed through Argenteuil's gates toward where Abelard awaited in the courtyard. The flash that accompanied the fearsome noise, causing my horse to jerk its reins from Jean's hand and turn about, might have portended a knife, or the fires of hell, or a rainstorm, or nothing. I laughed as my mare trotted away, but Jean urged his horse after us and, when I had dutifully pulled in the reins, led us around again toward my destiny and Abelard.

“Yours is a timely arrival.” He grinned as he helped me to dismount. When I said nothing, his gaze turned sorrowful, and he
kissed my mouth. “Do not fear, Heloise, the sisters will take care of you here. And I will come to see you tomorrow.”

The chapel door opened. A smiling priest whom I did not recognize stood within, beckoning us to enter. Clinging to Abelard's outstretched hand, I stumbled toward the door, leaving Jean to tend to the horses and my belongings.

“God's head, Heloise, you are not marching to your doom,” Abelard whispered. “They are helping us, or had you forgotten? You ought to strive, at least, for gratitude over sullenness.”

Gratitude over sullenness; sweetness over anger; smiles over tears; Abelard over Heloise. But to be severely afflicted by one's own misfortunes is the token of self-love, not friendship. And so I did his bidding and summoned a smile for the father; then, in the guesthouse, I thanked the abbess—not Basilia, who had died the previous year, but Beatrice, the prioress who had comforted me when first I'd arrived at Argenteuil as a child.

“The Montmorency family has endowed our abbey so generously over the years,” the Reverend Mother Beatrice said when, after pressing my lips to her hand, I said I hoped God would bless her for giving me shelter. “Providing aid to one of their daughters is the least we can do. The
magister
has told us of your troubles.” I glanced at Abelard: What had he revealed to her? “But we are pleased that God has sent you back to us. When you left, you had met all the requirements for taking the veil. Perhaps you will consider doing so now?”