Stealing Heaven (6 page)

The statement nearly propelled her off the stool. "A husband!" she cried. "I don't want a husband!"

Fulbert didn't seem to have heard her. His face was as matter-of-fact as though he were selecting hymns for vespers. "You are fifteen—"

"Fourteen," she interrupted.

"—almost fifteen, and of an age when it's proper that a woman be married." He walked to the doorway and called for Agnes without raising his voice. "You come from good stock. Be assured that I'll give you to a man of sufficiently high rank"—he cleared his throat again—"that is, the highest possible rank for a girl with no dower to speak of."

Agnes appeared in the doorway, wiping her hands on her apron. Fulbert spoke without looking at her. "Have Petronilla set up the trestle in the garden tonight. It's much too warm to dine indoors

Yes, my lord."

Heloise slumped on the stool, sluggish. Fulbert made everything sound so simple. Black and white, convent and marriage. She felt a torrent of involuntary fury surge over her, but it was directed entirely inward. In bed sometimes at night, after coming up from matins, she would make up lives for herself, and in her mind she often saw herself as the Margravine Ida who had ridden to the Holy Land at the head of her crusading army. Some said that the Austrian amazon had perished, killed at the same massacre in the hills of Asia Minor where Heloise's father had died; others swore that she had been captured and taken away to live in some emir's desert castle. But later, after Heloise had studied Greek, her dream-fantasies were all placed in Lesbos or Athens, where she pictured herself as the sweet-tongued lioness, Sappho, or as Aspasia, lovely and wise, strolling among the fluted columns of the Parthenon with her lover, Pericles. Yet these were the foolish mirages of a child, and for several years she had known it, even though she continued to dream, eddying on a phantasmal river that made life bearable. She thought sorrowfully, I'm too old for make-believe.

The moment of panic skittered away. All she felt was shame. She fully expected Fulbert to be furious with her, but he was still standing there, smiling amiably. Apparently he had already devoted some thought to this problem of a husband, for later, over supper, he spoke of little else. What he sought was a man of good family, a man somewhat learned himself who would appreciate the value of a young woman on whom he could get intelligent sons, someone to keep the household accounts in perfect order and read aloud in the evenings. Ideal would be an older man, preferably a widower seeking the exotic in a second or third wife.

Unfortunately, Fulbert confessed to her, he had been unable to think of anyone remotely approaching this description. Heloise, ravenous, ate and said nothing.

After the meal, on her way up to bed, she overheard him telling Agnes that Heloise was too big for a woman, but, God he thanked, she was at least pretty. A girl both ugly and learned would be nigh impossible to dispose of, she would be eating his bread until the day he died.

"She carries herself like a duchess," Agnes replied.
 

"Too tall."

 

 

 

3

 

 

At first
, Fulbert talked a great deal about Heloise's marriage, and so did Agnes and Petronilla. But on the second Sunday of June took place the Procession of the Relic, when Notre Dame displayed the piece of the True Cross that it had acquired a few years earlier. Since relics were Fulbert's chief passion, he was busy with arrangements for the feast day. On the Thursday after St. John's Day, he rode down to Melun to collect overdue rents from his tenant farms, and after he returned it rained steadily for a week. The coverlet on her bed began to smell of mildew, and the streets of the Ile turned into lakes of mud until horses floundered up to their fetlocks. On the main streets, planks had been thrown down at the crossings, but nobody went about much unless he had to. Heloise noticed that Fulbert no longer mentioned the betrothal. Probably he had forgotten, and she had no intention of reminding him.

During the first summer in Paris, life seemed to settle into a pattern, but unlike the oppressive rituals at Argenteuil, it was a routine that filled her with an immense peace. Fulbert owned a fine library; she would spend the mornings in his study or take the books to her turret chamber and read by the window, turning the parchment pages and memorizing whole passages from Seneca and St. Jerome. The more she read, the more she became aware of all she had not read, and she devoured books the way Petronilla bolted down Agnes's cardamom cakes.

Fulbert puzzled her. He was responsible for selecting the music at three of the seven daily services, but he hired others to do much of the work. Most of his time was spent dealing in relics, at which business he made considerable profit (with the exception of Christ's baby tooth, and in that case he claimed to have been cruelly swindled), and he was constantly adding to his property holdings near Melun. His canonical duties were performed as a sort of afterthought, or so it appeared to Heloise.

What gradually became clear to her was that Fulbert was growing fond of her. The moment he stepped foot in the house he would call for her, and they would sit under the pear tree while Agnes babied him insanely. She would seat him in a cushioned chair and slip a pillow under his feet; for that matter, she was on the run for him at all hours, massaging his feet with unguents, dosing him with broths of medicinal herbs, fetching his toothpick or a silver henap filled with Macon. Fulbert was a man who demanded, and received, good service from his women. The lesser sex might be gateways to the devil, but God had put women on earth for a purpose—to bear children and provide food, drink, and other sundries for men. As for his niece, he valued her for other reasons. Hearing her read aloud gave him pleasure, and after dark he ordered candles, instead of the rushlights they ordinarily burned, so that Heloise should not ruin her eyes.

According to Agnes, this in itself was remarkable, because Master was forever grumbling about the expense of candles, just as he grew anguished over any unnecessary expenditure. Petronilla said he was stingy, but Heloise believed it merely thrift. Certainly Fulbert esteemed money; he dressed in fine velvets and brocades and decked his fingers with rubies and emeralds so that he looked more lofty than a bishop.

This quirky passion of his for listening to her read embarrassed Heloise a little in the beginning, especially at his monthly "evenings," when he entertained his fellow canons and some of the local barons. These recitations being very nearly in the nature of public performances, Heloise started to balk, but then she thought better of it. It was clear that these fine gentlemen, despite their education, in no way approached her storehouse of knowledge, and if it gave them pleasure to learn, she did not begrudge them. Agnes said it was a blessing to have Heloise at these gatherings because, before her arrival at the Rue des Chantres, the men wound up arguing, and Canon Martin, Fulbert's closest friend, invariably stalked out in a fury.

 

After Lammas, Fulbert began taking her across the Petit Pont to a flat field near Saint-Germain-des-Pres, where he taught her to ride. He said it would be a disgrace for a noble girl to be anything less than a fine horsewoman. The sluggish brood mare he first brought for her was about as exciting as a half-dead mule; she lumbered along until Heloise feared each step would be her last. Heloise protested, and the next time they went out. Fulbert had selected a dun gelding, lively and high-stepping.

The meadow ran alongside the Left Bank of the Seine, across from the king's palace. There was a landing quay at the tip of the island, and Heloise could make out mossy green steps leading up to a gate and beyond that what appeared to be a luxuriant garden.

The early-morning mist was beginning to lift, breaking into frail patches and drifting up in the sunlight. Fulbert lengthened the dun's stirrups. Sighing, Heloise called to him, "I wish I were a lark. I'd fly across the river and sit on a branch of one of those lemon trees, and I could watch all the court ladies."

He straightened with a laugh. "That's not necessary. In summer, King Louis opens the garden to the masters and students from the schools. They hold classes there and anyone may enter." He hoisted her into the saddle and handed up the reins. "Frightened, poppet?"

"No." The dun took two steps forward and happily bucked her into the wet grass. She sat there in surprise a minute before pulling herself to her feet. The dun looked back, snorting disdainfully.

Fulbert held out his arms to lift her up again. "This time, don't slam down your behind so hard. You're too rough."

Heloise stroked the dun's withers, talking to him in Hebrew. "See. He's a Jew. He likes me now."

Her uncle grinned. "Mayhap."

At a slow jog, they began to move down the field. Heloise relaxed in the saddle and felt the breeze streaming over her bare ankles.

"Sit up straight!" shouted Fulbert. "Don't flap your elbows around like a hawk." He spurred his stallion into a canter, and the dun followed.

From the corner of her eye, Heloise kept swinging her gaze over to the blue roofs of the Cite Palace, foolishly hoping to catch a glimpse of the king or his new bride, Queen Adelaide. "Do you think I could go there?"

"Go where?"

"There." She pointed to the king's garden. 'To hear the masters teach."

Fulbert wheeled the stallion and galloped around her in a circle. With the haughty curve of his back and his fair hair streaming out behind in the glare of the sun, his head appeared speckled with a kind of luminous crown. Heloise thought that he looked like St. Michael, or one of those knights the jongleurs always sang about; he would have been a knight if his father had not sent him into the Church. He rode up behind Heloise. "Whatever for? My fair niece, you know more than the masters."

She doubted that. "I? You tease me."

"Indeed." He was gazing at her affectionately. "Oh, well. I suppose there are a few of them who might teach you something. Peter Abelard perhaps."

Before she could answer, he was halfway down the field. "Come on!" he yelled.

She still wanted to go; he hadn't said no.

They were coming to Pre-aux-Clercs, a strip of land lying between Saint-Germain and the river, and constantly disputed between the monks and the students. This morning the chewed-up field looked to be in the hands of the young people; they were dancing and singing, and some had gathered around a wrestling match, Heloise and Fulbert dismounted at the edge of the field and let the horses graze.

"Are you happy?" Fulbert asked kindly.

I'mhappy."

T mean, living with me." He rested his palms on her shoulders. She could feel the warmth of his fingers through her dress. "I'm happy." She swallowed. "It's been—“

"Good."

She caught his hand. "You won't send me away? I hated Argenteuil." She wanted to say more, to ask him never to send her away, but pride prevented her from drawing attention to her shameless insecurities. In all the empty places she must walk, he would stand between her and evil.

His fingers tightened around hers. "Don't talk about it."

She said tautly, "All right." It was funny, now that she thought of it, how people always wanted you to keep quiet about the things that mattered.

"You're only a child yet."

They ran toward the horses; on the way back to the Rue des Chantres, they talked of the petition the burghers were planning to draw up, requesting Louis the Fat to cobble the streets of the Ile.
 

 

Summer ended. Small whooping boys stopped diving naked off the Petit Pont, and the chestnut leaves in the cloister turned burnished red. Each day more and more students swarmed into the city, something Heloise had not believed possible. Michaelmas came and went, and now the evenings were too crisp to sit in the garden. She and Fulbert moved inside to a fire in the canon's private apartments, and they would talk long after the watchman had drawn the chain across the Rue des Chantres. Rarely, if ever now, did she brood about the future; there seemed to be an unspoken agreement between her and Fulbert. He did not again refer to the morning at Pre-aux-Clercs, yet it was taken for granted that there would be no husband, not now at least, and that they would skim through time together, snugly wrapped in a cocoon of their own making. They never talked about it.

Nevertheless, she knew that what she felt for Fulbert fell into some ill-defined category of love. She loved God, of course, and Jesus and the Blessed Virgin, but it was hard to say whether she loved any living person, and being uncertain, she rather thought not. The people one ordinarily loved, mother and father, brothers and sisters, had never existed for her. Sister Madelaine she had admired, but not loved, and Ceci she had tolerated, as one forbears to shoo away a dog forever curled around one's ankles. There was only Fulbert, who filled her with a kind of tranquillity, Fulbert with his pale hair and his fingers lightly stroking her cheek.

On a hazed-over morning in October, Heloise sat in the kitchen, her face smeared with one of Agnes's concoctions of lemon juice and goose grease to make skin smooth and white. The precise reason for these beauty treatments escaped her—there was no man she wished to impress, except perhaps Fulbert—but Agnes insisted. She made it a point of honor to advise her mistress on everything a young lady of good blood should know.

Agnes was rolling out pastry dough with floury arms and talking of how Queen Adelaide would have her lying-in at the Cite Palace instead of Compiegne, and how it was high time King Louis gave the Franks an heir, seeing as he had waited until the advanced age of thirty-five to marry.

Heloise yawned. "He must not like women."

"Oh, I imagine he likes them well enough," Agnes grunted. "He's sired at least one bastard." She began cutting the dough into circles. “True, it wouldn't surprise me if he did hate them, after Bertrada got done with him."

Agnes never ceased to astonish Heloise. She had a repertory of gossip, past and current, and given half a chance, she would chatter your ear off. "Bertrada?" asked Heloise. "Who's that?"