The Sharp Hook of Love (39 page)

Etienne turned to me. “What did your letter contain?”

I stared at him, openmouthed, uncertain what to say. If I confessed my error, would he tell Abelard what I had done? Abelard might blame me, then, for my uncle's cruel deed, and I would
lose him forever. But what choice did I have? Were I the most accomplished liar in the world, I could not deceive Etienne, not after all the times he had helped Abelard and me.

And so I told him everything. I told how Abelard had installed me at Argenteuil and then failed to answer my letters, leaving me to believe that he had abandoned me. I told him how Sister Adela had forced me to toil in the vineyards. And I told him of our son, of his secret birth and Abelard's promise to take me to Brittany on a date that he continually delayed. Although I dared not ask for Etienne's help, a part of me hoped that he might do what Abelard would not and bring Astralabe home to me.

Instead, he cursed and leapt to his feet, striding toward the chambers where Abelard slept, then turning around and walking back to us, running his hands through his hair.

“A child, born out of wedlock!” With a great sigh, he slumped back into his chair. “This is disturbing news. Who else knows?”

“No one except the two of you—and Agnes, and Jean, who took me to the boat.” We both looked at Pauline, who raised her hands toward heaven and swore before God that, although she knew about the child, she had never told a soul and would not.

“I hope you are telling the truth,” Etienne said to her. To me, he added: “Breaking the vow of continence is punishable in itself, but impregnating his own scholar would cost Pierre everything. The Church would show little mercy for such a sin.”

“Abelard and I sinned, but our hearts remained pure. We loved each other. We could not marry because of his vow of continence, but our souls joined as one from the moment we first kissed. By the time we consummated our love, we had married in our hearts.” At that moment, my soul wanted only for me to join my
speciälïs
in his bed and hold his wounded and cringing body, crippled by a scandal from which neither of us would recover.

“Married in your hearts? I appreciate the sentiment, but the bishop will not.”

Etienne spoke the truth, I knew. Love, in the eyes of the Church, did not excuse the flaunting of its rules. King Louis's father, King Philip, had married Bertrade of Montfort for love—setting aside the wife he had taken out of duty. In return, the pope excommunicated him several times, punishing not only the king but his subjects. The realm's cathedrals closed, depriving even the dying of the final blessings that would allow their souls to enter heaven. Lamentations rent the skies; rioters converged on the royal palace, throwing stones and shouting demands that the king repudiate his whore. No one, least of all the Church fathers, cared whether he loved her. How could we, not royals but mere mortals, expect their sympathy? That we loved each other counted for nothing except in our own hearts, and in the eyes of God—or so I pray.

Now I, too, had been called
whore
by the students who loved Abelard, and
daughter of Eve
by others who had forgotten, it seemed, that God is love. In daring to live life on our own terms, he and I now stood to lose all. Indeed, judging from Abelard's behavior, I might have lost him already. And Etienne, I realized, would not help me to regain my son. He could ill afford to be seen as endorsing our love while the rest of the world, including the king's favored chaplain, condemned it.

“Has Jean spoken to anyone of the child?” Etienne demanded of Pauline.

“I do not know, Your Grace,” she said, drawing back from him. “We have not discussed it much. After my husband left to work for Master Pierre, we saw each other only on Sundays, our day off from work. We did not spend our precious hours discussing our employers, as I am sure you can imagine.” Her skin colored.

“I must know.” Etienne stood and rang for his manservant, then commanded him to bring three horses to the mounting block. Turning to Pauline, Etienne said, “I shall arrange for you to see your husband.”

Pauline's eyes lit up. “God bless you, Your Grace! How can I ever repay your kindness?”

“You can find out whether Jean has told anyone of Master Pierre's child, and whom. And, for God's sake, ask him where Canon Fulbert is hiding.”

H
ow had I never noticed their love?

The tears in her eyes, the way she lifted her hands to his battered face as though her touch might heal his bruises; his steady gaze, the understanding that passed between them without need of words—how could anyone see Pauline and Jean together and not notice? But my uncle knew and had used their love to his advantage. Holding Pauline as his hostage, he had coerced Jean into committing his crime for him. But my uncle had gone to such lengths needlessly, Jean told me.

“Had Canon Fulbert asked, I would gladly have done the deed before that devil could even think of dishonoring you,” Jean said in the cold stone room set aside for visitors to the prison. He spoke with difficulty through a mouth swollen and bleeding, struck many times during his interrogation by a gendarme's heavily ringed hand.

“I saw right away what Master Pierre wanted. So did Pauline.” She nodded and squeezed Jean's hand. “We know too many women whose employers have taken advantage of their innocence, then cast them aside like dogs after the hunt. Pauline was in this situation when I met her. Her employer cast her out when at last she refused his demands. She was fortunate, indeed, that
Canon Fulbert hired her when he did, for she had spent nearly all the money that devil had paid her for her silence—and she had a babe to feed.” Jean spat on the floor as if telling the tale had embittered his mouth.

Suspecting Abelard's motives, Jean had tried to dissuade my uncle from renting a room to him—but Uncle would not listen.

“He fancied himself Master Petrus's friend, which vaunted his pride to no end.” But pride goes before destruction, and haughtiness before a fall, and my uncle before long found himself utterly humiliated by Abelard's—by our—deception.

“Drink gets the best of him at times, but Canon Fulbert is a good man,” Jean added staunchly. “He always had the best of intentions for you, my lady. But he didn't protect you, and he feels bad for it. His only fault is that he trusted that womanizer.”

I frowned. I'd been twenty years of age when Abelard and I first met, hardly in need of protection. What had Jean said of Abelard, or what might he say under the gendarme's blows?

I hastened to correct Jean: Abelard, I said, had not seduced me. We loved each other. “To change Abelard's feelings for me, you would have to cut out his heart.”

Jean shook his head, his eyes fathomless pools of sorrow. “I hope you are right. But I fear, for your sake, that you are badly mistaken. No man who loves a woman treats her as he has treated you.”

“It does not matter what we think, my lady,” Pauline said. “You will see for yourself very soon whether his love comes from his heart, or from another part of his body.”

I beg you, then, as you set about tending the wounds that others have dealt, heal the wounds you have yourself inflicted.

—HELOISE TO ABELARD

H
aving gained Jean's assurance that he had told no one, not even my uncle, of our child—“I would not cause harm to you for anything in this world, my lady,” he said, apparently not realizing that, in assaulting Abelard, he had destroyed me—Pauline and I left him at the prison, where he would remain until my uncle's arrest. Jean swore that he did not know where Uncle Fulbert had gone, but having been deceived so thoroughly by him before, I did not know whether to believe him.

“Jean,” Pauline said before we departed, wringing his hand, “I have a message for you from Canon Fulbert. He told it to me before he fled.
Non!
” She stood and pressed both palms against her cheeks. “Jean-Paul! Dear Lord—I have just remembered. I must find him.”

“What is it, Pauline?” I said. “What did my uncle say?”

She turned back toward her husband. “He said that if you were captured, Jean, you must not speak a word against Canon Fulbert. He said, ‘Tell Jean he must confess to the crime completely. If they ask of my involvement, say I knew nothing about
it.' ” She began to tremble. “Jean, he had tied me to the post. He slid the dull edge of his blade across my neck. He said he would hurt our son.”

“Jean-Paul.” Jean's strength returned to him. He stood and grasped his wife by her shoulders. “Where is he?”

“I—I don't know.” She stared into his eyes. “I can't find him.”

“Go and seek him at home. He must be there! Pauline, you must find him now. I have told the bishop all about Canon Fulbert. I . . . could not endure the torture.” Jean held out his hands to show the bleeding, torn skin where his fingernails had been.

In moments we were riding through the cloister gates, accompanied by Etienne's manservant, into the city. Rather than turn toward the south, we rode over the Petit Pont and the Grand-Pont to an area in the shadow of the northern wall. This was a part of Paris that I had never before visited. My stomach turned at the squalor we encountered. Garbage littered the streets and alleys, attracting dogs, pigs, and flies, and sending up a stench that mingled with the reek of feces and urine flung from chamber pots and left to rot. Dirty children ran barefoot through the muck, squealing with laughter and smearing their hands and clothes with filth. The houses, made of rotting wood, crowded together, blocking nearly all the day's light from the narrow street. A woman with arms as muscled as a man's hung clothes on a line stretched across her window, a child swelling her belly and another in a sling around her neck. Pauline waved and called her by name; when the woman smiled, I saw that she had just one tooth.

“How do these poor people live?” I asked Pauline.

“With hope, always with hope of better times in this life or the next.”

At the end of the street, the neighborhood brightened. The houses turned to stone and masonry; shops, rather than butchers'
stalls, occupied the ground level, selling soap and candles and linen fabric and cooking pots. A lone rooster crossed ahead of us.

“That place back there is sickening,
non
? I used to live there,” Pauline said, “before I married Jean.” Jean-Paul's father, her former employer, had put her there, she said, and, except for the few coins he sent from time to time, utterly neglected her and his son.

“He was terrified that his father, a count, would find out what he had done to me and force him into the priesthood. And so he hid me there with the lepers, the prostitutes, and the rats.” Her eyes drooped at the corners. She pressed her mouth shut, but her chin trembled. “It was the worst year of my life. You cannot imagine.”

I stared at her. No, I could not imagine living in such misery.

Why didn't she appeal to the man's father for aid? I asked. Surely he would not wish to have his grandson brought up in such a place.

“And have Jean-Paul taken from me to be raised in his castle? My son would never have known me. You may think me selfish, but I loved him too much to let him go. He was all I had in the world.” When, at his birth, he slipped into the world like a breath, as thin as a reed and too weak even to cry, she worried that she had made the wrong choice. She wrote to the boy's father, threatening to tell the count about Jean-Paul unless he gave her more help. In a few days she had a job cooking for my uncle, where she met Jean, who married her and claimed Jean-Paul as his own name.

“Now it seems my job is finished. Jean-Paul has just begun work as a servant to the new bishop. What will happen to him now that his father is disgraced? What will happen to us all?” Her eyes shone—not with light, but darkness.

I tried to think of some way I could ease her distress. “Pauline, you are the best cook in Paris. You will find work.” I would help
her if I could. Agnes loved Pauline's brewet and would need a cook when she married her seigneur. “But first, let us find that son of yours.”

She stopped her horse before a fabric shop, in whose window a rosy-faced man laid out rolls of linen and cotton before a woman in a brown-and-pink gown.

“
Bonjour
, Pauline!” the merchant called as we passed, lifting his brows at the sight of my clothes—a saffron chemise and blue
bliaut
embroidered with golden crosses, my attempt to add cheer to the gray-and-black world of Argenteuil. “Did Jean-Paul find you? He left a little while ago for your canon's house.”

“He went to Canon Fulbert's?” Pauline's voice rose. She turned to me with panic in her eyes. “What will he do to my son?” she cried.

We turned our horses and rode as quickly as we dared through the crowded, ice-slicked streets to my uncle's house, where we found Jean-Paul sitting on the mounting stone and wondering what had become of his parents.