Stealing Heaven (23 page)

"You'll feel better," he said. "By and by." His tone was hearty, unnatural.

"I know," she said in a small voice. Abruptly a cry ripped from her throat. "Oh God, Jourdain, I wish I were dead!"

He shook his head. "People don't die from love." A few seconds later, "Most people I know wouldn't sacrifice their lives for love, either."

"I would."

He said blandly, "That's the difference between you and—most people I know."

She knew that his face was bitter, but she hadn't the strength to argue with him. The road began tilting sharply upward. Over to her left, there were torches atwinkle in the abbey of Sainte-Genevieve. When they reached the crest of the hill, she asked Jourdain to rein in.

"Why?"

"I want to look."

 
"There's nothing to see."

She pulled up the stallion and moved it around. Down below, the Ile slept in its thinning gray mist. A few lights blinked like fireflies; she could see, indistinctly, the slender spires of the Cite Palace and the smudged contours of the topmost bell tower on Notre Dame. There was nothing to see. They rode on.

 

 

 

10

 

 

Le Pallet was a small
fortified castle perched on the slope of a hill, some dozen miles southeast of Nantes. Above the castle, the hill tapered to a summit capped by a fine grove of pines; below, on the far side of the hill, droned the river Sangueze, which local chroniclers claimed had been named after the savage battles between the Bretons and Angles centuries earlier.

If once the Sangueze had gushed with blood, Heloise could find nothing of violence in the landscape now. The scenery was as unpretentious as a cup of cool, clear water. Under an open sky, the land fanned away into the distance with nothing to jostle the eye but fields of vines, clusters of poplars and oaks and flapping willows, cattle grazing peacefully in the ragged meadow grass. Nothing, she thought, could happen there.

As baronial fortresses went, Le Pallet had to be regarded as outmoded. Nearly two hundred and fifty years old, it had been continually occupied by a succession of owners, some of whom had found it necessary to withstand expeditions of Scandinavian barbarians who had come in their long-prowed dragon ships and ravaged the countryside. But now it had been fifteen years or more since the castle had withstood a siege, that during a paltry private war between two local barons, and certainly no one had suffered the least inconvenience. Recent innovations in fortifications as a result of the crusade had rendered unformidable such strongholds as Le Pallet. It was now a well-run farm and little more.

Despite Heloise's confident farewells to Abelard, she had arrived there with tangled emotions: joy, hope, considerable apprehension. Abelard had assured her of a loving reception from his kin, but by now she knew both Abelard and human nature well enough to realize that this might not be the case. She was, she warned herself, the pregnant mistress of their famous brother, and, from what Jourdain had said of the family's piety, they might very well hold her lack of chastity against her. In the end, as these things have a way of doing, nothing turned out as she had anticipated. Secretly she had expected—a hit unreasonably, she knew—a castle full of Abelard facsimiles, that is to say, brilliant, good-looking men and women, as if the womb of Abelard's mother could only produce geniuses, and what she found were ordinary people, well-meaning and unsophisticated.

For that matter, very few of Abelard's family remained at the castle. Some years earlier, Berengarius and Lucia had retreated into their respective abbeys, and by now the children too had scattered: Porcarius and Dagobert to Nantes, where the former had become a canon, the latter a knight in the service of the Duke of Brittany; Radulphus, dead of dysentery, to a grave under the pine grove on the hill. Abelard's middle brother, Dagobert, preferred to live at the duke's palace, and he returned to Le Pallet only three or four times a year, on which occasions he invariably impregnated his wife if she were not already carrying a child. If it had once troubled Alienor that she saw her husband infrequently, this was no longer true, and she had come to regard his periodic visits as a seasonal annoyance that must be borne philosophically, like the sudden storm that leaves in its wake a torn roof to be mended.

Since Berengarius's departure, Le Pallet had become, in effect, the property of Abelard's sister, Denise, and her husband, William. A petty knight, a younger son with no prospects whatsoever, William had responded to this rise in his fortunes with a gratitude that bordered on the touching; he stewarded Berengarius's fief as if the land had been his own and toiled harder than any peasant. Denise, a small, slightly plump woman, was by no means happy with her hardworking spouse, but it took Heloise many months to realize this. Her first impression of the castle was a blur of children, for with Denise's surviving eight and Alienor's thirteen, the hall and ward echoed from prime to matins with the sound of excited voices and always, it seemed, with the squalling of one infant or another. Depending upon one's capacity for noise and affection for children, it was either a juvenile Utopia or the worst sort of chaos.

Unwilling to make any such judgment at the outset, Heloise decided to reserve opinion and observe, although as the months passed, after Jourdain had gone and she had made friends with some of the children, she was obliged to conclude that the only word for Le Pallet was bedlam. Happy bedlam, but bedlam nonetheless. This was, she often reminded herself, the place where she would be spending the remainder of her life. It was, after all, the real world, just as Saint-Gervais was also the normal world of dogs and children, horses and halls with their smoke-blackened walls. She had never existed in this world, neither Argenteuil nor the Rue des Chantres falling into any such category, and she embarked on a self-conducted campaign of adjustment. And when she sometimes awakened in the night with a queer hunger, only a dream perhaps, for her turret chamber in Fulbert's house, she hastily walled up the memories.

Living at Le Pallet, she decided, was just like sitting in a warm tub; it clipped the senses utterly so that the weeks and months slipped by with the greased passage of buttery soap. Perhaps, though, it was only the condition of pregnancy. She felt like doing nothing, and no one required anything of her, although she volunteered her services with the chores without being asked. At first, Denise and William seemed to approach her on tiptoe, as if she were some countess who had inexplicably stumbled through their gate for her lying-in. This partial awe in which they held her created, of course, barriers, and by autumn Heloise still had not become fully intimate with the members of the household. This did not bother her as much as it might have under other circumstances; she felt strangely lethargic, half there and half someplace other, but where she could not say.

Nothing troubled her excessively, except the news from Paris. It was very bad. Abelard had not come at Lammas as he had promised, only letters from both him and Jourdain describing more or less the same situation: that Fulbert had reacted to her disappearance with a grief and fury so spectacular that it bordered on insanity. It had to be seen, Abelard wrote, to be believed.

Her uncle roved the Ile and the Left Bank, knocking on doors and pleading with goodwives to tell him if they had seen his niece. Canon Martin and others had been sent bearing threats to cut Abelard's throat if he did not return Heloise, and when it finally became apparent that she was not with him, Fulbert took his complaints to Louis the Fat, accusing Master Peter of debauching and kidnaping his niece. He hired men to guard Abelard's house and to follow him day and night, and for this reason Abelard had not dared journey to Brittany in the summer. Only after classes had resumed in the fall did he explain the situation to King Louis, asking him to inform Fulbert that further search was futile, that Heloise, pregnant, had gone to Le Pallet.

Her uncle's uppermost thoughts were of vengeance, but what could he do?
If he were to kill or injure Abelard, some retribution might fall on Heloise among the barbaric Bretons. Nevertheless, Jourdain reassuringly wrote to her, Abelard was very much on guard against assault, and he had taken the precaution of hiring a bodyguard who accompanied him to class and slept outside his door at night. Fulbert had not, Jourdain added, the courage to harm Abelard now. Heloise could do nothing—but worry.

 

By the end of August, her belly was beginning to unfurl and she could feel the floating and fluttering of butterfly wings, a sensation that the women of the castle quickly demoted from the realm of the poetic to a prosaic observation: The babe was kicking.

The day before Michaelmas, Alienor gave birth to a stillborn son, and then, a week later, Denise followed with a live daughter, whom she christened Agnes. Neither of these occurrences created a ripple in the daily life of the castle, where gestation and parturition were as unremarkable as the passing of the seasons. Two days after Agnes's birth, Denise was out of bed, jangling the keys she wore on her girdle and screeching at the servingwomen for having neglected their chores.

"Lazy wretches," she grumbled to Heloise. "When I'm in childbed, they take it for a holiday."

Heloise watched as she opened her bliaut and guided the infant's mouth to her nipple. She looked at the color of Agnes's face; it was a queer reddish purple. She looked as if she had been boiled. "Does it hurt badly?" she asked impulsively.

"What? Giving suck?" Denise gave her a blank look. "Of course not."

"No, I meant having it." After listening to Alienor's shrieks, she had steeled herself when Denise's time had come. But Denise had done little more than whimper.

"It hurts," she said. Seeing the dismayed look on Heloise's face, she quickly added, "But not always. It depends. Don't think about it."

"I can't help thinking about it." Denise's second youngest child crawled between her feet. She hoisted Agathe into her lap and bounced her. The child, giggling, clawed with plump fingers at her plaits.

"Don't worry. Alienor's an excellent midwife."

Heloise hesitated, then said, "Alienor told me that I'm too old to have a first babe. Is that right?"

Denise smoothed her free hand wearily across her forehead. That single gesture reminded Heloise of Abelard, that and the thick dark hair; otherwise she would never have taken them for brother and sister. Denise answered reluctantly, "Well, eighteen is old. But I wouldn't worry. Just pray it comes out alive."

There was an inflection of mild rebuke in her last words, and Heloise fell silent. Although Denise invariably spoke to her in tones sweet as honey, she sensed a trace of something sharp behind them. She bit her lower lip and lowered Agathe to the floor. The child let out a howl, which Heloise ignored; she had wet through her napkin and left a damp patch on Heloise's skirt. After a moment: "How old were you when you married William?"

“Thirteen."

Heloise smiled. "How very young to be in love."

"In love? Believe me, I wasn't in love." Denise lifted the infant to her shoulder and rubbed her back. “I cried for a week. My lady mother kept threatening to beat me if I didn't stop weeping."

"You didn't want to marry?"

Denise corrected her matter-of-factly. "Didn't want to marry William."

"Why ever not? He's a worthy man."
 

"And poor." Denise laughed.

"What difference does that make?" Heloise said. "A man's worth depends on his merits, not on wealth or power."

"Oh, I suppose." She stood up and laid the infant in a basket of unmended clothes near the hearth. "But it's better to have a rich worthy man than a poor one."

Watching Denise's face, she felt a crackle of revulsion at the woman's mercenary attitude. What kind of marriage could Denise have? Keeping her voice neutral, she said, "Don't you think that a woman who marries for money is offering herself for sale?"

Denise straightened with a glare that she quickly amended. She said, rather carelessly, "Rich, poor. Who had a choice? I was given to a poor man, that's all."

"Yes, but—"

"Lady, it's all very well for you to talk." Denise's lips quivered with annoyance. "You have a rich man."

Struggling to keep from shouting, she deliberately folded her arms over her stomach. "Abelard isn't rich."

Denise's eyes rounded, disbelieving. "What are you talking about?" she snorted. "Mayhap he's not rich to you, but I call him rich."

Heloise looked beyond her, at Agathe poking a finger into her sister's mouth. Her temples were beginning to pound. She should have known better than to start this discussion with Denise. Now she could only try to maneuver herself out of it before any great damage was done. Finally she said, "Of course you're right."

Denise stood before the hearth, face flushed, hands clamped on her hips. This was the first time that Heloise could recall seeing her hands idle. She was staring down at her feet, as if some question were forming in her mind. Whatever it was, Heloise didn't want to hear. Smiling, she hoisted herself to her feet and started to walk away. Over her shoulder, she could hear Denise calling her name. She turned back, bracing herself slightly. The rushes crunched under her feet.

"I was wondering—" Denise cleared her throat. "In the letters I've had from my lord brother, there was no mention of when he plans to visit us."

Stiffening, Heloise said quickly, "Nor in mine."
 

"Christmas, do you think?"
 

"Mayhap. I don't know."

Denise rubbed her hands together fretfully. “I hope you don't mind my asking. But preparations must be made for the wedding, and if I know in advance I—"

"Wedding?" The lone word heaved itself involuntarily out of Heloise's mouth and hung in the air between them.

Abruptly, Denise began talking of slaughtering and baking, of special decorations for the chapel, and of how many casks of wine she would distribute to the varlets. She planned to invite the surrounding countryside and perhaps, she said, the duke.