The Cloister

by James Carroll

  “It was regular, until now. I should have had the monthly flowers three weeks ago.”

  The Jew nodded. “The body economizes with blood now, supplying the coming child. In these weeks, are mornings difficult for you?”

  “Yes. Biliousness.”

  “Also as it should be. The body purifies itself, expelling malignant humors. The Lord is making you ready. You will be formidable at this. You were made for it.”

  Héloïse was stunned to find tears welling in her eyes. “My mother died while giving birth.” She blurted this, having never meant to refer to her poor mother’s fate, the trauma of her own witnessing of it.

  “I am sorry. But that unhappy outcome…it was not when you yourself were born?”

  “No.”

  He moved his head up and down, slowly—indicating a conclusion. “You will die, my lady,” he said. “But not of this child. Not of this birth. You will live a long, good life.” The Jew said this as if his knowledge were certain, and Héloïse thought of Simeon, the just man of Jerusalem who consoled the Mother of Jesus. The Jew continued, “Still, it is true that the birth will be difficult, and you are right to be afraid. It is fear that I sense in you, is it not?”

  The tears spilled out of her eyes. Héloïse nodded yes.

  The Jew reached across the table and took her hand. “But you were made to bear the difficulty. The fearsomeness will be nothing when your child is placed in your arms.”

  “Saint Paul says as much,” Peter put in, but neither the Jew nor Héloïse acknowledged him.

  “I repeat…” the Jew began. Now he covered the hand of Héloïse with his second hand. “You will be formidable.”

  “And between now and then?” Peter asked.

  The Jew waited for Héloïse to ratify the question with her nod. He said, “What you eat will affect your unborn child. Dry food. Avoid fluids that are cold. Avoid acidic fruits like pomegranate, or mix them with wine. Dry and crush the flowers of fruit-bearing plants and brew them into tea. As the time progresses, confinement is appropriate, as if you yourself were returning to the womb. When the child is coming, you will do well to have your flanks rubbed with rose oil, but only for comfort. Your body will supply what you and your child need. Trust that.”

  “Will the child be deformed?”

  The Jew shrugged. “No more than all the sons and daughters of Adam are. Some deformities are of the body, some are of the spirit—but no one is spared, which is why we must be kind to one another. Caring for yourself is the way to care for your child. Leave the rest to the Holy One, who watches you. Nay, who abides in you right now. It is the Holy One you are carrying. Blessed are you, my lady.”

  The Jew stood. When his glance went to Peter, Peter said, “You know that, for us, there will be particular troubles.”

  The Jew nodded. “Your privilege, Master, is to protect her from the troubles. Protecting your woman is your privilege and solemn obligation.”

  Héloïse stood, but she leaned forward. “The barley seed,” she said. “The wheat.”

  “Yes.” The Jew turned and took a small square of purple velvet and a cord from a shelf—material prepared for such a purpose. He placed the square in the palm of one hand, then, with the other, swept the seeds and shoot onto the velvet, folded its corners up, and deftly tied them with the cord—a pouch. He handed it to Héloïse.

  She said, “I will do as you said, but for Master Peter’s sake. I know I have a son.”

  The Jew nodded. “I believe you do.”

  In the moments it required to pass out of the Vicus Judaeorum and through the jumbled market stalls, neither Peter nor Héloïse spoke. Finally, as they approached the wall of the Cathedral close, they halted in sync and faced each other. Héloïse went up on her toes to lose herself inside the cave of his hood, to kiss him. Peter encircled her with his arms and returned her kiss. The intensity with which they clung together was, even for them, unprecedented. Héloïse thought she would break with feeling.

  Pulling back at last, she said, “Thank you for bringing me to your prince.”

  “My darling, we have only just begun. I will protect you. I will marry you.”

  She laughed. “Marry me! What is that? We cannot get married.”

  “Of course we can. We must.”

  “Why?”

  Abelard was thrown. “The question of honor,” he said.

  “I care nothing for honor,” she answered.

  He shook his head, scrambling to keep up with her. “Consider your uncle, then. Honor is all he cares for. Fulbert will see a grievous breach of honor. His honor. The honor of your mother’s family. The honor of the Queen Consort. Therefore, the honor of the King! To say nothing of yours!”

  “Mine! My honor is to be your paramour. That is enough for me. Were we to marry, your rivals would drive you from Paris; your license to teach would be revoked, your clerical status nullified.” She was speaking as one whose thoughts on the matter were well laid out. She had already aligned this furrow of the field they were crossing. “If you were reduced to the lay state,” she continued, “your career as a philosopher would be finished. You! The most esteemed philosopher in Christendom! Ruined! Because of me! I will not hear of it.”

  “But without marriage—”

  “What is marriage to us? Are we not already bound for life? What need have we for the matrimonial cult? We are sworn already, are we not?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then we are married already.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “No one need know, dear Peter. Our secret marriage, by being secret, secures your place at the pinnacle of scholars.”

  Now it was Abelard who laughed. But he stifled himself to whisper, “You are carrying a child, woman! That secret will be kept for one month more—two at most. Then, as Prince Isaac said, you will need protection. Only sacramental matrimony protects you—protects our child. What is philosophy to that? What is Paris? I care nothing for either. I care only for you.”

  She cupped her hand at his mouth, to silence him. She, too, whispered, “I speak not of the mere vanity of the school, but of what you are embarked upon there. You are teaching a new mode of thought…thought itself, how to follow the chain of reason, to go wherever it leads.”

  He pulled his mouth free. “Not if it goes against God.”

  “But there’s the point! The point of your every lecture. Reason cannot go against God, since reason is God’s gift.” To Héloïse, Peter was God’s gift—pure and simple. God had put him in Paris. God had licensed his teaching. God needed him to carry on his new philosophy. With God at its center, why else should he not have invented a word for it: “theology”!

  Abelard cast his eyes about. The faint glow of the coming dawn was in the air. “This is no time for talk about God.”

  “I am talking about you. Your teaching. Its importance. Your God.”

  Through her cloak, he gently squeezed her upper arm. “It is only Christ’s God whom we worship.”

  “Yes! I have heard you speak boldly of Christ’s God, the One who sent His Son not to die, but to live!” That was indeed the watchword of his teaching, as she knew better than anyone. Peter Abelard held that salvation need not be won by appeasing an angry God, as the Fathers had it, because salvation already abounds in a loving God’s economy. “Life, therefore,” she insisted now, “not death! Mercy, not judgment! There is your teaching.”

  “You learn well, woman,” he said quietly.

  But she was impassioned now. “You are rewriting all that has been written. Sacraments do not save us; they merely celebrate that we are saved. Your ideas are great, and they are dangerous.”

  It was true: dangerous to the established order of hierarchy. The Church-empowered gatekeepers of grace posed a threat to Peter Abelard of which Héloïse was more aware, perhaps, than he. If God’s salvation was universally on offer, what need was there of priests? Of bishops? Of Popes? Abelard’s enemies, muttering in the shadows of the Cloister, were poised to en
circle him—to do more now than shout about flouted doctrine. Her ferocious rejection of marriage was rooted in an absolute determination not to be the instrument of Peter Abelard’s defeat by such dolts.

  “But dear, sweet Héloïse…” Again he cast his eyes about. Were they being overheard? Were the morning servants soon to appear? He began to tug at her, to draw this contest to its close.

  But by now, her only impulse was to warn him. “No, Peter,” she whispered intensely. “Listen to me. I know of the upcoming Great Chapter meeting of the so-called reformers at Chartres, where your teaching will be challenged on behalf of William of Champeaux.”

  “How do you know of that?”

  “The schoolboys know of it. Why shouldn’t I?” Peter famously kept his distance from the gossip that fueled the chatter of his students. They sat at his feet, but they also longed to see him in high-stakes verbal combat, never imagining that he could be vanquished. Yet Héloïse understood that even verbal combat could be deadly. His critics were arming themselves against him. She said, more quietly, “All the talk is of this upstart White Monk, your self-anointed inquisitor.”

  “A nobody, but not self-anointed. He is commissioned not by Champeaux, but by the toothless old lion, Anselm.”

  “Anselm is your nemesis—the great defender of the monster-God you repudiate. Old lions are dangerous when teamed with young jackals. ‘The White Monk’—why is he called that?”

  “He is too pure to wear the black robes of Saint Benedict, like the rest of us. The white habit is his claim to righteousness. His name is Bernard.”

  “If purity is his shibboleth, he threatens you doubly now. When he mixes illicit love into the cauldron of charges to be brought, Bernard will boil you. You will be scorned, and your reading of the Gospel will be lost—a catastrophe!”

  “Do not puff up my importance, woman.”

  “Do not deny it, man! Your work is only just begun. You promised the prince of the Jews that you would protect your woman. You protect her by protecting the truth of your work. That is all.”

  “No, listen to me!” he demanded. He released her and stepped back. He steepled his hands before his chin, a posture of supplication. He spoke urgently, but still in a whisper. “Suppose all that you say is true; even so, your words are mere bubbles in the air. Come down to earth with me. You yourself said it. I wear the tonsure. The rule of clergy applies to me. The bishops are ruthlessly enforcing it. If I remain as I am, a Canon of the Cathedral, our son, if such it is, will be seized from us—‘Filius nullius,’ yes—to be a slave of the Church. And you—you will be a scorned woman.”

  “I will not openly marry you. Nor will I remain in Paris. You protect me by protecting the pulse of my heart, my Peter Abelard—who is also the creator of a whole new way of thinking and learning and believing. Who am I to that?”

  “You are the absolute to me,” he said firmly.

  “Good. Then my will is absolute. You must obey it.”

  “But how—?” He opened his hands, a gesture of helplessness before her fierceness.

  “I have thought this through, using the train of logic I have from you.” She spoke with unrelenting earnestness. “My uncle’s honor, my health, the safe delivery of our son, the secret of our love—all of this is secured by my return to the convent at Argenteuil. Not as its orphaned ward, as before, nor as a senior pupil, but as a sister under the vow of postulancy—”

  “What?”

  “No, let me! I have thought this through, I say! Listen! I will enter the convent at Argenteuil. Once initially professed, I will be sent away for the year-long postulancy in the remote novitiate. Such claustration is a mandate of the Rule. All sisters begin by dying to the world, and so will I: the prescribed one year and one day. Gone. At my disappearance, my uncle, instead of humiliated and enraged, will be credited with my religious vocation. Not to mention his relief at being freed of responsibility for me. And Lady Gisela, the cousin of my mother whom he so fears, will be edified. Mother Prioress, because of my flimsy tie to the Royal household—and because she loves me—will protect my secret. All of this will unfold soon—at once!—apparently under the urgent inspiration of the Holy Ghost. So no one will know the truth of what I bear.”

  “But under vows? You? A false oath? This is violence. Violence to the absolute will you just declared. Violence to our love.”

  “You have vows,” she said.

  “I told you. I will renounce them.”

  “So will I, when the child is safely delivered. I will resume my life, my ‘formidable’ life, as Prince Isaac put it. I will ‘discover’ that my vocation lies elsewhere than in vowed consecration. Perhaps I will become one of those useful unmarried women of the Court who take care of the neglected children of the Royals. Perhaps one of those could be our own child, a ward of the household…whom I could love as my own child. As indeed I would.” Héloïse paused before going on with sudden gravity: “The only thing ‘formidable’ about me, Peter Abelard, is you. If we proceed in this way, our child will be safe, and our hidden bond can quicken once more, and thrive again, as it has until now.”

  “Never. Never,” he said. His face had darkened with a look of disbelief—that this woman could so surprise him, so shock him. “You would make a solemn vow, consciously intending to forswear it? Never!” Peter Abelard took her by the shoulders, gripping her more fiercely than he knew. “My violation of Holy Orders is a mistake,” he said. “An accident. I repent of it, and will seek dispensation. Your violation would be deliberate, a knowing falsification in advance, before God Himself. Solemnly sworn! A sacrilege, woman.”

  “You care nothing for philosophy. I care nothing for vows, and neither does an all-loving God. Don’t you see, I am carrying your logic to its conclusion. We are beloved of God whether we are in vows or not, and if the false swearing of an oath saves a life, or protects the greater truth—then Christ himself would swear it.”

  Peter Abelard, for a moment, could not speak. How was this unfolding before him? Who was this woman? Finally, with rare ferocity and still gripping her, he said, “This is no teaching of mine.”

  “Dear Peter, it follows from your teaching.”

  “Then my enemies are right.”

  “Do not say that. I beg of you. Do not say that.”

  “You would not be risking your soul, woman! You would be damning it for certain. I will have nothing to do with this. I will not permit it.”

  “I am not asking your permission.”

  “How dare you! The child is ours together. The solution to our dilemma must be won together.” He roughly released her.

  Héloïse had never seen Peter so angry. But then she realized—this was not anger. This was passionate protection, his protection of her soul. That she cared not one whit for some supposed eternal doom surprised her as much as him. She simply did not believe in the demon God who would make it so. In any case, her soul’s damnation in an imagined afterlife was pure abstraction, whereas the present destruction of Peter Abelard’s thought, the silencing of his voice, the reduction to ash of his rare wisdom—all because of her—this was Hades here and now.

  Chastened, she asked, “Then what is there for us?”

  The last hour of night, with its dampness, weighed upon them.

  Finally, Peter said, “Lucille. Nantes.”

  “What?”

  “My sister, her Breton village. A simple journey on the River Loire. We will go there. She will care for you. She has four children already underfoot. She is a masterpiece of motherhood. She will see you through your confinement, and she will see you safely delivered. For your sake, I will continue to meet my obligations at the Cathedral school, but I will manage to be with you for days and weeks at a time.” Peter did not say it—or need to—but her going to Nantes would mean that she had not falsified a sacred vow, or jeopardized her immortal soul. She would not have blasphemed, which, on his scale, was the weight that mattered most. He added, “In these months, our child will healthily come to te
rm, but so will our mutual knowledge of the way forward. I say again: the child is ours together. The solution to our dilemma must be won together. We will find it. There’s my marriage vow, dear wife of mine. I will take you to Nantes as soon as a keel can be readied.”

  “But my uncle…”

  “Your uncle, the fool, is easily handled. The Loire borders Bourgogne, the realm of your mother’s cousin. Use the available truth: the Loire! You’ve been unexpectedly summoned, which is, of course, the case! Imply that Lady Gisela has sent for you, a matter of your coming-of-age homage among the Ladies-in-Waiting in that distant retinue. The business of women tending to women at the court of the Duke. Imply that the Queen Consort will be there. All of that will silence your uncle.” Again Peter Abelard encircled her with his arms, and, again, she yielded to him.

  After a moment, she pulled back, just enough to whisper, “Meanwhile, I will soak the barley seeds in piss, and if they fail to sprout, I will signal you.”

  “I pray to God for the germination,” he said. They laughed and hugged, now with relief and delight.

  Neither knew it at that moment, although both would come roughly to the recognition later, but Brother Thrall, Fulbert’s servus, was watching through the boards of the garden horse-gate.

  CHAPTER TEN

  “Complications,” he’d said, trying to explain himself, but he could tell from Rachel Vedette’s quizzical expression that the word epitomized his fakery.

  She repeated, “ ‘Complications.’ ”

  Michael Kavanagh stood mutely, not moving a muscle. Finally, at the mercy of rank physical sensation, he blurted, “Forgive me. I’ve a splitting headache.” On Madison Avenue, two hours before, he had thought, A stroke: this is a stroke! But that piercing pain had eased off, leaving, as a residue of his meeting with Bishop Donovan, a mundane but still-screeching hurt behind his eyes. “Do you mind if I sit down?” he asked.

  “Of course not,” she said, clearly surprised at his acknowledgment. Even in that brisk phrase, he heard her French accent, still exotic. She said, with a gesture at the stone bench running the length of the wall, “Although, from a thousand years ago, the place is uncomfortable”—she smiled thinly—“where they confessed infractions of the Rule.”