The Cloister

by James Carroll

  Lucille was waiting for them on the rough ledge of the riverbank, where trodden grass held back the tidal mud. She was a pasty woman, looking, from the heft of her, to be well into her fourth decade. Her hair was hidden in the veil that creased her forehead. Her face, even shadowed, was bright with welcome. Hers was a familiar visage, since, as Héloïse saw at once, Lucille had Peter’s sharp nose and his sweetly cleft chin. To her tawny skirts clung a diminutive, smock-clad child, while a pair of boys wrestled roughly at her feet. Beside her stood an even larger man, in whose arms squirmed an even younger child. Because the sun was low in the sky behind them, the man and woman, together with their children, were suspended in a radiant aura, making them seem a chosen family—or such was the fuzzy thought that came unbidden to Héloïse.

  Enough of that! She focused. The man wore the sleeveless leather jerkin of an armorer, with a belt buckled at his ample belly by an oval of silver. A riot of long red hair and a rich red beard were organized around a broad smile, which made him seem the jolly fellow Peter had promised he would be: Marcus, then.

  Héloïse was surprised to realize that she had, perhaps in a dream, anticipated such an arrival, imagining some while ago a world of contentment, even in exile. This unlikely expectation seemed fulfilled when Lucille, seeing them and scooping up her child, rushed forward happily. “Peter!” she cried. “Dear Peter! Praise God, you are here!”

  As Peter scrambled across the mud to his sister, Héloïse took special notice of the deftness with which Lucille handled her child as she took her brother into her embrace. The woman’s heart was large, and her manner competent.

  Marcus, a skilled metal crafter and purveyor of breastplates and ring mail to the constables of the Duke of Bretagne, was a prosperous man. The house he provided for his family was large and well-built—a three-story stone-and-timber structure with decorated mullioned windows before which candles were set, and soon lit. Héloïse enjoyed watching the children rattle around the place. Given that guests were present, they seemed unusually free-spirited. After a raucous meal, and once the children were asleep, Lucille and Marcus sat formally with Héloïse and Abelard in the central ground-floor hall, before the warming hearth—the hosts in high-backed wooden chairs, the visitors on stools.

  Peter made his explanations with a curl of feeling for which Héloïse loved him. When he’d finished, Lucille stood, crossed to Héloïse, took her hands into her own, and said, “Daughter, you are at home with us.” And so she was.

  Peter, comforted by the peace Héloïse had found in the embrace of his family, returned within weeks to Paris. But he was anxious, too, about what awaited him on the overheated island in the Seine. From his later recounting, Héloïse knew what he found at the Cloister of Notre-Dame. His wholly self-absorbed students had resented his unexplained absence from the dais, and more than three hundred rowdies had shown up for the first of his resumed lectures, which was teasingly announced on posters throughout the school with the one-word title Ergo. The implication of Master Peter’s jibe was plain enough: “As you were about to conclude brilliantly before my absence so rudely interrupted you…”

  When Peter mounted the platform, the students stomped, pounded, hectored, and whistled, demanding his apologetic explanation. Peter put them off with joviality that was as counterfeit as it was, in the end, rhetorically triumphant. With a single upraised arm, palm open, he waited for them to fall silent. Laying his trap, he asked meekly, “Does the truant Master owe his scholars an explanation?” They exploded again, with whistles and stomping, demanding it. Again, seeking silence, he waited them out. Then, suddenly stern, he demanded, “Did Socrates explain himself to Plato?” he asked. “Or Plato to Dion?” He struck a tone that, once recognized as a challenge, ignited a happy sequence of alternating—and competing—antiphons.

  “Or Dion to Crean?” one called.

  “Or Heraclitus to Cratylus?” cried another, setting them off.

  “Or Aristotle to Timaeus?”

  “Or Cicero to Atticus?” And so on, until, as such raucous exchanges always did, the thing came round to Master Peter Abelard again. The boys were not disappointed when he cauterized their passionate rudeness with “And did Zechariah owe an accounting to his ass?” The hoots at that could be heard across the river. The Master was back.

  Over subsequent days, Peter Abelard learned that rumors had achieved the status of Holy Writ. His students had assured one another that his absence had been prompted by a summons from the Abbot Primate of Cluny, the monk-potentate seeking private forum counsel from the greatest teacher in Christendom. No, not Father Abbot, but the Cardinal of Sens. No, the school at Rheims had hired him as Rector. No, the Great Chapter at Chartres had finally issued its indictment, and Master Peter Abelard, in solemn disputation, had won the day at last against the White Monk, Bernard of Clairvaux, champion of a whole company of critics.

  Among the Cathedral’s other Masters of Philosophy, Abelard’s intimate enemies, whisperers agreed that he was off with Jews; that his insults to the great Anselm and Roscellinus had reached the King’s ears; that he would therefore be expelled from the school; that, intimidated by the coming Great Chapter and the threat of Bernard, he had fled Paris to avoid the subpoena, which the Cardinal was certain to have authorized by now. The clucking of fishmongers was nothing to the noise his rivals made.

  To Peter Abelard, however, there was only one figure whose current impression of him mattered, and that was Canon Fulbert. Peter was distressed to have learned that, as he feared, there had been one rumor that, although not rising to the credible level of others, had been discreetly passed among the inner circle of his admiring students, who, understanding its mortal danger, had apparently protected him by not spreading it more broadly: the tonsured Abelard was in violation of the vow of chastity with that fairest of girls oft seen in the Cloister. Had Canon Fulbert heard those whispers? What did he suspect? Indeed, what did he know?

  On the Sunday after returning from Nantes, at solemn Vespers, Peter Abelard and Fulbert would be together in choir with their fellow Canons of Notre-Dame, and Peter resolved to approach him. There were two dozen Canons Regular, the senior clerics who served the Cathedral as sacramental ministers, officers of the diocese, chaplains to the Bishop, or, as in Abelard’s case, Masters of the school. In the absence of the Bishop, Canon Fulbert presided at the festal ceremonies, and that was the case on this Sunday, as the evening celebration of the Divine Mystery unfolded. Into the dark reaches of the great vaulted nave soared the lilting chant of the Holy Office Psalter, together with pungent clouds of smoky incense. At the high altar, the Blessed Sacrament was lifted up in its crystal disc inside the hammered gold of the sunburst monstrance, which shimmered in the light of a score of candles and oil lamps. Once the adoration was accomplished, with the singing of “Panis Angelicus,” the liturgical party—in addition to the Canons, there were deacon acolytes, thurifers, and untonsured members of the minor orders, all robed variously—formed a long procession that wound behind torch candlesticks from the sanctuary, down the center aisle, through the crossing, to the sacristy lodged in the north porch of the Cathedral.

  Abelard was normally one to shed his cappa nigra promptly, hang the choir robe on its hook, and be off. But this evening, he lingered. A line of clerics waited for a word with Fulbert, their shaved heads shining in light reflected from the flaming wall sconces. Stout and perspiring, Fulbert openly delighted in this communal show of deference. He dispensed small servings of his attention like Communion wafers. At his elbow, waiting to receive his ceremonial birettum and cope, was his chaplain, but in the dark corner beyond the vestment case was the hunched form of Brother Thrall. Fulbert’s waiflike servus was standing by with the Canon’s cloak and staff, ready to be gestured forward.

  Filius Nullius: son of no one. It shamed Peter suddenly to realize that he had hardly ever registered Canon Fulbert’s omnipresent thrall, or the others like him scurrying about in the shadows of the Cathedral and its close, like t
he rats they were set to catch. How many of these church slaves were there, Peter wondered? And, apart from Fulbert’s lackey, whom Peter vaguely recognized, how were they distinguished one from another? Dark phantoms crossed his mind, figures glimpsed throughout our Lady’s precinct, but always on the edge of things, shoveling filth, hauling water, stacking firewood—or, if one of them was favored as the personal thrall of someone like Fulbert, holding ready the stave with which His Lordship might then stride off or, on a whim, turn and beat him. Peter felt a bolt of vomit rising in his throat—a rancid distillation of loathing at his own blind indifference to these sorry bastards until now, when it was possible that he himself had spawned a next one. He thought of his dear Héloïse, the certainty with which she dreaded the birth of a son, an incipient thrall, and for the first time, Peter Abelard felt the fear as she felt it—the sure knowledge that their child would be stolen from them, and stunted for life.

  At last, Canon Fulbert turned to him. “Master Peter Abelard,” he said, but icily. “How good of you to grace our Vespers with your presence.”

  Peter bowed, even while pushing down on the apprehension he felt at the Canon’s undisguised pique. “Your Lordship. Peace be with you.”

  “And with you. What news from the infidel?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “The Bishop received an account of your absence from Paris. He is not pleased.”

  “I am surprised His Excellency takes note of my whereabouts. What account?” Peter’s calm was counterfeit. This was not what he expected.

  “Al-Andalus. You traveled across the southern mountains, and not as a pilgrim on the Way of Saint James.”

  Peter snorted. “A journey to and from Compostela, dear Canon, requires many weeks.”

  “The Jewish academy at Mainz, then. The Bishop knows you were away consulting Jews—again.”

  Peter Abelard shook his head. He reined in his disdain, but he was wary. “As you know, Canon, the Jewish academy at Mainz was destroyed by the rabble armies of Peter the Hermit, a destruction which the Pope himself condemned. Would that the Torah was still being studied along the Rhine. I was not there. The Bishop is misinformed.”

  “You are the one who brings the pagan texts to Paris. You receive them from the Jews.”

  “The pagan texts, Canon Fulbert? Cicero? Virgil? Plato, whom Justin Martyr called the ‘unknowing Christian’? The loss of such texts to the Vandals was a catastrophe. Their recovery is a gift of Wisdom, which, of course, is a Name of God: ‘Chokhmat Elohim.’ ”

  Fulbert tossed his head, shaking off the better-knower’s jab. “The Proverbs tell us, ‘Wisdom’s instruction is to fear the Lord.’ ”

  “Indeed so,” Abelard replied. “And also: ‘The Lord giveth Wisdom. Out of His mouth cometh knowledge and understanding.’ ”

  “But God’s enemies trade in these pagan books—the Saracens and Jews.”

  Canon Fulbert was a formidable man, but he could also be dull-witted. Abelard knew that, if he was being patient, it was important not to be seen as being patient. He said, “You make a point, Canon. A serious one. Nevertheless, it remains that Saracens and Jews advance God’s purposes in this one realm. The books they translate define the study of universals and particulars not only in our school, but in Orléans, Chartres, Rheims, Metz, and Cologne. Yet Paris is supreme. The library of philosophers over which you preside is unsurpassed in Christendom. Does the Bishop know of this preeminence? Surely, you have helped him to take pride in your school?”

  Fulbert knew that the exchange had gone against him, but he had no idea what to do about it. Peter Abelard rescued him by saying simply, “As for my absence, I went away to visit my family in Bretagne.”

  Fulbert said nothing, standing immobile. His chaplain crooked a finger at Brother Thrall, who came forward with the cloak. The chaplain took it, and draped the Canon’s shoulders. Then the staff was handed over. Fulbert closed his fat fingers around it.

  Bowing, Peter Abelard said, “Canon Fulbert, I heartily wish to remain in your good graces. I am honored to be of your household.”

  Fulbert replied, “You have critics, Master Peter Abelard. The Bishop hears from them. I hear from the Bishop. No one hears from the legion of buffoonish boys who sit at your feet.”

  “Ah, but, Canon, that the boys are legion is the point. Their numbers define the triumph of our school. They are not buffoons. In their generation, the Gospel will be renewed throughout the world—by the Holy Spirit, making use of the learning they acquire here. The Holy Spirit is the wind that blows where it will, and our scholars have sailed upon it from all across Europe to the sacred college of thought you have created at Notre-Dame de Paris. My critics, as you know, are the disappointed Masters of the failing schools from which our lads have flown. Shall I meet with the Bishop to explain all this to him?”

  “No.” With a flip of his cloak, Fulbert made as if to go, but then stopped himself. “My household, you said. You are present to it for the sake of my niece, Héloïse.”

  “Indeed, so. A brilliant young woman.”

  “Does her brilliance shine better at night?” Fulbert’s gaze hardened.

  The question threw Peter. Without imagining ahead of time how it could go, he had hoped, in this encounter, to test Fulbert’s readiness to hear him out. When in doubt, Peter had often advised others, proceed with the truth. It was advice he had given himself—against himself—for days now: somehow to lay the impossible truth of his love for Héloïse before Fulbert. But Fulbert was not to be predicted. Or, rather, Fulbert was to be predicted in nothing but in his being dangerous. Peter had come here like a blind man rubbing his hands across the rough surface of a wall, looking for an opening. But now the wall had closed around him, a jail cell.

  What did Fulbert know of their secret life at night?

  Peter recognized the Canon’s question as a trap, but also as a signal that his suspicions, if he had them, were not confirmed. All Peter knew for certain was that he would not lie. He said, “We have it from the book of Job: some deep knowledge comes only in visions of the night. It is true, your niece and I have occasionally pursued…our work…beyond the coming of dusk. It is true, also, that I have never before…engaged with…such a one as this noble young woman. I look forward to informing you more fully, Reverend Canon, of our progress. I would like to say now that I…” Peter paused. The wall again, a blind search for an opening. “…have become mightily devoted to Héloïse.”

  Fulbert, having eyed Abelard carefully, looked sharply away, an evident act of deflection. “Yes. Well,” he said. The Canon made a dismissive gesture with his free hand, and there was relief in it. “No matter now. Her lessons are suspended. Concluded, in fact. In your absence, my niece decamped for the court of the Duke of Bourgogne, who, you remember, is her dearly departed mother’s cousin. It is not certain that Héloïse will return to Paris from Dijon. She is preparing there to become a Lady-in-Waiting to the mother of the Queen Consort. Héloïse is a credit to us. Who knows? Perhaps the Queen herself will tap her. Imagine, our Héloïse a member of the Royal Court. In that case”—with a wide grin, despite his resolve to be discreet, Fulbert betrayed his extreme delight—“she will return to Paris, but for the Royal Palace. I have advised the Bishop of this. He is awaiting an opportunity to recommend her to the Royal Court, and he will tell King Louis of our role in her preparation.” Fulbert touched Peter’s arm, almost fondly. “That would serve us both.” He moved off before Peter could think what to say.

  In Canon Fulbert’s vacant after-space, Brother Thrall waited for Peter to look at him, and when he did, Peter flinched at the hatred he saw in the twisted creature’s eyes. Once more, Peter thought of Héloïse, and their doomed son.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Immediately after the Six, Kavanagh took the parish car without asking. He drove downtown, arriving at the Villard Houses on Madison not long after seven-thirty, when the Chancery Offices, and hallways, would still be vacant.

  Just visibl
e, inside the elaborate double doors, the night watchman was still at his post in the great foyer, dwarfed by the gleaming chandelier that hung above him. He was a blue-suited, overweight retiree—an ex-cop, by Kavanagh’s guess. With his shiny bald head forward, he was slumped in a purposely uncomfortable bentwood chair, next to a small square table holding his chrome Thermos and workman’s lunch box. Kavanagh tapped softly on the door pane. The man snapped awake. He leapt to his feet. By crossing so quickly to the door, he displayed embarrassment at having been caught dozing, which Kavanagh knew could work for him.

  The guard threw the lock and pulled the door open. “Sorry, Father,” he said. Here, beyond all places, the Roman collar was a pass.

  “No, Sarge. I’m the one who’s sorry. It’s too early by a mile. I hate to disturb you.”

  The guard pulled out a pocket watch, plainly relieved to read the time—more than twenty minutes to go before the building was to open.

  “I left something upstairs yesterday,” Kavanagh said. “I have to get it.”

  “Sure, Father. Sure.”

  It hit Kavanagh, how readily the lie had come. He said, “I don’t need to bother you. Just let me borrow the master key, would you? I’ll be just a minute.”

  The guard hesitated. A dozen or more priests manned offices here, and most of them, coming in late and leaving early, rarely crossed paths with a fellow on the night shift. But why wouldn’t a Chancery official have his own key?

  Kavanagh said, “I’ve just come from Mass. I have to get to the hospital.” All true. “I’ll just be a minute,” he repeated.

  The guard handed over the large ring with its set of four keys. “It’s this one, Father. The big one.”

  “Thanks, Sarge.”

  The guard smiled. “I never made it off the beat, Father. You’ve promoted me.”

  “You deserve it, Sarge.” Kavanagh saluted the man, then crossed into the regal main hall, his heels clicking on the high-polished marble. He made for the glittering grand staircase, the spine of the Renaissance palazzo. At its foot, he looked back and saw that the guard was unscrewing his Thermos—good. Kavanagh took the first several stairs with a hop, and successive treads two at a time. On the second floor, he was struck, again, by the life-sized portraits on the gilded wall to his left—saints and prelates, the gallery of God. Jogues, Rogues.