Heloise

by Hager, Mandy

  Her head shoots up. This is not about her actions? ‘Yes?’

  ‘He has asked if we might accommodate him here. That, in return, he will pay a good weekly sum for board and lodging and — here is the thing — he hinted he might be favourable to teaching you, should I wish. It seems word of your talent has reached his ears.’ He takes a sip, his gaze locked on her face.

  As she fights to control any outward sign of her internal exhilaration, Fulbert reads her silence as reticence.

  ‘Have no fear, child,’ he says, patting her hand. ‘All masters of church schools must swear to their celibacy and behave with the utmost decorum. If he acts out of turn in any way he would forfeit his position. As it is, I have asked around and been assured he has a reputation for great continence.’

  She counts to eight before she answers, sure he will hear the knocking of her heart. ‘Then that would be most kind, Uncle. If it is truly offered, I happily accept.’

  She kisses him on each cheek and excuses herself. She walks through the kitchen, straight past Jehanne, and out the back door as if making for the privy. Instead, she slips down to the riverbank, and there in the deepening night she raises her arms to the heavens. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

  In less than a week, Master Peter arrives with three oak chests: two filled with books, the last bearing soft furnishings and his well-cut clothes. Heloise and Jehanne have cleaned the spare upstairs chambers, one furnished for him to sleep, the other for his study and housing his books. Corbus, his manservant, prefers to make his bed downstairs for ease of access to his late-night jaunts, so Jehanne moves up into the room adjacent to Heloise. As Master Peter settles in, Heloise sits on her bed, her stomach tightening, too tense to read as his footfalls prowl the room beyond. She has yet to face him; has hidden while he and his man lugged up the chests.

  ‘Heloise? Come!’ The force of Fulbert’s holler startles her.

  She rushes to answer his call and collides with Master Peter as he, too, quits his room. He stops, refusing to let her past.

  ‘We meet again, lady.’ With a small bow he offers his hand, politeness forcing her to take it.

  As they meet skin to skin, a sudden pulse runs through her. ‘Please …’ she pitches her voice low to keep it from Fulbert’s ears, ‘do not tell my uncle of my time spent in your lectures. He will not understand.’

  His smile is teasing. ‘Even if it indicates your excellent taste?’ He holds her still.

  She meets his eye and shrugs, breaking away. ‘I will be punished if he knows. I beg the mercy of your silence.’

  ‘I hear it said you are most learned for your sex.’

  Before she can stop herself, she lobs back Jehanne’s throwaway line. ‘And I hear it said you are an arrogant arse.’

  He blinks as if passing from dark to light and then starts to laugh. She hurries downstairs, where Fulbert and Stephen de Garlande sit side by side, wine already flowing as they pick the flesh off a river trout caught fresh that day. Master Peter enters no more than two strides behind her, not bothering to smother his grin.

  ‘Ah, Heloise, here!’ Her uncle’s grandiose arm-waving proclaims him master of the house. ‘Pour our new guest a draught of wine.’

  Master Peter joins Garlande and her uncle at their meal, beaming when she places the goblet in his hand.

  ‘I trust you find the lodgings to your liking?’ Fulbert plies a fish bone like a hook to remove a wad of flesh from his back molars.

  ‘Most excellent,’ Master Peter says. ‘There is a refreshing sense of frisson this close to the river.’ His glance slides to Heloise then whisks away, the wry twitch at the corners of his mouth one she recognises from his lectures. ‘I feel newly inspired.’

  ‘You were not happy on the Left Bank?’ Garlande licks his fingers one by one from the smallest to his wide-knuckled thumb, his tongue the same colour as the trout’s braised flesh.

  ‘I grow old!’ Master Peter laughs, and both men join him. ‘Carolling all night is fine for the young and those as hardy as my man Corbus, but I have my position to maintain under increasing scrutiny. Besides, these days I find I need my sleep!’

  Her uncle nods. ‘It will not tax you too much, I hope, to spare a little of your time to teach my niece?’

  All turn to Heloise, who feels their attention as a gust of wind. She lowers her head and wills Jehanne to enter with the stew-pot.

  ‘It is claimed everywhere she is a real scholar.’ Garlande’s measured tone leaves his meaning open, not quite either compliment or mockery. A wily fox.

  ‘I, too, have heard much in praise of her,’ Master Peter says. She looks up, thinking to catch him in a sneer but instead meets his full inquisitorial stare. ‘Tell me,’ he says, ‘who has taught you?’

  She glances at Fulbert, always more cautious in Garlande’s presence.

  Fulbert clears his throat, voice wavering as if unsure of his words’ reception. ‘Though few know it, and it is preferred you safeguard the mystery, she has been tutored by Kalman of Rumigny’s wife and daughter.’

  Her uncle’s reticence irritates. Her teachers deserve more.

  Master Peter’s nostrils flare. ‘The Jew?’

  His scorn shakes her; until this moment she has thought him perfect. ‘I would have thought one as well read as you, sir, knows that knowledge is not the sole domain of any one belief.’

  Fulbert pitches a scowl, the knot on his forehead transmitting palpable threat. ‘Ah, you see, Master Peter, how well the sharpness of her tongue reflects the brilliance of her mind.’ He leans toward him as if conspiring. ‘Clearly those who tutored her to date have failed to curb her forthrightness, but you are free to mete out any form of castigation you see fit.’ He laughs. ‘I dare say she will bend under a few stiff blows if reason fails.’

  Garlande, too, smiles. ‘Now there’s an open promissory note if ever there was one!’ He turns to Heloise, his fox face unreadable. ‘Take care, mademoiselle. I fear your uncle is not quite as soft-hearted as he pretends.’

  She has observed Master Peter enough now to know she has to make a stand if he is ever to take her seriously. She focuses between his eyes to fight their addictive pull. ‘My uncle taught me the value of love and loyalty, sir, for which I am most grateful. My opinions, however, I claim solely as my own — and plan to guard against incursion.’

  ‘Excellent!’ Master Peter grins. ‘I enjoy nothing better than a good tussle.’

  At this moment Jehanne makes her late entrance with the pot. Heloise hurries to dole out the onion stew, which they wolf down while Fulbert and Master Peter size each other up. As they talk, Heloise withdraws into her head, shocked by her uncle’s words. She can only hope Master Peter thinks his directive a joke … but what if he does not? Lurking in her buried years lies the whistle of the switch and its sting.

  At the meal’s end, she clears the spoils and fast excuses herself. Out in the kitchen she meets with Jehanne’s bristling silence, hers directed against the man Corbus. They set about the dishes, backs turned against him. Once he has eaten he leaves without a word.

  ‘He smells like a feral dog,’ Jehanne says. ‘A motley scrapper ruled solely by his balls!’

  ‘Jehanne!’

  They fall about laughing; yet beneath lies sadness, too, an understanding that the balance of their home, their sanctuary, has shifted.

  Master Peter waits another week before he says he has time that night to meet with her. She spends the intervening hours ill with nerves; twice changing her gown, three times rebraiding her hair. She reads through her lecture notes and memorises whole passages, but still her confidence dips further with every tolling of the bells.

  By the time he arrives, late to his meal, Fulbert has drunk so much he staggers off to bed. Once Master Peter has eaten, he invites her to his study.

  Much like her own room, it nestles under the thick rough-wooded rafters, one window staring out over the river, a low fur-draped bench slung beneath. A table and two chairs make up the only other fu
rnishings, besides two of his chests and one large set of shelves on which are stacked an enviable collection of books and manuscripts. It also holds three wax tablets, rolls of parchment, ink horns and a dish containing two ivory styluses, as well as three quill pens, a scraping knife, pumice and rule. She notes it all, fascinated to behold the trappings of a real scholar.

  They settle one each side of the table, his tapered fingers splayed wide, palms flat against the wooden top, while she clasps hers in her lap.

  ‘Tell me,’ he says, ‘what has been the focus of your learning?’

  Little by little she tells of the lessons and readings her two dear teachers shared, fighting a nervous tightening in her throat. Twice he questions her, the first time seeking a book title, the second a picky interpretation of a Latin verb, but he makes no real comment until she reaches the end.

  ‘I can see why you hold your teachers in such high esteem,’ he says. She tenses, not trusting this. ‘My apologies. When first you spoke I had little knowledge of them, but I have now heard much of their worth — and Kalman is also still spoken of most highly.’ He smiles. ‘Certainly better by far than that old wind-bag William of Champeaux!’

  ‘I have also gained much listening to you, sir.’

  He spreads his arms as if receiving applause. ‘As one would expect from France’s finest master!’ He grins at her astonishment. ‘Lesson One, Heloise, niece of Fulbert: truth where truth is due. For he who loves truth, and is truthful where nothing depends upon it, will still more surely tell the truth where serious interests are involved.’

  He watches as Heloise rifles through her memory. She can picture the words as if the parchment she once read now opens in the library of her mind. From a text of Aristotle’s that Gertrud was fond of quoting, it is little known in France. She said it had been brought into the country with the end of Philip’s holy crusade and rarely copied since. Is Master Peter testing her?

  ‘The boaster seems to be fond of pretending to things that men esteem, though he has them not, or not to such extent as he pretends.’ Sweat courses down the gully between her breasts, a tingling in their tips.

  His laughter emerges from deep within, an enticing mix of pleasure and teasing guile. As he applauds, he tracks the blush that roars from her cleavage to her face. ‘It seems Fulbert’s assessment of you is more than fair. Now tell me honestly a thought that comes not from your books or fine teachers but from yourself.’

  Panic strikes. While it is one thing to have a memory able enough to allow good recitation, it is quite another to come before such a man and claim a worthy and original thought. She stares at her balled fists, all thought frozen.

  ‘Come, come. Did you not say you discussed questions of importance in your dialectic with Kalman’s wife?’

  She nods, tears threatening. All that comes to mind are their early discussions, too simplistic to say.

  ‘Speak, girl! No learning will come if we cannot have frank discourse.’

  She presses an index finger into the duct of each welling eye, convinced this first lesson will also be her last. Still, trapped as she is, she has no choice but to inhale a ragged breath and work to find some calm.

  She forces out words past her strangling insecurity. ‘We talked of once — discussed — once — the question of our Lord’s decision to send his son as human man.’

  He snorts. ‘The Incarnation?’ He laces his hands behind his head and stretches, stiff-legged. ‘Well, well. This I do look forward to.’

  Heloise closes her eyes for a moment’s reprieve from his intense radiation. ‘It has to do with story,’ she eventually says. ‘And the power of words.’

  He drops his arms and folds his long body back into the curve of the chair, a human question-mark. ‘Words?’

  His attention makes her so nervous she cannot think. ‘Turn your back.’ When he raises an eyebrow, she demands it again. ‘Please. Turn your back and I will answer.’

  ‘This is ridiculous,’ he says. But he does so, spinning around to straddle his chair and lean on its rungs. ‘Speak out, hide it not in thy heart. If thou lookest for the physician’s help, thou must needs disclose thy wound …’

  Ironically, his quoting Boethius works to console her; it is just the sort of thing Gertrud used to say when she needed a prompt.

  ‘Think on this,’ she says. ‘How the most powerful words in God’s great book come to us through the voice of story — and each of those stories bears an expression of deep human emotion — love, hate, sorrow, anger, lust, grief … The Songs of Songs, for instance: Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth — for thy love is better than wine … or Job’s heartbreaking lament: Let the day perish on which I was to be born … or Jeremiah: Woe is me, my mother, that thou hast borne me a man of strife and a man of contention to the whole Earth!’

  Her relief at recalling these morsels spurs her and she does not wait for his response. ‘Why do they move us so? Because we feel them, because we are human, with the same pains, same hopes, same cares. God understands this, and he knows our greatest weakness is our deep absorption with ourselves.’ She sees Master Peter’s shoulders twitch. ‘Whether a window through which we spy our neighbour, brother, dearest love, or a mirror that reflects back who we really are, virtuous or sinful, fair or foul, a human story touches us in a way no unpopulated story ever can. Stories have souls, they speak, and they have in them the force to transport the heart. They hold the fires of our passions, able to raise them as if the people themselves were present; they hold all the tenderness and delicacy of speech — and sometimes even a boldness of expression well beyond it. Christ understood all this; he was the ultimate master of parable.’

  She can feel how he listens, his attention an alert presence in the room as she follows the liquid flow of curls that tumble from his skull. ‘How else could God bring us to such understanding of suffering and love? Through Christ’s own story we connect heart to heart, womb to womb, every woman feeling the all-consuming pain of her son lost, every man grieving the death of the precious seed who would have carried his name. It makes God real, embodies Him. A tangible, living person our small minds are able to connect with — while a concept, no matter how glorious and truthful, if it allows no human bond to form in our mind, is eventually lost.’

  Master Peter turns slowly back towards her, his countenance hard to read, and in his silence she hears Jehanne’s tired footfalls stump up the corridor. ‘That is most originally argued,’ he says at last. ‘And since this day is our first I will not shoot you down.’

  She hates condescension; cannot help but bite. ‘If you have arguments, sir, is it not your responsibility to tell me? Why else am I here?’ Fine words, although in truth she would rather drink a poisoned draught.

  Master Peter rubs the bridge of his nose. ‘What you imply is that we struggle to understand God without Him having taken the possession of a human form?’

  She nods, already less certain now he questions it.

  He stands in one fluid motion to pace the wide oak floorboards. ‘How then do you account for belief before the advent of Christ, or for those of the Hebrew faith who dare not even speak God’s name?’

  She suspects she is walking into one of his traps but fears his scorn if she gives no supporting answer. ‘The Old Testament gives voice to human prophets such as Moses and King David, and also uses the device of story to illuminate God’s words. How better to explain original sin, for instance, than through the story of the Fall of Adam and Eve.’ As soon as she has spoken she knows upon what grounds he will attack her. She has stepped over the line, her love of literature transcending for a moment her loyalty to God’s word.

  ‘You call the Fall a story? A fiction? A semantic tale to tell around a fire?’

  So great is her shame, she prays to die right here before him. ‘You twist my words.’ She aches to run. ‘Before Christ there was an implicit belief in God, yet none could picture Him by any human measure as they sat around your hypothetical fire. They kne
w He was both our great creator and our sternest judge, and yet he was removed, unknowable, the hand that played the pawns and knocked them down or redeemed them at His unseen will, much like the deities of the Romans and Greeks. Instead, it was through the human face of Him, through Christ, that our eyes at last were opened to His love. We see it through His many actions; actions to which we can form connection; actions we can try to emulate in our frail human state.’

  ‘Those ancient pagans you refer to also gave human faces to their gods, but they were false gods, idols. How do you account for this?’

  She senses the approaching sting in his tail but is too far down this track to back away. ‘Now, sir, you are being disingenuous! You, yourself, use the tales of the ancients to illustrate your points. You know how the whole understanding of words, of language, bends to the will of those great writers. They appreciate that the words need to nourish the heart; that every story is an exploration of our human nature; and that philosophy digs into the roots of this, using language to tease out behaviours, a way of studying the workings of the human mind.’ She fights back tears, unsure if they are summoned by excitement or fear of humiliation. ‘Can you, yourself, truly argue there were no ancient men of equal measure with enough good in them to be delivered of salvation, even if they knew not the source from which it came?’

  He smiles. ‘I will concede this point, but suspect you heard it first from me!’

  Although not the case, if it enables him to give her some respite she is not about to right his wrong. One of the verses of Boethius rises in her mind. ‘How shall he follow the unknown? How shall he find it, and when found / How shall he know it? Did the soul / Once see the universal mind, And know the part, and know the whole?’

  The candle’s light reflects in Master Peter’s eyes as if they pulse with inner fire. ‘Thus gently sang the Lady Philosophy with dignified mien and grave countenance.’