Stealing Heaven

by Marion Meade

  What gradually became clear to her was that Fulbert was growing fond of her. The moment he stepped foot in the house he would call for her, and they would sit under the pear tree while Agnes babied him insanely. She would seat him in a cushioned chair and slip a pillow under his feet; for that matter, she was on the run for him at all hours, massaging his feet with unguents, dosing him with broths of medicinal herbs, fetching his toothpick or a silver henap filled with Macon. Fulbert was a man who demanded, and received, good service from his women. The lesser sex might be gateways to the devil, but God had put women on earth for a purpose—to bear children and provide food, drink, and other sundries for men. As for his niece, he valued her for other reasons. Hearing her read aloud gave him pleasure, and after dark he ordered candles, instead of the rushlights they ordinarily burned, so that Heloise should not ruin her eyes.

  According to Agnes, this in itself was remarkable, because Master was forever grumbling about the expense of candles, just as he grew anguished over any unnecessary expenditure. Petronilla said he was stingy, but Heloise believed it merely thrift. Certainly Fulbert esteemed money; he dressed in fine velvets and brocades and decked his fingers with rubies and emeralds so that he looked more lofty than a bishop.

  This quirky passion of his for listening to her read embarrassed Heloise a little in the beginning, especially at his monthly "evenings," when he entertained his fellow canons and some of the local barons. These recitations being very nearly in the nature of public performances, Heloise started to balk, but then she thought better of it. It was clear that these fine gentlemen, despite their education, in no way approached her storehouse of knowledge, and if it gave them pleasure to learn, she did not begrudge them. Agnes said it was a blessing to have Heloise at these gatherings because, before her arrival at the Rue des Chantres, the men wound up arguing, and Canon Martin, Fulbert's closest friend, invariably stalked out in a fury.

  After Lammas, Fulbert began taking her across the Petit Pont to a flat field near Saint-Germain-des-Pres, where he taught her to ride. He said it would be a disgrace for a noble girl to be anything less than a fine horsewoman. The sluggish brood mare he first brought for her was about as exciting as a half-dead mule; she lumbered along until Heloise feared each step would be her last. Heloise protested, and the next time they went out. Fulbert had selected a dun gelding, lively and high-stepping.

  The meadow ran alongside the Left Bank of the Seine, across from the king's palace. There was a landing quay at the tip of the island, and Heloise could make out mossy green steps leading up to a gate and beyond that what appeared to be a luxuriant garden.

  The early-morning mist was beginning to lift, breaking into frail patches and drifting up in the sunlight. Fulbert lengthened the dun's stirrups. Sighing, Heloise called to him, "I wish I were a lark. I'd fly across the river and sit on a branch of one of those lemon trees, and I could watch all the court ladies."

  He straightened with a laugh. "That's not necessary. In summer, King Louis opens the garden to the masters and students from the schools. They hold classes there and anyone may enter." He hoisted her into the saddle and handed up the reins. "Frightened, poppet?"

  "No." The dun took two steps forward and happily bucked her into the wet grass. She sat there in surprise a minute before pulling herself to her feet. The dun looked back, snorting disdainfully.

  Fulbert held out his arms to lift her up again. "This time, don't slam down your behind so hard. You're too rough."

  Heloise stroked the dun's withers, talking to him in Hebrew. "See. He's a Jew. He likes me now."

  Her uncle grinned. "Mayhap."

  At a slow jog, they began to move down the field. Heloise relaxed in the saddle and felt the breeze streaming over her bare ankles.

  "Sit up straight!" shouted Fulbert. "Don't flap your elbows around like a hawk." He spurred his stallion into a canter, and the dun followed.

  From the corner of her eye, Heloise kept swinging her gaze over to the blue roofs of the Cite Palace, foolishly hoping to catch a glimpse of the king or his new bride, Queen Adelaide. "Do you think I could go there?"

  "Go where?"

  "There." She pointed to the king's garden. 'To hear the masters teach."

  Fulbert wheeled the stallion and galloped around her in a circle. With the haughty curve of his back and his fair hair streaming out behind in the glare of the sun, his head appeared speckled with a kind of luminous crown. Heloise thought that he looked like St. Michael, or one of those knights the jongleurs always sang about; he would have been a knight if his father had not sent him into the Church. He rode up behind Heloise. "Whatever for? My fair niece, you know more than the masters."

  She doubted that. "I? You tease me."

  "Indeed." He was gazing at her affectionately. "Oh, well. I suppose there are a few of them who might teach you something. Peter Abelard perhaps."

  Before she could answer, he was halfway down the field. "Come on!" he yelled.

  She still wanted to go; he hadn't said no.

  They were coming to Pre-aux-Clercs, a strip of land lying between Saint-Germain and the river, and constantly disputed between the monks and the students. This morning the chewed-up field looked to be in the hands of the young people; they were dancing and singing, and some had gathered around a wrestling match, Heloise and Fulbert dismounted at the edge of the field and let the horses graze.

  "Are you happy?" Fulbert asked kindly.

  I’mhappy."

  T mean, living with me." He rested his palms on her shoulders. She could feel the warmth of his fingers through her dress. "I'm happy." She swallowed. "It's been—“

  "Good."

  She caught his hand. "You won't send me away? I hated Argenteuil." She wanted to say more, to ask him never to send her away, but pride prevented her from drawing attention to her shameless insecurities. In all the empty places she must walk, he would stand between her and evil.

  His fingers tightened around hers. "Don't talk about it."

  She said tautly, "All right." It was funny, now that she thought of it, how people always wanted you to keep quiet about the things that mattered.

  "You're only a child yet."

  They ran toward the horses; on the way back to the Rue des Chantres, they talked of the petition the burghers were planning to draw up, requesting Louis the Fat to cobble the streets of the Ile.

  Summer ended. Small whooping boys stopped diving naked off the Petit Pont, and the chestnut leaves in the cloister turned burnished red. Each day more and more students swarmed into the city, something Heloise had not believed possible. Michaelmas came and went, and now the evenings were too crisp to sit in the garden. She and Fulbert moved inside to a fire in the canon's private apartments, and they would talk long after the watchman had drawn the chain across the Rue des Chantres. Rarely, if ever now, did she brood about the future; there seemed to be an unspoken agreement between her and Fulbert. He did not again refer to the morning at Pre-aux-Clercs, yet it was taken for granted that there would be no husband, not now at least, and that they would skim through time together, snugly wrapped in a cocoon of their own making. They never talked about it.

  Nevertheless, she knew that what she felt for Fulbert fell into some ill-defined category of love. She loved God, of course, and Jesus and the Blessed Virgin, but it was hard to say whether she loved any living person, and being uncertain, she rather thought not. The people one ordinarily loved, mother and father, brothers and sisters, had never existed for her. Sister Madelaine she had admired, but not loved, and Ceci she had tolerated, as one forbears to shoo away a dog forever curled around one's ankles. There was only Fulbert, who filled her with a kind of tranquillity, Fulbert with his pale hair and his fingers lightly stroking her cheek.

  On a hazed-over morning in October, Heloise sat in the kitchen, her face smeared with one of Agnes's concoctions of lemon juice and goose grease to make skin smooth and white. The precise reason for these beauty treatments escaped her—there was no man sh
e wished to impress, except perhaps Fulbert—but Agnes insisted. She made it a point of honor to advise her mistress on everything a young lady of good blood should know.

  Agnes was rolling out pastry dough with floury arms and talking of how Queen Adelaide would have her lying-in at the Cite Palace instead of Compiegne, and how it was high time King Louis gave the Franks an heir, seeing as he had waited until the advanced age of thirty-five to marry.

  Heloise yawned. "He must not like women."

  "Oh, I imagine he likes them well enough," Agnes grunted. "He's sired at least one bastard." She began cutting the dough into circles. “True, it wouldn't surprise me if he did hate them, after Bertrada got done with him."

  Agnes never ceased to astonish Heloise. She had a repertory of gossip, past and current, and given half a chance, she would chatter your ear off. "Bertrada?" asked Heloise. "Who's that?"

  At the spit, Petronilla was turning, halfheartedly, a pair of fowls. She threw Heloise a jeering look. "Lady. You are dumb."

  Heloise ignored her, but Agnes bounded across the kitchen and whacked the girl's face until she'd raised a liverish welt. "God's toenails, can't I trust you to do anything properly? Those hens are beginning to look like cinders." She went back to the circles of dough and started dropping spoonfuls of minced cheese on the moons. "Bertrada," she explained carefully, as if informing Heloise of some momentous battle, "Bertrada was Louis's stepmother, that is to say, the second wife of Old King Philip, God rest his soul. She tried to poison Louis so that her spindly brat could have the throne." Triumphant at the skill with which she had condensed years of complex history into a few sentences, she turned to Heloise with a smile and said, "You see? The point is, the old hag didn't succeed. Mind you, Louis was sickly for quite a time, but—" She shrugged, and immediately embarked on a dissertation about how to keep moths out of feather beds.

  The aromatic warmth of the kitchen made Heloise drowsy; the greasy juice rolling down the sides of her cheeks made her skin itch. Propping her feet up on a wooden keg, she raised her face to the ceiling. Hanging from the beams were bunches of dried herbs—sage, mint, fennel, hyssop, all carefully extracted from the garden before the first frost. This room was Heloise's favorite part of the house. The fireplace stretching across one whole wall belched warmth; everything was permeated with delicious aromas. When she awoke in the mornings, even before she had opened her eyes, the smells were already drifting through the house—stews and soups, goose, frumenty, bacon and beans, minced beef and raisin pies. In the pantry were massed jars of wine that Agnes had made from cherries, currants, raspberries, and pears, and down in the cellar she kept the imported wines of Cyprus and Spain that Fulbert served to guests. Never had Heloise imagined such an abundance of food and drink. As though she had been starved all her life, she ate ravenously and sometimes stole to the kitchen between meals to beg Agnes for a taste of this or that. In only a few months, her cheeks and breasts had rounded and her hips were beginning to curve snugly inside her gowns.

  From the hearth, Petronilla hissed belatedly, “I know why King Louis didn't die. He had a philtre from the Fairy Lady. And her magic was stronger than Bertrada's."

  "So they say," Agnes answered. She looked hastily over at Heloise. "If you believe that mumbo jumbo."

  Heloise sat up straight on the stool. "This Fairy Lady, does she make love philtres? Will she tell your fortune?"

  Petronilla was prowling along the wall, hoping Agnes would not notice the untended spit. "She knows who a girl's true love is."

  Heloise laughed uneasily. At Argenteuil, the nuns had gossiped incessantly about witches and fairies—after crossing themselves, of course. Madelaine had called it hocus-pocus, but Heloise always listened just the same. She believed all of it and none of it. How was it possible for a fortune-teller to scan the emptiness of time for that which is yet to be? It was not possible, she suddenly decided. Or if it was, then only God could manage such a feat. Wiping the grease from her face, she threw down the towel and turned her back on Petronilla and her Fairy Lady.

  Later that morning, she walked over to Notre Dame. Coming back from mass she decided to walk past Saint-Christofle and return home through the cloister, a route she rarely took because of Agnes's warnings that it was dangerous for decent girls to go among the students. "Animals," Agnes called them, and it was true that their drinking and roistering created disturbances in the Ile and gave them a bad name with the burghers. But with so many of them crammed into one small island, it was to be expected that a few would misbehave.

  A smell of burning leaves hung in the air. Trying to look inconspicuous, she pulled her cloak around her ears and tucked her chin into the collar. Everywhere there stood bands of gowned young men, but nobody paid attention to her; they were all too busy talking. She was marching briskly eastward when a boy disengaged himself from one of the gangs and began to skip alongside her. She threw him a stern glance and walked faster; with her long legs, she soon managed to outdistance him.

  When she jerked around to look, she saw that he had stopped but was continuing to stare at her.

  "La tres sage Heloise, greetings," he said. "Lady, forgive. I meant no harm." The boy was only half grown; he had apple cheeks and wisps of fuzz on his chin.

  Curious, Heloise waited while he came slowly toward her. "How do you know my name?" she said.

  "Everybody in Paris knows," he told her with a toothy grin. "The very wise Heloise they call you. You're Canon Fulbert's niece, and I've heard that you're the wisest girl in France. Mayhap in the whole world."

  Heloise laughed. "And you're a very foolish boy. Do you believe everything you hear?"

  "Lady, I've just begun studying with Master Abelard. I wish that I knew as much as you."

  His look was so full of admiration that she stifled her smile. "Good," she said gravely. "Then go back to Master Abelard and listen well." She turned away, amused by the boy but anxious to go home.

  He ran after her. "Lady, tell me something, please. Are you a Nominalist or a Realist?"

  "My friend, all I can tell you is that I have no idea what you're talking about. Pray, what is a Nominalist?" She felt dumb for asking.

  The boy spent ten minutes explaining that the Realists believed in the importance of universals—the Church, humanity, divinity—while the Nominalists thought particulars more significant—churchmen, individuals, persons of the Trinity. Apparently this was a fashionable intellectual controversy in the schools. No scholar could ignore it; one must, he informed her, take a side.

  Heloise smiled at him. "I'm in debt for your information," she said lightly, "but does it really matter, after all, believing one thing or the other?"

  "Oh, yes." He stood there, clumsily knotting and unknotting the girdle of his tunic. "Yes, it matters a lot."

  "Ah, well—in that case." She moved off quickly. "Farewell."

  Behind her, the boy was shouting, "God guard you, lady!"

  The rest of the morning she spent in her room translating Lucan, a project that had occupied her for some weeks. But today she found her attention wandering, her mind trailing back to the boy she had met in the close. Not to the boy himself but to something he had said, his explanation of the Nominalists and the Realists. The controversy in itself she found of no great interest, yet she had to admit that the idea of debating such subjects intrigued her. She knew that she was weak in dialectic, and even though Madelaine had halfheartedly imparted the fine points of logical argument, thesis and antithesis, antecedent and consequent, she had had few opportunities to practice. Fulbert was heavily unenthusiastic, dismissing it as mere showing off.

  The turret room was freezing. She padded down to the kitchen and asked Agnes to make her a cup of hot almond milk. Upstairs again, she crawled under the coverlet and sipped her milk thoughtfully. The idea that had been thrashing around at the back of her mind for hours suddenly forced its way into consciousness; she wanted to go to school. Immediately she began to sigh and berate herself for wishing the impossib
le. But was it?

  She pulled the cover around her neck. Agnes once mentioned a niece of the Count of Montmorency who had attended classes at the abbey of Saint-Victor across the river; at the same time Heloise vividly remembered Agnes's scalding grimaces of disapproval and her mutterings about immodest hussies. Evidently, females rarely showed their faces in the all-male schools, and when they did, people talked about them. Knowing Fulbert, she knew he would not want that. Coughing, she got out of bed and checked to see if the shutters were securely fastened.

  Something else occurred to her; that boy in the cloister knew all about her. How? Presumably through Fulbert's boasting and those of his friends who had met her. Uncle seemed to have no objection if the people of Paris admired his "wise" niece. Perhaps there was a way to get around him after all.

  She heard the clump of the downstairs door and Fulbert's voice, then Agnes squawking waves of orders to Petronilla and the creak of running feet. Abruptly the hushed house sprang into motion. Before going down, Heloise brushed her hair down with her palms.

  Already the trestle had been covered with a white cloth, and Petronilla was laying out the trenchers and goblets. The girl wore her usual surly expression. "Master was asking for you."

  A few minutes later, Fulbert was blessing the table and reaching for the pitcher of Macon. "Come kiss me, child," he said.

  Heloise trotted over and wound her arms around his neck. Unlike most men, who shaved only two or three times a week and had prickly cheeks, Fulbert had Agnes shave him every morning. His alabaster skin was always smooth as a woman's and smelled of pine scent. She stroked a tiny wet peck on his cheek and ran to her chair.

  Heloise poured a little of the Macon into her goblet and filled it to the top with water. While Agnes brought in the dishes, she studied Fulbert's face, searching for signs of his mood.