by Marion Meade
Upstairs, a fat man with large, soft eyes answered Jourdain's knock. Heloise heard them whispering and Jourdain calling the man Hilarius. She stood with her back to the door, breathing heavily. The fat man went to the bedroom door and opened it with an efficient air. He went in. Heloise remembered Abelard talking of him. He had written a play about Lazarus. Two youths, students, sprawled near the window, playing tables; they glanced up at Heloise and then turned back to their game.
When Hilarius came out, Heloise reeled toward him. Looking at Jourdain, he shook his head and pulled the door tight behind him.
Heloise's mouth was dry. She hurled herself toward the door, but Hilarius caught her wrist. "Lady, please. Jourdain, tell her."
She glanced at Jourdain, unreasonably furious at him.
He said, "He won't see you. Heloise, listen, mayhap tomorrow he'll feel differently."
She gave Hilarius a burning stare, and he stepped away from the door. She went in. There was no light in the room except a small rushlight next to the bed. The shutters were clamped, the air clotted with the smell of herbs and aromatic oil. She caught a quick glimpse of the side of Abelard's face before he wrenched his whole body toward the wall. She moved forward a step, breathing the pressure of his silence.
"Get out." His voice was slurred, feverish.
Not answering, she stared at the back of his head and ventured another step.
"Let me alone," he spat weakly.
His voice, webbed and ugly, struck her in the middle of the chest. Quietly rooted in place, she continued to observe him, felt the weight of his pain. "I love you," she said.
Abelard did not answer. She waited, watching the rushlight spin delicate patterns against the wall. At last, he said wearily, "Go away."
Heloise backed off to the window and stood looking out, her arms crossed over her breasts. She did not turn. After a while, she sat down on a chest, still not looking at him. There was no sound from the bed, and she thought he must be dozing.
Suddenly she heard him whisper, "A eunuch is an abomination to the Lord."
Her knees went to water; if she had been standing, she would have fallen. She prayed that he would fall asleep, but the prayer was hollow, mechanical, and she knew that God did not listen anyway. He had done this; why should he listen to her now? She got up and went out for a cup of herb wine. Jourdain was asleep on the floor; the other men stared at her. She took the wine to Abelard and sat on the side of his bed, thinking that the room needed airing. The sheets should be changed. She watched Abelard drinking, never once looking at her. His lips were cracked with fever. When he had finished, she took the cup away and lay down on the floor near the bed. After all movement from the bed had stopped and she heard only his even breathing, she slept without knowing.
In the morning, the crowd gathered in the road grew considerably larger. Many were Abelard's students, boys who worshiped him; others came because they had nothing better to do and wanted a little excitement. The Bloody Saracen was bursting with customers, and those who could not squeeze into the tavern were patronizing a wineseller who had set up for business near Abelard's stoop and who was charging what the traffic would bear. Heloise sent Hilarius down to ask the people to leave. From the window, she heard him shouting and pleading. He came back up, but when Heloise looked down a few minutes later, nobody had gone, and for that matter the size of the crowd had swollen.
She washed her face and unplaited her hair, then replaited it. There was nothing she could do about the filthy, sweaty gown. She said to Hilarius, "The wound. Is it bad?"
"Clean." Hilarius cut a piece of linen into thin strips for bandages. "They brought a surgeon with them."
Heloise turned, surprised. Jourdain had not mentioned a doctor.
"A Spanish doctor, I'm told. They wanted to take no chances with Master Peter dying."
She covered her mouth with her knuckles, willing her stomach to stop heaving. Hilarius meant well, she knew, and he wanted to talk. Out in the road, people were yelling. She went over to lean against the shutters, watching them mill around aimlessly. Hilarius was saying, “The surgeon used a bronze clamp. Surgical instrument. Nothing new, I'm told. A medical student told me—"
Heloise nodded. Hilarius, folding bandages, went on talking. He told her how the penis was drawn through an oval ring, and when the clamp was closed, the scrotum and testes were removed with a rapid slash of a knife, leaving the penis intact; the wound was then cauterized and sutured. His friend, the medical student, had described the operation in detail to him. When she did not reply, he came to her, belly quivering under his black gown. "Lady, if it is any consolation to you, it could have been worse. He might have been butchered and left for dead. We must thank God for that."
"Mayhap," she answered. No, she had nothing for which to thank God. In a little while, she excused herself and went downstairs to the street. She walked around and asked people to go home. Master Peter was ill, he needed complete quiet to recover, and if they stayed he might sicken and die. She waited calmly on the stoop, staring at them, watching them move slowly down the Rue de la Huchette. When only a dozen or so remained, she turned and went in. In the vestibule, a woman opened the door of the ground-floor flat and caught Heloise's arm. She introduced herself as Master Abelard's landlady.
"Lady Heloise," she said, her eyes big, "how is my lord this morning?"
"Sleeping."
"God help me, lady, I blame myself. I can't sleep in this heat. I heard people climbing the stairs in the middle of the night. But you know Master Abelard—people coming and going at all hours."
Heloise nodded impatiently.
"The next thing I heard were screams. It turned my blood to ice, I can tell you that. Lady—"
Heloise cut her off. "Please—" She put a foot on the bottom step.
The woman said, "Lady, a favor. A lock of your hair, please. As a token."
Drawing in a rough breath, Heloise ran up the stairs. Hilarius was standing in the middle of the room looking uncomfortably at the half-opened bedroom door. Inside, Abelard was cursing someone. Jourdain came out and carefully closed the door.
"He must feel better." Jourdain grinned wanly. "He's swearing."
She found a broom, went in, and threw back the shutters. Abelard, propped up, was sipping from a bowl of milk.
"Good morning, my lord," she said with as much cheer as she could. "It's a beautiful clear day. I think it will be cooler today."
He did not answer or glance at her.
Starting near the bed, Heloise began sweeping the old rushes toward the middle of the room. "Where do you keep your linen? Fresh sheets will make you feel better."
"Let me be."
"I'm your wife," she said mildly and went on sweeping. When she had made a pile of rushes near the door, she leaned the broom against the wall. Seeing his bowl empty, she took it from him. "Good. Milk will help you regain your strength."
His eyes were dazed. "Go home," he muttered.
She wondered what home he was talking about. Fulbert's? Argenteuil? It occurred to her that at the present she had no such place as home. "I'm going to stew a fowl later," she said. "You should drink the broth. It will calm the fever. In no time you'll—"
"What for?" he whispered scornfully. "How can I show my face in public? So that everyone can point at me, every tongue deride me, a monstrous spectacle to everyone I meet?"
"No," she said. "The whole Ile weeps for you."
He paid no attention. "Eunuchs are stinking, unclean. Forbidden to enter a church. Even castrated animals were rejected for sacrifice."
"Abelard—"
He began quoting Leviticus to her. "'Ye shall not present to the Lord any animal if its testicles have been bruised or crushed, torn or cut.'"
"Animals aren't sacrificed anymore."
"'No man whose testicles have been crushed or whose organ has been severed—'"
"Stop it!"
"'—shall become a member of the assembly of the Lord.' God, God!"
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br /> "An ancient law," she replied evenly. "Outmoded. It does not apply today." When he did not reply, she added impulsively, "Dearest, you can't hide for the rest of your life."
"Hold your tongue." He flung himself against the headboard. "Don't tell me about the rest of my life. What do you know about it? I shall hang myself."
Wooden, Heloise went back to the solar. She said to Jourdain, "You must find a place for me to stay. And, friend, this afternoon I'll be needing your horse."
She tied Jourdain's stallion by the Port Saint-Landry and walked up to the house. Two men-at-arms were sprawled on Fulbert's stoop playing dice. Bishop's men. She went around behind the stable and into the garden. On a rope strung between the privy and a branch of the pear tree were hanging a row of half-dried towels. Heloise ducked under the towels and opened the kitchen door. In the empty passageway, she stopped and listened. Low voices were coming from the solar, and she could hear an occasional clink of platters and goblets. Fulbert must be having a late dinner. On tiptoe, she edged her way to the stairs and started up.
The turret room was the same. Her clothes were all hanging neatly on the wall pegs. She opened the chest under the window. Abelard's letters, tied with a cord, had not been touched. She sat on the bed, wondering if Agnes had come in to clean. Nothing appeared to have been changed, except that the bloodstained coverlet had been replaced.
She began packing. The gowns she folded and laid inside her winter cloak, and then she tied them into a bundle. Her comb and Limoges box and the letters she wrapped in a shawl. When there was nothing more that she wanted, she pulled a bundle under each arm and kicked open the turret door.
At the bottom of the stairs, Agnes stood staring, her eyes round with fear. Heloise walked around her and dropped the bundles by the front door. She turned. "Where is he?" she asked, low.
Agnes motioned in the direction of the solar. Fulbert was calling, "Agnes, who's there?"
Heloise went in to him. When Fulbert saw her, he set his goblet down hard on the trestle. Wine spilled, making a purple blotch on the cloth. He sat as still as a statue.
Heloise said, "Assassin."
"Why, niece." He laughed nervously. "I don't know what you're talking about."
It was stifling in the room. The windows were open, but no air stirred. Behind her, Heloise could feel Agnes breathing. Fulbert remained silent. "Assassin," she repeated.
"Now, now," Fulbert said, clearing his throat, "he's not dead. Nobody killed him."
"You killed me."
"Surely—"
"You killed everything that made my life worthwhile." Her voice rose to a quiet explosion. "It is me you have murdered!" She waited until she could control herself.
"There," he said soothingly, the way a man speaks to a hysterical child. "I had nothing to do with the crime."
She laughed hollowly. "Liar." After a pause: "I curse you and the whole house of Saint-Gervais."
"God will punish you," Fulbert told her sharply. He shifted uneasily in his chair.
"God damn you. God damn you to hell everlasting."
He stared at her. "God is just. Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord. He punished Master Abelard, and he will punish you for blaspheming against his holy name. Abelard ruined our house. Is that nothing to you? My nephew unmanned, blinded. What of him? My brother hunted down like a dog. Who will look after the fief now?" He rose from the trestle, shaking. "He has done us harm, don't deny it."
Heloise turned her back on him and walked to the hall. She stooped for the bundles. When Agnes came up to open the door, Heloise did not look at her. She stepped over the guards on the stoop and dragged toward the Port Saint-Landry.
Jourdain found her an inn near the Petit Pont. A half dozen beds were wedged into the tiny chamber, and Heloise had to share hers with the wife of a wine merchant from Bordeaux and with uncountable vermin, Jourdain said the inn was respectable, but still, downstairs in the public dining hall, men drank and diced around the oaken trestles. In the garden at the rear, prostitutes crept in after dark, and Heloise could hear their smooth laughter. The whole place was dirty and smelled of stale wine and bad cooking.
Abelard's wound was healing, and now he spent the days in his armchair in the solar. Outside, the crowds had gone, the Rue de la Huchette returned to its normal traffic of sumpter beasts and rumbling carts, although patrons of the Bloody Saracen still stared at Abelard's windows and discussed the crime over bowls of ale. Every morning, Heloise took a basket and did the marketing, and then she came back to cook Abelard's meals—simple soups and stews. More complicated dishes were beyond her. Abelard did not ask her to do this; on the other hand, he offered no objections either. He spoke little to her, some days barely acknowledging her presence. His uncut hair grown shaggy on his neck, he sat, with bent head, calmly thinking, reading the Bible, occasionally playing tables with Jourdain or Hilarius.
At the window, Heloise made her face betray none of the unrestrained rage and pity that occupied her thoughts at the inn, and she examined Abelard from the corner of her eye when she thought he was not looking. His whole person seemed vastly altered: his head and shoulders slumped as if the ligaments in his neck and spine had disconnected. The face was sealed, the dazzling grin and reckless arrogance that had once lit him and shown like a beacon to all he met—this was gone. And without it his face, in repose, looked almost ordinary. This absence of arrogance was what most frightened Heloise; it was the psychic glue that had held him together, and now he seemed to be another person. For hours, he maintained the same position, turning the pages of Scripture slowly, suspended alone in some other world.
She did not intrude. Soon he would awake and life would go on. It had to. If he appeared indrawn, indifferent, at least he had calmed and he no longer railed at her to go away. They would have to leave the Ile for a while; in her mind she had it planned. The sensible thing would be to live at Le Pallet with their son. She was ready to leave, weary of the inn and these rooms of sickness and horror.
Once he said to her, "Heloise," not loud, and when she ran to him, he repeated her name. "Heloise."
"Oh, my love, my love," she murmured, and held his head.
He caught her left hand, kissing the fingers. He said nothing more, released her, and went back to his Bible. Heloise eased her way to the window stool again and stared into the road.
Suddenly he called, "Have you been attending mass?"
"No."
He leaned forward in his chair. "Why not?"
Cautiously, she answered, "I can't." Then: "God is unjust."
Shaking his head, he murmured, "Oh no. God's justice is all too apparent." He smiled slightly. "His judgment struck me where I had sinned. And isn't it justice that the reprisals were taken by the man I betrayed? Oh, it's absolutely perfect justice."
Shocked, she leaped up to face him. "No, my lord. I accuse God of the greatest cruelty. For us, he reversed the laws of equity. What adulterous women bring upon their lovers, your own wife brought on you."
Abelard did not reply, and when she glanced at him, she saw that he had returned to his reading. He did not look up again. She went back to the inn and allowed herself to weep.
Lammas Day came in a torrent of thundershowers. The Ile cooled off for a day and a night, but then the heat returned, more oppressive than ever. Heloise took a chill, which immediately settled in her chest. Her lungs filled with phlegm so that she was constantly coughing and spitting up greenish gobs. Jourdain ordered her to stay in bed, and he instructed the innkeeper to bring a poultice for her chest. The illness, inconsequential as it was, threw her into even deeper misery. It had not occurred to her that Abelard would take the attitude he apparently had; his humble acceptance of the castration, so utterly uncharacteristic, frightened her. She huddled on her bed, staring into emptiness, wheezing. Her mind spilled over with stray thoughts, flotsam-and-jetsam bits from twenty years of reading. Was it women's lot to ruin great men? Plenty of examples. It was the first woman, in the beginning, who had lure
d man from paradise; she who had been created as man's helpmate became the instrument of his downfall. And what of Delilah and Bathsheba and Job's wife, who had urged him to curse God? But she, Heloise, was not like those women, no consent of hers had been responsible for the crime.
Her chest racked by coughs, she wept and flung herself against the pillow. Why did she bother to defend herself, as if she were innocent? It was all words. She had committed too many sins to pretend freedom from guilt now. Long ago she had yielded to the pleasures of the flesh, long ago she deserved punishment. An evil beginning assures a bad end, she told herself; she should have expected it.
Abelard's reputation would be smeared, how badly she didn't want to guess, and certainly his life had been ruined. Those facts could not be altered by her or anyone. A thousand times she told herself that she would spend the rest of her life trying to make reparation to him. That, at least, she might do.
All through the early days of August, she waited for Abelard to announce their departure. He had written to Denise; she knew that because Jourdain had delivered a letter to the Nantes courier, but Jourdain did not know its contents. Heloise herself wrote a kind of letter to Astrolabe. She drew a picture of lords and ladies at a garden party, drinking, laughing gaily. In the background, she sketched a castle with ornate spires and gables, and she drew blue and yellow flowers and an enormous mouse chasing a small dog. Her skill as an artist left a great deal to be desired, and even the theme was not original —she had once seen something like it in a book of hours. Her babe. How big he would be now. Soon he would be walking and then running. It had been so long since they had left Le Pallet—four months; no, nearly five. It was not good for a mother to leave her babe; she would not, she swore fiercely, be parted from her angel again.
Gradually her coughing subsided, and she returned to the Rue de la Huchette. Now visitors began coming to see Abelard—abbots, priests, an emissary from the bishop. Once King Louis's monk friend, Suger, came, and he spent several hours shut up with Abelard in the bedchamber. Time crawled. Hilarius taught her to play tables. They sat whispering over the dice, discussing Hilarius's secondhand information about the aftereffects of castration. Eunuchs, castrati, harem boys, philosophers like Origen who had castrated themselves. She supposed it unseemly for a lady to discuss such matters with a man, but she didn't care and Hilarius was eager to share his information. Several times she had noticed, with a nervous shock of excitement, that Abelard had a slight erection. Did this mean that he was not completely dysfunctional? But to that question Hilarius had no ready answer. "We must wait to see God's will," he would say.
