by Hager, Mandy
‘In that case, say your farewells and our Prioress Sister Renee will take you to the dormitory. Welcome to our family, Heloise.’
Heloise turns to Fulbert. ‘You are leaving now? This night?’
‘We will first go over again what you have to know. But, yes, I have been away too long and must return to earn my keep.’
Heloise feels all the hope forged over these past four days drain out through the bottom of her imprisoned feet. He has to steer her out the door, and carries her to a bench in the cloister to sit her down. She cannot speak, although he tries to jolly her with light talk. In the end he settles for explaining the rules in a way she will understand: the bells will toll for Vigils in the darkest hour of night — though she can ignore them — and then again for Lauds at dawn and Prime, Terce, Sext and None throughout the day at three-hour intervals; these she must obey. After Vespers she will eat, before Compline readies all for bed. In the dormitory she must maintain complete silence. She absorbs little; all she can hear is the howl that fills her head.
‘I will visit you every month,’ he says. ‘And if you need me, ask the Reverend Mother to send word with the messengers who ride between Argenteuil and Paris most days. I can be here in half a day unless I am called away to duty.’
‘But what if I need you and you are not there?’ It is hard to speak past the ache in her throat.
‘Then I will come as soon as I can. Trust me, Heloise. I will not desert you; not ever. Now that I have found you, our lives are bound until the day we die.’
All she feels is new-found horror. What if he dies? What then? She has seen the terrible truth of bodies after death: the calf dragged rotten from its mother; her foster mother’s father who turned to bones before their eyes; the white grubs feeding on the carrion they scavenge from the fields. She throws her arms about him, burying her face into his neck.
‘Please, Uncle, never die.’
He holds her tight and she feels sobs breaking from his chest. Her own tears rise, hurting as if wrung from her, yet all sound is swallowed when the bells begin to toll. A mass of black-robed women swarm into the cloister, making their way from the refectory back to the chapel for their final prayers.
‘You are Heloise?’ A voice bristles with impatience.
Heloise glances up as a woman in her middle years bears down on her. Again she burrows into Fulbert’s warmth and tightens her grip. Perhaps if she refuses he will take her home with him instead.
‘Hurry, child. I have been asked to settle you before Compline starts.’
Heloise shakes her head. Beneath her, Fulbert sighs.
‘It is time, dearest. I will come again soon.’ Standing, he unpeels her clinging hands and steadies her on her feet.
She wails, open-mouthed, great peals of misery as he kisses her head and edges away. She throws herself back at him; arms twining around his leg. The nun steps in and clasps her by each wrist, wresting her free.
‘Go now,’ she barks at Fulbert, her hands as binding as any rope.
‘Please!’ Heloise shrieks at his receding back. ‘Take me with you!’
He turns one last time, his face a mask of anguish. ‘I will see you again soon. I swear it.’ With a groan he rushes for the door that will close between them.
Heloise thrashes, trying to release herself from the biting grip, and spits out the childish insults she has grown so used to having flung at her. The nun picks her up, arms pinned to her sides, and marches the raging girl to a dormitory where rows of straw mattresses fill every vacant space. She dumps Heloise on one and ignores her heart-broken sobs as she searches out a cover to bundle at the girl’s flailing feet.
‘There is a pail in the corner,’ she says, ‘should you need relief in the night. If you wet the bed you must replace the straw yourself.’
With this, the prioress hurries off to pray, and Heloise is left to cry herself to sleep.
Heloise’s first days are filled with constant trepidation. She feels overwhelmed by the throng of bodies, yeasty as rancid cheese, the ceaseless whispers stoking her fretfulness as if they are hissed threats. Night and day, day and night, the abbey echoes with tolling bells, chanted prayers, sniping asides; and every night she stifles her tears to the accompaniment of flatulence, coughs and wheezing snores.
The nuns pay her outbursts little heed, instead rewarding her with a smile or tender touch to the cheek whenever she rallies. She is put to work in the kitchen to occupy her time, and the refectorer assigns her simple tasks: collecting water, scrubbing soil from the garden’s produce, checking through baskets for perished fruit, helping shape the bread for Mass.
It is only when she stumbles across the room wedged between the cloister and the chapter house that something akin to excitement bubbles up. Rude shelves stacked with scrolls and illuminated manuscripts line the walls, wooden cabinets storing the overflow; a room of treasures to linger over, drinking in the richness of the images, allowing her to travel to the other worlds within her head.
By the time Fulbert returns she has her dreams mapped out. She drags him to the library and sweeps her arm around. ‘Look at all this!’ she says. ‘You said I would learn to read, but I have not.’ Heloise lifts an illuminated manuscript down from the shelf and finds the page that most enthrals her. It shows a woman dressed in vivid blue poring over a book, a glowing figure with wings beside her. Around its edges sit four armoured knights on fantastical beasts and seven yellow-breasted birds. Flowers of every possible shape and colour fill the rest of the page. She points to the text framed at its centre. ‘What does this mean?’
‘It is a line from Luke, written in Latin, a language that takes much learning. It says: And the angel came in unto her, and said, Hail, thou that art highly favoured, the Lord is with thee: blessed art thou among women.’
‘I knew she was special,’ she says. ‘See how it shines around her head?’
He laughs. ‘You do not need to read at all, Heloise. It seems you found the meaning all by yourself.’
‘But the words tell so much more.’ She grasps his face between her hands. ‘Please, Uncle, make them teach me now. It will help the days go faster.’
‘Dear one, you are as precocious as your mother.’ He cups his hands over hers and draws them together to kiss her fingertips. ‘Very well, I will speak to the Lady Alberea. If it is possible then I will insist on it.’
‘Oh, thank you, thank you!’ She returns his kiss with her own to his nose, his cheeks, his mouth.
He takes her from the abbey then, and they spend what is left of the day wading in a nearby stream, catching dragonflies to study their fragile wings, tickling lampreys, foraging for mushrooms in the nearby woods. Before he leaves, Fulbert speaks with the Reverend Mother alone in her private chamber off the refectory, while Heloise waits outside the door. When he returns it is with a smile.
‘You will start taking lessons with the novices. It took much argument to convince her you will comprehend, so see that you attend.’
‘I promise to make you proud!’
‘You already do, Hersende. You already do.’
She does not correct him. The praise is enough.
Two
ARGENTEUIL, 1103–1107
Sister Harildas stalks the room, her willow switch tapping on her open palm. Seven novices hunch over their tablets and yawn as she drones out scripture for Latin translation, their styluses scraping away at the wax. Heloise now habitually sits at the back; over the years of tutelage she has grown tired of hearing laughter swirl behind her and not know why.
Fulbert’s visits are still her one reprieve from gnawing loneliness. He takes her into the countryside, and together they scale the crumbling towers left by the Norman raids. He tells of battles, of Charlemagne, brave Roland, the wondrous lives of saints; and spins her tales, too, of Titans, of the roaring Minotaur, of Hercules, Ulysses and Jason’s golden fleece. The company of these ancients fill the weeks until he comes again, his visits now less frequent as his status grows.
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‘Now this, from the Epistles to Timothy,’ their teacher says. She reads the text so slowly Heloise completes it before the final words limp to air. ‘Let the woman learn in silence with all subjection. But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence.’
Heloise lays down her stylus to puzzle over the text’s unfairness. Why have a mind if not to use it?
Her teacher swoops on her. ‘Why do you not write?’
‘I have finished, Sister.’
The nun picks up the tablet. ‘This script is too untidy,’ she says. ‘Erase it and start again — and this time take more care.’
There are sniggers from the front; knowing looks exchanged.
‘Is it not correct?’
The willow swims at the corner of her vision before it slams down on her desk.
‘Did you not heed the words to Timothy, child? Learn in silence with all subjection.’
How sick she is of this. ‘But it also says women cannot teach, Sister. How can this be?’
The novices stare, seven hostile pairs of eyes on her, their passive sport.
‘How many times must I tell you not to question the Lord’s words?’
The Lord’s words? Heloise has studied the Epistles to Timothy, another who was thought too young to know his mind. ‘Were these words not written by Paul?’
The switch comes down on her back, its sting begging tears. But she will not give them this pleasure, these girls who vow to serve the Lord yet act with such collective spite.
Sister Harildas points to the doorway with her switch. ‘Get out! Enough of your disruptions for today.’
It invariably comes to this: her teacher making false or absurd claims, a trap set, the argument won not by logic or truth but by the switch. Heloise daily prays that her ease with memory and thought will one day seem a gift. Instead, her miseries repeat despite her prayers. She is an aberration, an oddity, at times accused of being a cheat or liar. It wounds; she cannot help her quickness. There are days she wishes her mind would dull. She has discovered Argenteuil’s fine reputation for its teaching is just that: a reputation. True, they are taught the basics of Latin and carefully chosen scriptures and texts, but they are actively discouraged from thinking for themselves.
She stands erect and gathers up her tablet and stylus before her measured steps carry her from the room. Only an act of conscious will prevents her sprinting as she makes for the sanctuary of the library, where she curls up beneath the one slot window spilling light. Now she cries, the humiliation worse than the switch’s bite. She dares not tell Fulbert; she fears he will insist all lessons cease — and though they frustrate her, they are better than nought.
When her tears are spent, she rummages for her current favourite on the shelf beside her, a small collection of the poems of Fulcoius which contains a verse that speaks most of her pining for Fulbert:
By day mine eyes, by night my soul desires thee,
Weary I lie alone.
Once in a dream it seemed thou wert beside me;
O far beyond all dreams, if thou wouldst come!
‘Do you really understand this, Heloise?’
She startles, cheeks ablaze, as a nun stands over her. She knows that this thin woman, who arrived to join the ranks at Argenteuil two years ago, has surreptitiously watched her. There were whispers of expulsion for bad behaviour from somewhere in the south, and she certainly appears withdrawn and out of sorts, never before acknowledging Heloise although their paths cross most days. She, too, haunts the library.
Sister Saris sinks down beside her. ‘Good heavens, child, no need to take such fright. I simply wish to know if you truly comprehend what you read.’
Heloise thought she knew the verse’s meaning, but now has doubts under the nun’s steady appraisal. She shrugs, opting for safety over ridicule.
‘How well do you read Latin, then? I see you often here.’
‘Not well enough.’
‘Why so?’
There seems no mocking in her tone, so Heloise indicates the well-stocked shelves. ‘I long to read all these and one day try to write my own.’
Sister Saris smiles, transforming her sallow face.
Heloise slaps shut the pages, heat rising. ‘You think me foolish, but I swear I will.’ She fumbles to replace the volume on the shelf and makes to leave.
‘Heloise, wait!’ Sister Saris scrabbles to her feet. ‘Allow me, then, to teach you. It was my role before—’ She faulters. ‘Before.’ She holds herself quite still, and in this moment the look of a cat-mauled mouse comes over her.
‘You mean this? You can teach me everything?’
‘I will teach you all I know, if Reverend Mother sanctions it.’ She gulps in air. ‘My father was a travelling philosopher. A scholar. We women — my mother, sister and I — also taught for many years.’
Suffer not a woman to teach … Yes, this alone is reason enough to accept. Why should women not teach — or, for that matter, not read a library full of books, and write? She tows Sister Saris straight to Lady Alberea’s office, in fear she will change her mind.
‘You would prefer this to the company of your peers?’ the Reverend Mother asks.
How is she to answer? To admit she is already far beyond them — and their teacher — would be sinfully vain … and to speak against them will only earn her added grief. ‘In truth, Reverend Mother, I think Sister Harildas would prefer it.’
Lady Alberea’s eyebrows arch. ‘Indeed? And you, Sister Saris? You choose to do this willingly?’
‘It would give me great comfort, Reverend Mother. I would very much appreciate it.’
Perhaps Alberea finds satisfaction in pairing two such awkward souls, for now she smiles. ‘Very well. But I must seek your uncle’s written blessing before you start.’
Heloise can barely take her leave with the required decorum. Outside she throws herself at the grinning nun, who returns the embrace with shared delight.
Sister Saris proves a skilled teacher, first testing Heloise’s skills with scriptural passages and verses from the favoured scholars, then guiding her through the other works deemed fitting for her tender years.
But just as Heloise rejoices at this new-found freedom, they are pinned beneath the sour inspection of their prioress. Sister Renee’s eyes, two mordant greengages, roll small in their sockets as she questions every choice of reading. She distrusts the passionate talk her prowling sometimes interrupts. Her hostility towards the younger nun appears to have no grounds beyond personal dislike, but once Heloise notices it she begins to see it in the faces of others as well. It makes no sense; her teacher takes great pains not to offend, yet still there is a suspicious whispering whenever she enters a room. Heloise hates this hissing scourge; it is like a chill wind always at her neck.
Such is her puzzlement she resolves to ask Fulbert his thoughts when next he comes. He is by now a canon at Paris’s Notre-Dame, his goal accomplished, and a full three months go by before she hears the welcome news that he has come again. She hurries to the abbey’s gate to greet him, and they settle in the cloister’s shade.
‘Forgive my delay, Heloise. I was sent to Beaugency by one of the king’s men to aid a delicate negotiation.’
‘Truly? You now serve the king?’
‘Not directly. I was there to observe on the chancellor’s behalf, not offer an opinion.’
‘Observe what?’
‘It is complicated and would take much explaining.’ He rubs his brow, ruching the skin into deep furrows.
She leans in to him and rests her head against his shoulder. ‘Tell me, Uncle, please. I want to understand the world; here no one speaks of it.’
‘You funny little thing.’ He wraps his arm around her and draws her close. ‘Very well. It all stems from our king’s desire for another’s wife. His Majesty rejected his own wife and now wants to marry a woman called Bertrada, though she is already wed.’
‘Is that allowed?’
‘Po
wer trumps all, Heloise. The longer you live, the more you will discover this for yourself.’ He takes her braid and threads loose strands back into its weave. ‘God knows, though I was hamstrung in your early years, since I found you I have sworn to do what I can to protect you from its poison.’
‘I can protect myself, Uncle, so long as you teach me how.’
His voice thickens. ‘Oh, Heloise, how like your mother you are.’ At this, his attention shifts to the cloister’s vaults and timber ribs, arrested there.
She knows this look: he festers in the past. ‘And the king?’
‘Ah, yes, the king … Well, the Bishop of Chartres claimed His Highness’s urge to marry was nothing short of bigamy, but the king paid no attention and took Bertrada as his own. For this our Holy Father excommunicated him.’
‘What is bigamy?’
He rubs his nose, taking his time to meet her eye. ‘Having two wives at once. It is against God’s law.’
‘But how can that be so? Is not every nun married to the Lord?’
Fulbert glances around before he answers, spying Sister Renee hovering further down the cloister. When she is noticed, she makes all haste away. Fulbert waits until she is gone from sight. ‘That is more a sacred joining, my sweet, thereby removing the need or temptation of any earthly marriage. It is the same expectation for all clergy and Church office-holders.’
‘I do not understand. I have often heard talk of married clergy.’
‘Times are changing. Back last century the Holy Father Gregory set reforms in place to eradicate this practice and, though he failed to enforce them at the time, momentum has been building again of late. Hence our king’s desires run foul of the Church.’
‘But why would the king even want two wives?’
Fulbert laughs. ‘I do not know, child. I am the wrong one to ask! I keep myself free from temptation, in line with the Church’s stricter codes; I have no wish to find myself turfed out on the street. It is a complex situation and I see trouble afoot.’