A Place of Light

by Kim Silveira Wolterbeek

  Madeleine leaned on her hoe, eyes locked with Hersend’s as she listened.

  “At first, the child is like a vegetable feeding and growing…”

  Madeleine thought of the lazy expansion of heavy orange pumpkins and plump red tomatoes.

  A sudden breeze ruffled Hersend’s habit. She spread her small hands (hardly bigger than a child’s!) against her thighs, holding the robe in place until the gentle wind settled.

  “And then?” Madeleine asked.

  “Next it assumes the characteristics of an animal—feeling, moving, full of fledgling desire,” Hersend said, rolling her tiny hands, one over the other.

  The wild tumbling motion reminded Madeleine of Brother Benoît’s young hound, whose devotion made his unbridled energy bearable.

  “Finally,” Hersend said, smiling a beatific smile and looking upward, “it acquires a rational mind and takes on human form.” Her voice was turquoise, full of comfort and hope. “Only then does God endow the child with an immortal soul.”

  These last words struck Madeleine with pain, like deadly nightshade spreading its wild branches and sprouting poisonous berries deep inside her belly. She thought of Evraud, a soulless devil if ever there was one.

  “You are thinking of the child’s father,” Hersend said, reaching out to smooth Madeleine’s brow. “It might help you to think of the man’s mother instead,” she said, softly. Taking both of Madeleine’s hands in her own, Hersend looked deeply into her eyes. “Consider the woman whose body nourished and cradled your child’s father. She must have hoped, as all mothers do, that her son would grow into a man of kindness and worth. Perhaps you can feel compassion for this woman destined to become your child’s grandmother?” Hersend squeezed Madeleine’s hands, and for a brief moment, Madeleine felt sorrow that was not her own.

  “Do not fear, my child. God will grant your child a holy soul.” Rising up on tiptoes, Hersend kissed Madeleine’s cheek just as the babe stretched and tumbled against her ribs.

  By late autumn Madeleine could no longer work comfortably in the garden. Whenever she stooped to sweet talk an ailing plant or uproot a pesky weed, the babe kicked and flailed about as though she intended it great harm. Bertrad and Florence took over her duties, and Madeleine spent her days sorting beans, soaking lentils, and measuring ingredients for Marie’s breads and pastries.

  Madeleine worried that Robert might imagine she had abandoned her work in the garden rather than chance another private conversation with him. In fact, after he asked for her forgiveness, she felt newly drawn to him and would have welcomed such an encounter. But Robert, consumed with abbey business, had no time for garden conversations.

  Around this same time Mother Hersend arranged for Brother Girard, an efficient if reluctant scribe, to teach Madeleine and the twins their Latin letters so that they might read holy hymns prior to singing them. Though it would be years before the buildings were completed, Robert insisted that the work of the abbey begin immediately and that no one’s spiritual life be put on hold.

  The newly designated scriptorium, where Agnes, Arsen, and Madeleine met every day after prime for their lesson, was a rustic, temporary structure with pine walls and a thatch roof that smelled of newly hewed wood, honey, bees wax, and acacia gum. Two large cutouts served as windows, allowing natural light to fall on a half dozen small tables, each with a little bench, lining the walls.

  Arriving early one morning, Madeleine and the twins interrupted Peter, who was sitting at one of the tables with his back to the three women, singing softly and writing musical notes on vellum pinned with knives to a triangular block of wood. His robe spilled over the bench and puddled onto the plank floor. While the twins lingered near the door, Madeleine, dizzy with anticipation, hurried to Peter’s side.

  “What is it you’re working on?” she asked.

  “Hymns,” he said simply, without meeting her eyes. He held his brush politely aloft, but his tapping foot revealed he was impatient to return to his manuscript.

  The twins, a step behind Madeleine, stretched their hands towards the gold paint, their fingers trailing the air as though poised to caress. They had grown plump on Philippa’s rations. Their hair returned to its former luster and their skin assumed a pale radiance.

  “Do not touch!” Peter said. “The notes are wet!” He shielded the unfinished page with the curve of an arm.

  “We’re only looking, Brother Peter,” Agnes said. “It’s alright to look, isn’t it?” She arched one brow and slid her tongue across her upper lip.

  Peter frowned, motioning that they might step closer.

  The twins glided into place beside Peter who began a new song, placing his brush on the page and shading the bulbous tip of one spindly note.

  Madeleine, intent on watching Peter’s progress, did not realize Girard had entered the room until he spoke. “I am here to teach you,” he said and walked to a small table across the room from Peter where he nudged aside the stool with one stout leg. Ignoring Agnes and Arsen, he tugged at the rope cincture girdling his waist and waved for Madeleine to join him. His halo, which waffled fitfully in Robert’s presence, scorched fiery red.

  “Shall we begin, then?” Girard said, brushing a crumb from his sloping belly. Madeleine recalled when she had last seen him, fleeing from the garden and wondered how much of her conversation with Robert the troubled monk had overheard. Abruptly, he turned to face her. She smelled bacon in the greasy folds of his robe and garlic on his breath. A wave of nausea left her light headed. She grabbed the edge of the table to steady herself.

  Girard, seemingly oblivious to Madeleine’s discomfort, slid his crippled hand into the drape of his robe. Leaning forward, he placed his other hand onto the vellum. His body relaxed, and he began to trace the letters with a sensuous slide. “Some are curved, others capped, still others ornamented with fat bellies and big feet,” he said. “You must feel their variations in your fingertips before you can hear them in your heart and know them in your head.” With a nod he indicated that Madeleine’s hand should replace his on the manuscript. She obliged, tracing the very same letters his fingers had just touched. Girard’s features softened even as his breathing quickened. Madeleine ignored Girard and focused on the letters.

  What attracted her most in the beautifully ornate manuscript were the large letters decorated with fantastic gilded figures.

  “This is a b,” Girard said pointing to a vegetable-green letter collaring a blue dog’s head. “And this one,” he said, touching the elongated neck of a rose-colored musician, “is a p.”

  “And this?” she asked, touching the curved tail of a majestic yellow lion.

  “The letter y,” he said, placing his hand over hers and guiding her fingers the length of the trailing loop again and again until his colors blistered like the burnt edge of bacon and his breath puffed ragged and foul against her cheek. She pulled her hand free and stepped back, toppling the small stool in her haste.

  The twins, sleek, voluptuous, and curious as crows, turned their heads towards the sound of the stool thumping against the plank floor. Holding hands, they crossed the room.

  Before Girard uprighted the stool, he glanced the length of Madeleine’s body, his eyes lingering on the swell of her belly. His expression was one she had seen on the faces of men who had something to hide—a limp organ or a perverse desire. Often they were angry afterwards, tossing down coins with violent, dismissive gestures.

  He motioned for the twins to move nearer the manuscript. “The letters are what’s important,” he said, his voice raspy and too loud. “The rest is for ornamentation. The dog, the musician, the lion are drawn for beauty’s sake, for aesthetics.”

  “Aesthetics,” Madeleine whispered, savoring the velvety roll of the word against her tongue. How like a garden the page appears, with each flowery letter arranged to form a bouquet of meaning!

  The twins bumped hips a
nd rolled their eyes. “Aesthetics,” they said in high fluty voices.

  Madeleine ignored their mimicry, for she had already determined that nothing would interfere with her learning to read.

  “Do not act like children!” Girard scolded.

  The twins muffled their giggles with the palms of their hands and backed away from the manuscript.

  “Shall we resume?” he said to Madeleine.

  He moved to her side. A great heat vapored off his body, and the air between them webbed with something ominous.

  Each time William slighted Philippa, she recalled the servants’ gossip and wondered if he had taken Dangerosa as his lover. The mere possibility put her in a leaden mood. On one such weighted morning, she bid Emma care for the children and declined a meeting with her aunts, claiming a sudden stitch had struck her in the night. Then, instead of tending to her duties, she lay in bed and studied the ivory carvings on the back of her hand mirror—a love story split in two by the gashed and dimpled trunk of a laurel tree. She seldom gave the familiar scene a second glance, but on this day the lovers demanded her attention and filled her with anxious dread.

  On the left panel, a seated man, his eyes fixed on the eyes of a beautiful woman proffering a crown, held a cluster of grapes in one hand and lifted a chalice with the other. Both the man and the woman were smiling.

  On the right panel, the woman now sat beside the man. Her knees were turned demurely away from his, but between her suddenly parted thighs the fabric of her gown bunched and pulled taut. The woman prepared to place the crown on the man’s head. The man reached for the woman’s breasts.

  The closer she studied the carving the more she considered a different story than the one she had always read. For the first time she noticed that in the right panel the man no longer looked into the woman’s eyes. Instead, he directed his gaze inward at his own separate desire. And in the woman’s posture, Philippa sensed hesitancy as if she understood that while her lover knew her body, he did not know her soul. Tossing the mirror onto the bed, Philippa buried her face in her pillow and prayed for guidance. But none came.

  Her mind passed randomly from one disappointment to another, created a dizzy momentum that spun her into a state of malaise. Love and betrayal are one and the same, she thought, recalling Sophie’s words. A great pressure clamped tight against her ribs and made it difficult to breathe. For the sake of the children she could not surrender to despair.

  Tossing aside the bed sheets, Philippa threw open the casement windows. The sun, a faint smear behind mountains of dark clouds, cast an eerie glow onto a spindly hedge of privet bushes half-submerged in fog. Grey puffs of chimney smoke filled the air with cinders. Head down, Philippa paced back and forth, opening and closing her hands, entirely unaware of the rattle of pans in the scullery or the chill of marble beneath her feet.

  Saint Hillary’s bells sparked a memory of Robert’s sermon in Toulouse. “Love,” Robert had said, “comes from God, it gives without taking.” Philippa’s frantic breathing slowed. “That’s it!” she said aloud. “I will write to the Master. He will tell me what to do!” She clamored for the maid’s bell. The moment Giseld appeared at her door, Philippa grabbed the parchment and stylus from her hands and told her to fetch Ponce. “I need him to take a letter to Fountervaud,” she explained.

  “Yes, Madame,” Giseld said, her fingers fretting the hem of her apron.

  “Is there something else?”

  Giseld blushed and took a deep breath. “The cook says to remind Madame that the duke and duchess of Anjou arrive today, and we must buy more poultry—hens and capons. They have a large entourage, and many others may come as well, lords and prelates,” she said, a childish excitement infusing her words.

  “Others? What others?” Philippa asked.

  “The lords of Lusignan and Parthenay,” she counted on her fingers. “And also the bishop of Angoulême…” Dropping her hands, Giseld began pleating the skirt of her apron.

  Philippa’s temple began to throb. Today was the Feast of All Souls. William had spoken of little else but his banquet for weeks. “Thank you,” she said to Giseld. “That will be all.”

  The maid curtsied and backed out of the room.

  By the time Philippa descended the stairs to the great hall that afternoon, most of the guests were already seated at the long trestle tables, listening to a performance by Eblo of Ventadorn. Guiscard and Alice had prepared enough food for a hundred people and arranged the great hall in grand fashion, setting the gilded plates, silver spoons, and maple mazers at each place and centering bronze ewers on the tables. The walls were festooned with colorful ribbons and flags, and an abundance of tapers lit up the room. A juggler wearing the rayed tunic of a court jester, tossed a half dozen balls into the air.

  Philippa took her place on the dais, between William and his brother Hugh. As one course after another of fish, foul, and meat crossed the table, she scanned the room. On her right was Aimé, the Archbishop of Bordeaux, so old that he had to be carried to the table in a litter. Further down the table Count Fulk argued with his eldest son. Conspicuously absent was Count Fulk’s wife, the lovely Bertrad, whose scandalous affair with King Philip had not ended even after Pope Pascal excommunicated Philip, instructing him to cease his adulterous behavior or face anathema. On her left sat Isabelle de Montfort, Count Fulk’s sister-in-law, Agnes de Craon, Agnes de Aïs, and a tiresome group of William’s comrades. Hugh, drunk on mead, and William, high on companionship, paid Philippa scant attention. She ate little but instead listened to Eblo’s song, a strange mélange of fact and fiction, about Count Geoffrey defending the English queen against the slanders of a seneschal, then marrying the daughter of a merchant, but leaving her to defend his territories against the invasions of a Spanish king. Just as Eblo’s song ended, Abbot Alexander of Talmond approached the dais.

  “Lady Philippa,” he said, bowing slightly, “you are married to a most generous man! Has Duke William told you how he wishes to make donations to the Abbey of Talmond so the monks may hold thirty masses for the souls of his father and mother and thirty more for the souls of Lady Philippa’s father and mother? The duke has kindly offered one third of the domain of Scolis, including the rents,” he said, wiping his brow with the back of his hand.

  Surprised, Philippa turned to William. Was it possible he still loved her? “Don’t forget the palfrey,” William said, frowning slightly.

  “Oh yes, we mustn’t forget that,” Abbot Alexander replied with a chuckle. Then, looking up at Philippa, he explained, “Duke William has taken a special liking to a fine dappled palfrey owned by the monks of Talmond. They are pleased to give the duke this horse in exchange for his generosity.”

  My dear God! Philippa thought. William had traded the souls of their parents for a horse! But before she could compose a word in response, William rose and escorted an ecclesiastic to a seat between the lords of Lusignan and Parthenay.

  She heard the sound of carriage wheels and the play of hooves on cobblestones. Since it was William’s habit to greet guests personally, she thought nothing of it when he left the great hall. Only later did it occur to her that he had all the while been listening for someone, his nervous expectation revealed in the clumsy stutter of his hand knocking over a goblet.

  Curiosity and a wife’s instinct compelled Philippa to turn her head towards the casement window just as a young woman alighted from her carriage. First the peak-a-boo thrust of a foot clad in a pointy-toed slipper secured at the ankle with a narrow band of ribbon, then the dainty, but not overly cautious, hop down onto cobblestone.

  Philippa took note of the woman’s red hair and expensive clothes. The silk cases that attached to and lengthened her thick braids were of variegated samite interwoven with gold and silver threads. Her gown, long, narrow, with wide bell sleeves and an exaggerated train, was the height of Parisian fashion. Philippa watched mesmerized as the woman’s finge
rtips impatiently fondled the tassel of her girdle, a long rope of vermillion silk looped once and knotted loosely around her small waist.

  Suddenly William arrived at the young woman’s side. She turned with a voluptuous grace born of wealth and comely looks. Smiling, William reached for her bejeweled hand. Philippa knew instinctively that the lady placed great demands on servants, expected reverential treatment from men and, most likely, had not accomplished a single thing of import in her life—never guided a babe to breast, comforted an ailing parent or penned an important document. But so what? The way William’s thumb lay claim to the back of the woman’s hand said it all.

  At that very moment, Philippa forgot the cold, calculating William who bartered the souls of their parents and recalled, instead, the warmth of him lying next to her in bed, the possessive way he pressed his knees against her legs before scooping her into the cradle of his embrace. Her heart relived the emotional truth of that experience even as her eyes took in the bare facts of the spectacle before her.

  William entered the grand hall and passed before the dais with Dangerosa’s hand tucked in the crook of his arm. Philippa smelled her scent—cloying attar of roses—before she heard Isabelle de Montfort’s insipid voice. “Can you blame him?” she whispered. “What man would be attracted to a manly woman? Even if she does have gold hair.” Her comment was greeted by the breathy titters of Agnes de Craon and Agnes de Aïsand—petty, narcissistic women disappointed with the shallowness of their own lives who were all too eager to take joy in someone else’s pain. But worse than their laughter were the brittle glances of recognition from the ones who had been betrayed by wandering husbands and faithless lovers, those lonely, bitter woman who carved out niches of martyrdom and lived their lives huddled in the narrow space of their constricted dreams. Philippa felt humiliated and longed to be anywhere else. The room split apart into dizzy shards. She prayed that she would not faint.