Love At The Edge of Morning

Love was not logical which is why he had banned it in pursuit of Divinity, Peter Abelard knew this of himself well. But Logick had been his first love, and the party had all but dissolved him when he met Heloise.

He found himself back in his native air by the twenty-eighth year of his life, abandoning the world of academia which had nearly killed him; his lungs he had once believed solely breathed for the scholarly gravity his life had centered itself around starting to fail. He was happy… when he thought himself rid of the desire for a mistress. He had renounced his birthright, studied under William des Champeaux, the novelty of this quickly dwindled as Peter realized he was much smarter than the man, and established a school of his own. But as he removed to Paris once more, the city adorned with laurels brought by the ingenious turn of the twelfth century, he realized perhaps he had been searching for Divinity in the wrong places, or more aptly, the wrong people. 

Peter, for all that it was worth, was a gentleman. His soul was sound, immune to the shocks of the ever-changing world; his delicate passions, keen judgment, and refined taste, had dressed him up to such an accomplishment. But in the world of Logick, over-hastiness had no place, and such had translated into his secret search for a mistress. He had a tongue shaped for song, a hand poised for poetry, and a mind absolutely sure – that in the throes of easy pleasure and forward want – he had not yet seen the woman he was to love. What he failed to consider, until that very day in the dying breaths of his first summer back in Paris as he moved into the Doctor’s house, was once a heart opened to love, it was impossible for the beating thing to remain unscathed. 

❦

Summer refused to surrender to autumn without a fight, lacing the air with a tantalizing chill and moisture that irritated Peter’s lungs. He arrived at the door of Doctor Fulbert’s home, conveniently situated only blocks from where he lectured, wheezing. Despite the awful noises coming from his throat, the bags he had stacked neatly against the stone facade, and the fact he told the Doctor he would arrive by noon, no one deigned him a greeting or a helping hand. Barely collecting himself, Peter tested the door in desperation. The door gave way with a slight creak, opening up into the darkness of the living space. “Hello?” he called in. No answer, and the horror of his situation only grew when he had realized the bottom floor to be a closed curbstone shop, meaning his room was undeniably up the stairs to his right. 

He rounded the corner of the third floor, praying to his God for some reprieve, when an oof shattered the silence of the house. “Watch it!” The woman had been inspecting the floor for dirt, he presumed, when he ran into her. He had told the Doctor noon, hadn’t he? Why was she just now cleaning? But it did not matter, for he was grateful to unload his bags unto her. 

“My room, please,” he huffed in-between breaths.

“Oh! You must be Mister Abelard, a pleasure it is to finally be in your company!” She extended her hand, which was odd for a scullery maid. He caught his first glimpse of her face – vermillion lips placed on a delicately proportioned plane, eyes that sparkled with an all knowingness; the air around her, he realized, was sweet, and he damned his lungs for failing to drink it in faster; her complexion to be revered as an angel’s. He took her hand into his, his words escaping him. 

She helped with his bags, and led him to his room, across from Doctor Fulbert, and now Peter’s, study. He thanked God for the short journey, for his lungs proved to be far from healed. He began unpacking his things, setting his books and journals into undisturbed dust. 

“Where are you from?” she asked from the doorway. He eyed the girl, beginning to wonder if she was a vagrant who had also figured out the loose front door downstairs. 

“Palais, Britany,” he answered, curtly. 

“And what are your plans here? In Paris?” The words were like fingers digging into his deepest bruise. He looked to the spires of Notre Dame, visible from where his room was situated; mocking him so.  

“Do you always interrogate your masters so thoroughly?”

Her face fell for a moment, before the mask returned just as quick as it cracked. “No, no I do not.”

“What time will dinner be held?” he asked, trying not to breathe in the disturbed dust. If she failed to leave in the next few minutes, she would bear witness to his impending coughing spell, which no one, not even this aggrandizing maid, should see.  

“Doctor Fulbert will fetch you,” she said, sweetly. Turning on her heels, she left him wondering what sort of madness had overtaken the Doctor to hire such a girl. 

Dinner that evening was significantly delayed, for the Doctor insisted on waiting for the other party to join the two of them. The food was quickly losing its warmth, as was Peter.

“Apologies, apologies” a familiar voice broke the awaiting silence. Peter’s head snapped towards the sound, finding the maid from earlier walking towards the table straight towards the Doctor. “Forgive me dear Uncle for the delay,” she said, kissing him on the cheek. “I was completely enraptured in world’s other than our own.” Uncle?

“Dear Heloise, you mustn't trouble yourself with such apologies. We weren’t waiting for long.” We hadn’t? Peter thought to himself, unsure if they operated on the same principles of time. “You must meet Mister Abelard! Oh Heloise, he is wonderful.”

“The pleasure is mine,” Peter said standing, extending his hand out to her. She took it wearily, eyeing him. 

“Well I do hope so, if we are to be under the same roof.” Peter froze, wondering if he heard her right. 

“I think you two will get on just fine,” the Doctor assured her. He took his seat from across Heloise, and wondered what he had done in his short life to offend God that such punishment as this was just. The Doctor took his cup into his hand. “A toast. To the will of our God for bringing us dear Peter, and to my niece, who shall flourish under his tutelage.”

Heloise choked down her wine, the latter statement only registering after it had fallen down her windpipe. “His tutelage?”

“Peter is one of the most brilliant minds in Paris, dear. Only the best for you,” he said warmly, clumsily sidestepping the horror overtaking both his guests.

“I do not need his brilliant mind. Perhaps Peter could learn a thing or two from me.”

It was Peter’s turn to laugh. “Please enlighten me on what I could learn from you, my lady.” He did not mean the statement to drip with such derision. He was actually curious. 

“For one, social graces,” she started. “No one is granted impunity for the assumption that just because I am a woman, I am your servant.”

The Doctor stiffened. “Heloise,” he warned.

“In fact, why waste any more time sitting here fooling ourselves. Let us skip to the end of this doomed proposition where you-” she pointed her finger toward Peter, “leave because I am too much woman and not enough a slave for your tastes.” Ah, the heart on her sleeve bled, and Peter couldn't help but admire the boldness in which this woman seemed to live her life by. “And may I answer your earlier question: No, I do not interrogate my masters so thoroughly because I answer to no one.”

“Who spoke of leaving?” Peter said with a small smile playing along his lips. “If you could not tell earlier, I am in no rush to leave. These damned lungs of mine would simply not allow it.”

“You lot are incorrigible,” Heloise muttered under her breath, taking her knife and hacking away at the duck breast before her. “I wake at dawn, and will be ready shortly after. Do not waste my time, Peter.” 

The next day, shortly after dawn had chased away the night, Heloise met him in his study as promised, eyes ablaze. “I must know before we begin, does it scare you to view me as your equal?”

“It does not,” Peter answered, truthfully. “Because I know what you are.”

She scoffed, taking it as an affront naturally. “And pray tell what that may be.”

“You refuse to be stunted by great repression based on your sex, yes?”

“I suppose.”

“That makes you a lamb with a wolf’s mind lurking below its skin.”

She mulled over it for a moment, before joining him at his side. “As all great and shunned women are.” Eyeing him for a moment, her face did not betray her, though the flush of her cheeks did. “Let us get on with it then.”

Peter was pleased to find Heloise had been right in one regard. She was well studied, though Doctor Fulbert loved his money too much to permit her to gain an education on par with her own desires. Her wit was as quick a bolt of lightning’s flash, and equally as striking. And because Doctor Fulbert had been his brother canon in church, their friendship surpassed strangeness quickly. She knew three languages, and the rate at which she learned their fluency had earned her some fame abroad. Weeks into their first lessons, Peter found quickly that the Enigmatic Heloise Fulbert was a matter of discourse wherever he found himself outside their lessons, reporting back to her the next morning of what they said about her. 

That autumn fell away in the same fashionable routine, their weeks together in the study punctuated by walks down to the curbstone shop – an apothecary, Peter found out later – and strolls along The Seine. She told him of her interest in medicinal healing, and had even given him a salve to rub on his chest at night to ease the cough that plagued him. Soon enough, Peter’s lungs had slowly begun to heal, liberation from his own confines and embracing his love for the mundane life he had found himself in, his remedy. Their hands brushed occasionally when forced proximity descended upon them on the busy sidewalks of the city; their eyes met when their minds operated in congruence, her fair complexion reddening when the once assumed impossibility of enjoying each other's company dissolved before them; her sweet air consumed his surroundings, and at night he soothed himself to sleep with the shirt he wore that day placed close enough he smelled her, as if she lay next to him. Peter spent these months in silent questioning, unsure if Heloise felt the same. Until one day, at the end of a particularly riveting lesson, her lips fell upon his in her own silent answer. 

Winter passed by in agony, as Doctor Fulbert’s waning tempers kept them from acting upon impulse. When the man was to be gone for two weeks on a trip, Peter found himself etching the days until his departure into his bedpost. And, as spring would have it, Peter and Heloise’s relationship blossomed into something sordid, though it did not feel as such; not when she warmed his bed and rubbed his salve onto his chest, or when they made love on the desk of his study, or when they found themselves stealing kisses from one another on their strolls. Peter’s mind laden with an enlivened surety he’d felt the moment his eyes fell upon her that summer day: he had found the woman he loved. 

The Doctor upon his return kept them separated, suspicions of their love flagrant. Peter had not known fear before until the Doctor’s own paranoia was confirmed. Perhaps it was the Devil, or perhaps God had abandoned this house altogether – for the mouth of the man, fueled by his temper and souring disposition towards the couple, spewed sin so dark it swallowed light.

“Feel this,” Heloise had whispered to him one night as they lay together. It was autumn once more, and Heloise had left for Britany to find refuge with Peter’s sister. She placed his hand upon her breast and felt her heart dancing. Then, she guided his hand to the lowest reaches of her stomach, which had swelled considerably. The tiniest jump greeted his palm. Peter shot up from his station, astonished. 

“You are with child?”

“Does it come as such a shock?”

“Not as much shock as dread,” Peter admitted. Heloise spirits dampened. “Marry me.”

“I can not,” she whispered.

“Can not or will not?”

Her silence was his answer. “Does our love not transcend such earthly matters? Is what we created not what defines Heaven itself?”

“You are my God, my faith, Heloise. On my knees I revere your love for me. But your Uncle will never see it that way.”

“I will not marry you. Let me be your mistress, your whore. Do not kill me by making me a wife.”

❦

It is said until the lamb sheds its skin, and the wolf learns how to write, every story will glorify the hunter. But such was not the case for Heloise and her Peter, though the hunters tried their damndest to transcribe the next chapters of their lives.

Their son, Astrolabe, was born shortly after his last trip to Brittany. When Heloise returned back to Paris with a child created in love and out of wedlock, Doctor Fulbert had cursed the Will of his God for sending Peter Abelard to his house, ruining his dear niece’s mind with the ruminating matters of motherhood! Heloise understood it then, Peter’s urgent proposal that night he laid his palm against her stomach. He only thought to protect her, and this child she strolled along the Seine, weaving tales of a world where love knew no bounds. That was all they were. Tales. When she and Astrolabe arrived at the small clearing in the field, precisely at the time she told the bishop and Peter to meet her, she blanched when she found neither. The gait crunching the grass behind her signaled Peter’s arrival, always dutifully behind her. “Marry me,” she said as a way of greeting. The bishop arrived, then. Peter smiled like the sun breaking out of the banked clouds of winter. They exchanged their vows in secret, in unison, as God intended: I am not above you, I am not below you, I will be beside you in every life.

“If only such bliss was made to last,” she whispered to herself as she gazed out the window of the monastery. It had been years since those vows had been bound in blood in the meadow. Heloise found it did not matter exactly how many of the damned things passed, the only measure which mattered was that of when God’s call home would find her. The wagon pulled up, and she rushed down the stairs to meet it. 

Soon after the secret of their marriage was divulged, Peter had disappeared to the outskirts of the city, the convent had come to rescue Heloise, and Peter’s sister had promised to receive Astrolabe and raise him as her own; the plan her husband’s final act of bravery before the humiliation took him forever. The news of the attack came in whispers, until one day she cornered a nun in the monastery and begged on her knees to hear it in full. 

“They came to his home in the middle of the night, and with the help of a bribed servant, cut parts from his body that brought upon such sorrow to your Uncle.”

She did not see her husband or son again. Not until today, at least. Though separated, Peter at the Abbey of St. Denis and Heloise at the Argenteuil, their love was canonized through ink and written word; the strongest weapon there ever would be, the world would eventually come to find. In her earliest letters, Heloise lamented her separation from the life she had come to love; memories haunting her every time she closed her eyes. Peter had written equal sentiments, as if their brains refused to unfurl from one another even from a distance, but Heloise felt God and all his monsters he had unleashed upon them lurking between the lines, mocking her. She met the driver at the back of the wagon, and there, in his simple habit, lay her Peter, sleeping as soundly as he did that spring when they first held one another.

She found herself in her sixty-third year of life, the same age Peter had been when he was laid to rest. How she had survived those twenty years since, a wonder. The first abbess of her own abbey, Heloise found herself engrossed with Greek, Latin, and French, just as she had been as a girl. Her last days were spent recounting those tales as she did once to her Astrolabe, but with a renewed vigor. She had His letters to prove it was more than myth, that their love, just like death, could change all things.                      

In the darkness of her room, a shadow reached for her through the enchanted dawn which roused her, caressing her forehead where a young man's bags had left a tiny scar. As her hand met it half-way, the sun broke through the clouds, like winter melting into spring. 

Divinity was not logical, which is why she had banned it in her pursuit for love, Heloise once knew this of herself well. But Divinity had brought her Peter that dying summer, and had now returned her back to him. 

A silent answer to a silent question, spanning across hundreds of separating years.