Heloise Holds the Sun ✓

4. like a lamb

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Perhaps it is because Fulbert wanted to busy himself in other concerns than attending to his niece that he was eager to keep me occupied. Or perhaps he really did come to take my education so seriously. In any case, my instructions with Abelard would be daily.

Without suspicion, he could come and go in my chambers as needed. He was my teacher, after all. It was the command of the canon of the cathedral that Heloise's tutor would visit her daily.

And Abelard was a chaste man; he had a reputation for his strict sobriety. He'd even berate his students for drinking. Of course he was celibate, as every man so serious about his scholarly pursuits was expected to be.

It wasn't only an external expectation that motivated his chastity and sobriety, though. It came from within.

I think he really wanted to be.

I always wondered if he hated me for bringing him away from it.

But there he was, standing against the desk in my room - bathed in the afternoon sun coming through my tall window.

In Abelard's memoir, the one he wrote many years later, he would describe this decision of my uncle's - this decision to give him unfettered access to my studies and to this space we shared, alone - as akin to leaving a lamb in the care of a ravenous wolf.

I did not know it yet, though. No one did. The nuns did not bat an eye to see the handsome man knock on my chamber door. And come in. And close it shut behind us...

Just think! The cloisters! And they did not bat one eye.

If not for his reputation as an incredible scholar, and his reputation as a chaste man, this would have been impossible.

But you wanted to like him, brilliant and charming and morally sound as he was.

People see what they want to see.

Besides, he was to be my teacher. Fulbert knew of the seriousness with which we both approached our studies. It would have been unthinkable - it wouldn't have crossed his mind! - what was to come.

So this was the beginning of our great ruse... the beginning of our pretence - hours and hours spent on my studies, because of how very serious I was about them - when all the while, truly, we passed the hours entangled in sheets, learning more of the curves and lines of each other's bodies than of any words on any paper.

It felt we were cheating time out of the world. Stealing these moments from it.

If I did not learn as much and as quickly in one hour as most men learn in a day, perhaps the ruse would have come to a close much sooner than it did. But as it stood, I seemed to be progressing well in my studies. As it stood...

Oh, I am getting far ahead of myself again.

Okay, it is the first day. The first day...

The first time Abelard steps into my chamber he is tall and he is boisterous and he is beautiful. And he has brought books with him - one on every subject he thinks I might like - and he sets them down at my desk.

I am standing across the room, arms crossed and sizing him up. I told you, I wanted to make him work for my favour. I would not be taken easily like the lamb to the wolf. Of course, a part of me did not know I was such in his eyes - that I was anything more than a student. And perhaps it angered me how much I wanted him; perhaps, expecting rejection, I planned to push him away first.

Whatever the case, I'm cold on this first day. And I tell him I have read his Sic et Non, and there are many points I would like to debate within it.

This does not faze him. He raises his eyebrows in amusement only, and he asks me why I did not come to Paris sooner to study.

"They had other plans for me; they knew me only for my beauty back home. It is only here that they know me for my brains."

"Oh, they know you for both," his smile is amused - challenging, even. He leans against my desk casually.

I narrow my eyes in confusion.

"Come on, we are celibate. We are not blind," he laughs. He turns, just like that, to slide the chair of my desk out for me. He motions to it. "Now tell me, what are these points of mine you must debate?"

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