Heloise Holds the Sun ✓

20. argenteuil

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A cry - a blood-curdling one that seemed foreign on my lips - slipped its way up my throat. I held the letter in my hands, collapsed on the floor, and my tears were flowing down my face in rivers. They soaked the entirety of the paper. It occurred to me, holding the letter tenderly in my hands, that this might be the last thing I ever held of Abelard's.

Sorrow reached me in places I didn't know it could reside. And, in equal measures, anger.

Why had he not come to me? Why had he not sought respite in me, his wife?

Did he think I would not love him still? No matter his form?

Or did his reputation - his pride - stand so strongly in him that he could not face me? This pride - the same pride that pushed him to stand up to Fulbert in the first place; the same pride that convinced him that his reputation was too grand for our affair to be found out - was the death of him. I nearly hated him in that moment, and yet my heart ached for him. My Abelard... in pain, in humiliation. Alone.

I willed my soul to reach out to his - wherever it was now. I wanted to wrap around him - fuse myself to him, even! My Abelard...

I could see him there, solemn under the stain glass light of a new cathedral. Head bent in prayer, his words frantic in their repentance.

He could repent all he wanted.

I would never deny the things we had done and the love that we shared.

I hated that it came so easy to him, this repentance. Was our story so easily forgotten? Did our memories no longer burn in him, as they burned on in me? And yet I obeyed. He was right: there was nowhere for me to go now - no family, no other place of safety. The convent of Argenteuil seemed to me a beacon. Not of hope - not of anything bright. Just of security.

And I held my son, my beautiful son, and sobbed the same rivers onto his face. I wanted to keep him so dearly, but I knew his life would be better lived here in Brittany. I knew I could not bring him with me. If I went to the convent, I would need to assume having led a life of chastity. And, on the other hand, if I chose to stick with him, we would live in hiding and in fear. Here, he had the open, rolling hills. He had his cousins. He had his aunt. He had love and freedom.

I do not know if he remembers me now, wherever he is. In some ways, I hope he never came to know of me. I would not want to break his mirage of happiness: I want him to have grown up knowing his aunt as his mom and his cousins as his brothers and sisters. I want him to have grown up knowing only the peaceful life of the village. I wished him, kissing his forehead goodbye, every single happiness. I did not wish he would be as brilliant as his father or as beautiful as his mother. I did not wish for him to be wealthy or pious or anything of the sort. Only happy.

Abelard had sent a friend to bring me to Argenteuil by horseback. It was a cloister much like the one I'd known in Paris. The colonnades were much the same - stone arches and stone columns, gardens and women in habits. A grand cathedral the monastery orbited around... None of it excited me.

I arrived into the warm and welcoming arms of the sisters who had expected me. I was an incoherent mess of sobs, but luckily I did not need to speak my story to them.

They fed me, and showed me to my room, and accepted my silence with grace. They offered me, sprawled out there on my bed, a habit of my own.

So this was to be my fate.

I spread my palms over the dark blue of the cloth. I held the white of the veil against my skin...

I would dress the part. But I decided I would never take the vows, at least not with my heart.

I stood before the altar some days later, reciting the empty syllables before a bishop.

But I kept all my secrets alive inside of me. I did not repent. Still, I have not.

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