Stealing Heaven Read Online Free Page A

vegetable gardens. The brightness of the air made her blink; she didn't remember May to be this hot. Before her swept the farm and pastureland belonging to Argenteuil. Robin, the oxherd, was veering his bulls toward the west pasture; over by the pens, the dairymaid screamed at her heifers and calves. The air smelled faintly of rosemary, rankly of manure.
    Argenteuil lay on the north bank of the Seine, and the path down the hill to the river took her by the convent's fishponds and then through tall, lush grass and a grove of willow trees. Under the arching branches, the noises of the farmyard faded; the air was colder and the grass wet and glistening from last night's rain. With a rush of joy, she ran along the muddy path, hair blowing behind her.
    In the woods grew banks of violets and gillyflowers, and between the moss-footed tree trunks she caught flashes of the river, steel-gray, and then in a burst of sunlight, brilliant cerulean blue. As a child, her greatest delight had been to steal away from Sister Madelaine and run to the riverbank to dream her secret dreams. At the water's edge, she scrambled up on a shelf of searing-hot rock and threw herself face down. Squinting, she watched a barge skimming downriver toward Paris, raising clouds of spray in the bobbing water.
    In the distance, across a loop in the river, she could see the red-tiled roofs of the abbey of Saint-Denis, the monastery favored by the royal house of Capet. Sister Judith had told her that King Louis had studied there as a boy and it was very famous. Heloise didn't care about that; she was only interested in the annual fair held in the little town that had grown up outside Saint-Denis's walls. For two weeks every June, the lay workers at Argenteuil talked about nothing but the Lendit. Colorful tents were laid out in streets, and if you had sous in your pocket, you could roam around and buy plenty of pasties and fruit and fish and cakes. There were jugglers and trained bears and storytellers who recited every single verse of the Chanson de Roland and made everyone weep. Minstrels brought their viols and strolled about the tent streets playing lays to maidens who painted their cheeks. It was all madly exciting. Or so she had been told; she had never been there.
    Thirteen years here. How little I have seen, she thought. Nothing but women and yellowing parchment manuscripts. Surely there is more poetry to life than is contained in the verses of Virgil and Seneca, as intoxicating as they may be. I'm old already and I know nothing, she told herself. She thrust the thought away with a sudden surge of resentment. Let Sister Madelaine get herself another prize pupil. Let all of them go to the devil. Even Ceci.
    Her back and scalp were beginning to prickle from the stinging fire of the sun. She closed her eyes and lay very still for a few minutes before leaping to her feet and starting back up the slope to the convent.
    Prime had ended and the cloister rumbled with the hum of women's voices, gossiping and laughing. Heloise brushed past unseeing and ducked into the library, which also served as scriptorium and schoolroom. There was no one there. In this room, when hardly more than an infant, she had held a wax-coated tablet on her knees and carefully traced the alphabet with an ivory stylus. And here, too, she had labored over her Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. She slid into a carrel next to the window and stroked the grain on the slanted wooden desk with a thumb.
    During Sister Madelaine's thirty years as prioress, she had assembled an excellent library of nearly a hundred volumes, few of which the nuns of Argenteuil ever bothered to open. Not only did she have Aristotle's De interpretatione and Boethius's De musica, but in her locked cupboard could be found all the ten books of Livy, Plutarch's Lives, and Caesar's Commentaries, as well as a wide variety of the heathen poets: Terence, Virgil, Seneca, Lucan, Plautus. Even Ovid's Art of Love, which, by rights, no nunnery