A Place of Light Read online

  A PLACE OF LIGHT

  Kim Silveira Wolterbeek

  Cuidono Press

  Brooklyn

  Author’s Note

  In the spring of 1101, with the backing of Peter II, Bishop of Poitiers, and the financial support of members of the aristocracy, including Philippa, Countess of Toulouse and Duchess of Aquitaine, the priest Robert of Arbrissel established Fontevraud Abbey, a double monastery where Robert and his male followers served the nuns. While this book draws upon actual people and historical events, it is a work of fiction.

  The Miracle at Rouen

  The sky shuddered and exploded. Deep in the forest of Craon, Robert sprinted for cover beneath the branches of a hawthorn tree. Weak from fasting, he lowered his sodden cowl and dropped to his knees. “O Lord, show me the way.” Shards of slate jutted up from the soil, piercing his flesh. Less than a stone’s throw from where he knelt, lightning touched ground. Amidst a cascade of blue sparks, a woman hovered above a knoll, completely unaffected by the storm. Transfixed by her presence, he stumbled to his feet.

  “Robert,” she said, in a calm voice that was audible above the tempest. “Help the women.”

  He wondered if she was an angel sent by God or one of Lucifer’s minions come to seduce him. He did not think her human, for no earthly being was ever so exquisitely formed. Her sheer linen gown hugged her breasts, flared at the hip and skimmed her bare feet. A disconcerting thrill mingled his desire for Parisian whores with his passion for the Word. Before he could say a word, hail the size of chickpeas thundered from the sky.

  “Use your gift to save women in need. Shelter them in safety and serve them diligently as the Evangelist served Mary.”

  Even as he struggled with her meaning, he understood that God had granted him a revelation. When he opened his mouth to give thanks, the woman vanished, the rain ceased and the air grew balmy. Sparrows preened in the bushes and squirrels chattered from the branches of trees.

  Raising his eyes to a sky of shifting colors, he watched pale blues meld with yellows and magentas and held his breath when the swallows mounted and rode the heady currents, gliding and falling in ecstasy. Looking to the heavens he placed his faith in the Blessed Virgin and left the forest for the bustling market city of Rouen.

  A dozen women sat before an open hearth scorched black from the flames of countless fires. Woolen rugs blanketed the clay walls and a single window covered by oilcloth funneled twilight into the room. The proprietress, a massive woman in her forties, sat facing the fire on a barrel chair, the cowhide hammocked to fit the spread of her rump. It had been years since a man mistook Marie for one of her girls.

  Marie wore a gown lined in rabbit fur for warmth beneath a quilted waistcoat and burgundy tunic. Her feet, the only portion of her body not affected by time, rested narrow as an aristocrat’s against the warm stone. In the days she had worked alongside her girls, men had licked the pink arches and sucked the tiny toes. Now those toes curled around the shaft of a metal rod, for while the girls worked the bellows, only Marie manned the poker.

  The women rested on straw trusses and cloth-covered pallets. Bertrad, who had recently given birth to a son, and Beatrice, who for five days would be spared the bother of accommodating men, wore dresses of rough serge. The rest wore their underclothing, long lengths of linen pinned at the back. The twins, Agnes and Arsen, held hands and whispered their gibberish, a secret language of incomplete utterances that Marie thought made them sound dumb as cattle. Most of the others talked quietly or took turns playing jacks and string games with Florence’s two daughters, Emma and Esther, while the younger children finished their dinner of beans. Only Madeleine, a girl of sixteen with strawberry blond hair and pale, freckled skin, sat slightly apart, lost in a daydream. While Marie did not approve of flights of fancy, she understood that in Madeleine’s case they provided temporary escape from unpleasant obligations and a troubled past.

  Madeleine’s father had spent ten years beating his frail wife, as disappointed by the rise of her bread as he was by her performance in bed. After she died giving birth, he had buried their stillborn son, left his two daughters with Marie and ran off to join the crusades. Like every man Marie had ever known, he thought his needs worthy of special consideration. And while Marie found such egotism annoying, she knew that the real evil in men was their ability to elicit hope. “Never trust a man,” she warned her girls. In response, they met any gesture of male kindness with suspicion.

  Studying Madeleine’s distracted gaze, Marie knew a profound satisfaction. Sex had long ago lost its power and its revulsion for Marie. In its place she discovered a ferocious maternal love for women. If not for her, these girls would likely have died at the hands of indigent fathers and uncles. God, she felt certain, would forgive her sins.

  Outside, a barefoot and cassocked figure sidestepped pigs and chickens picking through piles of kitchen rubbish. Stopping beneath a banner depicting a rose, the stranger made the sign of the cross and took the knocker in his hand.

  Marie sighed. Every evening the family life she had created ended abruptly and the other began. “Let’s go, girls,” she said, straightening her tunic. A rumbling cough seared her lungs and left her gasping.

  Florence scooped up jacks and slipped them into her pockets, promising her daughters a bedtime story if they moved quickly. Bertrad rose so abruptly that her son lost his hold on her nipple and began to howl. Beatrice shooed the older children behind a tapestry of a white unicorn with a spiral horn thrusting three hand spans from his forehead. The tapestry, a gift to Marie from a grateful lord, separated the communal area from Marie’s bedroom. Agnes and Arsen dropped hands long enough to adjust their shifts and assume expressions of haughty indifference. What, Marie wondered, did God have in mind creating two identical beauties that were so ugly mean?

  “Maddy,” Marie said, “see who it is.”

  Madeleine tucked a sprig of periwinkle behind her ear and unlatched the door to a tall, well-formed man with vivid blue eyes.

  “Come in, sir,” she said, for Marie insisted her girls address men with respect.

  The man lowered his cowl. Firelight haloed his bearded face. Wavy black hair brushed his shoulders. “Do I know you?” he asked Madeleine.

  “Perhaps.” She shrugged in a suggestive way.

  “Friends or strangers,” Marie commented from her place of privilege by the fire, “what all men want is the same. Isn’t that right, mister?” Her lungs had settled into a tolerable burn, and she did not want to risk a sudden move. So while she was curious to get a look at the man, she remained seated with her back to the door. “Come warm yourself,” she said.

  “Thank you, my daughter,” he replied, but made no movement towards the fire.

  “Daughter?” she grumbled. “You won’t find your daughter here.” Bodkins, a stringy tabby, threaded her ankles. Marie knuckled the sinewy hollow between the tom’s shoulders until he rattled a purr.

  “You are all my daughters,” he said. Although men of God seldom entered houses of prostitution, Marie pegged this one for a hair shirt, albeit one with a compelling voice.

  “Two pence,” she said, holding out her palm. “Then you may choose one of these… daughters… to accompany you upstairs.”

  Placing his hand on Madeleine’s shoulder, he whispered, “I choose you.”

  PART ONE

  The world is slippery, full of slime. A man cannot long remain steadfast within it, and once he falls, rarely if ever does he rise. You have risen in this world as if it were a high mountain, and for this reason you have turned the eyes and tongues of men toward you. But standing on your mountain, beware that you do not fall
, nor, practicing a form of martyrdom virtually unknown to the holy martyrs, that you bequeath a stain of infamy to the beginning of a religious life.

  Geoffrey of Vendôme, Letter to Robert of Arbrissel

  Vendôme, c. 1099

  The moment Robert touched Madeleine’s shoulder he grew dazed and disoriented. Backlit by the blaze of the fire, her sheer linen shift revealed a shapely body that tightened his belly and set his heart pounding. Her solemn grey eyes reminded him of the hovering beauty who had answered his prayers. The fire sparked blue, a blast of cold air whistled under the door, and for one confusing moment the whore before him and the woman from his vision merged into one graceful form.

  Robert followed Madeleine to the stairwell, mesmerized by the swell of her slender calves as she mounted the steps above him.

  Mint, lilac, and straw covered the planked floor of the second story. Casks and barrels stood along the walls. Madeleine lowered herself onto a sack of grain and fixed the candle on the floor. Robert prayed for divine direction, but his mind snaked into that dark cave where impure thoughts coiled and writhed. Instead of concentrating on the woman’s soul, he studied the curve of her lips and recalled the whores he had known in Paris, a sinful city where temptation walked the street in scarlet tunics and bare shoulders. His favorite, Black Mary, had been a solemn dark-haired girl of few words and an insatiable appetite.

  “What would you like, sir?” Madeleine asked now.

  “Like? I would like to help you,” he whispered, appalled by his own audacity. Who was he to offer help? He had been entering brothels for weeks, preaching the word without success. Despite his good intentions, he was a sinful man with no safe haven to offer anyone.

  “Help me? I must work for my two pence,” she said with a startled, vaguely derisive laugh, undoing her braid. “Let me bathe your feet while you—help me.

  He watched the muscles in Madeleine’s forearm tense as she scooped water into a bowl. In his youth Robert had imagined a benevolent God scooping sinners into His large forgiving hands and felt the weighted need of humanity in his own palms. As he grew older, this vision intensified—fueled his life, gave it meaning and fostered in him a calm serenity and an enormous guilt. Kneeling before our Lord, he confessed to being repulsed by the blemished skin of old men and the sour smell of colicky babes. No matter how hard he tried, he seldom felt drawn to the singular burning soul. Likewise, the need that welled up inside of him now had nothing to do with his love of mankind.

  “You wear the robes of a holy man. Are you a monk?” She dropped to her knees and swirled lemon rind and mint into the water. “Why don’t you tell me your story?”

  Robert’s breath caught in his throat. Repentant sinners asked forgiveness, young men for direction, and old women for clarification of the Word, but no one had ever asked him for his story. More seductive than her flower-scented hair was the power of her question.

  “My name is Robert. I grew up in Arbrissel, a village southeast of Rennes, in the vicinity of La Guerche de Bretagne and Craon. I attended seminary in Paris.” He blushed remembering the nights spent stalking lust in alleyways. “Several years after I was ordained, Pope Urban commissioned me to reform the corrupt church in Rennes.”

  “What is Rennes like?” she asked.

  Encouraged by her question, he continued. “Rennes is a dangerous city still reeling from the Viking attacks a generation ago,” he said. “Longhaired men wearing animal skins roam the streets brandishing knives.” She listened, wide-eyed and unblinking. He did not think her interest feigned, but the moment she placed his feet in the bowl of warm water he lost the thread of his story.

  “And the place where you grew up?” she prompted.

  “I grew up in a bleak town of stone,” he said and then faltered as she began humming. He began anew. “Arbrissel is a town of slate houses, cobble streets and barren countryside.”

  Madeleine furrowed her brow and touched the blossom tucked behind her ear. Water rained in rivulets down her arm and splashed a ripple in the bowl at Robert’s feet. All around them, the air churned with the grunting pleasure of men.

  He resumed his story, but whether to please her or to distract himself from temptation, even he did not know. “My earliest memories involve accompanying my father to visit the sick and dying or to assist an ailing cow or pig or even to prescribe a cure for an infertile field. I remember standing at the bedside of a dying farmer while my father performed the last rites. My father heard his confession and tried to calm the man’s fears, but as the moment of his death approached, the farmer reached for my hand. My family never questioned my future vocation. Like my father and grandfather before me, I entered the priesthood.”

  Madeleine nodded and began massaging Robert’s feet. He noticed that the pinkie nail on her right hand had been blackened by some accident. Had she pinched it in a drawer? Grazed it with a clabber? Robert’s mother had soothed his scraped fingers in her warm mouth, and now he wanted to do the same for this woman. His breath quickened and words failed him. Please God, he prayed, show me a sign that I am justified in taking this woman from the only life she knows. For the second time that night, the present moment in the brothel and the sacred one in Croan became one.

  The pitched ceiling of the whorehouse gave way to a bank of clouds. There, nestled in misty skies, a fountain bubbled near a white stone church. Before he could take in the spectacle before him, four domes formed the blue steepled roof of a nave. Dorters, a novice house, priory and convent broke ground and stretched in glory. Floating above the abbey was the woman of his vision. “Robert,” she said. “Gather your followers and journey to Vendôme. There your old friend Abbot Geoffrey will help you realize your dream.”

  As suddenly as the spectacle had formed, it vanished.

  Robert crossed himself and composed his thoughts. “My daughter,” he said to Madeleine, “I would like to take you away from this life of sin and give you a new life where you will be free.” Now that he had a plan, his voice swelled with confidence.

  Madeleine abandoned his feet and leaned back on one arm. Her hair fell away from her face. “What is this place?” she asked.

  He heard resistance in her question, a cynical hesitancy that prompted him to pray for eloquence. If he stumbled in his persuasion, then surely he would lose her soul.

  Wishing to avoid her arching brows, Robert dropped his eyes and discovered a strawberry birthmark in the shape of a butterfly, fluttering the pulse of her neck. “There is a majestic white-walled building,” he said, “a place of light with a blue roof and lofty spires that reach towards the heavens.”

  A look of startled recognition crossed her face. “Where?” she asked.

  “The place is not yet built,” he said, leaning forward to touch the darker corpse hair plaited in her own, “but it’s as genuine as the sorrow that floods your heart and real as the place where all that we love and have loved abides. Come with me. Together we will build a refuge for women, a holy place of contemplation and prayer.”

  She sighed and shook her head. “Look around you, sir. This is no nunnery. The likes of my kind are not found in any holy place.” She drew herself up onto her knees.

  “Please do not dwell on sins of the past, except so much as they may be named, confessed, and absolved. Declare your faith in God and be released from the chains of your dark prison.” Below them a door slammed, as if from a great gust of wind. The sound of booted footsteps and raucous laughter drifted up the stairwell.

  They sat for a moment without speaking, Robert resigned to failure, and Madeleine lost in thought. “Trust me,” he said. She did not respond except to study the empty air around his head and shoulders. Whatever she saw seemed to reassure her. She smiled faintly, her expression shifting from resignation to confusion to hope.

  “I have seen this place of light,” she whispered.

  Robert’s breath caught in his throat
. He felt the hand of God against his spine.

  Accustomed to men who fawned apologetically or swaggered in lust, Madeleine did not know what to make of Robert’s composure. When he chose her and placed his hand on her shoulder, she felt exhilarated. And though she reminded herself that men were greedy, self-involved creatures, she wondered if this one might be different. Certainly his colors glowed brighter than any she had seen before. No single shade dominated; instead, a muscular rainbow knocked against his shoulder and pulsed the length of his body.

  Madeleine had always possessed an unusual sensitivity to her surroundings. As a child, the world came to her in a jumble of separate notes that bled artlessly into noise. Slowly, and with enormous effort, she learned to distinguish her mother’s shushing presence from the ping of rain. The first time Madeleine saw colors tucked in around her mother, she thought that the delicate green that fluttered like the wings of a cabbage moth marked her mother as a saintly woman. But unlike the fixed halo in the statue of the crucified Christ that hung in the cathedral, her mother’s colors stretched, pooled and transformed on an hourly basis.

  As she grew older, Madeleine became aware of the fields of color surrounding all people. The blacksmith, a mean-spirited, contentious man, vibrated angry reds whereas her even-tempered sister Ruth shimmered pink and lavender. Madeleine did not discuss her ability to see colors, at first because she thought all people had the same capacity and then, later, because she knew they did not. She told no one when the fishmonger’s muddy orange disappeared the day before he died, but she spent hours wondering why. Madeleine had always been interested in why—why one man wanted this and another that, why the moon smoldered red on certain evenings, why snails left trails slick as egg whites, why the syllables of speech held more meaning than the hum of a treadle wheel. Curiosity, not fear, prompted her to hide behind a cask of grain whenever her parents argued.