Stealing Heaven by Marion Meade

began to snuffle noisily. "I'm nearly eighteen, Heloise. Are you listening? Eighteen. God, I'm old! Nobody will ever take me without a dowry. I'll rot here, that's all!"
    Heloise remembered seeing the one-eyed man in the hall. He had agravy-stained tunic and caved-in cheeks and, when he laughed, his mouth showed practically toothless. She thought Mabile's husband repulsive. Shrouded in loneliness, she stared into the bubbling darkness a long time before she slept.
    Â 

 

 
    4
    Â 
    Â 
    Two days after Christmas , Thibaut organized a hunt and took the men off to chase foxes in Saint-Gervais forest. Heloise was not sorry to see them go, especially Thibaut, who had pinched her bottom on the way to chapel the previous evening. Already she was counting the days until her departure; she suffered from constipation and dull pains in the head. By now, it seemed clear that she had nothing in common with her cousins. Thibaut's three boys, sly-looking youths with fleshy faces, had spoken no more than a few words to her. The eldest, Philip, wore a permanent sneer at the corners of his mouth. Mabile had troubles of her own with two infants and a third on the way, and her conversation was limited to complaints of sore breasts and pains in her lower back.
    Alis and Claude and the rest of them gibbered constantly about clothes and boys. Heloise had been shocked to leam that Alis could write no more than her name and that she had never been taught to read. None of them at Saint-Gervais knew, and would not have cared had they known, about Heloise's studies. They only knew that Fulbert had brought her home from Argenteuil to be married, and nearly everything they said to Heloise centered on this one subject.
    The morning, like all previous ones, dragged by sluggishly in a tiresome round of embroidery and gossip, most of which concerned persons that Heloise did not know. The laborious idleness, as well as the tattoo barking of the castle dogs, made her head throb, but she purposely said nothing.
    At noon, she was relieved when Alis suggested they take a few of the squires and go to play in the meadow. The day was bright; glazed snow glistened in the fields. Over the top of the forest hung a few ragged clouds, clouds that for some reason made her think of the sunsets over the Ile. She felt sick with the memory.
    Alis insisted that they must build a castle of love. When it was finished, they could all climb into it and pretend the squires were knights trying to rescue them. For most of the afternoon, they worked in a frenzy, but when they'd completed the snow castle, there was room for only one person to crawl inside. Heloise scrambled to the top and looked out. Two horsemen were approaching the drawbridge, and she could hear them hailing the gatekeeper.
    At the sound of the voices, Alis began to squeal with pleasure. "Jourdain, come here! Jourdain, look at our castle of love!" She laughed happily. "What a fine day. Jourdain's here!"
    Ambling toward them, smiling good-naturedly and dodging Alis's snowballs, came a young man with a stocky frame and an old-fashioned face, square, cherubic, his cheeks dusted with freckles. Heloise waited to be introduced, but Alis was too busy rolling up her eyes coquettishly through her lashes. She clung to Jourdain's arm like a thirsty leech.
    He looked up at Heloise and grinned with a sheepish shrug.
    She grinned back. "Are you another cousin, then?"
    He shook his head. "My father's fief adjoins Saint-Gervais. All of us grew up together." He added hurriedly, "I'm surprised to find you here, lady. I've seen you often on the streets of the Ile."
    "Oh?" Heloise frowned. "How do you do that when you live in the next fief?" She nodded toward the forest. "You must have very sharp eyes."
    Alis answered for him. "He lives in Paris now. Our Jourdain's a scholar." She said it in a mocking, flirtatious tone.
    Jourdain leaned over and kissed Alis's cheek, then promptly ignored her. "I have student's lodgings on the