The Book of the Maidservant (19 page)

As I look, a white-haired friar hobbles from the chapel, his back bent almost double. He smiles and raises a hand. “Benedicite, Constance,” he says. “And who have we here?” His words roll like a Welshman’s.

“Benedicite, Father Morgan. This is a new pilgrim.”

I duck my head and give him a little curtsy.

“And does this pilgrim have a name?”

“I’m Johanna, Father.” It’s been so long since I’ve heard my name that it sounds strange on my lips.

“Well, Johanna, welcome to the Hospice of St. Thomas of Canterbury,” he says, taking one of my hands in both of his.

“Constance!” a child’s voice calls.

Constance drops the friar a curtsy and runs toward a little boy leaning out of a door.

Father Morgan laughs. “Henry keeps his big sister busy,” he says. “Now, my dear, there are beds through that door and water for washing.” He lets his eyes linger on my filthy clothes and raises a bushy white eyebrow at me.

I blush. “Thank you, Father.”

At the dormitory door, I peer in, blinking to see in the dim light. Rows of cots with blankets folded at their ends have packs and odds and ends scattered around them. On one cot, a woman sits braiding a girl’s hair. On another, a woman sleeps, a round shape rising and falling under a blanket. I suck in my breath. Dame Margery?

Carefully, I pick my way between rows to get to her. I’m halfway there when the shape stirs, rolls over, and tosses the blanket back. It’s not her.

Up and down each row I go, looking at the packs, trying to find the one I carried all the way from Lynn to Venice, the one with the pot that poked into my back, the one with my hood and my blanket.

A woman glares at me.

“I’m looking for someone,” I say. “I thought I might recognize her pack.”

She watches me suspiciously, as if I’m going to steal something. I’m hardly the one she should be worried about—Dame Margery is the pack stealer, not me.

I look at the packs by every single bed. None of them is Dame Margery’s.

There’s an empty cot in the corner, and I sit down heavily. Of course she’s not here, I scold myself. She went to Assisi first. She’ll be here; I know she will.

When I wake, afternoon sun streams through the open door. My knee feels better, but my stomach growls, and I think I must have missed the midday meal. I find the well and scrub at my face and hands, my cloak, my gown, leaving wet patches. Then I sit back on the cot and pull my needle and thread from my scrip. It takes the very last length of my thread to mend the tear in my gown, but when I’m finished, my legs are covered once again.

As I step outside the dormitory, Constance sees me and
comes hurrying across the courtyard. “Are you hungry?” she asks in her soft voice.

I nod at the same moment my stomach growls again.

Constance hides a smile behind her hand. She leads me to the kitchen, points me to a bench, and brings me a bowl of oatmeal. The smooth wood warms my hands, and I lift the bowl to my nose to savor the smell.

“Not good enough for you?” a voice says. I lift my eyes to see the cook from the market staring down at me. “You don’t have to sniff at
my
meals,” she says. “There’s nothing rotten in there, to be sure.”

“Beg pardon, mistress,” I say. “It’s not that, not at all. It just smells so good.”

She harrumphs and stalks back to a table where she’s chopping something.

I lift the spoon to my mouth and let the buttery oatmeal warm me. I have never tasted anything so good in my life.

When I’m done, I wash out the bowl and give it back to Constance, who ducks her head at me. “Did you find your mistress?” she asks.

I shake my head.

“You can stay in here, if you want to,” Constance says. “As long as you keep out of the way.” She points at the huge stone window, and I sit in the casement, looking around the kitchen. There’s a two-ox fireplace against one wall, and Henry, Constance’s little brother, works the bellows. Smoke puffs back at him, and I can see he’s aiming the bellows at the wrong place, right into the ashes. I’d go help him if Constance hadn’t told me to stay out of the way.

Beyond Henry, a big man with greasy hair and an apron tied around his waist handles a huge knife with ease, carving a hunk of meat into pieces, and a younger man, his head as round as a cabbage, throws down a huge bag of something. As the bag hits the floor, a cloud of dust rises up and the young man sneezes.

It feels strange not having anything to do. I reach into my scrip and pull out Cook’s cross and turn it over in my fingers, looking at the green crust on it. I rub at it with my skirt, but it doesn’t come off. I rub harder, but I can’t get it clean.

When I look up, the cook is watching me. She comes over and squints at the cross. “You’ll never get it clean that way.” She goes away and comes back with a bowl of some kind of white paste and a rag. “Here,” she says, pushing it at me. “You have to attend to it every day, or it’ll end up like that again.”

I rub and rub with the paste. When I wipe the cross off this time, only a few green spots remain. As a ray of the setting sun pierces a cloud and streams through the window, I hold up the cross. It gleams in the light.

i
have a cot all to myself, and as darkness settles around the hospice, I pull the scratchy blanket up to my chin. Finally, after all these many days, I’ve found the place I’ve been searching for. But now that I’m here, I can’t sleep. I wake, then doze, then wake again, sure I’ve heard my mistress’s voice calling me.

The sound of bells wakens me in the morning, and I blink at the dark shapes of a dream I can’t remember. Sleep-fuddled, I pull on my gown and follow the other women to the chapel for Mass. Clouds of incense burn my eyes and fill my nostrils, making me cough. It hurts to kneel, and the cold stone floor seeps into my bones. I can hardly wait for the Mass to be over.

When it finally is, the other pilgrims hurry off to shrines or markets. Not knowing what else to do, I go back to the women’s dormitory and sit on my cot, examining the stitches in my newly mended gown. They’re almost straight, and I didn’t prick my fingers a single time. I wish I could show Cook.

On the far side of the dormitory, a door leads down a
narrow passageway. From the other end, I can hear familiar sounds: pots clanking, bread dough slapping on wood, a sharp voice saying, “That fire needs stirring.”

I tiptoe down the passage, toward the smell of smoke and simmering oats.

When I peek through the door into the kitchen, the cook I met at the marketplace squints up at me from a chopping block. “You’ll get your meal at midday, just like everyone else,” she says when she recognizes me.

“Can I help?” I ask.

She gives me a long stare. “There’s a new girl coming today, but she isn’t here yet. You can stir those oats till she gets here.”

I peer into the pot that hangs over the fire and see oats bubbling, making little
plop, plop
sounds as they boil. Their steamy scent smells like home.

“Are you going to let those oats burn?” the cook calls to me, and I pick up the wooden spoon to scrape the pot’s sides and bottom.

As I stir, I look for Constance, but I don’t see her. The big man I saw in the kitchen yesterday stands wiping his hands on his long apron, talking to someone just outside the doorway. He moves aside to let the young man with the round head come past him, his arms piled high with firewood. The young man drops the wood in the corner with a bright clinking sound and begins to stack it. Over at the fire, Henry is at the bellows, and just like yesterday, he’s pointing them wrong, sending ashes into the air around him. He doesn’t seem to mind, though—instead, he
watches, smiling, as if he’s having fun. When he gives the bellows an extra-hard pump and grins at the shower of ash he’s created, I smile, too.

At that moment, Constance rushes through the door, her hair coming loose from her thin brown braids, a load of onions gathered into her apron. She stoops to whisper to Henry, who frowns and moves his bellows back to the glowing coals where they belong. Constance scurries on toward the cook who spoke to me and unloads her onions. As she does, the cook says something, gesturing with her head toward me.

Constance comes over and smiles a shy greeting. “I’ll stir. Alice says will you help her?”

I hand her the spoon.

Alice looks around at me. “Still want something to do? Those pots over there need washing.” She points at a stack of dirty kettles. “Water’s in a barrel by the door.”

I scrub the gruel that’s stuck to the bottom of the kettles. Poor Alice must never be able to find someone who knows how to stir her pots. A fly buzzes around my face and I slap at it, getting water in my eye, but I keep scrubbing.

The kitchen is full of air and light, with huge windows facing the chapel. Brown-robed friars pass them, and every now and then, one comes into the kitchen to speak to the man wearing the apron.

Once, passing me, Constance whispers, “That’s Master Alan, the head cook. Try to stay out of his way. But Wat’s all right.” She gestures at the younger man and smiles. As if
he’s heard his name, he looks over at us, his round face lighting up when he sees Constance. Then he squints his eyes shut and loses himself in a fit of sneezing.

Constance and Alice rush from task to task, and almost before I finish each job she gives me, Alice is ready with new orders. I chop carrots and onions, I stir pots and wash them, I measure millet and sweep floors.

When it’s time for the midday meal, I’m still hard at work, but I don’t mind. I think of Cook at home in Lynn and hear her throaty laugh. Alice isn’t like Cook at all; she never laughs once all morning. But she never yells at me, either, even when I spill some porridge. Instead, she sighs and shakes her head before helping me clean it up.

After the rush of serving the midday meal dies down, Alice says gruffly, “You might as well eat in here with us.”

Constance and Henry take their bowls to the hearth beside the big fireplace. Constance puts her hand on the hearth beside her and looks a question at me.

Gratefully, I join her. My knee throbs, and I burned my finger on a pot, and the onions made my eyes sting, but I feel wonderful.

“Don’t know where that girl is,” Alice says. “Hope she didn’t find herself a position somewhere else, in some private house.” She looks toward the door as if the girl will show up now that she’s been mentioned.

Alice may want her, but I hope she’s found another position, an easy one she’ll never quit.

I stay in the kitchen all day, doing everything Alice asks and trying to do it quickly. Later, when darkness falls, I
find my cot in the women’s dormitory and fall into a dreamless sleep.

In the morning, after Mass, I’m back in the kitchen. I look around, but the new girl still isn’t there. Alice sees me and doesn’t say a word, just points to a kettle. I pick up the spoon and stir. Later, I help Constance weed the garden. She snaps weeds off at their stems, leaving the roots in the ground, so I show her how to work a stick into the dirt to get the weeds by their roots. “That way,” I tell her, “they can’t grow back as easily.”

As we work, Constance asks me more about Dame Margery and my pilgrimage. “How could she do that to you?” She shows me a long, thin root she’s pulled out intact. “If she comes here, will you go with her?”

I concentrate on a thick yellow root, digging the dirt around it with my stick, and don’t answer.

“What would you do if she left you again?” Constance asks.

I look up to meet her steady gaze. I don’t know how to answer.

“Johanna!” Alice calls from the kitchen.

The new girl must finally be here. My shoulders slump. Slowly, I rise and dust the dirt off my skirt. I don’t want to go back to Dame Margery, but when she shows up, I’ll have no choice. Pilgrims are only allowed to stay here for a few days before they have to give up their beds for new arrivals. When I leave, I’ll have nowhere else to go—except with Dame Margery. There’s no other way for me to get home.

I glance back at Constance just in time to see her snap a weed off by its stem. She gives me a guilty look. Then I step through the kitchen door.

“Hurry up, girl,” Alice barks, slapping flour from her hands as I come in. “I thought you wanted something to do.”

“I do,” I tell her, not mentioning that weeding the garden
is
doing something.

“Come along,” she says. She guides me through a doorway to a set of steps leading downward. “Let me show you how the wine works.”

Suddenly, I feel light and happy. The new girl still isn’t here.

I skip down the steps behind Alice into a cool, dim cellar and stand blinking until I can see again. Great wooden casks line the dirt wall, and a wooden counter stands in front of them.

“See this spigot?” Alice says, going behind the counter and picking up a cup. “You have to turn it slow, like this.” She twists a knob on the first cask, and red wine dribbles into the cup. “You try.”

The wine gushes out, spilling onto my hands, and Alice reaches up to shut the spigot off.

She shows me again and has me practice until I get it right. The cup the wine goes into is almost full. Alice takes it, looks at the stairs, and drinks it down. Then she gives me a funny look, the side of her mouth going up. I think it’s a smile.