The Book of the Maidservant (2 page)

I reach for another tall rush, and the wind whispers, “Johanna.” In the distance, a gull screeches my name. From town, the sound of bells floats over the marshes. My arms are sliced and raw from the rushes, but I’d rather be here in the muck than listening to my mistress weep.

“Johanna.” A small voice behind me. It’s Cicilly, pale and out of breath from running. She coughs and begins to cry.

Still crouching, I pull her into a hug. “What is it, my pet, my lamb?” I smooth her blond curls back from her head, just the way Rose comforted me long ago when our neighbor’s pig chased me.

“It’s Dame Margery,” Cicilly says, and hiccoughs. “It’s her father, John Burnham. And I couldn’t find you.”

“Shh, shh, you’ve found me now,” I say, wiping a tear from Cicilly’s dirty cheek. “What about John Burnham?”

“He’s dead,” Cicilly says. She begins crying in earnest.

I drop the rushes. “May the saints preserve us.” I take a deep breath. “Come on, lamb. We’d best get back.”

The Guild of the Holy Trinity gives my mistress’s father a funeral procession to remember. Mayor of Lynn and an alderman of the guild, he was. All the guildsmen wear their livery and carry their bright banners as they process from the guildhall to St. Margaret’s. My mistress wears her finest black wool, but she doesn’t weep.

Even if I had reason to weep, I wouldn’t have time. Nor would Cook. We keep Cicilly running, too. Ever must I haul more fresh water from the Common Ditch. I can’t find Piers anywhere, but he wouldn’t help me even if I asked. “That’s women’s work,” he’d say. Coal, firewood, more water. I carry and sweep and scrub and clean. I push the bellows into Cicilly’s hands; she can blow the fire into shape while I scour the iron pots and the roasting iron and scrub the wooden trenchers and bowls and saucers. That’s her job, but she’s too slow for a day like today. The rooms must be tidied, the cushions straightened, the linens and towels brought in, the beds made, the table laid. Then I must go for more wine. And where is Piers?

By the time Cicilly and I climb the ladder to our room under the roof, we can barely keep our feet on the rungs,
we’re so weary. We collapse onto the pallet, neither of us having washed.

Cicilly sleeps immediately, but my muscles protest and fleas swim in my sweat. Sharp straw from the pallet pokes my neck, my elbows. I scratch and turn and scratch some more.

I can’t stop thinking about the pilgrimage. What does the funeral mean? Will my mistress change her mind now that her father is dead? Or will his death make the trip easier for her? Cook told me Dame Margery’s husband has given her permission to go on pilgrimage if she pays his debts first.

When I first came to town, I thought my mistress must be a widow. Then Cook told me that my mistress and her husband had taken a vow of chastity. “At first they lived together,” Cook said, “but tongues will wag. Some said as how they enjoyed each other’s bodies while they called themselves chaste.”

I blushed and Cook swatted me with a rag she was holding.

“Go on there, you,” she said. “I’ve seen you looking at Piers when you thought you were private-like.”

“I never!” I said. “Not Piers!”

“Who, then?” she said, laughing, and swatted me again.

“What about the mistress?” I said.

“Well, now, she and her husband live apart, don’t they? And the parish priest gave them permission.”

“If Master Robert gave his permission, why do people dislike her?” I asked. I had heard people laughing when my mistress went by, and in the market, tradesmen sometimes
asked me about her—and about who she shared her bed with.

“Ah,” Cook said. “All that piety is wearisome; you’ll find out.”

I have found out. Dame Margery likes to be the most pious woman in Lynn. This pilgrimage is just another bead on a long rosary full of pieties.

I sit up in bed and hit my head on the low roofbeam, where my treasures are tucked into a knothole. I reach into it and finger the smooth brown pebble I brought with me from home and stroke my soft gray swallow’s feather. The scrap of red wool that I rescued from the ground beneath a tailor’s stall one market morning has disappeared. Mice must have found it. But the knife my father gave me is in its place. So is the tiny doll with the acorn head that Rose made for me when I was little.

In the still night, matins rings from Greyfriars, telling me there are only a few more hours before dawn, but I still can’t sleep. Moonlight steals in between the cracks in the boards above me.

Rome! It’s so far away, I can’t imagine it. My father went to Norwich once, and the parson has been all the way to Canterbury. But Rome!

I clench my pebble from the River Gay tight in my hand.

I never thought I would leave Rose and my father, but here I am in Lynn, where the walls of St. Margaret’s soar to the heavens, it’s so big, and where my mistress’s house could hold all the people from my village, it has so many rooms. Never did I think I would see a place like this, so
full of people and buildings and noises and smells. Even if I did come here, I thought it would be with Rose. I thought she would always be there to comfort me.

But in my thirteenth year, after my father had the second of two bad harvests, Rose stopped being so haughty with Hodge, the rich widowed farmer who lived across the fields. “But he’s so old, Rose, so much older than you!” I would wail.

“Not that old,” she would say.

“But he’s already got three children of his own,” I’d say.

“Three lovely little boys and you’ll help me take care of them,” she would answer. “We’ll come to love them, you’ll see,” she would say, but she didn’t laugh as much, and she stopped singing her funny goose songs as she did the washing.

Back then, I thought Rose was the only one getting a sour deal, marrying Hodge. “But he’s a good man, and he’ll be your brother, and perhaps he and Father can join their fields and work them together,” she said then. Does she still think Hodge is a good man, with our father working the bishop’s fields and me living with Dame Margery?

Cicilly rolls over and begins to cry in her sleep, fat round tears glinting in the moonstripes on her cheeks. I lie back down and put my arm around her, hot as it is in our little attic. I stroke her hair and whisper-sing a song about the Virgin to her. I’m asleep before I can finish the first verse.

w
e are still going. We are to leave by Michaelmas, just as the leaves begin to turn and the apples come ripe. Now that summer is ending, we spend all our time getting ready.

For me and Cook and Cicilly, this means endless preparations, in addition to our regular work. We’re sewing sheets and hoods and greasing our boots to keep the water out when it rains. Simon, the brother of our mistress’s husband, over in Skinner’s Row, is making us little leather packs to hang from our belts. He calls them
scrips
and says all pilgrims wear them.

He is delivering them to Cook when I return from my fourth visit to the Common Ditch in one day. I stop just outside the kitchen door when I hear my name. “Johanna may not be a beauty like our little angel Cicilly,” Cook is saying, “but she’s loyal as an ox and on her way to being strong as one, too.”

“Seems to me she’s got a thing or two to learn about work,” Simon says, just as I’ve set down my buckets. Eight
buckets of water today and he thinks I don’t know how to work?

“How’s that, now?” Cook asks.

“I’m not the only one who’s seen her chasing butterflies around the churchyard, if you take my meaning.”

I don’t want to hear any more. As I creep away, Cook’s voice floats through the open door. “She works hard enough in this house, you can be sure.”

Smiling at Cook’s words, I turn the corner. Just this morning, she had to remind me three different times to wash the pot she needed for our midday meal.

“Johanna!”

I groan. Now my mistress wants me—me, who just hauled home two buckets of water. Why can’t she get Piers or Cicilly to help her?

But, no. I’m the one who has to carry her basket to Dame Hawise’s house. My mistress is visiting everyone who has bad feelings toward her. This takes a lot of visiting.

As we walk to Checker Street, my mistress tells me about her conversation with the Lord. He speaks to her often, the way a friend speaks to a friend, she says, not all high and mighty like you might expect. Last night when they conversed, God told her not to worry about what people said of her. “‘Daughter,’ he said, ‘the people will gnaw at you just as any rat gnaws the stockfish,’” she tells me.

I’m busy pulling my skirts out of the mud in the street, trying not to step on cabbage rinds and horse dung and rotten fish, and lugging the basket. A few steps before us, Agneta Millener, her baby in her arms, puts a careful foot
out as she crosses the ditch that runs through the middle of the street.

Dame Margery stops short and stares at Agneta. Her lip begins to tremble and her nose reddens. “The blessed Virgin carried Our Lord just so,” she says. And then she’s weeping, great howling cries.

Agneta turns and looks at us. “It’s an evil spirit makes her weep that way,” she says to a man carrying two chickens by their legs.

“Could be bodily sickness,” the man says. One of the chickens squawks in agreement. The man looks concerned, but he keeps on his way.

“It’s an evil spirit, all right,” an old woman tells Agneta. “Keep your baby away from her.”

Agneta’s eyes widen and she hurries on.

My mistress is crying too hard to notice this talk. She backs her haunches onto a barrel outside the wineshop.

A crowd begins to gather round us. I look at them—Petrus Tappester, who owns the Cock and Hen; two fishermen; Jerold, the harvest reeve; a group of dirty little boys; and the fat woman who told Agneta about the evil spirit.

“Her pride let that evil in,” the old woman says.

“Thinks she’s better’n the rest of us,” Petrus Tappester bellows. He bellows everything. His voice is as big as the rest of him, especially the paunch that hangs over his belt. Too much of his own ale, Cook says. She’s warned me to stay away from him, but she needn’t worry. I’d sooner dance with the devil at midnight than speak with Petrus Tappester.

The old woman kicks a mangy dog away from where it sniffs about her skirts. Then she shakes her finger at my mistress. “Making her husband live alone while she enjoys her body with all manner of men out in the fields,” she says.

“That’s not true,” I say. I’m not sure about the evil spirit, but I know my mistress is chaste.

A woman in a fancy headdress leans in. “Why isn’t she home with her children and her husband like a wife should be?”

It’s a question I’ve wondered as well, so who am I to answer her? Behind me, my mistress continues to weep, oblivious.

Something hits me on the shoulder. A rotten onion. I whirl to face the group of boys. “Stop that!” I say, and rush toward them.

They scatter like chickens, laughing and hooting, and the rest of the group drifts away. The old woman continues to look back at my mistress, muttering darkly.

I take a deep breath. I’m shaking.

Dame Margery is wiping tears from her cheeks. She looks up at me. “God is always with me. He sends his angels to guard me, night and day, wherever I go.”

Fine. He didn’t send any angels for me, and I’m the one who got hit with the onion. I wipe at the slime on my shoulder.

Dame Margery heaves a great sigh and pushes herself away from the barrel. “That baby put me in mind of Our Lord when he was just a newborn. How his poor mother suffered when he died.”

I don’t say anything, but I’m thinking of what the woman with the fancy wimple said. My mistress has a lot of children, all living with their father and cared for by maidservants and the two older girls. If babies make her think so much of God, why doesn’t she take care of her own children? Then she could be thinking of God all the time.

When we get to Dame Hawise’s house, I go into the kitchen with my basket of bread and stockfish. Anne, the saucy girl who works there, wipes her hands on her apron and peeks into the other room. “They’ll be a while. Come on, the pots can wait,” she says.

We make ourselves comfortable on the bench just outside the kitchen door.

“A pilgrimage!” she says. “Are you afraid?”

Of course I’m afraid, but not right now while the breeze flits around us, bringing the smell of the salt sea. I shrug.

“I’d be afraid,” she says. “Did you hear that Petrus Tappester has to go on a pilgrimage, too?”

I whirl toward her.
“He’s
going to Rome?”

Anne shakes her head. “No, not Rome. The Holy Land. The parson’s making him go. And the Cock and Hen has to stay closed until he gets back.”

“Why?”

“My mistress told me about it.” She grabs one of her braids and strokes the tip, the way she does when she’s about to tell a story. “A long time ago, when his wife died—not long after they were married—he changed. That’s what my mistress says. When he was young, all the girls had their eyes on him. Even my mistress.”

“They had their eyes on Petrus Tappester? He’s bald!” I say.

“He is now. But when he was young, he had lovely blond hair and fine legs—and he wore a very short tunic.” She grins. “That’s what my mistress says.”