Read The Book of the Maidservant Online
Authors: Rebecca Barnhouse
j
ohn Mouse, here in Rome? I can’t believe it! I want to weep and laugh and dance all at once.
He holds out his arms and I can’t stop myself. I go to him, there on his cot, and let him wrap his arms around me, even if it isn’t seemly.
When I hear a man clearing his throat, I jump away. The friar. He casts an odd glance at me, then says something in another language. John Mouse answers him, so it must be Latin.
“I want to know everything,” he says to me, “but this good brother says he needs you now.”
I nod, blinking back tears.
“Good,” he says, and lays his head carefully on his pillow.
I follow the friar. Together we feed a man who can’t sit up, the friar cradling him in his arms while I spoon porridge into his mouth and wait for him to swallow. Some of it dribbles down his chin and the friar wipes it off, like a mother feeding a baby.
With every spoonful, I want to look at John Mouse. His
face was so pale and drawn, but he had the same brown eyes I remember from so long ago, before he fell in the Alps.
We go from bed to bed, sometimes handing out bowls, sometimes feeding people. As I sit on an old woman’s bed waiting for her to take another bite, my foot jiggles with impatience. She looks down at my leg and says meekly, “I’m so sorry, child. I can’t go any faster.”
Chastened, I still my foot and smile encouragingly as I feed her another spoonful.
Finally, I’ve served the last bowl. I look at the friar.
“Go to your friend,” he says.
I skip around beds, passing the other friar, who narrows his eyes at me in disapproval. Let him frown. What do I care?
But when I get back to the room John Mouse is in, I’m suddenly shy. My hand goes to my hair, and I smooth my gown, wishing it wasn’t so dirty. Then I peek around the doorway.
John Mouse lies on the bed, his eyes closed. His face is even thinner than I realized, his skin pale as an angel’s. His lashes flutter open. He looks at me and grins.
My heart beating fast, I perch at the end of his cot while he pulls himself up into a sitting position.
“Ah, my little serving maid,” he says. “I hoped I might find you here.”
“You did?” My words come out in a squeak.
“This is Rome, isn’t it?” His eyes dance, as bright and merry as I remember. “Where’s your mistress?”
I look down. “She’s not my mistress anymore.”
He raises his eyebrows.
“She left Venice without me,” I say. When he encourages me with his eyes, I tell him how I got to Rome.
“You just followed the nuns onto the ship? And no one stopped you?” He laughs. “That took some courage. Then what happened?”
I tell him how I walked behind the nuns until I built the fire for them and they took me in, and how Father Morgan hired me to work in the kitchen. There’s a lot I don’t tell him. It hardly seems to matter now how cold and hungry I was, or how alone and afraid I felt. I don’t say anything about the fight between Bartilmew and Petrus Tappester, either, and nothing about how even prayer deserted me.
He gives me a long, solemn look. “Your way hasn’t been easy, has it?” he says.
I drop my eyes. Then I look back at him. “Where’s Thomas?”
“In Bologna, at the university. He’ll be a brilliant lawyer.”
“You’re going to study law, too, aren’t you?” I ask.
“I
was
going to. Now I don’t know.” He makes a wry face, as if it doesn’t matter.
“I’m sorry, John Mouse,” I say.
“Beware of dreams.”
“They mock us with their flitting shadows.”
His eyes widen in surprise. “Where did you learn that?”
“Have you lost your memory?”
“Did I teach that to you?” he asks.
I nod, and he shakes his head, smiling. Then he closes his eyes and covers them with his long, pale fingers.
“John Mouse?” I say in a worried voice.
He keeps his eyes closed long enough for me to say a
silent Ave. That long. Finally, he opens them again. “The relics in Rome have healed people much worse off than me,” he says, “but the journey here was difficult.” He takes an unsteady breath and looks right into my eyes. “The relics will only help if I can get to them, and I don’t think I can do that alone. Will you help me get to St. Peter’s?”
As he speaks, the bells toll vespers, and I realize how late it is. “I have to go,” I say, looking around as if I’ll see Alice standing behind me, frowning. “But I’ll find out about St. Peter’s.”
He reaches for my hand. His fingers feel soft and warm against my work-roughened palms. I pull back, but he doesn’t let go. “You won’t desert me, little serving maid.”
I shake my head.
At the door, I look back. His eyes are already closed.
Father Morgan gives me permission to take the morning off from my wine duties. He also gives me directions to St. Peter’s.
And so it is that I see the altar of St. Veronica in St. Peter’s great church. On feast days, when St. Veronica’s handkerchief is displayed, you can see Christ’s face imprinted on it. If you traveled from overseas and prayed to it on a feast day, John Mouse says you would receive twelve thousand years off your time in Purgatory. Today, a curtain hides it, but we kneel and pray before it, anyway. He thinks the saint might help his head.
I help him up and steady him. He closes his eyes, then says, “Have you ever prayed to St. Pega, Johanna?”
I nod. How did he know? “That’s St. Guthlac’s sister. She’s from the Fens, near where I grew up.”
“Then come with me.” He leads me around a column and through the crowds to the other side of the great nave. We walk slowly, John Mouse leaning on my shoulder, and pass altar after altar. A white-robed monk sits in front of one, holding a pen and a sheet of parchment.
“What’s that monk doing?” I ask.
“If any miracles happen, he’ll write them down so everyone will know.”
A miracle? I look back, hoping to see a blind man regain his sight or a withered leg become whole again, but the crowd swallows up the altar and I can’t see anything.
John Mouse stops to lean against a column and puts his hand to his forehead. When he’s ready again, we push into the crowd.
“Here,” he says, pointing at the stone floor. “St. Pega’s tomb.”
How did a saint from the Fens end up here, so far from home? Perhaps the same way I did.
At my belt, I wear my scrip. I reach into it and pull out the two coins Alice gave me. I had thought to save them to help buy my passage home. Now I have a better idea. “How many candles do you think this will buy?” I hold the coins out to John Mouse.
His eyes widen a little. “Where did you get that?”
“I work at the hospice, you know. It’s my first pay.”
“Are you sure you want to spend it all?”
I nod.
John Mouse stops a deacon and asks him something in
Latin. He turns back to me. “You could light all of the candles they’ve got here at St. Pega’s tomb with that.”
“Will you wait for me?”
He holds my eyes in his for a moment, then smiles and sits at the base of a column.
I put the money in the little metal box beside the tomb. Then I start lighting candles. First I light one for John Mouse, since he’s right here for St. Pega to see. I ask her to help his head and his eyes. Can he still read books? How can he be a scholar without them?
Then I light candles for Rose, for my father, for my mother, and for the baby who died when my mother did. I light one for Hodge—it will have to do for his three little boys, too, because I can’t even remember all their names.
As I light a candle for Cook, I pull her cross out of my scrip. It gleams in the flickering flames, and I touch it to St. Pega’s tomb. Then I tuck it back into the scrip for safekeeping until I can take it back to her. The next candle is for Cicilly, who I haven’t thought about for so long I’m ashamed of myself.
Bartilmew comes after Cicilly. I rifle through my scrip until I find the blue glass bead I picked up outside the cathedral in Cologne. Carefully, I set it in a carved indentation in the tombstone. The blue might help St. Pega recognize Bartilmew—it’s the color of his eyes.
The nun who took me in on my trip from Venice to Rome gets her own candle. So does the friar who helped me my first night in Rome. Alice and Constance and Henry and Father Morgan do, too. I think for a minute and add
Alan and Wat to the list. “If there’s anything you can do about Wat’s sneezing, please help him,” I ask the saint.
Finally, there’s only one candle left. Who should I light it for? I think about my journey from Lynn, over the English Sea, through fields and forests and mountains, to Cologne and Constance, to Bolzano and the monastery in the Alps, from Venice to Rome. With a shudder, I remember the mercenaries, but the memory of warmth and the smell of baking bread chases them away when I remember the black-haired servant girl who let me sleep in the oven high in the mountains.
I’ll make it back to England someday. I’ll find Rose and Hodge and my father again. I know I will.
As people walk past, disturbing the air, I watch my flames flicker, leaping like dancers on Midsummer’s Eve. Finally, I light the last candle and kneel.
“Please,” I pray to St. Pega. “Take care of Dame Margery. Keep her safe.”
When I stand and turn, John Mouse is watching me, candle flames reflected in his dark eyes. I reach out my hand and help him to his feet.
He steadies himself, leaning against my shoulder.
“Are you ready?” I ask.
He nods.
I guide him into the stream of people making their way through St. Peter’s great church.
“Come,” I say. “Let’s go home.”
w
e may not know when or where Johanna was born, or even her real name, but she really existed. So did her mistress.
The Book of Margery Kempe
is the first autobiography written in English, and in it, Margery tells the story of her pilgrimage to Rome. Reading it, I was struck by the remarks Margery made about her maidservant, who she said was disobedient, someone who wouldn’t do as she was told and who wouldn’t take her mistress’s advice.
According to Margery, before they even left on their pilgrimage, a holy man warned her that her maidservant would give her trouble and would turn against her—as she believed happened in Rome. During the pilgrimage, when the company arrived in Constance, the rest of the pilgrims wouldn’t let the maidservant accompany Margery. Whom did Margery blame? The maidservant, of course. And in Venice, as Margery told it, the maidservant cooked meals for the entire company and washed their clothes instead of attending to her mistress alone—as if that were fun! When Margery arrived in Rome, she said she found her
maidservant at the Hospital of Saint Thomas, “living in great wealth and prosperity, for she was the keeper of their wine.” When I got to that line, I cheered for the maidservant and wondered how she had accomplished such a feat. I wanted to know how the story would sound if the maidservant was the one who told it. Thus, Johanna—and her book—came into being.
Ironically, for all the literary credit she gets, Margery Kempe was illiterate—as Johanna would have been. She dictated her memoirs to a priest several years after her pilgrimage. Because Margery saw her book as a religious autobiography, she focused on her relationship with God and his saints instead of on the sorts of details we might want to know today. She said nothing about how cold it was crossing the Alps in late autumn or what a wool cloak felt like in the rain or what she heard and smelled and saw in the markets of Venice. I had to rely on other pilgrims’ accounts to fill in many of the details. Margery did tell about the arguments she had with her fellow pilgrims, several of which resulted in her being kicked out of their company. Once, one of the other pilgrims was so angry at Margery that he said he wished she were out to sea in a bottomless boat. Another time, her fellow pilgrims ripped the bottom part of her gown away, perhaps to make her look foolish. Often, her fellow travelers worried about her preaching. This was understandable, because it was illegal for a woman to preach, and they didn’t want to be jailed—or worse, burned at the stake. But the way Margery tells it, no matter what happened, the other pilgrims were always wrong—because God was on her side.
In terms of medieval Christianity, Margery Kempe was not extreme. Other religious people cried as much as she did. However, they might not have cried quite as loudly or been quite as aggressive about their piety. Some pilgrims worried that because she cried so much, Margery might be possessed by an evil spirit, while others thought she was drunk or ill. Modern writers have argued just as much as medieval people did about whether Margery Kempe was truly holy, whether she had some kind of disease that caused her to have fits, or whether she was simply a proud and self-aggrandizing woman. We will probably never know the truth. We can say with certainty, however, that she must have been very difficult to live with.
Many of the things that happened to Margery and her maidservant are included in this novel. For example, a number of companions traveled together, one of whom was a priest, and in Cologne, a papal legate took care of Margery, finding her a companion to see her over the Alps. Margery’s speech was colorful, and she was given to metaphors that reveal a lot about her life as the daughter of a merchant, such as when she says she would rather be chopped up as small as meat for a pot than not tell religious tales, or when she compares holy things to commonplace ones from her life in Lynn—the sticky skin of boiled stockfish, the sound of a pair of bellows blowing, the song of “a little bird which is called the redbreast.” Members of the nobility would probably have used loftier metaphors.
Although the basic outline of the novel follows Margery’s memoir, for the sake of the story I have made some changes. The biggest of these is Margery’s itinerary.
On this particular pilgrimage, which began in the year 1413, Margery went to the Holy Land before she went to Rome. I took out her visit to the Holy Land. Nevertheless, the overland route that Margery took was one way people got to Rome, partly because of their desire to visit various holy places—such as Assisi, the home of St. Francis—on the way. (This could pay off: praying at some shrines could shorten by years the time you might spend in Purgatory, giving you a faster route to heaven after you died.) There’s so much Margery leaves out, including which pass she took to get over the Alps, but she does mention many of the places where she stopped on her route: Norwich and Yarmouth, Zierikzee (in what is now the Netherlands), Cologne, Constance, Venice (where she took a ship to the Holy Land and to which she returned), Assisi, and finally Rome.
What Margery tells us about her maidservant—mostly complaints—allowed me to piece together a great deal of Johanna’s story, but who she was, where she came from, and what happened to her after she became the keeper of wine—all of that I had to invent. Johanna sees things from a Christian perspective. Catholicism would have permeated her life. The Reformation, and the beginning of Protestantism, hadn’t happened yet, and in Western Europe, almost everybody was Roman Catholic. If you go to the town of Lynn, which is now called King’s Lynn, you can see St. Margaret’s Church, which Johanna mentions. It’s still in use. So is another church, All Saints. You can see the anchorhold attached to it, the small room in which a holy man chose to be walled up to pray for the rest of his
life. Walking around King’s Lynn, past the medieval guildhall and through the arched town gate, or listening to the wind blow across the flat salt marshes, you can still hear an echo of what life might have been like in the fifteenth century.
Most of the other characters in the novel are invented. Their names, however, all belonged to real people from fourteenth- and fifteenth-century England, including my favorite,
Iohn mowse, clarke
.