The Book of the Maidservant (9 page)

I look back again, but I can’t see her in the crowd clamoring to get into the gate.

“Dame Margery,” I say. “I have to find her.”

“No,” Bartilmew says.

“But I left her. The soldiers—”

He shakes his head.

I can’t just leave her. I turn to push my way back through the crowd. Bartilmew catches my shoulder. As he does, Dame Margery comes into view, one of her arms linked through John Mouse’s, the other through Thomas’s. Their faces are grim as they pull her along, but she smiles as if the king has asked her to dance.

As they near us, she says, “I told you we were in no danger. The Lord protected us. He said he would.”

I open my mouth, then clamp it shut. Maybe she’s right. Maybe that’s why I’m still alive.

The crowds push us forward into the city. We stop where the way widens out. I am too dazed to hear what the merchant and Petrus are saying. I watch, barely comprehending, as the students tear off down the street, their gowns rippling behind them like wings. The merchant points and says something before leading his packhorse in another direction.

The rest of us set out for the English hospice.

High walls rise around us, cutting off the light. From every direction, people push past, all of them speaking words I can’t understand. The aroma of cooking meat mingles with the smell of rot and waste. I dodge around a steaming pile of horse dung.

No matter how wide I open my eyes, I can’t take it all in. I can’t take anything in. All I can do is remember the
hand catching my braid, the feel of my knife hitting flesh. Everything seems so dark. I want to crawl into a safe corner somewhere and sleep.

I hardly notice when we enter the hospice. Following Dame Margery into the sleeping room for women, I place our pack on a cot to claim it.

“We’ll want something to eat,” Dame Margery says. “The kitchen is through there.” She gives me a little push toward a doorway.

I go through it and step into a courtyard. The smell of wood smoke and frying onions tells me the way.

Stopping just inside the door, I watch the fire dancing on the huge hearth. A boy comes in another door, staggering under a load of logs, his torn and filthy leggings protruding from under the wood. He drops the logs beside the fireplace, brushes off his ripped tunic, and goes out again.

At a long wooden table, a small bald man scoops millet from a huge bag on the ground into a kettle. He looks up and sees me. “New pilgrims?” he asks. “How many?”

I count on my fingers and say “Six,” before remembering myself. “No, seven.”

“Well, don’t just stand there,” he says.

He never says another word as we cook the millet into a porridge with oil and onions. As I stir, the fire warms me, and I feel my fear dissipating, my breath steadying, the life coming back to my limbs.

When it’s finally time for bed, I join my mistress on my knees to offer a long and heartfelt prayer. After my
Paternoster and my Ave Maria, I beg Our Lady to preserve me from the demons who bedevil us in nightmares.

She must hear me. I sleep like the blessed dead.

We stay three days in Cologne. On the first day, my mistress and I, Dame Isabel and her husband, and Bartilmew, Father Nicholas, and Petrus Tappester all go to the cathedral together.

When I first went to Lynn, to work in Dame Margery’s house, I thought I was in a city, it was so big. I thought the square towers of St. Margaret’s church rose as high as a building could. On market days, more people crowded the square than ants in an anthill, all dashing about, calling to each other, buying and selling, carrying baskets of vegetables and hens, loaves of bread, bolts of wool, pies and apples, cod and carrots. Never did I think there could be so many people.

Until I came to Cologne.

I’m not the only one who is impressed. Even Petrus Tappester keeps pointing and saying, “Look at that!”

When we get near the cathedral, we can see the scaffolding covering one side, a pile of stones and rubble below it. A few men sit in the scaffolding, but none of them seems to be working.

As we get nearer, I look up at the walls. They reach so high they make me dizzy. Carved figures gaze grandly down, and we try to identify our favorite saints by their symbols. In a stained-glass window in St. Margaret’s back
in Lynn, the saint holds a book and stands atop a winged dragon. We walk all the way around the cathedral, dodging legless beggars and friars and men who want to sell us pilgrim badges, stepping over muddy ditches and piles of stones and piles of dung, but I can’t find St. Margaret. Nor do I see St. Guthlac of the Fens or his sister, St. Pega. I can’t even find St. Audrey. I am in a strange and foreign place if they don’t even know my saints here.

Then I see St. Michael looking solemnly down at me, his scales in one hand, and I feel safer.

A glint on the ground catches my eye, and I reach for what looks like a little piece of sky fallen to the earth. It’s a blue glass bead. I wipe the mud off it and let it catch the sun.

“What do I do with it?” I ask Bartilmew, who is standing beside me.

We look around, but no one seems to have lost anything.

“Keep it,” he says.

“Are you sure?”

He nods and I slip the bead into my scrip, where I can hear it clinking against Cook’s metal cross and the pebble Rose gave me.

Around the corner, on the broad cathedral steps, a one-armed boy with a rag tied around his eyes calls for alms in a reedy voice. Beside him, a man in a ragged tunic points out the Paternoster beads and souvenirs he has placed on a cloth spread on the ground, his voice competing with the boy’s. Two smiling jugglers keep eight red and black balls in the air between them, joking loudly to each other, until a
priest comes out of the cathedral and shoos them away. I want to follow and watch their merry fun until one of them darts a sharp eye at me and holds out his cap for coins. When I shake my head at him and show my empty hands, he scowls and makes as if to rush at me.

My heart is still pounding as we walk through the huge door and into the cathedral.

I blink in the dimness. Candles flicker behind massive stone columns. I stumble over a woman who kneels in prayer, then follow the crowd forward. Like us, they’ve come to see the shrine of the Three Kings.

A deacon points people to a place behind the high altar, and we join the line of pilgrims shuffling around the shrine. It looks like a little golden church with tiny people carved into its sides, just the way statues surround this cathedral. Father Nicholas points out figures of the Virgin and Child and the emperor, who kneels to them. The emperor of what? I thought there were only the king and the Pope and then God.

When I stop to peer at the emperor, someone steps on my heel, so I have to move on. Once we’ve passed the shrine, we come to a little stall, right there in the cathedral, selling souvenirs. Everyone in our company buys a metal badge with the Three Kings’ heads on it to sew on their leather pilgrims’ hats. Everyone except Bartilmew and me. We have no money, but neither do we have hats.

As we prepare to leave, I look around for my mistress. She is speaking English to a priest, who nods and smiles at her. I stand beside them, waiting for her, but she has launched into a long story—one I’ve heard many a
time—about the way the Lord speaks to her. Finally, ducking my head submissively, I break in to say, “Beg pardon, Dame Margery, we’re going now.”

She looks down at me as if she doesn’t recognize me. “Go along. Father Geoffrey will see me back to the hospice.”

She turns her back and walks away.

w
here are the others? While I’ve been waiting for my mistress, they’ve gone on without me. There are so many people in the cathedral, all I can see are people’s backs. I scan the crowds, but it’s so dark in the cathedral that I can’t find anyone I know. If I get lost here, I’ll never find my way back to the hospice. A knot of fear seizes my stomach.

Then I see Bartilmew glance back, candle flame lighting his face. Pushing my way past priests and pilgrims, I run to catch up with the group. As I come alongside Bartilmew, he gives me a nod.

On the way back to the hospice, we pass the university district, where narrow streets of mud run past booksellers’ shops and wine merchants and taverns, where sly-looking women in low-cut bodices leer at Petrus and Bartilmew. A man goes by pushing a cart with a little oven in it. Black-robed students crowd around him like ants to buy meat pies. My mouth waters at the aroma, and I wish I had coins of my own.

Outside one tavern, students form a circle, some
standing, some sitting on stools. They crowd around a table where one student lies on his back while another pours wine from a flask into his mouth. The crowd chants something. The chanting grows louder and faster, and some of the students begin pounding on the table in time with the words.

I stand watching until Bartilmew tugs at my cloak. “A drinking game,” he says, disapproval in his voice as he hurries me along to catch up with the others.

The students cheer loudly, and I turn back to watch. The drinker has just stumbled up from the table when Bartilmew jerks my arm and pulls me out of the way—a stream of muddy brown liquid splashes into the street. I look up to see a woman emptying a pot from an upstairs window.

I’m shocked. In Lynn, we never emptied the night bucket from the windows. We always carried it to the street, and sometimes I even took it all the way to the ditch in the middle of the street. People in Cologne aren’t very clean.

Around a corner, we come upon another group of students. One of them stands on a little platform speaking, and others listen to him, scowling in concentration or whispering to each other. I can’t understand a word—it’s all in Latin, just like the Mass is—so I look at the students. Filthy, unkempt boys in filthy, ill-mended gowns, they seem to me. I try to find John Mouse in the crowd, but I don’t see him.

We go through narrow passageways under banners of laundry that flutter between buildings. We pass the river,
and I look across it, thinking of the mercenaries. When we go down one street, two men shout at each other from the upstairs windows on opposite sides of the street.

I don’t know how the others know where we are, but when we turn a corner, there’s the hospice.

I plop down on a bench inside. It feels so good to sit for a change. I lean my head back and close my eyes.

When I open them, Dame Isabel is standing in front of me. She plucks all the hair off her forehead and eyebrows, the way a gentlewoman does, even though her husband is a wool merchant—no gentleman at all. With her hair pulled back so severely beneath her veil, her eyes turn up at the corners, giving her a pained, catlike look.

“These need washing,” she says, dropping a bundle of clothes on the bench beside me and walking away.

Petrus sees what she has done and says, “Mine, too.” He disappears and comes back with more clothes, which he drops on top of Dame Isabel’s pile.

They expect me to wash their clothes? I’m already cooking for them. Isn’t that enough?

I close my eyes again. The hospice disappears, along with the clothes, the cooking, my mistress’s weeping. I’m back in the kitchen in Lynn, having a summer supper with Cook and Cicilly as the birds call in the twilit sky. Cook is laughing at one of her own jokes, and Cicilly and I are smiling at each other, happy to be eating Cook’s good dumplings.

Whap!

The blow knocks me off the bench. I crawl to my knees and look up.

Petrus towers over me, ready to strike again.

“You wash those clothes, or …” He shows me his meaty hand.

My teeth clenched in anger, I grab the clothes and scuttle away before he can hit me again. I wish John Mouse were here to defend me.

A servant in the kitchen shows me the way to the river.

Dame Isabel’s shift comes clean easy enough, but when I get to Petrus’s breeches, I refuse to do anything more than dip them in the water and hang them over a bush to dry. They need more cleaning than that—a lot more.

Just as I’ve spread the last pair of hose over a bush to dry, the sun comes out from behind a cloud. I sit down on a grassy place beside the river, rub the back of my head where Petrus hit it, and watch the pattern of sunlight sparkling on the water.

The gleaming nets of light lure me back to Lynn again, and further back still, to the pond near Hodge’s cottage, where the wind rippled the surface and Hodge’s three little boys chased the ducks. My job was to keep both ducks and boys safe. Ducks I could care for, but little boys I knew nothing about. Before long, I would yell and they would cry, and Rose would come running from the cottage, slapping flour from her hands and pulling William, the youngest, into a hug. He would make faces at me over her shoulder. He knew, just as I did, that they were her family now, not me.

I remember staring at the water so I wouldn’t have to see the hurt on Rose’s face, her disappointment in me.

Why did she have to marry Hodge? If it hadn’t been for Hodge, I’d never be here now, hating Petrus Tappester.

I focus on the patterned river water and try to erase Hodge and Petrus from my thoughts. Hodge and Petrus and that look on Rose’s face.