The Book of the Maidservant

by Rebecca Barnhouse

  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.”

  I shake my head in disbelief. People may change, but not that much.

  “Wait,” she says, and leans toward the open door to listen for our mistresses, but they’re still talking. She settles back onto the bench again. “When his wife died, he got angry. And then he got all hollow inside.” She rubs her belly and leans toward me to whisper, “So hollow, there was room for a devil to creep in.”

  A chicken startles me, pecking at my bare toes. I nudge it away. “Then what happened?”

  Anne’s eyes gleam. “It’s still there.”

  “It is?” The chicken pecks again and I kick at it.

  “The parson tried to get it out, but now he says the only way is for Petrus Tappester to go to the Holy Land.”

  I look at her, my eyes wide, a shiver on my scalp. “Can it get out? Before he gets to the Holy Land?”

  She shakes her head firmly. “That’s why Master Robert is making him go. It won’t come out until he gets there.”

  She raises her hand to silence me and listens again. Our mistresses’ voices are getting louder—they’re coming this way. We scramble back inside and start wiping pots with our aprons to look busy.

  On the way home, while my mistress stops at St. Margaret’s to talk to Master Robert, I try to picture the devil inside Petrus Tappester. Does it have wings and a tail like the demon peeking around a corner in one of the church wall paintings?

  I tell Cook all about it when we get back. And I tell her about Dame Margery. “She left me alone with all the crowd throwing things at me,” I say. “All she did was cry and moan while I had to face all those people.”

  “You’d think they’d throw things at her, not you. Or have the saints started speaking to you, too?” Cook says.

  We are brushing the moths out of clothes. Dame Margery has just given Cook an old dress, so she’s pleased. She keeps picking it up and pressing it against herself, looking for ways to make it fit her better. She acts like a girl readying herself for her first Michaelmas Fair.

  “And now Master Robert has given her permission to wear white, as if she were a virgin who never had a single child,” I say. “I wish he’d thought about who’d have to sew all those white clothes.”

  Cook laughs. “You think she’d let you sew them? With your seams going every which way?”

  “No. But while you’re sewing them, who’ll have to work twice as hard at the cooking and cleaning and washing?”

  “And Master Robert didn’t think of that, now?” Cook is laughing at me.

  “Cicilly!” I call. “Come help me bring in firewood.” Cook can brush out these clothes herself.

  Cicilly comes running. If nobody else loves me, at least Cicilly does. I glare at Cook as we go out, and she makes a show of curtsying.

  “Master Robert will come to his senses any minute now, you mark me,” she says, and bursts into a belly laugh. She gets to stay in Lynn instead of going on this pilgrimage. What does she care for my troubles?

  the closer the pilgrimage, the busier we become. Three days to go, then two days, then suddenly, it’s my last night in Lynn. I’ve packed my flint and bit of metal for starting fires, our cooking pot (Cook laughs at the idea of me cooking anything), and our pigs’ bladders for carrying drinking water. I have my needles and thread and extra pins for my mistress’s headdress. At my belt rides my knife, the one with the lark etched into the blade that my father gave me before he left home. And I bring my round brown pebble, worn smooth from tumbling in
the River Gay, down from its hidey-hole in the roofbeam. Rose found it in the stream when I was a little girl. She made me recite my Ave Maria and my Paternoster before she gave it to me, and I’ve kept it ever since, a little piece of home. I hold it tight and pray to Our Lady before I drop it into the little leather bag at my belt.

  I give my doll, the one with the black eyes painted onto an acorn face and the scrap of linen for a body, to Cicilly to keep for me until I get back.

  Cook has promised she’ll send Rose word about the pilgrimage, if she has a chance.

  We stay up late before the kitchen fire. After Cicilly falls asleep with her head in Cook’s lap, the acorn doll clenched in her fist, Cook and I sit in silence, listening to the snap of the flames. She leaves tomorrow as well, to serve in our mistress’s brother’s kitchen. Cicilly will go back to help her mother at Agnes Gough’s house. I fear for her—she and her mother will have to make one meal serve them both, and neither of them is strong.

  Finally, we wake Cicilly enough to get her to bed. Before I climb the ladder to the attic room, Cook hugs me long and hard.

  With Cicilly nestled beside me, I sleep.

  We travel to Yarmouth by way of Walsingham. A merchant on his way to Fakenham accompanies us the first day. We pass out of Lynn under the massive East Gate, the same path I trod a full year ago when I came to work for Dame Margery. Back then, I thought I’d be back with my family by now. Never could I have imagined going on a pilgrimage. It’s hard to imagine it now, even though we’re really leaving.

  I look back at the fog-shrouded gate looming like a fortress behind us. Droplets of mist on my cheeks feel like cold tears in the chill air. The bells summoning the friars to their prayers fade as we get farther from Dame Margery’s house, farther from Cook, farther from Cicilly, farther from everything that I’ve come to know in the last year.

  In the distance, we see Castle Rising. We pass the path into the marshes where Rose and my father and I lived, and we pull our skirts to our knees to wade across the River Gay. Will my father ever hear where I am? Will word ever come to him, wherever he is, working the bishop’s fields? Cook will get a message to Rose about me; I know she will.

  For the first time in a long time, I allow myself to think about Rose marrying Hodge. She says I mustn’t think ill of him, which means I can’t think of him at all. Hodge is to blame for everything, for my family being torn apart, for me being sent to Lynn. Why did he have to take Rose from us? He could have bought my father’s fields if he’d really wanted to; I’m sure he could. After all, he’s rich enough to have a cottage with a window and a separate room for sleeping.

  A thorn of anger pierces my heart, and suddenly, another memory comes creeping into my head, this one about Rose. One I don’t want to remember. I shut it away as fast as it comes and think about Hodge instead. I promised Rose I would try to love him as a brother. But she didn’t know what would happen to me. Nobody could have known about this pilgrimage. Especially me.

  Wind rushes across the flat marshland. A heron lifts himself out of the reeds and into flight. If only I could sweep across the sky like the heron, I’d fly back home to Rose and my father and how things used to be. Instead, I plod along beside the merchant’s donkey, my feet weary before we’ve even reached the church at Grymston.

  We stop in the churchyard to eat our bread and cheese and dried fish. I try to make friends with the donkey, but he bares his yellow teeth at me and narrows his eyes.

  “He’s sour through and through,” the merchant tells me. “Give him honey and he’ll trade it for nettles.”

  My mistress has lowered herself, slowly like a cow, to her knees. She must be having a conversation with Our Lord. I hope the donkey doesn’t make her think of Our Lady riding to Bethlehem and start the tearfall.

  The merchant goes right on talking about the donkey, not realizing the danger we’re in. “A cussed beast, this one, but he’ll carry the world on his back. He won’t like it, mind, but he’ll do it.”

  I wander around to the other side of the church and sit, my back against the cold stone wall. An abandoned swallow’s nest hangs from the eaves, a torn and tumbling clump of twigs. In the center where the eggs would have been in the spring, a hole gapes, black and jagged.

  As I bite into my cheese, a raindrop plops hard and cold onto my scalp. My mistress wears a broad-brimmed leather pilgrim’s hat that her brother-in-law Simon, the skinner, made for her. It keeps the rain off her head. I am not a pilgrim, just a pilgrim’s maidservant, so I get no hat.

  But I do have a metal cross to carry with me. Just as we were about to step over the threshold to begin our journey, Cook pressed it into my palm and said, “God bless you, child.” I’ve been clutching it tightly ever since, and now there’s a green smudge on my palm.

  I tuck the cross into my scrip next to the pebble from the River Gay and take out a hunk of hard brown bread to gnaw. It has as much of Cook in it as the cross does. She kneaded it and baked it and cut it into pieces for our journey.

  Too soon, my mistress calls for me, and we set off again. We walk all day, through marshes, across streams, past fields of flax and fields of barley, past grazing sheep and grazing cattle. At evensong, we finally come to the shrine outside of Walsingham. The merchant leaves us, and my mistress and I walk into the dark chapel. Ahead of us, lights flicker in brilliant colors, making me blink. As we get closer, we see hundreds of candle flames illuminating the jewels that surround the image of the Virgin. The air is so thick with incense that it makes me cough.

  We kneel and pray to Our Lady of Walsingham. “Bring my family back together,” I ask her. “Bring me safe home.” When I look up into her kind eyes, I think my prayer is being heard.

  My mistress’s prayers certainly are. People kneeling all around us look up when she cries out, “Blessed Lady, mother of Our Lord,” and begins to sob.

  I try to shut out her voice, but she is too loud.

  Then a priest approaches and gently raises her, still weeping. He leads her through a door, across a yard, and into a small room. I scurry to keep up.

  To another priest, he says, “This is the holy woman from Bishop’s Lynn. The Lord visited her in our chapel with holy tears of contrition and devotion.”

  The second priest calls a servant to find food and beds—not just for my mistress, but for me, too. Suddenly, Dame Margery’s tears seem like no bad thing.

  * * *

  We leave the next morning without kissing the phial of Virgin’s milk or even the piece of St. Peter’s fingerbone in the chapel. What do we care for a mere fingerbone when we’re going to Rome, St. Peter’s own city?

  Besides, a monk going to the priory at Bromholm says he’ll guide us there, where we can pray to the piece of the True Cross. I can hardly wait to tell Cook about it. Even Cicilly has heard of the Holy Cross of Bromholm.

  I skip along the rutted cart path, listening to blackbirds trilling as they rise from the marshes. When I try to whistle back to them, my mistress gives me a sharp look, reminding me of the monk’s presence.

  I stop skipping and start listening, my eyes on the rip at the bottom of his black robe. I don’t think he knows about it. Every now and then, his hairy leg peeks out like a bearded face from behind a curtain in a mystery play, and it’s all I can do not to laugh.

  He’s telling my mistress all about what St. Paul says of tears—that the Holy Ghost says to pray with mourning and weeping so plentiful that the tears can’t be numbered.

  Dame Margery weeps enough already. She hardly needs encouragement.

  But the monk speaks on about St. Jerome, who says that tears torment the devil. He tells her to persevere against her enemies and to have patience in her soul when people fault her for weeping. “The Lord will test you severely,” he says, “just as he tests his saints.”

  The monk ought to try serving Dame Margery for a day if he thinks she’s the one who’s being tested.

  Just as I’m thinking this, the monk looks back at me, his gentle b
lue eyes catching mine and holding them. My face burns with shame, and I look down. Can the monk hear my thoughts? I trail behind, watching my dirty bare feet emerging one after the other from my brown woolen skirt. I wish I hadn’t laughed at his ripped robe.

  If the monk says my mistress is favored by God, I’ve been wrong to be angry with her when she cries. But her weeping is so loud, you can barely hear yourself praying!

  I sigh and make a vow to pray for as long as my mistress. “By Our Lady of Walsingham,” I say, crossing myself, “I won’t think any more bad things about her this whole pilgrimage.”

  By the time we get to Yarmouth, I’ve broken my vow over five times. After five, I stopped counting.

  The last time was in the cathedral at Norwich, where my mistress prayed to the Holy Trinity. By her account, all three of them got into an argument about who she should love best—the Father, the Son, or the Holy Spirit. It took the Virgin Mary and all twelve apostles to set things right. Along with a lot of weeping. When she shrieked out loud in the Lady Chapel, I lost my patience and broke my vow.

  At Yarmouth, we’re staying at an inn where other people who are crossing the English Sea have gathered. One of them is Petrus Tappester. I watch him for signs of that devil. I may not see it, but I can hear it—he has nothing good to say and a large mouth with which to say it.

  At dinner, he tells me to serve everybody at our table. I look to Dame Margery to contradict him, but she’s so busy praying she doesn’t notice. Even when I bang her cup down hard enough that some of the ale sloshes out, she doesn’t look up. When I stomp into the kitchen for more ale, the yellow-haired boy tending to the roast laughs.

  I feel like a dog that’s been kicked—I want to snarl and bite anybody in my path. “What are you looking at?” I say.