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.”
autHoR’s Note
we 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.
souRces
i used many sources while writing this novel. Primary among them was Barry Windeatt’s translation, The Book of Margery Kempe (New York: Penguin, 1985), from which the quotations in the author’s note are taken, and Sanford Brown Meech and Hope Emily Allen’s Middle English edition, The Book of Margery Kempe (London: Oxford University Press, 1940). Three books about Margery that I found helpful were Clarissa Atkinson’s Mystic and Pilgrim: The Book and the World of Margery Kempe (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983), Margaret Gallyon’s Margery Kempe of Lynn and Medieval England (Norwich: Canterbury Press, 1995), and Anthony Goodman’s Margery Kempe and Her World (London: Pearson/Longman, 2002). Among other very useful books were Barbara Hanawalt’s Growing Up in Medieval London: The Experience of Childhood in History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), Norbert Ohler’s The Medieval Traveller (trans. Caroline Hillier; Rochester, N.Y.: Boydell, 1989), and Jonathan Sumption’s Pilgrimage: An Image of Mediaeval Religion (London: Faber and Faber, 1975). John Mouse and Thomas say some things that I took from Helen Waddell’s The Wandering Scholars (New York: Doubleday, 1955), and valuable information about medieval households came from The Household Book of Dame Alice de Bryene 1412–1413, edited by V. B. Redstone (Ipswich: W. E. H
arrison, 1931) and Elaine Power’s translation of The Goodman of Paris (New York: George Routledge and Sons, 1928). A Web site designed by Sarah Stanbury and Virginia Raguin, “Mapping Margery Kempe,” includes photographs of the town of King’s Lynn and some of its buildings, as well as other information about Margery’s life and times: www.holycross.edu/departments/visarts/projects/kempe
ackNOWLedGmeNts
when I think of all the people who contributed in some way to this book, I am humbled. To name each of them would take pages, so here I will thank only a few: Nancy and Bill Barnhouse, Sid Brown, and Allison Wallace for their support and encouragement; Megan Isaac and Lisa Carl for their helpful comments; Robbie Mayes for urging me to keep trying; Diane Landolf for saying yes; and Ena Jones, for being the best critique partner I could ever have imagined. My gratitude to you all.
This is a work of fiction. All incidents and dialogue, and all characters with the exception of some well-known historical and public figures, are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Where real-life historical or public figures appear, the situations, incidents, and dialogues concerning those persons are fictional and are not intended to depict actual events or to change the fictional nature of the work. In all other respects, any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2009 by Rebecca Barnhouse
Map copyright © 2009 by Grady McFerrin
All rights reserved.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Barnhouse, Rebecca.
The book of the maidservant / by Rebecca Barnhouse. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
Summary: In 1413, a young maidservant accompanies her deeply religious mistress, Dame Margery Kempe, on a religious pilgrimage to Rome. Includes author’s note on Kempe, writer of “The Book of Margery Kempe,” considered by some to be the first autobiography in the English language.
eISBN: 978-0-375-89291-2
1. Kempe, Margery, b. ca. 1373—Juvenile fiction. [1. Kempe, Margery, b. ca. 1373—Fiction. 2. Religious life—Fiction. 3. Pilgrims and pilgrimages—Fiction. 4. Voyages and travels—Fiction. 5. Middle Ages—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.B2668Bo 2009 [Fic]—dc22 2008028820
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