The Book of the Maidservant Read online

  For Sid

  my mistress says you mustn’t stare into the fire lest the devil look out at you from the flames. “He’ll see into your soul,” she says.

  My mistress says a great many things about the devil.

  But before cockcrow, when my mistress is still abed and I’m sitting on my heels coaxing the embers into life with my breath, I stare into the fire with no fear of the devil. The devil, I think, wakes up when my mistress does.

  Before then, the house is quiet and my face is warm with the fire I’m making. I stare into the coals and the new little flames licking blue and yellow around the kindling, and I don’t see the devil or the mouth of hell. I see summer and yellow sun, and in the smooth flames curling around the wood, I see clear water flowing through rushes the way it did in the stream when I was a little girl.

  I’ve just long enough for a memory of splashing in the stream with my big sister, Rose, before the rafters tremble with the sound of my mistress stirring above.

  Cook limps heavily into the kitchen and casts a baleful eye at the upstairs room. “There’ll be weeping today, you mark me,” she says, and busies herself with the pots.

  It’s a big house, this, for my mistress’s father was five times Lord Mayor of Lynn and an alderman of the Holy Trinity Guildhall, too. The mistress doesn’t let it be forgotten, not by the servants nor by the goodwives of the town, for all that she’s a religious woman.

  “She’ll be wanting you,” Cook says.

  I lean forward to give the fire one last breath, although it doesn’t need it. For one more instant, it’s summer and I’m with Rose and the sun is warming my face.

  Then I rock back on my heels and stand, letting the cold air settle around me. I heave the bucket of water I’ve brought in and start up the stairs.

  I’m halfway up when the weeping begins.

  “Ah, sweet Jesu,” my mistress calls out, and then she is crying in earnest, great heaving sobs. “My sweet Lord,” she cries.

  I hover on the stairs. Up or down?

  “Johanna!” My mistress shrieks my name from her room and up I scurry. I’ve been here long enough to know the consequences if I don’t.

  I open her door with my foot, swinging the heaving bucket into the room. She’s sitting on her bed, her face in her hands, the tears coming fast. The water from my bucket goes into the hand basin with only a river or so spilled out, and then her foul-smelling night bucket is in my hands and I’m on the stairs again.

  “Come back, you stupid girl.”

  I stop. Even when she’s full of the passion that Our Lady Mary suffered for her poor son, my mistress notices things. You’d think she’d be blinded by her tears.

  “The fire, Johanna.”

  I set the buckets down and creep into the room again. I had thought to come back for the fire later, when I brush her hair and pin up her headdress—after the weeping has abated. But my mistress likes to be warm and toasty while she shares Our Lady’s pain.

  The bellows crouch beside the fireplace. I mend the coals with the tongs, then blow them into flames with the bellows. Already, while my mistress was sleeping, I’ve brought up the coal. Also, I’ve scoured the bottles and pots left from yesterday. And brought in the water for Cook and for me, lots of water, fetched from the Common Ditch, a long walk through the ooze and muck of the streets in the chill damp of the morning.

  My mistress feels such compassion for Our Lord, she cries and cries at the thought of him on his rood. You’d think she could spare some compassion for me. Almost June and still the mornings are cold as midwinter.

  She interrupts her weeping to say, “Don’t dally before the fire, you wicked girl. The devil creeps into the souls of those who dally.”

  She should know.

  I escape down the stairs to haul the iron pots of water to the fire for washing. Linens today.

  When I lived by the river, off in the Fens, after my mother died giving birth to a baby who didn’t live to see the sunrise, my sister Rose did the washing. Back then, I really did dally, kicking my heels in the stream, weaving sedges together to make birdcages, trying to catch silvery minnows with my bare hands, fashioning pipes of reeds. I thought I was working, but Rose was doing it all. Now that she’s married to a farmer, she knows even more about work.

  Dame Margery thinks she’s overburdened, what with the Lord’s suffering on her shoulders, but she knows nothing of burdens. Cook and I and poor little Cicilly know about burdens. Cicilly has a cough, so Cook and I have conspired to let her sleep longer. Just so she’s visible by the time the mistress sweeps downstairs.

  Since our household broke up at Michaelmas—Rose going off with her farmer, my father going to harvest the bishop’s fields, and me going into service for Dame Margery here in town—Cook has been all the family I have. Cook and Cicilly. Piers, who does the men’s labor, treats me too ill to be family. He grabs my braids and sometimes my skirts in a way I don’t like at all. Besides, he smells.

  But Cook can laugh. She’s a sly one, Cook is, when her joints aren’t making her limp and groan.

  “Come, Johanna,” she says. “Here’s her morning meal to be taken up. Enough for her and whatever saint is visiting today.”

  It’s when I’m up the stairs, handing her the trencher, that my mistress changes my life again, for the second time in a year.

  “God has told me to go on pilgrimage to Rome,” Dame Margery says. “I’ll need a maidservant. Cicilly’s too young; Cook is too old. You’ll go with me, Johanna.”

  My mouth drops open. A pilgrimage to Rome? With my mistress?

  “The Lord doesn’t hold with idleness. Get on about your duties,” she says, her mouth full of bread.

  I tear down the stairs as fast as I can.

  warm weather finally comes, and I can go out without fear of frostbite. Cook says I never did need fear frostbite, but she was warm in her kitchen while I was elbowing my way through the Saturday market, my stomach leaping with fear and excitement every time I thought about Rome.

  Today I scuttle past St. Margaret’s, where my mistress has gone to speak to the parson about our pilgrimage. I glance over my shoulder, but she’s inside, so she doesn’t see me.

  Over the Millfleet and past All Saints, where the holy man prays in his anchorhold. I’m off to the marshes to gather rushes, which always makes me think of Rose and of our packed dirt floor at home that she kept so clean with her broom. The door was always open in the summer, and chickens wandered in and out, into the cool shade of the cottage and back out into the summer sun. There may have been only one room, and the fire smoked something dreadful, and the roof leaked every time it rained, but it was home.

  At Dame Margery’s, the wooden floors all have rushes on them, because she is rich and lives in a big house in town—so big that it has four different rooms, a staircase, and even a chimney for the smoke. It’s my task to gather the old, moldy, soggy rushes with their mice and bugs and bits of meat and slimy vegetables clinging to them and throw them in the street before laying down fresh rushes.

  But gathering rushes I like because I get to be alone, barefoot, under the wide sky with my thoughts of Rose and of home. And besides, there’s nobody to watch me when I stop to let the minnows nibble my toes. The sharp rushes slice into my wrists, and the edge of my skirt is muddy, but I don’t care. Huge gray clouds sail across an ocean of sky, and the waterbirds stalk and call to their mates. A snail, his home packed tight into his shell, sways sideways as a breeze ripples through the reeds.

  Why does the holy man wall himself up inside the anchor hold, praying night and day? Once, I went with my mistress to call on him. They talked in low voices, and then the holy man reached his hand out of his window to p
lace it on my head. I felt a tingle go down my spine. Was it a demon leaving my body? After that, I tried to be good for a long time. I didn’t hide beside the church to see the lepers coming to hear Mass through the lepersquint. And I prayed all during Mass instead of watching the wart on the priest’s chin wiggle as he spoke.

  What would it be like to wall yourself up for the rest of your life that way, to serve only God? When I listen to the wind whistling through the marshes, bringing with it the smell of salt and mud, making the reeds bend down to touch their knees, I know I could never lock myself up in a room that way. Nor could my mistress, for all her holiness.

  That makes me think of our pilgrimage and I shiver. We’ll take a ship at Yarmouth, my mistress says.

  Every day, ships and fishing boats come up the river to Lynn, and many’s the time I’ve stopped in my errands to watch men unload coal and cod. On Codling Lane, I’ve bargained with tradesmen for stockfish that have swum in seas as far away as Norway, wherever that is. But I don’t want to go to Norway. I don’t want to go to Rome. I don’t want to climb aboard any ship at all.

  Water runs through my life. I was born by the River Gay, and for thirteen years I lived there, summer and winter. Now I live in Lynn by the River Ouse, which empties into the sea. The Millfleet and the Purfleet run through town, and I crouch in the marshes, mud between my toes, to gather rushes. And I know that people belong beside the water, not upon it.

  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.

  we 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.