Only Alan, the head cook, is there, yawning so hugely his eyes are closed and he doesn’t see me. I blow the fire awake and set out the stacks of porridge bowls.
Alice comes in from the courtyard, one pin in her mouth, one in her hands as she arranges her wimple. She gives me a quick nod, and I go to the sack of oats. One, two, three, four, five, six handfuls go into the kettle of water. I give it a stir before I haul it to the fire.
By the time Constance and Henry have come into the kitchen, I’m sitting in one of the huge window casements, blowing on my bowl of porridge to cool it and watching a sparrow hop along the eaves of the dormitory roof, cocking its head this way and that.
Constance peers past me to see what I’m watching. “Like in Father Morgan’s sermon,” she says.
I look at her, confused.
“Remember? He said the poor man was like a sparrow, alone on the housetop. Henry, watch out!”
The bellows fall over with a clatter. Henry looks up sheepishly.
“Be careful!” Constance says. “Are you all right?”
He nods and she goes to him, folding him in her arms.
I finish my porridge and turn to last night’s pots. Then I measure millet for today’s meals and chop the pile of onions Constance brings in until it’s time for me to attend to the wine.
Down in the cellar, a long line of pilgrims waits for me, but I only spill wine once, when a pig’s bladder springs a leak. I don’t see Dame Margery at all.
When the line dwindles to nothing, I wipe the spigot and the counter the way Alice showed me and start back up the steps.
A shadow blocks the light. I stop midstep.
Dame Margery towers at the top, glaring down at me. She doesn’t say anything, just stares at me, a line creasing her brow.
I take a deep breath and start back up the stairs. When I reach the top step, she doesn’t move.
“Beg pardon, Dame Margery,” I say, squeezing around her in the narrow passageway.
She doesn’t speak, but I can feel her eyes on my back as I walk away.
“Johanna!” Alice’s voice.
I let out the breath I didn’t know I was holding.
“Come tell me how to cook this rabbit,” Alice calls.
Rabbit? If she only knew. I smile and skip toward the kitchen. The rough stones feel comfortable, and I know just where to lift my feet to keep from stubbing my toes on the wood of the threshold.
Once I’m there, I see the rabbit will have to wait. Father Morgan stands by the courtyard door, motioning me over.
My heart catches in my throat. What if he says I have to go with Dame Margery?
“How long have you been in Dame Margery Kempe’s service?” he asks me as I get near him. The kitchen grows quiet. Alice stands with her arms folded over her chest, watching us. Constance shushes Henry’s humming. Wat stifles a sneeze, and even Alan, the head cook, stops carving a side of meat and looks up.
I try to remember. “I was hired at the Michaelmas Fair,” I say, thinking back.
“Hmmm.” Father Morgan shakes his head and I cringe. Then he looks back at me. “This harvest just past?”
I shake my head. “No, Father, the one before that. We left on our pilgrimage just before the fair.”
“Ahh, I see,” he says, and suddenly, I see, too. Servants are hired for the year at the Michaelmas Fair, and wages for the next year are paid. We left before the fair, so Dame Margery couldn’t have paid Hodge and my sister. They must be furious. I’ve been working since October without any pay at all.
I smile at Father Morgan. “Then may I have the position?”
He nods. “You have it already. As far as I can figure, you started when you got here.”
I take a deep, happy breath. “Thank you, Father.”
He smiles and glances over at Alice, who gives him one of her funny grimaces. When he goes out the door, sound returns to the kitchen as everyone goes back to their tasks. Wat gives me a shy pat on the shoulder as he passes me, and Constance doesn’t stop smiling all afternoon. Alice might be smiling, too, but it’s always hard to tell.
That evening, the stream of pilgrims lightens, and things are so calm that Alice serves out six bowls of porridge, one for herself, one for Alan, one for Wat, one for Constance, and another for Henry. And a bowl for me. She pulls the bench up to the long wooden table where we do our chopping and calls us all over.
When I get to the table, Alice hands me two dirty slivers of metal. One is round and one is half-moon shaped. I look at them and back at her.
“It’s your first pay,” she says.
I stare at the coins, the dark grime etched into their edges. They feel cool and heavy on my palm. I don’t even know what they’re worth—they must be Roman. I squeeze my fingers around them, then open my hand and listen to the clink as I toss them.
When I look up, everyone in the kitchen is watching me. Wat bursts out laughing, and Constance hides her grin with her hand. Henry giggles. I look at Alice and see the side of her mouth pulled up into one of her peculiar grins.
Then we sit down to eat, just like we’re a family.
For two more days, Dame Margery makes her home in the hospice, glaring at me whenever I pass her but never speaking to me. I hear her weeping in the chapel and telling other pilgrims about her visions, but she pins up her wimple and veil by herself. The veil hangs lopsided, and greasy fingerprints mark the edges of the wimple.
On the third day, when I tiptoe past her bed at dawn, she isn’t there. Neither is the pack with my hood in it.
“Didn’t you hear?” Constance says when I ask her about it. “A rich woman invited her to stay in her house. Didn’t you see the servants coming to get her last night?”
I shake my head slowly.
“Their clothes must have been made of silk, and they were just servants!” she says.
I open my mouth, then close it. Dame Margery is gone? A ball of fear forms in my stomach. How will I ever get back to England?
As I pour wine for today’s pilgrims, I can’t stop my fear from growing. I look at each pilgrim, their faces, their clothes, and wonder if I could travel with any of them. It’s a long, dangerous trip. Who could I trust? How would I ever pay my way? The coins Alice gave me won’t get me far, that I know for sure.
After the last of the pilgrims disappears up the steps, I lean back against the wine casks, inhaling their scent of oak and summer sun, and wonder what’s to become of me. I wonder where Bartilmew is by now. In the Holy Land, I hope, a place even stranger than Rome. I think of him plodding along behind his mistress and her husband, carrying her heavy pack without complaint. I hope he’s safe.
Alice’s voice startles me from my thoughts. “Johanna? Where are you?”
I trudge back up the steps, making my way to the kitchen.
As I come in, Alice gives me a sharp look. “Hurry up. There’s work to be done.” She gestures toward a stack of wooden bowls.
Constance raises her eyebrows to ask if I’m all right, but she doesn’t say anything. She starts handing me bowls to dip porridge into to take to the sick people the friars take care of. I fill bowl after bowl, trying not to think about Dame Margery.
“Careful!” Constance says, and I realize a dipper full of porridge has landed on the floor.
“Beg pardon.” I turn my attention back to the bowls.
Alice comes over and I stiffen.
“Father Morgan is away till nightfall, and some of the brothers, too. I’ll need you to help feed the sick, Johanna.”
I nod, relieved. That’s the second time I’ve spilled porridge—the second time that Alice has seen, anyway—but she’s never yelled at me.
“When you finish with those, take that tray to the dormitory and help the brothers serve them.” She marches back to her worktable.
The tray is huge and heavy. Constance helps me navigate it through the kitchen. I cross the bright courtyard, staggering under the weight of all that porridge, looking for a place to set it down for a
moment. There isn’t one. I keep going. At the dormitory for the sick, I have to kick the door open, and the tray sways dangerously.
A friar rushes to help, taking the tray from my hands and setting it down.
I watch the two friars in their brown robes move from bed to bed, delivering the bowls. Old people with slack, spotted skin lie feebly on some beds. In another, I see a little boy with twisted legs, his mother sitting beside him. Near them is a man with a cloth tied around his eyes. The brothers whisper words of comfort and encouragement to them all. One friar leans over to spoon porridge into the mouth of a woman who can’t move her arms. The other friar comes back to get more bowls. “You start in the next room,” he says, pointing me toward a door.
I stack five bowls on top of each other, the way the friar has done, praying that I won’t drop them, and walk carefully to the other room. Just through the door, there’s a place to set them down. As I do, the stack wobbles. As the top bowl falls, I reach out and catch it. Good thing Alice wasn’t here to see that.
Behind me, I hear a voice. “The little serving maid? Johanna?”
I stop. I can’t move, lest it be a dream.
“Is it you, Johanna?”
Slowly, I turn.
In the cot behind me, John Mouse leans back on his elbows, watching me.
john 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.
The Book of the Maidservant Page 16
