Free The Book of the Maidservant by Rebecca Barnhouse

feet.
    I look wildly behind me, but I don’t see the mercenaries. My breath comes fast and sharp. Bartilmew holds my arms, as if he were calming a bucking horse. Then, carefully, he takes the knife from my hand. Without a word, he wipes the blood on the bottom of his boot.
    Blood?
    The mercenary’s blood.
    I shudder.
    Father Nicholas and the merchant, Dame Isabel and Petrus are all staring at me. Never in my life did I think I would be glad to see Petrus Tappester.
    Bartilmew hands me my knife back, then steps to his mistress’s side.
    Where is
my
mistress?
    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 thehand 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 myPaternoster 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