Free The Book of the Maidservant by Rebecca Barnhouse Page A

of St. Margaret’s church rose as high as a building could. On market days, more people crowded the square than ants in an anthill, all dashing about, calling to each other, buying and selling, carrying baskets of vegetables and hens, loaves of bread, bolts of wool, pies and apples, cod and carrots. Never did I think there could be so many people.
    Until I came to Cologne.
    I’m not the only one who is impressed. Even Petrus Tappester keeps pointing and saying, “Look at that!”
    When we get near the cathedral, we can see the scaffolding covering one side, a pile of stones and rubble below it. A few men sit in the scaffolding, but none of them seems to be working.
    As we get nearer, I look up at the walls. They reach so high they make me dizzy. Carved figures gaze grandly down, and we try to identify our favorite saints by their symbols. In a stained-glass window in St. Margaret’s backin Lynn, the saint holds a book and stands atop a winged dragon. We walk all the way around the cathedral, dodging legless beggars and friars and men who want to sell us pilgrim badges, stepping over muddy ditches and piles of stones and piles of dung, but I can’t find St. Margaret. Nor do I see St. Guthlac of the Fens or his sister, St. Pega. I can’t even find St. Audrey. I am in a strange and foreign place if they don’t even know my saints here.
    Then I see St. Michael looking solemnly down at me, his scales in one hand, and I feel safer.
    A glint on the ground catches my eye, and I reach for what looks like a little piece of sky fallen to the earth. It’s a blue glass bead. I wipe the mud off it and let it catch the sun.
    “What do I do with it?” I ask Bartilmew, who is standing beside me.
    We look around, but no one seems to have lost anything.
    “Keep it,” he says.
    “Are you sure?”
    He nods and I slip the bead into my scrip, where I can hear it clinking against Cook’s metal cross and the pebble Rose gave me.
    Around the corner, on the broad cathedral steps, a one-armed boy with a rag tied around his eyes calls for alms in a reedy voice. Beside him, a man in a ragged tunic points out the Paternoster beads and souvenirs he has placed on a cloth spread on the ground, his voice competing with the boy’s. Two smiling jugglers keep eight red and black balls in the air between them, joking loudly to each other, until apriest comes out of the cathedral and shoos them away. I want to follow and watch their merry fun until one of them darts a sharp eye at me and holds out his cap for coins. When I shake my head at him and show my empty hands, he scowls and makes as if to rush at me.
    My heart is still pounding as we walk through the huge door and into the cathedral.
    I blink in the dimness. Candles flicker behind massive stone columns. I stumble over a woman who kneels in prayer, then follow the crowd forward. Like us, they’ve come to see the shrine of the Three Kings.
    A deacon points people to a place behind the high altar, and we join the line of pilgrims shuffling around the shrine. It looks like a little golden church with tiny people carved into its sides, just the way statues surround this cathedral. Father Nicholas points out figures of the Virgin and Child and the emperor, who kneels to them. The emperor of what? I thought there were only the king and the Pope and then God.
    When I stop to peer at the emperor, someone steps on my heel, so I have to move on. Once we’ve passed the shrine, we come to a little stall, right there in the cathedral, selling souvenirs. Everyone in our company buys a metal badge with the Three Kings’ heads on it to sew on their leather pilgrims’ hats. Everyone except Bartilmew and me. We have no money, but neither do we have hats.
    As we prepare to leave, I look around for my mistress. She is speaking English to a priest, who nods and smiles at her. I stand beside them, waiting for her, but she has launched into a long story—one I’ve heard many atime—about the way the Lord