Free The Book of the Maidservant by Rebecca Barnhouse Page B

speaks to her. Finally, ducking my head submissively, I break in to say, “Beg pardon, Dame Margery, we’re going now.”
    She looks down at me as if she doesn’t recognize me. “Go along. Father Geoffrey will see me back to the hospice.”
    She turns her back and walks away.

w here are the others? While I’ve been waiting for my mistress, they’ve gone on without me. There are so many people in the cathedral, all I can see are people’s backs. I scan the crowds, but it’s so dark in the cathedral that I can’t find anyone I know. If I get lost here, I’ll never find my way back to the hospice. A knot of fear seizes my stomach.
    Then I see Bartilmew glance back, candle flame lighting his face. Pushing my way past priests and pilgrims, I run to catch up with the group. As I come alongside Bartilmew, he gives me a nod.
    On the way back to the hospice, we pass the university district, where narrow streets of mud run past booksellers’ shops and wine merchants and taverns, where sly-looking women in low-cut bodices leer at Petrus and Bartilmew. A man goes by pushing a cart with a little oven in it. Black-robed students crowd around him like ants to buy meat pies. My mouth waters at the aroma, and I wish I had coins of my own.
    Outside one tavern, students form a circle, somestanding, some sitting on stools. They crowd around a table where one student lies on his back while another pours wine from a flask into his mouth. The crowd chants something. The chanting grows louder and faster, and some of the students begin pounding on the table in time with the words.
    I stand watching until Bartilmew tugs at my cloak. “A drinking game,” he says, disapproval in his voice as he hurries me along to catch up with the others.
    The students cheer loudly, and I turn back to watch. The drinker has just stumbled up from the table when Bartilmew jerks my arm and pulls me out of the way—a stream of muddy brown liquid splashes into the street. I look up to see a woman emptying a pot from an upstairs window.
    I’m shocked. In Lynn, we never emptied the night bucket from the windows. We always carried it to the street, and sometimes I even took it all the way to the ditch in the middle of the street. People in Cologne aren’t very clean.
    Around a corner, we come upon another group of students. One of them stands on a little platform speaking, and others listen to him, scowling in concentration or whispering to each other. I can’t understand a word—it’s all in Latin, just like the Mass is—so I look at the students. Filthy, unkempt boys in filthy, ill-mended gowns, they seem to me. I try to find John Mouse in the crowd, but I don’t see him.
    We go through narrow passageways under banners of laundry that flutter between buildings. We pass the river,and I look across it, thinking of the mercenaries. When we go down one street, two men shout at each other from the upstairs windows on opposite sides of the street.
    I don’t know how the others know where we are, but when we turn a corner, there’s the hospice.
    I plop down on a bench inside. It feels so good to sit for a change. I lean my head back and close my eyes.
    When I open them, Dame Isabel is standing in front of me. She plucks all the hair off her forehead and eyebrows, the way a gentlewoman does, even though her husband is a wool merchant—no gentleman at all. With her hair pulled back so severely beneath her veil, her eyes turn up at the corners, giving her a pained, catlike look.
    “These need washing,” she says, dropping a bundle of clothes on the bench beside me and walking away.
    Petrus sees what she has done and says, “Mine, too.” He disappears and comes back with more clothes, which he drops on top of Dame Isabel’s pile.
    They expect me to wash their clothes? I’m already cooking for them. Isn’t that enough?
    I close my eyes again. The hospice disappears, along with the clothes, the cooking, my mistress’s weeping. I’m back in the kitchen in