The Book of the Maidservant by Rebecca Barnhouse Read Free Book Online

the weight of my pack. But my feet will never get used to my boots. The blisters they’ve caused now have blisters of their own. I tear little strips of cloth from the bottom of my shift and wrap them around mytoes. Sometimes it helps. But my shift is getting shorter just when I need it for warmth.
    Three days pass, or maybe four. One night, dusk overtakes us when we’re nowhere near a village or even a farm, and we have to sleep under the stars. This sounds like fun until I’m trying to start a fire. It’s nothing like blowing a banked kitchen fire back to life of a morning—instead, I have to make a flame from nothing. I’ve found enough wood and kindling, but no matter how hard I hit my metal strike-a-light against my flint, I can’t get a spark. Twice I cut myself on the sharp flint and have to suck the blood off my thumb.
    I look up to see Bartilmew watching me. He comes over, takes the flint and metal from my hands, and holds them up so I can see. “Fast, not hard,” he says, and hits them together. A spark leaps to the char-cloth, lighting it, and before I know it, Bartilmew has a fire burning.
    After we’ve eaten and I’m cleaning up, the priest tells a story about the time he saw a bishop exorcise a boy who was possessed by a demon. I glance at Petrus Tappester, but he doesn’t say anything, just picks at his teeth with a dirty fingernail.
    “What did the demon look like?” Dame Isabel’s husband asks, placing a protective hand on his wife’s arm. She shakes it away irritably.
    “It was about this big,” Father Nicholas says, measuring a span with his thumb and fingers. “With wings like a bat’s and a tail as long as its body.”
    “What happened to it?” Thomas asks.
    “It flew right out of the little boy’s mouth and perchedon his shoulder. Then the bishop sprinkled holy water on it, and the demon vanished in the blink of an eye.”
    “What about the little boy?” Dame Isabel keeps her eyes on John Mouse, who is stretched out against a tree, his arms folded behind his head, his long legs crossed.
    “When the demon disappeared, the boy started laughing,” Father Nicholas says, “because the Holy Spirit filled up the place where the demon had been.”
    “Our Lord is ever merciful,” my mistress says.
    Petrus Tappester kicks at a stone and walks out of the firelight. I watch the shadows the flames cast on his face and bald pate. I can’t imagine the Holy Spirit ever filling him, but it would be fun to see the demon leaving his body.
    Long into the night, when I’m lying on the ground with rocks biting into my back, images of Petrus’s demon haunt me. Does anybody besides me know it’s inside him? I shudder and pull my blanket up over my face. I’ll never sleep.
    But when the sky begins to grow light and the birds begin to call from the fields, I wake up and realize that I have slept, after all.
    Late the next afternoon, we come to a town as big as Lynn with a hospice for travelers. Everybody else is as tired as I am, and we crowd through the door.
    I slide the pack from my shoulders with a sigh of relief and lower myself to a bench. My break doesn’t last very long.
    The hospice has a buttery for travelers to use, and themerchant brings me two rabbits and a handful of carrots and onions he has bought.
    “You’ve got a pot. Cook these up for everybody,” he says, plumping them down in front of me. I look at my mistress, but she’s disappearing through the door, off to find a church where she can hear evensong.
    In the buttery, I stare at the bloody brown fur of the dead rabbits. Cook has always done this, and before her, Rose. I don’t know how to skin a rabbit.
    A man who is preparing his own meal takes pity on me and shows me what to do. “Squirrels are easier,” he says. “Just step on the tail and pull the body out.”
    When he has to show me how to cook the rabbits, too, he begins to lose his patience. “After you put in the turnips, boil it as long as it takes to say