I had fourteen years when my father died. When I think of him I shall ever remember him in his professor’s robes, not at the University where I was forbidden to go, but at home in the evening, still breathless from his walk. He would sit by the fire and drink the hot cider I had fetched him, and he would speak to me of his day’s lessons as if his body were not big enough to hold all the words. With a rapture like a saint’s upon his face he would tell me of rhetoric and the theory of music, and I would stay up so late to listen to him that I often slept long past dawn. But this was not noticed, for I had no nurse or servant to help me keep my father’s small house, and my mother was dead in the bearing of me.

When I think of my father’s house I must also think of his neighbor, Master Mounk, who taught arithmetic and geometry at the University. Master Mounk had a son, William, who is of an age with me. William Mounk gave me never a moment’s peace.

“I shall go to the University one day,” he would chant, following me down the street as he returned from his grammar school and I carried home the goods I bought at market. Did he ever help me carry them? “I’m going and you’re not!”

“How will you go to the University?” I asked him. “Your Latin is no good at all.” For I had heard him reciting his grammar through my window, and it was terrible. I had learned better by hearing my father prepare his lessons.

“My father knows math,” William would brag, though it did not follow logic at all. Those who have no virtues must boast of whatever they can.

“So do I,” I answered him, “and you do not!” This usually gained me a smack about the head, or he would upset my armful of goods and scatter them in the street. Those passing by or looking down on the street from their windows would chide him for his bad manners and he would run off, but never did he forget the insult, which was worse because it came from a girl.

So it was that William Mounk shadowed the days after my father’s burial. My father died in June, when the weather turned warm and people came out of their dreary wooden houses to visit each other and walk in the square. I remained in my house putting my father’s books in stacks. My cousins, another branch of my father’s family, had long been burgesses of Aberdeen, and I knew the house would soon be shut up and I would be sent to my nearest relatives, my aunt and uncle in Edinburgh. When I heard a knock at the door I jumped, certain it was the burgess coming to turn me out. But it was Master Mounk, carrying a package.

“You should come out, Jonete,” he said, and opened the package. His wife was a fine seamstress and she had made a gown as a present to me. It was in the English style, velvet and very fashionable, such as women in the great cities in the lowlands wore. “Today is the feast of Corpus Christi, and you shall miss the pageant.” So I changed my bodice and kirtle for the velvet gown, and Master Mounk led me out into the street.

Our pageants in Aberdeen are not so grand as those I have heard of in York or Wakefield. We are a university town and have not so many guilds, and it is the guilds that perform the plays. I went into the square and watched the wagons roll past, each performing their play as the pageant went through town. It was a feast day and all the people were out in their finery in the spring sun. This warmth began to lift my spirits; though saddened yet by the loss of my father, I now wished to see what the new day would bring.

It brought the voice of William Mounk. “Look at this! Is that a girl in that fancy dress? She looks like a stick! In breeches she’d look like a boy!”

I ran from the square. The players on the wagon noted my flight and improvised dialogue to speak of it in their play, turning me into comedy. As I look back on it I laugh as well. Little did William know how his words were to inspire me.