12 YEARS OLD GIRL
It was the year 1451 AD. The twelve-year-old Waltraud sat in her room on a footstool. A maid was plaiting her long straw-coloured hair. Waltraud was swinging her legs impatiently and rocking her upper body. The maid answered by pulling a bit too hard at the ribbons. The mass would soon be starting; in fact the bells had been calling people for quite a while. Here and there doors to the merchants’ houses were slowly opening, people were sliding in to the street, meeting their friends and moving towards the church. Dressed in a heavy fur coat Waltraud hurried behind her parents the best she could, although her leather shoes were slippery on the frozen cobblestone pavement. She held tightly on to Elseby’s hand so she wouldn’t slip. Her father occasionally paused to consult other fur-capped and loud men whose belts tingled with gold and silver and whose fat bellies shook with laughter. Waltraud glanced at the men shyly under her eyebrows: " Was that big-nosed man going to be her new groom… or was it the other one, the taciturn one who was awfully thin?" Elseby, three years her senior and already engaged teased her little sister. She argued that Waltraud would die an old maid and so it was best for her to enter a convent!
Waltraud remembered all too well the dreadful fight which arose when Wolf Von Göttingen, supposedly a nobleman from Lübeck, with whom she was almost engaged to, had turned out to be a fraud. Her father had been furious and thrown Wolf along with his spokesman out the door that instant and to make his point clear he had thrown a table after them.
On the stairs of the church Klaus Trapp, a merchant and a widower, bowed down towards Waltraud and patted her gently on the shoulder. And so Waltraud understood. That was why Klaus had spent the evening with her father and that was why they had drunk toasts and clapped each other on the shoulder like brothers! Waltraud was not able to hide her joy, but whispered to her friend Valborg Trapp: "Guess what Valborg! Soon we will be able to play together as much as we want to for I will be your father’s new bride."
LINKS
Children in the Middle Ages
