The Witch's Brat

by Rosemary Sutcliff

  Spring drew on towards summer, and on the Minster farm they got in the hay, and then the corn; and it was drawing on to the end of Lovel’s year as a novice, and the time for him to take his final vows.

  And then one day the Father Abbot sent for him again.

  Lovel hurriedly brushed himself down and straightened his habit, for there was no one in the Infirmary just then and he was back at his old work with Brother John in the physic garden; and went to answer the summons, rummaging in his mind as he went, for any misdeed, or duty left undone.

  But when he stood before the Father Abbot he realized with relief that it was not that kind of summons at all.

  The Father Abbot sat back in his great carved chair and looked at him consideringly down his great hooked nose. ‘My son, when our good Brother Rahere last came this way he asked my leave to take you from us, if you wished to go with him. I gather that he asked you, and that you refused.’

  ‘Brother Anselm was still in this life. I could not leave him, Father.’

  The Abbot nodded. ‘So if the thing returned to you again, you would go?’

  ‘Yes, Father Abbot.’

  ‘I thought so.’ The Abbot sat up. ‘This morning I received a letter from Rahere, asking that if you are free now and wish it, you should be allowed to join him.’

  ‘Where, Father?’ said Lovel. It was the only question that needed asking.

  ‘At a place just outside London Walls. Smithfield, they call it.’ The Abbot smiled. ‘He bids me tell you that if you ask for Smithfield where they hold the weekly horse-fair, anybody will tell you the way.’

  ‘I may go then, Father?’ Lovel said, wanting to get that clearly fixed amid the joyful confusion in his head.

  ‘My son, you are yet a novice, and free to go where or when you will, without my leave. Go with my blessing instead.’

  Three days later, Lovel stood outside the Minster gates; the first time, except for a few visits to the farm that he had passed through them in nearly eight years.

  He had the habit he stood up in, a little money that the Almoner had given him for the journey in his scrip, along with a barley loaf, and a sprig of rue from the physic garden; a stout ash staff to help his lame leg, and before him the long road to London.

  ‘Follow the road that goes that way, and don’t go branching off, and you’re safe to come to London Bridge in the end,’ Harding had told him. ‘But if you’d any sense in your head, you’d not be going. Valiant’ll miss you sore.’

  A surprising number of the Brothers and Monastery servants had seemed sorry that he was going, the Father Infirmarer among them; their ‘God speeds’ were still in his ears; and the loving thrust of Valiant’s muzzle still in his hand. Behind him in the shadow of the gate arch the Monastery gates stood open as they always did in the daytime; and for a moment he was within a hair’s breadth of turning back through them again, back from the strange world where men threw stones into the familiar sanctuary.

  But he knew that if he did that, he would have failed Rahere, and failed something deep within himself that men generally call their souls.

  He turned his face towards London and started walking.

  9

  The Beginning of a Dream

  THE ROAD TO London was white with the dust of August. It lay thick over the hedgerows, turning grass and bushes and the tattered, wayside tangle of ragwort and hardheads and yarrow to pale ghosts of themselves, and rose in choking clouds under the feet of the passers-by.

  There were many passers-by, coming and going, up to London and down to Winchester and the great seaport town beyond. A river of people, it had seemed to Lovel, often in the past, watching it flow by the Abbey gateway and sometimes come eddying in and out again. But then he had been safe, like someone standing on the bank and watching the river hurry by. Now he had let go his safety and pushed out into mid-stream, and he felt strange and frightened and a bit like a lost dog.

  So many people, and all with strangers’ faces . . . Even in the monasteries where he lodged each night, where the life was the kind he knew, the Brothers all had strangers’ faces; all eyes and mouths, like the people in the old evil dreams that had ended with stones whistling round his ears. Part of him longed for the quiet of the familiar cloisters, and the herbs growing in the physic garden that would surely not grow as well for anybody else as they had for him; and once or twice he was very near to turning back. But ahead of him was London, and Rahere who had whistled for him to come and help make an impossible dream come true. And that kept him going, day after weary day in the right direction.

  His leg made him a slow traveller, and once or twice he even had to lie up for a day to rest it before taking to the road again; and so it was Saint Bartholomew’s Eve, August almost turning into September, when he came at last to London Bridge.

  He was red-eyed and powdered thick with wayside dust, and his twisted foot had rubbed itself raw and bleeding under the chafing sandal strap; and the road from Winchester that had always seemed to him like a river, had become suddenly a river in roaring spate. He was shouldered to the wall by a knot of horsemen, and stood there for a while, watching the crowd go by, and trying to nerve himself to push out into it again. Merchants passed him with strings of packhorses; country folk bringing up farm stuff for the markets; a drover with a herd of lowing bullocks – they looked, Lovel thought, almost as tired and bewildered as himself, with strings of slime hanging from their soft muzzles; a knight in a leather hauberk freckled with rust spots from his mail; a pilgrim with scallop shells in his hat to show that he had been all the way to the shrine of Saint James at Compostella; a little wizened old woman in a horse litter with mounted servants riding before her to clear the way; beggars and craftsmen and men-at-arms, flocking into and out of London by the one narrow wooden bridge.

  Well, it was no good to stand here all day; the sun was well over towards the west, and he still had to find Smithfield. Lovel took a deep breath, tightened his hold on his staff, and plunged once more into the jammed and jostling throng.

  Soon he was out on the bridge, his footsteps and all those other footsteps turning hollow on the timber-way, and the whole bridge thrumming like a harp-string underfoot with the rush of the great river against its piers. He passed the little bridge chapel, dropping his toll penny into the hand of the wizened old Benedictine Brother in charge; and at last reached the other side, where the crowd thinned out again as it branched away into different streets.

  Lovel heaved a sigh of relief, and looked about for someone to tell him the way to Smithfield. There were people everywhere, but they all seemed in much too great a hurry to be able to tell anybody the way to anywhere. At last he found one citizen who did not seem to be going anywhere or doing anything special; a very fat man with a sprig of honeysuckle in his belt, propping up the front of a corn-chandler’s shop, and watching the gulls and the fisher-boats along the quayside as though he had all day to do it in, and all tomorrow too, if need be.

  ‘Smithfield is it?’ said the man. ‘Well now, if you follow Fish Street – that’s the steep one yonder – up the hill, and then turn off to the left along Candlewick Street to Paul’s Churchyard, pass the Folk Moot, and go down the Shambles, that’ll bring you to the New Gate. Look for the Church of Saint Sepulchre’s, just outside the City Walls, and take the turning to the right, just past it, and keep straight on for a bit, down the road, and if you haven’t had your throat cut by pickpurses, Reverend Brother, you’re there.’

  ‘I don’t think I’d be worth any pickpurse’s while,’ Lovel said, not quite sure whether to take one word of this seriously, and finding it hard to think straight, in so much noise and bustle.

  ‘You don’t know our pickpurses, you being, as I’d guess, from distant parts,’ said the fat man darkly. ‘No respect for the Church, they haven’t, and they’d strangle their own grandmothers for the price of her Sunday kerchief!’ And then, seeing Lovel’s tired and bewildered face, he dropped the joke, and said kindly enough, ‘If ’
twas me, when I got to New Gate I’d just look for a big crowd all going one way, and follow along. That way you can’t miss it.’

  ‘And this crowd – why would it be going to Smithfield?’ Lovel was finding it harder and harder to think straight. ‘I was told that the horse-market was on Saturdays, and surely this is only Wednesday?’

  ‘Wednesday as ever is,’ said the man reassuringly, now clearly deciding that Lovel was lacking in the head as well as all else. ‘They’d be going to Saint Bartholomew’s Fair. That’s a great new cloth-fair that the King has given leave to be held there. A three-day fair, and all the fair dues are going to help pay for building a hospital and a fine new priory for the good of the King’s soul! You just go along with the crowd, and you can’t miss it.’

  Lovel remembered Rahere saying that Henry was mean but devout, and he thought with a small warm flicker of laughter in the midst of all his weariness, that Rahere had used his vision well. He thanked the man, and was just turning away when the other was struck by an idea.

  ‘They’ve only just started building, as I hear; if it’s a miracle you’re wanting, best go back to where ever you came from, and wait a bit.’

  ‘There’s miracles and miracles,’ Lovel said, not knowing quite what he meant. ‘I think I’ll go on, all the same.’

  And he set off up the steep slope of Fish Street.

  He found the turning into Candlewick Street, and presently came out by a big church in an open space, that a man carrying a cadge of falcons told him was Saint Paul’s; and after that it wasn’t hard to find the Shambles by the smell of blood and the carcasses hanging everywhere outside the butchers’ stalls. Certainly by that time the crowd was growing thick again, and mostly heading one way. So he took the fat man’s advice, and simply went with the flow.

  He was so tired and hungry that everything had begun to seem like a dream, and the gable-ends of the tall houses that fronted the streets had become fantastic faces that watched him with windows for eyes. Then there was a gateway, like a dark, gaping throat, and then the houses dwindled and there was another church which he supposed vaguely must be Saint Sepulchre’s. And then at last, there was a glimpse of open country, with the shadows lying long and cool in the westering sunlight.

  But ahead of him there began to be a new buzz and hum and worry of sound; and suddenly, with marshy grass under his feet, Lovel found himself on the edge of what seemed to be another city. A city of painted wooden booths and many-coloured tents, all set out in streets, and the streets even more throng-full of people than the streets of London had been.

  Almost at once he was lost. Streets of cloth merchants melted into streets of shoemakers and leather merchants which faded in turn into a street of gold- and silver-smiths; and all around, in every bit of open space, were sellers of apples and gilt gingerbread, fortune-tellers, acrobats in spangled tights; once, a mangy bear, dancing sadly to the tune its keeper played on whistle-pipe. Lovel felt for it as a brother; it looked so sad and bewildered, and on its hind legs it was such a clumsy shape.

  Presently, without quite knowing how he got there, he came to the far edge of the fairground, and saw in front of him open space and evening light, sour grass churned up into mud underfoot, piles of stone and timber lying about, a cluster of wooden lodges with roofs of hurdles and reed-thatch, rough and shaggy as an old hill-ram’s fleece, and in the midst of all, the walls of a long building standing shoulder-high, raw with newness in the sunset light. And workmen everywhere, going about their jobs or leaning on their tools to watch other people working.

  The beginning of Rahere’s dream!

  Lovel stood and gazed, not knowing quite what to do next, and feeling a little like someone who has come home from a long journey but isn’t sure of the way in. Somewhere among those rough bothies he supposed that he would find Rahere; but suddenly it was more than he could do, to go forward and start the last bit of his search.

  And as he stood there, leaning on his staff, he heard a starling fluting close behind him, and for an instant he was back in the Nazareth Chamber at New Minster. He turned round clumsily, and there, with his black habit kilted up through his belt as he had used to wear his riding tunic, stood Rahere!

  Relief flooded over Lovel, and suddenly everything shone as it does when the sun breaks through a rift in the clouds on a wet day.

  ‘So you came,’ Rahere said.

  ‘Brother Anselm died the week after you were at the Abbey.’

  ‘And so it seemed good to you to follow when I whistled, after all.’

  ‘It seemed – very good,’ Lovel said; and then, ‘You know how greatly I wanted to, before; but I couldn’t leave Brother Anselm while he still needed me.’

  Around them, everything was a roaring many-coloured dream, but in the middle of the dream it was very quiet, and Lovel and Rahere stood and looked at each other, quite alone to themselves. Then Rahere reached out, the black sleeves of his habit falling back from his big bony hands, and touched the extreme tip of a long forefinger down on to each of Lovel’s shoulders, just as he had done that long ago stormy evening in the Nazareth Chamber.

  ‘You couldn’t leave Brother Anselm,’ he agreed. ‘What a ridiculous and contrariwise thing is the soul of man. If you could have left Brother Anselm – Oh, I would have taken you gladly for your skill with pills and poultices; but you can have no idea, Brother Brat, how disappointed I should have been!’

  And Lovel suddenly understood that the choice he had made, that early spring morning in the inner cloister, had indeed been a choice for life, but not the choice that he had thought it was.

  10

  Saint Bartholomew’s Hospital

  SMITHFIELD, ‘THE SMOOTH field’, was the open land between London Wall and the Fleet River. Beside the great Saturday horse-markets, it was used for games and horse-racing. Part of it was a market, where people brought in their cattle and sheep and pigs, and in another part of it, criminals were hanged. And it was all cut up by feet and hooves and wheels until it looked like a marsh. Not a very likely place to be building a priory and a hospital, seemingly; but under the mud and the sour trampled grass was good solid ground, and the water of the springs near the river was clean and pure.

  ‘Saint Bartholomew,’ Rahere said to Lovel the day after he arrived, ‘must have a quite remarkable eye for land.’

  Lovel did just wonder whether it was Saint Bartholomew who had the eye for land, or the Austin Canon who had once been the King’s Jongleur. But when he glanced round at the lean black crane-fly figure beside him, there was nothing in Rahere’s pale, bright eyes but reflected sunlight, as he cocked his head on one side and whistled companionably to a speckled starling gobbling crumbs where the workmen had eaten their midday meal.

  There were quite a lot of workmen on the hospital by now; mostly labourers and course-setters, and a few freemasons – skilled men who could trim up stone to a perfect fit and carve a chevron arch-moulding, and carried themselves as greater than other men accordingly. But beside these, there were men who had come in to help the work along, simply because Rahere wanted them. Rahere the Preacher could play on his hearers as Rahere the King’s Jongleur could play on his lute, and every time he went out to preach in some City church, men would come to him afterwards with offers of help, even if it was only a single day’s help that they could spare from their proper trade. And their proper trades were of every kind known to the City and the country around. Once there was even a pickpurse who remained honest for one whole day. Quite often there were young squires whose trade was simply that they were learning to be knights, who would strip off their good embroidered tunics and set to in their shirts and hose with the best will in the world.

  Those were the ones that drove Beornfred the master mason to the brink of distraction.

  ‘Have a little patience, my gentle flower of all master builders,’ Lovel heard Rahere saying to him one day. ‘Think how good it is for your soul as well as theirs.’

  ‘But they don’t know how
to lay a course,’ Beornfred had almost howled, his weather-burned face puckered like a baby’s when it is going to cry. ‘This wall, this whole fine hospital of yours is going to fall down if a cat breathes on it!’

  And Rahere had turned and laid one long finger experimentally against a squat stone buttress, and said in a tone as soothing as run honey, ‘It seems quite strong.’

  As the months went by, the new life folded itself round Lovel as once the old life had done. It was a life that centred, for him, and he thought for Rahere too, not so much in the cleared and levelled space marked out with stakes into the ground-pattern of the priory church that would rise there one day, but in the hospital house that was already taking shape nearby. The two long wards with the central hearth where they joined, and the little altar-chapel where the Master already held the daily Mass though there was no one yet to come to it except Lovel and sometimes a handful of workmen; and no roof but a few hurdles above the altar.

  The hospital house was stone built as the church would be, but round about it were low wattle-and-daub buildings (not very different, except that they were smaller, from the masons’ lodges), that would be kitchens and outhouses and the lodgings of the Master and Brothers one day. And on the one clear side of it, looking south towards the City Wall, Lovel had begun before he had been at Smithfield three days, to make his physic garden.

  Three old elder trees grew on that side of the hospital, and he took care to enclose them within the rough wattle fence that was to keep stray animals out; and as the months went by, with whatever help he could get, and often with no help at all, he cleared the scrub and dug the ground over so that the frost could get at it later. Already, in his head, he saw his garden laid out in neat plots with narrow paths between, stocked and beautiful with all the herbs and simples that he had tended with Brother John in the physic garden at New Minster. Foxglove and celandine, comfrey and rue . . . Already in a few carefully prepared patches, he had plants and cuttings coming on – presents from other monastery gardens, to be nursed through the winter under straw, and wild things from field and wood and hedgerow of the country round. One of the very first herbs he planted, with an apologetic thought towards Brother John, was the pinkish-white yarrow that he found beside the track to Clerkenwell. Nothing that was so good for an inflamed wound could belong to the Devil, he was quite sure, whatever Brother John had said; but to be on the safe side, he recited one of his grandmother’s herb-gathering charms over it, as he carefully loosened the earth from round the roots: