The Witch's Brat Read online

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Foreword

  1. ‘Drive him out!’

  2. Westward with the Sun

  3. New Minster

  4. The King’s Jongleur

  5. Valiant

  6. The Novice

  7. The King and the Begging Bowl

  8. The Road to London

  9. The Beginning of a Dream

  10. Saint Bartholomew’s Hospital

  11. The Promise

  12. Nick Redpoll

  13. Carved Angels

  14. The Miracle

  About the Author

  Also by Rosemary Sutcliff

  Copyright

  About the Book

  The Abbey of New Minster means safety to Lovel. It is the reign of Henry I in England, and the monks protect Lovel from the people who think that, because of his crooked back and healing skills, he must be a witch. And, he has nowhere else to go.

  Then he meets Rahere, the King’s Jester, in the abbey – and makes a bargain that will take Lovel to London, to establish a life of his own at the great hospital of St Bartholomew.

  The Witch’s Brat

  Rosemary Sutcliff

  For Margaret

  FOREWORD

  Lovel and most of the other people in this story are imaginary. But Rahere, the King’s Jongleur who founded a great hospital, was a real person; and you can visit his tomb in the Church of Saint Bartholomew the Great, in Smithfield, today. His figure lies there carved in stone, in the dress of an Austin Canon, and at his head and feet kneel two small figures in the same dress, reading from Latin Bibles:

  ‘For the Lord shall comfort Zion: he will comfort all her waste places; and he will make her wilderness like Eden, and her desert like the garden of the Lord; joy and gladness shall be found therein, thanksgiving, and the voice of melody.’

  1

  ‘Drive him out!’

  THE BOY CAME stumbling down between the two big outfields of the village, on his way back from taking Gyrth the shepherd his supper. It was October, and soon Gyrth would be bringing the sheep down from the summer pasture; but at this time of year, when the rams were running with the ewes, he stayed up on the Downs with the flock whole days and nights together. It had rained in the early morning, and the steep rutted chalk of the driftway was slippery, so that anybody would have to go carefully; but the boy, Lovel, had to go more carefully than most, because he was built crooked, with a hunched shoulder and a twisted leg that made him walk lop-sided like a bird with a broken wing. His bony face under the thatch of dusty dark hair was quick and eager and wanted to be friendly; but nobody had ever bothered to notice his face; unless perhaps it was his grandmother, and she had died a week ago.

  From the top stretch of the driftway the village was hidden by the shoulder of the Downs, but as one rounded the corner by the hawthorn windbreak, rusty-red now with berries that the thrushes loved, suddenly there it was below in the valley. The one long street with the villeins’ cottages on either side, the field-strips where Osric was sowing the winter wheat, and at the far end where the ground rose a little, the thatched timber hall of Sir Richard d’Eresby, the Lord of the Manor, among its byres and barns and apple-trees, its bee-skeps and its great dovecot. And village and knight’s hall alike all softly hazed over by the blue smoke of evening cooking-fires hanging low in the autumn air.

  Lovel checked and stood looking down, picking out from the rest, where it stood a little apart among the streamside alders, the turf-roofed bothy where he had lived with his grandmother all the eleven years since he came into the world and his mother went out of it. With his father, too; but his father had died last year of the spring sickness that came often after a bad winter and was sometimes stronger even than his grandmother’s medicine herbs.

  After that, by the usual laws of the Manor, his grandmother should have been turned out of the cottage to make room for another villein and his family; but she had been nurse and foster-mother to the old Lord’s son, him that had died when the English charged at Tenchbrai, and so she had been allowed to stay on.

  Lovel dug the kale patch and looked after Garland the cow, and helped his grandmother gather her hedgerow samples and tend the little herb plot behind the cottage. And people brought her things, a hatful of apples or a new baked loaf, in payment for charming away their warts or telling them where to find their strayed cattle, for a pot of green wound-salve (there was no better in all West Sussex) or a nosegay of certain scented herbs gathered at New Moon, which, if a girl wore it tucked into the breast of her gown, would make the lad she wanted look in her direction. So what with one thing and another, she and Lovel had never gone hungry. Not too hungry, anyway.

  Lovel looked away from the little humped tawny roof among the alder trees, that was home no more. He lived with Gyrth’s wife and children now; Sir Richard’s bailiff had arranged it, giving them the cow in payment. Gyrth’s wife had welcomed the cow, but not Lovel; and she had made it painfully clear that she only gave him house-room because she had to. ‘Well,’ Lovel thought, ‘she’s kind to Garland, anyway.’ And that was something. It seemed to him just then that there was not much kindness in the world, and he was glad that Garland should have some of it.

  A late yellow butterfly hovering past caught at his attention, and he watched it dance downward and settle on a dusty stem of Shepherd’s Purse beside the way. And for a sort of gleam of time, he seemed to see it not only with his eyes but with all of himself, the delicate veining of the yellow wings that quivered and half closed and fanned open again, the dark velvety nap on the butterfly’s slender body, the grey-green, heartshaped seedpods of the Shepherd’s Purse, stirring in the stray breath of wind, sharing with the butterfly the last warmth of the autumn sun; and the shadow of both tangled in the fieldside grass. Part of him longed to catch the butterfly, to hold it very carefully prisoned in his cupped hands and feel the life of it there and the flutter of its wings against his hollowed palms, as though in that way he could keep the small, shining moment from escaping. He had tried that once, when he was much younger, but the butterfly had turned broken and dead in his hands, and he had killed the moment and the shine and the beauty instead of keeping it; and been left with nothing but an empty feeling of desolation in his stomach because he could not mend the butterfly again. His grandmother had found him with the tiny, pitiful, broken thing in his hand, and he had not told her anything, not anything at all; but she had taken his face between her harsh, withered old hands and looked far down into him in the queer way she had that made her not quite like other people, and said, ‘So you have it too. Throw this one away now, it’s no good grieving, and not even I can mend a broken butterfly. But one day you will mend other things. You will be one of the menders of this world; not the makers, nor yet the breakers, just one of the menders.’ And then she had laughed and said, ‘It’s no good bidding you to remember that. Five’s too little to be remembering such things; but when the time comes, you’ll know.’ And she had given him a piece of honeycomb in his supper bowl of barley stirabout.

  It was after that that she had started taking him with her when she went to gather simples, explaining to him the uses of the different herbs.

  The yellow butterfly had taken to the air again, and went dancing and zigzagging off across the outfield. The moment was over. And Lovel turned back to the village. It was still the same village that he had known all his life, but it had put oh a stranger’s face, and he had to take a small sharp pull at his courage before he could go on down the driftway.

  There were people about in the street when he reached it, for it was almost sunset, and men were coming home from their work in t
he field-strips or in the Lord’s demesne fields, to the kale broth and brown rye-bread that the women would have ready for them.

  There would be kale broth and rye-bread for him too, in Gyrth’s cottage, but no homecoming. And as he drew nearer, he walked slower and slower still, knowing that he would get into trouble anyway for being so long away, and might as well get into a bit more while he was about it. Wulfgar the hayward had a lean cow tethered on the bit of rough ground beside his cottage, and Lovel stopped to stare at it, partly because that would put off getting back to Gyrth’s cottage a few moments longer. He thought it didn’t look well, and wondered if it had eaten something in the grass that was harming it. His grandmother would have known. . . . He was staring at the cow and wondering, when the hayward’s wife stuck her head out of the door and shouted at him, ‘Get away with you! Off, or I’ll call my man!’

  And it was at that moment that the bad thing began to happen, and the world became suddenly not merely strange, but terrible, like a nightmare.

  ‘I wasn’t doing any harm,’ Lovel said.

  The woman’s face was red-angry and at the same time oddly afraid. ‘No harm?’ she shrilled. ‘No harm? Didn’t you come by and stand staring at her three days since? And wasn’t she fine and hearty then? Now look at her!’

  ‘I think she’s eaten something,’ said Lovel, scared of the woman’s shrilling voice but standing his ground.

  ‘Eaten something, say you? What’s she eaten but good sweet grass? I’ll tell you what’s amiss with her – I’ll—’

  The hayward appeared in the doorway behind her, munching a crust thick with ewe-milk cheese, to see what all the noise was about; some men on their way home to supper stopped and drew closer, women and children began to appear from the nearest cottages.

  ‘What is it, then?’ somebody asked.

  ‘’Tis the witch’s brat, staring at our cow again! Only three days since, she was well enough; and there he was a-staring and a-staring at her, and now look at her – no more nor skin and bones!’

  ‘Happen he’s put the Evil Eye on her,’ somebody suggested.

  And others nodded their heads in agreement, ‘Surely.’

  And then somebody said, ‘Drive him out, the misshapen imp!’

  Lovel saw their faces, more faces every moment, angry and stupid and afraid. And then everything seemed to go very small and clear and distant; and he felt as though he wasn’t inside himself at all, but standing aside and watching, and understanding in a cold, far-off, sick sort of way exactly what was happening.

  Because his grandmother had had the Wisecraft, the old Wisdom, and the old skills, they had come to her, all these people, when they had the toothache or a cow was sick or the butter wouldn’t ‘come’ in the chum. But because they did not understand her wisdom or her skills, they had been afraid of her, too. And they had looked at Lovel himself sideways because he was her grandson and because he was crooked, and for them the two things were linkedtogether. So now that she was dead, they were letting loose on him the fear that they had felt for her.

  Someone held out a hand towards him and made the sign of the Horns with his fingers to divert ill-luck.

  It was when he saw that they were afraid, that Lovel began to be really afraid, too. The faces crowded nearer. They had open mouths shouting at him to get out and take his Evil Eye with him. They were all mouths and eyes. And then a boy took up a stone from the road and threw it. It grazed his chin and drew blood; and suddenly there was a shower of stones flying round his head; and Lovel was back inside himself again, and not thinking any more but only terrified. And he turned and ran as best he could, stumbling on his lame leg, with the stones whistling past his ears; a small, driven animal with the terror of the hunt upon him.

  A few of the boys followed him to the edge of the village, and threw a parting scatter of stones and earth clods after him. One of them hit him on the shoulder and brought him down; but he struggled up again and ran on, panting and sobbing, making like a hunted wild thing for the cover of the trees; and fell at last, full-length, on the woodshore where the Wealden Forest ended in a scrub of hazel and elder and brambles at the edge of the cultivated land.

  He lay quite still on his face, shuddering from head to foot, snatching at his breath, and listening, above the drumming of his heart, for any sound of the hunt behind him. But there was no sound except the brushing of a little wind through the branches, and somewhere the cry of an early hunting owl.

  And presently he struggled to his feet again, aching and bruised from head to foot, and dragged himself farther in among the trees. He had never been in the forest at night before. Only the bravest of the village folk would set foot among the trees between Owl Hoot and Cock Crow, for fear of the Things that lurked there. But he was not afraid, not anymore, of anything among the trees; he knew now that the forest was kinder than men. Men were the only thing one really had to be afraid of.

  A hollow under the roots of an ancient, slant-driven oak tree offered him shelter; and he crawled in and lay down, pressed close against the living strength of the tree, and slept.

  2

  Westward with the Sun

  WHEN THE LANCES of the autumn sunrise slanted through the night mist among the trees Lovel woke. He lay for a few moments wondering why he ached so much, and how he came to be there; and then he remembered, and panic began to whimper up in him. He dragged himself out of his cave of tree roots, and got to his feet again, looking round as though he expected to see his hunters come crashing through the undergrowth. He must get farther away – farther away from that dreadful village, so far that nobody would ever find him again. And then? He didn’t know; he thought maybe the simplest thing would be just to lie down somewhere and die. But not yet, not until he was safe from the village.

  He hadn’t anything to gather up or any food to eat, so he just started walking. It was hard going in the forest, with tree roots to trip him, and soft patches where old fallen trunks had turned to tinder that looked solid until one trod on it and broke through. Low-hanging branches whipped his face, brambles caught at his old russet tunic and tried to hold him back. The forest was a less friendly place today than it had been last night; but he never thought of turning back. He struggled on until the trees began to thin and it looked as though he might be coming to a clearing, perhaps another village; a village would mean men. He must go carefully. He wanted no more to do with men.

  But when the big trees gave place to the usual woodshore tangle of hazel and hawthorn and wayfaring trees, he saw in front of him not a clearing or a village but a great slow lift of turf that swept up and up in rounded masses and bush-filled hollows, until, far above him, it made huge, patient, whale-backed shapes against the sky. The Downs again, but not the Downs that he knew around his old home. Those Downs were broken up into islands and great turf-hills and hummocks, with the forest running everywhere between; these were a single wave-break of turf running, so far as he could see, from the sunrise to the sunset.

  Born and bred in the Down country as he was, it seemed natural to him to follow the Downs now. But which way? ‘Always go with the sun,’ his grandmother had told him once, stirring some herb brew over the fire. ‘Against the sun, that is widdershins, that is for the Black Magic. Always with the sun.’ She had meant stirring the brew; but her words came back to Lovel now and seemed to have another meaning. So he went westward, with the sun.

  He had forgotten about lying down and dying; something seemed to keep him on his feet and moving on. He lay down when it grew dark each evening, but always dragged himself up again when the light came back. He lived on hedge-nuts and brambles; and once when he was very near starving, he came close to a village and found a hen laying abroad, and sucked the warm eggs from her nest. But how many times he lay down, or how many times he dragged his aching body up again, he never knew, any more than he knew where he was going. He was not thinking very clearly; he only knew that he was going with the sun.

  Gradually as he went, the Dow
ns were changing, growing broader and more shallow, with great wooded valleys and low grazing land and river-meadows breaking through; and still he moved westward, making wide loops to avoid villages of men who would throw stones, casting up and down streamsides to find pack-bridges or the shallow places where the cattle crossed; but still he kept moving westward, along the run of the Downs. If the weather had broken he would have died, but day after day passed quiet and almost warm like Saint Martin’s summer. All the same, though he did not know it, he was growing weaker, covering less distance every day.

  On the last day he covered little more than a mile and everything round him seemed to shift and change like a dream. That evening the weather broke, and the wind rose, and fine cold rain came blowing in from the west, driving him down for shelter into the valley woods. Only a narrow strip of forest before the trees fell back on the edge of cultivated land; but he did not turn back into the forest depths as he would have done a few days ago, but crept nearer and nearer to the edge of the trees, remembering vaguely the warmth of hens’ eggs and hoping for another nest. And then, through the trees on the very edge of the open land he saw the red flicker of firelight and smelled the warm, companionable smell of pigs.

  Not really knowing what he did, but drawn by the promise of warmth and the companionable smell, he gathered up the last of his strength, and stumbled towards the red flicker through the trees.

  A dog began to bark furiously, and two lean hairy bodies came leaping towards him; and then he was on his back, held down by a dog’s paws – a wolf’s paws? – on his chest, and its muzzle was snarling over him, lips curled back over long white teeth; and beyond that one, another ready to fly at his throat. He heard a man’s shout, and footsteps crashing through the undergrowth; the dogs were thrust aside – dogs, then, not wolves – and a man was bending over him, hands on knees.