The Witch's Brat Read online

  Lovel nodded. He saw the harness that had just been taken off and hung up over the manger; not the harness of a knight’s horse, surely, for it was hung with little bells. ‘Who is it?’ he asked.

  ‘Our guest? Why, it’s Rahere.’

  ‘Rahere?’

  ‘Oh o’course, you wouldn’t know him; he’s not been here-along since well before your time. Rahere, the King’s Jongleur. Well they do say he’s more of a minstrel, really; that’s higher ranking, like. And there’s some say he’s just a natural born fool with a gift for making the King laugh. But if you was to ask me, he has too fine a taste in horse-flesh to be any kind of fool.’

  And he returned to hissing through his teeth and rubbing away at the damp, gleaming chestnut flanks with his whisps of hay.

  Lovell went and got the logs; as many as he could carry piled up under his chin. Jehan still had the carry cloth, so that would have to do. Then he set out once more for the lit window of the Nazareth Chamber.

  Again Jehan met him in the doorway. ‘What d’you think you’re up to? You’ve been all night, Humpy!’ And then without waiting for an answer, ‘All right, give me the logs and get back to the kitchen.’

  Lovel started to protest. He had had all the work of fetching the wood, and now he was to be robbed of his sight of the King’s Jongleur. ‘The King’s Jongleur’, the words were singing themselves over in his head. They never let him see or do anything interesting! But Jehan had already grabbed the logs from him and slammed the heavy door in his face.

  Standing there in the dark and the sleet, face to face with the blank uncaring door-timbers, a sudden fire of revolt rose in Lovel’s chest, and all at once it mattered more than anything else in the world that he should see this Rahere, this King’s Jongleur. In some queer way that he did not understand and certainly had no time to think out, it was as though if he did not, he would be accepting doors slammed in his face all the rest of his life.

  He had enough sense left to know that if he simply pushed the door open again, and went in, he would only run slap into Jehan and get his head half knocked off and be kicked outside again before he got so much as a glimpse of this Rahere. So he tried the lighted window; but the deep embrasure was too high above his head, and he could find no way of pulling himself up to it. It would have to be the door – but not until Jehan had gone. He slipped into the angle behind a buttress, and squatted down. It was not a very good hiding-place, but it was almost full dark now, and anyone passing would be in a hurry and have their heads tucked well down against the sleet.

  It was bitterly cold and he began to shiver from head to foot, but luckily he had not long to wait before the door opened and shut again, and Jehan came out, jingling coins in his hand, and disappeared into the kitchen buildings. Now! If he was going to do it at all he must do it now, before other people came with water for the guest to wash his hands or linen for the table. Any moment they might come! Lovel stumbled out from his hiding-place to the guest-lodging door; opened it and slipped inside, and managed to get it shut again without letting it bang in the wind.

  After the storm outside it seemed very warm and still and quiet. A torch burning in a wall sconce showed him three or four steps on his right leading down to a kind of undercroft; and on his left, several more leading up into a narrow slipway. And just where the slipway lost itself in darkness, the door of the Nazareth Chamber stood ajar, letting out a broad stripe of torchlight to paint itself on the opposite wall. Letting out also the chattering and whistling and soft fluting notes of a starling. Rahere must have a tame bird in there; and as Lovel checked, looking and listening, a long-legged fantastic shadow flickered across the torchlight on the wall, and was gone.

  Lovel was suddenly frightened. It all seemed like the beginning of a dream; and you never could tell with dreams. But he never thought of turning back. He crept up the steps and reached the door without a sound, and poked his head far enough round it to squint into the room with one eye.

  He could see the end of a bed hung with dark-coloured stuff; a wet, fur-lined cloak flung across it, and a cap with a battered bunch of game-cock’s feathers held by a jewelled clasp. Edging in a little farther he saw an unstrapped pack spilling a pair of shoes with fashionably curled toes and sundry other garments on the floor. And a pair of sleet-sodden riding-boots standing beside the central hearth. The starling was still whistling, but it and the King’s Jongleur were both hidden from him by the edge of the door. He pushed it open a little farther, and then just the breadth of a thumb-nail farther still.

  The King’s Jongleur stood in the window embrasure, looking out into the stormy dark where there could not possibly be anything to see but the black-and-trickling-silver beyond the reflected torches, and whistling like a starling under the eaves.

  4

  The King’s Jongleur

  RAHERE’S BACK WAS long and lanky and starling-dark from head to toe. Dark hair made darker still with wet at the ends; full-sleeved tunic of some wonderful black stuff, starling-freckled here and there with dim gold; and hitched up short through his belt for riding. Long bony legs in close-fitting black hose. Only where the wide sleeves fell back, the tight sleeves of his under-tunic showed a wonderful deep blazing green.

  Lovel thought that it was the most beautiful colour he had ever seen. The perfect colour for the King’s Jongleur. . . .

  The man in the window stopped whistling and said without moving, ‘Come in then, Brother.’

  For an instant, Lovel froze. But the voice had not been angry, only quietly amused. And he took a deep breath and went in.

  ‘And pray you shut the door behind you. There is a draught in this place to split a man down the centre as neatly as a pickled herring.’

  Lovel timidly closed the door and stood with his back to it, as Rahere turned from the window. He had a long blue-shadowed chin, clean-shaven like a monk’s, and his eyes in the darkness of his face were the greyest and brightest that Lovel had ever seen. He said in the same amused tone, ‘Next time you want to spy on anyone, remember that a window with glass in it makes a fine mirror after dark when the torches are lit.’

  ‘I wasn’t spying on you,’ Lovel said. ‘Jehan took the logs I brought for the fire and bade me get back to the kitchen, and I wanted – they said you were the King’s Jongleur—’

  ‘And so never having seen a King’s Jongleur, or a unicorn, or an Ethiopian with phoenix feathers in his hair, you wished to see me. And they were mistaken; oh, most woefully mistaken. I am the King’s nothing. I spend much of my time about the Court; I do my best for him, as it were; but not even I could stand our Henry all the time.’

  Lovel gazed with his mouth open in awed delight at this mad and magnificent man with the monk’s face and the cool mocking voice and long fantastic legs like a crane-fly, who spoke English, but in such splendid and far-off words that much of it was as far beyond his reach as the Norman French spoken by most of the knights and wealthy travellers who passed that way, and by some of the Brethren among themselves. And who called the King of England ‘Our Henry’ and could not stand him all the time, just as though he were an ordinary human being.

  Suddenly Rahere smiled. ‘Ah well, King’s Jongleur or no, you see me standing here before you. And fair is only fair. Come farther into the light so that I may see you also, small Brother.’

  Lovel hesitated an instant. But fair was only fair. He took the deep breath he always took before anything difficult, and limped forward, holding himself as straight as he could. And all the way the pale bright eyes of Rahere watched him.

  ‘So, that is greatly better,’ Rahere said. ‘I’ve a liking for seeing the faces of the people I talk to. Also for knowing their names. What do they call you?’

  ‘Humpy, most times,’ Lovel said.

  Rahere sat himself down in the carved chair by the hearth, and dangled one long black leg over the arm. There was a hole in the toe of his hose. ‘What pitiful lack of invention,’ he said. ‘And do you mind?’

  L
ovel nodded.

  ‘Remember that rather more than half the men in the world are fools,’ said Rahere. ‘But remember also that they cannot help it. And don’t let it make you proud; there’s always the chance that we are the most foolish of them all; I, because I spend my time thinking of witty things to say and songs to sing to amuse a fool in a crown and his fool barons—’ He fixed Lovel with an anguished gaze. ‘Not even witty. Do you know that when I pretend to fall over my own feet, or pull the cushion away from under one of them as he sits down, the rest laugh? You, because you mind being called Humpy. . . . What is your real name?’

  ‘Lovel.’

  ‘And you are one of the Abbot’s servants, Lovel?’

  Lovel was silent a moment, not quite sure how to answer: then he said, ‘Not really. I’m not really anything; I just fetch and carry and do the odd jobs nobody else wants to do.’ He was not complaining, just trying to tell the truth. ‘I’m not much use for anything else, you see,’ he added by way of explanation.

  ‘Did somone tell you that?’ Rahere said.

  Lovel stood and rubbed one foot over the other, remembering the morning when he had woken from his dream and heard Brother Peter and Brother Eustace talking. ‘They thought I was still asleep,’ he said.

  ‘And they were mistaken.’ The King’s Jongleur sat and looked at him consideringly, with his head a little on one side. Then he said, ‘I have the oddest feeling that they were mistaken about the other thing, too.’

  Footsteps came up the shallow stairs, the door opened, and the steward appeared on the threshold, backed by servants carrying linen and silver, warm water and towels. He saw Lovel and let out a squawk like an outraged hen, ‘You! And what do you suppose you are doing here? Away with you back to the kitchen where you belong! Master Rahere, I do crave your pardon that this wretched boy has troubled you.’

  Lovel, with all the brightness falling round him like withered leaves, turned towards the door. But Rahere’s voice pulled him up short. ‘Wait, Lovel,’ and as the boy hesitated, he withdrew that long black leg from over the arm of the chair, wagged his big toe at the steward through the hole in his stocking as another man might wag a reproving finger, and sat up. ‘I saw the brat from the window and called him in, having a mind for someone to talk to.’

  ‘If you wished for converse, I am sure that one of the Holy Fathers—’ began the steward.

  ‘Oh, I didn’t,’ sighed Rahere, ‘just for someone to talk to. You know what a creature of whim I am. For instance, I have a new whim opened within me – Pop! Like a gorse-pod – at this moment, that the brat shall stay and serve me at table, while you, after you have brought me some food and wine to eat off that fine white linen, and drink out of that fine silver cup, shall go quietly back to your own place and spend your time in pious contemplation.’

  ‘But – but, Master Rahere, the boy knows nothing of such matters—’

  ‘Then I will give him his first lesson,’ said Rahere.

  So Lovel stayed; and very gravely and carefully served Rahere at table, doing strange and complicated things with dishes and salt-cellars and clean linen napkins exactly as the King’s Jongleur bade him. And all the while he concentrated on not spilling anything, he was puzzling at the back of his mind over the surprising fact that Rahere had called him ‘the brat’ and it hadn’t brought the sound of stones whistling round his ears. He hadn’t minded at all. Perhaps it did not matter what names people called you by, only what they meant behind them.

  When the meal was over, Rahere leaned back in the carved chair, stretching his arms above his head, and smiled at him out of the depth of that half-haunted face of his. ‘If I were the King in his palace, I might have had a richer supper, but I could not be wishing for a better page to serve before me at table.’

  Lovel said eagerly, ‘I wish you were the King!’ And then flushed scarlet, because the words were out of his mouth before he knew it; and he had only just stopped himself in time from saying, ‘And I wish I were your page!’

  ‘So do not I,’ said Rahere, and laughed.

  And all the eagerness went out of Lovel like a pinched-out candle; and he thought, ‘No, and you’d not want a page the likes of me, if you were. It was only a kind of joke.’ But this time he did not say any of it aloud.

  But Rahere put out his hands that were big and bony like the rest of him, and touched the extreme tip of a long forefinger down on to each of Lovel’s shoulders, the hunched one and the good one, so that for the moment there did not feel to be any difference between them. ‘Do you know, brat, I nearly pushed on to join the King in Winchester tonight, in spite of the storm; only Bayard always shakes his ears when they are wet – flip, flap, flip, flap – the most irritating habit; and when I saw the Minster gatehouse looming up, I knew that I could not endure another mile of it; so in I turned to claim shelter – and caught you peering at me through the door-chink yonder. A fine thing is chance, small Brother Lovel. . . . If I were to come back and whistle you out of here one day, would you come?’

  Lovel tried to speak, but he could not. He had let out words that he hadn’t meant to, and now that he wanted most desperately to speak, he couldn’t find the words at all. He nodded and nodded, deeply and vehemently, hoping that Rahere would understand.

  And then high in the stormy dark, the great bell in the Minster tower began to ring for Compline; and Rahere got up and reached for his still damp boots. And the shining hour was over.

  Next morning as he knelt with the other Monastery servants at Mass in the great church, Lovel heard through the after-storm quiet and the droning voice of Brother Barnabas, the clatter of horses’ hooves under the gate arch, and then trippling away, fainter and fainter down the road.

  He had hoped against hope for another sight of Rahere, even from a distance. But Rahere was gone, and there was only emptiness where he had been. Lovel told himself firmly and sensibly that Rahere had come before, and one day he would come again. But all he knew just now was that Rahere was gone, and had maybe forgotten already what he had said last night about whistling for him.

  His face was sore where Jehan had cuffed him to teach him not to get ideas above himself, and his knee had begun to ache, as it did when he knelt on it too long. He shifted, trying to find an easier position, and so caught a glimpse between the two men in front of him of the High Altar, glimmering, coloured and gold in the shadows. He could not see the big stone slab in the pavement before it, but whenever he saw the High Altar he always thought of it there, with the carved cross and the words that Brother Anselm the Precentor had onced spelled out for him: ‘Alfredus Rex’.

  Brother Godwyne, the oldest of all the monks of New Minster, who loved quoting the sayings of King Alfred to anybody who would listen, had told him once a saying of the King’s that he hadn’t even remembered two minutes later; but it came back to him now.

  ‘If thou hast a sorrow, tell it to thy saddle-bow, and ride on, singing.’

  King Alfred must have known something about feeling cold and desolate inside, Lovel thought, before he could make a saying like that. And suddenly he felt very companionable towards the Saxon King sleeping under this stone.

  Lovel hadn’t got a saddle-bow and he couldn’t sing in tune. But he stuck out his tongue and caught the one salt-tasting tear that was trickling down his nose; and when Mass was over, went to chop up kindling for the bakehouse.

  5

  Valiant

  THE NEXT IMPORTANT thing that happened to Lovel was that he learned to read.

  Brother Anselm the Precentor, who had charge of all the books in the Monastery library as well as all the music in the church, found him one day looking at a book on physic herbs which had been left open in one of the library stalls, when he was supposed to be sweeping the floor; and asked him if he knew the herb drawn on that page.

  ‘Comfrey,’ Lovel said. ‘It is good for green wounds, and for knitting broken bones.’

  ‘And who told you that?’

  ‘My granny. She wa
s very wise in healing herbs. . . . It is wonderful, you can see that it is comfrey just by looking at the picture. But does it say, down here where these words are written, that it is a wound herb?’

  Brother Anselm looked at him a moment out of old, tired, blue eyes that must have been the colour of speedwell before they faded. ‘Would you like to know all that it says?’

  Lovel nodded, suddenly too shy to say how much he would like it. And the Precentor read to him what it said; and then turned the other pages and showed him other pictures, all most beautifully and lovingly drawn in brown-black ink on creamy parchment by a monk who had died long before the New Minster moved outside the walls of Winchester. And some of them Lovel knew, because they had grown in his granny’s herb plot and he had helped her tend them; and some were the wild-growing simples she had brought back in her rush basket from the woods and the Downs. And some were strangers to him; but when he asked Brother Anselm to read him what their words said, the old man said that if he wanted to know what the words meant, he must learn to read them for himself, and that he, Brother Anselm, would teach him.

  They were hard at it when Brother Eustace the Infirmarer came to put back on its shelf the book that he had left open when he was called away to a sick monk.

  Brother Anselm said, ‘Brother Eustace, do you think that Brother John could do with help in the physic garden?’

  ‘Why?’ said Brother Eustace without much interest. And then his voice became even sharper and more brittle than usual. ‘You have not been letting the boy touch that book? His hands are filthy.’

  Brother Anselm said gently, ‘Dear Brother Eustace, the sick of this Monastery are your concern; the books are mine. How many years have you been with us, Lovel?’