The Witch's Brat Read online

  He knew that if Rahere with the half bitter, half laughing monk’s face, had come back and whistled for him, he would have run out of the Monastery gates and away after him to the world’s edge and beyond. But Rahere had never come back.

  So on a soft autumn morning with the thrush singing his heart out in the elder tree, Lovel put on for the first time the habit of a Benedictine novice, and with Brother Peter on one side of him, and Brother Anselm who was growing very old and tottery on the other, crossed the cloister garth to the great Minster church. But all through the long ceremony that followed, no matter how hard he tried to turn his mind and heart to more solemn things, he heard the thrush singing in the Monastery garden.

  His days had been full enough before; but now they became so full that sometimes it seemed that there were not hours enough between one sunrise and the next. Now he studied every day with the other novices in the north walk of the cloister, and instead of the single daily Mass to which all the work people went, the bell called him seven times a day to worship; and in whatever time the other novices were free, there was always Brother Eustace or Brother John wanting him for the Infirmary or the physic garden.

  And then one dreary November day Brother Anseim was found slumped unconscious across his reading desk in the library. They carried him into the monk’s warming-room, and presently he recovered and was as though nothing had happened, laughing at them gently for their concern. But before November was out, it happened again, and this time he took longer to revive, and seemed dazed and unsure of himself, so they took him to the Infirmary and put him in the pallet bed where Lovel himself had lain when he first came to New Minster.

  ‘Let Lovel stay with me for a while,’ he said; and then, ‘I shall be back with you all again tomorrow.’

  But next morning, when he heard the bell ringing for Prime, and tried to get up, his tired old legs would not carry him; and Lovel, who had snatched a moment to look in on him before the service, helped Brother Peter to get him back into bed, and so arrived late for Prime, and got scolded as though he were about six by the Novice Master, and ordered to fast at the midday meal, by way of penance.

  The old Precentor lay in the pallet bed as the days went by, staring into the chapel where the candles glimmered before the altar, or out of the window at the bare trees in the garden and the old rooks’ nests. And every moment that he could snatch, Lovel spent with him; first thing in the dark of the winter mornings, last thing in the dark of the winter nights, a dozen times during the day. They stopped giving him penances for being late for things; indeed the time came when he was given leave to worship in the tiny Infirmary chapel instead of attending many of the services in the great Minster church. As the old man grew weaker, he seemed only content when Lovel was with him; and Lovel did everything for him, washed him and fed him, prayed with him and comforted him when he grew confused and did not know quite where he was. There was nothing to be done to make him well again.

  ‘He is not ill,’ Brother Peter said. ‘No, no, just old, and worn out with living.’

  The rooks were building in the trees that you could see from the Infirmary windows, and the snowdrops were in flower in the physic garden. And it became clear that Brother Anselm could not live more than a few days longer. Lovel sat beside him one night, wondering what to do because the old man had fallen asleep holding like a small child to his hand. The candles burned low in the sanctuary, and beyond the windows the rooks’ nests made dark blobs against the afterglow. He heard sandalled feet scuffing across the inner cloister; and one of his fellow-novices stood in the doorway. ‘There’s a traveller asking for you, and the Father Abbot has given you leave to go to him. Rahere, would that be the name?’

  7

  The King and the Begging Bowl

  IN THE SILENCE, the dry light breathing of the Precentor sounded very clear, and he felt the old man’s hand light and brittle as a withered leaf in his. ‘I cannot leave Brother Anselm,’ he said.

  ‘I am to sit with Brother Anselm till you get back. The Father Abbot said you might have an hour,’ said the young novice. ‘He’s asleep now anyway.’

  Lovel hesitated a moment longer, then very carefully he freed his hand from the old man’s and got up. ‘If he wakes, give him this cup to drink, and tell him that I will soon be back.’

  He saw his fellow-novice take his place, then went out. He went as fast as he could down the long dark slype to the main cloister, and past the monk who sat on duty in the little gate parlour, into the outer courtyard. He turned left towards the guest-lodging; but the man called after him, ‘You’re going the wrong way. It’s the hospice you want.’

  Lovel looked back ‘The hospice? Are you sure?’

  ‘Of course I’m sure,’ said the other testily, and returned to reading his breviary.

  Lovel hovered doubtfully a moment, then crossed the courtyard to the long, barn-like building beside the gatehouse, where the poorer kind of travellers were housed.

  Sometimes the hospice was crowded to overflowing, but this evening there was only one solitary traveller there, standing with his back to the room and looking at the little daubed picture of the Madonna of the Highways, which a travelling artist had painted there years ago in thanks for his night’s lodging.

  And seeing him, Lovel’s heart sank with sick disappointment. This was not Rahere, this unknown man in the black habit of an Austin Canon, tattered at the hem and caked to the knee with February mud. There had been some stupid mistake. . . .

  And then the man turned round – and there had been no mistake at all.

  They stood and looked at each other a few silent moments, and then Rahere’s face winged into its old twisted smile. ‘You find me changed?’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ Lovel said, slowly.

  ‘Not sure?’

  ‘The night I played page for you when you lodged in the Nazareth Chamber, I think you were a minstrel who was already half a monk. Now – I think you are a churchman who is still half a jongleur.’ Lovel broke off in confusion, surprised and rather ashamed of what he had said.

  ‘Bravo! But you, I find most surely changed. You have done a vast deal of growing up.’

  ‘You can do a vast deal of growing up in five years,’ Lovel said.

  Rahere looked at him with those strange, brilliant eyes that saw so uncomfortably deep. ‘It isn’t only the five years,’ he said at last. And then, ‘They told me when I asked for you that you were about your duties in the Infirmary. I take it that you no longer do all the odd jobs that nobody else wants to do.’

  ‘No, only the ones that the Father Infirmarer doesn’t,’ Lovel said with the ghost of a grin. ‘But I wasn’t about any duties, I was just sitting with Brother Anselm. He’s very ill’ – then remembering Brother Peter – ‘well no, not ill; but very old and worn out. He’s asleep now, and one of the other novices is sitting with him, so that I could come to you. But I must go back soon.’

  ‘Meanwhile, sit and keep me company while I eat my supper,’ said Rahere, as the Father Hospitaller entered with a novice carrying a bowl of fish broth and a loaf of dark rye-bread.

  So when they were alone again, Lovel drew a stool to the end of the long trestle-table, and sat down. He did not attempt to serve Rahere as he had done before; that had belonged to the Nazareth Chamber and the silver and fine linen. This was something different. Watching the other while he ate, Lovel thought that he looked ill, or as though he had quite lately been ill. His face was all sharp angles, the yellowish skin lying lightly over the bones, with no flesh between; his eyes sunk deep into his head. But the old sparkle was there, the old wicked laughter over the old sadness; only, Lovel realized suddenly, the sadness had deepened, and lost the bitterness that had been mixed with it; and so had the laughter. He had been wrong when he had thought that Rahere had not changed, and he wondered what had changed him.

  Rahere’s mouth quirked suddenly in amusement, and he said in the old soft drawl, as though Lovel had spoken his thoughts out loud, �
��Would it not be enough if I said that life became quite unbearably dull and dreary at Court after the White Ship went down, and I felt that it was time to make a change?’

  ‘No,’ Lovel said, ‘it wouldn’t.’

  ‘Then I must try again.’ But Rahere was silent for a long time, making bread pellets and dropping them into his empty bowl. At last he looked up. ‘It already seemed to me, five years ago, that there must be something more to life than making the King laugh after supper – either that, or life was such a small and unimportant matter that the only thing for a sensible man to do was to wear it as lightly as a feather in his bonnet – play with it like a jingle of fool’s bells. . . . I was with the King in Normandy those four years (did you wonder why I never came back?). When we were at Barfleur and on the point of sailing for England, the Prince bade me to wait, and sail with him and his fellows. The voyage, he said, would not be so merry without Rahere to set the tune. They were all in wild spirits. I refused, for no good reason save that I was not, and sailed with the King instead.’ He got up, and walked the length of the long room and back. ‘The Prince was just about your age, brat, few of them were much older. I’d seen them grow up.’

  Rahere sat down and began making bread pellets again; and again Lovel waited, patiently, for him to go on.

  ‘It seemed to me then, that if life was indeed a small matter, there could be no God to trouble Himself with such a trifle; and I found, somewhat to my surprise, that I could not believe there was no God. It followed then, that there was something more to life than making the King laugh after supper – which is as well, for the King is not one for laughter these days. Do I make sense to you? I am none so sure that I do to myself.’

  ‘I think so,’ Lovel said. ‘So you set out to find it; this something more.’

  ‘I did. But when I had taken this’ – Rahere touched his dusty black habit – ‘I felt that there should be something yet more, to mark the end of one life and the beginning of another. My artist’s soul demanded it.’ He was mocking himself now. ‘Hi my! I have all the jongleur’s instinct for the right dramatic gesture that is not only for the audience but the thing within oneself. I still make sense?’

  Lovel nodded.

  ‘There have been kings who had lain aside their crowns and taken up the begging bowl; and for a King that is gesture enough; but hardly for a King’s Jongleur. So to tidy up the ravelled ends of my old life and make ready for the new, I went on pilgrimage to Rome. It was like to be the start of a new life indeed, for at the Three Fountains there, I caught some foul fever which lurks there, and was, so the good Brothers who nursed me told me, very like to die – the which was no news to me. And I had no wish to die in Rome. We are told that it is a blessed thing to die on pilgrimage, but I – My grandfather was a Breton, following Richard de Belmeis in the Conqueror’s army, but I am London born and bred, even as de Belmeis’s son who is Bishop of London now, and was fain to see my own land and my own city again. So when I began to mend, I made a vow in thanks-offering, that when I came to my own place again, I would raise an infirmary, a hospital for the poor sick, that in London poor men might be cared for as I had been in Rome.’

  Again Lovel nodded, his eyes never leaving Rahere’s face.

  ‘Just the hospital, you understand, but on my way home I had a vision.’ Rahere said it as another man might say that he had found a penny or his horse had cast a shoe. ‘It was a very hot night, which is odd when one comes to think of it, for my sickness had held me long in Rome and it was close on Christmas time, and I could not sleep. I lay tossing about, trying both to get cool and to think whereabouts, in or near London, I might find the land I needed to build my hospital. Then it seemed to me suddenly that the room and all things about me dissolved away, and I saw coming towards me a great beast with eight legs and eagle’s wings. It caught me in its talons and lifted me up among the stars – if anyone ever asks you, you may tell them with my compliments that the stars do not merely twinkle; at close quarters they spin round and round upon themselves giving off a high singing sound and a strong smell of feverfew. Below me there was nothing but blackness, and I knew that in the next instant the beast would loose its hold and I should plunge down into blackness and falling that would last for all eternity. I cried out; and Saint Bartholomew came in at the door – oh a most respectable and dignified old body with a beard as long and white as the Milky Way – and told me that I should build the hospital at Smithfield, just outside London Walls. They have a horse-market there once a week, I’ve been out to it often. He bade me also to build a priory beside the hospital. And with that I fell asleep. And when I woke in the morning I was cold rather than hot; and small wonder, with the snow on the ground.’ Rahere rubbed his long blue chin. ‘The odd thing is that I had been thinking of Smithfield before, but it is the King’s land, and our Henry is not one to care greatly about the sick poor. But a priory is another matter, and with Saint Bartholomew for good measure. . . .’

  ‘You think he will really give you the land?’

  Rahere smiled gently, ‘Our Henry is mean, but devout. Saint Bartholomew will have his priory; but the hospital comes first.’

  Silence settled between them again, and they looked at each other across the corner of the table and Rahere’s soup bowl with its mess of bread pellets in the bottom. Lovel had a fairly shrewd idea that he knew this sickness. It was a fever that breathed from marshy, mosquito-ridden places in hot weather. And often, when the main attack was spent, if the one who had it lived, it returned from time to time, bringing cold and great heat and strange, waking dreams.

  He had a feeling that Rahere had some inkling of this, and perhaps only half believed in his vision; surely if he had quite believed he would have told the story in a different way – or maybe not. Another man would, but then another man was not Rahere. Only one thing was certain, that vision or fever-dream, it had shown Rahere how to get the land he needed from the King; and that however it had come he believed in the message and was grateful for it. How Rahere was going to build a hospital, let alone a priory, Lovel could not imagine, but seeing the brilliant eyes and faintly mocking, resolute mouth, he did not doubt that somehow, Rahere would do it.

  And suddenly he ached to be going with him, to help him do the impossible.

  He got up. ‘I was given an hour, and I think that I have been longer. I must go back to Brother Anselm.’

  Next morning after High Mass, he was with Rahere again, walking to and fro in the inner cloister close to the Infirmary. Already the buds of the fig-tree against the wall were swelling, and he could hear the thrush trying over the first notes of the year.

  ‘Come with me,’ Rahere said. ‘I’ll need your skill.’

  All night long, as he drowsed and woke beside Brother Anselm’s bed, Lovel had been thinking of Rahere saying that. But now he felt as unprepared as though he had not thought of it at all; and two waves of feeling surged over him, so close upon each other that they were almost one. The first was a great lift of the heart, a longing to go with Rahere who had come back and whistled for him after all. The second was fear; fear of the world outside the Monastery walls, where men had driven him away with stones, for a witch’s brat, because he was made crooked instead of straight like other men. But the longing was stronger than the fear.

  Then he shook his head. ‘I cannot.’

  ‘You’re still only a novice, you’re perfectly free.’

  ‘I can’t leave Brother Anselm,’ Lovel said. ‘Not now. He is not happy with anyone but me to do things for him; and he cannot live more than a few days more.’

  ‘And I cannot wait,’ Rahere said. ‘I must push on about the business that has been entrusted to me.’

  Lovel nodded. They had stopped walking and were standing at the arched doorway into the slype.

  ‘You wish to come, I think?’ Rahere said.

  ‘With all my heart.’

  ‘And you say that he can live only a few more days. Think, Lovel, are you prepared to trade yo
ur whole life for an old man’s few days?’

  They stood and looked at each other, and the silence drew out long and tight between them. On the sensible surface it was quite simple; Lovel had only to say ‘Let me wait these few days and then follow you.’ But he knew that this had nothing to do with the sensible surface of things. This was ‘Leave everything, other loves, other loyalties, and come now, or not at all.’ This was a choice for life.

  ‘Yes, I am prepared,’ he said at last. ‘I can’t leave Brother Anselm.’ And saying it seemed to tear at some thing deep within his chest.

  ‘You’ll make an Infirmarer, one day,’ Rahere said. ‘God keep you, Brother Brat.’

  And he turned and went with that long light step of his along the slype towards the main cloister and the outer court.

  Lovel looked after him for a moment, then turned also and went limping back to the Infirmary.

  8

  The Road to London

  JUST A WEEK later, Brother Anselm died. The old body was laid in the monks’ graveyard, and the pallet bed at the end of the Infirmary hall was first neatly and coldly empty, and then bulgingly overfull of Brother Dominic with the black colic. And Lovel was left in a sort of private wilderness, wondering whether he had been a complete fool after all; especially as Brother Anselm had slept almost all the time through that last week, anyway. But when he went to the library to look up something in the great herb book, it fell open at the page with the drawing of comfrey on it. And then he did not wonder any more.