The Witch's Brat Read online

  12

  Nick Redpoll

  IT WAS A few weeks before Lovel found time to spare for wandering over to the building-site again. Next year the great roof beams would be going up, but now the choir was roofed with grey, hurrying sky, and the soft wet wind from the west swooped in through the clerestory windows, plucking at the clothes of the men working up there on the scaffolding. The North Aisle was already covered in, not vaulted yet, but roofed with bare beams and rafters, and thick with warm shadows as you looked into it through the round headed arches of the choir. Something moved in the shadows, and Lovel saw that it was the boy Nick. He was standing there, a coil of scaffolding rope over his free shoulder, propped on his crutch, his head tipped back to watch the men working on the roof of the South Aisle opposite. And there was a raw look of longing on his face that suddenly hurt Lovel deep inside himself.

  It was only for a moment; and then Nick Redpoll looked round and saw him and grinned.

  Lovel limped over to join him, and they stood together watching the men on the high hurdle-walk.

  ‘Windy up there,’ Nick said after a little while.

  ‘Windy,’ Lovel agreed.

  ‘Soon be time to put her to bed for the winter.’

  Lovel glanced round quickly. That sounded like mason’s jargon, but the boy would have picked up a good deal of that by now, anyway.

  ‘Reckon Master Beornfred feels good every time he takes a look up there,’ Nick said. And after another companionable silence, ‘She’s going to be a beauty!’

  Still gazing up at the men on the scaffolding, he put out a hand and laid it on the shaft of the pillar beside him. And Lovel thought it was the way someone might lay their hand against a tree-trunk, feeling the good soundness of the living timber. But almost in the same instant, he saw Nick’s face freeze in horror, eyes wide and mouth open for a warning shout that would not come; and from overhead came a crash and a slithering sound and a cry; and his own gaze whipped back to the high spider-walk just as a plank came crashing down on to the floor of the choir.

  There was a flurry of shouting. Somebody was clinging to the edge of the hurdle-walk, with his legs kicking convulsively in empty air; being hauled to safety by two of his mates. The captain of the team standing below, where the plank had narrowly missed him, was bellowing, ‘By the horns of Saint Luke! Don’t none of you know yet how to carry a plank in a breath of wind?’

  A shuddering gasp beside him made Lovel look round again. Nick Redpoll had crumpled up at the base of the pillar, and was crouching there with one arm flung across his face.

  Lovel stooped over him quickly; the tumult on the spider walk could look after itself. ‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘It’s all right. It was only the plank that came down.’

  Slowly, Nick Redpoll lowered his arm, and looked up, past Lovel to the figures on the hurdle-walk, now arguing furiously and calling names. He tried to grin but there was a queer pearly greyness about his face and the freckles stood out black against it. He had the look of someone who has just had a nightmare and is not yet quite free of it.

  ‘It was only the plank,’ Lovel said again.

  ‘Aye. Just for the moment it looked like ’twas going to be Barty.’ Nick tried to make a joke out of it. ‘I must be gone in the cock-loft, coming all over dither-some like that. They say the Devil looks after his own. And Barty couldn’t fall off a spider-walk if he tried.’

  ‘No, it was you who did that, wasn’t it? Lovel heard his own voice before he knew that he had spoken.

  ‘Did – what?’ said Nick, playing for time.

  ‘Fell off a spider-walk. And you did it again just now when you thought Barty was coming down. That was how you hurt your knee.’

  For a long moment, there was silence between them. On the hurdle-walk things had returned to normal. Then Nick turned his head stiffly. ‘Aye. More’n two year agone.’ He reached for his crutch. ‘I must be getting on, or they’ll be howling for their rope over at the tower foot.’

  ‘Nick,’ Lovel said quickly, ‘after work stops this evening, come up to the hospital. If I’m not around, ask for me.’

  They stood looking at each other. Then Nick said, ‘And for why, Reverend Canon?’

  ‘I would like to look at your knee.’

  ‘It mended stiff,’ Nick said, almost sullenly.

  ‘Yes, I know. I’d like to look at it, all the same.’

  Nick looked down at his right hand, which had tightened into a fist. ‘Could you – g’arn, o’course you couldn’t.’

  Lovel said, ‘I don’t know whether I could or not. My grandmother had the Second Sight, but I haven’t. Please, Nick – after Vespers?’

  ‘I’ll be cooking for the lads.’

  ‘When you have finished cooking, then.’

  Nick went on staring at his fist. Then he nodded and turned away. ‘I’ll come,’ he said over his shoulder, hitching up the coil of rope.

  But Lovel was not sure he would; not quite sure, until late that evening Nick Redpoll was actually standing before him in the little crowded dispensary, looking as defiant as though he had been dragged there for a beating.

  Lovel made him sit down on his own plank bed in the corner, and strip off his tattered hose, then lit another candle and knelt down beside him. ‘Now, let me look.’

  But as usual it was not so much looking as feeling, and not so much feeling as looking with his hands. He could see the white puckered scar where an abscess had been, and feel the drawn tendon, tense and sharp like a bowstring, at the back of Nick’s leg, that had tightened and tightened, drawing his damaged knee with it until it could not be straightened at all . . . When at last he looked up, the boy’s gaze, wide and blue and solemn, was waiting for him. Nick drew the tip of his tongue over his lower lip, but he didn’t say anything.

  ‘Does that hurt?’ Lovel asked.

  ‘Not now.’

  ‘It will, if I try to make it straight again.’

  ‘Do you – think you can?’ Nick said hoarsely. ‘I’d like fine to get back to my trade.’

  Lovel got up, and went to see how the cough syrup that he was boiling over the brick stove in the corner was doing. Suddenly he was remembering across almost ten years, the time when he had had to decide much the same thing about Valiant. Nobody would hit Nick Redpoll on the head with a stone if he left that leg alone; he would just go on as he was. But mightn’t that be better than hurting him as he would have to hurt him, and going on hurting him and making him hope, for months and months; and then as like as not having to admit defeat for both of them after all? But there was a chance. He had felt it with his hands on Nick’s knee. There was a chance.

  He turned round and looked at the stirabout boy across the candle flame. ‘I believe there is a chance,’ he said. ‘Go and pray to St Bartholomew, we could do with a good prayer. And I’ll come and find you tomorrow.

  Later still that evening, in the little wattle-and-daub cabin that was the Master’s lodging, Lovel stood before the table at which Rahere sat struggling with the everlasting hospital accounts. ‘We must go begging again,’ Rahere said. ‘But what we really need is another miracle. What would you be wanting, Brother Lovel?’

  ‘I suppose a miracle too, Master,’ Lovel said.

  Rahere smiled, and pushed the accounts on one side. ‘For miracles you should go across to our fine sky-roofed priory church. It should have stars between the clouds for altar candles, tonight. I haven’t any miracles handy.’

  Lovel said, ‘There’s this boy – Nick Redpoll, one of the stirabout boys over at the priory—’

  ‘The boy with the crutch?’

  ‘May I bring him into the hospital?’

  ‘Is he sick?’ asked Rahere.

  ‘No. But I think it might be possible to get back the movement of his knee for him, if – if I could have him in here.’

  ‘For how long?’

  ‘I don’t know – maybe for half a year.’

  Rahere sighed, and laid down the pen he had been
playing with. The lines on his face looked in the candlelight deep and thin as though they had been cut with a sword, both the lines of laughter and the lines of grief. ‘The building-site is not far off. Could you not do whatever needs to be done if he came up here to you each day?’

  ‘He would not come. The men would find work for him all the time, and – and he would not be in a fit state to do it, what’s more. An old man-at-arms once told me that a hurt to the knee or elbow is the hardest of all to bear, and – he will have a great deal of pain, and I can’t do the work properly if he does not get the needful rest and tending with it.’

  ‘Nick Redpoll has been around the building-site for a month or more. Why all this so sudden interest?’ Rahere said.

  ‘I suppose I thought he was just – another like me. It was only today I found out that it was only an accident – a fall from the scaffolding on another church. I have looked at his knee, and I am sure that something could be done.’ He looked at Rahere beseechingly. ‘It – it isn’t only his leg, it’s his whole life – he was learning the building trade – and if you saw the way he was watching the man on the hurdle-walk— He has the right kind of hands, too, you can see it when he touches stone—’

  Rahere sat back, his winged eyebrows quirking. ‘Brother Lovel, I have never heard you in full spate before. So – if I let you have Nick Redpoll in here to mend him, you will give me another mason to build my priory.’

  ‘Master, don’t laugh at me,’ Lovel said. ‘Other times, but – not this time.’

  ‘Not this time, no,’ said Rahere. And indeed under the fly-away brows, his face was very far from laughter. ‘So then, you think there might be some hope of freeing the boy’s knee. But how much hope? Remember, we need every bed; if we keep him here all winter, somebody will die uncomforted in the gutter.’

  ‘He can have my bed in the dispensary.’

  ‘It is not only the bed, you know that. You know how this hospital of ours is always ready to burst at the seams. And how if, in the end “I hope” proves to be only “I want – I desperately want”?’

  Again Lovel remembered Valiant, and standing before Brother Eustace in the Infirmary at the New Minster. ‘I do want,’ he began slowly. ‘It matters a great deal to me—’

  ‘I know it does,’ Rahere said, ‘and I know why.’

  ‘But I also believe that by God’s grace, there is hope – I felt it – here in my hands.’

  Rahere was silent a long moment. Then he said, ‘So be it, Brother Brat, and God’s grace and strength be with you.’

  13

  Carved Angels

  NICK’S LODGE WAS not best pleased at parting with him, for though, as he had said, they would soon be putting the priory church to bed for the winter, they would still be working on the site, cutting stone and shaping up timbers for next year; so they would still need a stirabout boy – and Nick was a good cook.

  But it was all sorted out in the end, and by Michaelmas, an extra bed had been squeezed somehow into the long ward, close beside the dispensary door, and the long fight had begun.

  For it was a fight, and Lovel and the red-headed boy fought it together through the weeks and months that followed. That autumn and winter Lovel worked on Nick’s stiff knee with all the skill and caring and all the strength that was in him. He had had no training in what he was doing, because both Brother Eustace and Brother Peter would have left well – or ill – alone; and so he did not know with his head how to get the damaged joint moving again. He simply did what the queer knowledge in his hands told him needed doing.

  To begin with he simply rubbed it every day with warm linseed oil and a decoction of scabius flowers which are good for loosening drawn tendons. That part was quite easy for both of them. It was later, when he began to feel the tight hardness of the tendon softening a little, that the bad time began. Then he really got to work, with fingers that seemed suddenly made of steel, pressing and probing and twisting, making Nick try to straighten his knee himself, again and again, harder and harder, until his face was white and spent and the sweat prickled out along the roots of his red hair. He went to Hal the blacksmith, too, and got him to make a kind of iron splint that bent in the middle but was just the smallest bit straighter than Nick’s leg; and padded it with sheep’s wool; and every day when he had finished the rubbing and probing and pulling, he would bandage it on very tight, so that all the time it was pulling Nick’s leg in the right direction.

  He knew how much the splint hurt, not only by the little gasp Nick sometimes gave when he was bandaging it on but because in an odd way he could feel the pain through his hands into himself.

  Once he said, ‘Nick, are you sorry we started this?’

  And Nick shook his head, with his lower lip caught between his teeth. He couldn’t speak just then.

  But the day came when the splint did not hurt Nick nearly as much, because his leg had straightened just enough to fit it. That was when Lovel knew that he was going to get Nick’s leg straight again. But he would not know for a long time yet, whether it would ever bear his weight properly. So he only said, ‘Three days’ rest and then I’m taking this down to Hal to be straightened a bit more.’

  And so it went on.

  Across the strip of rough ground, they had put the priory church to bed. But all day long the sounds of sawing and hammering and the clink of adze on stone came from the lodges, where the craftsmen where at their winter’s work; and Master Beornfred came with his plans and drawings, and had long discussions with Rahere and Master Alfwine in the Master’s lodging.

  And in the two long wards of the hospital, the sick poor came and went, recovered or died. On Christmas Eve, with half a gale blowing from the north-west, and sleet spattering against the closed shutters, a beggar woman’s baby was born in the women’s ward. Saint Bartholomew’s was the only hospital in London where a mother could go for care and shelter when her baby was born, and so there had been many babies born there by now, but never before, one on Christmas Eve. And Sister Ursula and Sister Maudlin who had helped bring it into the world, were as happy about it as though they had just been in the stable at Bethlehem.

  Lovel, making his late night rounds, was not so happy. The mother was half starved and the baby was too small, and when their time came to leave the hospital, there would be nothing for the woman to do but go back to begging again, for the baby now, as well as for herself. The fire on the central hearth between the two wards had sunk to a red glow that still gave off a wave of warmth, as he checked beside it for a moment – the King gave them a tree-trunk every winter so that the hospital should not go cold; the candle flames burned bright in the chapel, flaring a little in the draughts, their light coming and going on the picture of the Saint and the scroll with the single butterfly perched on the edge of it. ‘The Lord shall comfort Zion . . .’ Lovel’s grey depression lifted a little, because whatever happened to them afterwards, there had been warmth and love and shelter for a little while, for the mother and the baby that had been born that night; and he felt less like shaking Sister Ursula and Sister Maudlin.

  The candles burned all night, not only because of the chapel, but so that there should be a little light in the wards; but it did not reach to the far end where Nick’s bed was (nor did much of the warmth); but Lovel, pausing there before going through the dispensary door to his own bed, knew by his breathing that the boy was awake and in pain. It was only two days since the splint had been straightened again – for the fourth time.

  ‘Not asleep?’ Lovel whispered, above the snoring of the old man in the next bed.

  ‘Never can sleep when the wind blows from this quarter,’ Nick said. He never admitted it when his leg was hurting. ‘Little ‘un’s in fine voice too, isn’t he?’

  For above the breathing and puffing and snoring of other sleepers, above the wing-beating of the wind and the sharp spatter of sleet, rose the thin, fretful bleating of the new baby.

  ‘He’ll go to sleep soon,’ Lovel said. ‘He’s finding the
world something strange.’

  ‘Lor’ bless you, I’m not complaining. Every hospital should have a new bratling on Christmas Eve,’ Nick said.

  Next morning when Lovel arrived beside Nick’s bed with the jar of rubbing oil, Nick who usually spent most of his time lying on his back with his hands behind his head and staring up at the rafters, was sitting up and whittling away at a piece of wood, with a knife that didn’t really look sharp enough for the job. The blanket was covered with chips and long curled shavings.

  ‘I’m making a present for the baby,’ he explained, rather shamefaced. ‘Maybe he won’t cry so much if he has something to play with. Brother Luke found me the bit of wood.’

  ‘But not the knife,’ said Lovel.

  ‘No. That was Sister Gertruda, it’s not very sharp.’

  ‘Maybe she thought you were less likely to cut your thumb off with a blunt one. It’s a mistake women make,’ Lovel said. ‘May I see?’

  Nick put the small thing into the hand he held out.

  ‘It’s a lamb,’ he said, in case there was any doubt.

  But Lovel did not need to be told that. The little half-made figure was rough and clumsy, but there was no mistaking the shape, with its outsize, unmanageable legs; and already Nick had managed somehow to catch the joyfulness of a very young lamb.

  ‘It’s not above half-finished yet,’ Nick said anxiously.

  ‘I can see that. Have you often carved things?’

  ‘Oh, I’ve whittled a bit from time to time, it’s just a knack. Do you think the baby will like it, then?’

  ‘I’m sure he will – when he’s a little older.’ Lovel handed back the lamb, and began to roll up the sleeves of his habit. ‘If you’ll wait a while, I’ll find you a better knife, and that one can go back to the kitchen where it belongs.’

  Nick spent most of the rest of that day finishing the lamb; and that evening, Lovel took it down to the far end of the hospital-house, where the woman lay with her tiny wizened baby in the crook of her arm. ‘A boy in the other ward has made a gift for your baby,’ he said. ‘I should treasure it, if I were you.’