The Witch's Brat

by Rosemary Sutcliff

  ‘Hallowed be thou, Yarrow,

  On the ground thou growest,

  For on the Mount of Calvary

  There thou wast found.

  Thou healest our Saviour Jesus Christ

  And staunchest the bleeding wound—’

  Carefully, he lifted the first root, with a good ball of earth to it.

  ‘In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost I take thee from the ground.’

  If it were the Devil’s after all, now it would wither and turn black and stinking in his hands. He looked at it rather anxiously, but the grey-green leaves and flat panicles of little whitish flowers remained as fresh as ever.

  He dug several more, and carried them back to the waiting plot that he had prepared for them, and planted them with as much care as though they had been the Balm of Gilead itself. That was when he felt that his physic garden was really born.

  But before autumn had turned to winter, long before the hospital was finished, Lovel found himself with people to tend as well as plants. It began with an old, old man whose family simply left him on the threshold like an unwanted baby. Then there was a foreign seaman who had been stabbed in a tavern brawl. Then a women with a baby in her arms, who, she said, was very sick, and begged Lovel to make well again; but it was the woman who was sick. The baby was dead.

  They buried the baby, and Lovel planted a white briar slip to mark the place, and they looked after the woman until she was well again. The seaman got better and went off vowing vengeance on the man who had stabbed him. The old man died and was buried beside the baby. But by this time others had begun to drift in, piteous and hopeful, asking to be made well again, or at least to be allowed to die in shelter with kindly people round them. And Rahere would turn no one away. So Saint Bartholomew’s had become a living hospital, with two more Brothers now to care for the sick, with food boiling in the kitchen and candles burning in the chapel, while the roof was still a makeshift affair of hurdles and thatch that let in the draughts and the winter rain.

  On a day at the edge of spring, when the first yellow celandines were opening their eyes in the physic garden, Lovel took his final vows as an Austin Canon, before Richard de Belmeis, Bishop of London.

  He would much sooner have taken them before Rahere; but when he said so, Rahere had smiled his swift, winged smile. ‘Once a king and his page, now a knight and his squire? It takes a bishop to make a canon, Brother Brat, and I am not even a prior, though I have solemn forebodings that I may blossom into one in some future year.’ He glanced towards the low line of stone footings where one day the priory church would rise. ‘But now – I am the Master of Saint Bartholomew’s Hospital, no more. It is not in my hands to make a knight out of my squire. So I shall stand beside you while you make your vows before His Grace the Bishop of London, when he comes to see the progress of the work next month.’

  So Lovel, with Rahere on one side of him and Master Alfwine who had come to join them from building Saint Giles’ at Cripplegate on the other, took his vows in the little bare hospital chapel, before Richard de Belmeis.

  Only the day before, they had finished the roof and the workmen had stuck up on the gable-end the little decorated tree that announced the fact joyously to the world.

  11

  The Promise

  NEARLY THREE YEARS went by since Lovel had left the New Minster and set out for London to help Rahere make an impossible dream come true. And it seemed as though the hospital had stood there with its doors open for all who needed it for as long as there had been alders growing by the Fleet River. There were eight Brothers now, and four Sisters, to tend the sick folk in the two long wards, but none of them had Lovel’s knowledge of herbs, nor the strange healing power of the hands that had come to him from his grandmother. So the physic garden was still his, and the dispensary that opened from the end of the hospital hall, with its ranged jars and pots and bundles of dried herbs. And he did not sleep in the long lime-washed dormer with the rest of the Brothers, but on a truckle-bed in the corner of the dispensary, so that he was always close at hand if he should be needed in the night.

  Most of the folk who came into the hospital or were brought in by their friends, were old, so old or so sick that there was not much to be done for them, except treat them kindly. Lovel did that. With the rest of the Brothers, he took his turn at going out with a handcart to beg food for them so that they should not go hungry. He nursed them, getting used to the sour, sick smell of oldness and filth. He listened to them when they wanted to talk, comforted them when they were frightened or miserable, prayed with them and did what he could to ease their aches and pains.

  He knew that he was doing the one thing in the world that he was good at; and yet – something was lacking. He didn’t notice it at first. But sometimes, at night when he was too tired to sleep, he began to remember from his childhood Brother Eustace’s dry, impatient voice: ‘For an Infirmarer there are two ways. One is to bleed a little of your own life away with every sick soul who passes through your hands. The other is to do all that may be done for the sick, but to stand well back while doing it. That way you don’t break your heart.’

  Lovel began to feel that he was doing just that: doing all he could, but standing back. And he didn’t want it to be like that; with all his heart and soul he didn’t want it to be like that. But could one choose? He prayed about it, but he had never been very good at prayer, and a queer kind of desolation began to grow inside him; a doubt of himself, and a doubt whether God really meant him to heal sick people after all.

  He lived with the doubt for quite a long time, until at last something happened that sent him, next day, to find Rahere in the Master’s lodging where he sat battling with the hospital’s accounts.

  Rahere put aside the accounts without even sighing, and listened to Lovel’s doubts as to whether God really meant him to be doctoring the sick at all. And then he said, ‘Brother Brat, if it is only hands and head with you, then I think for the present hands and head are enough. I could not ask for a better Infirmarer; and if God could, then I think He will give you whatever more you need, when the right time comes.’

  ‘That is – if He does mean me to be a healer,’ Lovel said. He took a deep breath. ‘Master, since yesterday I have doubted that still more. I – crooked as I am – I can’t be much of an encouragement to the people I try to help.’

  ‘I wonder,’ Rahere said, and then, ‘What happened yesterday?’

  ‘I was called to that labourer – the one who put his shoulder out stacking timber when the load slipped. He didn’t want me to touch him. He said why didn’t I do something about my own shoulder before I made hay with his.’

  ‘You put it in again for him, all the same, didn’t you,’ Rahere said simply, his chin propped between his long bony hands, his pale bright eyes never leaving Lovel’s face, ‘and I imagine he feels rather differently about both your shoulder and his today. . . . Hi my! I am being no help, am I? But what help could you hope for from a king’s fool turned cleric? You must find the way for yourself, with God’s help, not mine, Brother Brat.’

  That was in the summer.

  A day came in early autumn that seemed at first like any other day, except that it was a little less busy than most. There was nobody very ill, the garden was well in hand, and Lovel, pushing the stopper into the last jar of his new decoction of horehound and dill, found himself with a little time to spare, if he went without his midday meal. It was not, here, as it was in the rigidly ordered life of the big abbeys; with so many of the Brothers at work or out begging or with sick folk to tend, you could always skip a meal if you wanted to. Which was just as well, Lovel thought, because Sister Gertruda was no cook, and when it was her turn to take charge in the kitchen, as it was today, there would be lumps in everything that could have lumps in it, and everything else would be burned to a crisp.

  Somebody else was skipping dinner too, for as Lovel made his way down the long ward, taking a quick look from side to side as he wen
t, to make sure that all was well, he saw Brother Luke at work in the little chapel.

  Brother Luke was a huge, quiet man; one of those people who seem to drift about like a cloud, doing nothing in particular; and yet somehow at the end of the day he would have got through more work than Brother Anders and Brother Dominic put together. And however much he did, he always seemed to have time to spare for more. It was Brother Luke who always had time to sit with anyone who was especially sick, who always had time to help Lovel dig the physic garden, or watch something boiling in the dispensary to see that it didn’t boil over. It was Brother Luke, a sign-painter in his young days, who had now brought out his old skill, to paint a picture of Saint Bartholomew behind the altar in the hospital chapel.

  Several of the patients, who could leave their beds, had gathered round to watch – it is always interesting to watch other people at work – and Lovel checked for a moment to watch, too. The picture itself was finished; very bright, like the shop signs that Brother Luke had painted so often to hang out over the street and catch the attention of passers-by; and showed the Saint with a long white beard, wearing a blue tunic under a bright pink and red striped cloak, holding a model of the priory in one hand and with the other raised in blessing. He was standing in a garden, and looking, as Rahere had described him in his vision, a very respectable and dignified old body. And because Brother Luke loved his work and could not bear to waste any corner of it, every inch of the background was full of little clumps of flowers with birds and butterflies hovering over them and beetles climbing up their stalks, and small fat clouds and turning stars and the pointed roofs and tower-tops of distant cities. So, the picture itself was finished, even to the gold halo rather like a straw hat behind the Saint’s head. And Brother Luke was painting away carefully at the lettering on a scroll held by two crimson-winged angels underneath.

  ‘“For the Lord shall comfort Zion,”’ Lovel read. ‘“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.”’

  Lovel had seen the words there for two days, drawn out and ready for painting. But they looked different now, with Brother Luke’s big hands bringing them to life. They made him think how this place had changed in the three years that Rahere’s dream had been growing out of the rough ground of Smithfield; they made him think of his physic garden with the three sentinel elder trees. A promise, he thought, a promise of so many things to so many people, himself not forgotten among them.

  Brother Luke looked round and saw him watching, and said, ‘I have made it especially full, so that there will always be plenty for our sick folk to look at – nicer than just the hospital walls.’

  ‘Couldn’t you find space for just one grass blade more?’ Brother Luke never minded being laughed at.

  The big man sat back on his heels and looked gravely at his picutre, then nodded, and took another brush dipped in yellow paint, and carefully and lovingly painted a sulphur butterfly perching on the very edge of the scroll itself.

  For an instant a half-memory brushed across Lovel’s mind; something to do with a yellow butterfly and a promise . . . Then Rahere’s voice behind him said, ‘Perfection! I am convinced that until this moment Our Lord must have found one butterfly too few in that picture!’

  And the half-memory slipped back to where it had come from.

  A few moments later, parting from the Master on the hospital door-sill, Lovel went his way.

  Ahead of him he could see the choir of the priory church, the strength and beauty of it rising up to cut its proud shape against the sky. Only the choir as yet, with the rest to follow after, so that the Brothers would not have to wait for the whole church to be built before they could begin to worship God in it.

  At a little distance the building seemed remote and not quite real, but as Lovel drew nearer, it grew real and solid and tough and enduring. The men were just getting back to work after their own midday meal, and the whole site was beginning to hum with sound and movement like a swarming hive. Lovel passed the long shed where the master mason kept his plans drawn out on plastered boards, dodged a cart loaded with cut stone, and made his way over the rough churned ground where the carpenters were at work shaping up the great roof beams. In another place the blacksmiths were at work, making rods and clamps and dowels for the vaulting. And from the choir itself, where the big hoist was working, came the shouts of the men sweating at the great wheel that swung the cut stones skyward, and the men high overhead on the hurdle-walks, waiting to receive the swinging ashlars and guide them into place.

  Beside the outside hearth in front of one of the masons’ lodges, where the men had just been at their dinner, a lanky red-headed boy of about sixteen sat on a balk of timber, finishing up the remains of a big stirabout pot on his knees. He was wiping a long finger round and round inside the pot, and sucking off the blobs of stirabout. But he was not looking at what he was doing, he was gazing up at the tall mass of the choir with the blue sky shining through its clerestory windows.

  Lovel never knew, afterwards, quite what made him check in passing; he had never seen the boy before, but it was as though something in him recognized a kind of kinship between them. His shadow fell across the stirabout pot, and the boy looked round with a start; then seeing his black habit, made to get up, awkwardly, as though he was hampered by the big pot on his knees.

  Lovel shook his head, and sat down on the balk of timber beside him, stretching out his crooked leg, which was aching, as it often did with too much standing on it; and the boy stayed where he was, and looked at him, surprised. After a moment he grinned, showing a missing tooth, and then turned grave again. He had a grave face between the laughter.

  ‘You’re new on the site, aren’t you?’ Lovel said.

  ‘Aye. I’m the new scullion as you might say. The dog’s-body, the stirabout boy.’

  Lovel nodded. Every building-site had its odd hangers-on of that sort; boys or old men who brewed up the broth and fetched and carried for everybody. Sometimes they were kinsmen of someone among the labourers, sometimes a boy learning his trade the hard way, sometimes just a stray out of nowhere and going nowhere. Lovel found himself wanting to know about this boy; but there was something in his freckled face despite the grin, that made him feel that asking questions would be like pushing open somebody’s door and walking in without asking leave. Instead he said, ‘I have had no dinner, will you give me a turn at that pot?’

  The boy held it out to him. ‘You are most welcome, Reverend.’

  And Lovel dipped in a hand and brought out a blob of stirabout on his finger. It was almost cold, thick, and slabby, but not burned and with no lumps in it. ‘This is good. I wish you would come and cook for us in the hospital kitchen,’ he said, half in earnest.

  ‘I belong here.’ The boy jerked his chin towards where the walls of the choir rose into the sunlight with the swallows darting to and fro about it, beginning to gather for the autumn flight south. ‘Where there’s the walls going up.’

  It seemed somehow an odd thing to say, for someone who had only just come to Smithfield. But Lovel had scarcely time to notice, for at that moment someone hidden from view round the side of the forge hut nearby let out a shout, ‘Hi! Nick! Nick Redpoll! If you’ve naught better to do come and take a turn at the bellows! Do you expect me to forge clamps to the glory of God, and keep the plaguey forge fire going at the same time?’

  The boy put down the stiraboutpot, which Lovel had returned to him, and leaned sideways to reach for something half-hidden in the docks and long grass. And Lovel saw that it was a roughly-made crutch, and that Nick Redpoll’s left knee was stiff and bent, so that when he stood up his foot could not reach the ground; and he understood the odd sense of kinship that he had felt for the red-headed boy.

  Watching him hobble off in answer to another yell from the forge hut, Lovel was reminded sharply of his own early days at New M
inster, when he too had been at everybody’s beck and call, with no place in life to call his own.

  Well, it was too late to go into the church now. He turned back the way he had come, to all the things that would be waiting by now for him to do. But he did turn aside for a few moments to see how one of the freemasons, whom he had come to know a little, was getting on with the cushion-capitals that he was carving for the pillars of the choir.

  Standing beside the small bent craftsman, watching the slow, sure work of the adze cutting out the deep chevron pattern, he said, ‘Your new stirabout boy – Nick Redpoll, I heard someone call him – is he kin to any of the workmen?’

  Serle, the mason, watched the creamy stone flake away under the stroke of the adze. ‘Not kin to anyone that I know of,’ he said. ‘He just came hanging round the site like a stray dog, and the lads started giving him odd jobs. He makes a good enough stirabout boy. Good with his hands, too, and seems interested in building. Pity about that leg, he might have made a course-setter one day.’