The Witch's Brat

  The woman took the little lovingly-carved lamb and looked at it, then she held it against her face and began to cry.

  Lovel thought that he must give Nick something else to do, before he went back to staring at the rafters. But as it turned out, having once got started, Nick himself had the same thought, and next day, sitting on the edge of his bed – he was allowed up for a little while each day now – he said, ‘Brother Lovel – do you reckon you could get me a bit o’good carving wood – beech, say – out o’ the carpenters? ’Tisn’t no good just lying here, and maybe I could make something for the chapel – for “thank you”, like.’

  Lovel checked in bandaging on the splint, and looked at him. ‘For “thank you”? We are going to get your leg straight Nick, but we have still to find how well it will take your weight, when we have done it.’

  Nick looked back at him steadily. ‘Aye, I know that. I’ll make you an altar candlestick, all the same.’

  So Lovel got a piece of wood out of the carpenters, and Nick set to work. Sister Aldis, who did most of the ward sweeping, complained a good deal at first about shavings on the floor; but after Nick showed her what he was making, she admitted, rather grudgingly, that it was worth a little extra sweeping. For Nick’s candlestick was going to be no ordinary candlestick, but a tall, long-winged angel with a crown on his head, and the candle-socket rising from between his back-folded wings.

  It was by far the most difficult thing that he had ever tried to carve, and he didn’t know how to do it; so he felt his way along slowly, doing what the wood seemed to want him to do, much as Lovel was doing with his stiff knee. He made mistakes; he could not get the hands as he wanted them; and the two sides of the angel’s face came out not quite the same as each other, and he wasn’t at all satisfied with it himself. But all the same, as the days went by, and the carved angel got nearer and nearer to being finished, Lovel knew that it was beautiful.

  ‘I’ll make another after this,’ Nick said. ‘There should be the pair – an’ I’ll know what not to do next time.’

  Lovel sat turning the figure over and over in his hands and looking at it. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘you could make your living as an image maker.’

  ‘You mean – if I can’t be a mason.’

  Lovel looked up quickly. He had never pretended with Nick. ‘Yes,’ he said.

  Nick looked at the carved angel as though he were seeing it for the first time, and was surprised at what he saw. ‘It’s a thought,’ he said slowly. ‘Aye, it’s a thought . . .’

  ‘You don’t sound as though it was a thought you like very much.’

  ‘’Twouldn’t be the same, you see,’ Nick frowned, trying to explain what he meant. ‘It’s so small, and – oh, it’s fine to do in between whiles, but it’s not like the other – the walls going up, and the stones shaped true so’s you can’t scarce run your thumbnail along the joints, and knowing ’tis strong and sound and won’t never fall down because all the weight comes in the right places and the buttresses are taking the strain fair and square and nothing out of kilter. And yet all seeming like ’twas reaching up to the sky instead of crushing down on the earth—’ He broke off, suddenly flushing scarlet. ‘Here – give it me back, I haven’t finished the crown yet.’

  He was sitting on the edge of his bed with his splinted leg stuck awkwardly out in front of him because it was nearly straight now. Lovel said, ‘If you start on that second angel tomorrow, we might try your weight on your knee about the time it’s finished.’

  The year had turned, and the evenings were beginning to draw out, when at last the day came. Nick had saved the final polishing of his second angel to do that morning, as though finishing the angel and testing out his knee had become somehow two things that belonged together. But it was finished and standing with the other before the Saint’s picture, carrying its burden of light, when Lovel came with the rubbing oil and his sleeves rolled up. It was just after the midday meal, and Nick’s platter was still on the bed beside him, full of a cold stewed mess of some kind, that he had hardly touched. ‘Not hungry,’ he said when Lovel asked him, and wrinkled his nose at the platter. Certainly the bean stew did look even more unappetizing than usual; but Lovel had a feeling that that was only an excuse. . . .

  He set to work with the rubbing oil as usual, but when he had finished, instead of bandaging the splint on again, he gave Nick his crutch, and helped him up. ‘Get the feel of it first – you’ll miss the splint.’

  Nick stood and looked at him for a moment, the freckles standing out very black across the bridge of his nose. And Lovel saw the appeal in his face and understood it. Not with Sister Ursula who was clearing up after the meal, not with Brother Philip, and the folk in the other beds, all looking on.

  It was one of those days that come in late winter, suddenly soft and milky with promise though there might be blizzards still to come. In the physic garden on the south side of the hospital it would be warm as spring. Nick would come to no harm out there.

  ‘Come outside,’ he said.

  There was a side door from the dispensary into the physic garden. Lovel led the way, hearing the tap of Nick’s crutch behind him. There were blue-green snowdrop spears clustered about the door-sill, and a blackbird was singing in the nearest elder tree. A straight turf path led from the door across the garden, between the still bare beds where garlic and celandine, foxglove and feverfew and elecampane would soon be showing green again; and where it started, they stood for a moment looking at each other. ‘Are you ready?’ Lovel said.

  Nick said nothing, but nodded.

  And Lovel took his crutch and moved backwards a step. ‘Now – walk towards me. No, look at me, not at your feet.’

  For a long moment Nick did not move. His eyes were fixed on Lovel’s face. Lovel moved backwards another step. He was suddenly remembering Valiant again, and the stable at the New Minster. His throat ached with anxiety. ‘Come,’ he said.

  Nick, with enormous care and concentration, took a step, and then another, and another – five steps, and then Lovel caught him as he stumbled, and gave him back his crutch.

  He was grinning from ear to ear, and shivering. ‘I did it! I did it!’

  ‘Don’t crow!’ Lovel said. ‘And next time, remember to bend your knee. God gave you that knee for bending, and you’re carrying it as stiff as a broomstick! Now come indoors.’

  In the dispensary, Nick hung back from the doorway to the ward. ‘When can I go back to the building?’

  ‘To being a stirabout boy?’

  ‘There’s many a good freemason started that way.’

  Lovel nodded. ‘Not for a while yet. Five steps does not mean you are back on your feet, and I have to make sure it won’t start tightening up again, before I let you go.’ He smiled. ‘You had better start carving something else.’

  Nick was silent a moment, and then the corners of his mouth curled slowly upward. ‘Not I! I know something this place wants more than an image maker.’

  ‘And what would that be?’

  ‘A cook!’ said Nick.

  14

  The Miracle

  A FEW DAYS later Lovel went across to the priory in search of Serle. The masons had set up their winter workshop under cover of the roofed-in North Aisle, and there he found the man he was looking for among cut stone and column heads, chipping away at a stringcourse. It had been an open winter, and so they had been able to get a fair amount of work done, ready for when building started again, around Easter-time.

  When they had exchanged ‘Good days’, Lovel came straight to the point. ‘You remember Nick Redpoll?’

  Serle looked up from his work. ‘Aye, I mind Nick Redpoll. How does the lad?’

  ‘He can walk a fair bit without his crutch, now,’ Lovel said. ‘By the time you start building again, he’ll be fit for work.’

  ‘Always room for a good stirabout boy. We’ve missed his cooking.’

  Lovel sighed.’ We shall miss it, too. He’s been working in the hospital kitc
hen while his leg finishes mending. But it is not his cooking that I came to talk to you about. You said last autumn that he might have made a course-setter.’

  ‘Aye, but for the leg.’ Serle made a careful cut with his adze.

  ‘But with a sound leg?’

  ‘Sound enough for work on the high catwalks?’

  ‘He may always have a slight limp; but sound enough for the high catwalks, yes.’

  ‘Then – aye, he might make a course-setter.’

  ‘That’s just it. He was learning that trade before the accident to his knee; but I think, given the chance, he’d make not just a course-setter but a freemason.’

  Serle stopped work altogether, and stood up, rubbing his chin with a rasping sound. ‘Do you now, Canon Lovel: and what makes you think that?’ He grinned. ‘Every man to his own trade, they do say, and – asking your pardon – I never heard tell that yours was handling stone.’

  Lovel began carefully to unroll something that he had brought with him wrapped in a bit of sackcloth. ‘Look at this,’ he said, and set the second of Nick Redpoll’s long-winged angels on the flat top of the stone block that Serle had been working.

  Serle picked it up and looked at it, with eyebrows raised and mouth puckered as though in a soundless whistle. ‘Nick made this? – I mind he used to whittle a bit.’

  ‘Yes,’ Lovel said.

  ‘It’s pretty. Aye, it’s good work, for a youngling. But a little wooden angel don’t make a freemason. Stone’s different from wood; and all this’ – he jerked a thumb over his shoulder in a gesture that took in the still roofless choir, the piled ashlars in the aisle, and all the great church that would stand there one day but was as yet only a few foundations and a stack of drawing in the master mason’s tracing-shed – ‘all this is different from a little figure you can pick up in one hand. . . . You know what, the lad could do well as an image maker.’

  Lovel smiled. ‘I told him that. He said it wasn’t the same. Not the same as walls going up and the stones shaped true, so that you couldn’t run your thumbnail along the joints, and knowing it would never fall down because all the weight and stress came in the right places and nothing was out of kilter (whatever that means), and – and yet seeming all the time to be reaching up to the sky instead of crushing down on the earth.’

  There was a small silence filled with the sounds of the other masons at work. ‘He said that, did he?’ Serle said at last.

  ‘So nearly as I can remember. So I brought you the angel to show you that he has craft-skill in his hands.’

  ‘Craft-skill small isn’t the same as craft-skill big.’

  ‘Surely not. But I thought that the ability to carve detail was one of the skills needful in a freemason.’ Lovel looked at the fine chevron pattern of the stringcourse that Serle had been at work on.

  ‘One of them, aye. But even at that, it’s like I said, wood’s not stone – the lad understands wood, I grant you that.’

  ‘And if he understands wood – and if he feels as he does about all this’ – Lovel glanced about him at the same things that Serle had indicated with his thumb – ‘mightn’t it at least be worth finding out whether he can understand stone?’

  ‘Aye,’ Serle said at last. ‘But you’d best be saying your piece to the master mason. It’s not me that does the hiring round these parts.’

  ‘I have already spoken with Master Beornfred. He’ll try Nick as a course-setter, and let him work his way from there, if he can.’

  ‘Well then, what would you be wanting me to do about it?’ Serle was surprised and a little put out.

  ‘Keep a kindly eye on him. Try him at the job – and if you find him worth it, let him learn from your skill.’

  Serle was silent a moment, looking at the carved angel in his hands. Then abruptly he nodded, and handed it back. ‘I’ll do that. But no more, mind. Nothing but his own skill can make him a freemason.’

  At Easter the priory church woke from its winter sleep, and Nick Redpoll, with nothing left of the old injury but a limp that showed when he was tired, went back to work on the site, but no longer as a stirabout boy. Lovel did not even see him go, for it was the day of the weekly horse-market, and a man who had been kicked by a frightened colt was brought in just as Nick was gathering up his few belongings; and by the time the fellow’s broken head was patched up, there was nothing left of Nick Redpoll but his empty bed in the corner and the pair of long-winged angels who now held the altar candles in the little chapel.

  And from the Master to the newest patient who had been there long enough to remember it, Saint Bartholomew’s Hospital sighed and resigned itself to Sister Gertruda’s cooking again.

  Spring turned to summer, and the life of the hospital went on as usual. Folk came and went, got better or died; the herbs in the physic garden flourished and Rahere said Mass every day in the altar-chapel where the two wards met, and went on struggling with the accounts and the complaints and all the problems that the Master of a busy hospital had to deal with.

  And across the strip of rough ground that divided hospital from priory the great roof beams of the choir were hoisted into place, and the tower began to rise.

  Summer drew on, and the great three-day cloth-fair came and went. The choir was roofed in now, and the archway beyond which the nave of the church would one day rise, had been roughly boarded up, so that it made a complete building in which services could be held. And the day came, on the very edge of autumn, when the Bishop of London – that same Richard de Belmeis who had received Lovel’s vows four years ago – was to consecrate the priory church of Saint Bartholomew.

  It was a grey stormy day of low drifting cloud with the smell of rain in the wind. But the rain was still holding off when the Bishop’s procession followed by Rahere and his black-gowned canons, and the master craftsmen in their Sunday best, wound its way in through the small doorway that had been left in the boarded-up west end of the choir. Inside it was very dark, a great shell of empty shadow, with the grey clouds hurrying past the high clerestory windows that had no glass in them as yet; and in all the greyness, the scarlet and crimson and purple of the Bishop and his clergy glowed jewel-deep in the glimmer of the candles on the makeshift altar. The scent of incense drifted on the air, and the chanting voices of the Brothers rose and hung high under the shadowy roof. Lovel thought how presently nave and tower and transept would rise about them, and the buildings of the great priory itself; and it all seemed a great way from the long low-roofed hospital-house close by, where his sick folk waited for him to go back to them. Two separate worlds. He looked at the tall black crane-fly figure of Rahere who had been the King’s Jongleur and then the Master of the Hospital, and would be Prior here by and by, and wondered if it seemed as strange and remote to him. But Rahere’s face in the light of the altar candles was as hard to read as the face of a Crusader knight on a tomb.

  Lovel pulled his thoughts back to his devotions . . .

  The Bishop’s hand was raised in blessing; his strong, rather harsh voice filled the tall building. ‘This spiritual house, Almighty God shall inhabit, and bless and glorify it. His seeing and His hearing shall be towards it night and day, that the asker in it shall receive, the seeker shall find, and he who knocks shall enter in. . . .’

  The sun that had been hidden all day broke through the clouds, and the clerestory windows were suddenly full of light; great shafts of light that shone down into the heart of the choir, filling all the building with a sudden radiance that dimmed the altar candles.

  Lovel thought, ‘The asker shall receive, the seeker shall find, and he who knocks shall enter in – joy and gladness shall be found therein, thanksgiving, and the voice of melody – not two worlds but one.’ He saw Rahere’s strange, haunted face fly open into joy.

  Outside, the work had stood still for an hour, that the ceremony might not be marred by hammering and sawing; but as they came out into the still lingering sunshine, it was beginning again. The first tier of scaffolding was up round the tow
er, which now stood close on fifteen feet high, and already there were workmen up there. The head of one of them shone red as flame in the sunlight. . . .

  As soon as the procession had broken up, Lovel came back. He had only a few moments to spare; there was work waiting for him, but he came back, and found Nick Redpoll climbing down the ladder to meet him. It was as though they had arranged to meet; and yet they didn’t seem at first to have anything special to say.

  ‘How is the knee?’ Lovel asked.

  ‘It aches a bit by the end of the day, but it’s getting better all the time.’

  They stood looking up at the choir and the part-built tower rising proud against the stormy sky, with the craftsmen and labourers swarming round it.

  ‘There were times, you know,’ Lovel said, still watching the men on the hurdle-walk, ‘when I wondered if you could take very much more. When you are a master mason like Master Beornfred, you’ll be able to feel that maybe you’ve earned it more than most.’

  There was a small silence, and then Nick Redpoll turned to look down at Lovel. He had grown a lot during his time in hospital, and could look down quite a long way. He swallowed, and suddenly flushed fiery pink to the roots of his hair. ‘Well, it’s like this – if it’d been Brother Dominic or even Brother Luke, I reckon I couldn’t have took it; but ’twas you, you see,’

  ‘And so?’ said Lovel.

  Nick swallowed agin. ‘Well, you see, ’twasn’t so lonely that way. Like having a mate with you in a tight place. When the pain was bad and that, I says to myself, “It’s Brother Lovel, with a game leg of his own, and that humpy shoulder and all, and he knows” – and so I hangs on.’

  ‘I see,’ Lovel said after a moment. ‘Yes, I do see, I thank you, Nick.’

  And then, just as it had happened the first time they met, someone up on the hurdle-walk was roaring for Nick Redpoll, and he had to go.