Sutcliff - The Witchs Brat

The Abbey of New Minster means safety to Lovel. It is the reign of Henry I in England, and the monks protect Lovel from the people who think that, because of his crooked back and healing skills, he must be a witch. And, he has nowhere else to go.

Then he meets Rahere, the Kings Jester, in the abbey and makes a bargain that will take Lovel to London, to establish a life of his own at the great hospital of St Bartholomew.

Rosemary Sutcliff was born in 1920 in West Clanden, Surrey. With over 40 books to her credit, Rosemary Sutcliff is now universally considered one of the finest writers of historical novels for children. Her first novel, The Queen Elizabeth Story was published in 1950. In 1972 her book Tristan and Iseult was runner-up for the Carnegie Medal. In 1974 she was highly commended for the Hans Christian Andersen Award and in 1978 her book, Song for a Dark Queen was commended for the Other Award. Rosemary lived for a long time in Arundel, Sussex with her dogs and in 1975, she was awarded the OBE for services to Childrens Literature.

CONTENTS

For Margaret

Lovel and most of the other people in this story are imaginary. But Rahere, the Kings Jongleur who founded a great hospital, was a real person; and you can visit his tomb in the Church of Saint Bartholomew the Great, in Smithfield, today. His figure lies there carved in stone, in the dress of an Austin Canon, and at his head and feet kneel two small figures in the same dress, reading from Latin Bibles:

For the Lord shall comfort Zion: 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.

THE BOY CAME stumbling down between the two big outfields of the village, on his way back from taking Gyrth the shepherd his supper. It was October, and soon Gyrth would be bringing the sheep down from the summer pasture; but at this time of year, when the rams were running with the ewes, he stayed up on the Downs with the flock whole days and nights together. It had rained in the early morning, and the steep rutted chalk of the driftway was slippery, so that anybody would have to go carefully; but the boy, Lovel, had to go more carefully than most, because he was built crooked, with a hunched shoulder and a twisted leg that made him walk lop-sided like a bird with a broken wing. His bony face under the thatch of dusty dark hair was quick and eager and wanted to be friendly; but nobody had ever bothered to notice his face; unless perhaps it was his grandmother, and she had died a week ago.

From the top stretch of the driftway the village was hidden by the shoulder of the Downs, but as one rounded the corner by the hawthorn windbreak, rusty-red now with berries that the thrushes loved, suddenly there it was below in the valley. The one long street with the villeins cottages on either side, the field-strips where Osric was sowing the winter wheat, and at the far end where the ground rose a little, the thatched timber hall of Sir Richard dEresby, the Lord of the Manor, among its byres and barns and apple-trees, its bee-skeps and its great dovecot. And village and knights hall alike all softly hazed over by the blue smoke of evening cooking-fires hanging low in the autumn air.

Lovel checked and stood looking down, picking out from the rest, where it stood a little apart among the streamside alders, the turf-roofed bothy where he had lived with his grandmother all the eleven years since he came into the world and his mother went out of it. With his father, too; but his father had died last year of the spring sickness that came often after a bad winter and was sometimes stronger even than his grandmothers medicine herbs.

After that, by the usual laws of the Manor, his grandmother should have been turned out of the cottage to make room for another villein and his family; but she had been nurse and foster-mother to the old Lords son, him that had died when the English charged at Tenchbrai, and so she had been allowed to stay on.

Lovel dug the kale patch and looked after Garland the cow, and helped his grandmother gather her hedgerow samples and tend the little herb plot behind the cottage. And people brought her things, a hatful of apples or a new baked loaf, in payment for charming away their warts or telling them where to find their strayed cattle, for a pot of green wound-salve (there was no better in all West Sussex) or a nosegay of certain scented herbs gathered at New Moon, which, if a girl wore it tucked into the breast of her gown, would make the lad she wanted look in her direction. So what with one thing and another, she and Lovel had never gone hungry. Not too hungry, anyway.

Lovel looked away from the little humped tawny roof among the alder trees, that was home no more. He lived with Gyrths wife and children now; Sir Richards bailiff had arranged it, giving them the cow in payment. Gyrths wife had welcomed the cow, but not Lovel; and she had made it painfully clear that she only gave him house-room because she had to. Well, Lovel thought, shes kind to Garland, anyway. And that was something. It seemed to him just then that there was not much kindness in the world, and he was glad that Garland should have some of it.

A late yellow butterfly hovering past caught at his attention, and he watched it dance downward and settle on a dusty stem of Shepherds Purse beside the way. And for a sort of gleam of time, he seemed to see it not only with his eyes but with all of himself, the delicate veining of the yellow wings that quivered and half closed and fanned open again, the dark velvety nap on the butterflys slender body, the grey-green, heartshaped seedpods of the Shepherds Purse, stirring in the stray breath of wind, sharing with the butterfly the last warmth of the autumn sun; and the shadow of both tangled in the fieldside grass. Part of him longed to catch the butterfly, to hold it very carefully prisoned in his cupped hands and feel the life of it there and the flutter of its wings against his hollowed palms, as though in that way he could keep the small, shining moment from escaping. He had tried that once, when he was much younger, but the butterfly had turned broken and dead in his hands, and he had killed the moment and the shine and the beauty instead of keeping it; and been left with nothing but an empty feeling of desolation in his stomach because he could not mend the butterfly again. His grandmother had found him with the tiny, pitiful, broken thing in his hand, and he had not told her anything, not anything at all; but she had taken his face between her harsh, withered old hands and looked far down into him in the queer way she had that made her not quite like other people, and said, So you have it too. Throw this one away now, its no good grieving, and not even I can mend a broken butterfly. But one day you will mend other things. You will be one of the menders of this world; not the makers, nor yet the breakers, just one of the menders. And then she had laughed and said, Its no good bidding you to remember that. Fives too little to be remembering such things; but when the time comes, youll know. And she had given him a piece of honeycomb in his supper bowl of barley stirabout.

It was after that that she had started taking him with her when she went to gather simples, explaining to him the uses of the different herbs.

The yellow butterfly had taken to the air again, and went dancing and zigzagging off across the outfield. The moment was over. And Lovel turned back to the village. It was still the same village that he had known all his life, but it had put on a strangers face, and he had to take a small sharp pull at his courage before he could go on down the driftway.