The Devils Novice (14 page)

“I
desire,” he said, “to learn what is due from me and to deliver it faithfully. I
am here to be disposed of as may best be fitting.”

Well,
at any rate he knew how to keep his mouth shut, for evidently he had never let
out, even to Brother Paul, that Cadfael had told him what was intended for him.
By Isouda’s account he must have been keeping his own counsel ever since he
began to grow up, perhaps even before, as soon as it burned into his child’s
heart that he was not loved like his brother, and goaded him to turn
mischievous and obdurate to get a little notice from those who under-valued
him. Thus setting them ever more against him, and rendering himself ever more
outrageously exiled from grace.

And
I dared trounce him for succumbing to the first misery of his life, thought
Cadfael, remorseful, when half his life has been a very sharp misery.

The
abbot was austerely kind, putting behind them past errors atoned for, and
explaining to him what was now asked of him. “You will attend with us this
morning,” said Radulfus, “and take your dinner in refectory among your
brothers. This afternoon Brother Cadfael will take you to the hospice at Saint
Giles, since he will be going there to refill the medicine cupboard.” And that,
at least three days early, was news also to Cadfael, and a welcome indication
of the abbot’s personal concern. The brother who had shown a close interest in
this troubled and troublesome young novice was being told plainly that he had
leave to continue his surveillance.

They
set forth from the gatehouse side by side in the early afternoon, into the
common daily traffic of the high road through the Foregate. Not a great bustle
at this hour on a soft, moist, melancholy November day, but always some
evidence of human activity, a boy jog-trotting home with a bag on his shoulder
and a dog at his heels, a carter making for the town with a load of
coppice-wood, an old man leaning on his staff, two sturdy housewives of the
Foregate bustling back from the town with their purchases, one of Hugh’s
officers riding back towards the bridge at a leisurely walk. Meriet opened his
eyes wide at everything about him, after ten days of close stone walls and
meagre lamplight. His face was solemn and still, but his eyes devoured colour
and movement hungrily. From the gatehouse to the hospice of Saint Giles was
barely half a mile’s walk, alongside the enclave wall of the abbey, past the
open green of the horse-fair, and along the straight road between the houses of
the Foregate, until they thinned out with trees and gardens between, and gave
place to the open countryside. And there the low roof of the hospital came into
view, and the squat tower of its chapel, on a slight rise to the left of the
highway, where the road forked.

Meriet
eyed the place as they approached, with purposeful interest but no eagerness,
simply as the field to which he was assigned.

“How
many of these sick people can be housed here?”

There
might be as many as five and twenty at a time, but it varies. Some of them move
on, from lazar-house to lazar-house, and make no long stay anywhere. Some come
here too ill to go further. Death thins the numbers, and newcomers fill the
gaps again. You are not afraid of infection?”

Meriet
said: “No,” so indifferently that it was almost as if he had said: “Why should
I be? What threat can disease possibly be to me?”

“Your
Brother Mark is in charge of all?” he asked.

“There
is a lay superior, who lives in the Foregate, a decent man and a good manager.
And two other helpers. But Mark looks after the inmates. You could be a great
help to him if you choose,” said Cadfael, “for he’s barely older than you, and
your company will be very welcome to him. Mark was my right hand and comfort in
the herbarium, until he felt it his need to come here and care for the poor and
the strays, and now I doubt I shall ever win him back, for he has always some
soul here that he cannot leave, and as he loses one he finds another.”

He
drew in prudently from saying too much in praise of his most prized disciple;
but still it came as a surprise to Meriet when they climbed the gentle slope
that lifted the hospital clear of the highway, passed through wattled fence and
low porch, and came upon Brother Mark sitting at his little desk within. He was
furrowing his high forehead over accounts, his lips forming figures silently as
he wrote them down on his vellum. His quill needed retrimming, and he had
managed to ink his fingers, and by scrubbing bewilderedly in his spiky,
straw-coloured fringe of hair had left smudges on both his eyebrow and his
crown. Small and slight and plain of face, himself a neglected waif in his
childhood, he looked up at them, when they entered the doorway, with a smile of
such disarming sweetness that Meriet’s firmly-shut mouth fell open, like his
guarded eyes, and he stood staring in candid wonder as Cadfael presented him.
This little, frail thing, meagre as a sixteen-year-old, and a hungry one at
that, was minister to twenty or more sick, maimed, poor, verminous and old!

“I’ve
brought you Brother Meriet,” said Cadfael, “as well as this scrip full of
goods. He’ll be staying with you awhile to learn the work here, and you can
rely on him to do whatever you ask of him. Find him a corner and a bed, while I
fill up your cupboard for you. Then you can tell me if there’s anything more
you need.”

He
knew his way here. He left them studying each other and feeling without haste
for words, and went to unlock the repository of his medicines, and fill up the
shelves. He was in no hurry; there was something about those two, utterly
separate though they might be, the one son to a lord of two manors, the other a
cottar’s orphan, that had suddenly shown them as close kin in his eyes.
Neglected and despised both, both of an age, and with such warmth and humility
on the one side, and such passionate and impulsive generosity on the other, how
could they fail to come together?

When
he had unloaded his scrip, and noted any depleted places remaining on the
shelves, he went to find the pair, and followed them at a little distance as
Mark led his new helper through hospice and chapel and graveyard, and the
sheltered patch of orchard behind, where some of the abler in body sat for part
of the day outside, to take the clean air. A household of the indigent and
helpless, men, women, even children, forsaken or left orphans, dappled by skin
diseases, deformed by accident, leprosy and agues; and a leaven of reasonably
healthy beggars who lacked only land, craft, a place in the orders, and the
means to earn their bread. In Wales, thought Cadfael, these things are better
handled, not by charity but by blood-kinship. If a man belongs to a kinship,
who can separate him from it? It acknowledges and sustains him, it will not let
him be outcast or die of need. Yet even in Wales, the outlander without a clan
is one man against the world. So are these runaway serfs, dispossessed
cottagers, crippled labourers thrown out when they lose their working value.
And the poor, drab, debased women, some with children at skirt, and the fathers
snug and far, those that are not honest but dead.

He
left them together, and went away quietly with his empty scrip and his
bolstered faith. No need to say one word to Mark of his new brother’s history,
let them make what they could of each other in pure brotherhood, if that term
has truly any meaning. Let Mark make up his own mind, unprejudiced, unprompted,
and in a week we may learn something positive about Meriet, not filtered
through pity.

The
last he saw of them they were in the little orchard where the children ran to
play; four who could run, one who hurpled on a single crutch, and one who at
nine years old scuttled on all fours like a small dog, having lost the toes of
both feet through a gangrene after being exposed to hard frost in a bad winter.
Mark had the littlest by the hand as he led Meriet round the small enclosure.
Meriet had as yet no armoury against horror, but at least horror in him was not
revulsion. He was stooping to reach a hand to the dog-boy winding round his
feet, and finding him unable to rise, and therefore unwilling to attempt it, he
did not hoist the child willy-nilly, but suddenly dropped to his own nimble
haunches to bring himself to a comparable level, and squatted there distressed,
intent, listening.

It
was enough. Cadfael went away content and left them together.

He
let them alone for some days, and then made occasion to have a private word
with Brother Mark, on the pretext of attending one of the beggars who had a
persistent ulcer. Not a word was said of Meriet until Mark accompanied Cadfael
out to the gate, and a piece of the way along the road towards the abbey wall.

“And
how is your new helper doing?” asked Cadfael then, in the casual tone in which
he would have enquired of any other beginner in this testing service.

“Very
well,” said Mark, cheerful and unsuspicious. “Willing to work until he drops, if
I would let him.” So he might, of course; it is one way of forgetting what
cannot be escaped. “He’s very good with the children, they follow him round and
take him by the hand when they can.” Yes, that also made excellent sense. The
children would not ask him questions he did not wish to answer, or weigh him up
in the scale as grown men do, but take him on trust and if they liked him,
cling to him. He would not need his constant guard with them. “And he does not
shrink from the worst disfigurement or the most disgusting tasks,” said Mark,
“though he is not inured to them as I am, and I know he suffers.”

“That’s
needful,” said Cadfael simply. “If he did not suffer he ought not to be here.
Cold kindness is only half a man’s duty who tends the sick. How do you find him
with you—does he speak of himself ever?”

“Never,”
said Mark, and smiled, feeling no surprise that it should be so. “He has
nothing he wishes to say. Not yet.”

“And
there is nothing you wish to know of him?”

“I’ll
listen willingly,” said Mark, “to anything you think I
should
know of
him. But what most matters I know already: that he is by nature honest and
sweet clean through, whatever manner of wreck he and other people and ill
circumstances may have made of his life. I only wish he were happier. I should
like to hear him laugh.”

“Not
for your need, then,” said Cadfael, “but in case of his, you had better know
all of him that I know.” And forthwith he told it.

“Now
I understand,” said Mark at the end of it, “why he
would
take his pallet
up into the loft. He was afraid that in his sleep he might disturb and frighten
those who have more than enough to bear already. I was in two minds about
moving up there with him, but I thought better of it. I knew he must have his
own good reasons.”

“Good
reasons for everything he does?” wondered Cadfael.

“Reasons
that seem good to him, at any rate. But they might not always be wise,”
conceded Mark very seriously.

Brother
Mark said no word to Meriet about what he had learned, certainly made no move
to join him in his self-exile in the loft over the barn, nor offered any
comment on such a choice; but he did, on the following three nights, absent
himself very quietly from his own bed when all was still, and go softly into
the barn to listen for any sound from above. But there was nothing but the
long, easy breathing of a man peacefully asleep, and the occasional sigh and
rustle as Meriet turned without waking. Perhaps other, deeper sighs at times,
seeking to heave away a heavy weight from a heart; but no outcry. At Saint
Giles Meriet went to bed tired out and to some consoling degree fulfilled, and
slept without dreams.

Among
the many benefactors of the leper hospital, the crown was one of the greatest
through its grants to the abbey and the abbey’s dependencies. There were other
lords of manors who allowed certain days for the gathering of wild fruits or
dead wood, but in the nearby reaches of the Long Forest the lazar-house had the
right to make forays for wood, both for fuel and fencing or other building
uses, on four days in the year, one in October, one in November, one in
December, whenever the weather allowed, and one in February or March to
replenish stocks run down by the winter.

Meriet
had been at the hospice just three weeks when the third of December offered a
suitably mild day for an expedition to the forest, with early sun and
comfortably firm and dry earth underfoot. There had been several dry days, and
might not be many more. It was ideal for picking up dead wood, without the extra
weight of damp to carry, and even stacked coppice-wood was fair prize under the
terms. Brother Mark snuffed the air and declared what was to all intents a
holiday. They marshalled two light hand-carts, and a number of woven slings to
bind faggots, put on board a large leather bucket of food, and collected all
the inmates capable of keeping up with a leisurely progress into the forest.
There were others who would have liked to come, but could not manage the way
and had to wait at home.

From
Saint Giles the highway led south, leaving aside to the left the way Brother
Cadfael had taken to Aspley. Some way past that divide they kept on along the
road, and wheeled right into the scattered copse-land which fringed the forest,
following a good, broad ride which the carts could easily negotiate. The
toeless boy went with them, riding one of the carts. His weight, after all, was
negligible, and his joy beyond price. Where they halted in a clearing to
collect fallen wood, they set him down in the smoothest stretch of grass, and
let him play while they worked.