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.