The Physician

by Noah Gordon

  Rob blurted his gratitude and ran on his way.

  He never stopped for a breath. Dodging freight wagons, avoiding drunkards, careening through crowds, he made for Puddle Dock. Halfway there he saw his enemy, Anthony Tite, with whom he had had three fierce fights in the past year. With a pair of his wharf-rat friends Anthony was ragging some of the stevedore slaves.

  Don’t delay me now, you little cod, Rob thought coldly.

  Try, Pissant-Tony, and I’ll really do you.

  The way someday he was going to do his rotten Da.

  He saw one of the wharf rats point him out to Anthony, but he was already past them and well on his way.

  He was breathless and with a stitch in his side when he arrived at Egglestan’s stables in time to see an unfamiliar old woman swaddling a newborn child.

  The stable was heavy with the odor of horse droppings and his mother’s blood. Mam lay on the floor. Her eyes were closed and her face was pale. He was surprised by her smallness.

  “Mam?”

  “You the son?”

  He nodded, thin chest heaving.

  The old woman hawked and spat on the floor. “Let her rest,” she said.

  When his Da came he scarcely gave Rob J. a glance. In a straw-filled wagon Bukerel had borrowed from a builder they took Mam home along with the newborn, a male who would be christened Roger Kemp Cole.

  After bringing forth a new baby Mam had always shown the infant to her other children with teasing pride. Now she simply lay and stared at the thatched ceiling.

  Finally Nathanael called in the Widow Hargreaves from the nearest house. “She can’t even suckle the child,” he told her.

  “Perhaps it will pass,” Della Hargreaves said. She knew of a wet nurse and took the baby away, to Rob J.’s great relief. He had all he could do to care for the other four children. Jonathan Carter had been trained to the pot but, missing the attention of his mother, seemed to have forgotten the fact.

  His Da stayed home. Rob J. said little to him and maneuvered out of his way.

  He missed the lessons they had had each morning, for Mam had made them seem like a merry game. He knew no one so full of warmth and loving mischief, so patient with slowness of memory.

  Rob charged Samuel with keeping Willum and Anne Mary out of the house. That evening Anne Mary wept for a lullaby. Rob held her close and called her his Maid Anne Mary, her favorite form of address. Finally he sang of soft sweet coneys and downy birds in the nest, tra-la, grateful that Anthony Tite was not a witness. His sister was more round-cheeked and tender-fleshed than their mother, although Mam had always said Anne Mary had the Kemp side’s features and traits, down to the way her mouth relaxed in sleep.

  Mam looked better the second day, but his father said the color in her cheeks was fever. She shivered, and they piled extra covers on her.

  On the third morning, when Rob gave her a drink of water he was shocked by the heat he felt in her face. She patted his hand. “My Rob J.,” she whispered. “So manly.” Her breath stank and she was breathing fast.

  When he took her hand something passed from her body into his mind. It was an awareness: he knew with absolute certainty what would happen to her. He couldn’t weep. He couldn’t cry out. The hair rose on the back of his neck. He felt pure terror. He could not have dealt with it had he been an adult, and he was a child.

  In his horror he squeezed Mam’s hand and caused her pain. His father saw and cuffed him on the head.

  Next morning when he got out of bed, his mother was dead.

  Nathanael Cole sat and wept, which frightened his children, who had not absorbed the reality that Mam was gone for good. They had never before seen their father cry, and they huddled together white-faced and watchful.

  The guild took care of everything.

  The wives came. None had been Agnes’ intimate, for her schooling had made her a suspect creature. But now the women forgave her former literacy and laid her out. Ever after, Rob hated the smell of rosemary. If times had been better the men would have come in the evening after their work, but many were unemployed and people showed up early. Hugh Tite, who was Anthony’s father and looked like him, came representing the coffin-knockers, a standing committee that met to make caskets for members’ funerals.

  He patted Nathanael’s shoulder. “I’ve enough pieces of hard pine tucked away. Left over from the Bardwell Tavern job last year, you recall that nice wood? We shall do right by her.”

  Hugh was a semiskilled journeyman and Rob had heard his father speak scornfully of him for not knowing how to care for tools, but now Nathanael only nodded dully and turned toward the drink.

  The guild had provided plenty, for a funeral was the only occasion where drunkenness and gluttony were sanctioned. In addition to apple cider and barley ale there was sweet beer and a mixture called slip, made by mixing honey and water and allowing the solution to ferment for six weeks. They had the carpenter’s friend and solace, pigment; mulberry-flavored wine called morat; and a spiced mead known as metheglin. They came laden with braces of roasted quail and partridge, numerous baked and fried dishes of hare and venison, smoked herring, fresh-caught trout and plaice, and loaves of barley bread.

  The guild declared a contribution of tuppence for almsgiving in the name of Agnes Cole of blessed memory and provided pallholders who led the procession to the church, and diggers who prepared the grave. Inside St. Botolph’s a priest named Kempton absentmindedly intoned the Mass and consigned Mam to the arms of Jesus, and the guildsmen recited two psalters for her soul. She was buried in the churchyard in front of a little yew tree.

  When they returned to the house the funeral feast had been made hot and ready by the women, and people ate and drank for hours, released from poverty fare by the death of a neighbor. The Widow Hargreaves sat with the children and fed them tidbits, making a fuss. She clasped them into her deep, scented breasts where they wriggled and suffered. But when William became sick it was Rob who took him out behind the house and held his head while he strained and retched. Afterward, Della Hargreaves patted Willum’s head and said it was grief; but Rob knew she had fed the child richly of her own cooking and for the rest of the feasting he steered the children clear of her potted eel.

  Rob understood about death but nevertheless found himself waiting for Mam to come home. Something within him would not have been terribly surprised if she had opened the door and walked into the house, bearing provisions from the market or money from the embroidery exporter in Southwark.

  History lesson, Rob.

  What three Germanic tribes invaded Britain during the A.D. 400s and 500s?

  The Angles, the Jutes, and the Saxons, Mam.

  Where did they come from, my darling?

  Germania and Denmark. They conquered the Britons along the east coast and founded the kingdoms of Northumbria, Mercia, and East Anglia.

  What makes my son so clever?

  A clever mother?

  Ah! Here is a kiss from your clever mother. And another kiss because you have a clever father. You must never forget your clever father …

  To his great surprise, his father stayed. Nathanael seemed to want to talk to the children, but he could not. He spent most of his time repairing the thatch in the roof. A few weeks after the funeral, while the numbness was still wearing off and Rob was just beginning to understand how different his life was going to be, his father finally got a job.

  London riverbank clay is brown and deep, a soft, tenacious muck that is home to shipworms called teredines. The worms had created havoc with timber, boring in over the centuries and riddling wharves, so some had to be replaced. The work was brutal and a far cry from building fine homes, but in his trouble Nathanael welcomed it.

  To Rob J. fell the responsibility for the house, although he was a poor cook. Often Della Hargreaves brought food or prepared a meal, usually while Nathanael was home, when she took pains to be scented and goodnatured and attentive to the children. She was stout but not unattractive, with a florid comp
lexion, high cheekbones, pointed chin, and small plump hands that she used as little as possible in work. Rob had always tended his brothers and sister, but now he had become their sole source of care and neither he nor they liked it. Jonathan Carter and Anne Mary cried constantly. William Stewart had lost his appetite and was becoming pinchfaced and large-eyed, and Samuel Edward was cheekier than ever, bringing home swear words that he threw at Rob J. with such glee that the older boy knew no solution but to clout him.

  He tried to do whatever he thought she would have done.

  In the mornings, after the baby had been given pap and the rest had received barley bread and drink, he cleaned the hearth under the round smoke hole, through which drops fell hissing into the fire when it rained. He took the ashes behind the house and got rid of them and then swept the floors. He dusted the sparse furnishings in all three rooms. Three times a week he shopped at Billingsgate to buy the things Mam had managed to bring home in a single weekly trip. Many of the stall owners knew him; some made the Cole family a small gift with their condolences the first time he came alone—a few apples, a piece of cheese, half a small salt cod. But within a few weeks he and they were used to one another and he haggled with them more fiercely than Mam had done, lest they think to take advantage of a child. His feet always dragged on the way home from market, for he was unwilling to take back from Willum the burden of the children.

  Mam had wanted Samuel to begin school this year. She had stood up to Nathanael and persuaded him to allow Rob to study with the monks at St. Botolph’s, and he had walked to the church school daily for two years before it became necessary for him to stay home so she would be free to work at embroidery. Now none of them would go to school, for his father couldn’t read or write and thought schooling a waste. He missed the school. He walked through the noisome neighborhoods of cheap, close-set houses, scarcely remembering how once his principal concern had been childish games and the specter of Pissant-Tony Tite. Anthony and his cohorts watched him pass without giving chase, as if losing his mother gave him immunity.

  One night his father told him he did good work. “You have always been older than your years,” Nathanael said, almost with disapproval. They looked at one another uneasily, having little else to say. If Nathanael was spending his free time with tarts, Rob J. didn’t know it. He still hated his father when he thought of how Mam had fared, but he knew that Nathanael was struggling in a way she would have admired.

  He might readily have turned over his brothers and sister to the Widow, and he watched Della Hargreave’s comings and goings expectantly, for the jests and sniggers of neighbors had informed him that she was the candidate to become his stepmother. She was childless; her husband, Lanning Hargreaves, had been a carpenter killed fifteen months before by a falling beam. It was customary that when a woman died leaving young children the new widower would remarry quickly, and it caused little wonder when Nathanael began to spend time alone with Della in her house. But such interludes were limited, because usually Nathanael was too tired. The great piles and bulwarks used in constructing the wharves had to be hewn square out of black oak logs and then set deep into the river bottom during low tide. Nathanael worked wet and cold. Along with the rest of his crew he developed a hacking, hollow cough and he always came home bone-weary. From the depths of the clammy Thames mud they ripped bits of history: a leather Roman sandal with long ankle straps, a broken spear, shards of pottery. He brought home a worked flint flake for Rob J.; sharp as a knife, the arrowhead had been found twenty feet down.

  “Is it Roman?” Rob asked eagerly.

  His father shrugged. “Perhaps Saxon.”

  But there was no question about the origin of the coin found a few days later. When Rob moistened ashes from the fire and rubbed and rubbed, on one side of the blackened disk appeared the words Prima Cohors Britanniae Londonii. His church Latin proved barely equal. “Perhaps it marks the first cohort to be in London,” he said. On the other side was a Roman on horseback, and three letters, IOX.

  “What does IOX mean?” his father asked.

  He didn’t know. Mam would have, but he had no one else to ask, and he put the coin away.

  They were so accustomed to Nathanael’s cough it was no longer heard. But one morning when Rob was cleaning the hearth, there was a minor commotion out front. When he opened the door he saw Harmon Whitelock, a member of his father’s crew, and two slaves he had impressed from the stevedores to carry Nathanael home.

  Slaves terrified Rob J. There were various ways for a man to lose his freedom. A war prisoner became the servi of a warrior who might have taken his life but spared it. Free men could be sentenced into slavery for serious crimes, as could debtors or those unable to pay a severe wite or fine. A man’s wife and children went into slavery with him, and so did future generations of his family.

  These slaves were great, muscular men with shaven heads to denote their bondage and tattered clothes that stank abominably. Rob J. couldn’t tell if they were captured foreigners or Englishmen, for they didn’t speak but stared at him stolidly. Nathanael wasn’t small but they carried him as if he were weightless. The slaves frightened Rob J. even more than the sight of the sallow bloodlessness of his father’s face or the way Nathanael’s head lolled as they set him down.

  “What happened?”

  Whitelock shrugged. “It’s a misery. Half of us are down with it, coughing and spitting all the time. Today he was so weak he was overcome as soon as we got into heavy work. I expect a few days of rest will see him back on the wharves.”

  Next morning Nathanael was unable to leave the bed, his voice a rasping. Mistress Hargreaves brought hot tea laced with honey and hovered about. They spoke in low, intimate voices and once or twice the woman laughed. But when she came the following morning, Nathanael had a high fever and was in no mood for badinage or niceties, and she left quickly.

  His tongue and throat turned bright red and he kept asking for water.

  During the night he dreamed, once shouting that the stinking Danes were coming up the Thames in their high-prowed ships. His chest filled with a stringy phlegm that he couldn’t rid himself of, and he breathed with increasing difficulty. When morning arrived Rob hastened next door to fetch the Widow, but Della Hargreaves declined to come. “It appeared to me to be thrush. Thrush is highly impartible,” she said, and closed the door.

  Having nowhere else to turn, Rob went again to the guild. Richard Bukerel listened to him gravely and then followed him home and sat by the foot of Nathanael’s bed for a time, noting his flushed face and hearing the rattling when he breathed.

  The easy solution would have been to summon a priest; the cleric would do little but light tapers and pray, and Bukerel could turn his back without fear of criticism. For some years he had been a successful builder, but he was beyond his depth as leader of the London Corporation of Carpenters, trying to use a meager treasury to accomplish far more than could be achieved.

  But he knew what would happen to this family unless one parent survived, and he hurried away and used guild funds to hire Thomas Ferraton, a physician.

  Bukerel’s wife gave him the sharp edge of her tongue that night. “A physician? Is Nathanael Cole suddenly gentry or nobility, then? When an ordinary surgeon is good enough to take care of any other poor person in London, why does Nathanael Cole need a physician to charge us dear?”

  Bukerel could only mumble an excuse, for she was right. Only nobles and wealthy merchants bought the expensive services of physicians. Ordinary folk used surgeons, and sometimes a laboring man paid a ha’penny to a barber-surgeon for bloodletting or questionable treatment. So far as Bukerel was concerned, all healers were damned leeches, doing more harm than good. But he had wanted to give Cole every chance, and in a weak moment he had summoned the physician, spending the hard-earned dues of honest carpenters.

  When Ferraton came to the Cole house he had been sanguine and confident, the reassuring picture of prosperity. His tight trousers were beautifully cut and
the cuffs of his shirt were adorned with embroidery that immediately gave Rob a pang, reminding him of Mam. Ferraton’s quilted tunic, of the finest wool available, was encrusted with dried blood and vomitus, which he pridefully believed was an honorable advertisement of his profession.

  Born to wealth—his father had been John Ferraton, wool merchant—Ferraton had apprenticed with a physician named Paul Willibald, whose prosperous family made and sold fine blades. Willibald had treated wealthy people, and after his apprenticeship Ferraton had drifted into that kind of practice himself. Noble patients were out of reach for the son of a tradesman, but he felt at home with the well-to-do; they shared a commonality of attitudes and interests. He never knowingly accepted a patient from the laboring class, but he had assumed Bukerel was the messenger for someone much grander. He immediately recognized Nathanael Cole as an unworthy patient but, not wishing to make a scene, resolved to finish the disagreeable task as quickly as possible.

  He touched Nathanael’s forehead delicately, looked into his eyes, sniffed his breath.

  “Well,” he said. “It shall pass.”

  “What is it?” Bukerel asked, but Ferraton didn’t reply.

  Rob felt instinctively that the doctor didn’t know.

  “It is the quinsy,” Ferraton said at last, pointing out white sores in his father’s crimson throat. “A suppurative inflammation of a temporary nature. Nothing more.” He tied a tourniquet on Nathanael’s arm, lanced him deftly, and let a copious amount of blood.

  “If he doesn’t improve?” Bukerel asked.

  The physician frowned. He would not revisit this lower-class house. “I had best bleed him again to make certain,” he said, and did the other arm. He left a small flask of liquid calomel mixed with charcoaled reed, charging Bukerel separately for the visit, the bleedings, and the medicine.

  “Man-wasting leech! Ball-butchering gentleman prick,” Bukerel muttered, gazing after him. The Chief Carpenter promised Rob he would send a woman to care for his father.