The Physician

by Noah Gordon

  Barber knew what his new boy was feeling. He had been exactly this one’s age when he found himself alone after berserkers had struck Clacton, the fishing village where he was born. It was burned into his memory.

  Aethelred was the king of his childhood. As early as he could remember, his father had cursed Aethelred, saying the people had never been so poor under any other king. Aethelred squeezed and taxed, providing a lavish life for Emma, the strong-willed and beautiful woman he had imported from Normandy to be his queen. He also built an army with the taxes but used it more to protect himself than his people, and he was so cruel and bloodthirsty that some men spat when they heard his name.

  In the spring of Anno Domini 991, Aethelred shamed his subjects by bribing Danish attackers with gold to turn them away. The following spring the Danish fleet returned to London as it had done for a hundred years. This time Aethelred had no choice; he gathered his fighters and warships, and the Danes were defeated on the Thames with great slaughter. But two years later there was a more serious invasion, when Olaf, King of the Norwegians, and Swegen, King of the Danes, sailed up the Thames with ninety-four ships. Again Aethelred gathered his army around London and managed to hold the Norsemen off, but this time the invaders saw that the cowardly king had left his country vulnerable in order to protect himself. Splitting up their fleet, the Norsemen beached their ships along the English coast and laid waste to the small seaside towns.

  That week, Henry Croft’s father had taken him on his first long trip after herring. The morning they returned with a good catch he had run ahead, eager to be first in his mother’s arms and hear her words of praise. Hidden out of sight in a cove nearby were half a dozen Norwegian longboats. When he reached his cottage he saw a strange man dressed in animal skins staring out at him through the open shutters of the window hole.

  He had no idea who the man was, but instinct caused him to turn and run for his life, straight to his father.

  His mother lay on the floor already used and dead, but his father didn’t know that. Luke Croft pulled his knife as he made for the house, but the three men who met him outside the front door were carrying swords. From afar, Henry Croft saw his father overpowered and taken. One of the men held his father’s hands behind his back. Another pulled his hair with both hands, forcing him to kneel and extend his neck. The third man cut off his head with a sword. In Barber’s nineteenth year he had witnessed a murderer executed in Wolverhampton; the sheriff’s axman had cleaved off the criminal’s head as if killing a rooster. In contrast, his father’s beheading had been clumsily done, for the Viking had required a flurry of strokes, as if he were hacking a piece of firewood.

  Hysterical with grief and fear, Henry Croft had run into the woods and hidden himself like a hunted animal. When he wandered out, dazed and starving, the Norwegians were gone but they had left death and ashes. Henry had been collected with other orphan boys and sent to Crowland Abbey in Lincolnshire.

  Decades of similar raids by heathen Norsemen had left the monasteries with too few monks and too many orphans, so the Benedictines solved two problems by ordaining many of the parentless boys. At nine years of age Henry was administered vows and instructed to promise God that he would live in poverty and chastity forever, obeying the precepts established by the blessed St. Benedict of Nursia.

  It gained him an education. Four hours a day he studied, six hours a day he performed damp, dirty labor. Crowland owned vast tracts, mostly fens, and each day Henry and the other monks turned the muddy earth, pulling plows like staggering beasts in order to convert bogs into fields. It was expected that the rest of his time would be spent in contemplation or prayer. There were morning services, afternoon services, evening services, perpetual services. Every prayer was considered a single step up an interminable stairway that would take his soul to heaven. There was no recreation or athletics, but he was allowed to pace the cloister, a covered walk in the shape of a rectangle. To the north side of the cloister was the sacristy, the buildings in which the sacred utensils were kept. To the east was the church; to the west, the chapter house; to the south, a cheerless refectory consisting of a dining room, kitchen, and pantry on the ground floor and a dormitory above.

  Within the rectangle were graves, the ultimate proof that life at Crowland Abbey was predictable: tomorrow would be identical to yesterday and eventually every monk would lie inside the cloister. Because some mistook this for peace, Crowland had attracted several noblemen who had fled the politics of Court and Aethelred’s cruelty and saved their lives by taking the cowl. These influential elite lived in individual cells, as did the true mystics who sought God through agony of spirit and pain of body brought on by hair shirts, inspired pinching, and self-flagellation. For the other sixty-seven males who wore the tonsure despite the fact that they were uncalled and unholy, home was a single large chamber containing sixty-seven sleeping pallets. If Henry Croft awoke at any moment of any night he might hear coughing and sneezing, assorted snores, sounds of masturbation, the wounded cries of dreamers, the breaking of wind, and the shattering of the silence rule through unecclesiastic cursing and clandestine conversations which almost always were about food. Meals at Crowland were very sparse.

  The town of Peterborough was only eight miles away, but he never saw it. One day when he was fourteen years old he asked his confessor, Father Dunstan, for permission to sing hymns and recite prayers at the riverside between Vespers and Night Song. This was granted. As he walked the river meadow, Father Dunstan followed at a discreet distance. Henry paced slowly and deliberately, his hands behind his back and his head bowed as though in worship worthy of a bishop. It was a beautiful and warm summer’s evening with a fresh breeze off the water. He had been taught about this river by Brother Matthew, a geographer. It was the River Welland. It rose in the Midlands near Corby and easily slipped and wriggled to Crowland like a snake, thence flowing northeast between rolling hills and fertile valleys before rushing through coastal swamps to empty into the great bay of the North Sea called The Wash.

  Surrounding the river was God’s bounty of forest and field. Crickets shrilled. Birds twittered in the trees and cows looked at him with dumb respect as they grazed. There was a little cockleboat pulled up on the bank.

  The following week he asked to be allowed to recite solitary prayer by the river after Lauds, the dawn service. Permission was granted and this time Father Dunstan didn’t come. When Henry got to the riverbank he put the little boat into the water, clambered in, and pushed off.

  He used the oars only to get into the current, then he sat very still in the center of the flimsy boat and watched the brown water, letting the river take him like a fallen leaf. After a time, when he knew he was away, he began to laugh. He whooped and shouted boyish things. “That for you!” he cried, not knowing whether he was defying the sixty-six monks who would be sleeping without him, or Father Dunstan or the God who was seen at Crowland as such a cruel being.

  He stayed on the river all day, until the water that rushed toward the sea was too deep and dangerous for his liking. Then he beached the boat and began a time when he learned the price of freedom.

  He wandered the coastal villages, sleeping wherever, living on what he could beg or steal. Having nothing to eat was far worse than having little to eat. A farmer’s wife gave him a sack of food and an old tunic and ragged trousers in exchange for the Benedictine habit that would make woolen shirts for her sons. In the port of Grimsby a fisherman finally took him on as helper and worked him brutally for more than two years in return for scant fare and bare shelter. When the fisherman died, his wife sold the boat to people who wanted no boys. Henry spent hungry months until he found a troupe of entertainers and traveled with them, lugging baggage and helping with the necessities of their craft in return for scraps of food and their protection. Even in his eyes their arts were clumsy but they knew how to bang a drum and draw a crowd, and when a cap was passed surprising numbers in their audiences dropped a coin. He watched them hungrily. He wa
s too old to be a tumbler, since acrobats must have their joints broken while they are still children. But the jugglers taught him their trade. He mimicked the magician and learned the simpler feats of deception; the magician taught him that he must never give the impression of necromancy, for all over England the Church and the Crown were hanging witches. He listened carefully to the storyteller, whose young sister was the first to allow him inside her body. He felt a kinship with the entertainers, but the troupe dissolved in Derbyshire after a year and everyone went separate ways without him.

  A few weeks later in the town of Matlock, his luck took a turn when a barber-surgeon named James Farrow indentured him for six years. Later he would learn that none of the local youths would serve Farrow as prentice because there were stories linking him to witchcraft. By the time Henry heard the rumors he had been with Farrow two years and knew the man was no witch. Though the barber-surgeon was a cold man and bastardly strict, to Henry Croft he represented genuine opportunity.

  Matlock Township was rural and thinly populated, without upper-class patients or prosperous merchants to support a physician, or the large population of poorer folk to attract a surgeon. In a far-flung farm area surrounding Matlock, James Farrow, country barber-surgeon, was all there was, and in addition to administering cleansing clysters and cutting and shaving hair, he performed surgery and prescribed remedies. Henry did his bidding for more than five years. Farrow was a stern taskmaster; he beat Henry when the apprentice made mistakes, but he taught him everything he knew, and meticulously.

  During Henry’s fourth year in Matlock—it was the year 1002—King Aethelred committed an act that would have far-reaching and terrible consequences. In his difficulties the king had allowed certain Danes to settle in southern England and had given them land, on condition that they would fight for him against his enemies. He had thus bought the services of a Danish noble named Pallig, who was husband to Gunnhilda, the sister of Swegen, King of Denmark. That year the Vikings invaded England and followed their usual tactics, slaying and burning. When they reached Southampton, the king decided to pay tribute again, and he gave the invaders twenty-four thousand pounds to go away.

  When their ships had carried the Norsemen off, Aethelred was shamed and fell into a frustrated fury. He ordered that all Danish people who were in England should be slain on St. Brice’s Day, November 13. The treacherous mass murder was carried out as the king ordered, and it seemed to unlock an evil that had been festering in the English people.

  The world had always been brutal, but after the murders of the Danes life became even more cruel. All over England violent crimes took place, witches were hunted out and put to death by hanging or burning, and a blood lust seemed to take the land.

  Henry Croft’s apprenticeship was almost completed when an elderly man named Bailey Aelerton succumbed while under Farrow’s care. There was nothing remarkable about the death, but word quickly spread that the man had died because Farrow had stuck him with needles and bewitched him.

  The previous Sunday, in the small church in Matlock the priest had disclosed that evil spirits had been heard carousing at midnight about the graves in the churchyard, engaged in carnal copulation with Satan. “It is abominable to our Saviour that the dead should rise through devilskill. They who exercise such crafts are God’s enemies,” he thundered. The Devil was among them, the priest warned, served by an army of witches disguised as human creatures and practicing black magic and secret killing.

  He armed the awestruck and terrified worshipers with a counterspell to be used against anyone suspected of witchcraft: “Arch sorcerer who attacks my soul, your spell shall be reversed, your curse returned to you a thousandfold. In the name of the Holy Trinity restore me to health and strength again. In the name of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost. Amen.”

  And he reminded them of the biblical injunction, Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live. “They must be sought out and eradicated if each of you does not wish to burn in the terrible flames of Purgatory,” he exhorted them.

  Bailey Aelerton died on Tuesday, his heart stopping as he hoed in the field. His daughter claimed she had seen needle holes on his skin. No one else had seen them for certain, but Thursday morning a mob came into Farrow’s barnyard just after the barber-surgeon had mounted his horse, preparing to visit patients. He was still looking down at Henry and giving him instructions for the day when they pulled him from the saddle.

  They were led by Simon Beck, whose land abutted Farrow’s. “Strip him,” Beck said.

  Farrow was trembling as they ripped off his clothing. “You are an arse, Beck!” he shouted. “An arse!” He looked older unclothed, his abdominal skin loose and folded, rounded shoulders narrow, muscles soft and wasted, penis shriveled small above a huge purple sac.

  “Here it is!” Beck cried. “Satan’s mark!”

  On the right side of Farrow’s groin, plainly seen, were two small dark specks, like the bite of a serpent. Beck nicked one with the point of his knife.

  “Moles!” Farrow shrieked.

  Blood welled, which wasn’t supposed to happen with a witch.

  “They are smart as smart,” Beck said, “able to bleed at will.”

  “I am a barber and not a witch,” Farrow told them contemptuously, but when they tied him to a wooden cross and carried him to his own stock pond, he began to scream for mercy.

  The cross was flung into the shallow pond with a great splash and held beneath the surface. The crowd quieted, watching the bubbles. Presently they pulled it up and gave Farrow a chance to confess. He was still breathing, and sputtered weakly.

  “Do you own, neighbor Farrow, that you have worked with the Devil?” Beck asked him kindly.

  But the bound man could only cough and gasp for air.

  So they immersed him again. This time the cross was held under until the bubbles stopped coming. And still they didn’t raise it.

  Henry could only watch and weep, as if seeing them kill his father again. He was man-grown, no longer a boy, yet he was powerless against the witch-hunters, terrified they would take the notion that the barbersurgeon’s prentice was the sorcerer’s assistant.

  Finally they released the submerged cross and recited the counterspell and went away, leaving it to float in the pond.

  When all were gone, Henry waded through the ooze to pull the cross ashore. A pink froth showed between his master’s lips. He closed the eyes that accused sightlessly in the white face and picked duckweed from Farrow’s shoulders before cutting him free.

  The barber-surgeon had been a widower with no family and therefore the responsibility fell upon his servant. He buried Farrow as quickly as possible.

  When he went through the house he discovered they had been there before him. No doubt they were seeking evidence of Satan’s work when they took Farrow’s money and liquor. The place had been picked clean, but there was a suit of clothes in better condition than those he had on, and some food, which he put into a sack. He also took a bag of surgical instruments and captured Farrow’s horse, which he rode out of Matlock before they should recollect him and come back.

  He became a wanderer once again, but this time he had a craft and it made all the difference. Everywhere there were ailing people who would pay a penny or two for treatment. Eventually he learned the profit that could be found in the sale of medications, and to gather crowds he used some of the ways he had learned while traveling with the entertainers.

  Believing he might be sought, he never stayed long in one place and avoided use of his full name, becoming Barber. Before long these things were woven into the fabric of an existence that suited him; he dressed warmly and well, had women in variety, drank when he pleased and ate prodigiously at every meal, vowing never to hunger again. His weight quickly increased. By the time he met the woman he married, he weighed more than eighteen stone. Lucinda Eames was a widow with a nice farm in Canterbury, and for half a year he tended her animals and fields, playing husbandman. He relished her small
white bottom, a pale inverted heart. When they made love she poked the pink tip of her tongue out of the left corner of her mouth, like a child doing hard lessons. She blamed him for not giving her a child. Perhaps she was right, but she had not conceived with her first husband either. Her voice became shrill, her tone bitter, and her cooking careless, and long before the year with her was over he was remembering warmer women and pleasurable meals, and yearning for surcease from her tongue.

  * * *

  That was 1012, the year Swegen, King of the Danes, gained control of England. For ten years Swegen had harried Aethelred, eager to shame the man who had murdered his kinsmen. Finally Aethelred fled to the Isle of Wight with his ships, and Queen Emma took refuge in Normandy with her sons Edward and Alfred.

  Soon afterward Swegen died a natural death. He left two sons, Harold, who succeeded him to the Danish kingdom, and Canute, a youth of nineteen who was proclaimed King of England by Danish force of arms.

  Aethelred had one attack left in him and he drove the Danes off, but almost immediately Canute was back, and this time he took everything except London. He was on his way to conquer London when he heard that Aethelred had died. Boldly, he called a meeting of the Witan, the council of wise men of England, and bishops, abbots, earls, and thanes went to Southampton and chose Canute to be the lawful king.

  Canute showed his genius for healing the nation by sending envoys to Normandy to convince Queen Emma to marry her late husband’s successor to the throne, and she agreed almost at once. She was years older than he but still a desirable and sensuous woman, and sniggering jokes were told about the amount of time she and Canute spent in chambers.

  Even as the new king was hastening toward marriage, Barber was fleeing it. He simply walked away from Lucinda Eames’ shrewishness and bad cooking one day, and resumed traveling. He bought his first wagon in Bath, and in Northumberland he took his first boy in indenture. The advantages were apparent at once. Since then, over the years he had trained a number of chaps. The few who had been capable had earned him money, and the others had taught him what he required in a prentice.