The Physician

by Noah Gordon

  He charged the man sixpence for three small flagons and another tuppence for the consultation, and didn’t look at Rob.

  A stout, tight-lipped woman came with her thirteen-year-old daughter who was betrothed to wed. “Her monthly blood is stopped up within her body and never flows,” the mother said.

  Barber asked if she had ever had a blood period. “For more than a year they came every month,” the mother said. “But for five months now, nothing.”

  “Have you lain with a man?” Barber asked the girl gently.

  “No,” the mother said.

  Barber looked at the girl. She was slim and comely, with long blond hair and watchful eyes. “Do you vomit?”

  “No,” she whispered.

  He studied her, and then his hand went out and tightened her gown. He took her mother’s palm and pressed it against the small round belly.

  “No,” the girl said again. She shook her head. Her cheeks became bright and she began to weep.

  Her mother’s hand left her stomach and smashed across her face. The woman led her daughter away without paying, but Barber let them go.

  In rapid succession he treated a man whose leg had been ill-set eight years before and who dragged his left foot when he walked; a woman plagued by headache; a man with scabies of the scalp; and a stupid, smiling girl with a terrible sore on her breast who told them she had been praying to God for a barber-surgeon to come through their town.

  He sold the Universal Specific to everyone except the man with scabies, who didn’t buy though it was strongly recommended to him; perhaps he didn’t have the tuppence.

  They moved into the softer hills of the West Midlands. Outside the village of Hereford, Incitatus had to wait by the River Wye while sheep poured through the ford, a seemingly endless stream of bleating fleece that thoroughly intimidated Rob. He would have liked to be more at ease with animals, but though his Mam had come from a farm, he was a city boy. Tatus was the only horse he had handled. A distant neighbor on Carpenter’s Street had kept a milch cow, but none of the Coles had spent much time near sheep.

  Hereford was a prosperous community. Each farm they passed had a hog wallow and green rolling meadows flecked with sheep and cattle. The stone houses and barns were large and solid and the people generally more cheerful than the poverty-burdened Welsh hillsmen only a few days’ distance. On the village green their entertainment drew a good crowd and sales were brisk.

  Barber’s first patient behind the screen was about Rob’s own age, although much smaller in build. “Fell from the roof not six days past, and look at him,” said the boy’s father, a cooper. A splintered barrel stave on the ground had pierced the palm of his left hand and now the flesh was angry as a puffed-up blowfish.

  Barber showed Rob how to grasp the boy’s hands and the father how to grip his legs and then he took a short, sharp knife from his kit.

  “Hold him fast,” he said.

  Rob could feel the hands trembling. The boy screamed as his flesh parted under the blade. A greenish-yellow pus spurted, followed by a stink and a red welling.

  Barber swabbed the wound free of corruption and proceeded to probe into it with delicate efficiency, using an iron tweezers to pull out tiny slivers. “It’s bits from the piece that damaged him, you see?” he said to the parent, showing him.

  The boy groaned. Rob felt queasy but held on while Barber proceeded with slow care. “We must get them all,” he said, “for they contain peccant humors that will mortify the hand again.”

  When he was satisfied the wound was free of wood, he poured some Specific into it and bound it in a cloth, then drank the rest of the flask himself. The sobbing patient slipped away, happy to leave them while his father paid.

  Waiting next was a bent old man with a hollow cough. Rob ushered him behind the screen.

  “Morning phlegm. Oh, a great deal, sir!” He gasped when he talked.

  Barber ran his hand thoughtfully over the skinny chest. “Well. I shall cup you.” He looked at Rob. “Help him to disrobe partially, so his chest may be cupped.”

  Rob removed the old man’s shirtwaist gingerly, for he appeared fragile. To turn the patient back toward the barber-surgeon, he took both of the man’s hands.

  It was like grasping a pair of quivering birds. The sticklike fingers sat in his own, and from them he received a message.

  Glancing at them, Barber saw the boy stiffen. “Come,” he said impatiently. “We mustn’t take all day.” Rob didn’t seem to hear.

  Twice before Rob had felt this strange and unwelcome awareness slip into his very being from someone else’s body. Now, as on each of the previous occasions, he was overwhelmed by an absolute terror, and he dropped the patient’s hands and fled.

  Barber searched, cursing, until he found his apprentice cowering behind a tree.

  “I want the meaning. And now!”

  “He … The old man is going to die.”

  Barber stared. “What kind of poor shit is this?”

  His apprentice had begun to cry.

  “Stop that,” Barber said. “How do you know?”

  Rob tried to speak but couldn’t. Barber slapped his face and he gasped. When he began to talk the words poured, for they had been roiling over and around in his mind since before they had left London.

  He had felt his mother’s impending death and it had happened, he explained. And then he had known his father was going, and his father had died.

  “Oh, dear Jesus,” Barber said in disgust.

  But he listened carefully, watching Rob. “You tell me you actually felt death in that old man?”

  “Yes.” He had no expectation of being believed.

  “When?”

  He shrugged.

  “Soon?”

  He nodded. He could only, hopelessly, tell the truth.

  He saw in Barber’s eyes that the man recognized this.

  Barber hesitated and then made up his mind. “While I rid us of the people, pack the cart,” he said.

  They left the village slowly but once out of sight drove as fast as they dared over the rough track. Incitatus pounded through the river ford with a great noisy splashing and, just beyond, scattered sheep, whose frightened bleating almost drowned out the roar of the outraged shepherd.

  For the first time Rob saw Barber use the whip on the horse. “Why are we running?” he called, holding on.

  “Do you know what they do to witches?” Barber had to shout above the drumming of the hooves and the clattering of the things inside the wagon.

  Rob shook his head.

  “They hang them from a tree or from a cross. Sometimes they submerge suspects in your fucking Thames and if they drown they are declared innocent. If the old man dies, they’ll say it is because we are witches,” he bawled, bringing the whip down again and again on the back of the terrified horse.

  They didn’t stop to eat or relieve themselves. By the time they allowed Tatus to slow, Hereford was far behind, but they pushed the poor beast until daylight was gone. Exhausted, they made their camp and ate a poor meal in silence.

  “Tell it again,” Barber said at last. “Leaving nothing out.”

  He listened intently, interrupting only once to ask Rob to speak louder. When he had gotten the boy’s story he nodded. “In my own apprenticeship, I witnessed my barber-surgeon master wrongfully slain for a witch,” he said.

  Rob stared at him, too frightened to ask questions.

  “Several times during my lifetime, patients have died while I treated them. Once in Durham an old woman passed away and I was certain a priestly court would order trial by immersion or by the holding of a white-hot iron bar. I was allowed to leave only after the most suspicious interrogation, fasting, and almsgiving. Another time in Eddisbury a man died while behind my screen. He was young and apparently had been in health. Troublemakers would have had fertile ground but I was fortunate and no one barred my way when I took to the road.”

  Rob found his voice. “Do you think I’ve been … touch
ed by the Devil?” It was a question that had plagued him all through the day.

  Barber snorted. “If you believe so, you’re foolish and a twit. And I know you to be neither.” He went to the wagon and filled his horn with metheglin, drinking it all before speaking again.

  “Mothers and fathers die. And old people die. That’s the nature of it. You’re certain you felt something?”

  “Yes, Barber.”

  “Can’t be mistook or fancying, a young chap like you?”

  Rob shook his head stubbornly.

  “And I say it was all a notion,” Barber said. “So we’ve had enough of fleeing and talking and must gain our rest.”

  They made their beds on either side of the fire. But they lay for hours without sleeping. Barber tossed and turned and presently got up and opened another flask of liquor. He brought it around to Rob’s side of the fire and squatted on his heels.

  “Supposing,” he said, and took a drink. “Just suppose everyone else in the world had been born without eyes. And you were born with eyes?”

  “Then I would see what no one else could see.”

  Barber drank and nodded. “Yes. Or imagine that we had no ears and you had ears? Or suppose we didn’t have some other sense? And somehow, from God or nature or what you will, you’ve been given a … special gift. Just suppose that you can tell when someone is going to die?”

  Rob was silent, terribly frightened again.

  “It’s bullshit, we both comprehend that,” Barber said. “It was all your fancy, we agree. But just supposing…” He sucked thoughtfully from the flask, his Adam’s apple working, the dying firelight glinting warmly in his hopeful eyes as he regarded Rob J. “It would be a sin not to exercise such a gift,” he said.

  In Chipping Norton they bought metheglin and mixed another batch of Specific, replenishing the lucrative supply.

  “When I die and stand in line before the gate,” Barber said, “St. Peter shall ask, ‘How did you earn your bread?’ ‘I was a farmer,’ one man may say, or ‘I fashioned boots from skins.’ But I shall answer, ‘Fumum vendidi,’” the former monk said gaily, and Rob’s Latin was equal to the task: I sold smoke.

  Yet the fat man was far more than a peddler of questionable physick. When he treated behind the screen he was skillful and often tender. What Barber knew to do, he knew and did perfectly, and he taught Rob a sure touch and gentle hand.

  In Buckingham, Barber showed him how to pull teeth, having the good fortune to come upon a drover with a rotting mouth. The patient was as fat as Barber, a pop-eyed groaner and womanly screamer. Midway, he changed his mind. “Stop, stop, stop! Set me free!” he lisped bloodily, but there was no question that the teeth needed pulling, and they persevered; it was an excellent lesson.

  In Clavering, Barber rented the blacksmith’s shop for a day and Rob learned how to fashion the lancing irons and points. It was a task he would have to repeat in half a dozen smithies all over England during the next several years before he satisfied his master he could do it correctly. Most of his work in Clavering was rejected, but Barber grudgingly allowed him to keep a small two-edged lancet as the first instrument in his own kit of surgical tools, an important beginning. As they made their way out of the Midlands and into the Fens, Barber taught him which veins were opened for bleeding, bringing him unpleasant memories of his father’s last days.

  His father sometimes crept into his mind, for his own voice was beginning to sound like his father’s; its timbre deepened, and he was growing body hair. The patches weren’t as thick as they would become, he knew, for through helping Barber he was quite familiar with the unclothed male. Women remained more of a mystery, since Barber employed an enigmatically smiling, voluptuous doll they called Thelma, on whose naked plaster form females modestly indicated the area of their own affliction, making examination unnecessary. It still made Rob uneasy to intrude into the privacy of strangers, but he became accustomed to casual inquiry about bodily function:

  “When were you last at stool, master?”

  “Mistress, when shall you have your monthly flow?”

  At Barber’s suggestion Rob took each patient’s hands into his own when the patient came behind the screen.

  “What do you feel when you grasp their fingers?” Barber asked him one day in Tisbury as he dismantled the bank.

  “Sometimes I don’t feel anything.”

  Barber nodded. He took one of the sections from Rob and stowed it in the wagon and came back, frowning. “But sometimes … there is something?”

  Rob nodded.

  “Well, what?” Barber said testily. “What is it you feel, boy?”

  But he couldn’t define it or describe it in words. It was an intuition about the person’s vitality, like peering into dark wells and sensing how much life each contained.

  Barber took Rob’s silence as proof that the feeling was imagined. “I think we’ll return to Hereford and see whether the old man has not continued to exist in health,” he said slyly.

  He was annoyed when Rob agreed. “We can’t go back, you dolt!” he said. “For if he’s indeed dead, shouldn’t we be putting our heads into the noose?”

  He continued to scoff at “the gift,” often and loud.

  Yet when Rob began neglecting to take the patients’ hands, he ordered him to resume. “Why not? Am I not a cautious man of business? And does it cost us to indulge this fancy?”

  In Peterborough, only a few miles and a lifetime away from the abbey from which he had fled as a boy, Barber sat alone in the public house throughout a long and showery August evening, drinking slowly and steadily.

  By midnight, his apprentice came looking for him. Rob met him reeling along the way and supported him back to their fire. “Please,” Barber whispered fearfully.

  He was amazed to see the drunken man lift both hands and hold them out.

  “Ah, in the name of Christ, please,” Barber said again. Finally Rob understood. He took Barber’s hands and looked into his eyes.

  In a moment Rob nodded.

  Barber sank into his bed. He belched and turned on his side, then fell into untroubled sleep.

  10

  THE NORTH

  That year Barber didn’t make it to Exmouth in time for winter, for they had started out late and the falling leaves of autumn found them in the village of Gate Fulford, in the York Wolds. The moors were lavish with plants that made the cool air exciting with their spice. Rob and Barber followed the North Star, stopping at villages along the way to very good business, and drove the wagon through the endless carpet of purple heather until they reached the town of Carlisle.

  “This is as far north as I ever travel,” Barber told him. “A few hours from here Northumbria ends and the frontier begins. Beyond is Scotland, which everyone knows to be a land of sheep-buggers, and perilous to honest Englishmen.”

  For a week they camped in Carlisle and went every evening to the tavern, where judiciously bought drinks soon resulted in Barber’s learning about available shelter. He rented a house on the moor with three small rooms. It was not unlike the little house he owned on the southern coast but lacked a fireplace and a stone chimney, to his displeasure. They spread their beds on either side of the hearth as if it were a campfire, and they found a nearby stable willing to board Incitatus. Once again Barber bought winter’s provision lavishly, in the easy manner with money that never failed to give Rob a wondering sense of well-being.

  Barber laid in beef and pork. He had thought to buy a haunch of venison, but three market hunters had been hanged in Carlisle during the summer for killing the king’s deer, which were reserved for nobles’ sport. So they bought fifteen fat hens instead, and a sack of feed.

  “The chickens are your domain,” Barber told Rob. “They are yours to feed, to slaughter upon my request, to dress and pluck and ready for my pot.”

  He thought the hens were impressive creatures, large and buff-colored, with unfeathered shanks and red combs, wattles, and earlobes. They made no objection when h
e robbed their nests of four or five white eggs every morning. “They think you’re a big bloody rooster,” Barber said.

  “Why don’t we buy them a chanticleer?”

  Barber, who liked sleeping late on cold winter mornings and therefore hated crowing, merely grunted.

  Rob had brown hairs on his face, not exactly a beard. Barber said only Danes shaved but he knew it wasn’t true, for his father had kept his face hairless. In Barber’s surgical kit was a razor and the fat man nodded grumpily when Rob asked to use it. He nicked his face, but shaving made him feel older.

  The first time Barber ordered him to kill a chicken made him feel very young. Each bird stared at him out of little black beads that told him they might have grown to be friends. Finally he forced his strong fingers to clench around the nearest warm neck and, shuddering, closed his eyes. A strong, convulsive twist and it was done. But the bird punished him in death, for it didn’t easily relinquish its feathers. Plucking took hours, and the grizzled corpse was viewed with disdain when he handed it to Barber.

  Next time a chicken was called for, Barber showed him genuine magic. He held the hen’s beak open and slid a thin knife through the roof of the mouth and into the brain. The hen relaxed at once into death, releasing the feathers; they came away in great clumps at the slightest pull.

  “Here is the lesson,” Barber said. “It is just as easy to bring death to man, and I’ve done so. It’s harder to keep hold of life, harder still to maintain a grasp on health. Those are the tasks to which we must keep our minds.”

  The late fall weather was perfect for the picking of herbs, and they scoured the woods and moors. Barber especially wanted purslane; steeped in the Specific, it produced an agent that would cause fevers to break and dissipate. To his disappointment, they found none. Some things were more easily gathered, such as red rose petals for poultices, and thyme and acorns to be powdered and mixed with fat and spread on neck pustules. Others required hard work, like the digging of yew root that would help a pregnant woman to hold back her fetus. They collected lemon grass and dill for urinary problems, marshy sweet flag to fight deterioration of memory because of moist and cold humors, juniper berries to be boiled for opening blocked nasal passages, lupine for hot packs to draw abscesses, and myrtle and mallow to soothe itchy rashes.