The Physician

by Noah Gordon

  Barber shook his head, forgetting the gesture wasn’t visible. “I am able to give back sight no more than I can give back youth.”

  The clerk allowed himself to be led away. “It’s a hard piece of news,” he said to Rob. “Never to see again!”

  A man standing nearby, thin and hawk-faced and with a Roman nose, overheard and peered at them. His hair and beard were white but he was still young, no more than twice Rob’s age.

  He stepped forward and put his hand on the patient’s arm. “What is your name?” He spoke with a French accent; Rob had heard it many times from Normans on the London waterfront.

  “I am Edgar Thorpe,” the clerk said.

  “I am Benjamin Merlin, physician of nearby Tettenhall. May I look at your eyes, Edgar Thorpe?”

  The clerk nodded and stood, blinking. The man lifted his eyelids with his thumbs and studied the white opacity.

  “I can couch your eyes and cut away the clouded lens,” he said finally. “I’ve done it before, but you must be strong enough to endure the pain.”

  “I care nothing for pain,” the clerk whispered.

  “Then you must have someone deliver you to my house in Tettenhall, early in the morning on Tuesday next,” the man said, and turned away.

  Rob stood as if stricken. It hadn’t occurred to him that anyone might attempt something that was beyond Barber.

  “Master physician!” He ran after the man. “Where have you learned to do this … couching of the eyes?”

  “At an academy. A school for physicians.”

  “Where is this physicians’ school?”

  Merlin saw before him a large youth in ill-cut clothing that was too small. His glance took in the garish wagon and the bank on which lay juggling balls and flagons of physick whose quality he could readily guess.

  “Half the world away,” he said gently. He went to a tethered black mare and mounted her, and rode away from the barber-surgeons without looking back.

  Rob told Barber of Benjamin Merlin later that day, as Incitatus pulled their wagon slowly out of Leicester.

  Barber nodded. “I’ve heard of him. Physician of Tettenhall.”

  “Yes. He spoke like a Frenchy.”

  “He’s a Jew of Normandy.”

  “What’s a Jew?”

  “It’s another name for Hebrew, the Bible folk who slew Jesus and were driven from the Holy Land by the Romans.”

  “He spoke of a school for physicians.”

  “Sometimes they hold such a course at the college in Westminster. It’s widely said to be a piss-poor course that makes piss-poor physicians. Most of them just clerk for a physician in return for training, as you are apprenticing to learn the barber-surgeon trade.”

  “I don’t think he meant Westminster. He said the school was far away.”

  Barber shrugged. “Perhaps it’s in Normandy or Brittany. Jews are thick as thick in France, and some have made their way here, including physicians.”

  “I’ve read of Hebrews in the Bible, but I had never seen one.”

  “There’s another Jew physician in Malmesbury, Isaac Adolescentoli by name. A famous doctor. Perhaps you may glimpse him when we go to Salisbury,” Barber said.

  Malmesbury and Salisbury were in the west of England.

  “We don’t go to London, then?”

  “No.” Barber had caught something in his apprentice’s voice and had long known that the youth pined for his kinsmen. “We go straight on to Salisbury,” he said sternly, “to reap the benefits of the crowds at the Salisbury Fair. From there we’ll go to Exmouth, for by then autumn will be on us. You understand?”

  Rob nodded.

  “But in the spring, when we set out again we’ll travel east and go by way of London.”

  “Thank you, Barber,” he said in quiet exultation.

  His spirits soared. What did delay matter, when finally he knew they would go to London!

  He daydreamed about the children.

  Eventually his thoughts returned to other things. “Do you think he’ll give the clerk back his eyes?”

  Barber shrugged. “I’ve heard of the operation. Few are able to perform it and I doubt the Jew can. But people who would kill Christ will have no difficulty in lying to a blind man,” Barber said, and urged the horse to go a bit faster, for it was nearing the dinner hour.

  12

  THE FITTING

  When they reached Exmouth it wasn’t like coming home but Rob felt far less lonely than he had two years before, when he had first seen the place. The little house by the sea was familiar and welcoming. Barber ran his hand over the great fireplace, with its cooking devices, and sighed.

  They planned a splendid winter’s provision, as usual, but this time would bring no live hens into the house out of deference to the fierce stink chickens imparted.

  Once again Rob had outgrown his clothing. “Your expanding bones lead me straight into penury,” Barber complained, but he gave Rob a bolt of brown-dyed woollen stuff he had bought at the Salisbury Fair. “I’ll take the wagon and Tatus and go to Athelny to select cheeses and hams, stopping overnight at the inn there. While I’m away you must clean the spring of leaves and begin to work up the season’s firewood. But take the time to bring this woven wool to Editha Lipton and ask her to sew for you. You recall the way to her house?”

  Rob took the cloth and thanked him. “I can find her.”

  “The new clothing must be expandable,” Barber said as a grumbled afterthought. “Tell her to leave generous hems which can be let out.”

  He carried the fabric wrapped in a sheepskin against the chill rain that appeared to be Exmouth’s prevailing weather. He knew the way. Two years before, he had sometimes walked past her house, hoping for a glimpse.

  She answered his knock on her door promptly. He nearly dropped his bundle as she took his hands, drawing him in from the wet.

  “Rob J.! Let me study you. I’ve never seen such alterations as two years have made!”

  He wanted to tell her she had scarcely changed at all, and was struck dumb. But she noted his glance and her eyes warmed. “While I have become old and gray,” she said lightly.

  He shook his head. Her hair was still black and in every respect she was exactly as he had remembered, especially the fine and luminous eyes.

  She brewed peppermint tea and he found his voice, telling her eagerly and at length where they had been and some of the things he had seen.

  “As for me,” she said, “I’m better off than I had been. Times have become easier, and now people are again able to order garments.”

  It reminded him why he had come. He unwrapped the sheepskin and showed the material, which she pronounced to be sound woollen cloth. “I hope there is sufficient quantity,” she said worriedly, “for you’ve grown taller than Barber.” She fetched her measuring strings and marked off the width of his shoulders, the girth of his waist, the length of his arms and legs. “I’ll make tight trousers, a loose kirtle, and an outer cloak, and you’ll be grandly clothed.”

  He nodded and rose, reluctant to leave.

  “Is Barber waiting for you, then?”

  He explained Barber’s errand and she motioned him back. “It’s time to eat. I can’t offer what he does, being fresh out of aged royal beef and larks’ tongues and rich puddings. But you’ll join me in my country woman’s supper.”

  She took a loaf from the cupboard and sent him into the rain to her small springhouse to fetch a piece of cheese and a jug of new cider. In the gathering dark he broke off two willow withes; back in the house, he sliced the cheese and the barley bread and impaled them on the wands to make cheese toast over the fire.

  She smiled at that. “Ah, that man has left his mark on you for all time.”

  Rob grinned back at her. “It’s sensible to heat food on such a night.”

  They ate and drank and then sat and talked companionably. He added wood to the fire, which had begun to hiss and steam under the rain that came in through the smoke hole.

&nb
sp; “It grows worse outside,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “Folly to walk home in darkness through such a storm.”

  He’d walked through blacker nights and a thousand worse rains. “It feels snow,” he said.

  “Then I have company.”

  “I’m grateful.”

  He went numbly out to the spring with the cheese and the cider, not daring to think. When he came back into the house she was in the process of removing her gown. “Best peel the wet things off,” she said, and got calmly into the bed in her shift.

  He removed the damp trousers and tunic and spread them on one side of the round hearth. Naked, he hastened to the bed and lay down next to her between the pelts, shivering. “Cold!”

  She smiled. “You’ve been colder. When I took your place in Barber’s bed.”

  “And I was sent to sleep on the floor, on a bitter night. Yes, that was cold.”

  She turned to him. “‘Poor motherless child,’ I kept thinking. I so wished to let you into the bed.”

  “You reached down and touched my head.”

  She touched his head now, smoothing his hair and pressing his face into her softness. “I have held my own sons in this bed.” She closed her eyes. Presently she eased the loose top of her shift and gave him a pendulous breast.

  The living flesh in his mouth made him seem to remember a longforgotten infant warmth. He felt a prickling behind his eyelids.

  Her hand took his on an exploration. “This is what you must do.” She kept her eyes closed.

  A stick snapped in the hearth but went unheard. The damp fire was smoking badly.

  “Lightly and with patience. In circles as you’re doing,” she said dreamily.

  He threw back the cover and her shift, despite the cold. He saw with surprise that she had thick legs. His eyes studied what his fingers had learned; her femaleness was like his dream, but now the firelight allowed him the details.

  “Faster.” She would have said more but he found her lips. It was not a mother’s mouth, and he noted she did something interesting with her hungry tongue.

  A series of whispers guided him over her and between heavy thighs. There was no need for further instruction; instinctively he bucked and thrust.

  God was a qualified carpenter, he realized, for she was a warm and slippery moving mortise and he was a fitted tenon.

  Her eyes snapped open and looked straight up at him. Her lips curled back from her teeth in a strange grin and she uttered a harsh rattling from the back of her throat that would have made him think she lay dying if he hadn’t heard such sounds before.

  For years he had watched and heard other people making love—his father and his mother in their small and crowded house, and Barber with a long parade of doxies. He had become convinced that there had to be magic within a cunt for men to want it so. In the dark mystery of her bed, sneezing like a horse from the imperfect fire, he felt all anguish and heaviness pumping from him. Transported by the most frightening kind of joy, he discovered the vast difference between observation and participation.

  Awakened next morning by a knocking, Editha padded on bare feet to open the door.

  “He’s gone?” Barber whispered.

  “Long since,” she said, letting him in. “He went to sleep a man and awoke a boy. He muttered something about needing to clean out the spring, and hurried away.”

  Barber smiled. “All went well?”

  She nodded with surprising shyness, yawning.

  “Good, for he was more than ready. Far better for him to find kindness with you than a cruel introduction from the wrong female.”

  She watched him take coins from his purse and set them on her table. “For this time only,” he cautioned practically. “If he should visit you again …”

  She shook her head. “These days I’m much in the company of a wain-wright. A good man, with a house in the town of Exeter and three sons. I believe he will marry me.”

  He nodded. “And did you warn Rob not to follow my pattern?”

  “I said that when you drink, very often it makes you brutish and less than a man.”

  “I don’t recall telling you to say that.”

  “I offered it out of my own observation,” she said. She met his gaze steadily. “I also used your very words, as you instructed. I said his master had wasted himself on drink and worthless women. I advised him to be particular, and to ignore your example.”

  He listened gravely.

  “He wouldn’t suffer me to criticize you,” she said drily. “He said you were a sound man when sober, an excellent master who shows him kindness.”

  “Did he really,” Barber said.

  She was familiar with the emotions in a man’s face and saw that this one was suffused with pleasure.

  He seated his hat and went out the door. As she put the money away and returned to bed, she could hear him whistling.

  Men were sometimes comforters and often brutes but they were always puzzles, Editha told herself as she turned onto her side and went back to sleep.

  13

  LONDON

  Charles Bostock looked more like a dandy than a merchant, his long yellow hair held back with bows and ribbons. He was dressed all in red velvet, obviously costly stuff despite its layer of soil from travel, and wore highpointed shoes of soft leather meant more for display than rough service. But there was a bargainer’s cold light in his eyes and he sat a great white horse surrounded by a troop of servants all heavily armed for defense against robbers. He amused himself by chatting with the barber-surgeon whose wagon he allowed to travel with his caravan of horses laden with salt from the brine works at Arundel.

  “I own three warehouses along the river and rent others. We chapmen are making a new London and therefore are useful to the king and to all English people.”

  Barber nodded politely, bored by this braggart but happy for the opportunity to travel to London under protection of his arms, for there was much crime on the road as one drew nearer to the city. “What do you deal in?” he asked.

  “Within our island nation I mostly purchase and sell iron objects and salt. But I also buy precious things which are not produced in this land and bring them here from over the sea. Skins, silks, costly gems and gold, curious garments, pigments, wine, oil, ivory and brass, copper and tin, silver, glass, and such like.”

  “Then you’re much traveled in foreign places?”

  The merchant smiled. “No, though I plan to be. I’ve made one trip to Genoa and brought back hangings I thought would be bought by the richer of my fellow merchants. But before merchants could buy them for their manor houses, they were eagerly acquired for the castles of several earls who help our King Canute to govern the land.

  “I’ll make at least two voyages more, for King Canute promises that any merchant who sails to foreign parts three times in the interests of English commerce will be made a thane. At present I pay others to travel abroad, while I tend to business in London.”

  “Please tell us the news of the city,” Barber said, and Bostock agreed loftily. King Canute had built a large monarch’s house hard by the eastern side of the abbey at Westminster, he disclosed. The Danish-born king was enjoying great popularity because he had declared a new law that allowed any free Englishman the right to hunt on his own property—a right that previously had been reserved for the king and his nobles. “Now any landowner can kill himself a roebuck as if he were monarch of his own land.”

  Canute had succeeded his brother Harold as King of Denmark and ruled that country as well as England, Bostock said. “It gives him dominance over the North Sea, and he’s built a navy of black ships that sweep the ocean of pirates and give England security and her first real peace in a hundred years.”

  Rob scarcely heard the conversation. While they stopped for the dinner meal at Alton he put on an entertainment with Barber, paying the rent for their place in the merchant’s entourage. Bostock guffawed and wildly applauded their juggling. He presented Rob with tu
ppence. “It will come in handy in the metropolis, where fluff is dear as dear,” he said, winking.

  Rob thanked him but his thoughts were elsewhere. The closer they drew to London, the more exquisite was his sense of anticipation.

  They camped in a farmer’s field in Reading, scarcely a day’s journey from the city of his birth. That night he didn’t sleep, trying to decide which child to attempt to see first.

  Next day he began to see landmarks he remembered—a stand of distinctive oaks, a great rock, a crossroads close by the hill on which he and Barber had first camped—and each made his heart leap and his blood sing. They parted with the caravan in the afternoon at Southwark, where the merchant had business. Southwark had more of everything than when last he had seen it. From the causeway they observed that new warehouses were being raised on the marshy Bank Side near the ancient ferry slip, and in the river foreign ships were crowded at their moorings.

  Barber guided Incitatus across the London Bridge in a line of traffic. On the other side was a press of people and animals, so congested that he couldn’t turn the wagon onto Thames Street but was forced to proceed straight ahead to drive left at Fenchurch Street, crossing the Walbrook and then bumping over cobbles to Cheapside. Rob could scarcely sit still, for the old neighborhoods of small and weather-silvered wooden houses appeared not to have changed at all.

  Barber turned the horse right at Aldersgate and then left onto Newgate Street, and Rob’s problem about which of the children to see first was solved, for the bakery was on Newgate Street and so he would visit Anne Mary.

  He remembered the narrow house with the pastry shop on the ground floor and watched anxiously until he spotted it. “Here, stop!” he cried to Barber, and slid off the seat before Incitatus could come to a halt.

  But when he ran across the street, he saw that the shop was a ship chandler’s. Puzzled, he opened the door and went inside. A red-haired man behind the counter looked up at the sound of the little bell on the door and nodded.

  “What’s happened to the bakery?”