by Noah Gordon
“We’re looking for a woman, name of Della Hargreaves.”
The proprietor shrugged and shook his head.
“Hargreaves, her husband’s name. She’s a widow. Came four years ago to be with her brother. His name I don’t know, but I ask you to ponder, for this is a small place.” Barber ordered more ale, to encourage him.
The proprietor looked blank.
“Oswald Sweeter,” his wife whispered, serving the drink.
“Ah. Just so, Sweeter’s sister,” the man said, accepting Barber’s money.
Oswald Sweeter was Ramsey’s blacksmith, as large as Barber but all muscle. He listened to them with a slight frown and then spoke as though unwilling.
“Della? I took her in,” he said. “My own flesh.” With pincers he pushed a cherry-red bar deeper into glowing coals. “My wife showed her kindness, but Della has a talent for doing no work. The two women didn’t get on. Within half a year, Della left us.”
“To go where?” Rob asked.
“Bath.”
“What does she do in Bath?”
“Same as here before we threw her away,” Sweeter said quietly. “She left with a man like a rat.”
“She was our neighbor for years in London, where she was deemed respectable,” Rob was obligated to say, though he had never liked her.
“Well, young sir, today my sister is a drab who would sooner swive than labor for her bread. You may find her where there are whores.” Pulling a flaming white bar from the coals Sweeter ended the conversation with his hammer, so that a savage shower of sparks followed them through his door.
* * *
It rained for a solid week as they made their way up the coast. Then one morning they crawled from their damp beds beneath the wagon to find a day so soft and glorious that all was forgotten save their good fortune in being footloose and blessed. “Let us take a promenade through the innocent world!” Barber cried, and Rob knew exactly what he meant, for despite the dark urgency of his need to find the children he was young and healthy and alive on such a day.
Between blasts of the Saxon horn they sang exuberantly, hymns and raunchiness, a louder signal of their presence than any other. They drove slowly through a forested track that alternately gave them warm sunlight and fresh green shade. “What more could you ask,” Barber said.
“Arms,” he said at once.
Barber’s grin faded. “I’ll not buy you arms,” he said shortly.
“No need for a sword. But a dagger would seem sensible, for we could be set upon.”
“Any highwayman will think twice on it,” Barber said drily, “since we are two large folk.”
“It’s because of my size. I walk into a public house and smaller men look at me and think, ‘He’s big but one thrust can stop him,’ and their hands drift to their hilts.”
“And then they notice that you wear no arms and they realize you’re a puppy and not yet a mastiff despite your size. Feeling like fools, they leave you alone. With a blade on your belt you should be dead in a fortnight.”
They rode in silence.
Centuries of violent invasions had made every Englishman think like a soldier. Slaves weren’t allowed by law to bear arms and apprentices couldn’t afford them; but any other male who wore his hair long also signified his free birth by the weapons he displayed.
It was true enough that a small man with a knife could easily kill a large youth without one, Barber told himself wearily.
“You must know how to handle weapons when the time comes for you to own them,” he decided. “It’s a portion of your instruction that has been neglected. Therefore, I’ll begin to tutor you in the use of the sword and the dagger.”
Rob beamed. “Thank you, Barber,” he said.
In a clearing, they faced one another and Barber slipped his dagger from his belt.
“You mustn’t hold it like a child stabbing at ants. Balance the knife in your upturned palm as if you intended to juggle it. The four fingers close about the handle. The thumb can go flat along the handle or can cover the fingers, depending on the thrust. The hardest thrust to guard against is one that is made from below and moving upward.
“The knife fighter bends his knees and moves lightly on his feet, ready to spring forward or back. Ready to weave in order to avoid an assailant’s thrust. Ready to kill, for this instrument is for close and dirty work. It’s made of the same good metal as a scalpel. Once having committed yourself to either, you must cut as though life depends on it, for often it does.”
He returned the dagger to its scabbard and handed over his sword. Rob hefted it, holding it before him.
“Romanus sum,” he said softly.
Barber smiled. “No, you are not a bleeding Roman. Not with this English sword. The Roman sword was short and pointed, with two sharp steel edges. They liked to fight close and at times used it like a dagger. This is an English broadsword, Rob J., longer and heavier. The ultimate weapon, that keeps our enemies at a distance. It is a cleaver, an ax that cuts down human creatures instead of trees.”
He took back the sword and stepped away from Rob. Holding it in both hands he whirled, the broadsword flashing and glittering in wide and deadly circles as he severed the sunlight.
Presently he stopped and leaned on the sword, out of wind. “You try,” he told Rob, and handed him the weapon.
It gave Barber scant comfort to see how easily his apprentice held the heavy broadsword in one hand. It was a strong man’s weapon, he thought enviously, more effective when used with the agility of youth.
Wielding it in imitation of Barber, Rob whirled across the little clearing. The broadsword blade hissed through the air and a hoarse cry rose from his throat without volition. Barber watched, more than vaguely disturbed, as he swept through an invisible host, cutting a terrible swath.
The next lesson occurred several nights later at a crowded and noisy public house in Fulford. English drovers from a horse caravan moving north were there along with Danish drovers from a caravan traveling south. Both groups were overnighting in the town, drinking heavily and eyeing one another like packs of fighting dogs.
Rob sat with Barber and drank cider, not uncomfortably. It was a situation they had met before, and they knew enough not to be drawn into the competitiveness.
One of the Danes had gone outside to relieve his bladder. When he returned he carried a squealing shoat under his arm, and a length of rope. He tied one end of the rope to the pig’s neck and the other end to a pole in the center of the tavern. Then he hammered on a table with a mug.
“Who is man enough to meet me in a pig-sticking?” he shouted over to the English drovers.
“Ah, Vitus!” one of his mates called encouragingly, and began to hammer on his table, quickly joined by all his friends.
The English drovers listened sullenly to the hammering and the shouted taunts, then one of them walked to the pole and nodded.
Half a dozen of the more prudent patrons of the public house gulped their drinks and slipped outside.
Rob had started to rise, following Barber’s custom of leaving before trouble could begin, but to his surprise his master placed a staying hand on his arm.
“Tuppence here on Dustin!” an English drover called. Soon the two groups were busily placing bets.
The men were not unevenly matched. Both looked to be in their twenties; the Dane was heavier and slightly shorter, while the Englishman had the longer reach.
Cloths were bound across their eyes and then each was tethered to an opposite side of the pole by a ten-foot length of rope bound to his ankle.
“Wait,” the man named Dustin called. “One more drink!”
Hooting, their friends brought them each a cup of metheglin, which was quickly drained.
The blindfolded men drew their daggers.
The pig, which had been held at right angles to both of them, was now released to the floor. Immediately it tried to flee but, tethered as it was, it could only run in a circle.
“The litt
le bastard comes, Dustin!” somebody shouted. The Englishman set himself and waited, but the sound of the animal’s scurrying was drowned out by the shouts of the men, and the pig was past him before he knew it.
“Now, Vitus!” a Dane called.
In its terror the shoat ran straight into the Danish drover. The man stabbed at it three times without coming close, and it fled the way it had come, squealing.
Dustin could home in on the sound, and he came toward the shoat from one direction while Vitus closed in from the other.
The Dane took a swipe at the pig and Dustin drew a sobbing breath as the sharp blade sliced into his arm.
“You Northern fuck.” He slashed out in a savage arc that didn’t come near to either the squealing pig or the other man.
Now the pig darted across Vitus’ feet. The Danish drover grasped the animal’s rope and was able to pull the pig toward his waiting knife. His first stab caught it on the right front hoof, and the pig screamed.
“Now you have him, Vitus!”
“Finish him off, we eat him tomorrow!”
The screaming pig had become an excellent target and Dustin lunged toward the sound. His striking hand skittered off the shoat’s smooth side and with a thud his blade was buried to his fist in Vitus’ belly.
The Dane merely grunted softly but sprang back, ripping himself open on the dagger.
The only sound in the public house was the crying of the pig.
“Put the knife down, Dustin, you’ve done him,” one of the Englishmen commanded. They surrounded the drover; his blindfold was ripped off and his tether was cut.
Wordlessly, the Danish drovers hurried their friend away before the Saxons could react or the reeve’s men could be summoned.
Barber sighed. “Let us through to him, for we’re barber-surgeons and may give him succor,” he said.
But it was clear that there was little they could do for him. Vitus lay on his back as if broken, his eyes large and his face gray. In the gaping wound of his open stomach they saw that his bowel had been cut almost in half.
Barber took Rob’s arm and drew him down to squat alongside. “Look on it,” he said firmly.
There were layers: tanned skin, pale meat, a rather slimy light lining. The bowel was the pink of a dyed Easter egg, the blood was very red.
“It is curious how an opened-up man stinks far worse than any openedup animal,” Barber said.
Blood welled from the abdominal wall and with a gush the severed bowel emptied itself of fecal matter. The man was speaking weakly in Danish, perhaps praying.
Rob retched but Barber held him close to the fallen man, like a man rubbing a young dog’s nose in its own waste.
Rob took the drover’s hand. The man was like a bag of sand with a hole in the bottom; he could feel the life running out. He squatted next to the drover and held his hand tightly until there was no sand left in the bag and the soul of Vitus made a dry rustling sound like an old leaf and simply blew away.
* * *
They continued to practice with arms, but now Rob was more thoughtful and not quite so eager.
He spent more time thinking about the gift, and he watched Barber and listened to him, learning whatever he knew. As he became familiar with ailments and their symptoms he began to play a secret game, trying to determine from outward appearances what bothered each patient.
In the Northumbrian village of Richmond they saw waiting in their line a wan man with rheumy eyes and a painful cough.
“What ails that one?” Barber asked.
“Most likely consumption?”
Barber smiled in approval.
But when it was the coughing patient’s turn to see the barber-surgeon, Rob took his hands to lead him behind the screen. It wasn’t the grasp of a dying person; Rob’s senses told him that this man was too strong to have consumption. He sensed that the man had taken a chill and soon would be rid of what was merely passing discomfort.
He saw no reason to contradict Barber; but thus, gradually, he became aware that the gift was not only for predicting death but could be useful in considering illness and perhaps in helping the living.
Incitatus pulled the red cart slowly northward across the face of England, village by village, some too small to have a name. Whenever they came to a monastery or church Barber waited patiently in the cart while Rob inquired after Father Ranald Lovell and the boy named William Cole, but nobody had ever heard of them.
Somewhere between Carlisle and Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Rob climbed onto a stone wall built nine hundred years before by Hadrian’s cohorts to protect England from Scottish marauders. Sitting in England and gazing out at Scotland, he told himself that his most likely chance of seeing someone of his own blood lay in Salisbury, where the Haverhills had taken his sister Anne Mary.
When finally they reached Salisbury, he received short shrift from the Corporation of Bakers.
The Chief Baker was a man named Cummings. He was squat and froglike, not so heavy as Barber but fleshy enough to advertise his trade. “I know no Haverhills.”
“Will you not seek them out in your records?”
“See here. It is fair time! Much of my membership is involved in Salisbury Fair and we are harried and distraught. You must see us after the fair.”
All through the fair, only part of him juggled and drew and helped to treat patients, while he kept watch constantly for a familiar face, a glimpse of the girl he imagined she had grown to be.
He didn’t see her.
The day after the fair he returned to the building of the Salisbury Corporation of Bakers. It was a neat and attractive place, and despite his nervousness he wondered why the houses of other guilds were always built more soundly than those of the Corporations of Carpenters.
“Ah, the young barber-surgeon.” Cummings was kinder in his greeting and more composed, now. He searched thoroughly through two great ledgers and then shook his head. “We’ve never had a baker name of Haverhill.”
“A man and his wife,” Rob said. “They sold their pastry shop in London and declared they were coming here. They have a little girl, sister to me. Name of Anne Mary.”
“It’s obvious what has happened, young surgeon. After selling their shop and before coming here, they found better opportunity elsewhere, heard of a place more in need of bakers.”
“Yes. That’s likely.” He thanked the man and returned to the wagon.
Barber was visibly troubled but advised courage. “You mustn’t give up hope. Someday you’ll find them again, you will see.”
But it was as if the earth had opened and swallowed the living as well as the dead. The small hope he had kept alive for them now seemed too innocent. He felt the days of his family were truly over, and with a chill he forced himself to recognize that whatever lay ahead for him, most likely he would face it alone.
15
THE JOURNEYMAN
A few months before the end of Rob’s apprenticeship they sat over pitchers of brown ale in the public room of the inn at Exeter and warily discussed terms of employment.
Barber drank in silence, as if lost in thought, and eventually offered a small salary. “Plus a new set of clothing,” he said, as if overcome by a burst of generosity.
Rob hadn’t been with him six years for nothing. He shrugged doubtfully. “I feel drawn to go back to London,” he said, and refilled their cups.
Barber nodded. “A set of clothing every two years whether needed or not,” he added after studying Rob’s face.
They ordered a supper of rabbit pie, which Rob ate with gusto. Barber tore into the publican instead of the food. “What meat I find is overly tough and stupidly seasoned,” he grumbled. “We might make the salary higher. Slightly higher,” he said.
“It is poorly seasoned,” Rob said. “That’s something you never do. I’ve always been taken by your way with game.”
“How much salary do you hold to be fair? For a chap of sixteen years?”
“I wouldn’t want a salary.”
&n
bsp; “Not have a salary?” Barber eyed him with suspicion.
“No. Income is gotten from sale of the Specific and treatment of patients. Therefore, I want the income from every twelfth bottle sold and every twelfth patient treated.”
“Every twentieth bottle and every twentieth patient.”
He hesitated only a moment before nodding. “These terms to run one year, when they may be renewed upon mutual agreement.”
“Done!”
“Done,” Rob said calmly.
Each of them lifted his mug and grinned.
“Hah!” said Barber.
“Hah!” said Rob.
Barber took his new expenses seriously. One day when they were in Northampton, where there were skilled craftsmen, he hired a joiner to make a second screen, and when they reached the next place, which was Huntington, he set it up not far from his own.
“Time you stood on your own limbs,” he said.
After the entertainment and the portraits, Rob sat himself behind the screen and waited.
Would they look at him and laugh? Or, he wondered, would they turn away and go back to stand in Barber’s line?
His first patient winced when Rob took his hands, for his old cow had trod upon his wrist. “Kicked over the pail, the bitchy thing. Then, as I was reaching to set it right, the cursed animal stepped on me, you see?”
Rob held the joint tenderly and at once forgot about anything else. There was a painful bruise. There was also a bone broken, the one that ran down from the thumb. An important bone. It took him a little time to bind the wrist right and fix a sling.
The next patient was the personification of his fears, a slim and angular woman with stern eyes. “I have lost my hearing,” she declared.
Upon examination, her ears did not seem to be plugged with wax. He knew nothing that could be done for her. “I cannot help you,” he said regretfully.
She shook her head.
“I CANNOT HELP YOU!” he shouted.
“THEN ASK TH’OTHER BARBER.”
