by Noah Gordon
“I’m too large. And too young.”
“No, you shall play him,” Barber said stubbornly. “For I’m so fat that one look at me would reveal who I am.”
They both watched old men for a long time, studying how they walked in pain and the kind of clothing they wore, and they listened when old people spoke.
“Imagine what it must be like to feel your life disappearing,” Barber said. “You believe you’ll always be able to get hard with a woman. Think about growing old and not being able to do that.”
They fashioned a gray wig and a false gray mustache. They couldn’t give him wrinkles but Barber covered his face with cosmetics and simulated an old skin made dry and rough by years of sun and wind. Rob bent his long body and developed a hobbling walk, dragging his right leg. When he spoke he made his voice higher and hesitant, as if he had learned to be a little afraid.
The Old Man, dressed in a shabby coat, made his first appearance in Tadcaster, while Barber was discoursing on the remarkable regenerative powers of the Universal Specific. Walking painfully, he tottered up and bought a bottle.
“Doubtless I’m an old fool for wasting my money,” the dry old voice said. Opening the container with some difficulty, he drank the physick then and there and made his slow way to the side of a barmaid who had already been instructed and paid.
“Oh, you are a pretty,” he sighed, and the girl glanced away quickly as if abashed. “Would you do a kindness, my dear?”
“If I’m able.”
“Just place your hand upon my face. Merely a soft warm palm on an old man’s cheek. Aaah,” he breathed as she complied shyly.
There were titters as he closed his eyes and kissed her fingers.
In a moment his gaze opened wide. “By the blessed St. Anthony,” he breathed. “Oh, it’s most remarkable.”
He limped back to the bank as quickly as possible. “Let me have an other,” he told Barber, and drank it at once. This time when he returned to the barmaid she moved away and he followed.
“I’m your servant,” he said eagerly. “Mistress …” Leaning forward, he whispered into her ear.
“Oh, sirrah, you mustn’t talk so!” She moved again, and the crowd was convulsed as he followed.
When, a few minutes later, the Old Man limped away with the barmaid on his arm, they roared approval and then, still laughing, hurried to pay Barber their pennies.
Eventually they didn’t have to pay a female to play against the Old Man, for Rob quickly learned to manipulate women in the crowd. He could sense when a good wife was taking offense and must be abandoned, or when a more venturesome woman would not feel abused by a juicy compliment or even a quick pinch.
One night in the town of Lichfield he wore the Old Man costume into the public house and soon had the drinkers howling and wiping their eyes over his amorous memories.
“Once I was a rutter. I well recall swiving a plump beauty … hair like black fleece, teats you would milk. A sweet thatch like dark swansdown. While on the other side of the wall her fierce father, half my age, slept all gentle and unknowing.”
“And what age were you then, Old Man?”
He carefully straightened an aguish back. “Three days younger than now,” he said in his dry and dusty voice.
All evening, fools quarreled for the right to furnish him tipple.
That night, for the first time Barber aided his assistant back to their camp instead of being supported there himself.
Barber took refuge in victualing. He spitted capons and barded ducks, gorging on fowl. In Worcester he came upon the slaughtering of a pair of oxen and bought their tongues.
Here was eating!
He boiled the great tongues briefly before trimming and skinning them, then roasted them with onion and wild garlic and turnip, basting with thyme honey and melted lard until outside they were glazed sweet and crisp, and inside were so tender and yielding that the meat scarcely needed to be chewed.
Rob barely tasted the fine rich food, being in a hurry to find a new tavern in which to play the old ass. In each new place the drinkers kept him continually supplied. Barber knew he best liked ale or beer but presently recognized uneasily that Rob would accept mead, pigment, or morat—whatever there was.
Barber watched closely for signs that the hard drinking would hurt his own pocketbook. But no matter how puky or sodden Rob had been the night before, he appeared to do everything as previously, save in one detail.
“I note you no longer take their hands when they come behind your screen,” Barber said.
“Nor do you.”
“It’s not I who has the gift.”
“The gift! You have always held that there is no gift.”
“Now I think that there is a gift,” Barber said. “I believe that it’s dulled by drink, and that it flees before the regular use of liquor.”
“It was all our fancy, as you said.”
“Listen well. Whether or not the gift has fled, you shall take each person’s hands when they come behind your screen, for it’s evident they like it. Do you understand?”
Rob J. nodded sullenly.
Next morning, on a wooded track they met a fowler. He carried a long cleft stick which he baited with doughballs imbedded with seeds. When birds came to feed on the bait, by pulling on a rope he was able to close the cleft on their legs and capture them, and he was so clever with the device that his belt was hung all around with little white plovers. Barber bought the flock. Plovers were deemed such a delicacy they were commonly roasted without being drawn, but Barber was too picky. He cleaned and dressed each little bird and made a breakfast that was memorable, so that even Rob’s thunderous visage lightened.
In Great Berkhamstead they presented their entertainment before a good audience and sold a lot of physick. That night Barber and Rob went to the tavern together to make peace. For a portion of the evening all was well, but they were drinking strong morat that tasted faintly of bitter mulberries, and Barber watched Rob’s eyes grow bright and wondered if his own face reddened that way with drink.
Soon Rob went out of his way to jostle and insult a great burly woodcutter.
In a moment they were trying to maim one another. They were of a size and their brawling was savagely earnest, a form of madness. Benumbed with morat, they stood close and struck again and again with all their strength, using fists and knees and feet, and the blows and kicks sounded like hammers on oak.
Finally exhausted, each was able to be dragged apart by a small army of peacemakers, and Barber took Rob J. away.
“Drunken fool!”
“Look who talks,” Rob said.
Trembling with rage, Barber sat and regarded his assistant.
“It’s true I may also be a drunken fool,” he said, “but I have ever known how to avoid trouble. I have never sold poisons. I have nothing to do with magic that casts spells or raises evil spirits. I just buy large amounts of liquor and put on entertainment that allows me to sell small flasks at fine profit. It’s a living that depends upon not calling attention to ourselves. Therefore your stupidity must cease and your fists must stay unclenched.”
They glared at one another, but Rob nodded.
From that day Rob appeared to do Barber’s bidding almost against his will as they moved southward, racing the migrating birds into autumn. Barber chose to bypass the Salisbury Fair, understanding that it would aggravate old wounds for Rob. His effort was to no avail, for when they camped in Winchester instead of Salisbury, that night Rob returned to the campfire reeling. His face had the look of bruised meat and it was evident he’d been brawling.
“We passed an abbey this morning while you were driving the wagon, yet you didn’t stop to inquire after Father Ranald Lovell and your brother.”
“It does no good to ask. Whenever I ask, no one ever knows them.”
Nor did Rob speak any more of finding his sister Anne Mary or Jonathan or Roger, the brother he had last seen as an infant.
He had given them up and now
sought to forget them, Barber told himself, struggling to comprehend. It was as if Rob had turned himself into a bear and offered himself anew for baiting in every public house. Meanness was growing in him like a weed; he welcomed the pain brought by drink and fighting, to drive out the pain he suffered when his brothers and sister entered his mind.
Barber couldn’t decide whether Rob’s acceptance of the loss of the children was a healthy thing or not.
That winter was the most unpleasant they spent in the little house in Exmouth. In the beginning, he and Rob went to the tavern together. Usually they drank and exchanged talk with the local men, and then found women and brought them home. But he couldn’t match the younger man’s unflagging appetites, nor, to his surprise, did he wish to do so. Now it was Barber, many a night, who lay and watched the shadows and listened, wishing they would for Christ’s sweet sake get it over with and shut up and go to sleep.
There was no snow at all that year but it rained incessantly, and the hiss and spatter soon offended the ear and the spirit. On the third day of Christmas week, Rob came home in a fury.
“The damned publican! He’s barred me from the Exmouth Inn.”
“For no good reason, I trust?”
“For fighting,” Rob muttered, scowling.
Rob spent more time in the house but was moodier than ever, and so was Barber. They didn’t have long or pleasant conversation. Mostly Barber drank, his familiar answer to the season of bleakness. When he was able, he imitated the hibernating beasts. When he was awake he lay like a great rock in the sagging bed, feeling his flesh pulling him down and listening to his breath whistling and rasping out of his mouth. He had taken a dim view of many a patient whose breathing sounded better than his own.
Made anxious by such thoughts, he rose from bed once a day to cook an enormous meal, seeking in fatty meats protection against chill and foreboding. Usually next to his bed he kept an opened flask and a platter of fried lamb congealed in its own grease. Rob still cleaned house when he was of a mind, but by February the place smelled like a fox’s den.
They welcomed the spring eagerly and in March packed the wagon and drove out of Exmouth, moving across the Salisbury Plain and through the low scarpland where begrimed slaves dug through limestone and chalk to grub out iron and tin. They didn’t stop in the slave camps because there wasn’t a halfpenny to be earned there. It was Barber’s thought to travel the border with Wales until Shrewsbury, there to find the River Trent and follow it northeastward. They stopped in all the by-now-familiar villages and little towns. Horse didn’t step into a parade prance with anything like the verve that had been shown by Incitatus, but she was handsome and they dressed her mane with scores of ribbons. Business by and large was very good.
At Hope-Under-Dinmore they found a craftsman in leather who had clever hands and Rob bought two scabbards in soft leather to hold the weapons he had been promised.
When they reached Blyth they went at once to the smithy, where Durman Moulton made them a satisfied greeting. The artisan went to a shelf in the dim recesses of his shop and came back carrying two bundles wrapped in soft animal skins.
Rob undid them eagerly and caught his breath.
If it was possible, the broadsword was better than the one they had so admired the previous year. The dagger was equally wrought. While Rob exulted in the sword, Barber hefted the knife and felt its exquisite balancing.
“It is clean work,” he told Moulton, who accepted the compliment for what it was.
Rob slipped each blade into its scabbard on his belt, testing the unfamiliar weight. He placed his hands on their hilts and Barber couldn’t resist studying him.
He had presence. At eighteen he finally had reached full growth and stood a double span higher than Barber. He was broad in the shoulder and lean, with a mane of curling brown hair, wide-set blue eyes that changed their mood more swiftly than the sea, a large-boned face and a square jaw he kept scraped clean. He half pulled from its sheath the sword that advertised him as freeborn, and slid it down again. Watching, Barber felt a chill of pride and an overpowering apprehension to which he couldn’t give a name.
Perhaps it was not incorrect to call it fear.
17
A NEW ARRANGEMENT
The first time Rob walked into a public house wearing arms—it was in Beverley—he felt the difference. It was not that men showed him any more respect, but they were more careful with him, and more watchful. Barber kept telling him that he had to be more careful, too, since violent anger was one of Holy Mother Church’s eight capital crimes.
Rob grew weary of hearing what would happen if reeve’s men should drag him into churchly court, but Barber repeatedly described trials by ordeal, in which the accused were made to test their innocence by grasping heated rocks or white-hot metal, or drinking boiling water.
“Conviction for murder means hanging or beheading,” Barber said severely. “Often when someone does manslaughter, thongs are passed under the sinews of his heels and tied to the tails of wild bulls. The beasts are then hunted to death by hounds.”
Merciful Christ, Rob thought, Barber has become an elderly lady complete with faint sighs. Does he believe I’ll go out and slay the populace?
In the town of Fulford he discovered he had lost the Roman coin he’d carried with him since his father’s work crew had dredged it from the Thames. In the blackest of humors, he drank until it was easy to be provoked by a pockmarked Scot who jostled his elbow. Instead of apologizing, the Scot muttered nastily in Gaelic.
“Speak English, you damned dwarf,” Rob snarled, for the Scot, though powerfully built, was two heads shorter than he.
Barber’s cautions may have taken hold, for he had the sense to unbuckle his weapons. The Scot did likewise at once, and then they closed with one another. Despite the man’s lack of height it was a rude surprise to find him unbelievably skillful with his hands and feet. His first kick cracked a rib and then a fist like a rock broke Rob’s nose with an unpleasant sound and worse agony.
Rob grunted. “Whoreson,” he gasped, and called upon pain and rage to extend his strength. He was barely able to stay in the fight until the Scot was sufficiently used up to make mutual withdrawal possible.
He limped his way back to the camp feeling and looking as though he had been set upon and beaten mercilessly by a band of giants.
Barber was not overly gentle when he set the broken nose with a crackling of gristle. He dabbed liquor on the scrapes and bruises, but his words stung more than the alcohol.
“You’re at a crossroads,” he said. “You’ve learned our trade. You’ve a quick mind and there’s no reason you shouldn’t prosper, except the quality of your own spirit. For if you continue along your present path, you’ll soon be a hopeless drunkard.”
“Pronounced so by one who will himself die of the drink,” Rob said disdainfully. He grunted as he touched his swollen and bleeding lips.
“I doubt you’ll live long enough to die of the drink,” Barber said.
No matter how hard Rob searched, the Roman coin was not to be found. The only possession that remained to link him with his childhood was the arrowhead his father had given him. He had a hole bored through the flint and wore it on a short deerskin thong tied around his neck.
Now men tended to move out of his way, for in addition to his size and the professional look of his weapons, he had a motley nose that wandered slightly on a face in various stages of discoloration. Perhaps Barber had been too angry to do his best when he had set the nose, which was never to be straight again.
The rib hurt for weeks whenever he breathed. Rob was subdued as they traveled from the region of Northumbria to Westmoreland, and then back again to Northumbria. He didn’t go to public houses or taverns where it was easy to get into fights, but stayed close to the wagon and the evening fire. Whenever they were camped far from a town he took to sampling the physick and developed a taste for metheglin. But on a night when he had drunk heavily of their stock he found himself abo
ut to open a flask on whose neck was scratched the letter B. It was a container from the Special Batch of pissed-in liquor, put up to provide revenge on those who became Barber’s enemies. Shuddering, Rob threw the flask away; from then on he bought liquor when they stopped at a town and stowed it carefully in a corner of the wagon.
In the town of Newcastle he played the Old Man, taking refuge behind a false beard that hid his bruises. They had a good crowd and sold a lot of physick. After the entertainment, Rob came behind the wagon to remove his disguise so he could set up his screen and begin his examinations; Barber was already there, arguing with a tall, bony man.
“I have followed you from Durham, where I observed you,” the man was saying. “Where you go, you draw a crowd. A crowd is what I need, and I propose we travel together and share all earnings.”
“You have no earnings,” Barber said.
The man smiled. “I do, for my task is hard work.”
“You are a fingersmith and a cutpurse, and you’ll be caught one day with your hand in a stranger’s pocket and that will be the end of you. I do not work with thieves.”
“Perhaps the choice isn’t yours.”
“The choice is his,” Rob said.
The man scarcely favored him with a glance. “You must be silent, old man, lest you attract the attention of those able to do you harm.”
Rob stepped toward him. The pickpocket’s eyes widened in surprise, and he drew a long, narrow knife from inside his clothing and made a little movement toward them both.
Rob’s fine dagger seemed to leave the scabbard of its own accord and slip into the man’s arm. He wasn’t conscious of effort but the thrust must have been forceful, for he could feel the point grate against bone. When he pulled the blade from the flesh it was at once replaced by spouting blood. Rob was amazed that so much gore should appear so quickly from such a skinny crane of a person.
The pickpocket backed away, holding his wounded arm.
