The Physician

by Noah Gordon

  Next morning he cooked his own breakfast and fed the cat bread soaked in milk. When he gazed into her greenish eyes he recognized the feline bitchiness there, and he smiled. “I’ll name you after Mistress Buffington,” he told her.

  Perhaps feeding her was the necessary magic. Within hours she was purring to him, lying in his lap as he sat in the wagon seat.

  In the middle of the morning he set the cat aside when he drove around a curve in Tettenhall, and came upon a man standing over a woman in the road. “What ails her?” he called, and pulled Horse short. He saw she was breathing; her face was bright with exertion and she had an enormous belly.

  “Come her time,” the man said.

  In the orchard behind him, half a dozen baskets were filled with apples. He was dressed in rags and didn’t appear the man to own rich property. Rob guessed he was a cottager, doubtless laboring on a large tract for a landlord in return for a small soccage piece he could work for his own family.

  “We were picking earliest fruit when her pains came upon her. She started for home but was quickly caught out. There is no midwife here, for the woman died this spring. I sent a boy running to fetch the leech when it was clear she was in a hard place.”

  “Well, then,” Rob said, and picked up his reins. He was prepared to move on because it was precisely the kind of situation Barber had taught him to avoid; if he could help the woman there would be tiny payment, but if he could not, he might be blamed for what happened.

  “It’s been time and more now,” the man said bitterly, “and still the physician doesn’t come. He’s a Jew doctor.”

  Even as the man spoke, Rob saw his wife’s eyes roll back in her head as she went into convulsions.

  From what Barber had told him of Jew physicians he thought it likely the leech might not come at all. He was snared by the stolid misery in the cottager’s eyes and by memories he would have liked to forget.

  Sighing, he climbed down from the wagon.

  He knelt over the dirty, worn woman and took her hands. “When did she last feel the child move?”

  “It’s been weeks. For a fortnight she’s been feeling poorly, as if she was poisoned.” She had had four previous pregnancies, he said. There was a pair of boys at home but the last two babies had been born still.

  Rob felt that this child was dead too. He put his hand lightly on the distended stomach and wished devoutly to leave, but in his mind he saw Mam’s white face when she had lain on the shitty stable floor, and he had a disturbing knowledge that the woman would die quickly unless he acted.

  In the jumble of Barber’s gear he found the speculum of polished metal, but he didn’t use it as a mirror. When the convulsion had passed he positioned her legs and dilated the cervix with the instrument as Barber had described its use. The mass inside her slid out easily, more putrefaction than baby. He was scarcely aware of her husband sucking in his breath and walking away.

  His hands told his head what to do, instead of the other way around.

  He got the placenta out and cleansed and washed her. When he looked up, to his surprise he saw that the Jew doctor had arrived.

  “You will want to take over,” he said. He felt great relief, for there was steady bleeding.

  “There is no hurry,” the physician said. But he listened interminably to her breathing and examined her so slowly and thoroughly that his lack of faith in Rob was apparent.

  Eventually the Jew appeared satisfied. “Place your palm on her abdomen and rub firmly, like this.”

  Rob massaged her empty belly, wondering. Finally, through the abdomen he could feel the big, spongy womb snap back into a small hard ball, and the bleeding stopped.

  “Magic worthy of Merlin and a trick I’ll remember,” he said.

  “There is no magic in what we do,” the Jew doctor said calmly. “You know my name.”

  “We met some years ago. In Leicester.”

  Benjamin Merlin looked at the garish wagon and then smiled. “Ah. You were a boy, the apprentice. The barber was a fat man who belched colored ribbons.”

  “Yes.”

  Rob didn’t tell him Barber was dead, nor did Merlin inquire of him. They studied one another. The Jew’s hawk face was still framed by a full head of white hair and his white beard, but he was not so thin as he had been.

  “The clerk with whom you spoke, that day in Leicester. Did you couch his eyes?”

  “Clerk?” Merlin appeared puzzled and then his gaze cleared. “Yes! He is Edgar Thorpe of the village of Lucteburne, in Leicestershire.”

  If Rob had heard of Edgar Thorpe he had forgotten. It was a difference between them, he realized; much of the time he didn’t learn his patients’ names.

  “I did operate on him and removed his cataracts.”

  “And today? Is he well?”

  Merlin smiled ruefully. “Master Thorpe cannot be called well, for he grows old and has ailments and complaints. But he sees through both eyes.”

  Rob had hidden the ruined fetus in a rag. Merlin unwrapped it and studied it, then he sprinkled it with water from a flask. “I baptize you in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit,” the Jew said briskly, then he rewrapped the little bundle and carried it to the cottager. “The infant has been christened properly,” he said, “and doubtless will be allowed to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. You must tell Father Stigand or that other priest at the church.”

  The husbandman took out a soiled purse, the stolid misery on his face mingling with apprehension. “What do I pay, master physician?”

  “What you can,” Merlin said, and the man took a penny from the purse and gave it to him.

  “Was it a man-child?”

  “One cannot tell,” the physician said kindly. He dropped the coin into the large pocket of his kirtle and fumbled until he came up with a halfpenny, which he gave to Rob. They had to help the cottager carry her home, a hard ha’penny’s worth of work.

  When finally they were free they went to a nearby stream and washed off the blood.

  “You’ve watched similar deliveries?”

  “No.”

  “How did you know what to do?”

  Rob shrugged. “It had been described to me.”

  “They say some are born healers. Selected.” The Jew smiled at him. “Of course, others are simply lucky,” he said.

  The man’s scrutiny made him uncomfortable. “If the mother had been dead and the babe alive, …” Rob said, forcing himself to ask.

  “Caesar’s operation.”

  Rob stared.

  “You don’t know of what I speak?”

  “No.”

  “You must cut through the belly and the uterine wall and take the child.”

  “Open the mother?”

  “Yes.”

  “Have you done this?”

  “Several times. When I was a medical clerk I saw one of my teachers open a live woman to get at her child.”

  Liar! he thought, ashamed to be listening so eagerly. He remembered what Barber had said about this man and all his kind. “What happened?”

  “She died, but she would have died at any rate. I do not approve of opening live women, but I was told of men who had done so with both mother and child surviving.”

  Rob turned away before this French-sounding man could laugh at him for a fool. But he had taken only two steps when he was compelled to come back.

  “Where to cut?”

  In the dust of the road the Jew drew a torso and showed two incisions, one a long straight line on the left side, the other up the middle of the belly. “Either,” he said, and threw the stick far.

  Rob nodded and went away, unable to give him thanks.

  20

  CAPS AT TABLE

  He moved out of Tettenhall at once but something was already happening to him.

  He was running low on Universal Specific and next day bought a keg of liquor from a farmer, pausing to mix a new batch of physick which that afternoon he began to rid himself of in Ludlow. The Specific
sold as well as ever, but he was preoccupied and a little frightened.

  To hold a human soul in the palm of your hand like a pebble. To feel somebody slip away, yet by your actions to bring her back! Not even a king had such power.

  Selected.

  Could he learn more? How much could be learned? What must it be like, he asked himself, to learn all that could be taught?

  For the first time he recognized in himself a desire to become a physician.

  Truly to be able to fight death! He was having new and disturbing thoughts that at times produced rapture and at other times were almost an agony.

  Next morning he set out for Worcester, the next town to the south along the Severn River. He didn’t remember seeing the river or the track, or recollect guiding Horse, or recall anything else of the journey. When he reached Worcester, the townsfolk gaped as they watched the red wagon; it rolled into the square, made a complete circuit without stopping, and then left the town and traveled back in the direction whence it had come.

  The village of Lucteburne in Leicestershire wasn’t large enough to support a tavern, but haysel was in progress and when he stopped at a meadow in which four men wielded scythes, the cutter in the swath closest to the road ceased his rhythmic swinging long enough to tell him how to reach Edgar Thorpe’s house.

  Rob found the old man on his hands and knees in his small garden, harvesting leeks. He perceived at once, with a strange sense of excitement, that Thorpe was able to see. But he was suffering sorely from rheum sickness and, although Rob helped him to regain his feet amid groans and anguished exclamations, it was a few moments before they were able to speak calmly.

  Rob brought several bottles of Specific from the wagon and opened one, which pleased his host greatly.

  “I am here to inquire into the operation which gave you back your sight, Master Thorpe.”

  “Indeed? And what is your interest?”

  Rob hesitated. “I have a kinsman in need of such treatment, and I inquire in his name.”

  Thorpe took a swallow of liquor and then sighed. “I hope that he’s a strong man with bountiful courage,” he said. “Tied to a chair hands and feet, I was. Cruel bindings cut into my head, fixing it against the high back. I’d been fed many a stoup and was close to senseless from drink, but then small hooks were placed beneath my eyelids and lifted by assistants so I couldn’t blink.”

  He closed his eyes and shuddered. The tale obviously had been told many times, for the details were fixed in his memory and related without hesitation, but Rob found them no less fascinating for that.

  “Such was my affliction that I could only see, fuzzily, what was directly before me. There swam into my vision Master Merlin’s hand. It was holding a blade, which grew larger as it descended, until it cut into my eye.

  “Oh, the pain of it sobered me instantly! I was certain he had cut out my eye instead of merely removing the cloudiness and I shrieked at him and importuned him to do nothing more to me. When he persisted I rained curses on his head and said that at last I understood how his despised folk could have killed our gentle Lord.

  “When he cut into the second eye the pain was so great that I lost all knowledge. I awoke to the darkness of wrapped eyes and for almost a fortnight suffered grievously. But at length I was able to see as I hadn’t done for overly long. So great was the improvement of my sight that I spent two more full years as clerk before the rheum made it sensible to curtail my duties.”

  So it was true, Rob thought dazedly. Then perhaps the other things Benjamin Merlin had told him were fact as well.

  “Master Merlin is the goodliest doctor ever I did see,” Edgar Thorpe said. “Except,” he added crossly, “for so competent a physician he seems to be meeting untoward difficulty in ridding my bones and joints of great discomfort.”

  He went to Tettenhall again and camped in a little valley, staying near the town three days like a lovesick swain who lacked the courage to visit a female but couldn’t bring himself to leave her alone. The first farmer from whom he bought provision told him where Benjamin Merlin lived, and several times he drove Horse slowly past the place, a low farmhouse with well-kept barn and outbuilding, a field, an orchard, and a vineyard. There were no outward signs that here lived a physician.

  On the afternoon of the third day, miles from Merlin’s house, he met the physician on the road.

  “How do I find you, young barber?”

  Rob said he was well and asked after the physician’s health. They chatted of weather for a grave moment and then Merlin nodded his dismissal. “I may not tarry, for I must still go to the homes of three sick persons before my day’s work is done.”

  “May I accompany you, and observe?” Rob forced himself to say.

  The physician hesitated. He seemed less than pleased by the request. But he nodded, however reluctantly. “Kindly see that you stay out of the way,” he said.

  The first patient lived not far from where they had met, in a small cottage by a goose pond. He was Edwin Griffith, an old man with a hollow cough, and Rob saw at once that he was failing of advanced chest sickness and soon would be in his grave.

  “How do I find you this day, Master Griffith?” Merlin asked.

  The old man quailed beneath a paroxysm of coughing and then gasped and sighed. “I am same and with few regrets, save that I wasn’t able today to feed my geese.”

  Merlin smiled. “Perhaps my young friend here might tend to them,” he said, and Rob could do nothing but agree. Old Griffith told him where fodder was kept, and soon he was hurrying to the side of the pond with a sack. He was annoyed because this visit was a loss to him, since surely Merlin wouldn’t spend time overly with a dying man. He approached the geese gingerly, for he knew how vicious they could be; but they were hungry and single-mindedly made for the feed with a great squabble, allowing him a quick escape.

  To his surprise, Merlin was still talking with Edwin Griffith when he reentered the little house. Rob never had seen a physician work so deliberately. Merlin asked interminable questions about the man’s habits and diet, about his childhood, about his parents and his grandparents and what they had died of. He felt the pulse at the wrist and again on the neck, and he placed his ear against the chest and listened. Rob hung back, watching intently.

  When they left, the old man thanked him for feeding the fowl.

  It appeared to be a day devoted to tending the doomed, for Merlin led him two miles away to a house off the town square, in which the reeve’s wife lay wasting away in pain.

  “How do I find you, Mary Sweyn?”

  She didn’t answer but looked at him steadily. It was answer enough, and Merlin nodded. He sat and held her hand and spoke quietly to her; as he had done with the old man, he spent a surprising amount of time.

  “You may help me to turn Mistress Sweyn,” he said to Rob. “Gently. Gently, now.” When Merlin lifted her bedgown to bathe her skeletal body they noted, on her pitiful left flank, an angry boil. The physician lanced it at once to give her comfort and Rob saw to his satisfaction that it was accomplished as he would have done it himself. Merlin left her a flask filled with a pain-dulling infusion.

  “One more to see,” Merlin said as they closed Mary Sweyn’s door. “He is Tancred Osbern, whose son brought word this morning that he has done himself an injury.”

  Merlin tied his horse’s reins to the wagon and sat on the front seat next to Rob, for the company.

  “How fare your kinsman’s eyes?” the physician asked blandly.

  He might have known that Edgar Thorpe would mention his inquiry, Rob told himself, and felt the blood rushing into his cheeks. “I didn’t intend to deceive him. I wished to see for myself the results of your couching,” he said. “And it seemed the simplest way to explain my interest.”

  Merlin smiled and nodded. As they rode he explained the surgical method he had used to remove Thorpe’s cataracts. “It is not an operation I would advise anyone doing on his own,” he said pointedly, and Rob nodded, for he had n
o intention of going off to operate on any person’s eyes!

  Whenever they came to a crossroads Merlin pointed the way, until finally they drew near a prosperous farm. It had the orderly look produced by constant attention, but inside they found a massive and muscular farmer groaning on the straw-filled pallet that was his bed.

  “Ah, Tancred, what have you done to yourself this time?” Merlin said.

  “Hurt t’bloody leg.”

  Merlin threw back the cover and frowned, for the right limb was twisted at the thigh, and swollen. “You must be in frightful pain. Yet you told the boy to say, ‘whenever I arrived.’ Next time you are not to be stupidly brave, that I may come at once,” he said sharply.

  The man closed his eyes and nodded.

  “How did you do yourself, and when?”

  “Yesterday noon. Fell off damn roof while fixing cursed thatch.”

  “You will not be fixing the thatch for a while,” Merlin said. He looked at Rob. “I shall need help. Find us a splint, somewhat longer than his leg.”

  “Not to tear up buildings or fences,” Osbern growled.

  Rob went to see what he could find. In the barn there were a dozen logs of beech and oak, as well as a piece of pine that had been worked by hand into a board. It was too wide, but the wood was soft and it took him little time to split it lengthwise using the farmer’s tools.

  Osbern glowered when he recognized the splint but said nothing.

  Merlin looked down and sighed. “He has thighs like a bull’s. We have our work before us, young Cole,” he said. Grasping the injured leg by the ankle and the calf, the physician tried to exert a steady pressure, at the same time turning and straightening the twisted limb. There was a small crackling, like the sound made when dried leaves are crushed, and Osbern emitted a great bellowing.

  “It is no use,” Merlin said in a moment. “His muscles are huge. They have locked themselves to protect the leg and I do not have sufficient strength to overcome them and reduce the fracture.”

  “Let me try,” Rob said.

  Merlin nodded, but first he fed a full mug of liquor to the farmer, who was trembling and sobbing with the agony induced by the unsuccessful effort.