The Physician

by Noah Gordon

  Mary’s eyes were timid and her reply was lost in the sudden ringing of the bells of St. Asaph’s, which proved to be very loud.

  As soon as they were settled he hurried to a sign-maker’s and ordered the man to carve an oak board and blacken the letters. When the sign was done, it was fastened next to the doorway of the house on Thames Street, so all might see it was the home of Robert Jeremy Cole, Physician.

  At first it was pleasant for Mary to be among Britons and speak English, although she continued to address her sons in Erse, wanting them to have the language of the Scots. The chance to obtain things in London was heady fare. She found a seamstress and ordered a dress of decent brown stuff. She would have wished a blue such as the dye her father once had given her, a blue like summer sky, but of course that was impossible. Nevertheless, this dress was comely—long, girdled, with a high round neck and sleeves so loose they fell away from her wrists in luxurious folds.

  For Rob they ordered good gray trousers and a kirtle. Though he protested the extravagance, she bought him two black physician’s robes, one of light unlined stuff for summer and the other heavier and with a hood trimmed in fox. New garments were overdue him, since he still wore the clothing bought in Constantinople after they had completed the trail of Jewish safe places like following a chain, link by link. He had trimmed the bushy beard to a goatee and traded for Western dress, and by the time they joined a caravan, Jesse ben Benjamin had disappeared. In his place was Robert Jeremy Cole, an Englishman taking his family home.

  Ever frugal, Mary had kept the caftan and used the material to make garments for her sons. She saved Rob J.’s clothing for Tam, though this was made difficult by the fact that Rob J. was large for his age and Tam slightly smaller than most boys because he had experienced grave illness on their journey west. In the Frankish town of Freising both children had been taken by quinsy throats and watery eyes, and then racked by hot fevers that terrified her with the thought of losing her sons. The children had been febrile for days; Rob J. was left with no visible defect but the illness had settled in Tam’s left leg, which became pallid and appeared to be lifeless.

  The Cole family had come to Freising with a caravan that was soon scheduled to depart, and the caravan master said he wouldn’t wait for illness.

  “Go and be damned,” Rob had told him, because the child required treatment and would receive it. He had kept hot moist bandages on Tam’s limb, going without sleep in order to change them constantly and to engulf the small leg in his large hands and bend the knee and work the muscles again and again, and to pinch and squeeze and knead the leg with bear fat.

  Tam recovered, but slowly. He had been walking less than a year when stricken; he had had to learn again to creep and to crawl, and this time when he took his first steps he was off balance, the left leg being slightly shorter than the other.

  They were in Freising not quite twelve months waiting for Tam’s recovery and then for a suitable caravan. Although he never learned to love the Franks, Rob came to mellow somewhat regarding Frankish ways. People had come to him there for doctoring despite his ignorance of their language, having seen the care and tenderness with which he treated his own child. He had never stopped working on Tam’s leg, and although the boy sometimes dragged his left foot a bit when he walked, he was among the most active children in London.

  Indeed, both her children were more at ease in London than their mother, for she couldn’t reconcile herself. She found the weather damp and the English cold. When she went to the marketplace she had to steel herself against slipping into the spirited Eastern haggling to which she had grown affectionately accustomed. The people were generally less amiable here than she had expected. Even Rob said he missed the effusive flow of Persian conversation. “Though the flattery was seldom more than sheep jakes, it was pleasant,” he told her wistfully.

  She felt herself in turmoil concerning him. Something was amiss in their marriage bed, a joylessness she couldn’t define. She bought a looking-glass and studied her reflection, noting that her skin had lost luster under the cruel sun of travel. Her face was thinner than once it had been, and her cheekbones more pronounced. She knew her breasts had been altered by nursing. Everywhere in the city, hard-eyed tarts walked the street and some of them were beautiful. Would he turn to them, sooner or later? She imagined him telling a whore what he had learned of love in Persia and drew pain from the thought of them rolling about in laughter as once she and Rob had done.

  To her, London was a black quagmire in which they already stood ankle deep. The comparison was not accidental, for the city smelled more foul than any swamp she had encountered in her travels. The open sewers and dirt were no worse than the open sewers and dirt of Ispahan, but here there were many times the number of people and in some neighborhoods they lived crammed together, so the accumulated stench of their bodily wastes and garbage was an abomination.

  When they had reached Constantinople and she found herself once again among a Christian majority she had indulged in an orgy of churchgoing, but now that had palled, for she found London’s churches overpowering. There were far more churches in London than there had been mosques in Ispahan, more than a hundred churches. They towered over every other sort of building—it was a city built between churches—and they spoke with a constant booming voice that made her tremble. Sometimes she felt she was about to be lifted and carried away by a great churchly wind stirred up by the bells. Though the Church of St. Asaph was small, its bells were large and reverberated in the house on Thames Street, and they rang in dizzying concert with all the others, communicating more effectively than an army of muezzins. The bells called worshipers to prayer, the bells witnessed to the consecration of the Mass, the bells warned laggards about the curfew; the bells rocked the steeples for christenings and weddings and sounded a grim and solemn knell for every soul passing on; the bells clanged the alert for fire and riot, welcomed distinguished visitors, pealed to announce each holy day, and tolled with muffled tones to mark disasters. To Mary, the bells were the city.

  And she hated the damned bells.

  The first person brought to their door by the new sign was not a patient. He was a slight, stooped man who peered and blinked through narrowed eyes.

  “Nicholas Hunne, physician,” he said, and cocked his balding head like a sparrow, awaiting a reaction. “Of Thames Street,” he added meaningfully.

  “I’ve seen your sign,” Rob said. He smiled. “You’re at one end of Thames Street, Master Hunne, and I now establish myself on the other end. Between us there are enough ailing Londoners for the distraction of a dozen busy physicians.”

  Hunne sniffed. “Not so many ailing folk as you may think. And not such busy physicians. London is already too crowded with medical men, and in my opinion an outlying town would make a better choice for a physician just starting out.”

  When he asked where Master Cole had trained, Rob lied like a rug dealer and said he had apprenticed for six years in the East Frankish Kingdom.

  “And what shall you charge?”

  “Charge?”

  “Yes. Your fees, man, your schedule of fees!”

  “I haven’t given it sufficient thought.”

  “Do so at once. I’ll tell you what is the custom here, for it wouldn’t do for a newcomer to undercut the rest. Fees vary depending upon the patient’s wealth—heaven’s the limit, of course. Yet you must never go beneath forty pence for phlebotomy, since bloodletting is the staple of our trade, nor less than thirty-six pence for the examination of urine.”

  Rob stared thoughtfully, for the quoted fees were ruthlessly high.

  “You shan’t bother with the rabble who cluster at the far ends of Thames Street. They have their barber-surgeons. Nor will it be fruitful to yearn after the nobility, since these are tended by only a few physicians—Dryfield, Hudson, Simpson, and that lot. But Thames Street is a ripe enough garden of rich merchants, even if I have learned to get payment before treatment is begun, when the patient’s anxi
ety is highest.” He cast Rob a shrewd glance. “Our competition need not be all disadvantage, for I’ve found it impressive to call in a consultant when the afflicted is prosperous, and we shall be able to employ one another with profitable frequency, eh?”

  Rob took several steps toward the door, ushering him out. “I prefer to work largely alone,” he said coolly.

  The other colored, for there was no mistaking the rejection.

  “Then you will be content, Master Cole, for I shall spread the word and no other physician will come within hailing distance of you.” He nodded curtly and was gone.

  Patients came, but not often.

  It was to be expected, Rob told himself; he was a new herring in a strange sea, and it would take time for his presence to be realized. Better to sit and wait than to play dirty, prosperous games with such as Hunne.

  Meantime, he settled in. He took his wife and children to visit his family graves and the little boys played among the markers in the churchyard at St. Botolph’s. By now he acknowledged, deep in the most secret part of himself, that he would never find his sister or his brothers, but he took comfort and pride in this new family he had made, and he hoped that somehow his brother Samuel and Mam and Da could know about them.

  He found a tavern he liked on Cornhill. It was called The Fox, a workingmen’s public house of the kind in which his father had sought refuge when Rob was a boy. Here he avoided metheglin again and drank brown ale, and he discovered a contractor-builder named George Markham who had been in the carpenters’ guild at the same time as Rob’s father. Markham was a stout, red-faced man with black hair gone snowy at the temples and at the bottom of his beard. He had been in a different Hundred than Nathanael Cole but remembered him, and it turned out he was nephew to Richard Bukerel, who had been Chief Carpenter then. He had been a friend of Turner Home, the Master Carpenter with whom Samuel had lived before he had been run over on the docks. “Turner and his woman were killed by marsh fever five years ago, along with their youngest child. That was a terrible winter,” Markham said.

  Rob told the men in The Fox that he had been abroad for years, learning to be a physician in the East Frankish Kingdom. “Do you know an Apprentice Carpenter named Anthony Tite?” he asked Markham.

  “He was a Companion Joiner when he died last year of the chest disease.”

  Rob nodded, and they drank in silence for a time.

  From Markham and others at The Fox, Rob caught up on what had been happening to England’s throne. Some of the story he’d learned from Bostock in Ispahan. Now he discovered that after succeeding Canute, Harold Harefoot proved a weak king but with a strong guardian in Godwin, Earl of the West Saxons. His half-brother Alfred, who called himself the Atheling or Crown Prince, came from Normandy, and Harold’s forces butchered his men, put out Alfred’s eyes, and kept him in a cell until he died horribly from the festering of his tortured eye sockets.

  Harold quickly ate and drank himself to death and Harthacnut, another of his half-brothers, returned from fighting a war in Denmark and succeeded him.

  “Harthacnut ordered Harold’s body dug up from Westminster and thrown into a fenny marsh near the Isle of Thorney,” said George Markham, his tongue loosened by too much drink. “His own half-brother’s body! As if it were a sack of shit or a dead dog.”

  Markham told how the corpse that had been King of England lay in the reeds while tides ebbed and flowed over it.

  “Finally, a few of us sneaked down there in secret. Cold it was, that night, with a heavy fog that mostly hid the moon. We placed the body in a boat and guided it down the Thames. We buried the remains decently in the tiny churchyard of St. Clement’s. It was the least Christian men could do.” He crossed himself and took a deep draught from his cup.

  Harthacnut had lasted only two years as king, dropping dead one day at a wedding feast, and at last it was Edward’s turn. By then Edward had married Godwin’s daughter and he too was firmly dominated by the Saxon earl, but the people liked him. “Edward’s a good king,” Markham told Rob. “He’s built a proper fleet of black ships.”

  Rob nodded. “I’ve noted them. Are they fast?”

  “Fast enough to keep the sea lanes free of pirates.”

  All this royal history, embellished with tavern anecdotes and recollections, created thirsty throats that demanded to be whetted, and it required many a toast to the dead brothers and certainly to the living Edward, monarch of the realm. So several evenings Rob forgot his inability to manage spirits and reeled from The Fox to the house on Thames Street, and Mary was faced with the task of undressing a surly sot and putting him to bed.

  The sadness in her face deepened.

  “Love, let us go away from here,” she said to him one day.

  “Why, where should we go?”

  “We could live in Kilmarnock. There is my holding there, and a circle of kinsmen who would be warmed to see my husband and sons.”

  “We must give London more chance than that,” he said gently.

  He was no fool, and he vowed to be more careful when he went to The Fox, and to go there less often. What he didn’t tell her was that London had become a vision for him, more than just an opportunity for a living as a leech. He had absorbed things in Persia that were now a part of him, things they didn’t know here. He yearned for the open exchange of medical ideas that had existed in Ispahan. That required a hospital, and London would be an excellent location for an institution like the maristan.

  That year the long wintry spring turned into a wet summer. Each morning thick fog hid the waterfront. By midmorning, on days when it didn’t rain, the sun cut through the gray gloom and the city was coaxed into instant life. This moment of rebirth was Rob’s favorite time for walking, and on a particularly lovely day the dissolution of the fog came when he was passing a commercial wharf on which a large party of slaves was stacking iron pigs for shipment.

  There were a dozen piles of the heavy metal bars. They had been stacked too high, or perhaps there was an irregularity in one of the rows. Rob was enjoying the gleam of the sun on the wet metal when the driver of a dray, with loud commands and a cracking of his whip and tugging on his reins, backed his dirty white horses too far and too fast, so that the rear of the heavy wagon hit the pile with a thud.

  Rob long had vowed that his boys would not play on the docks. He hated drays. Never did he see one but that he thought of his brother Samuel being crushed to death under the wheels of a freight wagon. Now he watched in horror as another accident occurred.

  The iron bar at the top was jarred forward, so that it teetered at the edge and then began to slide over the lip of the pile, followed by two more.

  There was a shouted cry of warning and a desperate human scattering, but two of the slaves had others in front of them. They fell as they scrabbled, so that the full weight of one of the pigs of iron came down on one of them, crushing life from him in an instant.

  One end of another pig slammed down on the other man’s lower right leg, and his screaming incited Rob to action.

  “Here, get it off them. Quickly and carefully, now!” he said, and half a dozen slaves lifted the iron bars from the two men.

  He had them moved well away from the pile of iron. A single glance was all that was necessary to ascertain that the man who had taken the full brunt was dead. His chest was crushed and he had been throttled by a broken windpipe, so that his face already was dark and engorged.

  The other slave no longer was screaming, having fainted when he was moved. It was just as well; his foot and ankle were fearsomely mangled and Rob could do nothing to restore them. He dispatched a slave to his house to fetch his surgical kit from Mary, and while the wounded man was unconscious he incised the healthy skin above the injury and began to flay it back to make a flap, and then to slice through meat and muscle.

  From the man arose a personal stink that made Rob nervous and afraid, the stench of a human animal who had sweated in toil again and again until his unwashed rags had absorbed his rot
ten smell and compounded it and made it almost a tangible part of him like his shaven slave’s head or the foot Rob was in the process of removing. It caused Rob to remember the two similarly stinking stevedore slaves who had carried Da home from his job on the docks, home to die.

  “What in hell do you believe you’re doing?”

  He looked up and struggled to control his expression, for standing next to him was a person he had last seen in the home of Jesse ben Benjamin in Persia.

  “I am tending a man.”

  “But they say you’re a physician.”

  “They are right.”

  “I am Charles Bostock, merchant and importer, owner of this warehouse and this dock. And I’m not so foolish, God’s arse, as to hire a physician for a slave.”

  Rob shrugged. The kit arrived and he was ready for it; he took up his bone saw and cut off the ruined foot and sewed the flap over the blood-oozing stump as neatly as al-Juzjani would have demanded.

  Bostock was still there. “I meant my words precisely,” he was saying. “I ain’t to pay you. Not a ha’-penny shall you get from me.”

  Rob nodded. He gently tapped the slave’s face with two fingers and the man groaned.

  “Who are you?”

  “Robert Cole, physician of Thames Street.”

  “Are we acquainted, master?”

  “Not to my knowledge, master merchant.”

  He collected his belongings, nodded, and went away. At the end of the dock he risked a glance back, and he saw Bostock standing as one transfixed, or deeply puzzled, and continuing to stare after him as he made his escape.

  He told himself Bostock had seen a turbaned Jew in Ispahan, with a bushy beard and Persian clothing, the exotic Hebrew Jesse ben Benjamin. And on the dock the merchant had spoken with Robert Jeremy Cole, a free Londoner in plain English garb, his face … transformed? … by a closetrimmed beard.

  It was possible Bostock wouldn’t remember him at all. And equally possible that he would.

  Rob worried the question like a dog with a bone. It was not so much that he was frightened for himself (although he was frightened) as that he was concerned over what would happen to his wife and sons in the event that trouble should claim him.