The Physician

by Noah Gordon

  He nodded and was dismissed.

  Minutes later he stood outside St. Paul’s scarcely crediting that he was no longer exposed to their sharp and pecking words.

  “Master Cole!” someone called, and he turned and saw the Benedictine hastening after him.

  “Will you join me in the public house, master? I would like to speak with you.”

  Now what? he thought.

  But he followed the man across the muddy street and into the tavern, where they took a quiet corner. The monk said he was Brother Paulinus, and both of them ordered ale.

  “I thought that in the end the proceedings went well for you.”

  Rob said nothing, and his silence raised the monk’s eyebrows. “Come, an honest man can find twelve other honest men.”

  “I was born in St. Botolph’s Parish. Which I left as a young boy,” Rob said gloomily, “to wander England as a barber-surgeon’s helper. I will have damn-all of a time finding twelve men, honest or otherwise, who remember me and will be willing to travel to London to say so.”

  Brother Paulinus sipped his ale. “If you do not find all twelve, the issue is thrown into doubt. You will then be given an opportunity to prove your innocence by ordeal.”

  The ale tasted of despair. “What are the ordeals?”

  “The Church uses four ordeals—cold water, hot water, hot iron, and consecrated bread. I can tell you that Bishop Aelfsige favors hot iron. You will be given holy water to drink and holy water will be sprinkled on the hand to be used for the ordeal. Your choice of hand. You will pick a white-hot iron from the fire and carry it nine feet in three steps, then you will drop it and hasten to the altar, where the hand will be wrapped and sealed. In three days the wrapping will be removed. If your hand is white and pure within the wrapping, you will be declared innocent. If the hand is not clean, you will be excommunicated and given over to civil authority.”

  Rob tried to conceal his emotions, but he had no doubt that his face had lost color.

  “Unless your conscience is better than those of most men born of women, I think you must leave London,” Paulinus said drily.

  “Why are you telling me these things? And why do you offer me advice?”

  They studied one another. The man had a tight-curled beard and tonsure the light brown of old straw, eyes color of slate and just as hard … but secretive, the eyes of a man who lives within himself. A slash of righteous mouth. Rob was certain he had never seen this man before he had entered St. Paul’s that morning.

  “I know you are Robert Jeremy Cole.”

  “How do you know it?”

  “Before I became Paulinus in the Community of Benedict I was named Cole. Almost certainly I am your brother.”

  Rob accepted it at once. He had been ready to accept it for twenty-two years and now he felt a rising jubilation that was cut short by a quick and guilty caution, a sense of something amiss. He had started to rise, but the other man was still seated, watching him with an alert calculation that caused Rob to sit back into his chair.

  He heard his own breathing.

  “You are older than the baby, Roger, would be,” he said. “Samuel is dead. Did you know that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Therefore, you are … Jonathan or …”

  “No, I was William.”

  “William.”

  The monk continued to watch him.

  “After Da died you were taken by a priest named Lovell.”

  “Father Ranald Lovell. He brought me to the Monastery of St. Benedict in Jarrow. He lived only four more years himself, and then it was decided I should become an oblate.”

  Paulinus told his story sparely. “The abbot at Jarrow was Edmund, who was the loving guardian of my youth. He challenged and molded me, with the result that I was novice, monk, and provost, all at an early age. I was more than his strong right arm. He was abbas et presbyter, devoting himself wholly and continuously to reciting the opus dei and learning, teaching, and writing. I was the stern administrator, Edmund’s reeve. As provost I was not popular.” He smiled tightly. “When he died two years ago I was not elected to replace him, but the archbishop had been watching Jarrow and asked me to leave the community that had been my family. I am to take ordination and serve as auxiliary bishop of Worcester.”

  A curious and loveless reunion speech, Rob thought, this flat recital of career with its implicit admission of expectation and ambition. “Great responsibilities must lie in store for you,” he said bleakly.

  Paulinus shrugged. “It is with Him.”

  “At least,” Rob said, “now I need find only eleven other compurgators. Perhaps the bishop will allow my brother’s testimony to count for several others.”

  Paulinus didn’t smile. “When I saw your name in the complaint, I made an inquiry. Given encouragement, the merchant Bostock could testify in interesting detail. What if you are asked whether you have pretended to be a Jew in order to attend a heathen academy in defiance of the Church?”

  The tavern girl came to them and Rob waved her away. “Then I would reply that in His wisdom God has allowed me to become a healer because He did not create men and women solely for suffering and dying.”

  “God has an anointed army which interprets what He intends for man’s body and his soul. Neither barber-surgeons nor heathen-trained physicians are anointed, and we have enacted churchly laws to stop such as you.”

  “You have made it difficult for us. At times you have slowed us. I think, Willum, that you have not stopped us.”

  “You will leave London.”

  “And is your concern because of brotherly love, or fear that the next auxiliary bishop of Worcester will be embarrassed by an excommunicated brother who has been executed for heathenism?”

  Neither spoke for an endless moment.

  “I have searched for you all my life. I always dreamed of finding the children,” he said bitterly.

  “We are no longer children. And dreams are not reality,” Paulinus said.

  Rob nodded. He pushed back his chair. “Do you know of any of the others?”

  “Only the girl.”

  “Where is she?”

  “She is dead these last six years.”

  “Oh.” Now he stood heavily. “Where shall I find her grave?”

  “There is no grave. It was a great fire.”

  Rob nodded, then he walked away from the public house without looking back at the gray monk.

  Now he was less afraid of arrest than of killers hired by a powerful man to get rid of an embarrassment. He hurried to Thorne’s stables and paid his bill and took his horse. At the house on Thames Street, he paused only long enough to collect the things that had become essential parts of his life. He was weary of leaving places in a desperate hurry and then of traveling vast distances, but he had become swift and expert at it.

  When Brother Paulinus was seated at his evening meal in the refectory at St. Paul’s, his blood brother was departing the city of London. Rob rode the plodding horse over the muddy Lincoln road leading to the north country, chased by furies but never escaping them because some of them were carried within himself.

  78

  THE FAMILIAR JOURNEY

  The first night he slept soft on a hay pile by the side of the road. It was last fall’s hay, ripe and rotten below the surface, so he didn’t burrow into it, but it still gave off a little heat and the air was mild. When he awoke in the dawning his first thought was the bitter realization that he had left behind in the house on Thames Street the Shah’s Game that had been Mirdin’s. It was so precious to him that he had carried it across the world from Persia, and the reality that it was lost to him forever was a stab.

  He was hungry but didn’t want to try for a meal at a farmhouse, where he would be well remembered to anyone who might be seeking after him. Instead, he rode half the morning with an empty belly until he came to a village with a marketplace, where he bought bread and cheese to satisfy his hunger and extra to carry with him.

  He brood
ed as he rode. Finding such a brother was worse than never finding him, and he felt cheated and denied.

  But he told himself he had mourned Willum after they had lost each other as boys, and he would be happy not to set eyes upon the cold-eyed Paulinus again.

  “Go to hell, auxiliary bishop of Worcester!” he shouted.

  The yell sent the birds fluttering out of the trees and caused his horse to prick up its ears and shy. Lest it lead anyone to think the countryside was under attack, he sounded the Saxon horn, and the familiar moan drew him back into his childhood and youth and was a comfort to him.

  If there were pursuers they would search along the main routes, so he turned off the Lincoln road and followed the coastal roads linking the seaside villages. It was a trip he had made a number of times with Barber. Now he sounded no drum and gave no entertainment, nor did he seek out patients for fear a search was under way for a fugitive physician. In none of the villages did anyone recognize the young barber-surgeon of long ago; it would have been impossible to find compurgators in these places. He would have been doomed. He knew he was blessed to have escaped, and the bleakness left him as he realized that life was still full of infinite possibilities.

  He half-recognized some places, noting that here a landmark house or church had burned to the ground, or that there, where a new dwelling had been raised, forest had been cleared. He made painfully slow progress, for in places the tracks were deep muck and soon the horse was in very bad shape. The horse had been perfect for carrying him to midnight medical calls at a dignified pace, but it was unsuitable for traveling open country or muddy roads—elderly, broken-down, and dispirited. He did his best by the beast, stopping frequently to lie on his back by a riverside while the animal cropped the new green grass of spring and rested. But nothing would make the horse young again, or fit to ride.

  Rob husbanded his money. Whenever permission was given or sold he slept in warm barns on straw, avoiding people, but when it was unavoidable he sheltered in inns. One night in a public house in the harbor town of Middlesbrough, he watched two seamen putting away a fearsome amount of ale.

  One of them, squat and broad, with black hair half hidden by a stocking cap, pounded the table. “We need a crewman. Bound down the coast to port of Eyemouth, Scotland. Fish for herring all the way. Is there a man in this place?”

  The tavern was half full, but there was a silence and a few chuckles, and no one stirred.

  Dare I? Rob wondered. It would be so much faster.

  Even the ocean was better than floundering the horse through the mud, he decided, and he rose and went to them.

  “Is it your boat?”

  “Yes, I am the captain. I am Nee. He is Aldus.”

  “I am Jonsson,” Rob said. It was as good a name as any other.

  Nee peered up at him. “A big fucker.” He took Rob’s hand and turned it over, prodding at the soft palm contemptuously.

  “I can work.”

  “We’ll see,” Nee said.

  Rob gave the horse away that night to a stranger in the tavern, for there would be no time to sell it in the morning and the animal would have brought little. When he saw the weathered herring boat he thought it was as old and as poor as the horse, but Nee and Aldus had spent their winter well. The boat’s seams were caulked tightly with oakum and pitched, and it rode the swells lightly.

  He was in trouble a short time after they were under way, leaning overboard and vomiting while the two fishermen cursed and threatened to throw him into the sea. Despite the nausea and vomiting he forced himself to work. Within an hour they let out the net, dragging it behind them as they sailed and then all three of them hauling together to bring it in, empty and dripping. They let it out and pulled it back again and again, but they brought in few fish, and Nee became short-tempered and ugly. Rob was convinced that only his size kept them from treating him badly.

  The evening meal was hard bread, bony smoked fish, and water that tasted of herring. Rob tried choking down a few bites but cast it up. To make matters worse, Aldus had a loose stomach and soon made the slop bucket an offense to the eyes and nostrils. It was nothing to faze one who had worked in a hospital, and Rob emptied the bucket and rinsed it in sea water until it was clean. Perhaps the accomplishment of the homely chore took the other two men by surprise, for after that they didn’t curse him.

  That night, lying cold and desperate as the boat heaved and yawed in the darkness, Rob crawled again and again to the side, until he had nothing left in him to vomit. In the morning the routine began again, but on the sixth dragging of the net, something changed. When they tugged on it, it seemed anchored. Slowly, laboriously, they gathered it in, and finally it brought them a silvery, wriggling stream.

  “Now we catch herring!” Nee exulted.

  Three times the net came in full, and then with lesser amounts, and when there was no more room to store fish they steered before the wind for land.

  Next morning the catch was taken by merchants who would sell it fresh and sun-dried and smoked, and as soon as Nee’s boat had been unloaded, they put out to sea again.

  Rob’s hands blistered and smarted and toughened. The net tore and he learned how to tie the knots needed to make repairs. On the fourth day, without his notice, the queasy illness disappeared. It didn’t come back. I must tell Tam, he thought gratefully when he realized.

  Each day they inched farther up the coast, always putting into a new harbor to sell the latest catch before it could spoil. Sometimes on moonlit nights Nee would see a spray of fish tiny as raindrops, breaking water to escape a feeding school, and they would drop the net and drag it along a path of moonshine, pulling in the gift of the sea.

  Nee began to smile a lot and Rob heard him tell Aldus that Jonsson had brought good fortune. Now when they put into port of an evening, Nee bought his crew ale and a hot meal and the three of them sat up late and sang. Among the things Rob learned as a crewman was a number of filthy songs.

  “You would make a fisherman,” Nee said. “We’ll be in Eyemouth five, six days, repairing nets. Then we go back toward Middlesbrough because that is what we do, drift for herring between Middlesbrough and Eyemouth, back and forth. You want to stay?”

  Rob thanked him, pleased the offer was made, but said he would leave them in Eyemouth.

  They arrived a few days later, sailing into a crowded, pretty harbor, and Nee paid him off with a few coins and a clap on the back. When Rob mentioned his need for a mount, Nee led him through the town to an honest dealer who said he could recommend two of his horses, either a mare or a gelding.

  The mare was a prettier animal by far. “I once had good luck with a gelding,” Rob said, and chose to try a gelding again. This one was no Arabian horse but a scrubby-looking English native with short, hairy legs and a tangled mane. It was two years old and strong and alert.

  He arranged his pack behind the saddle and swung up onto the animal, and he and Nee saluted one another.

  “May you find good fishing.”

  “Go with God, Jonsson,” Nee said.

  The wiry gelding gave him pleasure. It was better than its appearance and he decided to call it Al Borak, after the horse Muslims believed carried Mohammed from earth to the seventh heaven.

  During the warmest part of each afternoon he tried to pause at a lake or a stream to give Al Borak a bath, and he worked at the tangled mane with his fingers, wishing he had a strong wooden comb. The horse seemed tireless and the roads were drying, so he traveled faster. The herring boat had taken him beyond the land with which he was familiar and now everything was more interesting because it was new. He followed a bank of the River Tweed for five days, until it turned south and he turned north, entering the uplands and riding between ridges that were too low to be called mountains. The rolling moors were broken in places by rocky cliffs. This time of year snowmelt still rushed down the hillsides and each stream crossing was a feat.

  Farms were few and widespread. Some were large holdings, others were modest croft
s; he noted that most were well kept and had the beauty of order that could be achieved only through hard work. He sounded the Saxon horn often. The crofters were watchful and guarded but no one tried to harm him. Observing the country and its people, for the first time he comprehended certain things about Mary.

  He hadn’t seen her in many long months. Was he on a fool’s errand? Maybe by now she had another man, perhaps the damn cousin.

  It was terrain pleasing to men but designed for sheep and cows. The tops of the hills were largely barren but most of the lower slopes consisted of rich pastureland. All the shepherds used dogs and he learned to fear them.

  Half a day beyond Cumnock he stopped at a farm to ask permission to sleep that night on their hay, and he found that the day before, the woman of the place had had a breast ripped off by one of the dogs.

  “Praise Jesus!” her husband whispered when Rob said he was a physician.

  She was a stout female with grown children, and now she was out of her mind with pain. It had been a savage attack, as if she had been bitten by a lion. “Where is the dog?”

  “The dog is no more,” the man said grimly.

  They forced grain liquor into her. It made her choke, but it helped her while Rob trimmed ragged flesh and sewed. He thought she’d have lived anyway, but there was no doubt she was better off because of him. He should have watched over her a day or two, but he stayed a week, until one morning he realized he was still there because he wasn’t far from Kilmarnock and he was afraid to finish his journey.

  He told her husband where he wanted to go and the man showed him the best way.

  Her wounds were still on his mind two days later when he was accosted by a great growling cur that blocked the horse’s way. His sword was half drawn when the animal was called off. The shepherd said something crisp to Rob in the Erse.

  “I haven’t your language.”

  “Ye be on Cullen land.”

  “That’s where I want to be.”