The Cole Trilogy: The Physician, Shaman, and Matters of Choice

by Noah Gordon

  “What does IOX mean?” his father asked.

  He didn’t know. Mam would have, but he had no one else to ask, and he put the coin away.

  They were so accustomed to Nathanael’s cough it was no longer heard. But one morning when Rob was cleaning the hearth, there was a minor commotion out front. When he opened the door he saw Harmon Whitelock, a member of his father’s crew, and two slaves he had impressed from the stevedores to carry Nathanael home.

  Slaves terrified Rob J. There were various ways for a man to lose his freedom. A war prisoner became the servi of a warrior who might have taken his life but spared it. Free men could be sentenced into slavery for serious crimes, as could debtors or those unable to pay a severe wite or fine. A man’s wife and children went into slavery with him, and so did future generations of his family.

  These slaves were great, muscular men with shaven heads to denote their bondage and tattered clothes that stank abominably. Rob J. couldn’t tell if they were captured foreigners or Englishmen, for they didn’t speak but stared at him stolidly. Nathanael wasn’t small but they carried him as if he were weightless. The slaves frightened Rob J. even more than the sight of the sallow bloodlessness of his father’s face or the way Nathanael’s head lolled as they set him down.

  “What happened?”

  Whitelock shrugged. “It’s a misery. Half of us are down with it, coughing and spitting all the time. Today he was so weak he was overcome as soon as we got into heavy work. I expect a few days of rest will see him back on the wharves.”

  Next morning Nathanael was unable to leave the bed, his voice a rasping. Mistress Hargreaves brought hot tea laced with honey and hovered about. They spoke in low, intimate voices and once or twice the woman laughed. But when she came the following morning, Nathanael had a high fever and was in no mood for badinage or niceties, and she left quickly.

  His tongue and throat turned bright red and he kept asking for water.

  During the night he dreamed, once shouting that the stinking Danes were coming up the Thames in their high-prowed ships. His chest filled with a stringy phlegm that he couldn’t rid himself of, and he breathed with increasing difficulty. When morning arrived Rob hastened next door to fetch the Widow, but Della Hargreaves declined to come. “It appeared to me to be thrush. Thrush is highly impartible,” she said, and closed the door.

  Having nowhere else to turn, Rob went again to the guild. Richard Bukerel listened to him gravely and then followed him home and sat by the foot of Nathanael’s bed for a time, noting his flushed face and hearing the rattling when he breathed.

  The easy solution would have been to summon a priest; the cleric would do little but light tapers and pray, and Bukerel could turn his back without fear of criticism. For some years he had been a successful builder, but he was beyond his depth as leader of the London Corporation of Carpenters, trying to use a meager treasury to accomplish far more than could be achieved.

  But he knew what would happen to this family unless one parent survived, and he hurried away and used guild funds to hire Thomas Ferraton, a physician.

  Bukerel’s wife gave him the sharp edge of her tongue that night. “A physician? Is Nathanael Cole suddenly gentry or nobility, then? When an ordinary surgeon is good enough to take care of any other poor person in London, why does Nathanael Cole need a physician to charge us dear?”

  Bukerel could only mumble an excuse, for she was right. Only nobles and wealthy merchants bought the expensive services of physicians. Ordinary folk used surgeons, and sometimes a laboring man paid a ha’penny to a barber-surgeon for bloodletting or questionable treatment. So far as Bukerel was concerned, all healers were damned leeches, doing more harm than good. But he had wanted to give Cole every chance, and in a weak moment he had summoned the physician, spending the hard-earned dues of honest carpenters.

  When Ferraton came to the Cole house he had been sanguine and confident, the reassuring picture of prosperity. His tight trousers were beautifully cut and the cuffs of his shirt were adorned with embroidery that immediately gave Rob a pang, reminding him of Mam. Ferraton’s quilted tunic, of the finest wool available, was encrusted with dried blood and vomitus, which he pridefully believed was an honorable advertisement of his profession.

  Born to wealth—his father had been John Ferraton, wool merchant—Ferraton had apprenticed with a physician named Paul Willibald, whose prosperous family made and sold fine blades. Willibald had treated wealthy people, and after his apprenticeship Ferraton had drifted into that kind of practice himself. Noble patients were out of reach for the son of a tradesman, but he felt at home with the well-to-do; they shared a commonality of attitudes and interests. He never knowingly accepted a patient from the laboring class, but he had assumed Bukerel was the messenger for someone much grander. He immediately recognized Nathanael Cole as an unworthy patient but, not wishing to make a scene, resolved to finish the disagreeable task as quickly as possible.

  He touched Nathanael’s forehead delicately, looked into his eyes, sniffed his breath.

  “Well,” he said. “It shall pass.”

  “What is it?” Bukerel asked, but Ferraton didn’t reply.

  Rob felt instinctively that the doctor didn’t know.

  “It is the quinsy,” Ferraton said at last, pointing out white sores in his father’s crimson throat. “A suppurative inflammation of a temporary nature. Nothing more.” He tied a tourniquet on Nathanael’s arm, lanced him deftly, and let a copious amount of blood.

  “If he doesn’t improve?” Bukerel asked.

  The physician frowned. He would not revisit this lower-class house. “I had best bleed him again to make certain,” he said, and did the other arm. He left a small flask of liquid calomel mixed with charcoaled reed, charging Bukerel separately for the visit, the bleedings, and the medicine.

  “Man-wasting leech! Ball-butchering gentleman prick,” Bukerel muttered, gazing after him. The Chief Carpenter promised Rob he would send a woman to care for his father.

  Blanched and drained, Nathanael lay without moving. Several times he thought the boy was Agnes and tried to take his hand. But Rob remembered what had happened during his mother’s illness and pulled away.

  Later, ashamed, he returned to his father’s bedside. He took Nathanael’s work-hardened hand, noting the horny broken nails, the ingrained grime and crisp black hairs.

  It happened just as it had before. He was aware of a diminishing, like the flame of a candle flickering down. He was somehow conscious that his father was dying and that it would happen very soon, and was taken by a mute terror identical to the one that had gripped him when Mam lay dying.

  Beyond the bed were his brothers and sister. He was a young boy but very intelligent, and an immediate practical urgency overrode his sorrow and the agony of his fear.

  He shook his father’s arm. “Now what will become of us?” he asked loudly, but no one answered.

  3

  THE PARCELING

  This time, because it was a guildsman who had died and not merely a dependent, the Corporation of Carpenters paid for the singing of fifty psalms. Two days after the funeral, Della Hargreaves went to Ramsey, to make her home with her brother. Richard Bukerel took Rob aside for a talk.

  “When there are no relatives, the children and the possessions must be parceled,” the Chief Carpenter said briskly. “The Corporation will take care of everything.”

  Rob felt numb.

  That evening he tried to explain to his brothers and his sister. Only Samuel knew what he was talking about.

  “We’re to be separated, then?”

  “Yes.”

  “Each of us will live with another family?”

  “Yes.”

  That night someone crept into bed beside him. He would have expected Willum or Anne Mary, but it was Samuel who threw his arms around him and held on as if to keep from falling. “I want them back, Rob J.”

  “So do I.” He patted the bony shoulder he had often whacked.

 
; For a time they cried together.

  “Will we never see one another again, then?”

  He felt a coldness. “Oh, Samuel. Don’t go daft on me now. Doubtless we’ll both live in the neighborhood and see each other all the time. We’ll forever be brothers.”

  It comforted Samuel and he slept some, but before dawn he wet the bed as if he were younger than Jonathan. In the morning he was ashamed and could not meet Rob’s eyes. His fears were not unfounded, for he was the first of them to go. Most of the members of their father’s Ten were still out of work. Of the nine woodworkers only one man was able and willing to take a child into his family. Along with Samuel, Nathanael’s hammers and saws went to Turner Home, a Master Carpenter who lived only six houses away.

  Two days later a priest named Ranald Lovell came with Father Kempton, the man who had sung the Masses for both Mam and Da. Father Lovell said he was being transferred to the north of England and wanted a child. He examined them all and took a fancy to Willum. He was a big, hearty man with pale yellow hair and gray eyes that Rob tried to tell himself were kind.

  White and tremulous, his brother could only nod as he followed the two priests out of the house.

  “Goodbye, then, William,” Rob said.

  He wondered wildly if perhaps he couldn’t keep the two small ones. But he was already doling out the last of the food from his father’s funeral, and he was a realistic boy. Jonathan and his father’s leather doublet and tool belt were given to a Companion Joiner named Aylwyn who belonged to Nathanael’s Hundred. When Mistress Aylwyn came, Rob explained that Jonathan was trained to pot but needed napkins when afraid, and she accepted the wash-thinned cloths and the child with a grin and a nod.

  The wet nurse kept the infant Roger and received Mam’s embroidery materials. Richard Bukerel informed Rob, who had never seen the woman.

  Anne Mary’s hair needed washing. He did it carefully, as he had been taught, but still some soap got into her eyes and it was harsh and burning. He wiped her dry and held her as she wept, smelling her clean seal-brown hair that gave off a scent like Mam’s.

  Next day the sounder pieces of furniture were taken by the baker and his wife, name of Haverhill, and Anne Mary went to live above their pastry shop. Clutching her hand, Rob brought her to them: Goodbye, then, little girl. “I love you, my Maid Anne Mary,” he whispered, holding her close. But she seemed to blame him for all that had happened and wouldn’t bid him farewell.

  Only Rob J. was left, and no possessions. That evening Bukerel came to see him. The Chief Carpenter had been drinking, but his mind was clear. “It may take long to find you a place. It’s the times, no one has food for an adult appetite in a boy who cannot do a man’s work.” After a brooding silence he spoke again. “When I was younger everyone said if we could only have a real peace and get rid of King Aethelred, the worst king who ever ruined his generation, then times would be good. We had invasion after invasion, Saxons, Danes, every bloody kind of pirate. Now finally we’ve a strong peacekeeping monarch in King Canute, but it’s as if nature conspires to hold us down. Great summer and winter storms do us in. Three years in a row crops have failed. Millers don’t grind grain, sailors stay in port. No one builds, and craftsmen are idle. It’s hard times, my boy. But I’ll find you a place, I promise.”

  “Thank you, Chief Carpenter.”

  Bukerel’s dark eyes were troubled. “I’ve watched you, Robert Cole. I’ve seen a boy care for his family like a worthy man. I’d take you into my own home if my wife were a different kind of woman.” He blinked, embarrassed by the realization that drink had loosened his tongue more than he liked, and got heavily to his feet. “A restful night to you, Rob J.”

  “A restful night, Chief Carpenter.”

  He became a hermit. The near-empty rooms were his cave. No one asked him to table. His neighbors were unable to ignore his existence but sustained him grudgingly; Mistress Haverhill came in the morning and left yesterday’s unsold loaf from the bakery and Mistress Bukerel came in the evening and left cheese in tiny portion, noting his reddened eyes and lecturing that weeping was a womanly privilege. He drew water from the public well as he had before, and he tended house but there was nobody to put the quiet and plundered place into disorder and he had little to do but worry and pretend.

  Sometimes he became a Roman scout, lying by the open window behind Mam’s curtain and listening to the secrets of the enemy world. He heard drawn carts go by, barking dogs, playing children, the sounds of birds.

  Once he overheard the voices of a knot of men from the guild. “Rob Cole is a bargain. Somebody should grab him,” Bukerel said.

  He lay there guilty and covert, listening to others talk about him as if he were someone else.

  “Aye, look at his size. He’ll be a great workhorse when he gets his full growth,” Hugh Tite said grudgingly.

  What if Tite took him? Rob considered in dismay the prospect of living with Anthony Tite. He wasn’t displeased when Hugh snorted in disgust. “He won’t be old enough for Apprentice Carpenter until another three years and he eats like a great horse right now, when London is full of strong backs and empty bellies.” The men moved away.

  Two mornings later, behind the same window curtain, he paid dearly for the sin of eavesdropping when he overheard Mistress Bukerel discussing her husband’s guild office with Mistress Haverhill.

  “Everyone speaks of the honor of being Chief Carpenter. It places no bread upon my table. Quite the reverse, it presents tiresome obligations. I am weary of having to share my provision with the likes of that great lazy boy in there.”

  “Whatever will become of him?” Mistress Haverhill said, sighing.

  “I have advised Master Bukerel that he should be sold as an indigent. Even in bad times a young slave will fetch a price to repay the guild and all of us for whatever has been spent on the Cole family.”

  He was unable to breathe.

  Mistress Bukerel sniffed. “The Chief Carpenter will not hear of it,” she said sourly. “I trust I’ll convince him in the end. But by the time he comes around, we shall no longer be able to recover costs.”

  When the two women moved away, Rob lay behind the window curtain as though in fever, alternately sweating and chilled.

  All his life he had seen slaves, taking it for granted that their condition had little to do with him, for he had been born a free Englishman.

  He was too young by far to be a stevedore on the docks. But he knew that boy slaves were used in the mines, where they worked in tunnels too narrow to admit the bodies of men. He also knew that slaves were wretchedly clothed and fed and often were brutally whipped for small infractions. And that once enslaved, they were owned for life.

  He lay and wept. Eventually he was able to gather his courage and tell himself that Dick Bukerel would never sell him for a slave, but he worried that Mistress Bukerel would send others to do it without informing her husband. She was fully capable of such an act, he told himself. Waiting in the silent and abandoned house, he came to start and tremble at every sound.

  Five frozen days after his father’s funeral, a stranger came to the door.

  “You are young Cole?”

  He nodded warily, heart pounding.

  “My name is Croft. I am directed to you by a man named Richard Bukerel, whom I’ve met while drinking at the Bardwell Tavern.”

  Rob saw a man neither young nor old with a huge fat body and a weather-beaten face set between a freeman’s long hair and a rounded, frizzled beard of the same gingery color.

  “What’s your full name?”

  “Robert Jeremy Cole, sir.”

  “Age?”

  “Nine years.”

  “I’m a barber-surgeon and I seek a prentice. Do you know what a barber-surgeon does, young Cole?”

  “Are you some kind of physician?”

  The fat man smiled. “For the time being, that’s close enough. Bukerel informed me of your circumstances. Does my trade appeal to you?”

  It didn’t; he
had no wish to become like the leech who’d bled his father to death. But even less did he wish to be sold as a slave, and he answered affirmatively without hesitation.

  “Not afraid of work?”

  “Oh, no, sir!”

  “That’s good, for I would work your arse off. Bukerel said you read and write and have Latin?”

  He hesitated. “Very little Latin, in truth.”

  The man smiled. “I shall try you for a time, chappy. You have things?”

  His little bundle had been ready for days. Am I saved? he wondered. Outside, they clambered into the strangest wagon he had ever seen. On either side of the front seat was a white pole with a thick stripe wrapped around it like a crimson snake. It was a covered cart daubed bright red and decorated with sun-yellow pictures of a ram, a lion, scales, a goat, fishes, an archer, a crab …

  The dappled gray horse pulled them away and they rolled down Carpenter’s Street and past the guild house. He sat frozen as they threaded through the tumult of Thames Street, managing to cast quick glances at the man and now noting a handsome face despite the fat, a prominent and reddened nose, a wen on the left eyelid, and a network of fine lines radiating from the corners of piercing blue eyes.

  The cart crossed the little bridge over the Walbrook and passed Egglestan’s stables and the place where Mam had fallen. Then they turned right and rattled over London Bridge to the southern side of the Thames. Moored beside the bridge was the London ferry and, just beyond, the great Southwark Market where imports entered England. They passed warehouses burned and wasted by the Danes and recently rebuilt. On the embankment was a single line of wattle-and-daub cottages, the mean homes of fishermen, lightermen, and wharf workers. There were two shabby inns for merchants attending market. And then, bordering the wide causeway, a double line of grand houses, the manors of the rich merchants of London, all of them with impressive gardens and a few built on piles driven into the marsh. He recognized the home of the embroidery importer with whom Mam had dealt. He had never traveled beyond this point.