by Noah Gordon
“When were you last at stool, master?”
“Mistress, when shall you have your monthly flow?”
At Barber’s suggestion Rob took each patient’s hands into his own when the patient came behind the screen.
“What do you feel when you grasp their fingers?” Barber asked him one day in Tisbury as he dismantled the bank.
“Sometimes I don’t feel anything.”
Barber nodded. He took one of the sections from Rob and stowed it in the wagon and came back, frowning. “But sometimes … there is something?”
Rob nodded.
“Well, what?” Barber said testily. “What is it you feel, boy?”
But he couldn’t define it or describe it in words. It was an intuition about the person’s vitality, like peering into dark wells and sensing how much life each contained.
Barber took Rob’s silence as proof that the feeling was imagined. “I think we’ll return to Hereford and see whether the old man has not continued to exist in health,” he said slyly.
He was annoyed when Rob agreed. “We can’t go back, you dolt!” he said. “For if he’s indeed dead, shouldn’t we be putting our heads into the noose?”
He continued to scoff at “the gift,” often and loud.
Yet when Rob began neglecting to take the patients’ hands, he ordered him to resume. “Why not? Am I not a cautious man of business? And does it cost us to indulge this fancy?”
In Peterborough, only a few miles and a lifetime away from the abbey from which he had fled as a boy, Barber sat alone in the public house throughout a long and showery August evening, drinking slowly and steadily.
By midnight, his apprentice came looking for him. Rob met him reeling along the way and supported him back to their fire. “Please,” Barber whispered fearfully.
He was amazed to see the drunken man lift both hands and hold them out.
“Ah, in the name of Christ, please,” Barber said again. Finally Rob understood. He took Barber’s hands and looked into his eyes.
In a moment Rob nodded.
Barber sank into his bed. He belched and turned on his side, then fell into untroubled sleep.
10
THE NORTH
That year Barber didn’t make it to Exmouth in time for winter, for they had started out late and the falling leaves of autumn found them in the village of Gate Fulford, in the York Wolds. The moors were lavish with plants that made the cool air exciting with their spice. Rob and Barber followed the North Star, stopping at villages along the way to very good business, and drove the wagon through the endless carpet of purple heather until they reached the town of Carlisle.
“This is as far north as I ever travel,” Barber told him. “A few hours from here Northumbria ends and the frontier begins. Beyond is Scotland, which everyone knows to be a land of sheep-buggers, and perilous to honest Englishmen.”
For a week they camped in Carlisle and went every evening to the tavern, where judiciously bought drinks soon resulted in Barber’s learning about available shelter. He rented a house on the moor with three small rooms. It was not unlike the little house he owned on the southern coast but lacked a fireplace and a stone chimney, to his displeasure. They spread their beds on either side of the hearth as if it were a campfire, and they found a nearby stable willing to board Incitatus. Once again Barber bought winter’s provision lavishly, in the easy manner with money that never failed to give Rob a wondering sense of well-being.
Barber laid in beef and pork. He had thought to buy a haunch of venison, but three market hunters had been hanged in Carlisle during the summer for killing the king’s deer, which were reserved for nobles’ sport. So they bought fifteen fat hens instead, and a sack of feed.
“The chickens are your domain,” Barber told Rob. “They are yours to feed, to slaughter upon my request, to dress and pluck and ready for my pot.”
He thought the hens were impressive creatures, large and buff-colored, with unfeathered shanks and red combs, wattles, and earlobes. They made no objection when he robbed their nests of four or five white eggs every morning. “They think you’re a big bloody rooster,” Barber said.
“Why don’t we buy them a chanticleer?”
Barber, who liked sleeping late on cold winter mornings and therefore hated crowing, merely grunted.
Rob had brown hairs on his face, not exactly a beard. Barber said only Danes shaved but he knew it wasn’t true, for his father had kept his face hairless. In Barber’s surgical kit was a razor and the fat man nodded grumpily when Rob asked to use it. He nicked his face, but shaving made him feel older.
The first time Barber ordered him to kill a chicken made him feel very young. Each bird stared at him out of little black beads that told him they might have grown to be friends. Finally he forced his strong fingers to clench around the nearest warm neck and, shuddering, closed his eyes. A strong, convulsive twist and it was done. But the bird punished him in death, for it didn’t easily relinquish its feathers. Plucking took hours, and the grizzled corpse was viewed with disdain when he handed it to Barber.
Next time a chicken was called for, Barber showed him genuine magic. He held the hen’s beak open and slid a thin knife through the roof of the mouth and into the brain. The hen relaxed at once into death, releasing the feathers; they came away in great clumps at the slightest pull.
“Here is the lesson,” Barber said. “It is just as easy to bring death to man, and I’ve done so. It’s harder to keep hold of life, harder still to maintain a grasp on health. Those are the tasks to which we must keep our minds.”
The late fall weather was perfect for the picking of herbs, and they scoured the woods and moors. Barber especially wanted purslane; steeped in the Specific, it produced an agent that would cause fevers to break and dissipate. To his disappointment, they found none. Some things were more easily gathered, such as red rose petals for poultices, and thyme and acorns to be powdered and mixed with fat and spread on neck pustules. Others required hard work, like the digging of yew root that would help a pregnant woman to hold back her fetus. They collected lemon grass and dill for urinary problems, marshy sweet flag to fight deterioration of memory because of moist and cold humors, juniper berries to be boiled for opening blocked nasal passages, lupine for hot packs to draw abscesses, and myrtle and mallow to soothe itchy rashes.
“You’ve grown faster than these weeds,” Barber observed wryly, and it was true; already he stood almost as tall as Barber and he had long since outstripped the clothing Editha Lipton had made for him in Exmouth. But when Barber took him to a Carlisle tailor and ordered “new winter clothes that will fit for a while,” the tailor shook his head.
“The boy still grows, does he not? Fifteen, sixteen years? Such a lad outgrows clothing quickly.”
“Sixteen! He’s not yet eleven!”
The man looked at Rob with respect-tinged amusement. “He’ll be a large man! And he’s certain to make my raiment appear to shrink. May I suggest that we make over an old garment?”
So another suit of Barber’s, this one of mostly-good gray stuff, was recut and sewn. To their general hilarity it was far too wide when first Rob put it on, yet much too short in the arms and the legs. The tailor took some of the material left over from the width and extended the pants and the sleeves, hiding the joined seams with rakish bands of blue cloth. Rob had gone without shoes most of the summer but soon the snows were due, and he was grateful when Barber bought him boots made of cowhide.
He walked in them across Carlisle’s square to the Church of St. Mark and sounded the knocker on its great wooden doors, which were opened at length by an elderly curate with rheumy eyes.
“If you please, Father, I seek a priest name of Ranald Lovell.”
The curate blinked. “I knew a priest so named, served the Mass under Lyfing, in the time when Lyfing was Bishop of Wells. He is dead these ten years come Easter.”
Rob shook his head. “It’s not the same priest. I saw Father Ranald Lovell with my own ey
es but several years ago.”
“Perhaps the man I knew was Hugh Lovell and not Ranald.”
“Ranald Lovell was transferred from London to a church in the north. He has my brother, William Stewart Cole. Three years younger than I.”
“Your brother by now may have a different name in Christ, my son. Priests sometimes bring their boys to an abbey, to become acolytes. You must ask others everywhere. For Holy Mother Church is a great and boundless sea and I am but a single tiny fish.” The old priest nodded kindly and Rob helped him to close the doors.
A skin of crystals dulled the surface of the small pond behind the town tavern. Barber pointed out a pair of ice gliders tied to a rafter of their little house. “Pity they aren’t larger. They won’t fit, for you have an uncommonly great foot.”
The ice thickened daily, until one morning it gave back a solid thunk when he walked out to the middle and stamped. Rob took down the too-small gliders. They were carved from stag antler and were almost identical to a pair his father had made for him when he was six years old. He had quickly outgrown those but had used them for three winters anyway, and now he took these to the pond and tied them onto his feet. At first he used them with pleasure, but their edges were nicked and dull and their size and condition did him in during his first attempt to turn. His arms flailing, he fell heavily and slid a good distance.
He became aware of someone’s amusement.
The girl was perhaps fifteen years old. She was laughing with great enjoyment.
“Can you do better?” he said hotly, at the same time acknowledging to himself that she was a pretty dolly, too thin and top-heavy but with black hair like Editha’s.
“I?” she said. “Why, I cannot, and would never have the courage.”
At once his temper disappeared. “They were meant more for your feet than mine,” he said. He stripped them off and carried them to where she stood on the bank. “It’s not at all difficult. Let me show you,” he said.
He quickly overcame her objections and soon was fastening the runners to her feet. She couldn’t stand on the unaccustomed slickness of the ice and clutched at him, alarm widening her brown eyes and causing her thin nostrils to flare. “Don’t fear, I have you,” he said. He supported her weight and propelled her along the ice from behind, conscious of her warm haunches.
Now she was laughing and squealing as he pushed her around and around the pond. She was Garwine Talbott, she said. Her father, Aelfric Talbott, had a farm outside the town. “What is your name?”
“Rob J.”
She chattered, revealing a store of information about him, for it was a small town; she already knew when he and Barber had come to Carlisle, their profession, the provision they had bought, and whose house they had taken.
She soon liked being on the ice. Her eyes gleamed with pleasure and the cold turned her cheeks ruddy. Her hair flew back, revealing a small pink earlobe. She had a thin upper lip but her lower lip was so ripe it appeared almost swollen. There was a faded bruise high on her cheek. When she smiled, he saw that one of her lower teeth was crooked. “You examine people, then?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Women as well?”
“We have a doll. Women point out areas of their ailment.”
“What a pity,” she said, “to use a doll.” He was dazzled by her sidelong glance. “Does she have a fine appearance?”
Not so fine as yours, he wished to say but lacked the courage. He shrugged. “She is called Thelma.”
“Thelma!” She had a breathless, ragged laugh that made him grin. “Eh,” she cried, glancing up to see where the sun stood. “I must get back there for late milking,” and her soft fullness leaned into his arm.
He knelt before her on the bank and removed the gliders. “They are not mine. They were in the house,” he said. “But you may keep them for a while and use them.”
She shook her head quickly. “If I bring them home he would near kill me, wanting to learn what things I did to get them.”
He felt a rush of blood to his face. To escape his embarrassment he picked up three pine cones and began juggling for her.
She laughed and clapped her hands, and then in a breathless rush of words told him how to find her father’s farm. Leaving, she hesitated and turned back for a moment.
“Thursday mornings,” she said. “He doesn’t encourage visitors, but Thursday mornings he brings cheeses to the market.”
When Thursday came he didn’t seek out the farm of Aelfric Talbott. Instead he loitered fearfully in his bed, afraid not of Garwine or her father but of things that were happening within him that he couldn’t comprehend, mysteries he had neither the courage nor the wisdom to confront.
He had dreamed of Garwine Talbott. In the dream they had lain in a hayloft, perhaps in her father’s barn. It was the kind of dream he had had several times about Editha, and he tried to wipe his bedding without catching Barber’s attention.
The snow began. It dropped like heavy goose down, and Barber lashed hides over the window holes. Inside the house the air became foul, and even by day it was impossible to see anything except right next to the fire.
It snowed four days, with only brief interruptions. Searching for things to do, Rob sat next to the hearth and fashioned pictures of their various herbs. Using charcoal sticks rescued from the fire, on bark ripped from firewood, he sketched curly mint, the limp blossoms of drying flowers, the veined leaves of the wild bean trefoil. In the afternoon he melted snow over the fire and watered and fed the chickens, being careful to swiftly open and close the door to the hens’ room, for despite his cleaning the stink was becoming impressive.
Barber kept to his bed, nipping metheglin. On the second night of the snowfall he floundered his way to the public house and brought back a quiet blond trull named Helen. Rob tried to watch them from his bed on the other side of the hearth, for although he had seen the act many times he was puzzled by certain details which lately had made their way into his thoughts and dreams. But he was unable to penetrate the thick darkness and studied only their heads illuminated in the firelight. Barber was rapt and intent but the woman appeared drawn and melancholy, someone engaged in joyless work.
After she had left, Rob picked up a piece of bark and a stick of charcoal. Instead of sketching the plants he tried to shape the features of a woman.
Heading for the pot, Barber stopped to study the sketch and frowned. “I appear to know that face,” he said.
A short time later, back in his bed, he lifted his head from the fur. “Why, it is Helen!”
Rob was very pleased. He tried to make a likeness of the unguent seller named Wat, but Barber could identify it only after he added the small figure of Bartram the bear. “You must continue your attempts to re-create faces, for I believe it is something that can be useful to us,” Barber said. But he soon grew tired of watching Rob and went back to drinking until he slept.
On Tuesday the snow finally stopped falling. Rob wrapped his hands and head in rags and found a wooden shovel. He cleared a path from their door and went to the stables to exercise Incitatus, who was growing fat on no work and a daily ration of hay and sweet grain.
On Wednesday he helped some boys of the town shovel the snow from the surface of the pond. Barber removed the hides that covered the window holes and let cold sweet air into the house. He celebrated by roasting a joint of lamb, which he served with mint jelly and apple cakes.
Thursday morning Rob took down the ice gliders and hung them around his neck by their leather thongs. He went to the stables and put only the bridle and halter on Incitatus, then he mounted the horse and rode out of the town. The air crackled, the sun was bright and the snow pure.
He transformed himself into a Roman. It was no good pretending to be Caligula astride the original Incitatus because he was aware that Caligula had been crazy and had met an unhappy end. He decided to be Caesar Augustus, and he led the Praetorian Guard down the Via Appia all the way to Brundisium.
He had no d
ifficulty in finding the Talbott farm. It was exactly where she had said it would be. The house was tilted and mean-looking, with a sagging roof, but the barn was large and fine. The door was open and he could hear someone moving about inside, among the animals.
He sat on the horse uncertainly, but Incitatus whinnied and he had no choice but to announce himself.
“Garwine?” he called.
A man appeared in the doorway of the barn and walked slowly toward him. He was holding a wooden fork laden with manure that steamed in the cold air. He walked very carefully and Rob could see he was drunk. He was a sallow, stooped man with an untrimmed black beard the color of Garwine’s hair, who could only be Aelfric Talbott.
“Who are you?” he said.
Rob told him.
The man swayed. “Well, Rob J. Cole, you do not have luck. She isn’t here. She’s run off, the dirty little whore.”
The shovel of dung moved slightly and Rob was certain he and the horse were about to be showered with smoking-fresh cow shit.
“Go away from my holding,” Talbott said. He was crying.
Rob rode Incitatus slowly back toward Carlisle. He wondered where she had gone and if she would survive.
He was no longer Caesar Augustus leading the Praetorian Guard. He was just a boy trapped in his doubts and fears.
When he got back to the house he hung the ice gliders up on the rafter and didn’t take them down again.
11
THE JEW OF TETTENHALL
There was nothing left to do but wait for spring. New batches of the Universal Specific had been brewed and bottled. Every herb Barber had sought, except for purslane to fight fevers, had been dried and powdered or steeped in physick. They were tired of practicing juggling, weary of rehearsing magic, and Barber was sick of the north and jaded with drinking and sleeping. “I am too impatient to linger while winter peters out,” he said one morning in March, and they abandoned Carlisle too early, making slow progress southward because the roads were still poor.
