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

by Noah Gordon

  He nodded. “And did you warn Rob not to follow my pattern?”

  “I said that when you drink, very often it makes you brutish and less than a man.”

  “I don’t recall telling you to say that.”

  “I offered it out of my own observation,” she said. She met his gaze steadily. “I also used your very words, as you instructed. I said his master had wasted himself on drink and worthless women. I advised him to be particular, and to ignore your example.”

  He listened gravely.

  “He wouldn’t suffer me to criticize you,” she said drily. “He said you were a sound man when sober, an excellent master who shows him kindness.”

  “Did he really,” Barber said.

  She was familiar with the emotions in a man’s face and saw that this one was suffused with pleasure.

  He seated his hat and went out the door. As she put the money away and returned to bed, she could hear him whistling.

  Men were sometimes comforters and often brutes but they were always puzzles, Editha told herself as she turned onto her side and went back to sleep.

  13

  LONDON

  Charles Bostock looked more like a dandy than a merchant, his long yellow hair held back with bows and ribbons. He was dressed all in red velvet, obviously costly stuff despite its layer of soil from travel, and wore highpointed shoes of soft leather meant more for display than rough service. But there was a bargainer’s cold light in his eyes and he sat a great white horse surrounded by a troop of servants all heavily armed for defense against robbers. He amused himself by chatting with the barber-surgeon whose wagon he allowed to travel with his caravan of horses laden with salt from the brine works at Arundel.

  “I own three warehouses along the river and rent others. We chapmen are making a new London and therefore are useful to the king and to all English people.”

  Barber nodded politely, bored by this braggart but happy for the opportunity to travel to London under protection of his arms, for there was much crime on the road as one drew nearer to the city. “What do you deal in?” he asked.

  “Within our island nation I mostly purchase and sell iron objects and salt. But I also buy precious things which are not produced in this land and bring them here from over the sea. Skins, silks, costly gems and gold, curious garments, pigments, wine, oil, ivory and brass, copper and tin, silver, glass, and such like.”

  “Then you’re much traveled in foreign places?”

  The merchant smiled. “No, though I plan to be. I’ve made one trip to Genoa and brought back hangings I thought would be bought by the richer of my fellow merchants. But before merchants could buy them for their manor houses, they were eagerly acquired for the castles of several earls who help our King Canute to govern the land.

  “I’ll make at least two voyages more, for King Canute promises that any merchant who sails to foreign parts three times in the interests of English commerce will be made a thane. At present I pay others to travel abroad, while I tend to business in London.”

  “Please tell us the news of the city,” Barber said, and Bostock agreed loftily. King Canute had built a large monarch’s house hard by the eastern side of the abbey at Westminster, he disclosed. The Danish-born king was enjoying great popularity because he had declared a new law that allowed any free Englishman the right to hunt on his own property—a right that previously had been reserved for the king and his nobles. “Now any landowner can kill himself a roebuck as if he were monarch of his own land.”

  Canute had succeeded his brother Harold as King of Denmark and ruled that country as well as England, Bostock said. “It gives him dominance over the North Sea, and he’s built a navy of black ships that sweep the ocean of pirates and give England security and her first real peace in a hundred years.”

  Rob scarcely heard the conversation. While they stopped for the dinner meal at Alton he put on an entertainment with Barber, paying the rent for their place in the merchant’s entourage. Bostock guffawed and wildly applauded their juggling. He presented Rob with tuppence. “It will come in handy in the metropolis, where fluff is dear as dear,” he said, winking.

  Rob thanked him but his thoughts were elsewhere. The closer they drew to London, the more exquisite was his sense of anticipation.

  They camped in a farmer’s field in Reading, scarcely a day’s journey from the city of his birth. That night he didn’t sleep, trying to decide which child to attempt to see first.

  Next day he began to see landmarks he remembered—a stand of distinctive oaks, a great rock, a crossroads close by the hill on which he and Barber had first camped—and each made his heart leap and his blood sing. They parted with the caravan in the afternoon at Southwark, where the merchant had business. Southwark had more of everything than when last he had seen it. From the causeway they observed that new warehouses were being raised on the marshy Bank Side near the ancient ferry slip, and in the river foreign ships were crowded at their moorings.

  Barber guided Incitatus across the London Bridge in a line of traffic. On the other side was a press of people and animals, so congested that he couldn’t turn the wagon onto Thames Street but was forced to proceed straight ahead to drive left at Fenchurch Street, crossing the Walbrook and then bumping over cobbles to Cheapside. Rob could scarcely sit still, for the old neighborhoods of small and weather-silvered wooden houses appeared not to have changed at all.

  Barber turned the horse right at Aldersgate and then left onto Newgate Street, and Rob’s problem about which of the children to see first was solved, for the bakery was on Newgate Street and so he would visit Anne Mary.

  He remembered the narrow house with the pastry shop on the ground floor and watched anxiously until he spotted it. “Here, stop!” he cried to Barber, and slid off the seat before Incitatus could come to a halt.

  But when he ran across the street, he saw that the shop was a ship chandler’s. Puzzled, he opened the door and went inside. A red-haired man behind the counter looked up at the sound of the little bell on the door and nodded.

  “What’s happened to the bakery?”

  The proprietor shrugged, behind a pile of neatly coiled rope.

  “Do the Haverhills still live upstairs?”

  “No, it’s where I live. I heard there had formerly been bakers.” But the shop had been empty when he bought the place two years before, he said; from Durman Monk, who lived right down the street.

  Rob left Barber waiting in the wagon and sought out Durman Monk, who proved to be lonesome and delighted at a chance to talk, an old man in a house full of cats.

  “So you are brother to little Anne Mary. I recall her, a sweet and polite kitten of a girl. I knew the Haverhills well and thought them excellent neighbors. They have moved to Salisbury,” the old man said, stroking a tabby with savage eyes.

  It made his stomach tighten to enter the guild house, which was the same as his memory in every detail, down to the chunk of mortar missing from the wattle-and-daub wall above the door. There were a few carpenters sitting about and drinking, but there were no faces Rob knew.

  “Is Bukerel here?”

  A carpenter set down his mug. “Who? Richard Bukerel?”

  “Yes, Richard Bukerel.”

  “Passed on, these two years.”

  Rob felt more than a twinge, for Bukerel had shown him kindness. “Who is now Chief Carpenter?”

  “Luard,” the man said laconically. “You!” he shouted to an apprentice. “Fetch Luard, there’s a lad.”

  Luard came from the back of the hall, a chunky man with a seamed face, young to be Chief Carpenter. He nodded without surprise when Rob asked him to supply the whereabouts of a member of the Corporation.

  It took a few minutes of turning the parchment pages of a great ledger. “Here it is,” he said finally, and shook his head. “I’ve an expired listing for a Companion Joiner named Aylwyn, but there’s been no entry for several years.”

  Nobody in the hall knew Aylwyn or why he was no longer on the
rolls.

  “Members move away, often to join a guild elsewhere,” Luard said.

  “What of Turner Horne?” Rob asked quietly.

  “The Master Carpenter? He’s still there, at the house he’s always had.”

  Rob sighed in relief; he would at any rate see Samuel.

  One of the men who had been listening rose and drew Luard aside, and they whispered.

  Luard cleared his throat. “Master Cole,” he said. “Turner Home is foreman of a crew that’s raising a house on Edred’s Hithe. May I suggest that you go there directly and speak with him?”

  Rob looked from one face to another. “I don’t know Edred’s Hithe.”

  “A new section. Do you know Queen’s Hithe, the old Roman port by the river wall?”

  Rob nodded.

  “Go to Queen’s Hithe. Anyone will direct you to Edred’s Hithe from there,” Luard said.

  Hard by the river wall were the inevitable warehouses, and beyond them the streets of houses in which lived the common people of the port, makers of sails and ships’ gear and cordage, watermen, stevedores, lightermen, and boat builders. Queen’s Hithe was thickly populated and had its share of taverns. In a foul-smelling eating house Rob received directions to Edred’s Hithe. It was a new neighborhood that began just at the edge of the old, and he found Turner Home raising a house on a piece of marshy meadow.

  Horne came down from the roof when he was hailed, looking displeased that his work was interrupted. Rob remembered him when he saw his face. The man had run to florid flesh and his hair had turned.

  “It’s Samuel’s brother, Master Home,” he said. “Rob J. Cole.”

  “So it is. But how you have grown!”

  Rob saw pain flood into his decent eyes.

  “He had been with us less than a year,” Home said simply. “He was a likely boy. Mistress Home was fairly smitten with him. We had told them again and again, ‘Don’t play on the wharves.’ It is worth a grown man’s life to get behind freight wagons when a driver is backing four horses, never mind a nine-year-old’s.”

  “Eight.”

  Home looked inquiringly.

  “If it happened one year after you took him in, he was eight,” Rob said. His lips were stiff and didn’t seem to want to move, making talk difficult. “Two years younger than I, you see.”

  “You would know best,” Horne said gently. “He’s buried in St. Botolph’s, on the right rear side of the churchyard. We were told it’s the section where your father was laid to rest.” He paused. “About your father’s tools,” he said awkwardly. “One of the saws has snapped but the hammers are quite sound. You may have them back.”

  Rob shook his head. “Keep them, please. To remember Samuel,” he said.

  They were camped in a meadow near Bishopsgate, close to the wetlands in the northeast corner of the city. Next day he fled the grazing sheep and Barber’s sympathy and went in the early morning to stand in their old street and recall the children, until a strange woman came out of Mam’s house and threw wash water next to the door.

  He wandered the morning away and found himself in Westminster, where the houses along the river dwindled and then the fields and meadows of the great monastery became a new estate that could only be King’s House, surrounded by barracks for troops and outbuildings in which Rob supposed all manner of national business was conducted. He saw the fearsome housecarls, who were spoken of with awe in every public house. They were huge Danish soldiers, handpicked for their size and fighting ability to serve as King Canute’s protection. Rob thought there were too many armed guards for a monarch beloved of his people. He turned back toward the city and, without knowing how he reached it, eventually was close to St. Paul’s when a hand was laid on his arm.

  “I know you. You’re Cole.”

  Rob peered at the youth and for a moment was nine years old once more and unable to make up his mind whether to fight or take to his heels, for it was unmistakably Anthony Tite.

  But there was a smile on Tite’s face and no henchmen were visible. Besides, Rob observed, he was now three heads taller and a good deal heavier than his old foe; he slapped Pissant-Tony on the shoulder, suddenly as glad to see him as if they had been best friends as small boys.

  “Come into a tavern and talk of yourself,” Anthony said, but Rob hesitated, for he had only the tuppence given to him by the merchant Bostock for juggling.

  Anthony Tite understood. “I buy the drink. I’ve had wages for the past year.”

  He was an Apprentice Carpenter, he told Rob when they had settled into a corner of a nearby public house and were sipping ale. “In the sawpit,” he said, and Rob noted his voice was husky and his complexion sallow.

  He knew the work. An apprentice stood in a deep ditch, across the top of which a log was laid. The apprentice pulled one end of a long saw and all day breathed the sawdust that showered him, while a Companion Joiner stood on a lip of the pit and managed the saw from above.

  “Hard times appear to be at an end for carpenters,” Rob said. “I visited the guild house and saw few men lolling about.”

  Tite nodded. “London grows. The city already has one hundred thousand souls, one-eighth of all Englishmen. There is building everywhere. It’s a good time to apply to prentice the guild, for it’s rumored that soon another Hundred will be established. And since you were son to a carpenter…”

  Rob shook his head. “I already have a prenticeship.” He told of his travels with Barber and was gratified at the envy in Anthony’s eyes.

  Tite spoke of Samuel’s death. “I’ve lost my mother and two brothers in recent years, all to the pox, and my father to a fever.”

  Rob nodded somberly. “I must find those who are alive. Any London house I pass may contain the last child born to my mother before she died, and given away by Richard Bukerel.”

  “Perhaps Bukerel’s widow would know something.”

  Rob sat straighter.

  “She has remarried, to a greengrocer named Buffington. Her new home is not far from here. Just past Ludgate,” Anthony said.

  The Buffington house was in a setting not unlike the solitude in which the king had built his new residence, but it was hard by the dankness of the Fleet River marshes and was a patched shelter instead of a palace. Behind the shabby house were neat fields of cabbages and lettuces, and surrounding them was an undrained moor. He stood for a moment and watched four sulky children; carrying sacks of stones, they circled the mosquito-loud fields in a silent, deadly patrol against marsh hares.

  He found Mistress Buffington in the house and she greeted him. She was sorting produce into baskets. The animals ate their profits, she explained, grumbling.

  “I remember you and your family,” she said, examining him as if he were a select vegetable.

  But when he asked, she couldn’t recollect her first husband ever mentioning the name or whereabouts of the wet nurse who had taken the infant christened Roger Cole.

  “Did no one write down the name?”

  Perhaps something showed in his eyes, for she bridled. “I cannot write. Why did you not obtain the name and write it, sirrah? Is he not your brother?”

  He asked himself how such responsibility could have been expected of a young boy who had been in his circumstances; but he knew she was more right than wrong.

  She smiled at him. “Let’s not be uncivil toward one another, for we have shared hard earlier days as neighbors.”

  To his surprise she was studying him as a woman looks at a man, her eyes warm. Her body was slimmed by labor and he saw that at one time she had been beautiful. She was no older than Editha.

  But he thought wistfully of Bukerel and remembered the terrible righteousness of her niggardly charity, reminding himself that this woman would have sold him for a slave.

  He gave her a cool stare and muttered his thanks, and then he went away.

  At St. Botolph’s Church the sacristan, an old pockmarked man with uncut hair of dirty gray, answered his knock. Rob asked for the pries
t who had buried his parents.

  “Father Kempton is transferred to Scotland, these ten months now.”

  The old man took him into the church graveyard. “Oh, we are become powerfully crowded,” he said. “You was not here two years past, for the scourge of pox?”

  Rob shook his head.

  “Lucky! So many died, we buried straight through every day. Now we are pressed for space. People flock to London from every place, and a man quickly reaches the two score of years for which he may reasonably pray.”

  “Yet you are older than forty years,” Rob observed.

  “I? I’m protected by the churchly nature of my work and have in all ways led a pure and innocent life.” He flashed a smile and Rob smelled liquor on his breath.

  He waited outside the burial house while the sacristan consulted the Interment Book; the best the fuddled old man could do was lead him through a maze of leaning memorials to a general area in the eastern portion of the churchyard, close by the mossy rear wall, and declare that both his father and his brother Samuel had been buried “near to here.” He tried to recall his father’s funeral and thus remember the site of the grave, but couldn’t.

  His mother was easier to find; the yew tree over her grave had grown in three years but still was familiar.

  Suddenly purposeful, he hurried back to their camp. Barber went with him to a rocky section below the bank of the Thames, where they chose a small gray boulder with a surface flattened and smoothed by long years of tidal flow. Incitatus helped them drag it from the river.

  He had planned to chisel the inscriptions himself, but was dissuaded. “We’re here overlong,” Barber said. “Let a stonecutter do it quickly and well. I’ll provide for his labor, and when you complete apprenticeship and work for wages you’ll repay me.”

  They stayed in London only long enough to see the stone inscribed with all three names and dates and set in place in the churchyard beneath the yew.

  Barber clapped a beefy hand on his shoulder and gave him a level glance. “We are travelers. We’re able at length to reach every place where you must inquire after the other three children.”