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

by Noah Gordon

  He spread out his map of England and showed Rob that six great roads left London: northeast to Colchester; north to Lincoln and York; northwest to Shrewsbury and Wales; west to Silchester, Winchester, and Salisbury; southeast to Richborough, Dover, and Lyme; and south to Chichester.

  “Here in Ramsey,” he said, stabbing a finger at central England, “is where your widow neighbor, Della Hargreaves, went to live with her brother. She’ll be able to tell you the name of the wet nurse to whom she gave the infant Roger, and you will seek him when next we return to London. And down here is Salisbury, where, you are told, your sister Anne Mary has been taken by her family the Haverhills.” He frowned. “Pity we didn’t have that news when we were lately in Salisbury during the fair,” he said, and Rob felt a chill with the realization that he and the little girl may well have passed by one another in the crowds.

  “No matter,” Barber said. “We’ll return to Salisbury on the way back to Exmouth, in the fall.”

  Rob took heart. “And everywhere we go in the north,” he said, “I’ll ask priests and monks if they know of Father Lovell and his young charge, William Cole.”

  Early next morning they abandoned London and took to the wide Lincoln Road leading to the north of England. When they left behind all houses and the stink of too many people and stopped for an especially lavish breakfast cooked by the side of a noisy stream, each agreed that a city was not the finest place to breathe God’s air and enjoy the sun’s warmth.

  14

  LESSONS

  On a day in early June the two of them lay on their backs by a brook near Chipping Norton, observing clouds through leafy branches and waiting for trouts to bite.

  Propped onto two Y-shaped branches stuck into the ground, their willow poles were unmoving.

  “Late in the season for trouts to be hungry for hackles,” Barber murmured contentedly. “In a fortnight, when hoppers are in the fields, fish will be caught faster.”

  “How do male worms tell the difference?” Rob wondered.

  Nearly dozing, Barber smiled. “Doubtless hackles are alike in the dark, like women.”

  “Women aren’t alike, day or night,” Rob protested. “They appear similar, yet each is separate in scent, taste, touch, and feel.”

  Barber sighed. “That’s the true wonder that lures man on.”

  Rob got up and went to the wagon. When he came back he held a square of smooth pine on which he had drawn the face of a girl in ink. He squatted by Barber and held out the board. “Do you make her out?”

  Barber peered at the drawing. “It’s the girl from last week, the little dolly in St. Ives.”

  Rob took back the sketch and studied it, pleased.

  “Why have you placed the ugly mark on her cheek?”

  “The mark was there.”

  Barber nodded. “I recall it. But with your quill and ink, you’re able to make her prettier than reality. Why not allow her to view herself more favorably than she’s seen by the world?”

  Rob frowned, troubled without understanding why. He studied the likeness. “At any rate, she hasn’t seen this, since it was drawn after I left her.”

  “But you could have drawn it in her presence.”

  Rob shrugged and smiled.

  Barber sat up, fully awake. “The time has come for us to make practical use of your capability,” he said.

  Next morning they stopped at a woodcutter’s and asked him to saw thin rounds from the trunk of a pine. The slices of wood were a disappointment, being too grainy for easy drawing with quill and ink. But rounds from a young beech tree proved to be smooth and hard, and the woodcutter willingly sliced a medium-sized beech in exchange for a coin.

  Following the entertainment that afternoon, Barber announced that his associate would draw free likenesses of half a dozen residents of Chipping Norton.

  There was a rush and a flurry. A crowd gathered around Rob, watching curiously as he mixed his ink. But he was long since schooled as a performer and inured to scrutiny.

  He drew a face on each of six wooden discs, in turn: an old woman, two youths, a pair of dairy maids who smelled of cows, and a man with a wen on his nose.

  The woman had deepset eyes and a toothless mouth with wrinkled lips. One of the youths was plump and round-faced, so it was like drawing features on a gourd. The other boy was thin and dark, with baleful eyes. The girls were sisters and looked so much alike that the challenge was in trying to capture their subtle difference; he failed, for they could have exchanged their sketches without noticing. Of the six, he was satisfied only with the last drawing. The man was almost old, and his eyes and every line of his face contained melancholy. Without knowing how, Rob captured the sadness.

  With no hesitation, he drew the wen on the nose. Barber didn’t complain, since all the subjects were visibly pleased and there was sustained applause from the onlookers.

  “Buy six bottles and you may have—free, my friends!—a similar likeness,” Barber bawled, holding the Universal Specific aloft and launching into his familiar discourse.

  Soon there was a line in front of Rob, who was drawing intently, and a longer line before the bank, on which Barber stood and sold his medicine.

  Since King Canute had liberalized the hunting laws, venison began to appear in butchers’ stalls. In the market square of Aldreth town, Barber bought a great saddle of meat. He rubbed it with wild garlic and covered it with deep slashes that he filled with tiny squares of pork fat and onion, larding the outside richly with sweet butter and basting continually while it roasted with a mixture of honey, mustard, and brown ale.

  Rob ate heartily, but Barber finished most of it himself along with a prodigious amount of mashed turnip and a loaf of fresh bread. “Perhaps just a bit more. To keep up my strength,” he said, grinning. In the time Rob had known him he had increased remarkably—perhaps, Rob thought, as much as six stone. Flesh ridged his neck, his forearms had become hams, and his stomach sailed before him like a loose sail in a stiff wind. His thirst was as prodigious as his appetite.

  Two days after leaving Aldreth they arrived in the village of Ramsey, where in the public house Barber gained the proprietor’s attention by wordlessly swallowing two pitchers of ale before imitating thunder with a belch and turning to the business at hand.

  “We’re looking for a woman, name of Della Hargreaves.”

  The proprietor shrugged and shook his head.

  “Hargreaves, her husband’s name. She’s a widow. Came four years ago to be with her brother. His name I don’t know, but I ask you to ponder, for this is a small place.” Barber ordered more ale, to encourage him.

  The proprietor looked blank.

  “Oswald Sweeter,” his wife whispered, serving the drink.

  “Ah. Just so, Sweeter’s sister,” the man said, accepting Barber’s money.

  Oswald Sweeter was Ramsey’s blacksmith, as large as Barber but all muscle. He listened to them with a slight frown and then spoke as though unwilling.

  “Della? I took her in,” he said. “My own flesh.” With pincers he pushed a cherry-red bar deeper into glowing coals. “My wife showed her kindness, but Della has a talent for doing no work. The two women didn’t get on. Within half a year, Della left us.”

  “To go where?” Rob asked.

  “Bath.”

  “What does she do in Bath?”

  “Same as here before we threw her away,” Sweeter said quietly. “She left with a man like a rat.”

  “She was our neighbor for years in London, where she was deemed respectable,” Rob was obligated to say, though he had never liked her.

  “Well, young sir, today my sister is a drab who would sooner swive than labor for her bread. You may find her where there are whores.” Pulling a flaming white bar from the coals Sweeter ended the conversation with his hammer, so that a savage shower of sparks followed them through his door.

  * * *

  It rained for a solid week as they made their way up the coast. Then one morning they crawled from
their damp beds beneath the wagon to find a day so soft and glorious that all was forgotten save their good fortune in being footloose and blessed. “Let us take a promenade through the innocent world!” Barber cried, and Rob knew exactly what he meant, for despite the dark urgency of his need to find the children he was young and healthy and alive on such a day.

  Between blasts of the Saxon horn they sang exuberantly, hymns and raunchiness, a louder signal of their presence than any other. They drove slowly through a forested track that alternately gave them warm sunlight and fresh green shade. “What more could you ask,” Barber said.

  “Arms,” he said at once.

  Barber’s grin faded. “I’ll not buy you arms,” he said shortly.

  “No need for a sword. But a dagger would seem sensible, for we could be set upon.”

  “Any highwayman will think twice on it,” Barber said drily, “since we are two large folk.”

  “It’s because of my size. I walk into a public house and smaller men look at me and think, ‘He’s big but one thrust can stop him,’ and their hands drift to their hilts.”

  “And then they notice that you wear no arms and they realize you’re a puppy and not yet a mastiff despite your size. Feeling like fools, they leave you alone. With a blade on your belt you should be dead in a fortnight.”

  They rode in silence.

  Centuries of violent invasions had made every Englishman think like a soldier. Slaves weren’t allowed by law to bear arms and apprentices couldn’t afford them; but any other male who wore his hair long also signified his free birth by the weapons he displayed.

  It was true enough that a small man with a knife could easily kill a large youth without one, Barber told himself wearily.

  “You must know how to handle weapons when the time comes for you to own them,” he decided. “It’s a portion of your instruction that has been neglected. Therefore, I’ll begin to tutor you in the use of the sword and the dagger.”

  Rob beamed. “Thank you, Barber,” he said.

  In a clearing, they faced one another and Barber slipped his dagger from his belt.

  “You mustn’t hold it like a child stabbing at ants. Balance the knife in your upturned palm as if you intended to juggle it. The four fingers close about the handle. The thumb can go flat along the handle or can cover the fingers, depending on the thrust. The hardest thrust to guard against is one that is made from below and moving upward.

  “The knife fighter bends his knees and moves lightly on his feet, ready to spring forward or back. Ready to weave in order to avoid an assailant’s thrust. Ready to kill, for this instrument is for close and dirty work. It’s made of the same good metal as a scalpel. Once having committed yourself to either, you must cut as though life depends on it, for often it does.”

  He returned the dagger to its scabbard and handed over his sword. Rob hefted it, holding it before him.

  “Romanus sum,” he said softly.

  Barber smiled. “No, you are not a bleeding Roman. Not with this English sword. The Roman sword was short and pointed, with two sharp steel edges. They liked to fight close and at times used it like a dagger. This is an English broadsword, Rob J., longer and heavier. The ultimate weapon, that keeps our enemies at a distance. It is a cleaver, an ax that cuts down human creatures instead of trees.”

  He took back the sword and stepped away from Rob. Holding it in both hands he whirled, the broadsword flashing and glittering in wide and deadly circles as he severed the sunlight.

  Presently he stopped and leaned on the sword, out of wind. “You try,” he told Rob, and handed him the weapon.

  It gave Barber scant comfort to see how easily his apprentice held the heavy broadsword in one hand. It was a strong man’s weapon, he thought enviously, more effective when used with the agility of youth.

  Wielding it in imitation of Barber, Rob whirled across the little clearing. The broadsword blade hissed through the air and a hoarse cry rose from his throat without volition. Barber watched, more than vaguely disturbed, as he swept through an invisible host, cutting a terrible swath.

  The next lesson occurred several nights later at a crowded and noisy public house in Fulford. English drovers from a horse caravan moving north were there along with Danish drovers from a caravan traveling south. Both groups were overnighting in the town, drinking heavily and eyeing one another like packs of fighting dogs.

  Rob sat with Barber and drank cider, not uncomfortably. It was a situation they had met before, and they knew enough not to be drawn into the competitiveness.

  One of the Danes had gone outside to relieve his bladder. When he returned he carried a squealing shoat under his arm, and a length of rope. He tied one end of the rope to the pig’s neck and the other end to a pole in the center of the tavern. Then he hammered on a table with a mug.

  “Who is man enough to meet me in a pig-sticking?” he shouted over to the English drovers.

  “Ah, Vitus!” one of his mates called encouragingly, and began to hammer on his table, quickly joined by all his friends.

  The English drovers listened sullenly to the hammering and the shouted taunts, then one of them walked to the pole and nodded.

  Half a dozen of the more prudent patrons of the public house gulped their drinks and slipped outside.

  Rob had started to rise, following Barber’s custom of leaving before trouble could begin, but to his surprise his master placed a staying hand on his arm.

  “Tuppence here on Dustin!” an English drover called. Soon the two groups were busily placing bets.

  The men were not unevenly matched. Both looked to be in their twenties; the Dane was heavier and slightly shorter, while the Englishman had the longer reach.

  Cloths were bound across their eyes and then each was tethered to an opposite side of the pole by a ten-foot length of rope bound to his ankle.

  “Wait,” the man named Dustin called. “One more drink!”

  Hooting, their friends brought them each a cup of metheglin, which was quickly drained.

  The blindfolded men drew their daggers.

  The pig, which had been held at right angles to both of them, was now released to the floor. Immediately it tried to flee but, tethered as it was, it could only run in a circle.

  “The little bastard comes, Dustin!” somebody shouted. The Englishman set himself and waited, but the sound of the animal’s scurrying was drowned out by the shouts of the men, and the pig was past him before he knew it.

  “Now, Vitus!” a Dane called.

  In its terror the shoat ran straight into the Danish drover. The man stabbed at it three times without coming close, and it fled the way it had come, squealing.

  Dustin could home in on the sound, and he came toward the shoat from one direction while Vitus closed in from the other.

  The Dane took a swipe at the pig and Dustin drew a sobbing breath as the sharp blade sliced into his arm.

  “You Northern fuck.” He slashed out in a savage arc that didn’t come near to either the squealing pig or the other man.

  Now the pig darted across Vitus’ feet. The Danish drover grasped the animal’s rope and was able to pull the pig toward his waiting knife. His first stab caught it on the right front hoof, and the pig screamed.

  “Now you have him, Vitus!”

  “Finish him off, we eat him tomorrow!”

  The screaming pig had become an excellent target and Dustin lunged toward the sound. His striking hand skittered off the shoat’s smooth side and with a thud his blade was buried to his fist in Vitus’ belly.

  The Dane merely grunted softly but sprang back, ripping himself open on the dagger.

  The only sound in the public house was the crying of the pig.

  “Put the knife down, Dustin, you’ve done him,” one of the Englishmen commanded. They surrounded the drover; his blindfold was ripped off and his tether was cut.

  Wordlessly, the Danish drovers hurried their friend away before the Saxons could react or the reeve’s men could be summ
oned.

  Barber sighed. “Let us through to him, for we’re barber-surgeons and may give him succor,” he said.

  But it was clear that there was little they could do for him. Vitus lay on his back as if broken, his eyes large and his face gray. In the gaping wound of his open stomach they saw that his bowel had been cut almost in half.

  Barber took Rob’s arm and drew him down to squat alongside. “Look on it,” he said firmly.

  There were layers: tanned skin, pale meat, a rather slimy light lining. The bowel was the pink of a dyed Easter egg, the blood was very red.

  “It is curious how an opened-up man stinks far worse than any openedup animal,” Barber said.

  Blood welled from the abdominal wall and with a gush the severed bowel emptied itself of fecal matter. The man was speaking weakly in Danish, perhaps praying.

  Rob retched but Barber held him close to the fallen man, like a man rubbing a young dog’s nose in its own waste.

  Rob took the drover’s hand. The man was like a bag of sand with a hole in the bottom; he could feel the life running out. He squatted next to the drover and held his hand tightly until there was no sand left in the bag and the soul of Vitus made a dry rustling sound like an old leaf and simply blew away.

  * * *

  They continued to practice with arms, but now Rob was more thoughtful and not quite so eager.

  He spent more time thinking about the gift, and he watched Barber and listened to him, learning whatever he knew. As he became familiar with ailments and their symptoms he began to play a secret game, trying to determine from outward appearances what bothered each patient.

  In the Northumbrian village of Richmond they saw waiting in their line a wan man with rheumy eyes and a painful cough.

  “What ails that one?” Barber asked.

  “Most likely consumption?”

  Barber smiled in approval.

  But when it was the coughing patient’s turn to see the barber-surgeon, Rob took his hands to lead him behind the screen. It wasn’t the grasp of a dying person; Rob’s senses told him that this man was too strong to have consumption. He sensed that the man had taken a chill and soon would be rid of what was merely passing discomfort.