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

by Noah Gordon

  The priest went about the church and thriftily extinguished the rush lights, and then left him mourning by the bier.

  Rob departed neither to eat nor to drink but remained kneeling, seemingly suspended between dancing candlelight and the heavy blackness.

  Time passed without his knowledge.

  He was startled when loud bells chimed the hour of matins, and he rose to lurch down the aisle on benumbed legs.

  “Make your reverence,” the priest said coldly, and he did so.

  Outside, he walked down the road. Under a tree he passed water, then returned and washed hands and face from the bucket by the door while within the church the priest completed Midnight Office.

  Some time after the priest went away for the second time the tapers burned down, leaving Rob alone in darkness with Barber.

  Now he allowed himself to think of how the man had saved him when he was a boy in London. He remembered Barber when he was gentle and when he was not; his tender pleasure at preparing and sharing food, and his selfishness; his patience in instruction, and his cruelty; his raunchiness, and his sober advice; his laughter, and his rages; his warm spirit, and his drunkenness.

  What had passed between them wasn’t love, Rob knew. Yet it had been something that substituted for love sufficiently that, as first light grayed the waxen face, Rob J. wept bitterly, and not entirely for Henry Croft.

  Barber was buried after lauds. The priest didn’t spend overly long at the graveside. “You may fill it in,” he told Rob. As the stone and gravel rattled onto the lid, Rob heard him mutter in Latin, something about the sure and certain hope of the Resurrection.

  Rob did what he would have done for family. Remembering his lost graves, he paid the priest to order a stone and specified how it was to be marked.

  Henry Croft.

  Barber-surgeon.

  Died Jul 11 in the yr A.D. 1030.

  “Mayhap Requiescat in Pace, or some such?” the priest said.

  The only epitaph true to Barber that came to him was Carpe Diem, “Enjoy the Day.” Yet, somehow …

  And then he smiled.

  The priest was annoyed when he heard the selection. But the formidable young stranger was paying for the stone and insisted, so the cleric carefully wrote it down.

  Fumum vendidi. “I sold smoke.”

  Watching this cold-eyed priest putting away his profit with a satisfied mien, Rob realized that it wouldn’t be remarkable if no stone were raised to a dead barber-surgeon. With no one in Aire’s Cross to care.

  “I shall be back one day soon to see that all is to my satisfaction.”

  A veil came over the priest’s eyes. “Go with God,” he said shortly, and went back into the church.

  Weary to the bone and hungry, Rob drove Horse to where he had left their things in the willow copse.

  Nothing had been disturbed. When he had loaded it all back into the wagon, he sat in the grass and ate. What remained of the meat pie was spoiled, but he chewed and swallowed a stale loaf Barber had baked four days before.

  It occurred to him that he was the heir. It was his horse and his wagon. He had inherited the instruments and techniques, the ratty fur blankets, the juggling balls and the magic tricks, the dazzle and the smoke, the decisions about where to go tomorrow and the day after tomorrow.

  The first thing he did was remove the flasks of Special Batch and throw them against a rock, smashing them one by one.

  He would sell Barber’s weapons; his own were better. But he hung the Saxon horn around his neck.

  He clambered onto the front seat of the wagon and sat there, solemn and erect, as though it were a throne.

  Perhaps, he thought, he would look around and get himself a boy.

  19

  A WOMAN IN THE ROAD

  He traveled on as they always had done, “taking a promenade through the innocent world,” Barber would have said. For the first days he couldn’t force himself to unpack the wagon or give an entertainment. In Lincoln he bought himself a hot meal at the public house but he did no cooking, mostly feeding on bread and cheese made by others. He didn’t drink at all. Evenings, he sat by his campfire and was assailed by a terrible loneliness.

  He was waiting for something to happen. But nothing did, and after a bit he came to understand that he would have to live his life.

  In Stafford he decided to return to work. Horse picked up her ears and pranced as he banged the drum and announced their presence in the town square.

  It was as though he had always worked alone. The people who gathered didn’t know there should have been an older man who signaled when to start and stop the juggling and who told the best stories. They gathered about and listened and laughed, watched enthralled as he drew likenesses, bought his doctored liquor, and waited in line to seek treatment behind the screen. When Rob took their hands he discovered the gift was back. A burly blacksmith who looked as though he could lift the world had something in him that was consuming his life, and he wouldn’t last long. A thin girl whose wan appearance might have suggested illness had a reservoir of strength and vitality that filled Rob with joy when he felt it. Perhaps, as Barber had declared, the gift had been stifled by alcohol and liberated by abstinence. Whatever the reason for its return, he found himself astir with excitement and eager to be linked to the next pair of hands.

  Leaving Stafford that afternoon, he stopped at a farm to buy bacon and saw the barn mouser with a litter of kittens. “Take your pick of the lot,” the farmer told him hopefully. “I’ll have to drown most of them, for they all consume food.”

  Rob played with them, dangling a piece of rope in front of their noses, and they were each winsome save for one disdainful little white cat that remained haughty and scornful.

  “Do you not wish to come with me, eh?” The kitten was composed and looked to be the goodliest, but when he tried to hold her she scratched him on the hand.

  Strangely, it made him all the more determined to take her. He whispered to her soothingly, and it was a triumph when he was able to pick her up and smooth her fur with his fingers.

  “This one will do,” he said, and thanked the farmer.

  Next morning he cooked his own breakfast and fed the cat bread soaked in milk. When he gazed into her greenish eyes he recognized the feline bitchiness there, and he smiled. “I’ll name you after Mistress Buffington,” he told her.

  Perhaps feeding her was the necessary magic. Within hours she was purring to him, lying in his lap as he sat in the wagon seat.

  In the middle of the morning he set the cat aside when he drove around a curve in Tettenhall, and came upon a man standing over a woman in the road. “What ails her?” he called, and pulled Horse short. He saw she was breathing; her face was bright with exertion and she had an enormous belly.

  “Come her time,” the man said.

  In the orchard behind him, half a dozen baskets were filled with apples. He was dressed in rags and didn’t appear the man to own rich property. Rob guessed he was a cottager, doubtless laboring on a large tract for a landlord in return for a small soccage piece he could work for his own family.

  “We were picking earliest fruit when her pains came upon her. She started for home but was quickly caught out. There is no midwife here, for the woman died this spring. I sent a boy running to fetch the leech when it was clear she was in a hard place.”

  “Well, then,” Rob said, and picked up his reins. He was prepared to move on because it was precisely the kind of situation Barber had taught him to avoid; if he could help the woman there would be tiny payment, but if he could not, he might be blamed for what happened.

  “It’s been time and more now,” the man said bitterly, “and still the physician doesn’t come. He’s a Jew doctor.”

  Even as the man spoke, Rob saw his wife’s eyes roll back in her head as she went into convulsions.

  From what Barber had told him of Jew physicians he thought it likely the leech might not come at all. He was snared by the stolid misery in the cottag
er’s eyes and by memories he would have liked to forget.

  Sighing, he climbed down from the wagon.

  He knelt over the dirty, worn woman and took her hands. “When did she last feel the child move?”

  “It’s been weeks. For a fortnight she’s been feeling poorly, as if she was poisoned.” She had had four previous pregnancies, he said. There was a pair of boys at home but the last two babies had been born still.

  Rob felt that this child was dead too. He put his hand lightly on the distended stomach and wished devoutly to leave, but in his mind he saw Mam’s white face when she had lain on the shitty stable floor, and he had a disturbing knowledge that the woman would die quickly unless he acted.

  In the jumble of Barber’s gear he found the speculum of polished metal, but he didn’t use it as a mirror. When the convulsion had passed he positioned her legs and dilated the cervix with the instrument as Barber had described its use. The mass inside her slid out easily, more putrefaction than baby. He was scarcely aware of her husband sucking in his breath and walking away.

  His hands told his head what to do, instead of the other way around.

  He got the placenta out and cleansed and washed her. When he looked up, to his surprise he saw that the Jew doctor had arrived.

  “You will want to take over,” he said. He felt great relief, for there was steady bleeding.

  “There is no hurry,” the physician said. But he listened interminably to her breathing and examined her so slowly and thoroughly that his lack of faith in Rob was apparent.

  Eventually the Jew appeared satisfied. “Place your palm on her abdomen and rub firmly, like this.”

  Rob massaged her empty belly, wondering. Finally, through the abdomen he could feel the big, spongy womb snap back into a small hard ball, and the bleeding stopped.

  “Magic worthy of Merlin and a trick I’ll remember,” he said.

  “There is no magic in what we do,” the Jew doctor said calmly. “You know my name.”

  “We met some years ago. In Leicester.”

  Benjamin Merlin looked at the garish wagon and then smiled. “Ah. You were a boy, the apprentice. The barber was a fat man who belched colored ribbons.”

  “Yes.”

  Rob didn’t tell him Barber was dead, nor did Merlin inquire of him. They studied one another. The Jew’s hawk face was still framed by a full head of white hair and his white beard, but he was not so thin as he had been.

  “The clerk with whom you spoke, that day in Leicester. Did you couch his eyes?”

  “Clerk?” Merlin appeared puzzled and then his gaze cleared. “Yes! He is Edgar Thorpe of the village of Lucteburne, in Leicestershire.”

  If Rob had heard of Edgar Thorpe he had forgotten. It was a difference between them, he realized; much of the time he didn’t learn his patients’ names.

  “I did operate on him and removed his cataracts.”

  “And today? Is he well?”

  Merlin smiled ruefully. “Master Thorpe cannot be called well, for he grows old and has ailments and complaints. But he sees through both eyes.”

  Rob had hidden the ruined fetus in a rag. Merlin unwrapped it and studied it, then he sprinkled it with water from a flask. “I baptize you in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit,” the Jew said briskly, then he rewrapped the little bundle and carried it to the cottager. “The infant has been christened properly,” he said, “and doubtless will be allowed to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. You must tell Father Stigand or that other priest at the church.”

  The husbandman took out a soiled purse, the stolid misery on his face mingling with apprehension. “What do I pay, master physician?”

  “What you can,” Merlin said, and the man took a penny from the purse and gave it to him.

  “Was it a man-child?”

  “One cannot tell,” the physician said kindly. He dropped the coin into the large pocket of his kirtle and fumbled until he came up with a halfpenny, which he gave to Rob. They had to help the cottager carry her home, a hard ha’penny’s worth of work.

  When finally they were free they went to a nearby stream and washed off the blood.

  “You’ve watched similar deliveries?”

  “No.”

  “How did you know what to do?”

  Rob shrugged. “It had been described to me.”

  “They say some are born healers. Selected.” The Jew smiled at him. “Of course, others are simply lucky,” he said.

  The man’s scrutiny made him uncomfortable. “If the mother had been dead and the babe alive, …” Rob said, forcing himself to ask.

  “Caesar’s operation.”

  Rob stared.

  “You don’t know of what I speak?”

  “No.”

  “You must cut through the belly and the uterine wall and take the child.”

  “Open the mother?”

  “Yes.”

  “Have you done this?”

  “Several times. When I was a medical clerk I saw one of my teachers open a live woman to get at her child.”

  Liar! he thought, ashamed to be listening so eagerly. He remembered what Barber had said about this man and all his kind. “What happened?”

  “She died, but she would have died at any rate. I do not approve of opening live women, but I was told of men who had done so with both mother and child surviving.”

  Rob turned away before this French-sounding man could laugh at him for a fool. But he had taken only two steps when he was compelled to come back.

  “Where to cut?”

  In the dust of the road the Jew drew a torso and showed two incisions, one a long straight line on the left side, the other up the middle of the belly. “Either,” he said, and threw the stick far.

  Rob nodded and went away, unable to give him thanks.

  20

  CAPS AT TABLE

  He moved out of Tettenhall at once but something was already happening to him.

  He was running low on Universal Specific and next day bought a keg of liquor from a farmer, pausing to mix a new batch of physick which that afternoon he began to rid himself of in Ludlow. The Specific sold as well as ever, but he was preoccupied and a little frightened.

  To hold a human soul in the palm of your hand like a pebble. To feel somebody slip away, yet by your actions to bring her back! Not even a king had such power.

  Selected.

  Could he learn more? How much could be learned? What must it be like, he asked himself, to learn all that could be taught?

  For the first time he recognized in himself a desire to become a physician.

  Truly to be able to fight death! He was having new and disturbing thoughts that at times produced rapture and at other times were almost an agony.

  Next morning he set out for Worcester, the next town to the south along the Severn River. He didn’t remember seeing the river or the track, or recollect guiding Horse, or recall anything else of the journey. When he reached Worcester, the townsfolk gaped as they watched the red wagon; it rolled into the square, made a complete circuit without stopping, and then left the town and traveled back in the direction whence it had come.

  The village of Lucteburne in Leicestershire wasn’t large enough to support a tavern, but haysel was in progress and when he stopped at a meadow in which four men wielded scythes, the cutter in the swath closest to the road ceased his rhythmic swinging long enough to tell him how to reach Edgar Thorpe’s house.

  Rob found the old man on his hands and knees in his small garden, harvesting leeks. He perceived at once, with a strange sense of excitement, that Thorpe was able to see. But he was suffering sorely from rheum sickness and, although Rob helped him to regain his feet amid groans and anguished exclamations, it was a few moments before they were able to speak calmly.

  Rob brought several bottles of Specific from the wagon and opened one, which pleased his host greatly.

  “I am here to inquire into the operation which gave you back your sight, Master Thorpe.”
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  “Indeed? And what is your interest?”

  Rob hesitated. “I have a kinsman in need of such treatment, and I inquire in his name.”

  Thorpe took a swallow of liquor and then sighed. “I hope that he’s a strong man with bountiful courage,” he said. “Tied to a chair hands and feet, I was. Cruel bindings cut into my head, fixing it against the high back. I’d been fed many a stoup and was close to senseless from drink, but then small hooks were placed beneath my eyelids and lifted by assistants so I couldn’t blink.”

  He closed his eyes and shuddered. The tale obviously had been told many times, for the details were fixed in his memory and related without hesitation, but Rob found them no less fascinating for that.

  “Such was my affliction that I could only see, fuzzily, what was directly before me. There swam into my vision Master Merlin’s hand. It was holding a blade, which grew larger as it descended, until it cut into my eye.

  “Oh, the pain of it sobered me instantly! I was certain he had cut out my eye instead of merely removing the cloudiness and I shrieked at him and importuned him to do nothing more to me. When he persisted I rained curses on his head and said that at last I understood how his despised folk could have killed our gentle Lord.

  “When he cut into the second eye the pain was so great that I lost all knowledge. I awoke to the darkness of wrapped eyes and for almost a fortnight suffered grievously. But at length I was able to see as I hadn’t done for overly long. So great was the improvement of my sight that I spent two more full years as clerk before the rheum made it sensible to curtail my duties.”

  So it was true, Rob thought dazedly. Then perhaps the other things Benjamin Merlin had told him were fact as well.

  “Master Merlin is the goodliest doctor ever I did see,” Edgar Thorpe said. “Except,” he added crossly, “for so competent a physician he seems to be meeting untoward difficulty in ridding my bones and joints of great discomfort.”

  He went to Tettenhall again and camped in a little valley, staying near the town three days like a lovesick swain who lacked the courage to visit a female but couldn’t bring himself to leave her alone. The first farmer from whom he bought provision told him where Benjamin Merlin lived, and several times he drove Horse slowly past the place, a low farmhouse with well-kept barn and outbuilding, a field, an orchard, and a vineyard. There were no outward signs that here lived a physician.