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

by Noah Gordon

  When he reached the house, Mary opened the door at his call, her face ashen and her father’s sword still in her hand.

  “We are going home.”

  She was terrified but he saw her lips moving in thanksgiving.

  He took off the turban and Persian clothing and put on his black caftan and the leather Jew’s hat.

  They assembled his copy of Ibn Sina’s Canon of Medicine, the anatomical drawings rolled and inserted into a length of bamboo, his casebook, his kit of medical tools, Mirdin’s game, foodstuffs and a few drugs, her father’s sword and a small box containing their money. All this was packed on the smaller camel.

  From one side of the larger camel he hung a reed basket and from the other, a loosely woven sack. He had a tiny amount of buing in a small vial, just enough to allow him to wet the end of his little finger and let Rob J. suckle the fingertip, and then do the same for Tam. When they were sleeping he placed the older boy in the basket and the baby in the sack, and their mother mounted the camel to ride between them.

  It wasn’t quite dark when they left the little house in Yehuddiyyeh for the last time, but they didn’t dare delay, since the Afghans could fall upon the city at any moment.

  Darkness was complete by the time he led the two camels through the deserted western gate. The hunting trail they followed through the hills passed so close to the Ghazna campfires that they could hear singing and shouting, and the shrill cries of the Afghans working themselves into a frenzy for the pillaging.

  Once a horseman seemed to be galloping straight at them, yipping as he rode, but the hoofbeats veered away.

  The buing began to wear off and Rob J. started to whimper and then to cry. Rob thought the sound doomingly loud, but Mary took the boy from the basket and silenced him with her teat.

  There was no pursuit. Soon they left the campfires behind, but when Rob looked back whence they had come a roseate nimbus had appeared low in the sky and he knew Ispahan was burning.

  They traveled all night and when the first thin light of morning came, he saw he had led them out of the hills and no soldiers were in sight. His body was numb, and his feet … he knew that when he stopped walking pain would be another enemy. By this time both children were wailing and his gray-faced wife rode with closed eyes, but Rob didn’t stop. He forced his tired legs to continue to plod, leading the camels west, toward the first of the Jewish villages.

  PART SEVEN

  The Returned

  75

  LONDON

  They crossed the great channel on March 24, Anno Domini 1043, and touched land late in the afternoon at Queen’s Hythe. Perhaps if they had come to the city of London on a warm summer’s day the rest of their lives might have been different, but Mary landed in a sleety spring rain carrying her younger son, who, like his father, had retched and vomited from France till journey’s end, and she disliked and mistrusted London from the damp bleakness of the first moment.

  There was scarcely room to disembark; of fearsome black naval ships alone, Rob counted more than a score riding the swells at anchor, and merchant craft were everywhere. They were, all four, exhausted by travel. They made their way to one of the market inns Rob remembered at Southwark but it proved a sorry haven, crawling with vermin that added to their misery.

  At earliest light next morning he set out alone to find them a better place, walking down the causeway and over London Bridge, which was in good repair, the least changed detail of the city. London had grown; where there had been meadows and orchards he saw unfamiliar structures and streets that meandered as crazily as those in Yehuddiyyeh. The northern quarter of the town made a complete stranger of him, for when he was a boy it had been a neighborhood of manor houses set off by fields and gardens, the properties of old families. Now some of these had been sold and the land converted to use by the dirtier trades. There was an iron works, and the goldsmiths had their own cluster of houses and shops, as did the silversmiths and the copper workers. It was not a place he chose to live, with its pall of misty wood smoke, the stink of the tanneries, the constant clang of hammers on anvils, the roaring of the furnaces, and the tapping, beating, and banging of work and industry.

  Every neighborhood came up lacking something in his eyes. Cripple gate was hard by the undrained moor, Halborn and Fleet Street remote from the center of London, Cheapside too crowded with retail business. The lower part of the city was even more congested but it had been a heroic part of his childhood and he found himself drawn back to the waterfront.

  Thames Street was the most important street in London. In the squalor of the narrow lanes that ran from Puddle Dock on one end of it and Tower Hill on the other lived porters, stevedores, servants, and other unprivileged folk, but the long stretch of Thames Street itself and its wharves were the prosperous center of the export, import, and wholesale trades. On the south side of the street, the river wall and the quays compelled a certain amount of alignment, but the north side ran crazily, sometimes narrow, sometimes broad. In places, great houses pushed gabled fronts out as pregnant overhangs. Sometimes a small fenced garden poked out or a warehouse stood back, and most of the time the street was filled with humanity and animals whose vital effluvia and sounds he remembered well.

  In a tavern he inquired about empty housing and was told of a place not far from the Walbrook. It proved to be next to the small Church of St. Asaph, and he told himself Mary would like that. On the ground floor lived the landlord, Peter Lound. The second floor was to let, being one small room and one large room for general living, connected to the busy street below by the steep stairway.

  There was no sign of bugs and the price seemed fair. And it was a good location, for along the better side streets on the rising land to the north, wealthy merchants lived and kept their shops.

  Rob lost no time in going to Southwark to fetch his family.

  “Not yet a fine home. But it will do, will it not?” he asked his wife.

  Mary’s eyes were timid and her reply was lost in the sudden ringing of the bells of St. Asaph’s, which proved to be very loud.

  As soon as they were settled he hurried to a sign-maker’s and ordered the man to carve an oak board and blacken the letters. When the sign was done, it was fastened next to the doorway of the house on Thames Street, so all might see it was the home of Robert Jeremy Cole, Physician.

  At first it was pleasant for Mary to be among Britons and speak English, although she continued to address her sons in Erse, wanting them to have the language of the Scots. The chance to obtain things in London was heady fare. She found a seamstress and ordered a dress of decent brown stuff. She would have wished a blue such as the dye her father once had given her, a blue like summer sky, but of course that was impossible. Nevertheless, this dress was comely—long, girdled, with a high round neck and sleeves so loose they fell away from her wrists in luxurious folds.

  For Rob they ordered good gray trousers and a kirtle. Though he protested the extravagance, she bought him two black physician’s robes, one of light unlined stuff for summer and the other heavier and with a hood trimmed in fox. New garments were overdue him, since he still wore the clothing bought in Constantinople after they had completed the trail of Jewish safe places like following a chain, link by link. He had trimmed the bushy beard to a goatee and traded for Western dress, and by the time they joined a caravan, Jesse ben Benjamin had disappeared. In his place was Robert Jeremy Cole, an Englishman taking his family home.

  Ever frugal, Mary had kept the caftan and used the material to make garments for her sons. She saved Rob J.’s clothing for Tam, though this was made difficult by the fact that Rob J. was large for his age and Tam slightly smaller than most boys because he had experienced grave illness on their journey west. In the Frankish town of Freising both children had been taken by quinsy throats and watery eyes, and then racked by hot fevers that terrified her with the thought of losing her sons. The children had been febrile for days; Rob J. was left with no visible defect but the illness had settled i
n Tam’s left leg, which became pallid and appeared to be lifeless.

  The Cole family had come to Freising with a caravan that was soon scheduled to depart, and the caravan master said he wouldn’t wait for illness.

  “Go and be damned,” Rob had told him, because the child required treatment and would receive it. He had kept hot moist bandages on Tam’s limb, going without sleep in order to change them constantly and to engulf the small leg in his large hands and bend the knee and work the muscles again and again, and to pinch and squeeze and knead the leg with bear fat.

  Tam recovered, but slowly. He had been walking less than a year when stricken; he had had to learn again to creep and to crawl, and this time when he took his first steps he was off balance, the left leg being slightly shorter than the other.

  They were in Freising not quite twelve months waiting for Tam’s recovery and then for a suitable caravan. Although he never learned to love the Franks, Rob came to mellow somewhat regarding Frankish ways. People had come to him there for doctoring despite his ignorance of their language, having seen the care and tenderness with which he treated his own child. He had never stopped working on Tam’s leg, and although the boy sometimes dragged his left foot a bit when he walked, he was among the most active children in London.

  Indeed, both her children were more at ease in London than their mother, for she couldn’t reconcile herself. She found the weather damp and the English cold. When she went to the marketplace she had to steel herself against slipping into the spirited Eastern haggling to which she had grown affectionately accustomed. The people were generally less amiable here than she had expected. Even Rob said he missed the effusive flow of Persian conversation. “Though the flattery was seldom more than sheep jakes, it was pleasant,” he told her wistfully.

  She felt herself in turmoil concerning him. Something was amiss in their marriage bed, a joylessness she couldn’t define. She bought a looking-glass and studied her reflection, noting that her skin had lost luster under the cruel sun of travel. Her face was thinner than once it had been, and her cheekbones more pronounced. She knew her breasts had been altered by nursing. Everywhere in the city, hard-eyed tarts walked the street and some of them were beautiful. Would he turn to them, sooner or later? She imagined him telling a whore what he had learned of love in Persia and drew pain from the thought of them rolling about in laughter as once she and Rob had done.

  To her, London was a black quagmire in which they already stood ankle deep. The comparison was not accidental, for the city smelled more foul than any swamp she had encountered in her travels. The open sewers and dirt were no worse than the open sewers and dirt of Ispahan, but here there were many times the number of people and in some neighborhoods they lived crammed together, so the accumulated stench of their bodily wastes and garbage was an abomination.

  When they had reached Constantinople and she found herself once again among a Christian majority she had indulged in an orgy of churchgoing, but now that had palled, for she found London’s churches overpowering. There were far more churches in London than there had been mosques in Ispahan, more than a hundred churches. They towered over every other sort of building—it was a city built between churches—and they spoke with a constant booming voice that made her tremble. Sometimes she felt she was about to be lifted and carried away by a great churchly wind stirred up by the bells. Though the Church of St. Asaph was small, its bells were large and reverberated in the house on Thames Street, and they rang in dizzying concert with all the others, communicating more effectively than an army of muezzins. The bells called worshipers to prayer, the bells witnessed to the consecration of the Mass, the bells warned laggards about the curfew; the bells rocked the steeples for christenings and weddings and sounded a grim and solemn knell for every soul passing on; the bells clanged the alert for fire and riot, welcomed distinguished visitors, pealed to announce each holy day, and tolled with muffled tones to mark disasters. To Mary, the bells were the city.

  And she hated the damned bells.

  The first person brought to their door by the new sign was not a patient. He was a slight, stooped man who peered and blinked through narrowed eyes.

  “Nicholas Hunne, physician,” he said, and cocked his balding head like a sparrow, awaiting a reaction. “Of Thames Street,” he added meaningfully.

  “I’ve seen your sign,” Rob said. He smiled. “You’re at one end of Thames Street, Master Hunne, and I now establish myself on the other end. Between us there are enough ailing Londoners for the distraction of a dozen busy physicians.”

  Hunne sniffed. “Not so many ailing folk as you may think. And not such busy physicians. London is already too crowded with medical men, and in my opinion an outlying town would make a better choice for a physician just starting out.”

  When he asked where Master Cole had trained, Rob lied like a rug dealer and said he had apprenticed for six years in the East Frankish Kingdom.

  “And what shall you charge?”

  “Charge?”

  “Yes. Your fees, man, your schedule of fees!”

  “I haven’t given it sufficient thought.”

  “Do so at once. I’ll tell you what is the custom here, for it wouldn’t do for a newcomer to undercut the rest. Fees vary depending upon the patient’s wealth—heaven’s the limit, of course. Yet you must never go beneath forty pence for phlebotomy, since bloodletting is the staple of our trade, nor less than thirty-six pence for the examination of urine.”

  Rob stared thoughtfully, for the quoted fees were ruthlessly high.

  “You shan’t bother with the rabble who cluster at the far ends of Thames Street. They have their barber-surgeons. Nor will it be fruitful to yearn after the nobility, since these are tended by only a few physicians—Dryfield, Hudson, Simpson, and that lot. But Thames Street is a ripe enough garden of rich merchants, even if I have learned to get payment before treatment is begun, when the patient’s anxiety is highest.” He cast Rob a shrewd glance. “Our competition need not be all disadvantage, for I’ve found it impressive to call in a consultant when the afflicted is prosperous, and we shall be able to employ one another with profitable frequency, eh?”

  Rob took several steps toward the door, ushering him out. “I prefer to work largely alone,” he said coolly.

  The other colored, for there was no mistaking the rejection.

  “Then you will be content, Master Cole, for I shall spread the word and no other physician will come within hailing distance of you.” He nodded curtly and was gone.

  Patients came, but not often.

  It was to be expected, Rob told himself; he was a new herring in a strange sea, and it would take time for his presence to be realized. Better to sit and wait than to play dirty, prosperous games with such as Hunne.

  Meantime, he settled in. He took his wife and children to visit his family graves and the little boys played among the markers in the churchyard at St. Botolph’s. By now he acknowledged, deep in the most secret part of himself, that he would never find his sister or his brothers, but he took comfort and pride in this new family he had made, and he hoped that somehow his brother Samuel and Mam and Da could know about them.

  He found a tavern he liked on Cornhill. It was called The Fox, a workingmen’s public house of the kind in which his father had sought refuge when Rob was a boy. Here he avoided metheglin again and drank brown ale, and he discovered a contractor-builder named George Markham who had been in the carpenters’ guild at the same time as Rob’s father. Markham was a stout, red-faced man with black hair gone snowy at the temples and at the bottom of his beard. He had been in a different Hundred than Nathanael Cole but remembered him, and it turned out he was nephew to Richard Bukerel, who had been Chief Carpenter then. He had been a friend of Turner Home, the Master Carpenter with whom Samuel had lived before he had been run over on the docks. “Turner and his woman were killed by marsh fever five years ago, along with their youngest child. That was a terrible winter,” Markham said.

  R
ob told the men in The Fox that he had been abroad for years, learning to be a physician in the East Frankish Kingdom. “Do you know an Apprentice Carpenter named Anthony Tite?” he asked Markham.

  “He was a Companion Joiner when he died last year of the chest disease.”

  Rob nodded, and they drank in silence for a time.

  From Markham and others at The Fox, Rob caught up on what had been happening to England’s throne. Some of the story he’d learned from Bostock in Ispahan. Now he discovered that after succeeding Canute, Harold Harefoot proved a weak king but with a strong guardian in Godwin, Earl of the West Saxons. His half-brother Alfred, who called himself the Atheling or Crown Prince, came from Normandy, and Harold’s forces butchered his men, put out Alfred’s eyes, and kept him in a cell until he died horribly from the festering of his tortured eye sockets.

  Harold quickly ate and drank himself to death and Harthacnut, another of his half-brothers, returned from fighting a war in Denmark and succeeded him.

  “Harthacnut ordered Harold’s body dug up from Westminster and thrown into a fenny marsh near the Isle of Thorney,” said George Markham, his tongue loosened by too much drink. “His own half-brother’s body! As if it were a sack of shit or a dead dog.”

  Markham told how the corpse that had been King of England lay in the reeds while tides ebbed and flowed over it.

  “Finally, a few of us sneaked down there in secret. Cold it was, that night, with a heavy fog that mostly hid the moon. We placed the body in a boat and guided it down the Thames. We buried the remains decently in the tiny churchyard of St. Clement’s. It was the least Christian men could do.” He crossed himself and took a deep draught from his cup.

  Harthacnut had lasted only two years as king, dropping dead one day at a wedding feast, and at last it was Edward’s turn. By then Edward had married Godwin’s daughter and he too was firmly dominated by the Saxon earl, but the people liked him. “Edward’s a good king,” Markham told Rob. “He’s built a proper fleet of black ships.”