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

by Noah Gordon

  Rob nodded. “I’ve noted them. Are they fast?”

  “Fast enough to keep the sea lanes free of pirates.”

  All this royal history, embellished with tavern anecdotes and recollections, created thirsty throats that demanded to be whetted, and it required many a toast to the dead brothers and certainly to the living Edward, monarch of the realm. So several evenings Rob forgot his inability to manage spirits and reeled from The Fox to the house on Thames Street, and Mary was faced with the task of undressing a surly sot and putting him to bed.

  The sadness in her face deepened.

  “Love, let us go away from here,” she said to him one day.

  “Why, where should we go?”

  “We could live in Kilmarnock. There is my holding there, and a circle of kinsmen who would be warmed to see my husband and sons.”

  “We must give London more chance than that,” he said gently.

  He was no fool, and he vowed to be more careful when he went to The Fox, and to go there less often. What he didn’t tell her was that London had become a vision for him, more than just an opportunity for a living as a leech. He had absorbed things in Persia that were now a part of him, things they didn’t know here. He yearned for the open exchange of medical ideas that had existed in Ispahan. That required a hospital, and London would be an excellent location for an institution like the maristan.

  That year the long wintry spring turned into a wet summer. Each morning thick fog hid the waterfront. By midmorning, on days when it didn’t rain, the sun cut through the gray gloom and the city was coaxed into instant life. This moment of rebirth was Rob’s favorite time for walking, and on a particularly lovely day the dissolution of the fog came when he was passing a commercial wharf on which a large party of slaves was stacking iron pigs for shipment.

  There were a dozen piles of the heavy metal bars. They had been stacked too high, or perhaps there was an irregularity in one of the rows. Rob was enjoying the gleam of the sun on the wet metal when the driver of a dray, with loud commands and a cracking of his whip and tugging on his reins, backed his dirty white horses too far and too fast, so that the rear of the heavy wagon hit the pile with a thud.

  Rob long had vowed that his boys would not play on the docks. He hated drays. Never did he see one but that he thought of his brother Samuel being crushed to death under the wheels of a freight wagon. Now he watched in horror as another accident occurred.

  The iron bar at the top was jarred forward, so that it teetered at the edge and then began to slide over the lip of the pile, followed by two more.

  There was a shouted cry of warning and a desperate human scattering, but two of the slaves had others in front of them. They fell as they scrabbled, so that the full weight of one of the pigs of iron came down on one of them, crushing life from him in an instant.

  One end of another pig slammed down on the other man’s lower right leg, and his screaming incited Rob to action.

  “Here, get it off them. Quickly and carefully, now!” he said, and half a dozen slaves lifted the iron bars from the two men.

  He had them moved well away from the pile of iron. A single glance was all that was necessary to ascertain that the man who had taken the full brunt was dead. His chest was crushed and he had been throttled by a broken windpipe, so that his face already was dark and engorged.

  The other slave no longer was screaming, having fainted when he was moved. It was just as well; his foot and ankle were fearsomely mangled and Rob could do nothing to restore them. He dispatched a slave to his house to fetch his surgical kit from Mary, and while the wounded man was unconscious he incised the healthy skin above the injury and began to flay it back to make a flap, and then to slice through meat and muscle.

  From the man arose a personal stink that made Rob nervous and afraid, the stench of a human animal who had sweated in toil again and again until his unwashed rags had absorbed his rotten smell and compounded it and made it almost a tangible part of him like his shaven slave’s head or the foot Rob was in the process of removing. It caused Rob to remember the two similarly stinking stevedore slaves who had carried Da home from his job on the docks, home to die.

  “What in hell do you believe you’re doing?”

  He looked up and struggled to control his expression, for standing next to him was a person he had last seen in the home of Jesse ben Benjamin in Persia.

  “I am tending a man.”

  “But they say you’re a physician.”

  “They are right.”

  “I am Charles Bostock, merchant and importer, owner of this warehouse and this dock. And I’m not so foolish, God’s arse, as to hire a physician for a slave.”

  Rob shrugged. The kit arrived and he was ready for it; he took up his bone saw and cut off the ruined foot and sewed the flap over the blood-oozing stump as neatly as al-Juzjani would have demanded.

  Bostock was still there. “I meant my words precisely,” he was saying. “I ain’t to pay you. Not a ha’-penny shall you get from me.”

  Rob nodded. He gently tapped the slave’s face with two fingers and the man groaned.

  “Who are you?”

  “Robert Cole, physician of Thames Street.”

  “Are we acquainted, master?”

  “Not to my knowledge, master merchant.”

  He collected his belongings, nodded, and went away. At the end of the dock he risked a glance back, and he saw Bostock standing as one transfixed, or deeply puzzled, and continuing to stare after him as he made his escape.

  He told himself Bostock had seen a turbaned Jew in Ispahan, with a bushy beard and Persian clothing, the exotic Hebrew Jesse ben Benjamin. And on the dock the merchant had spoken with Robert Jeremy Cole, a free Londoner in plain English garb, his face … transformed? … by a closetrimmed beard.

  It was possible Bostock wouldn’t remember him at all. And equally possible that he would.

  Rob worried the question like a dog with a bone. It was not so much that he was frightened for himself (although he was frightened) as that he was concerned over what would happen to his wife and sons in the event that trouble should claim him.

  And so when Mary chose to talk about Kilmarnock that evening he listened with a dawning realization of what had to be done.

  “How I wish we could go there,” she said. “I’ve a yearning to walk the ground I own and to be again among kinsfolk and Scots.”

  “There are things I must do here,” he said slowly. He took her hands. “But I think that you and the young ones should go to Kilmarnock without me.”

  “Without you?”

  “Yes.”

  She sat perfectly still. The pallor seemed to heighten her high cheekbones and cast interesting new shadows in her slender face, making her eyes appear larger as she examined him. The corners of her mouth, those sensitive corners that always betrayed her emotions, told him how unwelcome was the suggestion.

  “If that is what you want, we shall go,” she said quietly.

  In the next few days he changed his mind a dozen times. There was no outcry or alarm. No armed men came to arrest him. It was obvious that though he had seemed familiar to Bostock, the merchant hadn’t identified him as Jesse ben Benjamin.

  Don’t go, he wanted to tell her.

  Several times he almost said it, but always something kept him from uttering the words; within him he carried a heavy burden of fear, and it could do no harm if she and the boys were safely elsewhere for a time.

  So they spoke of it again. “If you can get us to the port of Dunbar,” she said.

  “What is in Dunbar?”

  “MacPhees. Kinsmen to Cullens. They will see to our safe arrival in Kilmarnock.”

  Dunbar proved no problem. It was by then almost the end of summer, and there was a flurry of sailings as owners of ships attempted to crowd in last short voyages before storms closed off the North Sea for another winter. In The Fox, Rob heard of a packet boat that stopped at Dunbar. It was called the Aelfgifu after Harold Harefoo
t’s mother, and its captain was a grizzled Dane who was happy to be paid for three passengers who would not eat much.

  The Aelfgifu would leave in less than two weeks, and it demanded hurried preparation, mending of clothing, decisions about what she would take and what she would not.

  Suddenly, their leavetaking was a few days away.

  “I’ll come for you in Kilmarnock when I’m able.”

  “Will you?” she said.

  “Of course.”

  On the night before departure she said, “If you cannot come …”

  “I shall.”

  “But… if you do not. If the world should keep us apart in some way, know that my kinsmen will raise the boys to manhood.”

  That served to annoy him more than it reassured, and it so fueled his fears that he was sorry he had suggested that they part from him.

  They touched each other carefully, all the familiar places, like two sightless people wishing to store the memory in their hands. It was a sad lovemaking, as though they knew it was for the last time. When they were done, she wept soundlessly and he held her without words. There were things he desired to say but could not.

  In the morning he put them aboard the Aelfgifu in gray light. She was built along the lines of a stable Viking ship but only sixty feet long, with an open deck. There was one mast, thirty feet high, and a large square sail, and the hull was built of thick overlapping planks of oak. The king’s black ships would keep pirates far out to sea and the Aelfgifu would hug the coast, putting in to deliver and take on cargo and at first sign of a storm. It was the safest sort of boat.

  Rob stood on the dock. Mary was wearing her invincible face, the armor she wore when she had girded herself against the threatening world.

  Though the boat was only rocking in the swells, poor Tam already looked greenish and distressed. “You must continue to work his leg,” Rob called, and made massaging motions. She nodded to show she understood. A crewman lifted the hawser away from the mooring and the boat swung free. Twenty oarsmen pulled once and it was sucked into the strong outgoing tide. A good mother, Mary had placed her boys on cargo in the boat’s very heart, where they couldn’t fall overboard.

  She leaned down and said something to Rob J. as the sail was raised.

  “Fare thee well, Da!” the thin, obedient voice shouted clearly.

  “Go with God!” Rob called.

  Too soon they were indeed gone, though he stayed where he was and strained his eyes peering after them. He didn’t wish to leave the dock, for it struck him that he had come again to a place he had been when he was nine years old, without family or friends in the city of London.

  76

  THE LONDON LYCEUM

  That year on the ninth of November a woman named Julia Swane became the chief topic of conversation in the city when she was arrested as a witch. It was charged she had transformed her daughter Glynna, age sixteen, into a flying horse and then had ridden her so brutally the girl was permanently maimed. “If true, it is heinous and wicked, to do that to one’s child,” his landlord told Rob.

  He missed his own children grievously, and their mother. The first ocean storm had come more than four weeks after they had left him. By that time they must long since have landed at Dunbar, and he prayed that wherever they were, they would wait out storms in safe places.

  Again he became a solitary wanderer, revisiting all the parts of London he had known and the new sights that had emerged since his boyhood. When he stood before King’s House, which once had seemed to him the perfect picture of royal magnificence, he marveled at the difference between its English simplicity and the soaring lushness of the House of Paradise. King Edward spent most of the time in his castle at Winchester, but one morning outside King’s House Rob witnessed him walking in silence among his housecarls and henchmen, pensive and introspective. Edward looked older than his forty-one years. It was said his hair had gone white when he was very young, on hearing what Harold Harefoot had done to their brother Alfred. Rob didn’t think Edward nearly so kingly a figure as Alā had been, but he minded himself that Alā Shah was gone and King Edward was alive.

  From Michaelmas onward that autumn was cold and scourged by winds. Early winter came warm and rainy. He thought of them often, wishing he knew exactly when they had arrived in Kilmarnock. Out of loneliness he spent many an evening at The Fox but tried to keep his thirst in check, not wishing to fall into brawling as he had done in his youth. Yet the drink brought him more melancholy than ease, for he felt himself turning into his father, a man of the public houses. It caused him to resist the drabs and the available females made more attractive by a troubling horniness; he told himself bitterly that despite the drink he must not become entirely transformed into Nathanael Cole the married whoremaster.

  The advent of Christmas was difficult, a holiday that begged to be spent with family. Christmas Day he ate a purchased meal at The Fox: the head-cheese called brawn and a mutton pie, washed down by a prodigious amount of mead. Making his way home he came upon two sailors beating a man whose leather cap was in the mud, and Rob saw that he wore a black caftan. One of them held the Jew’s arms behind his back while the other delivered punches that thudded sickeningly each time they landed.

  “Cease, damn you.”

  The puncher paused in his work. “Shove away, master, while it’s yet safe.”

  “What has he done?”

  “A crime committed a thousand years ago, and now we’ll send the stinking Frenchy Hebrew back to Normandy dead.”

  “Leave him be.”

  “You like him so, we’ll watch you suck his cock.”

  Alcohol always built an aggressive fury in him and he was ready. His fist smashed into the tough and ugly face. The accomplice released the Jew and sprang away as the sailor he had knocked down climbed to his feet. “Bastard! You’ll drink the Saviour’s blood from this fucking Jew’s cup!”

  Rob didn’t chase them when they ran. The Jew, a tall man of middle age, stood with heaving shoulders. His nose was bloody and his lips smashed but he seemed to weep more from humiliation than from hurt.

  “Halloa, what is happening?” asked a newcomer, a man with frizzy red hair and beard and a large vein-purpled nose.

  “It isn’t much. This man was waylaid.”

  “Hmmm. You’re certain he was not the instigator?”

  “Yes.”

  The Jew had won control of himself and found his voice. It was clear he was expressing gratitude, but he spoke in voluble French.

  “Do you understand that language?” Rob asked the red-haired man, who shook his head scornfully. Rob wanted to speak to the Jew in the Tongue and wish him a more peaceful Festival of Lights, but in the presence of the witness he didn’t dare. Presently the Jew picked up his hat and went away, and so did the bystander.

  On the riverfront Rob found a small public house and rewarded himself with red wine. The place was dark and airless and he carried the flask of wine onto a dock to drink, sitting on a piling his father might have set, with the rain soaking and the wind buffeting him and the dangerous-looking gray waves curling through the waters below.

  He was satisfied. What better day to have prevented a crucifixion?

  The wine wasn’t a regal vintage and it stung when swallowed, but nonetheless it pleased him.

  He was his father’s son and could enjoy drink if he allowed himself.

  No, the transformation already had taken place; he was Nathanael Cole. He was Da. And in some strange way he knew he was also Mirdin and Karim. And Alā and Dhan Vangalil. And Abu Ali at-Husain ibn Abdullah ibn Sina (oh, yes, especially he was Ibn Sina!) … But he was also the fat highwayman he had killed years ago, and that pious old shit, the hadji Davout Hosein …

  With a clarity that numbed him more than the wine, he knew he was all men and all men were part of him, and that whenever he fought the fucking Black Knight he was simply fighting for his own survival. Alone and drunk, he perceived that for the first time.

  When
he had finished the wine he slid from the piling. Carrying the empty flask, which soon would contain medicine or perhaps somebody’s piss to be analyzed for a fair fee, he and all the rest of them walked carefully and unsteadily from the dock toward the safety of the house on Thames Street.

  He hadn’t remained behind without wife and children to turn into a sot, he told himself severely on the following day, when his head had cleared.

  Determined to tend to the details of healing, he went to an herb seller’s shop on lower Thames Street to renew his supply of medicinals, for in London it was easier to buy certain herbs than to try to find them in nature. He had already met the proprietor, a small, fussy man named Rolf Pollard who appeared to be a capable pharmacist.

  “Where shall I go to find the company of other physicians?” Rob asked him.

  “Why, I should say the Lyceum, Master Cole. It’s a meeting held regularly by the physicians of this city. I don’t have details, but doubtless Master Rufus does,” he said, indicating a man at the other end of the room who was sniffing a branch of dried purslane to test its volatility.

  Pollard led Rob across the shop and introduced him to Aubrey Rufus, physician of Fenchurch Street. “I’ve told Master Cole of the Physicians’ Lyceum,” he said, “but couldn’t recall the particulars.”

  Rufus, a sober fellow about ten years older than Rob, ran a hand over his thinning sandy hair and nodded pleasantly enough. “It’s held first Monday eve of each month, dinner hour in the room above Illingsworth’s Tavern on Cornhill. Mostly it’s an excuse to make gluttons of ourselves. Each man buys his own food and drink.”

  “Must one be invited?”

  “Not at all. It is open to London physicians. But if an invitation is more pleasing, why I invite you now,” Rufus said affably, and Rob smiled and thanked him and took his leave.