by Noah Gordon
But he knew that if they had made up their minds, witnesses wouldn’t matter. They would strip him and see his circumcision as proof, and they would search his body until they decided they had found the witch’s spot.
Doubtless they had as many methods as the Imam for gaining a confession.
Dear God …
He had more than enough time for his fear to mount. It was early afternoon before he was called into the clerics’ presence. Seated on an oak throne was a squinting elderly bishop in faded brown wool alb, stole, and chasuble; from listening to others outside Rob knew he was Aelfsige, ordinary of St. Paul’s and a hard punisher. To the bishop’s right were two middle-aged priests in black, and to his left, a young Benedictine in severe dark gray.
A clerk produced Holy Writ, which Rob was bade to kiss and swear solemn oath that his testimony would be true. It began matter-of-factly.
Aelfsige peered at him. “What is your name?”
“Robert Jeremy Cole, Excellency.”
“Residence and occupation?”
“Physician of Thames Street.”
The bishop nodded to the priest on his right.
“Did you, on the twenty-fifth day of December last, join with a foreign Hebrew in unprovoked attack on Master Edgar Burstan and Master William Symesson, freeborn London Christians of the Parish of St. Olave?”
For a moment Rob was puzzled and then he felt tremendous relief as he realized they weren’t stalking him for sorcery. The sailors had reported him for coming to the aid of the Jew! A minor charge, even if he were to be convicted.
“A Norman Jew named David ben Aharon,” the bishop said, blinking rapidly. His vision appeared to be very bad.
“I have never before heard the Jew’s name nor those of the complainants. But the seamen have reported it untruly. It was they who had been unfairly ganging on the Jew. That was why I intervened.”
“Are you a Christian?”
“I am baptized.”
“You attend regular service?”
“No, Excellency.”
The bishop sniffed and nodded gravely. “Fetch the deponent,” he told the gray monk.
Rob’s sense of relief dissipated at once when he saw the witness.
Charles Bostock was richly clothed and wore a heavy gold neck chain and a large seal ring. During his identification he told the court he had been elevated to the rank of thane by King Harthacnut in reward for three voyages as a merchant-adventurer, and that he was an honorary canon of St. Peter’s. The churchmen treated him with deference.
“Now then, Master Bostock. Do you know this man?”
“He is Jesse ben Benjamin, a Jew and a physician,” Bostock said flatly.
The nearsighted eyes fixed on the merchant. “You are certain of the Jew portion?”
“Excellency, four or five years ago I was traveling the Byzantine Patriarchate, buying goods and serving as envoy from His Blessed Holiness in Rome. In the city of Ispahan I learned of a Christian woman who had been left alone and bereft in Persia by the death of her Scottish father, and had married a Jew. Upon receiving invitation, I could not resist going to her home to investigate the whisperings. There, to my dismay and disgust, I saw that the stories were true. She was wife to this man.”
The monk spoke for the first time. “You’re certain this is he, good thane, the same man?”
“I am sure, holy brother. He appeared some weeks ago on my wharf and tried to charge me dear for butchering up one of my thralls, for which of course I would not pay. When I saw his face I understood that I knew it from somewhere, and I studied on the matter until I recalled. He is the Jew physician of Ispahan, of that there is no doubt. A despoiler of Christian females. In Persia, the Christian woman already had one child by this Jew and he had bred her a second time.”
The bishop leaned forward. “On solemn oath, what is your name, master?”
“Robert Jeremy Cole.”
“The Jew lies,” Bostock said.
“Master merchant,” the monk said. “Was it only a single time that you saw him in Persia?”
“Yes, one occasion,” Bostock said grudgingly.
“And you did not see him again for almost five years?”
“Closer to four years than five. But that is true.”
“Yet you are certain?”
“Yes. I tell you, I have no doubt.”
The bishop nodded. “Very well, Thane Bostock. You have our thanks,” he said.
While the merchant was escorted away, the clerics looked at Rob and he struggled to remain calm.
“If you are a freeborn Christian, does it not seem strange,” the bishop said thinly, “that you are brought before us on two separate charges, and the one states that you aided a Jew and the other states that you are a Jew yourself?”
“I am Robert Jeremy Cole. I was baptized half a mile from here, in St. Botolph’s. The parish book will bear me out. My father was Nathanael, a journeyman joiner in the Corporation of Carpenters. He lies buried in St. Botolph’s churchyard, as does my mother, Agnes, who in life was a seamstress and an embroiderer.”
The monk addressed him coldly. “Did you attend the church school at St. Botolph’s?”
“Two years only.”
“Who taught the Scriptures there?”
Rob closed his eyes and wrinkled his brow. “That was Father … Philibert. Yes, Father Philibert.”
The monk glanced inquiringly at the bishop, who shrugged and shook his head. “The name Philibert isn’t familiar.”
“Then Latin? Who taught you Latin?”
“Brother Hugolin.”
“Yes,” the bishop said. “Brother Hugolin taught Latin at the St. Botolph’s school. I recall him well. He has been dead these many years.” He pulled his nose and regarded Rob nearsightedly. Finally he sighed. “We shall check the parish book, of course.”
“You will find it as I have said, Excellency,” Rob told him.
“Well, I shall allow you to purge yourself by oath that you are the person you claim to be. You are instructed to appear again before this court in three weeks’ time. With you must come twelve free men as compurgators, each willing to swear that you are Robert Jeremy Cole, Christian and freeborn. Do you understand?”
He nodded and was dismissed.
Minutes later he stood outside St. Paul’s scarcely crediting that he was no longer exposed to their sharp and pecking words.
“Master Cole!” someone called, and he turned and saw the Benedictine hastening after him.
“Will you join me in the public house, master? I would like to speak with you.”
Now what? he thought.
But he followed the man across the muddy street and into the tavern, where they took a quiet corner. The monk said he was Brother Paulinus, and both of them ordered ale.
“I thought that in the end the proceedings went well for you.”
Rob said nothing, and his silence raised the monk’s eyebrows. “Come, an honest man can find twelve other honest men.”
“I was born in St. Botolph’s Parish. Which I left as a young boy,” Rob said gloomily, “to wander England as a barber-surgeon’s helper. I will have damn-all of a time finding twelve men, honest or otherwise, who remember me and will be willing to travel to London to say so.”
Brother Paulinus sipped his ale. “If you do not find all twelve, the issue is thrown into doubt. You will then be given an opportunity to prove your innocence by ordeal.”
The ale tasted of despair. “What are the ordeals?”
“The Church uses four ordeals—cold water, hot water, hot iron, and consecrated bread. I can tell you that Bishop Aelfsige favors hot iron. You will be given holy water to drink and holy water will be sprinkled on the hand to be used for the ordeal. Your choice of hand. You will pick a white-hot iron from the fire and carry it nine feet in three steps, then you will drop it and hasten to the altar, where the hand will be wrapped and sealed. In three days the wrapping will be removed. If your hand is white and pure within th
e wrapping, you will be declared innocent. If the hand is not clean, you will be excommunicated and given over to civil authority.”
Rob tried to conceal his emotions, but he had no doubt that his face had lost color.
“Unless your conscience is better than those of most men born of women, I think you must leave London,” Paulinus said drily.
“Why are you telling me these things? And why do you offer me advice?”
They studied one another. The man had a tight-curled beard and tonsure the light brown of old straw, eyes color of slate and just as hard … but secretive, the eyes of a man who lives within himself. A slash of righteous mouth. Rob was certain he had never seen this man before he had entered St. Paul’s that morning.
“I know you are Robert Jeremy Cole.”
“How do you know it?”
“Before I became Paulinus in the Community of Benedict I was named Cole. Almost certainly I am your brother.”
Rob accepted it at once. He had been ready to accept it for twenty-two years and now he felt a rising jubilation that was cut short by a quick and guilty caution, a sense of something amiss. He had started to rise, but the other man was still seated, watching him with an alert calculation that caused Rob to sit back into his chair.
He heard his own breathing.
“You are older than the baby, Roger, would be,” he said. “Samuel is dead. Did you know that?”
“Yes.”
“Therefore, you are … Jonathan or …”
“No, I was William.”
“William.”
The monk continued to watch him.
“After Da died you were taken by a priest named Lovell.”
“Father Ranald Lovell. He brought me to the Monastery of St. Benedict in Jarrow. He lived only four more years himself, and then it was decided I should become an oblate.”
Paulinus told his story sparely. “The abbot at Jarrow was Edmund, who was the loving guardian of my youth. He challenged and molded me, with the result that I was novice, monk, and provost, all at an early age. I was more than his strong right arm. He was abbas et presbyter, devoting himself wholly and continuously to reciting the opus dei and learning, teaching, and writing. I was the stern administrator, Edmund’s reeve. As provost I was not popular.” He smiled tightly. “When he died two years ago I was not elected to replace him, but the archbishop had been watching Jarrow and asked me to leave the community that had been my family. I am to take ordination and serve as auxiliary bishop of Worcester.”
A curious and loveless reunion speech, Rob thought, this flat recital of career with its implicit admission of expectation and ambition. “Great responsibilities must lie in store for you,” he said bleakly.
Paulinus shrugged. “It is with Him.”
“At least,” Rob said, “now I need find only eleven other compurgators. Perhaps the bishop will allow my brother’s testimony to count for several others.”
Paulinus didn’t smile. “When I saw your name in the complaint, I made an inquiry. Given encouragement, the merchant Bostock could testify in interesting detail. What if you are asked whether you have pretended to be a Jew in order to attend a heathen academy in defiance of the Church?”
The tavern girl came to them and Rob waved her away. “Then I would reply that in His wisdom God has allowed me to become a healer because He did not create men and women solely for suffering and dying.”
“God has an anointed army which interprets what He intends for man’s body and his soul. Neither barber-surgeons nor heathen-trained physicians are anointed, and we have enacted churchly laws to stop such as you.”
“You have made it difficult for us. At times you have slowed us. I think, Willum, that you have not stopped us.”
“You will leave London.”
“And is your concern because of brotherly love, or fear that the next auxiliary bishop of Worcester will be embarrassed by an excommunicated brother who has been executed for heathenism?”
Neither spoke for an endless moment.
“I have searched for you all my life. I always dreamed of finding the children,” he said bitterly.
“We are no longer children. And dreams are not reality,” Paulinus said.
Rob nodded. He pushed back his chair. “Do you know of any of the others?”
“Only the girl.”
“Where is she?”
“She is dead these last six years.”
“Oh.” Now he stood heavily. “Where shall I find her grave?”
“There is no grave. It was a great fire.”
Rob nodded, then he walked away from the public house without looking back at the gray monk.
Now he was less afraid of arrest than of killers hired by a powerful man to get rid of an embarrassment. He hurried to Thorne’s stables and paid his bill and took his horse. At the house on Thames Street, he paused only long enough to collect the things that had become essential parts of his life. He was weary of leaving places in a desperate hurry and then of traveling vast distances, but he had become swift and expert at it.
When Brother Paulinus was seated at his evening meal in the refectory at St. Paul’s, his blood brother was departing the city of London. Rob rode the plodding horse over the muddy Lincoln road leading to the north country, chased by furies but never escaping them because some of them were carried within himself.
78
THE FAMILIAR JOURNEY
The first night he slept soft on a hay pile by the side of the road. It was last fall’s hay, ripe and rotten below the surface, so he didn’t burrow into it, but it still gave off a little heat and the air was mild. When he awoke in the dawning his first thought was the bitter realization that he had left behind in the house on Thames Street the Shah’s Game that had been Mirdin’s. It was so precious to him that he had carried it across the world from Persia, and the reality that it was lost to him forever was a stab.
He was hungry but didn’t want to try for a meal at a farmhouse, where he would be well remembered to anyone who might be seeking after him. Instead, he rode half the morning with an empty belly until he came to a village with a marketplace, where he bought bread and cheese to satisfy his hunger and extra to carry with him.
He brooded as he rode. Finding such a brother was worse than never finding him, and he felt cheated and denied.
But he told himself he had mourned Willum after they had lost each other as boys, and he would be happy not to set eyes upon the cold-eyed Paulinus again.
“Go to hell, auxiliary bishop of Worcester!” he shouted.
The yell sent the birds fluttering out of the trees and caused his horse to prick up its ears and shy. Lest it lead anyone to think the countryside was under attack, he sounded the Saxon horn, and the familiar moan drew him back into his childhood and youth and was a comfort to him.
If there were pursuers they would search along the main routes, so he turned off the Lincoln road and followed the coastal roads linking the seaside villages. It was a trip he had made a number of times with Barber. Now he sounded no drum and gave no entertainment, nor did he seek out patients for fear a search was under way for a fugitive physician. In none of the villages did anyone recognize the young barber-surgeon of long ago; it would have been impossible to find compurgators in these places. He would have been doomed. He knew he was blessed to have escaped, and the bleakness left him as he realized that life was still full of infinite possibilities.
He half-recognized some places, noting that here a landmark house or church had burned to the ground, or that there, where a new dwelling had been raised, forest had been cleared. He made painfully slow progress, for in places the tracks were deep muck and soon the horse was in very bad shape. The horse had been perfect for carrying him to midnight medical calls at a dignified pace, but it was unsuitable for traveling open country or muddy roads—elderly, broken-down, and dispirited. He did his best by the beast, stopping frequently to lie on his back by a riverside while the animal cropped the new green grass of spring an
d rested. But nothing would make the horse young again, or fit to ride.
Rob husbanded his money. Whenever permission was given or sold he slept in warm barns on straw, avoiding people, but when it was unavoidable he sheltered in inns. One night in a public house in the harbor town of Middlesbrough, he watched two seamen putting away a fearsome amount of ale.
One of them, squat and broad, with black hair half hidden by a stocking cap, pounded the table. “We need a crewman. Bound down the coast to port of Eyemouth, Scotland. Fish for herring all the way. Is there a man in this place?”
The tavern was half full, but there was a silence and a few chuckles, and no one stirred.
Dare I? Rob wondered. It would be so much faster.
Even the ocean was better than floundering the horse through the mud, he decided, and he rose and went to them.
“Is it your boat?”
“Yes, I am the captain. I am Nee. He is Aldus.”
“I am Jonsson,” Rob said. It was as good a name as any other.
Nee peered up at him. “A big fucker.” He took Rob’s hand and turned it over, prodding at the soft palm contemptuously.
“I can work.”
“We’ll see,” Nee said.
Rob gave the horse away that night to a stranger in the tavern, for there would be no time to sell it in the morning and the animal would have brought little. When he saw the weathered herring boat he thought it was as old and as poor as the horse, but Nee and Aldus had spent their winter well. The boat’s seams were caulked tightly with oakum and pitched, and it rode the swells lightly.
He was in trouble a short time after they were under way, leaning overboard and vomiting while the two fishermen cursed and threatened to throw him into the sea. Despite the nausea and vomiting he forced himself to work. Within an hour they let out the net, dragging it behind them as they sailed and then all three of them hauling together to bring it in, empty and dripping. They let it out and pulled it back again and again, but they brought in few fish, and Nee became short-tempered and ugly. Rob was convinced that only his size kept them from treating him badly.
