A Vision of Light

by Judith Merkle Riley

  “Yes—I do,” I managed to answer.

  “Then we’ll load you up and take you back to the shop. It’s too big a job for a chapel floor. You’ll have to wait a bit, though. I’ve got an even nicer fracture over in the corner there.” He called for his assistants and, after strapping the leg to a temporary splint, conveyed me to his place of business, only a few paces behind the man with the “nicer fracture.” Carried through the door of a narrow shop front that lay behind a barber’s pole, draped with the red, bloody bandages that signified one could be bled within, we were laid out like sacks of wheat on the benches of his “establishment.”

  It was a distressing place. He had a large chair for cutting hair, shaving, and bleeding people. At its foot was a bloody basin that looked well used. A string of teeth hanging on a wall advertised his prowess as a tooth puller. On another wall hung a ghastly array of instruments such as one might find in a torture chamber—knives, saws, pliers, and cautery irons—while a chest contained lancets and other small instruments. On one side of the room there was a sinister apparatus: his battered and well-used wooden surgery table. There were dark stains of dried blood about on the walls and furniture, and the rush-covered floor was dark and matted with filthy stuff, the drainings of many disgusting old wounds.

  “So,” I heard him say to the first man, “your leg is pretty well smashed up. These ones usually go bad. Would you like to die with your leg on, or live with it off?”

  “Live, I want to live,” mumbled the man. He looked like a decent sort of person, perhaps a carter, in a russet tunic and the remains of gray hose. He lay on his old gray cloak, biting his teeth together to keep from crying out.

  “Sensible fellow. I’ll have it off in a jiffy. You’re not in the hands of one of those ordinary, butchering surgeons, you know. I can take off an arm or a leg so fast you hardly feel it. ‘Lightning John’ is what they used to call me in the army.”

  Lightning John needed no preparation, for he was already wearing his spattered apron. His assistants donned theirs, and they lifted their victim onto the big wooden surgery table. Then all four of them (and they were very muscular, as surgeon’s assistants must be) pinned the man down with their full weight—his shoulders, torso, and good leg—so he could not writhe and spoil the surgeon’s work. The cautery irons were already sitting in the fire, red hot, minded by an apprentice. Lightning John tightened the tourniquet as the man screamed, and then went to work. He was a modern surgeon: he didn’t just hack off the limb at a blow, trusting to providence that he would place the axe right. Instead he slashed it to the bone, which he sawed through with a few rapid strokes. Despite the tourniquet blood spattered everywhere, renewing the marks on the wall and floor, and the hideous screams of the amputee made my own blood stop in my veins. In only a moment his apprentice had put the handle of the cautery iron into Lightning John’s hand, and with the ghastly sizzle and stink of seared flesh the victim gave a piercing shriek, before he mercifully lost consciousness.

  “Nice job, boys,” announced Lightning John, wiping off his tools. “I think he’ll live. Clear the table and we’ll do the woman next.” The two muscular journeymen came to lift me up.

  “Don’t touch me until you’ve wiped that table. I don’t want to lie in anyone else’s blood,” I said.

  “Women! Ha! Always fussy. Well, I aim to satisfy. Albert, wipe off the table, the lady wants to keep her dress clean.” When I was on the table, he began to whistle again.

  “Now, sweetheart, do you want to die with your leg on, or live with it off?”

  “I’ll die with it on,” I said through clenched teeth. “Just set the bone.”

  “Pity. It’s much safer to have it off,” he answered. “Well, it’s not so bad as that other one. You might have a chance, if it doesn’t go putrid on you.” I turned my head; I could see his assistant taking the man’s leg, to throw it out with the trash. I felt sick.

  “Set it straight. I don’t want to be a cripple.” As he inspected the leg, I grabbed his hand and held on, so he’d look me in the face. “Say you’ll set it straight, no matter what,” I begged him.

  He looked surprised. “So now you’re prescribing for yourself? There’s no end to what women want. You should beware of vanity, young woman. It’s what kills you all so quickly. Low-cut gowns in winter, tight lacing. If there’s ever a decision to be made, a woman always lets her vanity guide her—straight into the arms of death! Now that fellow over there, he knows how to make decisions—chose like a real man, for life! Setting will take much longer, and I can’t guarantee the results. It may just have to come off anyway. I’ll ask you once more—will you have the lesser pain? I can have it off in no time at all.”

  “Never, never, I say. You just set it straight, and I’ll absolve you of my death.” I spoke through my gritted teeth, for the leg was very painful.

  “So it goes,” he said cheerfully, poking at the bone. “But I can’t have you screaming like that. It breaks my concentration. Setting is much harder than taking off, and you said you wanted it straight.” He gave orders to have fresh boneset brought in and had its root smashed to a paste. Linen cloth was wrung out in the liquid extracted from the plant, as he got out the long, trough-shaped splint.

  “Here,” he said, proffering a heavy leather strap with a lot of tooth marks on it. “Bite on this. I can’t have you making a lot of noise. Besides, you may break a tooth otherwise. Primum non nocere, I always say.”

  It is a rule of nature that when people are in a position in which they are unable to talk back, they are spoken to much more than they would desire. Lightning John was a master of one-sided conversation. As I writhed in speechless agony under the dead weight of his assistants, he continued his cheerful flow of conversation.

  “Now, where’s the other side—aha, there you are! Both bones broken clean through! Hmmmm. Some people think it a strange place to practice, the bridge, but it’s a grand place—plenty of business, day and night. Accidents, fights, drownings—there’s not a week goes by that you can’t hear the screams of some boatman overturned below. Don’t wiggle so, I’m just getting it right. Oh, yes. You have to understand that the other side of disaster is opportunity. Opportunity! When times are slow, which is rare indeed in this excellent location, I remind all these healthy merchant folk that the best way to remain in health is regular bleeding, at least four times a year. Once a season—balances the humours. I’ve told you already to hold still—you’ll spoil the work! Now it’s straight, we pack it in boneset. You know, you don’t have any scars on the wrist and ankle. I can tell you don’t look after your health. How you got this far without a simple precaution like bleeding, I don’t understand—now we strap it up—your humours are probably very unbalanced at this moment—you can’t preserve your health short of a miracle if your humours are out of order—hmm, yes. A nice piece of work, if I do say so myself. Isn’t that nicely done?”

  “Why, yes, Master John,” chorused his assistants.

  “Now we’ll send a boy around to tell your people to pick you up. Where did you say you lived?”

  I was as limp as a wet rag. I could barely whisper, “Cornhill, St. Katherine’s”—when they took out the gag.

  “‘Thieves’ Alley?’ By the bones of Christ! I might not have set it if I’d known that!”

  “Don’t worry, you’ll be paid.”

  “Well, I’m glad of that—clear the table, boys, we never know when the next opportunity may arise.” Master John went about whistling as he put back his instruments and readied himself for the next customer. He was a man who enjoyed his work.

  While there are things I count more embarrassing than being borne through the streets in a surgeon’s litter, I still rank it very high on my list of annoyances. It would help, of course, to be bleeding and unconscious, which is more dignified, if not less painful. But I felt like a tremendous fool when Brother Malachi arrived, looking somewhat annoyed at being drawn from his work, accompanied by two great louts from the neighbo
rhood that he had hired to convey me home. He paid the rental fee for the litter and arranged with the surgeon to settle his bill in two parts. I was relieved when they loaded me up and conveyed me out of the surgeon’s establishment. The gloomy horror of the place weighed me down. We made quite a procession, the louts, the litter, Brother Malachi in his old singed and stained brown habit, and a surgeon’s man, who was going to return with the litter.

  “This is what comes of wandering about, Margaret. I’ve always said you were lucky not to be attacked or robbed. I hope from now on you build your practice in the immediate neighborhood. You’re just not clever enough to look after yourself in a big city.” On and on he scolded, by which token I assumed he had grown fond of me, despite his professed rootlessness. By the time we approached our own neighborhood, we had collected a train of idle little boys, most of whom knew me.

  “Hey, Margaret, it’s too late for skating! How did you do it?” they shouted gleefully.

  “Someone stepped on me,” I answered.

  “Must have been an elephant!” joked one little boy.

  “Margaret was stepped on by an elephant!”

  “No, ninny, it must have been a horse.”

  By the time we turned up our alley, news had spread that a hundred knights in full armor had galloped into the City on a military mission, trampling dozens of women and children to death on the bridge. Soon it appeared that the French might have landed on the coast, and while it took several days to squelch the invasion rumor, the one about the smashed babies was never quite eradicated.

  By the time I was carried into the house and deposited by the fire, the neighborhood dragons had arrived, ostensibly to help, but in fact to gather supposed eyewitness information. I was too weary to deny them their fun.

  “They say,” said the neighbor woman who was so fond of denouncing me, “that the street ran with blood.”

  “Oh, yes, there was a lot of blood.”

  “And children screaming?”

  “There was hideous screaming—praying, too, just as if the Last Judgment had come.”

  “They say there were eighty knights on destriers, fully armed,” broke in another woman.

  “Well, I didn’t see so many—” I protested.

  “Of course she didn’t,” interrupted the first woman. “She was already trampled; you don’t see much when you’re trampled.”

  Soon they were telling each other what had happened, and got it better and better as they worked at it. Hilde dished out pease porridge left from supper for me, and still they had not left. My leg hurt, and I could feel a fever coming on.

  “How was it with the woman you went to see?” Hilde asked me quietly, while the gabble continued.

  “The child is not dropped yet; it will be a while,” I answered.

  “That is the sort of thing my midwife said,” broke in one of the women. “But she was a fool, the baby came so quickly that it tore my insides all up—I’ve never been the same.”

  “You? Torn up? Why, you can’t imagine the pain when I had my fifth child. He came backward. I was crippled for months.”

  “My dear, it is only through God’s intervention that you live to tell that tale. Now, my cousin’s daughter had a child come backward, and it killed her. They buried her with the baby in her arms!”

  Soon they were happily exchanging symptoms and horror stories. Every so often one of them would turn to Hilde or me for corroboration and we would nod silently. Eventually, surfeited with gossip, they took their leave, chattering happily.

  “Oh, Hilde,” I said when they had gone, “I hope they don’t come back.”

  “You are wrong to hope that. I hope they do. Women like that can make your reputation.”

  “But I’ve worked hard to make my own reputation. Those people are just chatterboxes.”

  “What you do matters very little,” responded Hilde. “It’s what people say about what you do that is what counts.” Hilde was a wise woman, much wiser than I, as I soon discovered. Now that I could not climb stairs, I slept with Lion by the fire and sat daytimes with my foot up on the bench, doing mending and other sedentary chores. There I heard one day through the open window the neighboring dragon explain to someone else that she had discussed important matters with me and had found my conversation “sober and godly.” What a joke, I thought ruefully, all I’ve ever done is nod my head while she did the talking.

  “She appears young, but she is a pious widow and, I hear, a very good midwife,” came the voice from outside.

  By the time I could go about my business on a crutch, the neighbors hailed me from their windows. When I was fully recovered, I found they had been recommending the “little midwife,” as very nearly as good as the “big one,” and much cheaper. I had done as well during my convalescence as if I had delivered a hundred babies safely. It all goes to show that reputations are made in odd ways in a big city. I knew now that I would always be able to make a living in London.

  THE NATURAL CONTENTIOUSNESS OF Brother Gregory had been diminished greatly with his change of clothes, so he was content to wait until the writing was done to spring his surprise argument and sit back to relish Margaret’s annoyance.

  “You look well in black, Brother Gregory. Very dignified,” Margaret commented, looking over the sheets of writing she was holding. She could still not make out everything, but the profound pleasure she felt at seeing the dark squiggles on the paper resolve themselves into the words she had spoken had not diminished in the least over the past few weeks.

  “I feel like a fool.” Brother Gregory looked down at the dark fur-lined gown and plucked at it disconsolately.

  “Lots of clerics have taken to secular clothing these days, and some of it very dandyish. Why, just the other day I saw a friar in particolored hose, who’d given up the tonsure. Now, he looked like a fool, I’d say.” Margaret was sitting on the cushioned window seat, turning pages slowly and squinting ever so slightly when she met with a difficult passage.

  “That’s because they are not true Seekers. It’s all the times. Since the great pestilence, priests walk out on their congregations, and swarm to London hunting easy jobs as chantry priests. Ignorant, money-hungry fellows who can’t tell A from B, let alone speak Latin, have swarmed into religion. It’s a disgrace, as far as I’m concerned. But it’s no different in any other walk of life. The old virtues are forgotten. We’ve abandoned God’s way of life.” Brother Gregory looked gloomily at his clean fingernails.

  “God’s way of life? When did God ever intend for us to live like this? Or as we did before the pestilence? Or as the Pope and the cardinals at Avignon, with all those mistresses? Surely God has better ideas than that. I really don’t remember that virtue was any greater in the past. You’ve just worked yourself into a state from gloomy thinking.” Margaret’s voice was firmly righteous, as she opened the secret drawer in the chest and put away the most recently completed portion of the manuscript. As she turned to face Brother Gregory, he sprang his trap.

  “But surely, whatever God’s plan, isn’t it a sin to oppose it?”

  “I suppose so, but first one must know what it is.”

  “Let us take, for example, God’s plan to give the high places in the world to those of noble birth.”

  “Oh, that again? I don’t believe that at all. After all, how are dynasties founded? By the man with the most ancient lineage, or the man with the mightiest sword arm? I think the latter.”

  “And I say the gift of the sword is given to the one with mighty blood, showing that the plan is for great blood to rule.”

  If Margaret had not been feeling so content with herself, just at that moment, she would have noticed the leading tone of Brother Gregory’s voice. She answered, “And I say, there’s no accounting for God’s gifts; He gives them as He wills.”

  “God, an anarchist? Never!” Brother Gregory’s eyes glittered. Now he had her. “Let us take what you would think to be a good example. Didn’t your brother have gifts that led him to b
e noticed? Wouldn’t you say that proves your case, because he rose higher on his talents?”

  Margaret looked puzzled.

  “I suppose you might say so, but he worked hard too. That’s how he won favor. That, and being cleverer than the others.”

  “And more attractive too?”

  “Well, that, of course. But we both took after mother. She was unusual that way.”

  “And so you’ve just proved my case.”

  “I’ve not done anything of the sort. You’ve just agreed with me.”

  “Oh, no, I haven’t. You’re just missing one piece of information, and it’s that that proves my case instead.”

  Margaret looked sharply at Brother Gregory; suddenly she realized that she greatly disliked the sardonic look he fixed on her.

  “If you’re going to say something nasty, then think twice and don’t say it at all,” she said firmly.

  “Then I won’t say anything. Just ask a few questions, like Socrates, until you state the truth yourself.”

  “And just who was this Socrates?”

  “Why, a philosopher—who found out the truth by asking questions.”

  Margaret mistrusted Brother Gregory when he mentioned philosophers. He usually brought them into an argument like military reinforcements, to shore up a particularly obnoxious line of attack. But she thought, I just won’t answer his questions, and then he’ll have to give up and live with being wrong, just this once.

  “You wouldn’t disagree that rich men and lords keep mistresses, would you?”

  “Well, no, of course.”

  “And the lords of the Church too?”

  “That, too, if they’re corrupt.”

  “And there’s lots of corrupt ones lately, too, I recall you saying.”

  Margaret didn’t answer.

  “What do the rich men and lords do with their natural offspring?”

  “Acknowledge them, if they feel like it, and then help them.”

  “And what about the lords of the Church?”

  “Well, they can’t acknowledge them, but sometimes they help them secretly. I’ve even delivered a bishop’s daughter—he gave her an immense dowry, just to see her married properly.”