by Noah Gordon
Blanched and drained, Nathanael lay without moving. Several times he thought the boy was Agnes and tried to take his hand. But Rob remembered what had happened during his mother’s illness and pulled away.
Later, ashamed, he returned to his father’s bedside. He took Nathanael’s work-hardened hand, noting the horny broken nails, the ingrained grime and crisp black hairs.
It happened just as it had before. He was aware of a diminishing, like the flame of a candle flickering down. He was somehow conscious that his father was dying and that it would happen very soon, and was taken by a mute terror identical to the one that had gripped him when Mam lay dying.
Beyond the bed were his brothers and sister. He was a young boy but very intelligent, and an immediate practical urgency overrode his sorrow and the agony of his fear.
He shook his father’s arm. “Now what will become of us?” he asked loudly, but no one answered.
3
THE PARCELING
This time, because it was a guildsman who had died and not merely a dependent, the Corporation of Carpenters paid for the singing of fifty psalms. Two days after the funeral, Della Hargreaves went to Ramsey, to make her home with her brother. Richard Bukerel took Rob aside for a talk.
“When there are no relatives, the children and the possessions must be parceled,” the Chief Carpenter said briskly. “The Corporation will take care of everything.”
Rob felt numb.
That evening he tried to explain to his brothers and his sister. Only Samuel knew what he was talking about.
“We’re to be separated, then?”
“Yes.”
“Each of us will live with another family?”
“Yes.”
That night someone crept into bed beside him. He would have expected Willum or Anne Mary, but it was Samuel who threw his arms around him and held on as if to keep from falling. “I want them back, Rob J.”
“So do I.” He patted the bony shoulder he had often whacked.
For a time they cried together.
“Will we never see one another again, then?”
He felt a coldness. “Oh, Samuel. Don’t go daft on me now. Doubtless we’ll both live in the neighborhood and see each other all the time. We’ll forever be brothers.”
It comforted Samuel and he slept some, but before dawn he wet the bed as if he were younger than Jonathan. In the morning he was ashamed and could not meet Rob’s eyes. His fears were not unfounded, for he was the first of them to go. Most of the members of their father’s Ten were still out of work. Of the nine woodworkers only one man was able and willing to take a child into his family. Along with Samuel, Nathanael’s hammers and saws went to Turner Home, a Master Carpenter who lived only six houses away.
Two days later a priest named Ranald Lovell came with Father Kempton, the man who had sung the Masses for both Mam and Da. Father Lovell said he was being transferred to the north of England and wanted a child. He examined them all and took a fancy to Willum. He was a big, hearty man with pale yellow hair and gray eyes that Rob tried to tell himself were kind.
White and tremulous, his brother could only nod as he followed the two priests out of the house.
“Goodbye, then, William,” Rob said.
He wondered wildly if perhaps he couldn’t keep the two small ones. But he was already doling out the last of the food from his father’s funeral, and he was a realistic boy. Jonathan and his father’s leather doublet and tool belt were given to a Companion Joiner named Aylwyn who belonged to Nathanael’s Hundred. When Mistress Aylwyn came, Rob explained that Jonathan was trained to pot but needed napkins when afraid, and she accepted the wash-thinned cloths and the child with a grin and a nod.
The wet nurse kept the infant Roger and received Mam’s embroidery materials. Richard Bukerel informed Rob, who had never seen the woman.
Anne Mary’s hair needed washing. He did it carefully, as he had been taught, but still some soap got into her eyes and it was harsh and burning. He wiped her dry and held her as she wept, smelling her clean seal-brown hair that gave off a scent like Mam’s.
Next day the sounder pieces of furniture were taken by the baker and his wife, name of Haverhill, and Anne Mary went to live above their pastry shop. Clutching her hand, Rob brought her to them: Goodbye, then, little girl. “I love you, my Maid Anne Mary,” he whispered, holding her close. But she seemed to blame him for all that had happened and wouldn’t bid him farewell.
Only Rob J. was left, and no possessions. That evening Bukerel came to see him. The Chief Carpenter had been drinking, but his mind was clear. “It may take long to find you a place. It’s the times, no one has food for an adult appetite in a boy who cannot do a man’s work.” After a brooding silence he spoke again. “When I was younger everyone said if we could only have a real peace and get rid of King Aethelred, the worst king who ever ruined his generation, then times would be good. We had invasion after invasion, Saxons, Danes, every bloody kind of pirate. Now finally we’ve a strong peacekeeping monarch in King Canute, but it’s as if nature conspires to hold us down. Great summer and winter storms do us in. Three years in a row crops have failed. Millers don’t grind grain, sailors stay in port. No one builds, and craftsmen are idle. It’s hard times, my boy. But I’ll find you a place, I promise.”
“Thank you, Chief Carpenter.”
Bukerel’s dark eyes were troubled. “I’ve watched you, Robert Cole. I’ve seen a boy care for his family like a worthy man. I’d take you into my own home if my wife were a different kind of woman.” He blinked, embarrassed by the realization that drink had loosened his tongue more than he liked, and got heavily to his feet. “A restful night to you, Rob J.”
“A restful night, Chief Carpenter.”
He became a hermit. The near-empty rooms were his cave. No one asked him to table. His neighbors were unable to ignore his existence but sustained him grudgingly; Mistress Haverhill came in the morning and left yesterday’s unsold loaf from the bakery and Mistress Bukerel came in the evening and left cheese in tiny portion, noting his reddened eyes and lecturing that weeping was a womanly privilege. He drew water from the public well as he had before, and he tended house but there was nobody to put the quiet and plundered place into disorder and he had little to do but worry and pretend.
Sometimes he became a Roman scout, lying by the open window behind Mam’s curtain and listening to the secrets of the enemy world. He heard drawn carts go by, barking dogs, playing children, the sounds of birds.
Once he overheard the voices of a knot of men from the guild. “Rob Cole is a bargain. Somebody should grab him,” Bukerel said.
He lay there guilty and covert, listening to others talk about him as if he were someone else.
“Aye, look at his size. He’ll be a great workhorse when he gets his full growth,” Hugh Tite said grudgingly.
What if Tite took him? Rob considered in dismay the prospect of living with Anthony Tite. He wasn’t displeased when Hugh snorted in disgust. “He won’t be old enough for Apprentice Carpenter until another three years and he eats like a great horse right now, when London is full of strong backs and empty bellies.” The men moved away.
Two mornings later, behind the same window curtain, he paid dearly for the sin of eavesdropping when he overheard Mistress Bukerel discussing her husband’s guild office with Mistress Haverhill.
“Everyone speaks of the honor of being Chief Carpenter. It places no bread upon my table. Quite the reverse, it presents tiresome obligations. I am weary of having to share my provision with the likes of that great lazy boy in there.”
“Whatever will become of him?” Mistress Haverhill said, sighing.
“I have advised Master Bukerel that he should be sold as an indigent. Even in bad times a young slave will fetch a price to repay the guild and all of us for whatever has been spent on the Cole family.”
He was unable to breathe.
Mistress Bukerel sniffed. “The Chief Carpenter will not hear of it,” she said s
ourly. “I trust I’ll convince him in the end. But by the time he comes around, we shall no longer be able to recover costs.”
When the two women moved away, Rob lay behind the window curtain as though in fever, alternately sweating and chilled.
All his life he had seen slaves, taking it for granted that their condition had little to do with him, for he had been born a free Englishman.
He was too young by far to be a stevedore on the docks. But he knew that boy slaves were used in the mines, where they worked in tunnels too narrow to admit the bodies of men. He also knew that slaves were wretchedly clothed and fed and often were brutally whipped for small infractions. And that once enslaved, they were owned for life.
He lay and wept. Eventually he was able to gather his courage and tell himself that Dick Bukerel would never sell him for a slave, but he worried that Mistress Bukerel would send others to do it without informing her husband. She was fully capable of such an act, he told himself. Waiting in the silent and abandoned house, he came to start and tremble at every sound.
Five frozen days after his father’s funeral, a stranger came to the door.
“You are young Cole?”
He nodded warily, heart pounding.
“My name is Croft. I am directed to you by a man named Richard Bukerel, whom I’ve met while drinking at the Bardwell Tavern.”
Rob saw a man neither young nor old with a huge fat body and a weather-beaten face set between a freeman’s long hair and a rounded, frizzled beard of the same gingery color.
“What’s your full name?”
“Robert Jeremy Cole, sir.”
“Age?”
“Nine years.”
“I’m a barber-surgeon and I seek a prentice. Do you know what a barber-surgeon does, young Cole?”
“Are you some kind of physician?”
The fat man smiled. “For the time being, that’s close enough. Bukerel informed me of your circumstances. Does my trade appeal to you?”
It didn’t; he had no wish to become like the leech who’d bled his father to death. But even less did he wish to be sold as a slave, and he answered affirmatively without hesitation.
“Not afraid of work?”
“Oh, no, sir!”
“That’s good, for I would work your arse off. Bukerel said you read and write and have Latin?”
He hesitated. “Very little Latin, in truth.”
The man smiled. “I shall try you for a time, chappy. You have things?”
His little bundle had been ready for days. Am I saved? he wondered. Outside, they clambered into the strangest wagon he had ever seen. On either side of the front seat was a white pole with a thick stripe wrapped around it like a crimson snake. It was a covered cart daubed bright red and decorated with sun-yellow pictures of a ram, a lion, scales, a goat, fishes, an archer, a crab …
The dappled gray horse pulled them away and they rolled down Carpenter’s Street and past the guild house. He sat frozen as they threaded through the tumult of Thames Street, managing to cast quick glances at the man and now noting a handsome face despite the fat, a prominent and reddened nose, a wen on the left eyelid, and a network of fine lines radiating from the corners of piercing blue eyes.
The cart crossed the little bridge over the Walbrook and passed Egglestan’s stables and the place where Mam had fallen. Then they turned right and rattled over London Bridge to the southern side of the Thames. Moored beside the bridge was the London ferry and, just beyond, the great Southwark Market where imports entered England. They passed warehouses burned and wasted by the Danes and recently rebuilt. On the embankment was a single line of wattle-and-daub cottages, the mean homes of fishermen, lightermen, and wharf workers. There were two shabby inns for merchants attending market. And then, bordering the wide causeway, a double line of grand houses, the manors of the rich merchants of London, all of them with impressive gardens and a few built on piles driven into the marsh. He recognized the home of the embroidery importer with whom Mam had dealt. He had never traveled beyond this point.
“Master Croft?”
The man scowled. “No, no. I’m never to be called Croft. I’m always called Barber, because of my profession.”
“Yes, Barber,” he said. In moments all of Southwark was behind them, and with rising panic Rob J. recognized that he had entered the strange and unfamiliar outside world.
“Barber, where are we going?” he couldn’t refrain from crying.
The man smiled and flicked the reins, causing the dappled horse to trot.
“Everywhere,” he said.
4
THE BARBER-SURGEON
Before dusk they made camp on a hill by a stream. The man said the gray plodder of a horse was Tatus. “Short for Incitatus, after the steed the emperor Caligula loved so much he made the beast a priest and a consul. Our Incitatus is a passing fair animal for a poor beggar with his balls cut off,” Barber said, and showed him how to care for the gelding, rubbing the horse with handfuls of soft dry grass and then allowing him to drink and go to grazing before they tended to their own needs. They were in the open, a distance from the forest, but Barber sent him to gather dry wood for the fire and he had to make repeated trips to accumulate a pile. Soon the fire was snapping, and cooking had begun to produce odors that weakened his legs. Into an iron pot Barber had placed a generous amount of thick-sliced smoked pork. Now he poured out most of the rendered fat and into the sputtering grease cut a large turnip and several leeks, adding a handful of dried mulberries and a sprinkling of herbs. By the time the pungent mixture had cooked, Rob had never smelled anything better. Barber ate stolidly, watching him wolf down a large portion and in silence giving him another. They mopped their wooden bowls with chunks of barley bread. Without being told, Rob took the pot and bowls to the stream and scrubbed them with sand.
When he had returned the utensils he went to a nearby bush and passed water.
“My blessed Lord and Lady, but that is a remarkable-looking peter,” Barber said, coming up on him suddenly.
He finished before his need and hid the member. “When I was an infant,” he said stiffly, “I had a mortification … there. I’m told a surgeon removed the little hood of flesh at the end.”
Barber gazed at him in astonishment. “Took off the prepuce. You were circumcised, like a bleeding heathen.”
The boy moved away, very disturbed. He was watchful and expectant. A dankness rolled toward them from the forest and he opened his small bundle and took out his other shirt, putting it on over the one he wore.
Barber removed two furred pelts from the wagon and flung them toward him. “We bed outside, for the cart is full of all manner of things.”
In the open bundle Barber saw the glint of the coin and picked it up. He didn’t ask where it had been gotten, nor did Rob tell him. “There’s an inscription,” Rob said. “My father and I … We believed it identifies the first cohort of Romans to come to London.”
Barber examined it. “Yes.”
Obviously he knew a lot about the Romans and valued them, judging from the name he’d given his horse. Rob was seized with a sick certainty that the man would keep his possession. “On the other side are letters,” he said hoarsely.
Barber took the coin to the fire to read in the growing dark. “IOX. Io means ‘shout.’ X is ten. It’s a Roman cheer for victory: ‘Shout ten times!’”
Rob accepted the coin’s return with relief and made his bed near the fire. The pelts were a sheepskin, which he placed on the ground fleece up, and a bearskin, which he used as a topping. They were old and smelled strong but would keep him warm.
Barber made his own bed on the other side of the fire, placing his sword and knife where they could be used to repel attackers or, Rob thought fearfully, to slay a fleeing boy. Barber had removed a Saxon horn which he wore on a thong around his neck. Closing the bottom with a bone plug, he filled it with a dark liquid from a flask and held it toward Rob. “My own spirits. Drink deep.”
He didn�
��t want it but feared to refuse. A child of working-class London was threatened with no soft and easy version of the boogerman but instead was taught early that there were sailors and stevedores anxious to lure a boy behind deserted warehouses. He knew of children who had accepted sweetmeats and coins from men like these, and he knew what they had to do in return. He was aware that drunkenness was a common prelude.
He tried to refuse more of the liquor but Barber frowned. “Drink,” he commanded. “It will set you at ease.”
Not until he had taken two more full swallows and was set to violent coughing was Barber satisfied. He took the horn back to his own side of the fire and finished the flask and another, finally loosing a prodigious fart and settling into his bed. He looked over at Rob only once more. “Rest easy, chappy,” he said. “Sleep well. You have nothing to fear from me.”
Rob was certain it was a trick. He lay under the rank bearskin and waited with tightened haunches. In his right hand he clutched his coin. In his left hand, although he knew that even if he had Barber’s weapons he would be no match for the man and was at his mercy, he gripped a heavy rock.
But eventually there was ample evidence that Barber slept. The man was an ugly snorer.
The medicinal taste of the liquor filled Rob’s mouth. The alcohol coursed through his body as he snuggled deep in the furs and allowed the rock to roll from his hand. He clutched the coin and imagined the Romans, rank upon rank, shouting ten times for heroes who wouldn’t allow themselves to be beaten by the world. Overhead, the stars were large and white and wheeled all over the sky, so low he wanted to reach up and pluck them to make a necklace for Mam. He thought of each member of his family, one by one. Of the living he missed Samuel the most, which was peculiar because Samuel had resented him as eldest and had defied him with foul words and a loud mouth. He worried whether Jonathan was wetting his napkins and prayed Mistress Aylwyn would show the little boy patience. He hoped Barber would return to London very soon, for he longed to see the other children again.