by Noah Gordon
The central fireplace was cold but the place was redolent of last winter’s smoke and a less attractive stench, strongest when their escort stopped before the hound lying by the hearth.
“Lost two toes in a snare, a fortnight ago. At first they healed nicely, then they festered.”
Barber nodded. He shook meat from a silver bowl by the hound’s head and poured in the contents of two of his flasks. The dog watched with rheumy eyes and growled when he set down the bowl, but in a moment she started to lap up the specific.
Barber took no chances; when the hound was listless, he tied her muzzle and lashed her feet so she couldn’t use her paws.
The dog trembled and yipped when Barber cut. It smelled abominably, and there were maggots.
“She will lose another toe.”
“She mustn’t be crippled. Do it well,” the man said coldly.
When it was done, Barber washed the blood from the paw with the rest of the medicinal, then bound it in a rag.
“Payment, lord?” he suggested delicately.
“You must wait for the Earl to return from his hunting, and ask him,” the knight said, and went away.
They untied the dog gingerly, then took the instruments and returned to the wagon. Barber drove them away slowly, like a man with permission to leave.
But when they were out of sight of the keep, he hawked and spat. “Perhaps the Earl would not return for days. By then, if the dog were well, perhaps he would pay, this saintly Earl. If the dog were dead or the Earl out of sorts with constipation, he might have us flayed. I shun lords and take my chances in small villages,” he said, and urged the horse away.
Next morning, he was in better mood when they came to Chelmsford. But there already was an unguent seller set up to entertain there, a sleek man dressed in a gaudy orange tunic and with a mane of white hair.
“Well met, Barber,” the man said easily.
“Hullo, Wat. You still have the beast?”
“No, he turned sickly and became too mean. I used him in a baiting.”
“Pity you didn’t give him my Specific. It would have made him well.”
They laughed together.
“I have a new beast. Do you care to witness?”
“Why not?” Barber said. He pulled the wagon up under a tree and allowed the horse to graze while the crowd gathered. Chelmsford was a large village and the audience was good. “Have you wrestled?” Barber asked Rob.
He nodded. He loved to wrestle; wrestling was the everyday sport of working-class boys in London.
Wat began his entertainment in the same manner as Barber, with juggling. His juggling was skillful, Rob thought. His storytelling couldn’t measure up to Barber’s and people laughed less frequently. But they loved the bear.
The cage was in the shade, covered by a cloth. The crowd murmured when Wat removed the cover. Rob had seen an entertaining bear before. When he was six years old his father had taken him to see such a creature performing outside Swann’s Inn, and it had appeared enormous to him. When Wat led this muzzled bear onto the bank on a long chain, it seemed smaller. It was scarcely larger than a great dog, but it was very smart.
“Bartram the Bear!” Wat announced.
The bear lay down and pretended to be dead on command, he rolled a ball and fetched it, he climbed up and down a ladder, and while Wat played a flute he danced the popular clog step called the Carol, turning clumsily instead of twirling but so delighting the onlookers that they applauded the animal’s every move.
“And now,” Wat said, “Bartram will wrestle all challengers. Anyone to throw him will be given a free pot of Wat’s Unguent, that most miraculous agent for the relief of human ills.”
There was an amused stir but no one came forward.
“Come, wrestlers,” Wat chided.
Barber’s eyes twinkled. “Here is a lad who is not fear-struck,” he said loudly.
To Rob’s amazement and great concern, he found himself propelled forward. Willing hands aided him onto the bank.
“My boy against your beast, friend Wat,” Barber called.
Wat nodded and they both laughed.
Oh, Mam! Rob thought numbly.
It was truly a bear. It swayed on its hind legs and cocked its large, furry head at him. This was no hound, no Carpenter’s Street playmate. He saw massive shoulders and thick limbs, and his instinct was to leap from the bank and flee. But to do so would defy Barber and everything the barber-surgeon represented to his existence. He made the less courageous choice and faced the animal.
His heart pounding, he circled, weaving his open hands in front of him as he had often seen older wrestlers do. Perhaps he didn’t have it quite right; someone tittered, and the bear looked toward the sound. Trying to forget that his adversary wasn’t human, Rob acted as he would have toward another boy: he darted in and tried to unbalance Bartram, but it was like trying to uproot a great tree.
Bartram lifted one paw and struck him lazily. The bear had been declawed but the cuff knocked him down and halfway across the stage. Now he was more than terrified; he knew he could do nothing and would have fled, but Bartram shambled with deceptive swiftness and was waiting. When he got to his feet he was wrapped by the forelimbs. His face was pulled into the bear, which filled his nose and mouth. He was strangling in scruffy black fur that smelled exactly like the pelt he slept on at night. The bear was not fully grown, but neither was he. Struggling, he found himself looking up into small and desperate red eyes. The bear was as afraid as he, Rob realized, but the animal was in full control and had something to harry. Bartram couldn’t bite but it was obvious he would have; he ground the leather muzzle into Rob’s shoulder and his breath was strong and stinking.
Wat reached his hand toward the little handle on the animal’s collar. He didn’t touch it, but the bear whimpered and cringed; he dropped Rob and fell onto his back.
“Pin him, you dolt!” Wat whispered.
He flung himself down and touched the black fur near the shoulders. No one was fooled and a few people jeered, but the crowd had been entertained and was in good humor. Wat caged Bartram and returned to reward Rob with a tiny clay pot of unguent, as promised. Soon the entertainer was declaiming the salve’s ingredients and uses to the crowd.
Rob walked to the wagon on rubbery legs.
“You did handsomely,” Barber said. “Dove right into him. Bit of a nosebleed?”
He snuffled, knowing he was fortunate. “The beast was about to do me harm,” he said glumly.
Barber grinned and shook his head. “Did you note the little handle on its neckband? It’s a choke collar. The handle allows the band to be twisted, cutting off the creature’s breathing if it disobeys. It is the way bears are trained.” He gave Rob a hand up to the wagon seat and then took a dab of salve from the pot and rubbed it between thumb and forefinger. “Tallow and lard and a touch of scent. And, oh, but he sells a good deal of it,” he mused, watching customers line up to hand Wat their pennies. “An animal guarantees prosperity. There are entertainments built around marmots, goats, crows, badgers, and dogs. Even lizards, and generally they take in more money than I do when I work alone.”
The horse responded to the reins and started down the track into the coolness of the woods, leaving Chelmsford and the wrestling bear behind them. The shakiness was still in Rob. He sat motionless, thinking. “Then why do you not entertain with an animal?” he said slowly.
Barber half-turned in the seat. His friendly blue eyes found Rob’s and seemed to say more than his smiling mouth.
“I have you,” he said.
6
THE COLORED BALLS
They began with juggling, and from the start Rob knew he would never be able to perform that kind of miracle.
“Stand erect but relaxed, hands at your sides. Bring your forearms up until they’re level with the ground. Turn your palms up.” Barber surveyed him critically and then nodded. “You must pretend that on your palms I have placed a tray of eggs. The tray can’t be
allowed to tilt for even a moment or the eggs will slide off. It’s the same with juggling. If your arms don’t remain level, the balls will be all over the ground. Is this understood?”
“Yes, Barber.” He had a sick feeling in his stomach.
“Cup your hands as though you’re to drink water from each of them.” He took two wooden balls. He placed the red ball in Rob’s cupped right hand and the blue ball in his left. “Now toss them up the way a juggler does, but at the same time.”
The balls went over his head and fell to the ground.
“Observe. The red ball rose higher, because you have more strength in your right arm than in your left. Therefore you must learn to compensate, to use less effort from your right hand and more from your left, for the throws must be equal. Also, the balls went too high. A juggler has enough to do without having to pull back his head and peer up into the sun to see where the balls have gone. The balls should come no higher than here.” He tapped Rob’s forehead. “That way you see them without moving your head.”
He frowned. “Another thing. Jugglers never throw a ball. The balls are popped. The center of your hand must pop up for a moment so that the cup disappears and your hand is flat. The center of your hand drives the ball straight up, while at the same time the wrist gives a quick little snap and the forearm makes the smallest of motions upward. From the elbows to the shoulders, your arms shouldn’t move.”
He retrieved the balls and handed them to Rob.
When they reached Hertford, Rob set up the bank and carried out the flasks of Barber’s elixir and then took the two wooden balls off by himself and practiced popping. It hadn’t sounded hard but he found that half the time he placed a spin on the ball when he threw it up, causing it to veer. If he hooked the ball by hanging on to it too long it fell back toward his face or went over his shoulder. If he allowed a hand to go slack, the ball traveled away from him. But he kept at it, and soon he grasped the knack of popping. Barber seemed pleased when he showed his new skill that evening before supper.
The next day Barber stopped the wagon outside the village of Luton and showed Rob how to pop two balls so their paths crossed. “You can avoid collisions in midair if one ball has a head start or is popped higher than the other,” he said.
As soon as the show had begun in Luton, Rob stole away with the two balls and practiced in a small clearing in the woods. More often than not, the blue ball met the red ball with a small clunking sound that seemed to mock him. The balls fell and rolled and had to be retrieved, and he felt stupid and out of sorts. But nobody watched except a woods mouse and an occasional bird, and he continued to try. Eventually he was able to see that he could pop both balls successfully if the first one came down wide of his left hand and the second one went lower and traveled a shorter distance. It took him two days of trial and error and constant repetition before he was sufficiently satisfied to demonstrate it to Barber.
Barber showed him how to move both balls in a circle. “It looks more difficult than it is. You pop the first ball. While it is in the air, you shift the second ball into the right hand. The left hand catches the first ball, the right hand pops the second ball, and so on, hop, hop, hop! The balls are sent into the air quickly by your pops, but they come down much slower. That’s the juggler’s secret, that’s what saves jugglers. You have plenty of time.”
By the end of a week Barber was teaching him how to juggle both the red and the blue from the same hand. He had to hold one ball in his palm and the other farther forward, on his fingers. He was glad he had large hands. He dropped the balls a lot but finally he caught on: first red was tossed up, and before it could drop back into his hand, up went blue. They danced up and down from the same hand, hop, hop, hop! He practiced every moment that he could, now—two balls in a circle, two balls crossing over, two balls with the right hand only, two balls one-handed with the left. He found that by juggling with very low pops he could increase his speed.
They held over outside a town called Bletchly because Barber bought a swan from a farmer. It was scarcely more than a cygnet but nevertheless larger than any fowl Rob had ever seen prepared for table. The farmer sold it dressed but Barber fussed over the bird, washing it painstakingly in a running stream and then dangling it by the legs over a small fire to singe off the pinfeathers.
He stuffed it with chestnuts, onions, fat, and herbs as befit a bird that had cost him dear. “A swan’s flesh is stronger than a goose’s but drier than a duck’s and so must be barded,” he instructed Rob happily. They barded the bird by wrapping it completely in thin sheets of salt pork, overlapped and molded snugly. Barber tied the package with flaxen cord and then hung it over the fire on a spit.
Rob practiced his juggling near enough to the fire so that the smells were a sweet torment. The heat of the flames drew the grease from the pork, basting the lean meat while the fat in the stuffing melted slowly and anointed the bird from within. As Barber turned the swan on the green branch that served as a spit, the thin skin of pork gradually dried and seared; when finally the bird was done and he removed it, the salt pork crackled and broke away. Inside, the swan was moist and delicate, slightly stringy but nicely larded and seasoned. They ate some of the flesh with the hot chestnut stuffing and boiled new squash. Rob had a great pink thigh.
Next morning they rose early and pushed hard, buoyed by the day of rest. They stopped for breakfast by the side of the track and enjoyed some of the swan’s breast cold with their toasted bread and cheese. When they had finished eating, Barber belched and gave Rob a third wooden ball, painted green.
They moved like ants across the lowlands. The Cotswold Hills were gentle and rolling, beautiful in their summer softness. The villages nestled in the valleys, with more stone houses than Rob had been accustomed to seeing in London. Three days after St. Swithin’s Day he was ten years old. He made no mention of it to Barber.
He was growing; the sleeves of the shirt Mam had sewn purposely long now ended well above his knobby wrists. Barber worked him hard. He performed most of the chores, loading and unloading the wagon at every town and village, hauling firewood and fetching water. His body was making bone and muscle of the fine rich food that kept Barber massively round. He had become quickly accustomed to wonderful food.
Rob and Barber were getting used to each other’s ways. Now when the fat man brought a woman to the campfire it was no novelty; sometimes Rob listened to the sounds of humping and tried to see, but usually he turned over and went to sleep. If the circumstances were right, on occasion Barber spent the night in a woman’s house, but he was always at the wagon when morning came and it was time to leave a place.
Gradually there grew in Rob an understanding that Barber tried to cosset every woman he saw and did the same to the people who watched his entertainments. The barber-surgeon told them the Universal Specific was an Eastern physick, made by infusing the ground dried flower of a plant called Vitalia which was found only in the deserts of far-off Assyria. Yet when they ran low on the Specific, Rob helped Barber to mix up a new batch and he saw that the physick was mostly everyday liquor.
They didn’t have to inquire more than half a dozen times before finding a farmer with a keg of metheglin he was happy to sell. Any variety would have served, but Barber said he always tried to find metheglin, a mixture of fermented honey and water. “It’s a Welsh invention, chappy, one of the few things they’ve given us. Named from meddyg, their word for physician, and llyn, meaning strong liquor. It is their way of taking medicine and it is a good one, for metheglin numbs the tongue and warms the soul.”
Vitalia, the Herb of Life from far-off Assyria, turned out to be a pinch of niter, stirred well into each gallon of metheglin by Rob. It gave the strong spirits a medicinal bite, softened by the sweetness of the fermented honey that was its base.
The flasks were small. “Buy a keg cheap, sell a flask dear,” Barber said. “Our place is with the lower classes and the poor. Above us are the surgeons, who charge fatter fees and sometimes will t
hrow the likes of us a dirty job they don’t wish to soil their own hands on, like tossing a bit of rotten meat to a cur! Above that sorry lot are the ruddy physicians, who are full of importance and cater to gentlefolk because they charge most of all.
“Do you ever wonder why this Barber doesn’t trim beards or cut hair? It’s because I can afford to choose my tasks. For here’s a lesson, and learn it well, apprentice: By mixing a proper physick and selling it diligently, a barber-surgeon can make as much money as a physician. Should all else fail, that is all you would have to know.”
When they were through mixing the physick for sale, Barber got out a smaller pot and made some more. Then he fumbled with his clothing. Rob stood transfixed and watched the stream tinkle into the Universal Specific.
“My Special Batch,” Barber said silkily, milking himself.
“Day after tomorrow we’ll be in Oxford. The reeve there, name of Sir John Fitts, charges me dear in order not to run me out of the county. In a fortnight we’ll be in Bristol, where a tavern-keeper named Potter always utters loud insults during my entertainments. I try to have suitable small gifts ready for men such as these.”
When they reached Oxford, Rob didn’t disappear to practice with his colored balls. He waited and watched until the reeve appeared in his filthy satin tunic, a long, thin man with sunken cheeks and a perpetual cold smile that seemed prompted by some private amusement. Rob saw Barber pay the bribe and then, in reluctant afterthought, offer the bottle of metheglin.
The reeve opened the flask and drank its contents down. Rob waited for him to gag and spit and shout for their immediate arrest, but Lord Fitts finished the final drop and smacked his lips.
“Adequate tipple.”
“Thank you, Sir John.”
“Give me several flasks to carry home.”
Barber sighed, as if put upon. “Of course, my lord.”
The pissy bottles were scratched to mark them as different from the undiluted metheglin, and kept separate in a corner of the wagon; but Rob didn’t dare to drink any honey liquor for fear of making a mistake. The existence of the Special Batch made all metheglin nauseating, perhaps saving him from becoming a drunkard at an early age.