by Noah Gordon
In the Herring, a mariners’ hole on the waterfront, Rob stood and thumped his mug of mulled cider against the tabletop. “I’m searching for snug, clean lodging until spring sailing,” he said. “Is anyone here who knows of such?”
A short, wide man, built like a bull dog, studied him as he drained his cup and then nodded. “Aye,” he said. “My brother Tom died last voyage. His widow, name of Binnie Ross, is left with two small ones to feed. If you’re willing to pay fair I know she would welcome you.”
Rob bought him a drink and then followed him a short way to a tiny house near the marketplace at East Chepe. Binnie Ross turned out to be a thin mouse of a girl, all worried blue eyes in a thin, pale little face. The place was clean enough but very small.
“I have a cat and a horse,” Rob said.
“Oh, I would welcome the cat,” she said anxiously. It was clear she was desperate for the money.
“You might put up the horse for the winter,” her brother-in-law said. “There is Egglestan’s stables on Thames Street.”
Rob nodded. “I know the place,” he said.
“She is with young,” Binnie Ross said, picking up the cat and stroking her.
Rob could see no extra roundness in the sleek stomach. “How do you know?” he asked, thinking her mistaken. “She’s still a young one herself, just born this past summer.”
The girl shrugged.
She was right, for within a few weeks Mistress Buffington bloomed. He fed the cat tidbits and provided good food for Binnie and her son. The little daughter was an infant who still took milk at her mother’s breast. It pleasured Rob to walk to the marketplace and buy for them, remembering the miracle of eating well after a long time with a rumbling-empty belly.
The infant was named Aldyth and the little boy, less than two years old, was Edwin. Every night Rob could hear Binnie crying. He had been in the house less than a fortnight when she came to his bed in the dark. She said not a word but lay down and put her slender arms around him, silent all through the act. Curious, he tasted her milk and found it sweet.
When they were finished she slipped back to her own bed and next day made no reference to what had happened.
“How did your husband die?” he asked her as she was dishing out the breakfast gruel.
“A storm. Wulf—that is his brother, who brought you here—said my Paul was washed away. He could not swim,” she said.
She used him one more night, grinding to him desperately. Then her dead husband’s brother, who doubtless had been marshaling his courage to speak to her, came to the house one afternoon. After that Wulf came every day with small gifts; he played with his niece and nephew but it became clear he was paying court to their mother, and one day Binnie told Rob that she and Wulf would be married. It made the house an easier place in which Rob could do his waiting.
During a blizzard he delivered Mistress Buffington of a fine litter: a white female miniature of herself, a white male, and a pair of black and white toms that presumably resembled their sire. Binnie offered to drown the four kittens as a service, but as soon as they were weaned Rob lined a basket with rags and took them to public houses, buying a number of drinks in order to give each of them away.
In March, the slaves who did the brute work of the port were moved back to the waterfront, and long lines of men and drays again began to crowd Thames Street, loading the warehouses and the ships with exports.
Rob asked innumerable questions of traveling men and determined his journey was best started by way of Calais. “That is where my ship is bound,” Wulf told him, and took him down to the slip to see the Queen Emma. She was not as grand as her name, a great old wooden tub with one towering mast. The stevedores were loading her with slabs of tin mined in Cornwall. Wulf brought Rob to the master, an unsmiling Welshman who nodded when asked if he would take a passenger, and named a price that seemed to be fair.
“I have a horse and a wagon,” Rob said.
The captain frowned. “It will cost you dear to move them by sea. Some travelers sell their beasts and carts on this side of the Channel and buy new ones on the other side.”
Rob did some pondering, but at length he decided to pay the freight charges, high as they were. It was his plan to work as a barber-surgeon during his travels. Horse and the red wagon were a good rig and he had no faith that he would find another that pleased him as much.
April brought softer weather and finally the first ships began to depart. The Queen Emma raised her anchor from the Thames mud on the eleventh day of the month, sent off by Binnie with much weeping. There was a fresh but gentle wind. Rob watched Wulf and seven other sailors haul on the lines, raising an enormous square sail that filled with a crack when it was barely up, and they floated into the outgoing tide. Laden low with its metal cargo, the big boat moved out of the Thames, slipped heavily through the narrows between the Isle of Thanet and the mainland, crept along the coast of Kent, and then doggedly crossed the Channel before the wind.
The green coast became darker as it receded, until England was a blue haze and then a purple smudge that was swallowed by the sea. Rob had no chance to think noble thoughts, for he was pukingly ill.
Wulf, passing him on deck, stopped and spat contemptuously over the side. “God’s blood! We are too low in the water to pitch or roll, it is the kindest of weather and the sea is calm. So what ails you?”
But Rob couldn’t answer, for he was leaning over in order not to sully the deck. Part of his problem was terror, for he had never been to sea and now was haunted by a lifetime of tales of drowned men, from the husband and sons of Editha Lipton to the unfortunate Tom Ross who had left Binnie a widow. The oily water onto which he was sick appeared inscrutable and bottomless, the likely home of every evil monster, and he rued the recklessness with which he had ventured into this strange environment. To make matters worse the wind quickened and the sea developed deep billows. Soon he confidently expected to die and would have welcomed the release. Wulf sought him out and offered dinner of bread and cold fried salt pork. He decided that Binnie must have confessed her visits to Rob’s bed and this was her future husband’s revenge, to which he hadn’t the strength to reply.
The voyage had lasted seven endless hours when another haze lifted itself out of the heaving horizon and slowly became Calais.
Wulf said a hasty goodbye, for he was busy with the sail. Rob led the horse and cart down the gangway and onto firm land that appeared to rise and fall like the sea. He reasoned that the ground in France could not go up and down or he would surely have heard of this oddity; indeed, after he had walked for a few minutes, the earth seemed firmer. But where was he bound? He had no idea as to destination or what his next action should be. The language was a blow. People around him spoke in a rattle of sound, and he could make no sense of it. Finally he stopped and climbed onto his cart and clapped his hands.
“I will hire somebody who has my language,” he shouted.
A pinch-faced old man came forward. He had thin shanks and a skeletal frame that warned he wouldn’t be of much use in lifting or carrying. But he noted Rob’s pale complexion and his eyes twinkled. “May we talk over a soothing glass? Apple spirits do wonders to settle the stomach,” he said, and the familiar English was benison to Rob’s ears.
They stopped at the first public house and sat at a rough pine table outside the front door.
“I am Charbonneau,” the Frenchman said above the waterfront din. “Louis Charbonneau.”
“Rob J. Cole.”
When the apple brandy came they drank to one another’s health and Charbonneau was proven right, for the spirits warmed Rob’s stomach and made him one of the living again. “I believe I can eat,” he said wonderingly.
Pleased, Charbonneau spoke an order and presently a serving girl brought to their table a crusty bread, a platter of small green olives, and a goat’s cheese of which even Barber would have approved.
“You can see why I’m in need of someone’s help,” Rob said ruefully, “for
I can’t even ask for food.”
Charbonneau smiled. “All my life I’ve been a sailor. I was a boy when my first ship put into London, and I well remember my longing to hear my native tongue.” Half of his time ashore had been spent on the other side of the Channel, he said, where the language was English.
“I’m a barber-surgeon, traveling to Persia to buy rare medicines and healing herbs that will be sent to England.” It was what he had decided to tell people, to avoid discussing the fact that his real reason for going to Ispahan was considered a crime by the Church.
Charbonneau lifted his eyebrows. “A long way.”
Rob nodded. “I need a guide, someone who can also translate for me, so that I may present entertainments and sell physick and treat the ill as we travel. I’ll pay a generous wage.”
Charbonneau took an olive from the plate and set it on the sun-warmed table. “France,” he said. He took another. “The Saxon-ruled five duchies of Germany.” Then another and another, until there were seven olives in a line. “Bohemia,” he said, indicating the third olive, “where live the Slavs and the Czechs. Next is the territory of the Magyars, a Christian country but full of wild barbarian horsemen. Then the Balkans, a place of tall, fierce mountains and tall, fierce people. Then Thrace, about which I know little save that it marks the final limit of Europe and contains Constantinople. And finally Persia, where you want to go.”
He regarded Rob contemplatively. “My native city is on the border between France and the land of the Germans, whose Teutonic languages I have spoken since childhood. Therefore, if you will hire me, I’ll accompany you past—” He picked up the first two olives and popped them into his mouth. “I must leave you in time to return to Metz by next winter.”
“Done,” Rob said in relief.
Then, while Charbonneau grinned at him and ordered another brandy, Rob solemnly consumed the other olives in the line, eating his way through the remaining five countries, one by one.
23
STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND
France was not as determinedly green as England but there was more sun. The sky seemed higher, the color of France was deep blue. Much of the land was woods, as at home. It was a country of fiercely neat farms, with here and there a somber stone castle similar to the ones Rob was accustomed to seeing in the countryside; but some of the lords lived in great wooden manor houses such as were uncommon in England. There were cattle in the pastures and peasants sowing wheat.
Already Rob saw some wonders. “Many of your farm buildings are roofless,” he observed.
“There is less rain here than in England,” Charbonneau said. “Some of our farmers thresh the grain in the open barns.”
Charbonneau rode a big, placid horse, light gray, almost white. His arms were used-looking and well kept. Each night he tended the mount carefully and cleaned and polished the sword and the dagger. He was good company at the campfire and on the road.
Every farm had orchards, glorious with blossom. Rob stopped at several, seeking to buy spirits; he could find no metheglin but bought a barrel of apple brandy similar to the tipple he had enjoyed in Calais, and found that it made superior Universal Specific.
The best roads here, as everywhere, had been built in earlier times by the Romans for their marching armies, broad highways, connecting and as straight as spear shafts. Charbonneau remarked on them lovingly. “They’re everywhere, a network that covers the world. If you wished, you could travel on just this kind of road all the way to Rome.”
Nevertheless, at a signpost pointing to a village called Caudry, Rob turned Horse off the Roman road. Charbonneau disapproved.
“Dangerous, these wooded tracks.”
“I must travel them to ply my trade. They’re the only way to the smaller villages. I blow my horn. It’s what I’ve always done.”
Charbonneau shrugged.
Caudry’s houses were cone-shaped on top, with roofs of brush or thatched straw. Women were cooking out of doors and most houses had a plank table and benches near the fire, beneath a rude sun shelter laid on four stout poles cut from young trees. It couldn’t be mistaken for an English village, but Rob went through the routine as if he were at home.
He handed Charbonneau the drum and told him to thump it. The Frenchman looked amused and then was intently interested as Horse began to prance to the sound of the drum.
“Entertainment today! Entertainment!” Rob called.
Charbonneau got the idea at once and thereafter translated everything as soon as Rob said it.
Rob found the entertainment a droll experience in France. The spectators laughed at the same stories but in different places, perhaps because they had to wait for the translation. During Rob’s juggling, Charbonneau stood transfixed, and his sputtered comments of delight seemed to infect the crowd, which applauded vigorously.
They sold a great deal of Universal Specific.
That night at their campfire Charbonneau kept urging him to juggle, but he refused. “You’ll get your fill of watching me, never fear.”
“It’s amazing. You say you’ve done this since you were a boy?”
“Yes.” He told of how Barber had taken him in after his parents had died.
Charbonneau nodded. “You were fortunate. In my twelfth year my father died and my brother Etienne and I were given to a pirate crew as ship’s boys.” He sighed. “My friend, that was a hard life.”
“I thought you said your first voyage took you to London.”
“My first voyage on a merchant ship, when I was seventeen. For five years before, I sailed with pirates.”
“My father helped defend England against three invasions. Twice when Danes invaded London. And once when pirates invaded Rochester,” Rob said slowly.
“My pirates didn’t attack London. Once we landed at Romney and burned two houses and took a cow that we killed for meat.”
They stared at one another.
“They were bad men. It was what I did to stay alive.”
Rob nodded. “And Etienne? What happened to Etienne?”
“When he was old enough he ran from them, back to our town, where he apprenticed himself to the baker. Today he’s an old man too, and makes exceptional bread.”
Rob grinned and wished him a good night.
Every few days they drove into a different village square, where it was business as usual—the dirty songs, the flattering portraits, the liquorish cures. At first Charbonneau translated Rob’s barber-surgeon enticements, but soon the Frenchman was so accustomed to them that he could assemble a crowd on his own. Rob worked hard, driven to fill his cash box because he knew money was protection in foreign places.
June was warm and dry. They bit tiny pieces out of the olive called France, traversing its northern edge, and by early summer were almost at the German border.
“We’re getting close to Strasbourg,” Charbonneau told him one morning.
“Let us go there, so you may see your people.”
“If we do, we’ll lose two days’ time,” Charbonneau said scrupulously, but Rob smiled and shrugged, for he had come to like the elderly Frenchman.
The town proved to be beautiful, abustle with craftsmen who were building a great cathedral that already showed the promise of surpassing the general grace of Strasbourg’s wide streets and handsome houses. They rode straight to the bakery, where a voluble Etienne Charbonneau clasped his brother in floury embrace.
Word of their arrival spread on a family intelligence system and that evening Etienne’s two handsome sons and three of his dark-eyed daughters, all with children and spouses, came to celebrate; the youngest girl, Charlotte, was unmarried and still lived at home with her father. Charlotte prepared a lavish dinner, three geese stewed with carrots and dried plums. There were two kinds of fresh bread. A round loaf that Etienne called Dog Bread was delicious despite its name, being composed of alternate layers of wheat and rye. “It is inexpensive, the bread of the poor,” Etienne said, and urged Rob to try a costlier long loaf baked fro
m meslin, flour blended from many grains ground fine. Rob liked the Dog Bread best.
It was a merry evening, with both Louis and Etienne translating for Rob to the general hilarity. The children danced, the women sang, Rob juggled for his dinner, and Etienne played the pipes as well as he baked bread. When finally the family left, everyone kissed both travelers farewell. Charlotte sucked in her stomach and stuck out her newly ripened chest, and her great warm eyes invited Rob outrageously. That evening as he lay in bed he wondered what life would be like if he were to settle into the bosom of such a family, and in such pleasant surroundings.
In the middle of the night he rose.
“Something?” Etienne asked softly. The baker was sitting in the dark not far from where his daughter lay.
“I have to piss.”
“I join you,” Etienne said, and the two of them walked outside together and plashed companionably against the side of the barn. When Rob returned to his bed of straw, Etienne settled into the chair and sat watching over Charlotte.
In the morning the baker showed Rob his great round ovens and gave them a sack full of Dog Bread baked twice so it was hard and unspoilable, like ship’s biscuit.
Strasbourgians would have to wait for their loaves that day; Etienne shut the bakery and rode with them a little of the way. The Roman road took them to the Rhine River a short ride from Etienne’s home and then turned downstream for a few miles to a ford. The brothers leaned from their saddles and kissed. “Go with God,” Etienne told Rob, and turned his horse toward home while they splashed across. The swirling water was cold and still faintly brown from the earth that had been washed into it by the spring floods far upstream. The trail up the opposite bank was steep, and Horse had to labor to pull the wagon into the land of the Teutons.