A gasp of horror rose from the onlookers. They shook their fists at Oliver for his cruelty in killing innocent defenseless animals. “Here now!” they shouted, and “Bloody bastard!” All the while, Montagu sat where he was in his sedan chair, an amused smile playing over his lips. His lackey was running among the ragged bullies, shouting orders. They began to throw bricks at Oliver again. Two or three of the missiles struck him. He uttered a loud grunt after each impact but stood his ground. Suddenly, amid the milling bullies, Oliver saw the slack-jawed woodman with the black hair who had killed Henry m the Gypsy football game and then run away into the wood. With a roar, Oliver ran straight for him. Bricks filled the air, the melee shifted in front of Oliver’s eyes, the man disappeared.
Oliver knew that these men would kill him if he let them go on throwing bricks at him. The woodman reappeared, flinging bricks with a whippy motion of his arm. His hair hung down over his unshaven face. He was missing all his front teeth, so that he had a black mouth in the middle of a black beard. Was he the same man? He vanished again.
Oliver drew the other two pistols and aimed them at his enemies. Over the gleaming blue barrels of the weapons he glimpsed terrified faces, oxlike faces with glazed eyes. The bullies scattered, looking back fearfully over their shoulders. Oliver saw everything that happened around him. Montagu said something to his lackey. “Surround him, you fools!” the lackey shouted. “Come at him from the back!” Two or three bricks struck Oliver in the kidneys. He hunched his back against the pain and fired one of the pistols. Somebody howled. The rest fell back. Oliver lowered his pistols and looked at the crowd of onlookers. They were watching the oxen rather than the men. One of the animals had broken its neck trying to escape from its yoke and the other three looked as though they might do the same. Oliver’s chest heaved; half-strangled by pain and rage, he drew in his breath in rasping gulps.
To Rose, riding around the end of Catherine Street with Edward Ash beside her, Oliver looked like a bear. Other men were circling around him, baying like hounds. What else could Oliver be if he were not a bear? How could there be any mistake about it? Suddenly Rose saw the oxen, feebly thrashing and lowing beyond Oliver’s embattled figure.
“Look!” she said.
Ash glanced up from his Hobbes, marking the place with a finger as usual. He said, “That is your husband.” It was not a question, but Rose answered it anyway in her absent tone of voice.
“Yes,” she said. She bit her gloved fist. “But, oh, the poor oxen!”
“Oxen, madam? Oxen? Your husband is bleeding in the public street.”
While they rode across Buckinghamshire, Rose had told Ash the whole story of Henry’s house being pulled down. At the time, he did not seem to be listening, but now he appeared to know every detail.
“That is what’s left of Harding’s house?” he asked. “And that person in blue is Montagu?”
Rose nodded. Montagu wore pale blue silk today. Coat, breeches, shirt, hat, matched beautifully, making the lace on his cuffs and collar seem whiter than it really was. His hat and stockings were a paler, matched blue. Even his boots were blue. He was wearing a magnificent wig that also seemed faintly blue.
Lolling in his sedan chair, Montagu was eating another walnut; the mud around him was littered with broken shells. The woman from the Widow’s, seated beside him in a second sedan chair, drank wine greedily from a glass goblet while watching Oliver and his tormentors over the rim.
“You, there,” Ash said in his mighty voice.
Montagu gave no sign that he heard. Who in this rabble had the right to address him?
But Ash’s voice had an effect on everyone else. Even Oliver heard it. It penetrated the muffling cloud produced by his concussion and caused the buzzing in his ears to stop. Oliver thought it was miraculous.
“You, on the sedan chair, in the blue wig,” Ash said.
Montagu looked for the owner of the voice. His eyes sparkled when he saw Edward Ash seated on his ridiculous off-color horse, gray-haired and gray-faced, wearing plain black cloth and a round hat without a band and twisted stockings instead of boots.
“What did you say, you silly weed?” Montagu said. As he spoke, his gaze was on Rose, who sat her horse easily a few steps beyond Ash.
“Answer me, weed,” Montagu said, looking Rose up and down.
Ash put his book into the pocket of his baggy coat, which was so old that its black dye was fading into dull green.
“If you wish it, sir, I will come closer, so that you will hear me,” he said.
The crowd laughed—not at Ash’s words, but at the novelty of his voice. He could have been heard on the other side of the Thames.
While they laughed, Ash clapped his heels into the ribs of his horse and spoke to it. The astonished beast, which had walked all the way from Chesham with a man reading a book in the saddle, suddenly found that it had a cavalryman on its back. Hands gripping the reins squarely in front of his belt buckle, back straight, heels down, Edward Ash drove the old hammerhead through the bullies and straight for Montagu’s sedan chair. Sir Cecil Lockwood’s mastiffs, footsore after their long walk but excited by the noise and the smell of ox blood, bounded after the horse with phlegmy barks.
The crowd scattered. Montagu’s chairmen tried to get out of the carrying poles, but the mud was too sticky for fast movement. Ash turned the pony at the last instant so that its shoulder struck the sedan chair, then pulled his wild-eyed mount to a halt with its haunches in the muck.
Far away beyond the mob of bullies, Rose shrieked. Montagu sprawled into the mud in his silk suit, taking the woman from the Widow’s down with him in a tangle of skirt and sword. His wig fell off, revealing a bald crown surrounded by a long fringe of wispy white hair. For the first time, Rose noticed that Montagu was not a young man. He could not get up without assistance, but lay in the mud, struggling to sit up, tugging at the hilt of his sword, which was pinned beneath the whore. He slapped the woman on the side of the head and tried to push her away.
The mastiffs, four of them, leaped on Montagu and the woman. The weight of the dogs knocked Montagu backward into the mud again. A brindle animal growled and snuffled Montagu’s face. The others seized the skirt of his coat and dragged him a few feet over the slimy ground while the first dog licked his face. The blue silk ripped in their teeth. Then they bounded onto him again, growling and drooling and woofing happily as their teeth shredded Montagu’s clothes. One of the mastiffs snatched the big puff of lace from Montagu’s neck, revealing a dark brown mole the size of a small plum, and gamboled over the mud with the lace, shaking his blunt head and growling like a puppy. Another rolled Montagu in the mud and stripped off his shirt, leaving him with nothing but the sleeves. The mastiffs growled and frisked as they worked. They weren’t angry or dangerous; they were playing Trespassers.
Suddenly Ash called them off. Although they had never heard his voice before, they obeyed it. They sat all in a row between Montagu and Ash’s horse, which watched the scene with lowered head and pricked ears.
Ash looked down on Montagu’s prostrate figure. Montagu was practically naked. His chest and back were covered with large brown moles, and others were forming beneath the skin. Some had been sliced off by a quack and were suppurating. A look of pity came over Ash’s face.
“Give this man a cloak to cover himself,” Ash said.
Montagu’s lackey handed him his own cloak. Still sitting on the ground, Montagu hid himself inside it, but when the woman from the Widow’s crawled across the mud and offered him his wig, he dashed it into the mud.
“You bloody bastard,” Montagu said. “You’d put the dogs on me?”
Montagu was on his feet now, frizzy-haired and smeared with mud, blue silk hanging in tatters from his emaciated arms and legs. The woman from the Widow’s sprawled in the mud with her skirts thrown up and two plump legs spread out in white stockings. She began to sob hysterically. Montagu, struggling to find his sword beneath his cloak, kicked her hard in the ribs; she s
obbed louder and lay where she was.
Finally Montagu got his sword out of its scabbard. “Put that weapon down,” Ash said.
“I’ll put it down your fucking throat,” Montagu said. He flogged the chairmen onto their feet with the flat of the sword and got back into the sedan chair. Shoulder-high again, he lifted the sword above his head and shouted to the bullies.
“Pull this noisy bastard off his horse and bring him to me,” he said.
“Do not attempt it!” Ash said.
“Attempt it?” Montagu said. “I won’t attempt it, I’ll do it. You’ll learn to get out of the way when I pass by—by God you will!”
Ash was completely unruffled. “You won’t pass by very much longer, friend,” he said. The words clanged down the street. “I forewarn you of your end. The tokens are all over your body.”
“What?”
“Friend, believe the danger. Do not put off your preparation for your end.”
“What the hell are you?” Montagu tried to laugh.
“God has arranged that we meet. I am very sorry to say it, friend, but you are dying. Any physician will tell you so after a single look at those brown growths you are having treated by a fool.”
“Dying, am I?” Montagu said, his voice sounding thin coming after Ash’s. “Not before you do, friend. Seize this madman!”
The bullies hesitated for a moment. Then, led by the lank-haired woodman from Norwood, they surged forward. Oliver seized the woodman, who squirmed in his grasp with his toothless mouth open like a carp’s. “I know you!” Oliver cried. “I know everything!” The woodman pulled a knife—a homemade knife with a broken blade tied with thongs into a piece of split sapling—and stabbed Oliver in the biceps. Blood spurted. Oliver released the man, who ran away waving his bloody knife and bowling people over in the crowd.
“An artery!” Ash cried. “Help him!”
Oliver, swaying, looked at his gushing wound.
But Sir Cecil’s yokels hung back. This was not the jolly, rough, ale-drinking Oliver Barebones they knew. Things in London were not as they had imagined they would be. They had not expected to see murder. They were shocked by the suffering of the oxen, who were still thrashing around and bellowing piteously. Not one of them had ever been more than five miles from home. They had never heard so much noise before. What did Sir Cecil want them to do?
While they pondered this question, Montagu’s bullies knocked Oliver to the ground and bore down on Ash. Montagu stood up in his sedan chair and waved his sword.
“All fellows to football!” Ash thundered, and plunged his horse into the onrushing knot of toughs.
Several of them fell. Others grasped at Ash’s leg and he reared his mount to shake them off. With a cheer, the yokels burst into motion at last and began to knock down Montagu’s men. The crowd fled, with the woman from the Widow’s swaying among them in her ruined clothes.
Oliver was on his knees with his undischarged pistol still dangling from his hands, staring dumbly at the blood spraying from the wound in his arm.
Ash leaped off the horse, seized the pistol, and fired it into the air. Behind him the yokels and the bullies were fighting so hard that they did not hear it go off. Oliver did not question Ash’s action. He was feeling very faint and sick at his stomach. There was a roaring in his ears that even Ash’s voice could not pierce.
Ash pulled the turban from Oliver’s head, tore off a strip of cloth, wound it around the bleeding arm above the knife puncture, tied a knot, inserted the barrel of the pistol into the knot, and twisted.
Oliver said, “The blood stopped.”
Ash nodded in satisfaction. “Yes. It is a method invented by the French, though some say it was originated by the Red Indians of America,” he said in what was, for him, a conversational tone. “Pinch the artery between the wound and the heart and the bleeding stops.”
“Wonderful,” Oliver said. “The Indians, you say? I am going to America soon.”
“Then you can thank your benefactors in person. Now, Mr. Barebones, on your feet, if you please. We must sew up this artery before the flesh mortifies.”
Rose had not moved. Mounted sidesaddle on her beautiful chestnut, her profile prettily displayed under her favorite bonnet, she watched the fight with fascination. Two of the yokels had captured Montagu’s chair and they were dashing up and down the street with it while he slashed ineffectually at them with his sword.
Ash spoke to her. “Off your horse, if you please, madam,” he said. “Your husband needs doctoring.”
To her own surprise, Rose dismounted instantly and walked obediently to where Oliver kneeled, soupy muck splashing over her boots and hems. She took Oliver by his unwounded arm.
“Come, husband,” she said.
It was the first time she had touched him of her own accord. Oliver felt love in his heart again and desire coursing through his wounded body. He imagined Rose beside him in the lovely soft light of the American forest.
“Lay him in his bed and stay by him,” Ash said. “I must fetch my box.”
Sir Cecil’s men had pushed the baggage down to London on a little cart. Ash strode toward it through what remained of the battle. Montagu’s men, Rose’s enemies, lay groaning all over the ground. Like any general whose mind was elsewhere, Ash paid them no heed. Yet he was tremendously alert, and he rode better than Robert.
Who was this Edward Ash? What was he? Rose had to think in order to breathe; the air burned in her chest. London seemed very strange, like a place she had never seen before but only heard about, which was filling up a space that had been saved for it in her mind.
“Rose,” Oliver said.
Why didn’t Ash speak to her in his wonderful voice? Rose did not realize it, but she was feeling the same things that Oliver was feeling as he stumbled along beside her, dreaming from his wounds and murmuring her name.
21
The condition that Edward Ash observed in Montagu, consisting of the formation of a large number of malignant moles or tumors on and under the skin, was one he had seen before. It was a form of cancer that appeared suddenly and killed very quickly.
In addition to being a minister of God, Ash was a physician and surgeon. This had come about, Ash knew, through God’s intention. Ash had been created as a man of powerful sexual instincts—so strong, in fact, that he knew from an early age that only marriage could contain them. He had married at the age of twenty, as soon as he was ordained. His bride, a fifteen-year-old Chesham girl named Betsy, was pretty and mild and possessed of a radiant smile. Betsy had borne him a child every ten months, including a set of mixed twins, so that by the time Ash was whipped and impoverished and cast out of London, he was the father of six living children.
After the whipping, Ash returned with his wife and children to Buckinghamshire and lived in a cottage on his family’s property. His people were minor landowners, more than yeomen but not quite gentry, who had always been puzzled by their son’s religious zeal. While Ash’s back healed, he prayed, locking himself into a room for five or six hours a day, and sometimes praying all night too, so that Betsy would find him unconscious—not asleep—on the floor in the morning. His muffled voice, locked up in the room with him, made the atmosphere in the cottage tremble like the skin of a drum. Ash knew that he could not have suffered so greatly in the absence of a purpose. In his prayers, he asked God for a sign that would reveal His plan for the remainder of His servant’s life.
Sickness struck. All six of Ash’s children died of meningitis in rapid succession. Like less horrible illnesses, the disease began with a low fever and loss of appetite. This was followed by intense headache and by constipation and retention of the urine so that the stomach became distended and the skin turned yellow. In the final stage, the neck arched backward toward the heels as if the body was seeking to form itself into a circle, causing indescribable agony. As in the plague, the victim could not bear to look at the light. Noise also caused pain, and the dying children shrieked at their father to stop
praying. He could not do so.
The physician called by Ash subscribed to the dominant medical theory of the day, which held that all illnesses were caused by distempers of the four humors that ruled the body—blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile. Meningitis, the doctor explained, was caused by an excess of phlegm, or pituita, dripping down from the pituitary gland at the base of the brain. To drive out the excessive phlegm, he prescribed expectorants, which the children could not swallow because they were screaming. The doctrine of contraries, recorded by the Greek physician Galen in the second century after Christ, stated that the body was ruled by the four elements, heat, cold, wet, and dry, and each part should be treated by its opposite element. The stomach was cold. Therefore the physician prescribed hot drinks and hot compresses. Forcing liquids into children who could not void may have been a merciful treatment in the end, in the sense that it hastened their deaths if it did not make them easier.
Betsy was unable to bear these blows. She had a morbid fear of meningitis, a disease that had killed all of her own sisters. Terrified of infection, she sat all day on the floor behind the bed, refusing to touch her children while they died. At this time she herself was only twenty-one years old. When the last child died, Betsy stopped speaking. Ash found it impossible to comfort her. She would not utter a word, even in prayer, and would cover her ears when Ash prayed; sometimes Ash thought that Betsy believed in her heart that his praying had killed the children because it had agonized them so.
Like everyone else, Ash understood that most children in England died before they grew up; as a minister he had buried nearly as many as he had christened. He accepted God’s will in this matter. He realized that excessive grief was impious. But as he watched the small bodies of his children, which had been so perfect and so beautiful, twist in pain and waste away, he could not accept his helplessness.
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