by Noah Gordon
“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.
Barber knew what his new boy was feeling. He had been exactly this one’s age when he found himself alone after berserkers had struck Clacton, the fishing village where he was born. It was burned into his memory.
Aethelred was the king of his childhood. As early as he could remember, his father had cursed Aethelred, saying the people had never been so poor under any other king. Aethelred squeezed and taxed, providing a lavish life for Emma, the strong-willed and beautiful woman he had imported from Normandy to be his queen. He also built an army with the taxes but used it more to protect himself than his people, and he was so cruel and bloodthirsty that some men spat when they heard his name.
In the spring of Anno Domini 991, Aethelred shamed his subjects by bribing Danish attackers with gold to turn them away. The following spring the Danish fleet returned to London as it had done for a hundred years. This time Aethelred had no choice; he gathered his fighters and warships, and the Danes were defeated on the Thames with great slaughter. But two years later there was a more serious invasion, when Olaf, King of the Norwegians, and Swegen, King of the Danes, sailed up the Thames with ninety-four ships. Again Aethelred gathered his army around London and managed to hold the Norsemen off, but this time the invaders saw that the cowardly king had left his country vulnerable in order to protect himself. Splitting up their fleet, the Norsemen beached their ships along the English coast and laid waste to the small seaside towns.
That week, Henry Croft’s father had taken him on his first long trip after herring. The morning they returned with a good catch he had run ahead, eager to be first in his mother’s arms and hear her words of praise. Hidden out of sight in a cove nearby were half a dozen Norwegian longboats. When he reached his cottage he saw a strange man dressed in animal skins staring out at him through the open shutters of the window hole.
He had no idea who the man was, but instinct caused him to turn and run for his life, straight to his father.
His mother lay on the floor already used and dead, but his father didn’t
know that. Luke Croft pulled his knife as he made for the house, but the three men who met him outside the front door were carrying swords. From afar, Henry Croft saw his father overpowered and taken. One of the men held his father’s hands behind his back. Another pulled his hair with both hands, forcing him to kneel and extend his neck. The third man cut off his head with a sword. In Barber’s nineteenth year he had witnessed a murderer executed in Wolverhampton; the sheriff’s axman had cleaved off the criminal’s head as if killing a rooster. In contrast, his father’s beheading had been clumsily done, for the Viking had required a flurry of strokes, as if he were hacking a piece of firewood.
Hysterical with grief and fear, Henry Croft had run into the woods and hidden himself like a hunted animal. When he wandered out, dazed and starving, the Norwegians were gone but they had left death and ashes. Henry had been collected with other orphan boys and sent to Crowland Abbey in Lincolnshire.
Decades of similar raids by heathen Norsemen had left the monasteries with too few monks and too many orphans, so the Benedictines solved two problems by ordaining many of the parentless boys. At nine years of age Henry was administered vows and instructed to promise God that he would live in poverty and chastity forever, obeying the precepts established by the blessed St. Benedict of Nursia.
It gained him an education. Four hours a day he studied, six hours a day he performed damp, dirty labor. Crowland owned vast tracts, mostly fens, and each day Henry and the other monks turned the muddy earth, pulling plows like staggering beasts in order to convert bogs into fields. It was expected that the rest of his time would be spent in contemplation or prayer. There were morning services, afternoon services, evening services, perpetual services. Every prayer was considered a single step up an interminable stairway that would take his soul to heaven. There was no recreation or athletics, but he was allowed to pace the cloister, a covered walk in the shape of a rectangle. To the north side of the cloister was the sacristy, the buildings in which the sacred utensils were kept. To the east was the church; to the west, the chapter house; to the south, a cheerless refectory consisting of a dining room, kitchen, and pantry on the ground floor and a dormitory above.
Within the rectangle were graves, the ultimate proof that life at Crowland Abbey was predictable: tomorrow would be identical to yesterday and eventually every monk would lie inside the cloister. Because some mistook this for peace, Crowland had attracted several noblemen who had fled the politics of Court and Aethelred’s cruelty and saved their lives by taking the cowl. These influential elite lived in individual cells, as did the true mystics who sought God through agony of spirit and pain of body brought on by hair shirts, inspired pinching, and self-flagellation. For the other sixty-seven males who wore the tonsure despite the fact that they were uncalled and unholy, home was a single large chamber containing sixty-seven sleeping pallets. If Henry Croft awoke at any moment of any night he might hear coughing and sneezing, assorted snores, sounds of masturbation, the wounded cries of dreamers, the breaking of wind, and the shattering of the silence rule through unecclesiastic cursing and clandestine conversations which almost always were about food. Meals at Crowland were very sparse.
The town of Peterborough was only eight miles away, but he never saw it. One day when he was fourteen years old he asked his confessor, Father Dunstan, for permission to sing hymns and recite prayers at the riverside between Vespers and Night Song. This was granted. As he walked the river meadow, Father Dunstan followed at a discreet distance. Henry paced slowly and deliberately, his hands behind his back and his head bowed as though in worship worthy of a bishop. It was a beautiful and warm summer’s evening with a fresh breeze off the water. He had been taught about this river by Brother Matthew, a geographer. It was the River Welland. It rose in the Midlands near Corby and easily slipped and wriggled to Crowland like a snake, thence flowing northeast between rolling hills and fertile valleys before rushing through coastal swamps to empty into the great bay of the North Sea called The Wash.
Surrounding the river was God’s bounty of forest and field. Crickets shrilled. Birds twittered in the trees and cows looked at him with dumb respect as they grazed. There was a little cockleboat pulled up on the bank.
The following week he asked to be allowed to recite solitary prayer by the river after Lauds, the dawn service. Permission was granted and this time Father Dunstan didn’t come. When Henry got to the riverbank he put the little boat into the water, clambered in, and pushed off.
He used the oars only to get into the current, then he sat very still in the center of the flimsy boat and watched the brown water, letting the river take him like a fallen leaf. After a time, when he knew he was away, he began to laugh. He whooped and shouted boyish things. “That for you!” he cried, not knowing whether he was defying the sixty-six monks who would be sleeping without him, or Father Dunstan or the God who was seen at Crowland as such a cruel being.
He stayed on the river all day, until the water that rushed toward the sea was too deep and dangerous for his liking. Then he beached the boat and began a time when he learned the price of freedom.
He wandered the coastal villages, sleeping wherever, living on what he could beg or steal. Having nothing to eat was far worse than having little to eat. A farmer’s wife gave him a sack of food and an old tunic and ragged trousers in exchange for the Benedictine habit that would make woolen shirts for her sons. In the port of Grimsby a fisherman finally took him on as helper and worked him brutally for more than two years in return for scant fare and bare shelter. When the fisherman died, his wife sold the boat to people who wanted no boys. Henry spent hungry months until he found a troupe of entertainers and traveled with them, lugging baggage and helping with the necessities of their craft in return for scraps of food and their protection. Even in his eyes their arts were clumsy but they knew how to bang a drum and draw a crowd, and when a cap was passed surprising numbers in their audiences dropped a coin. He watched them hungrily. He was too old to be a tumbler, since acrobats must have their joints broken while they are still children. But the jugglers taught him their trade. He mimicked the magician and learned the simpler feats of deception; the magician taught him that he must never give the impression of necromancy, for all over England the Church and the Crown were hanging witches. He listened carefully to the storyteller, whose young sister was the first to allow him inside her body. He felt a kinship with the entertainers, but the troupe dissolved in Derbyshire after a year and everyone went separate ways without him.
A few weeks later in the town of Matlock, his luck took a turn when a barber-surgeon named James Farrow indentured him for six years. Later he would learn that none of the local youths would serve Farrow as prentice because there were stories linking him to witchcraft. By the time Henry heard the rumors he had been with Farrow two years and knew the man was no witch. Though the barber-surgeon was a cold man and bastardly strict, to Henry Croft he represented genuine opportunity.
Matlock Township was rural and thinly populated, without upper-class patients or prosperous merchants to support a physician, or the large population of poorer folk to attract a surgeon. In a far-flung farm area surrounding Matlock, James Farrow, country barber-surgeon, was all there was, and in addition to administering cleansing clysters and cutting and shaving hair, he performed surgery and prescribed remedies. Henry did his bidding for more than five years. Farrow was a stern taskmaster; he beat Henry when the apprentice made mistakes, but he taught him everything he knew, and meticulously.
During Henry’s fourth year in Matlock—it was the year 1002—King Aethelred committed an act that would have far-reaching and terrible consequences. In his difficulties the king had allowed certain Danes to settle in southern England and had given them land, on condition that they would fight for him against his enemies. He had thus bought the services of a Danish noble named Pallig, who was husband to Gunnhilda, the sister of Swegen, King of Denmark. That year the Vikings invaded England and followed their usual tactics, slay
ing and burning. When they reached Southampton, the king decided to pay tribute again, and he gave the invaders twenty-four thousand pounds to go away.
When their ships had carried the Norsemen off, Aethelred was shamed and fell into a frustrated fury. He ordered that all Danish people who were in England should be slain on St. Brice’s Day, November 13. The treacherous mass murder was carried out as the king ordered, and it seemed to unlock an evil that had been festering in the English people.
The world had always been brutal, but after the murders of the Danes life became even more cruel. All over England violent crimes took place, witches were hunted out and put to death by hanging or burning, and a blood lust seemed to take the land.
Henry Croft’s apprenticeship was almost completed when an elderly man named Bailey Aelerton succumbed while under Farrow’s care. There was nothing remarkable about the death, but word quickly spread that the man had died because Farrow had stuck him with needles and bewitched him.
The previous Sunday, in the small church in Matlock the priest had disclosed that evil spirits had been heard carousing at midnight about the graves in the churchyard, engaged in carnal copulation with Satan. “It is abominable to our Saviour that the dead should rise through devilskill. They who exercise such crafts are God’s enemies,” he thundered. The Devil was among them, the priest warned, served by an army of witches disguised as human creatures and practicing black magic and secret killing.
He armed the awestruck and terrified worshipers with a counterspell to be used against anyone suspected of witchcraft: “Arch sorcerer who attacks my soul, your spell shall be reversed, your curse returned to you a thousandfold. In the name of the Holy Trinity restore me to health and strength again. In the name of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost. Amen.”