The Cole Trilogy: The Physician, Shaman, and Matters of Choice

by Noah Gordon

  He saw no reason to contradict Barber; but thus, gradually, he became aware that the gift was not only for predicting death but could be useful in considering illness and perhaps in helping the living.

  Incitatus pulled the red cart slowly northward across the face of England, village by village, some too small to have a name. Whenever they came to a monastery or church Barber waited patiently in the cart while Rob inquired after Father Ranald Lovell and the boy named William Cole, but nobody had ever heard of them.

  Somewhere between Carlisle and Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Rob climbed onto a stone wall built nine hundred years before by Hadrian’s cohorts to protect England from Scottish marauders. Sitting in England and gazing out at Scotland, he told himself that his most likely chance of seeing someone of his own blood lay in Salisbury, where the Haverhills had taken his sister Anne Mary.

  When finally they reached Salisbury, he received short shrift from the Corporation of Bakers.

  The Chief Baker was a man named Cummings. He was squat and froglike, not so heavy as Barber but fleshy enough to advertise his trade. “I know no Haverhills.”

  “Will you not seek them out in your records?”

  “See here. It is fair time! Much of my membership is involved in Salisbury Fair and we are harried and distraught. You must see us after the fair.”

  All through the fair, only part of him juggled and drew and helped to treat patients, while he kept watch constantly for a familiar face, a glimpse of the girl he imagined she had grown to be.

  He didn’t see her.

  The day after the fair he returned to the building of the Salisbury Corporation of Bakers. It was a neat and attractive place, and despite his nervousness he wondered why the houses of other guilds were always built more soundly than those of the Corporations of Carpenters.

  “Ah, the young barber-surgeon.” Cummings was kinder in his greeting and more composed, now. He searched thoroughly through two great ledgers and then shook his head. “We’ve never had a baker name of Haverhill.”

  “A man and his wife,” Rob said. “They sold their pastry shop in London and declared they were coming here. They have a little girl, sister to me. Name of Anne Mary.”

  “It’s obvious what has happened, young surgeon. After selling their shop and before coming here, they found better opportunity elsewhere, heard of a place more in need of bakers.”

  “Yes. That’s likely.” He thanked the man and returned to the wagon.

  Barber was visibly troubled but advised courage. “You mustn’t give up hope. Someday you’ll find them again, you will see.”

  But it was as if the earth had opened and swallowed the living as well as the dead. The small hope he had kept alive for them now seemed too innocent. He felt the days of his family were truly over, and with a chill he forced himself to recognize that whatever lay ahead for him, most likely he would face it alone.

  15

  THE JOURNEYMAN

  A few months before the end of Rob’s apprenticeship they sat over pitchers of brown ale in the public room of the inn at Exeter and warily discussed terms of employment.

  Barber drank in silence, as if lost in thought, and eventually offered a small salary. “Plus a new set of clothing,” he said, as if overcome by a burst of generosity.

  Rob hadn’t been with him six years for nothing. He shrugged doubtfully. “I feel drawn to go back to London,” he said, and refilled their cups.

  Barber nodded. “A set of clothing every two years whether needed or not,” he added after studying Rob’s face.

  They ordered a supper of rabbit pie, which Rob ate with gusto. Barber tore into the publican instead of the food. “What meat I find is overly tough and stupidly seasoned,” he grumbled. “We might make the salary higher. Slightly higher,” he said.

  “It is poorly seasoned,” Rob said. “That’s something you never do. I’ve always been taken by your way with game.”

  “How much salary do you hold to be fair? For a chap of sixteen years?”

  “I wouldn’t want a salary.”

  “Not have a salary?” Barber eyed him with suspicion.

  “No. Income is gotten from sale of the Specific and treatment of patients. Therefore, I want the income from every twelfth bottle sold and every twelfth patient treated.”

  “Every twentieth bottle and every twentieth patient.”

  He hesitated only a moment before nodding. “These terms to run one year, when they may be renewed upon mutual agreement.”

  “Done!”

  “Done,” Rob said calmly.

  Each of them lifted his mug and grinned.

  “Hah!” said Barber.

  “Hah!” said Rob.

  Barber took his new expenses seriously. One day when they were in Northampton, where there were skilled craftsmen, he hired a joiner to make a second screen, and when they reached the next place, which was Huntington, he set it up not far from his own.

  “Time you stood on your own limbs,” he said.

  After the entertainment and the portraits, Rob sat himself behind the screen and waited.

  Would they look at him and laugh? Or, he wondered, would they turn away and go back to stand in Barber’s line?

  His first patient winced when Rob took his hands, for his old cow had trod upon his wrist. “Kicked over the pail, the bitchy thing. Then, as I was reaching to set it right, the cursed animal stepped on me, you see?”

  Rob held the joint tenderly and at once forgot about anything else. There was a painful bruise. There was also a bone broken, the one that ran down from the thumb. An important bone. It took him a little time to bind the wrist right and fix a sling.

  The next patient was the personification of his fears, a slim and angular woman with stern eyes. “I have lost my hearing,” she declared.

  Upon examination, her ears did not seem to be plugged with wax. He knew nothing that could be done for her. “I cannot help you,” he said regretfully.

  She shook her head.

  “I CANNOT HELP YOU!” he shouted.

  “THEN ASK TH’OTHER BARBER.”

  “HE CANNOT HELP YOU EITHER.”

  The woman’s face had grown choleric. “BE DAMNED TO HELL. I SHALL ASK HIM MYSELF.”

  He was aware both of Barber’s laughter and the amusement of other patients as she stomped away.

  He was waiting behind the screen, red-faced, when he was joined by a young man perhaps a year or two older than he. Rob restrained an impulse to sigh as he looked at a left forefinger in an advanced stage of mortification.

  “Not a beautiful sight.”

  The young man was whitish in the corners of his mouth but managed a smile nevertheless. “I mashed it chopping wood for the fire all of a fortnight ago. It hurt, of course, but appeared to be mending nicely. And then …”

  The first joint was black, running into an area of angry discoloration that became blistered flesh. The large blisters gave off a bloody flux and a gaseous stink.

  “How was it treated?”

  “A neighbor man cautioned me to pack it with moist ashes mixed with goose shit, to draw the pain.”

  He nodded, for it was a common remedy. “Well. It’s now a consuming sickness that, if allowed, will eat into the hand and then the arm. Long before it gets into the body, you will die. The finger must come off.”

  The young man nodded gamely.

  Rob allowed the sigh to escape. He had to be doubly certain; to take an appendage was a serious step, and this one would miss the finger for the rest of his life as he tried to earn his living.

  He walked to Barber’s screen.

  “Something?” Barber’s eyes twinkled.

  “Something I need to show you,” Rob said, and led the way back to his patient, the fat man following at a more labored pace.

  “I’ve told him it must come off.”

  “Yes,” Barber said, and the smile was gone. “That was correct. You wish assistance, chappy?”

  Rob shook his head. He gave the patient thre
e bottles of the Specific to drink and then carefully collected everything he would need, so he wouldn’t have to go searching in the middle of the procedure or shout for Barber’s help.

  He took two sharp knives, a needle and waxed thread, a short piece of board, rag strips for binding, and a little fine-toothed saw.

  The youth’s arm was lashed to the board so that his hand was palm up. “Make a fist without the mortified finger,” Rob said, and wrapped the hand with bandages and tied it off so the sound digits were out of the way.

  He enlisted three strong men from the nearby loungers, two to hold the youth and one to grasp the board.

  A dozen times he had witnessed Barber doing this and twice had done it himself under Barber’s supervision, but never before had he attempted it alone. The trick was to cut far enough away from the mortification to stop its progress, while at the same time leaving as much of a stub as possible.

  He picked up a knife and sliced into sound flesh. The patient screamed and tried to rise out of his chair.

  “Hold him.”

  He sliced a circle all around the finger and paused for a moment to soak up the bleeding with a rag before slitting the healthy section of finger on both sides and carefully flaying the skin toward the knuckle, making two flaps.

  The man holding the board let go and began to vomit.

  “Take the board,” Rob told the one who had been holding the shoulders. There was no trouble with the transfer, for the patient had fainted.

  Bone was an easy substance to cut, and the saw made a reassuring rasping as he took off the finger.

  He trimmed the flaps carefully and made a neat stump as he had been taught, neither so tight as to give pain nor so loose as to give trouble, then took up the needle and thread and made a good job of it with small, thrifty stitches. There was a bloody ooze that he washed away by pouring the Universal Specific over the stump. Rob helped carry the groaning youth to where he could recover in the shade under a tree.

  After that in quick succession he bound a sprained ankle, dressed a deep sickle cut in a child’s arm, sold three bottles of the physick to a widow cursed with the headache and another half dozen bottles to a man with the gout. He was beginning to feel cocky when a woman came behind the screen with the wasting sickness.

  There was no mistaking it; she was gaunt and her skin was waxy, with a sheen of perspiration on her cheeks. He had to force himself to look at her, having sensed her fate through his hands.

  “ … do not desire to eat,” she was saying, “nor can I keep anything I eat, for what is not spewed forth rushes through me in the form of bloody stools.”

  He placed his hand on her poor abdomen and felt the bumpy rigidity, to which he guided her palm.

  “Bubo.”

  “What is bubo, sirrah?”

  “A lump that grows by feeding on healthy flesh. You feel a number of buboes beneath your hand.”

  “There is terrible pain. Is there no medicine?” she said calmly.

  He loved her for her courage and was not tempted to lie for mercy’s sake. He shook his head, for Barber had told him that many persons suffered from bubo of the stomach and each died of the sickness.

  When she had left him wishing he had become a carpenter, he saw the severed finger on the ground. Picking it up and wrapping it in a rag, he carried it to where the recovering youth lay under the tree and placed it in his good hand.

  Puzzled, he looked at Rob. “What shall I do with it?”

  “The priests say you must bury lost parts to await you in a churchyard, so you may rise whole again on Judgment Day.”

  The young man thought on it and then nodded. “Thank you, barbersurgeon,” he said.

  When they reached Rockingham the first thing they saw was the white hair of the unguent seller named Wat. Next to Rob on the wagon seat, Barber grunted in disappointment, assuming that the other mountebank had preempted their right to put on an entertainment there. But after they had exchanged greetings, Wat put their minds to rest.

  “I give no performance here. Instead, let me invite you both to a baiting.”

  He took them to see his bear, a large scarred beast with an iron ring through its black nose. “It is sickly and would soon die of natural causes, so bruin shall make me a final profit tonight.”

  “Is this Bartram, whom I wrestled?” Rob asked, in a voice that sounded strange in his ears.

  “No, Bartram is long gone, baited four years past. This is a sow, name of Godiva,” Wat said, and replaced the cloth over the cage.

  That afternoon Wat observed their entertainment and the subsequent sale of physick; with Barber’s permission, the unguent peddler climbed onto their bank and announced the bear-baiting that would take place that evening in the pit behind the tannery, admission half a penny.

  By the time he and Barber arrived, dusk had fallen and the meadow surrounding the pit was illumined by the leaping flames of a dozen pitch torches. The field was loud with profanity and male laughter. Trainers held back three muzzled dogs that strained against their short leashes: a rawboned brindle mastiff, a red dog that looked like the mastiff’s smaller cousin, and a large Danish elkhound.

  Godiva was led in by Wat and a pair of handlers. The shambling bear was hooded, but she smelled the dogs and instinctively turned to face them.

  The men led her to a thick post in the center of the pit. Stout leather fastenings were attached to the top and the bottom of the pole, and the pitmaster used the lower set to tether the bear by her right hind.

  Immediately there were cries of protest. “The upper strap, the upper strap!”

  “Tether the beast’s neck!”

  “Fasten her by the nose ring, you bloody fool!”

  The pitmaster was unmoved by calls or insults, for he was experienced. “The bear is declawed. Therefore it would be a dull show indeed if her head were tied. I allow her the use of her fangs,” he said.

  Wat untied the hood from Godiva’s head and sprang back.

  The bear looked about in the flickering light, staring with small puzzled eyes at the men and the dogs.

  She was obviously an old beast and far from her prime, and the men shouting the wagering odds received few bets until they offered three to one on the dogs, which looked savage and fit as they were led to the lip of the pit. Their trainers scratched their heads and massaged their necks, then slipped off the muzzles and leashes and stepped away.

  At once the mastiff and the smaller red dog went low on their bellies, their eyes fixed on Godiva. Growling, they darted in to snap at air and then retreated, for they were not yet aware that the bear’s claws were gone and they feared and respected them.

  The elkhound loped around the perimeter of the pit, and the bear cast nervous glances at him over her shoulder.

  “You must watch the small red dog,” Wat shouted in Rob’s ear.

  “He would seem the least fearsome.”

  “He is from a remarkable line, bred down from the mastiff to kill bulls in the pit.”

  Blinking, the bear stood erect on her hind paws with her back against the pole. Godiva appeared confused; she saw the real threat of the dogs but she was a performing animal and accustomed to tethers and the screams of human beings, and she wasn’t angry enough to suit the pitmaster. The man picked up a long lance and jabbed one of her wrinkled dugs, slicing off a dark nipple.

  The bear howled in pain.

  Encouraged, the mastiff flew in. What he wanted to tear was soft underbelly, but the bear turned and the dog’s terrible teeth ripped into her left haunch. Godiva bellowed and swiped. If her claws had not been cruelly removed when she was a cub, the mastiff would have been disemboweled, but the paw brushed harmlessly. The dog sensed it was not the danger he had expected and spat out hide and meat and bore in for more, maddened now by the taste of blood.

  The small red dog had launched himself through the air at Godiva’s throat. His teeth were as awful as the mastiff’s; his long underjaw locked into the upper jaw and the dog hung beneath
the bear’s muzzle like a great ripe fruit from a tree.

  At last the elkhound saw it was time, and he leaped at Godiva from the left, climbing over the mastiff in his eagerness to get at her. Godiva’s left ear and left eye were taken out in the same slashing bite, and crimson gobbets flew as the beast shook her ruined head.

  The bull dog had locked into a great fold of thick fur and loose skin; its gripping jaws placed enough relentless pressure on the bear’s windpipe so that she began to suck for air. And now the mastiff had found her stomach and was tearing at it.

  “A poor fight,” Wat shouted, disappointed. “They already have the bear.”

  Godiva brought a great right forepaw down on the mastiff’s back. The crack of the dog’s spine wasn’t heard above the other sounds but the dying mastiff wriggled away over the sand, and the bear turned its fangs against the elkhound.

  The men roared their delight.

  The elkhound was thrown almost out of the pit and lay where it fell, for its throat was rent. Godiva pawed at the smallest dog, which was spattered redder than ever with the blood of the bear and the mastiff. The stubborn jaws were locked in Godiva’s throat. The bear folded her forelimbs and squeezed crushingly while she stood and swayed.

  Not until the small red dog was lifeless did the jaws relax. Finally the bear was able to brush the bull dog against the pole again and again until it fell off her into the trampled sand like a dislodged burr.

  Godiva dropped onto all fours next to the dead dogs but took no interest in them. Agonized and trembling, she began to lick her own raw and bleeding flesh.

  There was a murmur of conversation as spectators paid up or collected their wagers. “Too soon, too soon,” a man next to Rob grumbled.

  “The damned beast still lives and we can yet have some pleasure,” another said.

  A drunken youth had picked up the pitmaster’s lance and began to harry Godiva with it from the rear, poking her in the anus. The men cheered as the bear whirled, roaring, but was jerked up short by the tether on her leg.

  “The other eye,” someone cried at the rear of the crowd. “Blind the other eye!”