The Cole Trilogy: The Physician, Shaman, and Matters of Choice (13 page)

Rob found his voice. “Do you think I’ve been … touched by the Devil?” It was a question that had plagued him all through the day.

Barber snorted. “If you believe so, you’re foolish and a twit. And I know you to be neither.” He went to the wagon and filled his horn with metheglin, drinking it all before speaking again.

“Mothers and fathers die. And old people die. That’s the nature of it. You’re certain you felt something?”

“Yes, Barber.”

“Can’t be mistook or fancying, a young chap like you?”

Rob shook his head stubbornly.

“And I say it was all a notion,” Barber said. “So we’ve had enough of fleeing and talking and must gain our rest.”

They made their beds on either side of the fire. But they lay for hours
without sleeping. Barber tossed and turned and presently got up and opened another flask of liquor. He brought it around to Rob’s side of the fire and squatted on his heels.

“Supposing,” he said, and took a drink. “Just
suppose
everyone else in the world had been born without eyes. And you were born with eyes?”

“Then I would see what no one else could see.”

Barber drank and nodded. “Yes. Or imagine that we had no ears and you had ears? Or suppose we didn’t have some other sense? And somehow, from God or nature or what you will, you’ve been given a … special gift. Just
suppose
that you can tell when someone is going to die?”

Rob was silent, terribly frightened again.

“It’s bullshit, we both comprehend that,” Barber said. “It was all your fancy, we agree. But just
supposing
…” He sucked thoughtfully from the flask, his Adam’s apple working, the dying firelight glinting warmly in his hopeful eyes as he regarded Rob J. “It would be a sin not to exercise such a gift,” he said.

In Chipping Norton they bought metheglin and mixed another batch of Specific, replenishing the lucrative supply.

“When I die and stand in line before the gate,” Barber said, “St. Peter shall ask, ‘How did you earn your bread?’ ‘I was a farmer,’ one man may say, or ‘I fashioned boots from skins.’ But I shall answer,
‘Fumum vendidi,’”
the former monk said gaily, and Rob’s Latin was equal to the task:
I sold smoke.

Yet the fat man was far more than a peddler of questionable physick. When he treated behind the screen he was skillful and often tender. What Barber knew to do, he knew and did perfectly, and he taught Rob a sure touch and gentle hand.

In Buckingham, Barber showed him how to pull teeth, having the good fortune to come upon a drover with a rotting mouth. The patient was as fat as Barber, a pop-eyed groaner and womanly screamer. Midway, he changed his mind. “Stop, stop, stop! Set me free!” he lisped bloodily, but there was no question that the teeth needed pulling, and they persevered; it was an excellent lesson.

In Clavering, Barber rented the blacksmith’s shop for a day and Rob learned how to fashion the lancing irons and points. It was a task he would have to repeat in half a dozen smithies all over England during the next several years before he satisfied his master he could do it correctly. Most of his work in Clavering was rejected, but Barber grudgingly allowed him to keep a small two-edged lancet as the first instrument in his own kit of
surgical tools, an important beginning. As they made their way out of the Midlands and into the Fens, Barber taught him which veins were opened for bleeding, bringing him unpleasant memories of his father’s last days.

His father sometimes crept into his mind, for his own voice was beginning to sound like his father’s; its timbre deepened, and he was growing body hair. The patches weren’t as thick as they would become, he knew, for through helping Barber he was quite familiar with the unclothed male. Women remained more of a mystery, since Barber employed an enigmatically smiling, voluptuous doll they called Thelma, on whose naked plaster form females modestly indicated the area of their own affliction, making examination unnecessary. It still made Rob uneasy to intrude into the privacy of strangers, but he became accustomed to casual inquiry about bodily function:

“When were you last at stool, master?”

“Mistress, when shall you have your monthly flow?”

At Barber’s suggestion Rob took each patient’s hands into his own when the patient came behind the screen.

“What do you feel when you grasp their fingers?” Barber asked him one day in Tisbury as he dismantled the bank.

“Sometimes I don’t feel anything.”

Barber nodded. He took one of the sections from Rob and stowed it in the wagon and came back, frowning. “But sometimes … there is
something?”

Rob nodded.

“Well, what?” Barber said testily.
“What
is it you feel, boy?”

But he couldn’t define it or describe it in words. It was an intuition about the person’s vitality, like peering into dark wells and sensing how much life each contained.

Barber took Rob’s silence as proof that the feeling was imagined. “I think we’ll return to Hereford and see whether the old man has not continued to exist in health,” he said slyly.

He was annoyed when Rob agreed. “We can’t go back, you dolt!” he said. “For if he’s indeed dead, shouldn’t we be putting our heads into the noose?”

He continued to scoff at “the gift,” often and loud.

Yet when Rob began neglecting to take the patients’ hands, he ordered him to resume. “Why not? Am I not a cautious man of business? And does it cost us to indulge this fancy?”

In Peterborough, only a few miles and a lifetime away from the abbey from which he had fled as a boy, Barber sat alone in the public house
throughout a long and showery August evening, drinking slowly and steadily.

By midnight, his apprentice came looking for him. Rob met him reeling along the way and supported him back to their fire. “Please,” Barber whispered fearfully.

He was amazed to see the drunken man lift both hands and hold them out.

“Ah, in the name of Christ, please,” Barber said again. Finally Rob understood. He took Barber’s hands and looked into his eyes.

In a moment Rob nodded.

Barber sank into his bed. He belched and turned on his side, then fell into untroubled sleep.

10

THE NORTH

That year Barber didn’t make it to Exmouth in time for winter, for they had started out late and the falling leaves of autumn found them in the village of Gate Fulford, in the York Wolds. The moors were lavish with plants that made the cool air exciting with their spice. Rob and Barber followed the North Star, stopping at villages along the way to very good business, and drove the wagon through the endless carpet of purple heather until they reached the town of Carlisle.

“This is as far north as I ever travel,” Barber told him. “A few hours from here Northumbria ends and the frontier begins. Beyond is Scotland, which everyone knows to be a land of sheep-buggers, and perilous to honest Englishmen.”

For a week they camped in Carlisle and went every evening to the tavern, where judiciously bought drinks soon resulted in Barber’s learning about available shelter. He rented a house on the moor with three small rooms. It was not unlike the little house he owned on the southern coast but lacked a fireplace and a stone chimney, to his displeasure. They spread their beds on either side of the hearth as if it were a campfire, and they found a nearby stable willing to board Incitatus. Once again Barber bought winter’s provision lavishly, in the easy manner with money that never failed to give Rob a wondering sense of well-being.

Barber laid in beef and pork. He had thought to buy a haunch of venison, but three market hunters had been hanged in Carlisle during the summer for killing the king’s deer, which were reserved for nobles’ sport. So they bought fifteen fat hens instead, and a sack of feed.

“The chickens are your domain,” Barber told Rob. “They are yours to feed, to slaughter upon my request, to dress and pluck and ready for my pot.”

He thought the hens were impressive creatures, large and buff-colored,
with unfeathered shanks and red combs, wattles, and earlobes. They made no objection when he robbed their nests of four or five white eggs every morning. “They think you’re a big bloody rooster,” Barber said.

“Why don’t we buy them a chanticleer?”

Barber, who liked sleeping late on cold winter mornings and therefore hated crowing, merely grunted.

Rob had brown hairs on his face, not exactly a beard. Barber said only Danes shaved but he knew it wasn’t true, for his father had kept his face hairless. In Barber’s surgical kit was a razor and the fat man nodded grumpily when Rob asked to use it. He nicked his face, but shaving made him feel older.

The first time Barber ordered him to kill a chicken made him feel very young. Each bird stared at him out of little black beads that told him they might have grown to be friends. Finally he forced his strong fingers to clench around the nearest warm neck and, shuddering, closed his eyes. A strong, convulsive twist and it was done. But the bird punished him in death, for it didn’t easily relinquish its feathers. Plucking took hours, and the grizzled corpse was viewed with disdain when he handed it to Barber.

Next time a chicken was called for, Barber showed him genuine magic. He held the hen’s beak open and slid a thin knife through the roof of the mouth and into the brain. The hen relaxed at once into death, releasing the feathers; they came away in great clumps at the slightest pull.

“Here is the lesson,” Barber said. “It is just as easy to bring death to man, and I’ve done so. It’s harder to keep hold of life, harder still to maintain a grasp on health. Those are the tasks to which we must keep our minds.”

The late fall weather was perfect for the picking of herbs, and they scoured the woods and moors. Barber especially wanted purslane; steeped in the Specific, it produced an agent that would cause fevers to break and dissipate. To his disappointment, they found none. Some things were more easily gathered, such as red rose petals for poultices, and thyme and acorns to be powdered and mixed with fat and spread on neck pustules. Others required hard work, like the digging of yew root that would help a pregnant woman to hold back her fetus. They collected lemon grass and dill for urinary problems, marshy sweet flag to fight deterioration of memory because of moist and cold humors, juniper berries to be boiled for opening blocked nasal passages, lupine for hot packs to draw abscesses, and myrtle and mallow to soothe itchy rashes.

“You’ve grown faster than these weeds,” Barber observed wryly, and it was true; already he stood almost as tall as Barber and he had long since
outstripped the clothing Editha Lipton had made for him in Exmouth. But when Barber took him to a Carlisle tailor and ordered “new winter clothes that will fit for a while,” the tailor shook his head.

“The boy still grows, does he not? Fifteen, sixteen years? Such a lad outgrows clothing quickly.”

“Sixteen! He’s not yet eleven!”

The man looked at Rob with respect-tinged amusement. “He’ll be a
large
man! And he’s certain to make my raiment appear to shrink. May I suggest that we make over an old garment?”

So another suit of Barber’s, this one of mostly-good gray stuff, was recut and sewn. To their general hilarity it was far too wide when first Rob put it on, yet much too short in the arms and the legs. The tailor took some of the material left over from the width and extended the pants and the sleeves, hiding the joined seams with rakish bands of blue cloth. Rob had gone without shoes most of the summer but soon the snows were due, and he was grateful when Barber bought him boots made of cowhide.

He walked in them across Carlisle’s square to the Church of St. Mark and sounded the knocker on its great wooden doors, which were opened at length by an elderly curate with rheumy eyes.

“If you please, Father, I seek a priest name of Ranald Lovell.”

The curate blinked. “I knew a priest so named, served the Mass under Lyfing, in the time when Lyfing was Bishop of Wells. He is dead these ten years come Easter.”

Rob shook his head. “It’s not the same priest. I saw Father Ranald Lovell with my own eyes but several years ago.”

“Perhaps the man I knew was Hugh Lovell and not Ranald.”

“Ranald Lovell was transferred from London to a church in the north. He has my brother, William Stewart Cole. Three years younger than I.”

“Your brother by now may have a different name in Christ, my son. Priests sometimes bring their boys to an abbey, to become acolytes. You must ask others everywhere. For Holy Mother Church is a great and boundless sea and I am but a single tiny fish.” The old priest nodded kindly and Rob helped him to close the doors.

A skin of crystals dulled the surface of the small pond behind the town tavern. Barber pointed out a pair of ice gliders tied to a rafter of their little house. “Pity they aren’t larger. They won’t fit, for you have an uncommonly great foot.”

The ice thickened daily, until one morning it gave back a solid thunk when he walked out to the middle and stamped. Rob took down the
too-small gliders. They were carved from stag antler and were almost identical to a pair his father had made for him when he was six years old. He had quickly outgrown those but had used them for three winters anyway, and now he took these to the pond and tied them onto his feet. At first he used them with pleasure, but their edges were nicked and dull and their size and condition did him in during his first attempt to turn. His arms flailing, he fell heavily and slid a good distance.