A Corpse at St Andrew's Chapel (19 page)

As he spoke the man wrapped himself in the stained linen belt and donned his kirtle and cotehardie.

“You have the better of me,” I said. “You know my name, I do not know yours.”

“I am remiss,” he frowned. “My injury often drives other thoughts from my mind. I am Robert Caxton. My daughter, Katherine, you have met.”

“Indeed. A most lovely young woman.”

I feared I had misspoke myself, for the stationer made no reply, nor even gave me a glance. No doubt he had heard such appraisals before.

Caxton was on his way down the stairs to the shop before he spoke again. “Favors her mother,” he said softly.

As he had vowed, the stationer would take no pay for his ink and parchments. I clutched the bundle under an arm, promised to return two days hence, and walked through the clamor of Oxford’s streets to the Stag and Hounds and the patient Bruce.

T
here is much to be said for Oxford’s bustle and energy, but after nearly two years in bucolic Bampton I was not sorry to cross the river and leave the din behind. I arrived at Bampton Castle too late for dinner, which was become my custom since Easter. I spent the afternoon at my duties for Lord Gilbert, chief of which was seeing to the construction of new stables for the marshalsea. John Holcutt had the work well in hand, but was pleased to relinquish the business to me and seek his occupation in Lord Gilbert’s fields. John is better suited to beasts and grain than adze and hammer.

The builders needed little advice from me. Corner posts were set true and tenons and crossbeams fit tightly. Of course the workmen knew that I or John would observe their work, so I cannot say whether the labor would have been done so well due to pride alone.

I advised the marshalsea that, after a day of rest, I would require Bruce again, and on the Thursday before Whitsunday I slung a pack full of herbs and instruments over his rump and set off again for Oxford.

This day was not so pleasant as that of the journey three days earlier. Thickening clouds blew in from Wales and before I was past Cote a cold mist began to fall. I saw no sign of life in the villages I passed, but for the occasional wisp of smoke from a gable vent which hung thick and low in the air ’til it mingled with the drizzle.

The mist became a steady rain before I reached the Thames Bridge. Bruce and I were soaked through before we reached the Stag and Hounds. I left instructions for the old horse to be dried thoroughly and fed, washed down a dinner of coney pie with a mug of watery ale, and set off for Holywell Street and my patient.

I was expected. The shop was shuttered against the weather, but my knuckles made contact with the door but once before it swung open. I stood, dripping, with my fist ready to strike the door again. A distant observer might have thought I had it in mind to rap on the nose the one who greeted me. This was assuredly not so, for Kate peered around the door as she opened it, and smiled when she saw ’twas me. I melted. And not because of my sodden condition.

The shop was equipped with fireplace and chimney, as befits a prosperous merchant. The girl drew me to the fire and pulled a bench close. She took my cloak and hung it beside the fire. I sat, steaming and dripping, as she called up the stairs to her father.

The shop was dark, lit only by the fire. Even were the shutters open there was not enough light on such a day to see my work. And with rain yet falling I could not proceed even in the toft. I had no choice but to delay the surgery.

I told Caxton this as he took a place on another bench opposite me. I could not see in the darkened room whether his face reflected relief at the postponement, or dismay that the deliverance he sought would not soon appear.

The stationer sat stiffly on his bench. One who knew not of his affliction might think him a hard, rigid man. But I had seen him deal with young customers and knew his posture was more likely due to his discomfort than a measure of his character.

Kate had busied herself in the room behind the shop when her father appeared. I saw her approach through the corner of my eye carrying two leather tankards which she offered to me and her father.

“Ale,” she advised, “fresh-brewed.”

“I have in my sack some herbs to add to your father’s ale. ’Twill make a potion to relieve the pain of surgery. Should the sky clear we may then proceed without delay.”

I had dropped my bag on a table when I entered the shop. I went to it and fished about in its damp recesses until I found the stoppered bottles I sought. One contained ground willow bark, the other the pounded seeds of hemp. I poured a generous amount from each into one of the tankards and gave it to the stationer.

“These herbs will make the pain of surgery less severe,” I told the man as he drank. “But you will be afflicted, even so.”

Caxton peered at me over his tankard, then tipped it and swallowed more.

“The potion will take effect in an hour or two,” I told him. “Let us hope God will clear the sky so we may proceed with our business.”

“Amen,” the stationer agreed, and finished his potion.

The benches upon which we sat were of unequal length. The stationer’s was short. Kate had directed me to the longer of the two. I resumed my place and there lifted my untouched tankard to drink when the girl reappeared from the hidden room behind the shop. She carried a smaller cup. I saw her glance at the two benches, divined her intent, and slid to the end of mine so she might sit. I wondered if she might think this invitation too forward. She did not, and sat primly next to me without a look in my direction. Her father, however, scrutinized us intently. I saw in the firelight his eyes flicker from me to his daughter and back again.

“Have you lived long in Bampton?” he asked.

“Two years come Michaelmas. I thought to practice surgery here in Oxford, and set up for a time on the High Street. But Lord Gilbert Talbot invited me to Bampton after I was of service to him.”

“You hale from Oxford, then?”

“Nay…Lancashire. My father held the manor of Little Singleton of Sir Robert de Sandford, but as I am the youngest of four sons I was sent to Oxford to study and make my own way in the world.”

“Hmmm,” he mused. “Most scholars who do business here intend to serve at law, or in holy orders. I know of none who studies surgery.”

“That was my intent as well…to be a lawyer and advise kings. But a friend gave me a book. ’Twas about surgical practice. I read it through three times and when I completed the course of study at Baliol College I set off for Paris and the university there, where the book’s author, Henry de Mondeville, had once taught.”

“You were welcomed there?” Kate asked with some surprise.

“Aye. Even though we held the French king, a student paying his way was accepted though he came from England. And I did not brag of the English victory at Poitiers.”

“A good friend,” the stationer observed, “to give away a book.”

“’Twas a dying bequest. Four years ago, when the plague returned, he was stricken. I did what I could to ease him. For that service he gave me his three books.”

As I spoke I noted a sudden gleam appear between wall and shutter. But it quickly faded. Then the opening to the room at the rear of the shop lightened as a brief flash of sunlight came through a skin-covered window in the rear of the house.

The stationer looked toward the floor beams above his head. We were silent for a moment, then he spoke: “The rain has stopped.”

Kate rose from the bench, walked silently to the door, and pulled it open. A few drops yet fell from the thatching. The sky was mostly grey, but dotted with tiny swift-moving patches of blue where the cloud cover was beginning to break.

I stood in the doorway the better to observe the weather and felt Kate close behind me. Unlike some young women – and older, too – whose presence can be detected by the scent of their unwashed bodies, the girl exuded the pleasant fragrance of soapwort and woodbine with which she had recently freshened her clothes. Crones say that if honeysuckle be brought into a home there will soon be a wedding. I regarded the sky and wondered if the girl had a husband in mind.

The stationer rose slowly from his seat and glanced between us at the broken clouds. “Think you to proceed?” he asked.

“Aye. If the table is placed in the toft there will be light enough to see my work.”

Kate helped me drag the heavy table into the space behind the shop. The door from the small back room into the toft was barely wide enough to serve. Caxton tried to assist, but the exertion caused him to catch his breath and turn red in the face.

I instructed the stationer to remove his cotehardie and kirtle while I returned to the shop for my instruments. When I returned he was standing beside the table shivering. ’Twas not a warm day. Still, I expect his quaking had more to do with uncertainty about my skill than the chilly air.

I sent Kate for the wine, then assisted Caxton on to the table. I had him stretched face-first on the planks when the girl returned.

It is my practice to bathe in wine the place where I intend to make an incision. There is no tradition which calls for this, but it seems to me that if washing a wound in wine after the cut is made will aid healing, then perhaps doing so before applying the knife may be beneficial also.

So I poured wine over the exposed fistula and wiped the liquid about with a scrap of clean linen. Caxton winced as the wine touched his sore, but otherwise lay quietly while I set out my instruments. Kate stood in the doorway, uncertain whether or not to stay. She saw me glance in her direction, and spoke: “Must I go?”

“No. Observers do not trouble me. But there will be blood, and your father may cry out in pain. Should you swoon, I will be too busy to assist you.”

“May I help?”

“I think not. This surgery will not require three hands.”

I scraped pus and crusted ooze from the fistula, then probed the putrid flesh with a lancet. I hoped to feel some resistance just under the skin which might tell me that the wood fragment I suspected was not lodged deep. But I felt nothing though I thoroughly probed the area between two ribs where the fistula lay.

While I poked at Caxton’s ribs his daughter left her place at the door and stood by her father’s head. She took his outstretched hands in hers and waited, her eyes fixed on me as I laid the lancet aside and selected a scalpel.

With this blade I enlarged the fistula in a line parallel to the ribs. I took three separate strokes to deepen the cut until I thought it had reached to the ribs, but no deeper. I wished to avoid entering the abdominal cavity, unless such trespass be unavoidable.

The laceration I thus made was longer than a man’s finger; longer, perhaps, than needful, but I wished no interference with my inspection of the abscess. With the blade I pushed aside flesh and fat to the depth of my incision. There was pus there, and corrupt flesh about the fistula, but no foreign object.

I stood upright and wiped sweat and a stray lock of hair from my eyes. The day remained cloudy and cool, but I perspired. There was nothing to do but enlarge the incision and continue the search for the root of the fistula.

A few strokes of the blade added a knuckle’s length to the cut. The stationer, who aside from an occasional gasp through clenched teeth, had been quiet, now twitched and writhed under my knife. Kate stood silent, her hands tight to her father’s. Not once did she look away from the bloody wound I had made in her father’s back.

I separated flesh from rib with my scalpel in this extended incision and there glimpsed the cause of Caxton’s distress. It was indeed a fragment of broken oak, driven so deep into the fellow’s back it had lodged under a rib, between the bone and abdominal wall, just above a kidney.

I tried to tease the offending fragment from under the rib with the point of my scalpel but could not. Some hard, white gristle with which I was not familiar had nearly encapsulated the wood and held it firmly in place.

With the blade in my left hand to open the wound I took forceps in my right hand and found the end of the embedded splinter. The first tug was unsuccessful. The forceps slipped from the gristle. I found the fragment again, grasped the thing more tightly, and pulled.

A sliver near the size of my little finger came out from under the stationer’s rib. He gasped and his legs jerked, but he did not cry out. He is a person of great fortitude, as is his daughter. She watched the process from beginning to end without blanching.

I took the offending fragment, still held tight in my forceps, to the end of the table and held it before the stationer’s watering eyes. “This was lodged beneath a rib,” I explained.

Caxton raised his head to inspect the fragment. “Much thanks,” he whispered.

“I will stitch the wound and you will soon be good as new.”

I requested more wine from Kate, and threaded a needle while she ran to fetch it. I closed the wound with fourteen stitches, bathed the cut in wine, and when I was done assisted Caxton to a sitting position on the table.

“’Tis improved already,” he exclaimed. “Will you dress it now?”

I was again required to explain that I follow the practice of Henry de Mondeville, who taught that wounds heal best when dry and uncovered. Aside from the occasional poultice of egg albumin, a wound left open mends most readily. I know that this practice contradicts the ancients and the university physicians, but de Mondeville saw his method work in practice. I am a Baliol man, so I should not write this; perhaps the books are wrong.

Caxton seemed unconvinced of this, but as I had been successful thus far in dealing with his affliction he made no objection. His daughter helped him into kirtle and cotehardie, we dragged the table back into the workroom, and we were done. And just in time. The sky was clearing as evening drew near, and the sun was dropping behind the rooftops to the west of the toft as I completed the needlework on the stationer’s back.

I made my way through darkening streets to New Canterbury Hall. I hoped Master John might invite me to occupy the empty room which had been my home two nights earlier. The porter recognized me, for it was not yet dark enough that my features were obscured, and sent me unaccompanied to Master John’s chamber.

A dim glow through the window told me that the scholar was within. I rapped upon his door and heard from the other side a bench scrape across the flags. Wyclif drew open the door, his brow furrowed. Behind him a book lay open on a table, under a sputtering cresset. He was clearly annoyed at being disturbed in his study. But then he recognized me in the gloom and a smile washed the frown from his face. Well, I assume it did. Master John’s beard obscured his mouth quite thoroughly, but his knitted brow relaxed and he greeted me warmly.

“Master Hugh?”

“Aye…my profession called me to return to Oxford.”

“Surgery? Come in and tell me of it.”

Wyclif shoved the heavy door closed and drew me to the table where he pulled up a second bench and motioned for me to sit. He took his former place, and studied me across the cresset.