The Cole Trilogy: The Physician, Shaman, and Matters of Choice (17 page)

Rob shook his head. “I already have a prenticeship.” He told of his travels with Barber and was gratified at the envy in Anthony’s eyes.

Tite spoke of Samuel’s death. “I’ve lost my mother and two brothers in recent years, all to the pox, and my father to a fever.”

Rob nodded somberly. “I must find those who are alive. Any London house I pass may contain the last child born to my mother before she died, and given away by Richard Bukerel.”

“Perhaps Bukerel’s widow would know something.”

Rob sat straighter.

“She has remarried, to a greengrocer named Buffington. Her new home is not far from here. Just past Ludgate,” Anthony said.

The Buffington house was in a setting not unlike the solitude in which the king had built his new residence, but it was hard by the dankness of the Fleet River marshes and was a patched shelter instead of a palace. Behind the shabby house were neat fields of cabbages and lettuces, and surrounding them was an undrained moor. He stood for a moment and watched four sulky children; carrying sacks of stones, they circled the mosquito-loud fields in a silent, deadly patrol against marsh hares.

He found Mistress Buffington in the house and she greeted him. She was sorting produce into baskets. The animals ate their profits, she explained, grumbling.

“I remember you and your family,” she said, examining him as if he were a select vegetable.

But when he asked, she couldn’t recollect her first husband ever mentioning the name or whereabouts of the wet nurse who had taken the infant christened Roger Cole.

“Did no one write down the name?”

Perhaps something showed in his eyes, for she bridled. “I cannot write.
Why did
you
not obtain the name and write it, sirrah? Is he not your brother?”

He asked himself how such responsibility could have been expected of a young boy who had been in his circumstances; but he knew she was more right than wrong.

She smiled at him. “Let’s not be uncivil toward one another, for we have shared hard earlier days as neighbors.”

To his surprise she was studying him as a woman looks at a man, her eyes warm. Her body was slimmed by labor and he saw that at one time she had been beautiful. She was no older than Editha.

But he thought wistfully of Bukerel and remembered the terrible righteousness of her niggardly charity, reminding himself that this woman would have sold him for a slave.

He gave her a cool stare and muttered his thanks, and then he went away.

At St. Botolph’s Church the sacristan, an old pockmarked man with uncut hair of dirty gray, answered his knock. Rob asked for the priest who had buried his parents.

“Father Kempton is transferred to Scotland, these ten months now.”

The old man took him into the church graveyard. “Oh, we are become powerfully crowded,” he said. “You was not here two years past, for the scourge of pox?”

Rob shook his head.

“Lucky! So many died, we buried straight through every day. Now we are pressed for space. People flock to London from every place, and a man quickly reaches the two score of years for which he may reasonably pray.”

“Yet you are older than forty years,” Rob observed.

“I? I’m protected by the churchly nature of my work and have in all ways led a pure and innocent life.” He flashed a smile and Rob smelled liquor on his breath.

He waited outside the burial house while the sacristan consulted the Interment Book; the best the fuddled old man could do was lead him through a maze of leaning memorials to a general area in the eastern portion of the churchyard, close by the mossy rear wall, and declare that both his father and his brother Samuel had been buried “near to here.” He tried to recall his father’s funeral and thus remember the site of the grave, but couldn’t.

His mother was easier to find; the yew tree over her grave had grown in three years but still was familiar.

Suddenly purposeful, he hurried back to their camp. Barber went with him to a rocky section below the bank of the Thames, where they chose a small gray boulder with a surface flattened and smoothed by long years of tidal flow. Incitatus helped them drag it from the river.

He had planned to chisel the inscriptions himself, but was dissuaded. “We’re here overlong,” Barber said. “Let a stonecutter do it quickly and well. I’ll provide for his labor, and when you complete apprenticeship and work for wages you’ll repay me.”

They stayed in London only long enough to see the stone inscribed with all three names and dates and set in place in the churchyard beneath the yew.

Barber clapped a beefy hand on his shoulder and gave him a level glance. “We are travelers. We’re able at length to reach every place where you must inquire after the other three children.”

He spread out his map of England and showed Rob that six great roads left London: northeast to Colchester; north to Lincoln and York; northwest to Shrewsbury and Wales; west to Silchester, Winchester, and Salisbury; southeast to Richborough, Dover, and Lyme; and south to Chichester.

“Here in Ramsey,” he said, stabbing a finger at central England, “is where your widow neighbor, Della Hargreaves, went to live with her brother. She’ll be able to tell you the name of the wet nurse to whom she gave the infant Roger, and you will seek him when next we return to London. And down here is Salisbury, where, you are told, your sister Anne Mary has been taken by her family the Haverhills.” He frowned. “Pity we didn’t have that news when we were lately in Salisbury during the fair,” he said, and Rob felt a chill with the realization that he and the little girl may well have passed by one another in the crowds.

“No matter,” Barber said. “We’ll return to Salisbury on the way back to Exmouth, in the fall.”

Rob took heart. “And everywhere we go in the north,” he said, “I’ll ask priests and monks if they know of Father Lovell and his young charge, William Cole.”

Early next morning they abandoned London and took to the wide Lincoln Road leading to the north of England. When they left behind all houses and the stink of too many people and stopped for an especially lavish breakfast cooked by the side of a noisy stream, each agreed that a city was not the finest place to breathe God’s air and enjoy the sun’s warmth.

14

LESSONS

On a day in early June the two of them lay on their backs by a brook near Chipping Norton, observing clouds through leafy branches and waiting for trouts to bite.

Propped onto two Y-shaped branches stuck into the ground, their willow poles were unmoving.

“Late in the season for trouts to be hungry for hackles,” Barber murmured contentedly. “In a fortnight, when hoppers are in the fields, fish will be caught faster.”

“How do male worms tell the difference?” Rob wondered.

Nearly dozing, Barber smiled. “Doubtless hackles are alike in the dark, like women.”

“Women aren’t alike, day or night,” Rob protested. “They appear similar, yet each is separate in scent, taste, touch, and feel.”

Barber sighed. “That’s the true wonder that lures man on.”

Rob got up and went to the wagon. When he came back he held a square of smooth pine on which he had drawn the face of a girl in ink. He squatted by Barber and held out the board. “Do you make her out?”

Barber peered at the drawing. “It’s the girl from last week, the little dolly in St. Ives.”

Rob took back the sketch and studied it, pleased.

“Why have you placed the ugly mark on her cheek?”

“The mark was there.”

Barber nodded. “I recall it. But with your quill and ink, you’re able to make her prettier than reality. Why not allow her to view herself more favorably than she’s seen by the world?”

Rob frowned, troubled without understanding why. He studied the likeness. “At any rate, she hasn’t seen this, since it was drawn after I left her.”

“But you could have drawn it in her presence.”

Rob shrugged and smiled.

Barber sat up, fully awake. “The time has come for us to make practical use of your capability,” he said.

Next morning they stopped at a woodcutter’s and asked him to saw thin rounds from the trunk of a pine. The slices of wood were a disappointment, being too grainy for easy drawing with quill and ink. But rounds from a young beech tree proved to be smooth and hard, and the woodcutter willingly sliced a medium-sized beech in exchange for a coin.

Following the entertainment that afternoon, Barber announced that his associate would draw free likenesses of half a dozen residents of Chipping Norton.

There was a rush and a flurry. A crowd gathered around Rob, watching curiously as he mixed his ink. But he was long since schooled as a performer and inured to scrutiny.

He drew a face on each of six wooden discs, in turn: an old woman, two youths, a pair of dairy maids who smelled of cows, and a man with a wen on his nose.

The woman had deepset eyes and a toothless mouth with wrinkled lips. One of the youths was plump and round-faced, so it was like drawing features on a gourd. The other boy was thin and dark, with baleful eyes. The girls were sisters and looked so much alike that the challenge was in trying to capture their subtle difference; he failed, for they could have exchanged their sketches without noticing. Of the six, he was satisfied only with the last drawing. The man was almost old, and his eyes and every line of his face contained melancholy. Without knowing how, Rob captured the sadness.

With no hesitation, he drew the wen on the nose. Barber didn’t complain, since all the subjects were visibly pleased and there was sustained applause from the onlookers.

“Buy six bottles and you may have—free, my friends!—a similar likeness,” Barber bawled, holding the Universal Specific aloft and launching into his familiar discourse.

Soon there was a line in front of Rob, who was drawing intently, and a longer line before the bank, on which Barber stood and sold his medicine.

Since King Canute had liberalized the hunting laws, venison began to appear in butchers’ stalls. In the market square of Aldreth town, Barber bought a great saddle of meat. He rubbed it with wild garlic and covered
it with deep slashes that he filled with tiny squares of pork fat and onion, larding the outside richly with sweet butter and basting continually while it roasted with a mixture of honey, mustard, and brown ale.

Rob ate heartily, but Barber finished most of it himself along with a prodigious amount of mashed turnip and a loaf of fresh bread. “Perhaps just a bit more. To keep up my strength,” he said, grinning. In the time Rob had known him he had increased remarkably—perhaps, Rob thought, as much as six stone. Flesh ridged his neck, his forearms had become hams, and his stomach sailed before him like a loose sail in a stiff wind. His thirst was as prodigious as his appetite.

Two days after leaving Aldreth they arrived in the village of Ramsey, where in the public house Barber gained the proprietor’s attention by wordlessly swallowing two pitchers of ale before imitating thunder with a belch and turning to the business at hand.

“We’re looking for a woman, name of Della Hargreaves.”

The proprietor shrugged and shook his head.

“Hargreaves, her husband’s name. She’s a widow. Came four years ago to be with her brother. His name I don’t know, but I ask you to ponder, for this is a small place.” Barber ordered more ale, to encourage him.

The proprietor looked blank.

“Oswald Sweeter,” his wife whispered, serving the drink.

“Ah. Just so, Sweeter’s sister,” the man said, accepting Barber’s money.

Oswald Sweeter was Ramsey’s blacksmith, as large as Barber but all muscle. He listened to them with a slight frown and then spoke as though unwilling.

“Della? I took her in,” he said. “My own flesh.” With pincers he pushed a cherry-red bar deeper into glowing coals. “My wife showed her kindness, but Della has a talent for doing no work. The two women didn’t get on. Within half a year, Della left us.”

“To go where?” Rob asked.

“Bath.”

“What does she do in Bath?”

“Same as here before we threw her away,” Sweeter said quietly. “She left with a man like a rat.”

“She was our neighbor for years in London, where she was deemed respectable,” Rob was obligated to say, though he had never liked her.

“Well, young sir, today my sister is a drab who would sooner swive than labor for her bread. You may find her where there are whores.” Pulling a flaming white bar from the coals Sweeter ended the conversation with his hammer, so that a savage shower of sparks followed them through his door.

* * *

It rained for a solid week as they made their way up the coast. Then one morning they crawled from their damp beds beneath the wagon to find a day so soft and glorious that all was forgotten save their good fortune in being footloose and blessed. “Let us take a promenade through the innocent world!” Barber cried, and Rob knew exactly what he meant, for despite the dark urgency of his need to find the children he was young and healthy and alive on such a day.

Between blasts of the Saxon horn they sang exuberantly, hymns and raunchiness, a louder signal of their presence than any other. They drove slowly through a forested track that alternately gave them warm sunlight and fresh green shade. “What more could you ask,” Barber said.