The Cole Trilogy: The Physician, Shaman And Matters Of Choice Part 65

"MacPhees. Kinsmen to Cullens. They will see to our safe arrival in Kilmarnock."

Dunbar proved no problem. It was by then almost the end of summer, and there was a flurry of sailings as owners of ships attempted to crowd in last short voyages before storms closed off the North Sea for another winter. In The Fox, Rob heard of a packet boat that stopped at Dunbar. It was called the Aelfgifu after Harold Harefoot's mother, and its captain was a grizzled Dane who was happy to be paid for three pa.s.sengers who would not eat much.

The Aelfgifu would leave in less than two weeks, and it demanded hurried preparation, mending of clothing, decisions about what she would take and what she would not.

Suddenly, their leavetaking was a few days away.

"I'll come for you in Kilmarnock when I'm able."

"Will you?" she said.

"Of course."

On the night before departure she said, "If you cannot come ..."

"I shall."

"But... if you do not. If the world should keep us apart in some way, know that my kinsmen will raise the boys to manhood."

That served to annoy him more than it rea.s.sured, and it so fueled his fears that he was sorry he had suggested that they part from him.

They touched each other carefully, all the familiar places, like two sightless people wishing to store the memory in their hands. It was a sad lovemaking, as though they knew it was for the last time. When they were done, she wept soundlessly and he held her without words. There were things he desired to say but could not.

In the morning he put them aboard the Aelfgifu in gray light. She was built along the lines of a stable Viking ship but only sixty feet long, with an open deck. There was one mast, thirty feet high, and a large square sail, and the hull was built of thick overlapping planks of oak. The king's black ships would keep pirates far out to sea and the Aelfgifu would hug the coast, putting in to deliver and take on cargo and at first sign of a storm. It was the safest sort of boat.

Rob stood on the dock. Mary was wearing her invincible face, the armor she wore when she had girded herself against the threatening world.

Though the boat was only rocking in the swells, poor Tam already looked greenish and distressed. "You must continue to work his leg," Rob called, and made ma.s.saging motions. She nodded to show she understood. A crewman lifted the hawser away from the mooring and the boat swung free. Twenty oarsmen pulled once and it was sucked into the strong outgoing tide. A good mother, Mary had placed her boys on cargo in the boat's very heart, where they couldn't fall overboard.

She leaned down and said something to Rob J. as the sail was raised.

"Fare thee well, Da!" the thin, obedient voice shouted clearly.

"Go with G.o.d!" Rob called.

Too soon they were indeed gone, though he stayed where he was and strained his eyes peering after them. He didn't wish to leave the dock, for it struck him that he had come again to a place he had been when he was nine years old, without family or friends in the city of London.

76.

THE LONDON LYCEUM.

That year on the ninth of November a woman named Julia Swane became the chief topic of conversation in the city when she was arrested as a witch. It was charged she had transformed her daughter Glynna, age sixteen, into a flying horse and then had ridden her so brutally the girl was permanently maimed. "If true, it is heinous and wicked, to do that to one's child," his landlord told Rob.

He missed his own children grievously, and their mother. The first ocean storm had come more than four weeks after they had left him. By that time they must long since have landed at Dunbar, and he prayed that wherever they were, they would wait out storms in safe places.

Again he became a solitary wanderer, revisiting all the parts of London he had known and the new sights that had emerged since his boyhood. When he stood before King's House, which once had seemed to him the perfect picture of royal magnificence, he marveled at the difference between its English simplicity and the soaring lushness of the House of Paradise. King Edward spent most of the time in his castle at Winchester, but one morning outside King's House Rob witnessed him walking in silence among his housecarls and henchmen, pensive and introspective. Edward looked older than his forty-one years. It was said his hair had gone white when he was very young, on hearing what Harold Harefoot had done to their brother Alfred. Rob didn't think Edward nearly so kingly a figure as Al had been, but he minded himself that Al Shah was gone and King Edward was alive.

From Michaelmas onward that autumn was cold and scourged by winds. Early winter came warm and rainy. He thought of them often, wishing he knew exactly when they had arrived in Kilmarnock. Out of loneliness he spent many an evening at The Fox but tried to keep his thirst in check, not wishing to fall into brawling as he had done in his youth. Yet the drink brought him more melancholy than ease, for he felt himself turning into his father, a man of the public houses. It caused him to resist the drabs and the available females made more attractive by a troubling horniness; he told himself bitterly that despite the drink he must not become entirely transformed into Nathanael Cole the married wh.o.r.emaster.

The advent of Christmas was difficult, a holiday that begged to be spent with family. Christmas Day he ate a purchased meal at The Fox: the head-cheese called brawn and a mutton pie, washed down by a prodigious amount of mead. Making his way home he came upon two sailors beating a man whose leather cap was in the mud, and Rob saw that he wore a black caftan. One of them held the Jew's arms behind his back while the other delivered punches that thudded sickeningly each time they landed.

"Cease, d.a.m.n you."

The puncher paused in his work. "Shove away, master, while it's yet safe."

"What has he done?"

"A crime committed a thousand years ago, and now we'll send the stinking Frenchy Hebrew back to Normandy dead."

"Leave him be."

"You like him so, we'll watch you suck his c.o.c.k."

Alcohol always built an aggressive fury in him and he was ready. His fist smashed into the tough and ugly face. The accomplice released the Jew and sprang away as the sailor he had knocked down climbed to his feet. "b.a.s.t.a.r.d! You'll drink the Saviour's blood from this f.u.c.king Jew's cup!"

Rob didn't chase them when they ran. The Jew, a tall man of middle age, stood with heaving shoulders. His nose was b.l.o.o.d.y and his lips smashed but he seemed to weep more from humiliation than from hurt.

"Halloa, what is happening?" asked a newcomer, a man with frizzy red hair and beard and a large vein-purpled nose.

"It isn't much. This man was waylaid."

"Hmmm. You're certain he was not the instigator?"

"Yes."

The Jew had won control of himself and found his voice. It was clear he was expressing grat.i.tude, but he spoke in voluble French.

"Do you understand that language?" Rob asked the red-haired man, who shook his head scornfully. Rob wanted to speak to the Jew in the Tongue and wish him a more peaceful Festival of Lights, but in the presence of the witness he didn't dare. Presently the Jew picked up his hat and went away, and so did the bystander.

On the riverfront Rob found a small public house and rewarded himself with red wine. The place was dark and airless and he carried the flask of wine onto a dock to drink, sitting on a piling his father might have set, with the rain soaking and the wind buffeting him and the dangerous-looking gray waves curling through the waters below.

He was satisfied. What better day to have prevented a crucifixion?

The wine wasn't a regal vintage and it stung when swallowed, but nonetheless it pleased him.

He was his father's son and could enjoy drink if he allowed himself.

No, the transformation already had taken place; he was Nathanael Cole. He was Da. And in some strange way he knew he was also Mirdin and Karim. And Al and Dhan Vangalil. And Abu Ali at-Husain ibn Abdullah ibn Sina (oh, yes, especially he was Ibn Sina!) ... But he was also the fat highwayman he had killed years ago, and that pious old s.h.i.t, the hadji Davout Hosein ...

With a clarity that numbed him more than the wine, he knew he was all men and all men were part of him, and that whenever he fought the f.u.c.king Black Knight he was simply fighting for his own survival. Alone and drunk, he perceived that for the first time.

When he had finished the wine he slid from the piling. Carrying the empty flask, which soon would contain medicine or perhaps somebody's p.i.s.s to be a.n.a.lyzed for a fair fee, he and all the rest of them walked carefully and unsteadily from the dock toward the safety of the house on Thames Street.

He hadn't remained behind without wife and children to turn into a sot, he told himself severely on the following day, when his head had cleared.

Determined to tend to the details of healing, he went to an herb seller's shop on lower Thames Street to renew his supply of medicinals, for in London it was easier to buy certain herbs than to try to find them in nature. He had already met the proprietor, a small, fussy man named Rolf Pollard who appeared to be a capable pharmacist.

"Where shall I go to find the company of other physicians?" Rob asked him.

"Why, I should say the Lyceum, Master Cole. It's a meeting held regularly by the physicians of this city. I don't have details, but doubtless Master Rufus does," he said, indicating a man at the other end of the room who was sniffing a branch of dried purslane to test its volatility.

Pollard led Rob across the shop and introduced him to Aubrey Rufus, physician of Fenchurch Street. "I've told Master Cole of the Physicians' Lyceum," he said, "but couldn't recall the particulars."

Rufus, a sober fellow about ten years older than Rob, ran a hand over his thinning sandy hair and nodded pleasantly enough. "It's held first Monday eve of each month, dinner hour in the room above Illingsworth's Tavern on Cornhill. Mostly it's an excuse to make gluttons of ourselves. Each man buys his own food and drink."

"Must one be invited?"

"Not at all. It is open to London physicians. But if an invitation is more pleasing, why I invite you now," Rufus said affably, and Rob smiled and thanked him and took his leave.

So it happened that on the first Monday of the slushy new year he went to Illingsworth's Tavern and found himself in the company of a score of medical men. They sat around tables talking and laughing over drink, and when he came in they inspected him with the furtive curiosity a group always directs at a newcomer.

The first man he recognized was Hunne, who scowled when he saw Rob and muttered something to his companions. But Aubrey Rufus was at another table and motioned for Rob to join him. He introduced the four others at the table, mentioning that Rob was recently arrived in the city and set up in practice on Thames Street.

Their eyes contained varying amounts of the grim wariness with which Hunne had regarded him.

"Under whom did you prentice?" asked a man named Brace.

"I clerked with a physician named Heppmann, in the East Frankish town of Freising." During the time they had spent in Freising while Tam was ill, Heppmann had been their landlord's name.

"Hmmph," Brace said, doubtless an opinion of foreign-trained physicians. "How long an apprenticeship?"

"Six years."

His questioning was diverted by the arrival of the victuals, overdone roast fowl with baked turnips, and ale that Rob drank sparingly, not wanting to make a fool of himself. After the meal it turned out that Brace was the lecturer of the evening. He spoke on cupping, warning his fellow physicians to heat the cupping gla.s.s sufficiently, since it was the warmth in the gla.s.s that drew the blood's ugliness to the surface of the skin, where it might be eliminated by bleeding.

"You must demonstrate to the patients your confidence that repeated cupping and bleeding will bring cures, so they may share your optimism," Brace said.

The talk was ill prepared, and from the conversation Rob knew that by the time he was eleven Barber had taught him more about bleeding and cupping, and when to use them and when not to use them, than most of these physicians knew.

So the Lyceum was quickly a disappointment.

They seemed obsessed with fees and income. Rufus even envyingly joshed the chairman, a royal physician named Dryfield, because each year he was furnished with a stipend and robes.

"It's possible to heal for a stipend without serving the king," Rob said.

Now he gained their attention. "How might this happen?" Dryfield asked.

"A physician might work for a hospital, a healing center devoted to patients and the understanding of illness."

Some looked at him blankly but Dryfield nodded. "An Eastern idea that is spreading. One hears of a hospital newly established in Salerno, and the Hotel Dieu has long been in Paris. But let me warn you, folk are sent to die in the Hotel Dieu and then forgotten, and it is a h.e.l.lish place."

"Hospitals needn't be like the Hotel Dieu," Rob said, troubled that he couldn't tell them of the maristan.

But Hunne cut in. "Perhaps such a system works well for the greasier races, but English physicians are more independent of spirit and must be free to conduct their own businesses."

"Surely medicine is more than a business," Rob objected mildly.

"It is less than a business," Hunne said, "fees being what they are and new s.h.i.tty-legged come-latelys arriving in London all the time. How do you count it as more than a business?"

"It is a calling, Master Hunne," he said, "as men are said to be divinely called to the Church."

Brace hooted. But the chairman coughed, having had enough of wrangling. "Who will offer the discourse next month?" he asked.

There was a silence.

"Come now, each must do his share," Dryfield said impatiently.

It was a mistake to offer at his first meeting, Rob knew. But n.o.body else said a word and finally he spoke. "I'll lecture, if it's your desire."

Dryfield's eyebrows went up. "And on what subject, master?"

"I'll speak on the subject of abdominal distemper."

"On abdominal distemper? Master ... ah, Crowe, was it?"

"Cole."

"Master Cole. Why, a talk on abdominal distemper would be splendid," the chairman said, and beamed.

Julia Swane, accused witch, had confessed. The witch's spot had been found in the soft white flesh of her inner arm, just beneath the left shoulder. Her daughter Glynna testified that Julia had held her down and laughed while she was used s.e.xually by someone she took to be the Fiend. Several of her victims accused her of casting spells. It was while the witch was being tied into the dunking stool before immersion in the icy Thames that she decided to tell all, and now she was cooperating with the evil-rooters of the Church, who were said to be interviewing her at length regarding all manner of subjects relating to witchcraft. Rob tried not to think of her.

He bought a somewhat fat gray mare and arranged to board her at what had been Egglestan's stables, now owned by a man named Thorne. She was aging and undistinguished but, he told himself, he wouldn't be playing ball-and-stick on her. He rode to patients when summoned, and others found their way to his door. It was the season for croup and though he'd have liked Persian medicinals such as tamarind, pomegranate, and powdered fig, he made up potions with what was at hand: purslane steeped in rose water to produce a gargle for angry throat, an infusion of dried violet to treat headache and fever, pine resin mixed with honey to be eaten against phlegm and cough.

One who came to him said his name was Thomas Hood. He had carroty hair and beard and a discolored nose; he seemed familiar and presently Rob realized the man had been the bystander at the incident between the Jew and the two sailors. Hood complained of thrushlike symptoms but there were no pustules in his mouth, no fever, no redness in the throat, and he was far too lively to be afflicted. In fact, he was a constant source of personal questions. With whom had Rob apprenticed? Did he reside alone? What, no wife, no child? How long had he been in London? Whence had he come?

A blind man would clearly see this was no patient but a snoop. Rob told him nothing, prescribed a strong purgative he knew Hood wouldn't take, and ushered him out amid more questions he ignored.

But the visit bothered him inordinately. Who had sent Hood? For whom was he inquiring? And was it only coincidence that he had observed Rob's routing of the two sailors?

On the following day he learned some possible answers when he went to the herb seller's to buy ingredients for remedies, and again found Aubrey Rufus there on the same errand.

"Hunne is speaking against you when he can," Rufus told him. "He says you are too forward. That you have the appearance of a ruffian and blackguard and he doubts you are a physician. He seeks to close membership in the Lyceum to any who haven't prenticed to English physicians."

"What is your advice?"

"Oh, do nothing," Rufus said. "It's apparent he cannot reconcile him self to sharing Thames Street with you. We all know Hunne would rip away his grandfather's ballocks for a coin. No one will pay him heed."

Comforted, Rob returned to the Thames Street house.

He would overcome their doubts with scholarship, he decided, and fell to work preparing the discourse on abdominal distemper as though he would be giving it in the madra.s.sa. The original Lyceum near ancient Athens was where Aristotle had lectured; he wasn't Aristotle, but he had been trained by Ibn Sina and would show these London physicians what a medical lecture could be like.

There was interest, certainly, because every man attending the Lyceum had lost patients who had suffered agony in the lower right portion of the abdomen. But there was also general scorn.