The Cole Trilogy: The Physician, Shaman, and Matters of Choice by Noah Gordon Read Free Book Online Page A

knife.
    “Moles!”
Farrow shrieked.
    Blood welled, which wasn’t supposed to happen with a witch.
    “They are smart as smart,” Beck said, “able to bleed at will.”
    “I am a barber and not a witch,” Farrow told them contemptuously, but when they tied him to a wooden cross and carried him to his own stock pond, he began to scream for mercy.
    The cross was flung into the shallow pond with a great splash and held beneath the surface. The crowd quieted, watching the bubbles. Presently they pulled it up and gave Farrow a chance to confess. He was still breathing, and sputtered weakly.
    “Do you own, neighbor Farrow, that you have worked with the Devil?” Beck asked him kindly.
    But the bound man could only cough and gasp for air.
    So they immersed him again. This time the cross was held under until the bubbles stopped coming. And still they didn’t raise it.
    Henry could only watch and weep, as if seeing them kill his father again. He was man-grown, no longer a boy, yet he was powerless againstthe witch-hunters, terrified they would take the notion that the barbersurgeon’s prentice was the sorcerer’s assistant.
    Finally they released the submerged cross and recited the counterspell and went away, leaving it to float in the pond.
    When all were gone, Henry waded through the ooze to pull the cross ashore. A pink froth showed between his master’s lips. He closed the eyes that accused sightlessly in the white face and picked duckweed from Farrow’s shoulders before cutting him free.
    The barber-surgeon had been a widower with no family and therefore the responsibility fell upon his servant. He buried Farrow as quickly as possible.
    When he went through the house he discovered they had been there before him. No doubt they were seeking evidence of Satan’s work when they took Farrow’s money and liquor. The place had been picked clean, but there was a suit of clothes in better condition than those he had on, and some food, which he put into a sack. He also took a bag of surgical instruments and captured Farrow’s horse, which he rode out of Matlock before they should recollect him and come back.
    He became a wanderer once again, but this time he had a craft and it made all the difference. Everywhere there were ailing people who would pay a penny or two for treatment. Eventually he learned the profit that could be found in the sale of medications, and to gather crowds he used some of the ways he had learned while traveling with the entertainers.
    Believing he might be sought, he never stayed long in one place and avoided use of his full name, becoming Barber. Before long these things were woven into the fabric of an existence that suited him; he dressed warmly and well, had women in variety, drank when he pleased and ate prodigiously at every meal, vowing never to hunger again. His weight quickly increased. By the time he met the woman he married, he weighed more than eighteen stone. Lucinda Eames was a widow with a nice farm in Canterbury, and for half a year he tended her animals and fields, playing husbandman. He relished her small white bottom, a pale inverted heart. When they made love she poked the pink tip of her tongue out of the left corner of her mouth, like a child doing hard lessons. She blamed him for not giving her a child. Perhaps she was right, but she had not conceived with her first husband either. Her voice became shrill, her tone bitter, and her cooking careless, and long before the year with her was over he was remembering warmer women and pleasurable meals, and yearning for surcease from her tongue.
    * * *
    That was 1012, the year Swegen, King of the Danes, gained control of England. For ten years Swegen had harried Aethelred, eager to shame the man who had murdered his kinsmen. Finally Aethelred fled to the Isle of Wight with his ships, and Queen Emma took refuge in Normandy with her sons Edward and Alfred.
    Soon afterward Swegen died a natural death. He left two sons, Harold, who succeeded