CAPS AT TABLE.

He moved out of Tettenhall at once but something was already happening to him.

He was running low on Universal Specific and next day bought a keg of liquor from a farmer, pausing to mix a new batch of physick which that afternoon he began to rid himself of in Ludlow. The Specific sold as well as ever, but he was preoccupied and a little frightened.

To hold a human soul in the palm of your hand like a pebble. To feel somebody slip away, yet by your actions to bring her back! Not even a king had such power.

Selected.

Could he learn more? How much could be learned? What must it be like, he asked himself, to learn all that could be taught?

For the first time he recognized in himself a desire to become a physician.

Truly to be able to fight death! He was having new and disturbing thoughts that at times produced rapture and at other times were almost an agony.

Next morning he set out for Worcester, the next town to the south along the Severn River. He didn't remember seeing the river or the track, or recollect guiding Horse, or recall anything else of the journey. When he reached Worcester, the townsfolk gaped as they watched the red wagon; it rolled into the square, made a complete circuit without stopping, and then left the town and traveled back in the direction whence it had come.

The village of Lucteburne in Leicestershire wasn't large enough to support a tavern, but haysel was in progress and when he stopped at a meadow in which four men wielded scythes, the cutter in the swath closest to the road ceased his rhythmic swinging long enough to tell him how to reach Edgar Thorpe's house.

Rob found the old man on his hands and knees in his small garden, harvesting leeks. He perceived at once, with a strange sense of excitement, that Thorpe was able to see. But he was suffering sorely from rheum sickness and, although Rob helped him to regain his feet amid groans and anguished exclamations, it was a few moments before they were able to speak calmly.

Rob brought several bottles of Specific from the wagon and opened one, which pleased his host greatly.

"I am here to inquire into the operation which gave you back your sight, Master Thorpe."

"Indeed? And what is your interest?"

Rob hesitated. "I have a kinsman in need of such treatment, and I inquire in his name."

Thorpe took a swallow of liquor and then sighed. "I hope that he's a strong man with bountiful courage," he said. "Tied to a chair hands and feet, I was. Cruel bindings cut into my head, fixing it against the high back. I'd been fed many a stoup and was close to senseless from drink, but then small hooks were placed beneath my eyelids and lifted by a.s.sistants so I couldn't blink."

He closed his eyes and shuddered. The tale obviously had been told many times, for the details were fixed in his memory and related without hesitation, but Rob found them no less fascinating for that.

"Such was my affliction that I could only see, fuzzily, what was directly before me. There swam into my vision Master Merlin's hand. It was holding a blade, which grew larger as it descended, until it cut into my eye.

"Oh, the pain of it sobered me instantly! I was certain he had cut out my eye instead of merely removing the cloudiness and I shrieked at him and importuned him to do nothing more to me. When he persisted I rained curses on his head and said that at last I understood how his despised folk could have killed our gentle Lord.

"When he cut into the second eye the pain was so great that I lost all knowledge. I awoke to the darkness of wrapped eyes and for almost a fortnight suffered grievously. But at length I was able to see as I hadn't done for overly long. So great was the improvement of my sight that I spent two more full years as clerk before the rheum made it sensible to curtail my duties."

So it was true, Rob thought dazedly. Then perhaps the other things Benjamin Merlin had told him were fact as well.

"Master Merlin is the goodliest doctor ever I did see," Edgar Thorpe said. "Except," he added crossly, "for so competent a physician he seems to be meeting untoward difficulty in ridding my bones and joints of great discomfort."

He went to Tettenhall again and camped in a little valley, staying near the town three days like a lovesick swain who lacked the courage to visit a female but couldn't bring himself to leave her alone. The first farmer from whom he bought provision told him where Benjamin Merlin lived, and several times he drove Horse slowly past the place, a low farmhouse with well-kept barn and outbuilding, a field, an orchard, and a vineyard. There were no outward signs that here lived a physician.

On the afternoon of the third day, miles from Merlin's house, he met the physician on the road.

"How do I find you, young barber?"

Rob said he was well and asked after the physician's health. They chatted of weather for a grave moment and then Merlin nodded his dismissal. "I may not tarry, for I must still go to the homes of three sick persons before my day's work is done."

"May I accompany you, and observe?" Rob forced himself to say.

The physician hesitated. He seemed less than pleased by the request. But he nodded, however reluctantly. "Kindly see that you stay out of the way," he said.

The first patient lived not far from where they had met, in a small cottage by a goose pond. He was Edwin Griffith, an old man with a hollow cough, and Rob saw at once that he was failing of advanced chest sickness and soon would be in his grave.

"How do I find you this day, Master Griffith?" Merlin asked.

The old man quailed beneath a paroxysm of coughing and then gasped and sighed. "I am same and with few regrets, save that I wasn't able today to feed my geese."

Merlin smiled. "Perhaps my young friend here might tend to them," he said, and Rob could do nothing but agree. Old Griffith told him where fodder was kept, and soon he was hurrying to the side of the pond with a sack. He was annoyed because this visit was a loss to him, since surely Merlin wouldn't spend time overly with a dying man. He approached the geese gingerly, for he knew how vicious they could be; but they were hungry and single-mindedly made for the feed with a great squabble, allowing him a quick escape.

To his surprise, Merlin was still talking with Edwin Griffith when he reentered the little house. Rob never had seen a physician work so deliberately. Merlin asked interminable questions about the man's habits and diet, about his childhood, about his parents and his grandparents and what they had died of. He felt the pulse at the wrist and again on the neck, and he placed his ear against the chest and listened. Rob hung back, watching intently.

When they left, the old man thanked him for feeding the fowl.

It appeared to be a day devoted to tending the doomed, for Merlin led him two miles away to a house off the town square, in which the reeve's wife lay wasting away in pain.

"How do I find you, Mary Sweyn?"

She didn't answer but looked at him steadily. It was answer enough, and Merlin nodded. He sat and held her hand and spoke quietly to her; as he had done with the old man, he spent a surprising amount of time.

"You may help me to turn Mistress Sweyn," he said to Rob. "Gently. Gently, now." When Merlin lifted her bedgown to bathe her skeletal body they noted, on her pitiful left flank, an angry boil. The physician lanced it at once to give her comfort and Rob saw to his satisfaction that it was accomplished as he would have done it himself. Merlin left her a flask filled with a pain-dulling infusion.

"One more to see," Merlin said as they closed Mary Sweyn's door. "He is Tancred Osbern, whose son brought word this morning that he has done himself an injury."

Merlin tied his horse's reins to the wagon and sat on the front seat next to Rob, for the company.

"How fare your kinsman's eyes?" the physician asked blandly.

He might have known that Edgar Thorpe would mention his inquiry, Rob told himself, and felt the blood rushing into his cheeks. "I didn't intend to deceive him. I wished to see for myself the results of your couching," he said. "And it seemed the simplest way to explain my interest."

Merlin smiled and nodded. As they rode he explained the surgical method he had used to remove Thorpe's cataracts. "It is not an operation I would advise anyone doing on his own," he said pointedly, and Rob nodded, for he had no intention of going off to operate on any person's eyes!

Whenever they came to a crossroads Merlin pointed the way, until finally they drew near a prosperous farm. It had the orderly look produced by constant attention, but inside they found a ma.s.sive and muscular farmer groaning on the straw-filled pallet that was his bed.

"Ah, Tancred, what have you done to yourself this time?" Merlin said.

"Hurt t'b.l.o.o.d.y leg."

Merlin threw back the cover and frowned, for the right limb was twisted at the thigh, and swollen. "You must be in frightful pain. Yet you told the boy to say, 'whenever I arrived.' Next time you are not to be stupidly brave, that I may come at once," he said sharply.

The man closed his eyes and nodded.

"How did you do yourself, and when?"

"Yesterday noon. Fell off d.a.m.n roof while fixing cursed thatch."

"You will not be fixing the thatch for a while," Merlin said. He looked at Rob. "I shall need help. Find us a splint, somewhat longer than his leg."

"Not to tear up buildings or fences," Osbern growled.

Rob went to see what he could find. In the barn there were a dozen logs of beech and oak, as well as a piece of pine that had been worked by hand into a board. It was too wide, but the wood was soft and it took him little time to split it lengthwise using the farmer's tools.

Osbern glowered when he recognized the splint but said nothing.

Merlin looked down and sighed. "He has thighs like a bull's. We have our work before us, young Cole," he said. Grasping the injured leg by the ankle and the calf, the physician tried to exert a steady pressure, at the same time turning and straightening the twisted limb. There was a small crackling, like the sound made when dried leaves are crushed, and Osbern emitted a great bellowing.

"It is no use," Merlin said in a moment. "His muscles are huge. They have locked themselves to protect the leg and I do not have sufficient strength to overcome them and reduce the fracture."

"Let me try," Rob said.

Merlin nodded, but first he fed a full mug of liquor to the farmer, who was trembling and sobbing with the agony induced by the unsuccessful effort.

"Give me another," Osbern gasped.

When he had swallowed the second cup, Rob grasped the leg as Merlin had done. Careful not to jerk, he exerted steady pressure, and Osbern's deep voice changed to a shrill prolonged scream.

Merlin had grabbed the big man beneath the armpits and was pulling the other way, his face contorted and his eyes popping with the effort.

"I think we're getting it," Rob shouted so Merlin could hear him over the anguished sounds. "It's going!" Even as he spoke, the ends of the broken bone grated past one another and locked into place.

There was a sudden silence from the man in the bed.

Rob glanced to see if he had fainted, but Osbern was lying back limply, his face wet with tears.

"Keep up the tension on the leg," Merlin said urgently.

He fashioned a sling out of strips of rag and fastened it around Osbern's foot and ankle. He tied one end of a rope to the sling and the other end tautly to the door handle, then he applied the splint to the extended limb. "Now you may let go of him," he told Rob.

For good measure, they tied the sound leg to the splinted one.

Within minutes they had comforted the trussed and exhausted patient, left instructions with his pale wife, and taken leave of his brother, who would work the farm.

They paused in the barnyard and looked at one another. Each of them wore a shirt soaked through with perspiration, and both faces were as wet as...o...b..rn's tear-streaked cheeks had been.

The physician smiled and clapped him on the shoulder. "You must come home with me now and share our evening meal," he said.

"My Deborah," Benjamin Merlin said.

The doctor's wife was a plump woman with a figure like a pigeon's, a sharp little nose, and very red cheeks. She had blanched when she saw him and she acknowledged their introduction stiffly. Merlin carried a bowl of spring water into the yard so Rob could refresh himself. As he bathed he could hear the woman inside the house haranguing her husband in a language he had never heard before.

The physician grimaced when he came out to wash. "You must forgive her. She is fearful. Law says we must not have Christians in our homes during holy feasts. This will scarcely be a holy feast. It is a simple supper." He glanced at Rob levelly as he wiped himself dry. "However, I can bring food outside to you, if you choose not to sit at table."

"I'm grateful to be allowed to join you, master physician."

Merlin nodded.

A strange supper.

There were the parents and four small children, three of them males. The little girl was Leah and her brothers were Jonathan, Ruel, and Zechariah. The boys and their father wore caps to table! When the wife brought in a hot loaf Merlin nodded to Zechariah, who broke off a piece and began to speak in the guttural tongue Rob had heard previously.

His father stopped him. "Tonight, brochot will be in English as courtesy to our guest."

"Blessed art Thou, O Lord our G.o.d, King of the Universe," the boy said sweetly, "Who brings forth bread from the earth." He gave the loaf directly to Rob, who found it good and pa.s.sed it to others.

Merlin poured red wine from a decanter. Rob followed their example and lifted his goblet as the father nodded to Ruel.

"Blessed art Thou, O Lord our G.o.d, King of the Universe, Who creates the fruit of the vine."

The meal was a fish soup made with milk, not as Barber had made it, but hot and zesty. Afterward they ate apples from the Jew's orchard. The youngest boy, Jonathan, told his father with great indignation that rabbits were wasting their cabbages.

"Then you must waste the rabbits," Rob said. "You must snare them so your mother may serve a savory stew."

There was a strange little silence and then Merlin smiled. "We do not eat rabbit or hare, for they are not kasher."

Rob saw that Mistress Merlin appeared apprehensive, as if she feared he wouldn't comprehend or sympathize with their ways.

"It is a set of dietary laws, old as old." Merlin explained that Jews were not allowed to eat animals that didn't chew their cud and have cloven hooves. They couldn't eat flesh together with milk, because the Bible admonished that lamb mustn't be seethed in the flow of its milch-mother's teats. And they were not permitted to drink blood, or to eat meat that had not been thoroughly bled and salted.

Rob's blood turned cold and he told himself that Mistress Merlin had been right: he could not comprehend Jews. Jews were pagans indeed!

His stomach churned as the physician thanked G.o.d for their bloodless and meatless food.

Nonetheless he asked if he might camp in their orchard that night. Benjamin Merlin insisted that he sleep under shelter, in the barn which was attached to the house, and presently Rob lay on fragrant straw and listened through the thin wall to the sharp rise and fall of the wife's voice. He smiled mirthlessly in the gloom, knowing the essence of her message despite the unintelligible language.

You do not know this great young brute, yet you bring him here. Can you not see his bent nose and battered face, and the expensive weapons of a criminal? He will murder us in our beds!

Presently Merlin came out to the barn with a great flask and two wooden goblets. He handed Rob a cup and sighed. "She is otherwise a most excellent woman," he said, and poured. "It is difficult for her here, for she feels cut off from many she holds dear."

It was good strong drink, Rob discovered. "What section of France are you from?"

"Like this wine we drink, my wife and I were made in the village of Falaise, where our families live under the benevolent surety of Robert of Normandy. My father and two brothers are vintners and suppliers to the English trade."

Seven years before, Merlin said, he had returned to Falaise from studying in Persia at an academy for physicians.

"Persia!" Rob had no idea where Persia was, but he knew it was very far away. "In what direction does Persia lie?"

Merlin smiled. "It is in the East. Far to the east."

"How came you to England?"

When he returned to Normandy as a new physician, Merlin said, he found that within the protectorate of Duke Robert there were medical pract.i.tioners in too goodly a number. Outside of Normandy there was constant strife and the uncertain dangers of war and politics, duke against count, n.o.bles against king. "Twice in my youth I had been to London with my wine merchant father. I remembered the beauty of the English countryside, and all Europe knows of King Canute's gift of stability. So I decided to come to this green and peaceful place."

"And has Tettenhall proved to be a sound choice?"

Merlin nodded. "But there are difficulties. Without those who share our faith we cannot pray to G.o.d properly and it is hard to keep the laws of victuals. We speak to our children in their own tongue but they think in the language of England, and despite our efforts, they're ignorant of many of the customs of their people. I am seeking to attract other Jews here from France."