It comforted Samuel and he slept some, but before dawn he wet the bed as if he were younger than Jonathan. In the morning he was ashamed and could not meet Rob's eyes. His fears were not unfounded, for he was the first of them to go. Most of the members of their father's Ten were still out of work. Of the nine woodworkers only one man was able and willing to take a child into his family. Along with Samuel, Nathanael's hammers and saws went to Turner Home, a Master Carpenter who lived only six houses away.

Two days later a priest named Ra.n.a.ld Lovell came with Father Kempton, the man who had sung the Ma.s.ses for both Mam and Da. Father Lovell said he was being transferred to the north of England and wanted a child. He examined them all and took a fancy to Willum. He was a big, hearty man with pale yellow hair and gray eyes that Rob tried to tell himself were kind.

White and tremulous, his brother could only nod as he followed the two priests out of the house.

"Goodbye, then, William," Rob said.

He wondered wildly if perhaps he couldn't keep the two small ones. But he was already doling out the last of the food from his father's funeral, and he was a realistic boy. Jonathan and his father's leather doublet and tool belt were given to a Companion Joiner named Aylwyn who belonged to Nathanael's Hundred. When Mistress Aylwyn came, Rob explained that Jonathan was trained to pot but needed napkins when afraid, and she accepted the wash-thinned cloths and the child with a grin and a nod.

The wet nurse kept the infant Roger and received Mam's embroidery materials. Richard Bukerel informed Rob, who had never seen the woman.

Anne Mary's hair needed washing. He did it carefully, as he had been taught, but still some soap got into her eyes and it was harsh and burning. He wiped her dry and held her as she wept, smelling her clean seal-brown hair that gave off a scent like Mam's.

Next day the sounder pieces of furniture were taken by the baker and his wife, name of Haverhill, and Anne Mary went to live above their pastry shop. Clutching her hand, Rob brought her to them: Goodbye, then, little girl. "I love you, my Maid Anne Mary," he whispered, holding her close. But she seemed to blame him for all that had happened and wouldn't bid him farewell.

Only Rob J. was left, and no possessions. That evening Bukerel came to see him. The Chief Carpenter had been drinking, but his mind was clear. "It may take long to find you a place. It's the times, no one has food for an adult appet.i.te in a boy who cannot do a man's work." After a brooding silence he spoke again. "When I was younger everyone said if we could only have a real peace and get rid of King Aethelred, the worst king who ever ruined his generation, then times would be good. We had invasion after invasion, Saxons, Danes, every b.l.o.o.d.y kind of pirate. Now finally we've a strong peacekeeping monarch in King Canute, but it's as if nature conspires to hold us down. Great summer and winter storms do us in. Three years in a row crops have failed. Millers don't grind grain, sailors stay in port. No one builds, and craftsmen are idle. It's hard times, my boy. But I'll find you a place, I promise."

"Thank you, Chief Carpenter."

Bukerel's dark eyes were troubled. "I've watched you, Robert Cole. I've seen a boy care for his family like a worthy man. I'd take you into my own home if my wife were a different kind of woman." He blinked, embarra.s.sed by the realization that drink had loosened his tongue more than he liked, and got heavily to his feet. "A restful night to you, Rob J."

"A restful night, Chief Carpenter."

He became a hermit. The near-empty rooms were his cave. No one asked him to table. His neighbors were unable to ignore his existence but sustained him grudgingly; Mistress Haverhill came in the morning and left yesterday's unsold loaf from the bakery and Mistress Bukerel came in the evening and left cheese in tiny portion, noting his reddened eyes and lecturing that weeping was a womanly privilege. He drew water from the public well as he had before, and he tended house but there was n.o.body to put the quiet and plundered place into disorder and he had little to do but worry and pretend.

Sometimes he became a Roman scout, lying by the open window behind Mam's curtain and listening to the secrets of the enemy world. He heard drawn carts go by, barking dogs, playing children, the sounds of birds.

Once he overheard the voices of a knot of men from the guild. "Rob Cole is a bargain. Somebody should grab him," Bukerel said.

He lay there guilty and covert, listening to others talk about him as if he were someone else.

"Aye, look at his size. He'll be a great workhorse when he gets his full growth," Hugh t.i.te said grudgingly.

What if t.i.te took him? Rob considered in dismay the prospect of living with Anthony t.i.te. He wasn't displeased when Hugh snorted in disgust. "He won't be old enough for Apprentice Carpenter until another three years and he eats like a great horse right now, when London is full of strong backs and empty bellies." The men moved away.

Two mornings later, behind the same window curtain, he paid dearly for the sin of eavesdropping when he overheard Mistress Bukerel discussing her husband's guild office with Mistress Haverhill.

"Everyone speaks of the honor of being Chief Carpenter. It places no bread upon my table. Quite the reverse, it presents tiresome obligations. I am weary of having to share my provision with the likes of that great lazy boy in there."

"Whatever will become of him?" Mistress Haverhill said, sighing.

"I have advised Master Bukerel that he should be sold as an indigent. Even in bad times a young slave will fetch a price to repay the guild and all of us for whatever has been spent on the Cole family."

He was unable to breathe.

Mistress Bukerel sniffed. "The Chief Carpenter will not hear of it," she said sourly. "I trust I'll convince him in the end. But by the time he comes around, we shall no longer be able to recover costs."

When the two women moved away, Rob lay behind the window curtain as though in fever, alternately sweating and chilled.

All his life he had seen slaves, taking it for granted that their condition had little to do with him, for he had been born a free Englishman.

He was too young by far to be a stevedore on the docks. But he knew that boy slaves were used in the mines, where they worked in tunnels too narrow to admit the bodies of men. He also knew that slaves were wretchedly clothed and fed and often were brutally whipped for small infractions. And that once enslaved, they were owned for life.

He lay and wept. Eventually he was able to gather his courage and tell himself that d.i.c.k Bukerel would never sell him for a slave, but he worried that Mistress Bukerel would send others to do it without informing her husband. She was fully capable of such an act, he told himself. Waiting in the silent and abandoned house, he came to start and tremble at every sound.

Five frozen days after his father's funeral, a stranger came to the door.

"You are young Cole?"

He nodded warily, heart pounding.

"My name is Croft. I am directed to you by a man named Richard Bukerel, whom I've met while drinking at the Bardwell Tavern."

Rob saw a man neither young nor old with a huge fat body and a weather-beaten face set between a freeman's long hair and a rounded, frizzled beard of the same gingery color.

"What's your full name?"

"Robert Jeremy Cole, sir."

"Age?"

"Nine years."

"I'm a barber-surgeon and I seek a prentice. Do you know what a barber-surgeon does, young Cole?"

"Are you some kind of physician?"

The fat man smiled. "For the time being, that's close enough. Bukerel informed me of your circ.u.mstances. Does my trade appeal to you?"

It didn't; he had no wish to become like the leech who'd bled his father to death. But even less did he wish to be sold as a slave, and he answered affirmatively without hesitation.

"Not afraid of work?"

"Oh, no, sir!"

"That's good, for I would work your a.r.s.e off. Bukerel said you read and write and have Latin?"

He hesitated. "Very little Latin, in truth."

The man smiled. "I shall try you for a time, chappy. You have things?"

His little bundle had been ready for days. Am I saved? he wondered. Outside, they clambered into the strangest wagon he had ever seen. On either side of the front seat was a white pole with a thick stripe wrapped around it like a crimson snake. It was a covered cart daubed bright red and decorated with sun-yellow pictures of a ram, a lion, scales, a goat, fishes, an archer, a crab ...

The dappled gray horse pulled them away and they rolled down Carpenter's Street and past the guild house. He sat frozen as they threaded through the tumult of Thames Street, managing to cast quick glances at the man and now noting a handsome face despite the fat, a prominent and reddened nose, a wen on the left eyelid, and a network of fine lines radiating from the corners of piercing blue eyes.

The cart crossed the little bridge over the Walbrook and pa.s.sed Egglestan's stables and the place where Mam had fallen. Then they turned right and rattled over London Bridge to the southern side of the Thames. Moored beside the bridge was the London ferry and, just beyond, the great Southwark Market where imports entered England. They pa.s.sed warehouses burned and wasted by the Danes and recently rebuilt. On the embankment was a single line of wattle-and-daub cottages, the mean homes of fishermen, lightermen, and wharf workers. There were two shabby inns for merchants attending market. And then, bordering the wide causeway, a double line of grand houses, the manors of the rich merchants of London, all of them with impressive gardens and a few built on piles driven into the marsh. He recognized the home of the embroidery importer with whom Mam had dealt. He had never traveled beyond this point.

"Master Croft?"

The man scowled. "No, no. I'm never to be called Croft. I'm always called Barber, because of my profession."

"Yes, Barber," he said. In moments all of Southwark was behind them, and with rising panic Rob J. recognized that he had entered the strange and unfamiliar outside world.

"Barber, where are we going?" he couldn't refrain from crying.

The man smiled and flicked the reins, causing the dappled horse to trot.

"Everywhere," he said.

4.

THE BARBER-SURGEON.

Before dusk they made camp on a hill by a stream. The man said the gray plodder of a horse was Tatus. "Short for Incitatus, after the steed the emperor Caligula loved so much he made the beast a priest and a consul. Our Incitatus is a pa.s.sing fair animal for a poor beggar with his b.a.l.l.s cut off," Barber said, and showed him how to care for the gelding, rubbing the horse with handfuls of soft dry gra.s.s and then allowing him to drink and go to grazing before they tended to their own needs. They were in the open, a distance from the forest, but Barber sent him to gather dry wood for the fire and he had to make repeated trips to acc.u.mulate a pile. Soon the fire was snapping, and cooking had begun to produce odors that weakened his legs. Into an iron pot Barber had placed a generous amount of thick-sliced smoked pork. Now he poured out most of the rendered fat and into the sputtering grease cut a large turnip and several leeks, adding a handful of dried mulberries and a sprinkling of herbs. By the time the pungent mixture had cooked, Rob had never smelled anything better. Barber ate stolidly, watching him wolf down a large portion and in silence giving him another. They mopped their wooden bowls with chunks of barley bread. Without being told, Rob took the pot and bowls to the stream and scrubbed them with sand.

When he had returned the utensils he went to a nearby bush and pa.s.sed water.

"My blessed Lord and Lady, but that is a remarkable-looking peter," Barber said, coming up on him suddenly.

He finished before his need and hid the member. "When I was an infant," he said stiffly, "I had a mortification ... there. I'm told a surgeon removed the little hood of flesh at the end."

Barber gazed at him in astonishment. "Took off the prepuce. You were circ.u.mcised, like a bleeding heathen."

The boy moved away, very disturbed. He was watchful and expectant. A dankness rolled toward them from the forest and he opened his small bundle and took out his other shirt, putting it on over the one he wore.

Barber removed two furred pelts from the wagon and flung them toward him. "We bed outside, for the cart is full of all manner of things."

In the open bundle Barber saw the glint of the coin and picked it up. He didn't ask where it had been gotten, nor did Rob tell him. "There's an inscription," Rob said. "My father and I ... We believed it identifies the first cohort of Romans to come to London."

Barber examined it. "Yes."

Obviously he knew a lot about the Romans and valued them, judging from the name he'd given his horse. Rob was seized with a sick certainty that the man would keep his possession. "On the other side are letters," he said hoa.r.s.ely.

Barber took the coin to the fire to read in the growing dark. "IOX. Io means 'shout.' X is ten. It's a Roman cheer for victory: 'Shout ten times!'"

Rob accepted the coin's return with relief and made his bed near the fire. The pelts were a sheepskin, which he placed on the ground fleece up, and a bearskin, which he used as a topping. They were old and smelled strong but would keep him warm.

Barber made his own bed on the other side of the fire, placing his sword and knife where they could be used to repel attackers or, Rob thought fearfully, to slay a fleeing boy. Barber had removed a Saxon horn which he wore on a thong around his neck. Closing the bottom with a bone plug, he filled it with a dark liquid from a flask and held it toward Rob. "My own spirits. Drink deep."

He didn't want it but feared to refuse. A child of working-cla.s.s London was threatened with no soft and easy version of the boogerman but instead was taught early that there were sailors and stevedores anxious to lure a boy behind deserted warehouses. He knew of children who had accepted sweetmeats and coins from men like these, and he knew what they had to do in return. He was aware that drunkenness was a common prelude.

He tried to refuse more of the liquor but Barber frowned. "Drink," he commanded. "It will set you at ease."

Not until he had taken two more full swallows and was set to violent coughing was Barber satisfied. He took the horn back to his own side of the fire and finished the flask and another, finally loosing a prodigious fart and settling into his bed. He looked over at Rob only once more. "Rest easy, chappy," he said. "Sleep well. You have nothing to fear from me."

Rob was certain it was a trick. He lay under the rank bearskin and waited with tightened haunches. In his right hand he clutched his coin. In his left hand, although he knew that even if he had Barber's weapons he would be no match for the man and was at his mercy, he gripped a heavy rock.

But eventually there was ample evidence that Barber slept. The man was an ugly snorer.

The medicinal taste of the liquor filled Rob's mouth. The alcohol coursed through his body as he snuggled deep in the furs and allowed the rock to roll from his hand. He clutched the coin and imagined the Romans, rank upon rank, shouting ten times for heroes who wouldn't allow themselves to be beaten by the world. Overhead, the stars were large and white and wheeled all over the sky, so low he wanted to reach up and pluck them to make a necklace for Mam. He thought of each member of his family, one by one. Of the living he missed Samuel the most, which was peculiar because Samuel had resented him as eldest and had defied him with foul words and a loud mouth. He worried whether Jonathan was wetting his napkins and prayed Mistress Aylwyn would show the little boy patience. He hoped Barber would return to London very soon, for he longed to see the other children again.

Barber knew what his new boy was feeling. He had been exactly this one's age when he found himself alone after berserkers had struck Clacton, the fishing village where he was born. It was burned into his memory.

Aethelred was the king of his childhood. As early as he could remember, his father had cursed Aethelred, saying the people had never been so poor under any other king. Aethelred squeezed and taxed, providing a lavish life for Emma, the strong-willed and beautiful woman he had imported from Normandy to be his queen. He also built an army with the taxes but used it more to protect himself than his people, and he was so cruel and bloodthirsty that some men spat when they heard his name.

In the spring of Anno Domini 991, Aethelred shamed his subjects by bribing Danish attackers with gold to turn them away. The following spring the Danish fleet returned to London as it had done for a hundred years. This time Aethelred had no choice; he gathered his fighters and warships, and the Danes were defeated on the Thames with great slaughter. But two years later there was a more serious invasion, when Olaf, King of the Norwegians, and Swegen, King of the Danes, sailed up the Thames with ninety-four ships. Again Aethelred gathered his army around London and managed to hold the Nors.e.m.e.n off, but this time the invaders saw that the cowardly king had left his country vulnerable in order to protect himself. Splitting up their fleet, the Nors.e.m.e.n beached their ships along the English coast and laid waste to the small seaside towns.

That week, Henry Croft's father had taken him on his first long trip after herring. The morning they returned with a good catch he had run ahead, eager to be first in his mother's arms and hear her words of praise. Hidden out of sight in a cove nearby were half a dozen Norwegian longboats. When he reached his cottage he saw a strange man dressed in animal skins staring out at him through the open shutters of the window hole.

He had no idea who the man was, but instinct caused him to turn and run for his life, straight to his father.

His mother lay on the floor already used and dead, but his father didn't know that. Luke Croft pulled his knife as he made for the house, but the three men who met him outside the front door were carrying swords. From afar, Henry Croft saw his father overpowered and taken. One of the men held his father's hands behind his back. Another pulled his hair with both hands, forcing him to kneel and extend his neck. The third man cut off his head with a sword. In Barber's nineteenth year he had witnessed a murderer executed in Wolverhampton; the sheriff's axman had cleaved off the criminal's head as if killing a rooster. In contrast, his father's beheading had been clumsily done, for the Viking had required a flurry of strokes, as if he were hacking a piece of firewood.

Hysterical with grief and fear, Henry Croft had run into the woods and hidden himself like a hunted animal. When he wandered out, dazed and starving, the Norwegians were gone but they had left death and ashes. Henry had been collected with other orphan boys and sent to Crowland Abbey in Lincolnshire.

Decades of similar raids by heathen Nors.e.m.e.n had left the monasteries with too few monks and too many orphans, so the Benedictines solved two problems by ordaining many of the parentless boys. At nine years of age Henry was administered vows and instructed to promise G.o.d that he would live in poverty and chast.i.ty forever, obeying the precepts established by the blessed St. Benedict of Nursia.

It gained him an education. Four hours a day he studied, six hours a day he performed damp, dirty labor. Crowland owned vast tracts, mostly fens, and each day Henry and the other monks turned the muddy earth, pulling plows like staggering beasts in order to convert bogs into fields. It was expected that the rest of his time would be spent in contemplation or prayer. There were morning services, afternoon services, evening services, perpetual services. Every prayer was considered a single step up an interminable stairway that would take his soul to heaven. There was no recreation or athletics, but he was allowed to pace the cloister, a covered walk in the shape of a rectangle. To the north side of the cloister was the sacristy, the buildings in which the sacred utensils were kept. To the east was the church; to the west, the chapter house; to the south, a cheerless refectory consisting of a dining room, kitchen, and pantry on the ground floor and a dormitory above.

Within the rectangle were graves, the ultimate proof that life at Crowland Abbey was predictable: tomorrow would be identical to yesterday and eventually every monk would lie inside the cloister. Because some mistook this for peace, Crowland had attracted several n.o.blemen who had fled the politics of Court and Aethelred's cruelty and saved their lives by taking the cowl. These influential elite lived in individual cells, as did the true mystics who sought G.o.d through agony of spirit and pain of body brought on by hair shirts, inspired pinching, and self-flagellation. For the other sixty-seven males who wore the tonsure despite the fact that they were uncalled and unholy, home was a single large chamber containing sixty-seven sleeping pallets. If Henry Croft awoke at any moment of any night he might hear coughing and sneezing, a.s.sorted snores, sounds of masturbation, the wounded cries of dreamers, the breaking of wind, and the shattering of the silence rule through unecclesiastic cursing and clandestine conversations which almost always were about food. Meals at Crowland were very spa.r.s.e.

The town of Peterborough was only eight miles away, but he never saw it. One day when he was fourteen years old he asked his confessor, Father Dunstan, for permission to sing hymns and recite prayers at the riverside between Vespers and Night Song. This was granted. As he walked the river meadow, Father Dunstan followed at a discreet distance. Henry paced slowly and deliberately, his hands behind his back and his head bowed as though in worship worthy of a bishop. It was a beautiful and warm summer's evening with a fresh breeze off the water. He had been taught about this river by Brother Matthew, a geographer. It was the River Welland. It rose in the Midlands near Corby and easily slipped and wriggled to Crowland like a snake, thence flowing northeast between rolling hills and fertile valleys before rushing through coastal swamps to empty into the great bay of the North Sea called The Wash.

Surrounding the river was G.o.d's bounty of forest and field. Crickets shrilled. Birds twittered in the trees and cows looked at him with dumb respect as they grazed. There was a little c.o.c.kleboat pulled up on the bank.

The following week he asked to be allowed to recite solitary prayer by the river after Lauds, the dawn service. Permission was granted and this time Father Dunstan didn't come. When Henry got to the riverbank he put the little boat into the water, clambered in, and pushed off.

He used the oars only to get into the current, then he sat very still in the center of the flimsy boat and watched the brown water, letting the river take him like a fallen leaf. After a time, when he knew he was away, he began to laugh. He whooped and shouted boyish things. "That for you!" he cried, not knowing whether he was defying the sixty-six monks who would be sleeping without him, or Father Dunstan or the G.o.d who was seen at Crowland as such a cruel being.

He stayed on the river all day, until the water that rushed toward the sea was too deep and dangerous for his liking. Then he beached the boat and began a time when he learned the price of freedom.

He wandered the coastal villages, sleeping wherever, living on what he could beg or steal. Having nothing to eat was far worse than having little to eat. A farmer's wife gave him a sack of food and an old tunic and ragged trousers in exchange for the Benedictine habit that would make woolen shirts for her sons. In the port of Grimsby a fisherman finally took him on as helper and worked him brutally for more than two years in return for scant fare and bare shelter. When the fisherman died, his wife sold the boat to people who wanted no boys. Henry spent hungry months until he found a troupe of entertainers and traveled with them, lugging baggage and helping with the necessities of their craft in return for sc.r.a.ps of food and their protection. Even in his eyes their arts were clumsy but they knew how to bang a drum and draw a crowd, and when a cap was pa.s.sed surprising numbers in their audiences dropped a coin. He watched them hungrily. He was too old to be a tumbler, since acrobats must have their joints broken while they are still children. But the jugglers taught him their trade. He mimicked the magician and learned the simpler feats of deception; the magician taught him that he must never give the impression of necromancy, for all over England the Church and the Crown were hanging witches. He listened carefully to the storyteller, whose young sister was the first to allow him inside her body. He felt a kinship with the entertainers, but the troupe dissolved in Derbyshire after a year and everyone went separate ways without him.

A few weeks later in the town of Matlock, his luck took a turn when a barber-surgeon named James Farrow indentured him for six years. Later he would learn that none of the local youths would serve Farrow as prentice because there were stories linking him to witchcraft. By the time Henry heard the rumors he had been with Farrow two years and knew the man was no witch. Though the barber-surgeon was a cold man and b.a.s.t.a.r.dly strict, to Henry Croft he represented genuine opportunity.

Matlock Township was rural and thinly populated, without upper-cla.s.s patients or prosperous merchants to support a physician, or the large population of poorer folk to attract a surgeon. In a far-flung farm area surrounding Matlock, James Farrow, country barber-surgeon, was all there was, and in addition to administering cleansing clysters and cutting and shaving hair, he performed surgery and prescribed remedies. Henry did his bidding for more than five years. Farrow was a stern taskmaster; he beat Henry when the apprentice made mistakes, but he taught him everything he knew, and meticulously.

During Henry's fourth year in Matlock-it was the year 1002-King Aethelred committed an act that would have far-reaching and terrible consequences. In his difficulties the king had allowed certain Danes to settle in southern England and had given them land, on condition that they would fight for him against his enemies. He had thus bought the services of a Danish n.o.ble named Pallig, who was husband to Gunnhilda, the sister of Swegen, King of Denmark. That year the Vikings invaded England and followed their usual tactics, slaying and burning. When they reached Southampton, the king decided to pay tribute again, and he gave the invaders twenty-four thousand pounds to go away.

When their ships had carried the Nors.e.m.e.n off, Aethelred was shamed and fell into a frustrated fury. He ordered that all Danish people who were in England should be slain on St. Brice's Day, November 13. The treacherous ma.s.s murder was carried out as the king ordered, and it seemed to unlock an evil that had been festering in the English people.

The world had always been brutal, but after the murders of the Danes life became even more cruel. All over England violent crimes took place, witches were hunted out and put to death by hanging or burning, and a blood l.u.s.t seemed to take the land.