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

with the right hand only, two balls one-handed with the left. He found that by juggling with very low pops he could increase his speed.
    They held over outside a town called Bletchly because Barber boughta swan from a farmer. It was scarcely more than a cygnet but nevertheless larger than any fowl Rob had ever seen prepared for table. The farmer sold it dressed but Barber fussed over the bird, washing it painstakingly in a running stream and then dangling it by the legs over a small fire to singe off the pinfeathers.
    He stuffed it with chestnuts, onions, fat, and herbs as befit a bird that had cost him dear. “A swan’s flesh is stronger than a goose’s but drier than a duck’s and so must be barded,” he instructed Rob happily. They barded the bird by wrapping it completely in thin sheets of salt pork, overlapped and molded snugly. Barber tied the package with flaxen cord and then hung it over the fire on a spit.
    Rob practiced his juggling near enough to the fire so that the smells were a sweet torment. The heat of the flames drew the grease from the pork, basting the lean meat while the fat in the stuffing melted slowly and anointed the bird from within. As Barber turned the swan on the green branch that served as a spit, the thin skin of pork gradually dried and seared; when finally the bird was done and he removed it, the salt pork crackled and broke away. Inside, the swan was moist and delicate, slightly stringy but nicely larded and seasoned. They ate some of the flesh with the hot chestnut stuffing and boiled new squash. Rob had a great pink thigh.
    Next morning they rose early and pushed hard, buoyed by the day of rest. They stopped for breakfast by the side of the track and enjoyed some of the swan’s breast cold with their toasted bread and cheese. When they had finished eating, Barber belched and gave Rob a third wooden ball, painted green.
    They moved like ants across the lowlands. The Cotswold Hills were gentle and rolling, beautiful in their summer softness. The villages nestled in the valleys, with more stone houses than Rob had been accustomed to seeing in London. Three days after St. Swithin’s Day he was ten years old. He made no mention of it to Barber.
    He was growing; the sleeves of the shirt Mam had sewn purposely long now ended well above his knobby wrists. Barber worked him hard. He performed most of the chores, loading and unloading the wagon at every town and village, hauling firewood and fetching water. His body was making bone and muscle of the fine rich food that kept Barber massively round. He had become quickly accustomed to wonderful food.
    Rob and Barber were getting used to each other’s ways. Now when the fat man brought a woman to the campfire it was no novelty; sometimes Rob listened to the sounds of humping and tried to see, but usually he turnedover and went to sleep. If the circumstances were right, on occasion Barber spent the night in a woman’s house, but he was always at the wagon when morning came and it was time to leave a place.
    Gradually there grew in Rob an understanding that Barber tried to cosset every woman he saw and did the same to the people who watched his entertainments. The barber-surgeon told them the Universal Specific was an Eastern physick, made by infusing the ground dried flower of a plant called Vitalia which was found only in the deserts of far-off Assyria. Yet when they ran low on the Specific, Rob helped Barber to mix up a new batch and he saw that the physick was mostly everyday liquor.
    They didn’t have to inquire more than half a dozen times before finding a farmer with a keg of metheglin he was happy to sell. Any variety would have served, but Barber said he always tried to find metheglin, a mixture of fermented honey and water. “It’s a Welsh invention, chappy, one of the few things they’ve given us. Named from
meddyg,
their word for physician, and
llyn,
meaning strong liquor. It is their way of taking medicine and it is a good one, for