The Cole Trilogy: The Physician, Shaman, and Matters of Choice Read Online Free PDF

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 Dick 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 circumstances. 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 arse 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 passed 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 passed 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?”