The Cole Trilogy: The Physician, Shaman, and Matters of Choice Read Free Page B

life was going to be, his father finally got a job.
    London riverbank clay is brown and deep, a soft, tenacious muck that is home to shipworms called teredines. The worms had created havoc with timber, boring in over the centuries and riddling wharves, so some had to be replaced. The work was brutal and a far cry from building fine homes, but in his trouble Nathanael welcomed it.
    To Rob J. fell the responsibility for the house, although he was a poor cook. Often Della Hargreaves brought food or prepared a meal, usually while Nathanael was home, when she took pains to be scented and goodnatured and attentive to the children. She was stout but not unattractive, with a florid complexion, high cheekbones, pointed chin, and small plump hands that she used as little as possible in work. Rob had always tended his brothers and sister, but now he had become their sole source of care and neither he nor they liked it. Jonathan Carter and Anne Mary cried constantly. William Stewart had lost his appetite and was becoming pinchfaced and large-eyed, and Samuel Edward was cheekier than ever, bringing home swear words that he threw at Rob J. with such glee that the older boy knew no solution but to clout him.
    He tried to do whatever he thought
she
would have done.
    In the mornings, after the baby had been given pap and the rest had received barley bread and drink, he cleaned the hearth under the round smoke hole, through which drops fell hissing into the fire when it rained. He took the ashes behind the house and got rid of them and then swept the floors. He dusted the sparse furnishings in all three rooms. Three times a week he shopped at Billingsgate to buy the things Mam had managed to bring home in a single weekly trip. Many of the stall owners knew him; some made the Cole family a small gift with their condolences the first time he came alone—a few apples, a piece of cheese, half a small salt cod. Butwithin a few weeks he and they were used to one another and he haggled with them more fiercely than Mam had done, lest they think to take advantage of a child. His feet always dragged on the way home from market, for he was unwilling to take back from Willum the burden of the children.
    Mam had wanted Samuel to begin school this year. She had stood up to Nathanael and persuaded him to allow Rob to study with the monks at St. Botolph’s, and he had walked to the church school daily for two years before it became necessary for him to stay home so she would be free to work at embroidery. Now none of them would go to school, for his father couldn’t read or write and thought schooling a waste. He missed the school. He walked through the noisome neighborhoods of cheap, close-set houses, scarcely remembering how once his principal concern had been childish games and the specter of Pissant-Tony Tite. Anthony and his cohorts watched him pass without giving chase, as if losing his mother gave him immunity.
    One night his father told him he did good work. “You have always been older than your years,” Nathanael said, almost with disapproval. They looked at one another uneasily, having little else to say. If Nathanael was spending his free time with tarts, Rob J. didn’t know it. He still hated his father when he thought of how Mam had fared, but he knew that Nathanael was struggling in a way she would have admired.
    He might readily have turned over his brothers and sister to the Widow, and he watched Della Hargreave’s comings and goings expectantly, for the jests and sniggers of neighbors had informed him that she was the candidate to become his stepmother. She was childless; her husband, Lanning Hargreaves, had been a carpenter killed fifteen months before by a falling beam. It was customary that when a woman died leaving young children the new widower would remarry quickly, and it caused little wonder when Nathanael began to spend time alone with Della in her house. But such interludes were limited, because usually Nathanael was too