REQUIESCAT
“I did not know him.”
“He was my friend.”
“Nor ever have I seen you,” the priest said dourly.
“You see me now.” Rob had unloaded their belongings from the wagon and hidden them behind a copse of willows, in order to make room for Barber’s body. He had driven six hours to reach the small village of Aire’s Cross, with its ancient church. Now this mean-eyed cleric asked suspicious and surly questions, as if Barber had pretended to die, solely for his inconvenience.
The priest sniffed in open disapproval when his inquiry revealed what Barber had been in life. “Physician, surgeon, or barber—all of these flout the obvious truth that only the Trinity and the saints have true power to heal.”
Rob was burdened with strong emotions and not disposed to listen to such sounds. Enough, he snarled silently. He was conscious of the weapons on his belt but it was as though Barber counseled him to forbear. He spoke softly and pleasingly to the priest and made a sizable contribution to the church.
Finally the priest sniffed. “Archbishop Wulfstan has forbidden priests to entice away another priest’s parishioner with his tithes and dues.”
“He wasn’t another priest’s parishioner,” Rob said. In the end burial in sacred ground was arranged.
It was fortunate he had taken a full purse with him. The matter couldn’t be delayed, for already there was the smell of death. The joiner in the village was shocked when he saw how large a box he must construct. The hole had to be correspondingly generous, and Rob dug it himself in a corner of the churchyard.
Rob had thought Aire’s Cross was so named because it marked a ford on the River Aire, but the priest said the hamlet was called after a great rood of polished oak within the church. Before the altar at the foot of this enormous cross was placed Barber’s rosemary-strewn coffin. By chance the day was Feast of St. Callistus and the Church of the Rood was well attended. When the Kyrie Eleison was said, the little sanctuary was almost filled.
“Lord have mercy, Christ have mercy,” they chanted.
There were only two small windows. Incense fought with the stink, but some air came through the walls of split trees and the thatched roof, causing the rush lights to flicker in their sockets. Six tall tapers struggled against the gloom in a circle around the casket. A white pall covered all but Barber’s face. Rob had closed his eyes and he looked asleep, or perhaps very drunk.
“He was father to you?” an old woman whispered. Rob hesitated, then it seemed easiest to nod. She sighed and touched his arm.
He had paid for a Mass of Requiem in which the people participated with touching solemnity, and he saw with satisfaction that Barber wouldn’t have been better attended had he belonged to a guild, nor more respectfully prayed away if his pall had been the purple of royalty.
When the Mass was done and the people departed, Rob approached the altar. He knelt four times and signed the cross upon his breast as he had been taught by Mam so long ago, bowing himself separately to God, His Son, Our Lady, and finally to the Apostles and all holy souls.
The priest went about the church and thriftily extinguished the rush lights, and then left him mourning by the bier.
Rob departed neither to eat nor to drink but remained kneeling, seemingly suspended between dancing candlelight and the heavy blackness.
Time passed without his knowledge.
He was startled when loud bells chimed the hour of matins, and he rose to lurch down the aisle on benumbed legs.
“Make your reverence,” the priest said coldly, and he did so.
Outside, he walked down the road. Under a tree he passed water, then returned and washed hands and face from the bucket by the door while within the church the priest completed Midnight Office.
Some time after the priest went away for the second time the tapers burned down, leaving Rob alone in darkness with Barber.
Now he allowed himself to think of how the man had saved him when he was a boy in London. He remembered Barber when he was gentle and when he was not; his tender pleasure at preparing and sharing food, and his selfishness; his patience in instruction, and his cruelty; his raunchiness, and his sober advice; his laughter, and his rages; his warm spirit, and his drunkenness.
What had passed between them wasn’t love, Rob knew. Yet it had been something that substituted for love sufficiently that, as first light grayed the waxen face, Rob J. wept bitterly, and not entirely for Henry Croft.
Barber was buried after lauds. The priest didn’t spend overly long at the graveside. “You may fill it in,” he told Rob. As the stone and gravel rattled onto the lid, Rob heard him mutter in Latin, something about the sure and certain hope of the Resurrection.
Rob did what he would have done for family. Remembering his lost graves, he paid the priest to order a stone and specified how it was to be marked.
Henry Croft.
Barber-surgeon.
Died Jul 11 in the yr A.D. 1030.
“Mayhap Requiescat in Pace, or some such?” the priest said.
The only epitaph true to Barber that came to him was Carpe Diem, “Enjoy the Day.” Yet, somehow …
And then he smiled.
The priest was annoyed when he heard the selection. But the formidable young stranger was paying for the stone and insisted, so the cleric carefully wrote it down.
Fumum vendidi. “I sold smoke.”
Watching this cold-eyed priest putting away his profit with a satisfied mien, Rob realized that it wouldn’t be remarkable if no stone were raised to a dead barber-surgeon. With no one in Aire’s Cross to care.
“I shall be back one day soon to see that all is to my satisfaction.”
A veil came over the priest’s eyes. “Go with God,” he said shortly, and went back into the church.
Weary to the bone and hungry, Rob drove Horse to where he had left their things in the willow copse.
Nothing had been disturbed. When he had loaded it all back into the wagon, he sat in the grass and ate. What remained of the meat pie was spoiled, but he chewed and swallowed a stale loaf Barber had baked four days before.
It occurred to him that he was the heir. It was his horse and his wagon. He had inherited the instruments and techniques, the ratty fur blankets, the juggling balls and the magic tricks, the dazzle and the smoke, the decisions about where to go tomorrow and the day after tomorrow.
The first thing he did was remove the flasks of Special Batch and throw them against a rock, smashing them one by one.
He would sell Barber’s weapons; his own were better. But he hung the Saxon horn around his neck.
He clambered onto the front seat of the wagon and sat there, solemn and erect, as though it were a throne.
Perhaps, he thought, he would look around and get himself a boy.