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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 God’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 cockleboat 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 God 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 scraps 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 passed 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 bastardly strict, to Henry Croft he represented genuine opportunity.
    Matlock Township was rural and thinly populated, without upper-class patients or prosperous merchants to support a physician, or the large populationof 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