Doctor Mirabilis (13 page)

‘We have made you concessions enough,’ Henry said, rolling the rings of his knuckles back and forth along the arm of his throne.
‘But we shall abide you. Richard Marshal shall live and live in our honour, will he desire it. Enough. We are ill. We thank
you for your graciousness. This convocation is ended.’

He relinquished the mace and stepped unsteadily down.
The sackbuts sounded while he walked behind the throne and went out through the same small door he had come in. Under the
vair of his cloak, Roger saw, the shanks of the beautiful Plantagenet legs were as thin as rushes.

What remained of the convocation began to move and break into groups, with a general murmur of bemused and cautious self-congratulation.
The Bishops of Chester and Rochester edged through the
muggy
press toward Edmund Rich – obviously the Welsh adventure was going to require planning of the most mischancy kind – but Rich
was already deeply in converse with the Oxford group, in which Roger found himself included without protest, and the two appointed
bishops hung back deferentially until this conference should be through. No such considerations restrained Simon de Montfort,
who found his way directly to Adam.

‘What news?’ he said, drawing the Franciscan a little aside. ‘No, no, Roger, ye needn’t withdraw, I remember thee well; “stones
and rocks”; the best advice our Henry ever had. Well, dear Adam?’

‘She is willing,’ Adam said, with a glance over his shoulder at Grosseteste. The master appeared to be out of earshot. ‘I
had no easy road in my suasions, but she sees that ‘tis the only way out of her present dilemma. She’s affrighted of thee
a little, which I assured her was unfounded quite. The rest, Simon, thou must do thyself; this present marriage of thine is
without my demesne.’

‘Well I ken it,’ Montfort said. ‘I have work in progress to dissolve it. It may be that I shall have to go to the Holy See;
if so, very well, I shall. What thinkest thou of today’s bit of business?’

‘I mislike it. Doubtless the earl-Marshal will trust the Archbishop; but can he trust the King?’

‘I greatly fear that he may,’ Montfort said grimly. ‘Though certes Henry means what he says, he has the Plantagenet bias for
tortuous dealings. Roger, we are well met today; there is one here, Guy de Foulques, the papal legate, who hath heard of our
Oxford scholars’ studies in the
natural sciences; and I have told him of the book thou art writing, as Adam told it me. Thou shouldst talk with him a while,
an Adam can let thee; for if thy book be well received de Foulques may ask thee for more at some later date.’

‘My lord,’ Roger said. ‘Gladly. Though I am exceeding poor in knowledge of the sciences as yet. I am astonished that thou
know’st my passion so well, when as yet it be no more than that.’

‘Simon never forgets a face or a fact,’ Adam said with a half smile. ‘He is my perpetual despair. By all means, take him with
thee, Simon, for there are still some favours to be curried ere the other matter is made certain.’

‘Come then, Roger.’

How much had been done and undone since then I There had been as much promise, precisely, in the meeting with Guy de Foulques
as Montfort had foreshadowed, but that promise depended upon the completion of the present book, which lay neglected still.
That the marriage of the King’s sister to Simon de Montfort would be celebrated was now certain – for that had been the meaning
behind Adam’s high manoeuvring, that, and that Adam would become spiritual adviser to both the earl and his countess thereafter;
which meant that both Adam and Grosseteste would inevitably become court personages, and Roger, too, if he remained, if only
through Adam’s inexplicable delight in involving Roger in these matters, and the earl’s incredible desire to do everyone he
knew a service (which, thanks to the earl’s miraculous memory, seemed to include everyone he had ever met). As for Henry,
his court remained the same as it had always been, an incredibly complex little society in which affairs managed to go backwards
and forwards at the same time: Richard earl-Marshal had sensibly refused the King’s peace offer even when it had been delivered
by three bishops, but had later been taken prisoner by a set of treacheries so involved that even Henry’s worst enemies suspected
that he could have had no hand in some of them, and had died of his wounds on Palm Sunday; yet Hubert de
Burgh and the nobles had, nevertheless, become reconciled with Henry the day before the Sunday preceding the Ascension, though
there was not a baron to be found who did not believe the earl-Marshal a martyr – all in all, no court to leave a sane
man time
or sanity for any study of the sciences. Oxford would be no better now, not with Adam utterly taken up in de Montfort’s affairs,
Grosseteste consecrated by Edmund Rich at Reading the next June, and now Richard Fishacre steadily cutting into Roger’s ephemeral
reputation as resident master in Aristotle.

The sun was almost down, and the treatise on old age still resting unfinished. The letter to himself was unfinished as well;
it would never be done; it was slowly winding itself into a Gordian knot which would make a decision impossible, rather than
offering him through the sternest of logic any dmision upon which he could depend. Nothing remained now but what he wanted
to do, for the letter to himself made nothing clear about the logic of events, except that there was no logic to them except
in the mind of God.

Well, then, Paris.

That road, too, had seemed impossible, without spending almost the whole of his hoard. He had driven himself to see his brother
Robert before leaving London, but that had been ES profitless a meeting as he had known it would be
ab initio:
where Robert had been without sympathy for Roger’s clerkship at Oxford, and contemptuous of Eugene’s at Toulouse, the idea
of expending good pounds to send Roger from Oxford to Paris had provoked him to gross and intolerable laughter. They had parted
in a blizzard of enmity; Robert’s last words were a flat order to return to Ilchester to put the estate in order, or be disowned
the moment that Robert could legally consider Harold Bacon dead. Roger could only turn his back and exclude Robert forever
from his memory;
and from rumour,
the self told him with icy satisfaction,
to the end of time.

Nevertheless, it could be done, and without too much diminishing the bag of money. It was only July; by swinking, he could
complete his secular mastership by the end of
summer. Between then and Martinmas would leave him enough time to complete the book for Philip the Chancellor, and give him
in addition a little time to work on something to satisfy Guy de Foulques; perhaps something on light, a subject about which
Grosseteste had written extensively already, so that Roger would again have a library upon which to base his first draft.

And Martinmas was slaughtering time. Soon thereafter, in the winter storms, William Busshe would be leaving one or another
of the Cinque Ports with his sarplers and fells for Wissant. With him would be one Roger Bacon, lately of Oxenford, master
in Aristotle to come to the hundred colleges of the University of Paris, under the aegis of Robert Grosseteste, scholar to
all the world.

He sponged out the letter to himself in the last light of the day. Tomorrow he would write again, but to another self: Magister
Roger, whose works were writ for popes.

Explicit prima pars.

There might have been a time, in Roger’s mind belonging so safely to history that it might have happened on the moon, when
William Busshe had been young. Busshe himself remembered it well: then he had sailed out of Maidstone and across the Channel
in a barge – of necessity, to begin with, since she had been his first vessel, and secondly because nothing larger could have
passed under Aylesford Bridge. She had displaced twenty-two tons, and had cost him exactly three pounds; not quite a fair
price, but a good enough transaction for a youngster, especially one who meant to do his own sailing, as well as his own trading
in the Staple.

The barge had been called the Maudelayne Busshe, after his mother, but now was the
Maudelayne
only, as a more considerable enterprise better meriting the protection of heaven. She was five times the displacement of
her original; about four times the price, neither a bargain nor an extortion; sailing out of Hull with a crew of nine (not
counting her master, still Busshe himself, and the boatswain and cook); loaded with packs of fells (four hundred to the pack,
eighteen packs in all, some forward of the mast under hatches, some in the stern sheets, the summer fells marked X and the
winter fells O in red chalk – but not all Busshe’s wool, for he knew better than to ship his whole consignment in one bottom,
his though she be; and besides, on the wide waters he was a master, not a merchant, and there was a profit to be taken in
shipping the sarplers of other traders); loaded also with bows and quarrels for every man, boarding hooks, pikes, pitch and
a barrel of darts, in case of Scotsmen, Lombards or other pirates; with salt fish, onions, bread and beer in case of being
blown far off course; and, this time out of the glowing, wrinkling bay, in honour of a promise, with Roger Bacon.

Of that choppy black howling crossing Busshe was to say thereafter that even the rats were sick, and his sailormen that none
but a saint, a devil or William Busshe could have forborne to cast his wool overboard for the saving of his life. This, however,
was the turn of the dice that a man chanced when he shipped with Busshe, for it was known that no storm bad ever wrested a
single sack from him since the day he had burned his whole cargo under the hatches rather than let it go to two close-pressing
Lombard corsairs (the stench had been ferocious, and the Lombards, quite without Busshe’s anticipating any such outcome, had
lost him in the huge pall of greasy black smoke which had lain in the wake of the
Maudelayne);
most of his crew, all the same, had been with him for fifteen years.

As for the supercargo, it took Roger three days, in the house of Busshe’s host in Wissant, to stop the earth from swinging
under him and to look without horror at his own face on the surface of a broth. It was only then that he discovered he was
in Busshe’s customary bed, wide and deep, with a fine mattress and two linens and the richest of coverings.

‘Never mind. I’ve slept in that bed these dozen years, I’ve naught to suffer for a night out of it. Eat.’

‘Yes. But William … was I … meseemeth I was dying, or so praydeth I. But do storms … doth the sea always.… I would say, did
I commend me to God for a trifle?’

‘Nay. ’Tis not always thus. But it’s never a trifle. To say sooth, young Roger, we ’scaped narwe. But rest thee, and sup,
for that’s a voyage past.’

Roger shuddered and tried the broth. His shame was promptly overcome by the marvellous discovery that he was hungry. Only
toward the last swallows did he remember what he ought to have been thinking of from the first.

‘William – my chest? My books?’

‘Yonder. Dost think, young Roger, that William Busshe would save a fell and drown a book? Merchant I be, but nat so ill a
man as that.’

‘God’s blessing on thee,’ Roger said with a great puff of a sigh. ‘And on thine hosts, now that I reflect on’t. I’m a trial
to all, I fear me.’

Busshe smiled. ‘’Tis an old song in Wissant. Half the populace is just in from the keys, and the half of that abed with the
sea-sickness, at least as the winter draws in. I am just up of it myself. Nay, I meant not to ’stonish thee; I’m oft fearful
seasick; so be we
all
from time to time. ’Tis the Channel – no lilypond when the wind’s from the north.’

‘God preserve me from it till I die. Why persisteth thou, William? Dost
like
being seasick?’

‘Nay, there’s a fool’s question. ’Tis what I do, ne more, and it bringeth me money, on which I am most fond. Were I not William
Busshe, by God’s hand, might I be fond on something quite other; but there, I’m not; and thilke other’d-be the selfsame drink,
half honey, half aloes. It is so decreed, and therefore are we bidden to use one another kindly, lest the bitter half make
us doubt even the love of God?’

‘Nay, never! Forgive me, but thou art wrong entire. There cannot be a dewdrop of that doubt in a Christian heart – least of
all thine.’

‘Wait,’ William Busshe said heavily. ‘It will assault thee, in due course, thouten thou beest heavy with sainthood, young Roger.
Then wilt thou need the love of man. If thou canst find none better, pray for me then; or for some beggar; only thus is the
cup passed. But enough, enough. How wilt thou go to Paris?’

‘Oh,’ Roger said, ‘somehow.’ He was not ready to think of travelling again yet; instead, there hovered in his memory, from
Hroswitha’s
Abraham –
how oddly Terence-like a comedy to come from the pen of a nun in the convent of Grandesheim! – the speech of the anchorite
to his more-than-Alexandrian sinner: Who
despairs Of God sins mortally.
Busshe did not have the look of a man in pain of mortal sin; yet he had not only accepted the error but was counselling it,
which made him at the least an abettor of heresy.

If William Busshe were an evil man, how then could a
good man be known? For a moment Roger felt as though the seasickness were returning, but it passed; it passed. The question,
unanswered, remained.

By the river on the left bank the water in the evening whistled like sleepy blackbirds:
Vidi … viridt … Phyllidem sub tilia …;
or with a brief flourish of breeze would start up a lisping distant nightingale,
Veni … veni … venias … ne me more facias.… Hyrca, hyrca, nazaza, trillirivos! …
Across the Seine, the Ile de la Cite gradually lost reality, and Notre-Dame with it, almost as though one could see the cathedral
schools falling silent with the night; • the stews about the cathedral would be noisy till dawn, but they were too tangled
to allow much light to escape across the river. Candles still burned visibly in rooms here and there on the Petit-Pont, little
stars votive to the philosophers who lived there, the rising Parvipontani; on the water, Roger thought, they looked like real
stars, except for their yellowness. Would they seed jewels into the mud of the river, as the real stars gave birth to jewels
in the hot press of the deep earth? Probably not. It was by no means certain that real stars were so potent, though the best
authorities maintained it to be true. How, after all, would one test such a notion, the deep earth being so furiously hot
and so close to hell, as one could see readily in the volcanoes of Greece and Italy, the
mofettes
of Eifel, the hot springs of Baden? And of what use would the answer be, except to defraud further such princes as were already
fond on alchemy? None, almost surely unless one appeal to Cato, who said that to know anything is praiseworthy.