Doctor Mirabilis (3 page)

This, in, an oval-rubbed spot in the centre, surrounded by a haze of extinguished knowledge, or what passed for it. There
was, unhappily, nothing in the least cryptic about the message. It meant that Roger’s home was gone and his money with it.
Somehow the soldiers of the King’s justiciar, scouring the country for remaining pockets of baronial resistance, had happened
into Ilchester, and had seen in the substantial heirs of Christopher Bacon, freeman landholder, some taint of sympathy with
the partisans of the rebel barons, or some stronghold for the mercenaries who had infected the whole east of England, since
the evacuation of the French in 1217. The rest had followed inevitably. No matter that Ilchester had always been an uneventful
town, notable for nothing but its Wednesday market and its authorized fair every twenty-ninth of August; Hubert de Burgh stood
accused of the failure of last year’s expedition to the west of France (regardless of the fact, or, as Adam Marsh had remarked
sadly, perhaps because of the fact that the justiciar had advised King Henry most strongly against any such hunting party);
he was out to prove that French sedition was still eating away at the body politick, even in a place as unlikely as Ilchester,
and that the King’s justiciar was swift and terrible in hawking it. And so, farewell, suddenly,
to the ancient yeoman house of Bacon, though it had yet to see partisan, baron, Frenchman or mercenary; the serfs would thieve
away the harvest, and leave the family only exile and poverty. The reference to ‘ferne Strondea’ could only mean exile for
Harold, Christopher’s brother; he was the last of authority in the family to remain in Ilchester; not even Hubert de Burgh
could touch Robert Bacon in his factor’s fastness in London.

Very well; and so, good-bye as well to new copies of old books, to virgin parchment, to clean quills and fresh ink, to meat
and to wine, to warm wool and pliant leather, to a new growth in wisdom under Oxford’s once
magister scholarum
Robert Grosseteste, to a doctorate in theology, to becoming
(Thou art addled in thy wits! the
self cried in its sweet voice) the world’s wonder in moral philosophy. From now on, he would be poor. Robert Bacon would
not help him, that was certain; Robert had been scathing, indeed flyting, of Roger’s scholiast bent and his penchant for the
Latin language of the papal parasites, and of the money spent to support it – a scorn which had not been much tempered by
the fact that Robert had twice been captured by the soldiers of Prince Louis’ invading army shortly after the thirteen-year-old
Roger had entered Oxford, and had had to ransom himself. By now, Robert thought of Roger as a renegade from the family – and
never mind that the still younger Eugene, now fifteen and at the new University of Toulouse, had shown the same scholar’s
bent without being flyted for it; nor that now in. London Robert was farther away from the family than Roger and had even
less of the grain on his tongue; still the indictment stuck.

As well it might,
the self whispered in the darkness.
Distresseth thou thyself, an thy people be dispersed? Justice is Love.

And it was true. He was more distressed by the loss of his money and his problematical fame than by the loss of his kin and
seat, and more urgent to reclaim whatever effects the unknown Wulf had hidden for him than to succour his sisters, let alone
the serfs. Perhaps there was even some
money left; Christopher had always been careful to conceal caches of several scores of pounds at a time about the acres during
the invasion against just such a catastrophe as this, and did not dream even on the day of his death that his sullen second-born
son had found the records of those oubliettes and broken the cypher which told where all but two were buried. Roger had never
touched but one, and that one of the two not mentioned in the cypher at all, but deducible by simple geometrical reasoning
from the positions of the others; he had lifted a heavy stone and there it was, and he bad taken from it one pound, no more,
as an honorarium to the power of his boy’s reasoning, watched only by three snotty-nosed yearling calves – all of whom had
died not long after of the trough fever. It did not seem likely that either a serf or a pack of de Burgh’s mailed looters
could have had the wit to uncover even the encyphered hideyholes, let alone Roger’s deposit-lighter-by-one pound; and at the
worst, there was still the undiscovered, unrecorded burial, which, by evidence of its highest secrecy, might well be the richest
of all – and a problem worthy of a subtle intellectual soul as much for its difficulty as for its treasure-trove.

And after that discovery, there were certain burials and other concealments that he had made – nothing that this Wulf could
have known about, but as close to wealth as mark or pound might be in these times. There was, for instance, a flat glass that
he had made from a broken wind-eye in the buttery, with a thin poured lead back in the centre of which he had dug out a peephole;
through that chipped spot one might look in a dark room into a cat’s eye, reflecting a candle flame into the cat’s eye from
the glass side – particularly into the eye of massive old Petronius, the black arbiter of the barn rats – and see deep in
the lambent slitgated sphere a marvellous golden sparkle, overlaid with dusky red vessels. What might you see inside a man’s
head with such a tool? He had tried it with the infant Beth, but there had been no light in her eyes that he could see, and
besides, his mother had cut the experiment short with a within& In another
pocket in the house he had hidden a small clump of nitre crystals which he had culled with reeking labour from the dungheap;
he did not in the least know what they were good for, but anything so precisely formed had to be good for something, like
the cylindrical bits of beryl which he had split from a prismatic rock, which laid on a page fattened the strokes and made
even dirty minuscules easier to read. Every man has sisters; but how many men have such tools, and such mysteries?

Suddenly he realized that he was trembling. He let go of the letter and clasped his hands back together violently. If there
is one thing in the world I will do, he told himself in the tear-freezing darkness …. No, if there is one thing in the world
I will not do,
Domine, dominus noster,
I will not let go. I will not let go. Thou hast taken away mine house; so be it. But Thou shalt not take away from me what
Thou hast given me, which is the lust to know Thy nature.

I shall never let go.

The wind made a sudden sucking sound somewhere in the convent and poured itself up the throat of a chimney with a low brief
moan. The corridor lightened slightly, flickeringly. The time had come; Robert Grosseteste’s door was open. Adam Marsh was
standing in the muddy, wavering light, one long hand crooked, one deep shadow laid along his narrow pointed nose.

‘Roger,’ he said softly. ‘Roger? Art still there? Ah, I see thee now. Come in most quietly, he is asleep, or so I think. But
would talk with thee.’

Roger stirred, painfully; his bones were almost frozen. He cleared his throat, but his whisper was still harsh when it came
forth:

‘Adam, if he is so ill—’

Certes he is ill, but would see thee all the same. He asked for thee, Roger. Come in quickly, this plaudering lets the chill
in, too, and he needs warmth.’

Roger moved quickly then, fighting the stiffness, and Adam shut the door behind him with a miraculous soundlessness. If the
room had been chilled during their brief
exchange, Roger could not detect it; the air seemed almost hot to him, and the heat from the ardent coals in the fireplace
beat against his cheeks and made his eyes tighten. Though there were two candles on a lectern against the wall to the left,
and two more on an age-blackened, book-heaped table butting a wardrobe just to the right of the door, the room was quite dark
all along its peripheries; the light and heat made an island in the centre, between the door and the hearth, where the low
narrow bed was drawn up, parallel with the low stone mantel. The bed was deep in disordered robes and blankets.

The matter of the letter and his patrimony fled tracelessly from his mind the moment he saw the massive head of the lector
upon the bolster, its bushy grey monk’s tonsure in a tangle under a blue woollen skullcap, the veined eyelids closed in deep-shadowed
sockets, the skin of the face as tight and semi-transparent as parchment over the magnificent leonine cheekbones. Bending
over Robert Grosseteste and listening with cat-still intentness to his breathing was a fierce-looking swarthy man in mouse-coloured
breeches and a saffron tunic; the ear that was tipped down to the lector was bare, but from the other a gold earring lay along
the cord of his neck. As Roger made an involuntary half-step forward, the swarthy man held up one palm with all the command
of a lord.

‘Very well,’ the swarthy man said. ‘A will stay on live, an his stars permit it. But these are mischancy times. Give him of
the electuary when a wakens:-

‘What is it he bath with him?’ Adam said with an equal intensity.

‘Not the consumption,’ the Jew said. ‘Beyond that I am as ignorant as any man. If there’s a crisis, call me no more; I have
done what I could.’

‘And for that all thanks,’ Adam said, ‘and my purse. Would God might send thee His grace as well as His wisdom.’

The physician straightened, his eyes burning sombrely. ‘Keep thy purse,’ he said between startlingly white teeth. The purse
struck the stone floor almost at Roger’s feet and burst,
scattering coins among the rushes and the alder leaves spread to trap fleas. ‘Thou payest me ill enough already with thy blessing.
I spit on thee.’

For a moment it seemed to Roger that he might actually do just that, but instead, he strode past them both with an odd, stoop-shouldered,
loping gait and was gone. Adam stared after him; he seemed stunned.

‘What did I say?’ the Franciscan murmured.

‘What matter?’ Roger said in a hoarse whisper. He was having difficulty in keeping himself from tallying the spatter of coins
in the rushes; he felt as though the parchment in his pocket had suddenly been set afire. ‘’Tis but a Jew.’

‘As were three of the nine worthies of the world,’ Adam said gently, ‘and among Christians there were eke but three, as among
the paynims. Since Our Lord was a Jew as well, that giveth the Jews somewhat the advantage.’

Roger shrugged convulsively. This was an ill time, it seemed to him, to be resurrecting the Nine Worthies.

‘Thou’dst talk nonsense on the day of wrath could it be mathematical nonsense, Master Marsh,’ he said edgily. The words, as
they came out, appalled him; suddenly, it seemed as though he were giving voice to the self for the first time in all his
guarded life – here in the presence of an undoubted elected saint, and of the angel of death. But it could hardly be unsaid.
‘Forgive me; Christ is as Christian a worthy as He was a Jew, it seemeth me. And meseemeth the
Capito
yonder as worthy a Christian as Godfrey of Bouillon, and leader of as worthy a crusade. I count ignorance as deadly as the
paynim.’

Adams stared at Roger a little while as though he had seen the youngster for almost the first time. After a few moments, Roger
was forced to drop his eyes, but that was no better, for that brought him back into encounter with the money on the floor.

‘A dangerous notion, and a bad piece of logic,’ Adam said at last in a strange voice. ‘Thou art an ill-tempered youngster,
Roger. Nevertheless, thou remindest me that our matter here is with the lector, not disputation; which is a point
which pierceth, be it never so poorly thrust. Let neither of us raise our voices again here.’

‘So be it,’ Roger muttered. There was a long and smothering silence, during which Roger began to hear the slightly ragged,
slightly too rapid breathing of Robert Grosseteste, as though his lungs were being squeezed by a marching piper of the Scots
to keep him harrowing the air. As time stretched out under Adam’s level eyes, the pace of the breathing increased; and then,
with a start, the lector coughed rackingly and jerked his great head up.

‘That shall I do,’ he said in a thick, strangled voice. His head moved uncertainly and for a moment his eyes rested on Roger
without seeming to see him. Adam stepped forward and Grosseteste’s head turned once more, but his eyes were still glazed;
two hectic fever-spots began to burn on his cheeks, as though they had been rubbed with snow. Seeing the great head lolling
thus frighteningly brought home to Roger as nothing else had done the precariousness of the lector’s future from moment to
moment; he was, after all, My-seven years old and the uprightness of his life had not prevented it from being most active
and taxing. He had been the chancellor of the University until 1229, when he had resigned the post to give the lectures to
the Franciscans, and in the short course of Roger’s own lifetime he had been archdeacon of Chester, Northampton and Leicester,
one after the other. No man in orders had ever been more attentive to the needs of his parishes; no member of the Faculty
of Theology more assiduous of the needs of the whole University and all three thousand of its students; no scholar more careful
to build the massive learning which alone justifies a master to lecture before the young. Were God to terminate his life in
the next instant, no man could call it anything but long, full and rich in works – and the death had been laying an especial
hand on the old.

Adam Marsh, murmuring something indistinguishable, was kneeling beside the bed, holding an enamelled Syran wine glass to Grosseteste’s
lips. The lector drank with difficulty, made a fearful face and then lay back among the
blankets with a shuddering sigh. The quiet seeped back into the room, which was becoming hotter and stuffier with every instant;
nevertheless, the lector’s breathing was becoming a little easier, and he seemed now to be relaxed without either trembling
from weakness or looking flaccid with morbidity. The honey vehicle of the Jew’s electuary obviously had not much sweetened
the dose, but the active principle of the slow-flowing mass was quick to take effect. Mandragora? No, that would have put
the lector back to sleep, whereas he was obviously not under any narcotic, but simply more composed, less desperately distracted
by the failure of his flesh. He lay staring at the dark flickering ceiling for a long time.