Doctor Mirabilis (36 page)

‘Not I!’ Roger cried. ‘I am on no business of King Henry, good my lady.’ But the words sounded thin in his own ears. The
Pope had been, and was still, Henry the King’s ally … and for her, the civil war had been, literally, husband against brother.

‘Nay, nor did I mean my words to be taken so. In thee, I see only the prospering of God’s business in Rome, through its best
English instrument; we French are near outworn. So taught me my lord to think of thee, Friar Bacon, when I knew thee not;
my lord, and eke one other.’

‘One other? Forgive me, my lady – I ask it not in vanity, but for the judgment of mine own soul in hope of heaven: who was
that one?’

Her eyes closed again for a moment. ‘I cannot speak for him.’

‘Well wis I. Yet was it – was that one Friar Marsh?’

There was no answer. After a while, she clasped her hands and walked slowly to a near window.

‘Let us speak no more of all those that are dead … no more of these, but only on thine errand. How may I help? The way is
far from clear. I am in perpetual exile, a widow, and without arms. Were this fief threatened, I could not protect it; were
the castle besieged, I could not hold it; nor have I men to collect my taxes, so that I cannot even keep my fortifications
in repair. Of late, some worthy franklins have remembered who was my lord, and his strange doctrines; and thus emboldened,
have banded together, against some future war, to buy the castle from me, with myself as … caretaker. Though I have refused,
I shall not be able to refuse a second time, and will instead betake myself to Montargis; but I have not these monies yet.’

‘Good my Lady. I should have anticipated of this some substantial part. Give me but a shilling for mine Order, and I shall
not trouble thee more.’

She swung quickly upon him. ‘This to me, Roger Bacon? I am Eleanor of Pembroke and Leicester, and sister to a king! Shall
it be said that she gave the Vicar of God a shilling? Wait.’

She left the hall, supple as an elm, and seemingly as tall. Roger was left alone with Hanno, who had risen, and blinked at
him with slow implacability. A sweet smell of apple-blossoms drifted in through the window she had quitted. Suddenly, as though
he had come to some dim conclusion, the huge dog lay down once more and put his head on his paws.

When Eleanor returned, she bore in her hands a small casket of boxwood, with iron clasps: a mean thing, and crudely carved,
yet she held it before her as though it were more costly and more fragile than a crystal egg.

‘When I was but a princess five years old,’ she said quietly, ‘Hubert de Burgh that was my guardian gave this to me. I
wore it round my wimple, and feigned to be a queen; and, as so feigned I, so was I. I kept ’t for mine own daughter; but now
I shall have none. See.’

She lifted the lid and held out the rude jewel-box. Within, upon a fold of worn damask, lay a child-size coronet of gold filigree,
set with pearls and fronted by a cool amethyst about the size of a millet. The woven gold was much dulled by time, but glowed
slowly with a reddish light, as if in the sleep of Charlemagne. Roger lifted his eyes and tried to see her as a child with
this above her brows, and for an instant did so; then the pain in the present eyes, womanly beyond all compare since the orange
gardens of Tivoli, sponged away the vision and left him empty.

‘My Lady … it may be that I do not understand. Is this—? I dare not think it.’

Her eyes shuttered. ‘Were you to refuse me, I would take it ill. Here, please, Friar Bacon. Take it. I have held it far too
long; that child is dead.’

Numbly, Roger took the boxwood chest. How had he come to this? Surely he had never been formed to be a
beggar;
for the wounds were dreadful.

The coronet did not prove to be as valuable as he had hoped, but nevertheless it brought him by far the largest fruit of his
beggary yet: thirty-five pounds, bringing his total to forty-four. And unexpectedly, while he was in Gascony, there had arrived
for him a letter from Rome.

It was very brief:

My daughter Olivia whom you address is gone into a convent. I send you herewith ten ducats. Had you written to me I would
have sent more.

MODENA

And so, another friendship spoiled by his gracelessness; it was easy to see, now that it was too late, wherein the affront
had lain. And the price of his friendship was ten ducats, or approximately three pounds.

His time was virtually run out. The new year was upon
him, and the brothers were demanding that he return to his duties. There was nothing left to do but go to the usurers; a step
that was anathema to him, but all other possibilities were exhausted. He was forced to visit three of them, for no one would
give him any substantial sum, because of his visible lack of good security; it was only upon his promise to send an expense
account to the Pope that they would give him anything at all.

Even this petty scrabbling was brought to an abrupt end upon the arrival of four more pounds from Peter Peregrine – not by
the sum itself, but by Roger’s discovery that Peter, having gotten wind of Roger’s dealings with the usurers, had mortgaged
his house for the money. This was truly the final humiliation; the firm sign to stand fast with what he had.

As early as Epiphany it became clear to him that the
Communia naturalium
would have to be abandoned. It could no doubt be finished at a later date, when he had had more time for study and for consultation
with other experimenters and philosophers, but he could not encompass all of the natural sciences for the Pope in his present
state of ignorance and confinement. There could be no
scriptum principale;
the best he could hope to achieve would be a
persuasio
of some length, an attempt to convince the Pontiff of the value of natural knowledge, and the importance of supporting its
investigation.

Nevertheless even this would have to be most carefully planned. After a week, he had an outline which seemed satisfactory
as a start. The letter would be divided into seven parts: The first would expose and analyse the four causes of human error,
and here he could use a great part of the
De erroribus
verbatim; next would come the relationship between natural philosophy and theology, with special attention to the problem
posed by the knowledge of the pagan philosophers and poets, and its solution as revealed in the
Secret of Secrets;
third, the beauty and utility of the study of tongues, with brief discussions of Hebrew, Chaldean and Greek, and a commentary
on the evils of faulty translation; fourth, a demonstration that mathematics is’ the key
to all other sciences, beginning with
De laudibus mathematicae
, and drawing examples from astrology, astronomy, calendar reform, chronology, geography and optics; fifth would follow the
Perspectiva
, covering the general principles of vision, direct vision, reflection and refraction, with an analysis of the anatomy of
the animal eye, and in addition enough of
De multiplicatione specierum as
was needful to show that the propagation of light was only a special case of a universal property of space and time; sixth,
an exposition of the virtues and methods of experimental science, with a demonstration of its powers provided by the treatise
on the rainbow; and finally, moral philosophy, the crown and seal of the whole, the science of the salvation of man. It would
be no small task in itself; but unlike the
Communia, at
least it looked practicable.

And thus it began:

A thorough consideration of knowledge consists of two things, perception of what is necessary to obtain it, and then of the
method of applying it to all matters that they may be directed by its means in the proper way. For by the light of knowledge
the Church of God is governed, the commonwealth of the faithful is regulated, the conversion of unbelievers is secured, and
those who persist in their malice can be held in check by the excellence of knowledge, so that they may be, driven off from
the borders of the Church in a better way than by the shedding of Christian blood. Now all matters requiring the guidance
of knowledge are reduced to these four heads and no more. Therefore, I shall now try to present to your Holiness the subject
of the attainment of this knowledge, not only relatively but absolutely, according to the tenor of my former letter, as best
I can at the present time, in the form of a plea that will win your support until my fuller and more definite statement is
completed. Since, moreover, the subjects in question are weighty and unusual, they stand in need of the grace and favour accorded
to human frailty.…

Now there are four chief obstacles in grasping truth, which
hinder every man, however learned, and scarcely allow anyone to win a clear title to learning, namely, submission to faulty
and unworthy authority, influence of custom, popular prejudice, and concealment of our own ignorance accompanied by an ostentatious
display of our knowledge. Every man is entangled in these difficulties, every rank is beset, for people without distinction
draw the same conclusion from three arguments, than which none could be worse, namely, for this the authority of our predecessors
is adduced, this is the custom, this is the common belief; hence correct. An opposite conclusion and a far better one should
be drawn from the premises, as I shall abundantly show by authority, experience and reason. Should, however, these three
errors be refuted by the convincing force of reason, the fourth is always ready and on everyone’s lips for the excuse of his
own ignorance, and although he has no knowledge worthy of the name, he may yet shamelessly magnify it, so that at least to
the wretched satisfaction of his own folly he suppresses and evades the truth. Moreover, from these deadly banes come all
the evils of the human race; for the most useful, the greatest, and most beautiful lessons of knowledge, as well as the secrets
of all science and art, are unknown. But, still worse, men blinded in the fog of these four errors do not perceive their own
ignorance, but with ever precaution cloak and defend it so as not to find a remedy; and worst of all, although they are in
the densest shadows of error, they think they are in the full light of truth. For these reasons they reckon that truths most
firmly established are at the extreme limits of falsehood, that our greatest blessings are of no moment, and our chief interests
possess neither weight nor value. On the contrary, they proclaim what is most false, praise what is worst, extol what is most
vile, blind to every gleam of wisdom and scorning what they can obtain with great ease. In the excess of their folly they
expend their utmost efforts, consume much time, pour out large expenditures on matters of little or no use and of no merit
in the judgment of a wise mane Hence it is necessary that the violence and banefulness of these four causes of all evils
should be recognized in the beginning and rebuked and banished from the consideration of science. For where these bear sway,
no reason influences, no right decides, no law binds, religion has no domain, nature’s mandate fails, the complexion of things
is changed, their order is confounded, vice prevails, virtue is extinguished, falsehood reigns, truth is hissed off the scene.

And with this, he was launched upon such a fury of composition as he had never known before in his life; nor, in fact, had
ever been known in the history of the phenomenal world.

The letter grew and grew, and the months went by: the Purification of the Virgin, St. David, St. Richard, Inventio Sanctae
Crucis, St. Barnabas. By June, a year after Clement had sat down to write to Roger, he had gotten only as far as the analysis
of the rainbow, and here he was forced to stop by the discovery that, of the nineteen experiments by which he proposed to
demonstrate the nature of the bow, he himself had not performed three, and that they did indeed require an astrolabe; and
in addition, he needed to observe a lunar rainbow, which stubbornly failed to appear for nearly a month. Only then could the
writing be resumed.

The feasts marched by: Visitatio Mariae, Lammas, St. Giles, the Holy Guardian Angels. At last he was launched into the section
on moral philosophy; he knew as he worked that the pressure of time was coming between him and the subject, but for time there
was no remedy but eternity.

The letter was finished on All Saints’ Day, almost precisely ten months after he had begun it. It would take more months to
copy, for its length was almost half a million words.

While he waited on the copyists, he began the composition of an introductory letter for this huge mass of leaves. He was by
no means through; for as he worked, he was dogged both day and night, labouring and resting, by the whispering of his demon
self, tormenting him constantly with the thought that the large work might well be lost amidst the perils of the
road, and never reach Clement at all. At the very least, the introductory letter should contain a summary of the plan of the
work, and of its major conclusions; this would be useful as well, were the Pope to be too busy to read the large work, as
was also wholly possible.

But the self did not let him rest even there. There were sections of the large work that were inexcusably badly argued, particularly
the discussion of the seven sins of theology; the analysis of astrology was scrappy and inconclusive; and although Roger had
discussed medicine at some length, he had said almost nothing about alchemy, that most useful of the ancillary sciences, and
the one in which – though for the wrong reasons – any prince would be most likely to be interested.

All these matters went in, and more besides, until what had been meant to be but an introductory letter had become a treatise
in itself; by no means so formidable as the first, but still a good thirty thousand words long. More expenditures! But there
was no question but that it, too, would have to go to the Pope; he dispatched it to the copyists, and began all over again
to write an introductory letter, this time for both works.