Doctor Mirabilis (22 page)

‘Peter, I beg you,’ Roger said. ‘Fifty pounds is but a fraction of the whole, your own eyes so testify. Take it; for there’s
much else yet to be done.’

Peter nodded blindly, and reached into the bag. When he was finished counting, he discovered that he had no place about his
person to put fifty pounds; one of the fellows tied it up for him.

‘So. Now I require you all, help me up, as first I asked. Julian can carry the rest of the money; I once ran with it, when
there was more, and he’s far larger a carl than I.’

‘But Roger,’ Peter said. ‘This wealth – what mean you to do now? Think me not ungrateful, but is not this wholesale generosity
a little fond? Bear in mind, you’re not wholly in your right humour, and …’

‘… And was always a little strange,’ Roger said. ‘Never fear, Peter, these since yesterday are different times, and
better. I’ll not scatter the rest of my patrimony in the streets of Paris; I mean to keep it, until I may use it again in
the study of the sciences. And this day or die I shall join the Franciscans who are rich in learned men, for only strict sanctity
of life can foster true philosophy; thenceforward shall I be poor in Christ. Who will help me? Peter, Raymond, Julian, lift
me up!’

And silently: Lift me; I must be in orders, before another voice say again to me:
Time is past.
I have seen the powers of the Antichrist.

They would have improvised a litter, but he would not have it; so they bore him downstairs in the cradle of their interlocking
hands, and set him on his feet in the blinding sunlight; Raymond on one side, Peter on the other, and the rest of the college
knotted around Julian and the bag, glowering at passersby. While they stood waiting for Roger’s nausea to pass – for he was
really as weak as death, and knew well that he was wood to insist upon today for so solemn a step, and so taxing – a voice
came calling against them in the middle distance.

No one seemed to notice; they shifted Roger’s weight, and the weight of the bag, preparing their first steps. After a while,
a man in tatters came in sight at the intersection and began to cross it slowly, limping painfully and indistinguishable with
dirt. That way led toward the English Nation, and he was crying in English as he stumped the street:

‘An alms for John.… Only a penny to touch the bowl of Belisarius.… Only a sterling for John the Pilgrim.… An alms for John,
who hath the very relict of Belisarius the Anointed.… Only a penny …’

Then he stopped, and caught sight of the unusual still group in Straw Street. He swivelled around and came toward them, his
gimpy leg making poor weather of the broken paving, holding out a wooden bowl with carven writing around its edge. He needed
a crutch, that was plain, but he had none.

The fellows around Julian closed ranks and jostled forward, but the
beggar
went by without paying them any heed.
His filthy hand, missing its middle finger, thrust the bowl toward Roger.

‘An alms, clerkly sir, to thy better health. Only a penny.’

For a moment the two haggard men looked each into the eyes of the other. Why Roger was so moved he did not know, but leaning
for the moment more heavily upon Raymond, he stretched his hand out to the bag and by the feel of the metal fumbled out a
penny. No more, no less; this was what had been asked; he reached it out to touch that most famous of all begging bowls, which
had been freighted once with tears from the blinded eyes of the last general to defend Rome from the infidels. Surely he who
carried that bowl in the streets of modem Paris must be a holy man.

‘God bless thee, Daun Buranus, holy friar,’ the beggar said. ‘I’ll will thee my relict, an thou livest.’ He tasted the penny,
and put it away in his rags. ‘God bless thee, students. Alms, alms for John! Only a penny for John the Pilgrim! … Only a sterling
to touch the bowl of Belisarius.… An alms for John.… Alms, an alms for John.…’

Sweetly the cry died …
hyrca … hyrca … nazaza … trillirivos …
and with a heart waiting to be filled, Roger Bacon turned his burning face toward Rome.

The announcement of the King being even more wearisomely held back than was usual at a commanded secret audience, Adam March
cleaved, perforce, to his room; where, even after many prayers, he found ample time remaining in which to think of what he
might say to Henry, and Henry to him; and each of these imagined interviews was more disquieting than the last.

The very walls and village were disturbing, not only because Adam had never been there before, but also that the King himself
was strange to them, as belike all of his line had been. The castle at Kirkby-Muxloe, a property of Simon de Montfort’s, was
beyond being merely ancient. Regarding it, one could hardly bring one’s self to guess at who had built it, maugre what might
have happened in its narrow precincts since. In so rude and disproportioned a keep might the Grendel-worm have been slain,
that the most brutish of the serfs used under their breaths to frighten their children. The outer works might have been more
recent, but looked much older by fault of neglect; for a work of Norman design cannot simply be maintained, it must be constantly
under construction, otherwise it falls down almost at once.

Without a past, it frowned emptily upon the town from its tonsured hill. Someone had been there, once, for torches had smudged
the ceilings inside; but who? No one could say. This room and a few others had been hastily furnished, but only because Henry
had demanded of Simon a place of meeting secret and unlikely enough to permit him to pursue one single matter of state without
interruption until the King should in his own time have done with it. Hence they were in Kirkby-Muxloe now, but neither wind
nor wall would grant that they occupied it. Here they were less even than ghosts, for that nothing that had ever happened
to their ancestors was more than a rumour of a rumour. It was not
only for warmth and for the modesty of his Order that Adam kept his hands inside his sleeves, and not only from diligence
that his thoughts pursued imaginary audiences with Henry which gave him no satisfaction nor comfort.

About the Inquisition itself, he believed, he might with confidence offer certain reassurances. The King necessarily still
had vividly in his mind that series of Lateran edicts against heresy by which the Emperor had bought the favour of Honorius
III for his coronation, and later, the favour of the Church as a whole despite his break with that Pope. In these Henry, a
pious king, could hardly have seen any real access of devotion on the part of the Emperor; it was very plain that Frederick
was no friend of the Church, nor in fact of any religion, true or heretical. No, the real motives had to lie elsewhere, and
where but in the greater aggrandizement of the imperial power, over even such lands as England? And if so, what could be more
alarming to a devout king with a heart of wax, than the joy with which the Church itself had adopted these edicts as its own?

This, Adam was almost convinced, was needless alarm. It had to be granted that Gregory IX seemed also to have embraced the
edicts; but Adam was wholly familiar with
Ilk humans generis
and
Licet ad capiendos,
the two papal bulls involved, and it was quite clear from their texts that Gregory’s intentions had been to limit the Emperor’s
statutes, not to extend them. The bulls did no more than invest all preachers of the Dominican Order with legantine authority
to condemn heretics without appeal; and even this power he had at once further limited by placing the selection of the Preachers
Inquisitors in the hands of the provincial prior involved. That so heavily qualified and cumbersome a procedure might represent
any threat to Henry’s throne or realm – that Frederick might reach through it and grasp the King – this was only a fancy.

But intentions are not the only forces that rule popes; and the first bull in question had been promulgated in 1233 on April
20, which was not a saint’s day; the second on May 20, 1236, which was not a saint’s day either; two days later
in the one case, only a day later in the other, the Pope might have been vouchsafed better guidance. The fact, in any event,
remained, that the Inquisition was
already
reaching into England – and not by the agency of the Friars Preachers either, but in the hands of a Franciscan: Robert Grosseteste.

In the face of this, how could Adam rationally assure the King of anything? It was even possible that the Capito had been
prompted to this surprising new outburst of zeal by the urgings of some within his and Adam’s own Order, discontent that only
the black-robed Dominicans should be deemed worthy of the pursuit and punishment of heresy. Nor could it be said with any
assurance that the English nation lacked the inquisitorial temperament – not here in Kirkby-Muxloe, inherited from the man
who had extinguished the Albigensian heresy in the field in a torrent of blood.

And hindsight made it equally clear that what Grosseteste was doing was wholly consistent with his nature, his conscience
and his history. The regularity and severity of his visitations to the deaneries, chapters and monasteries of Lincoln were
already famous; he had long fought for the resumption of this right, which had fallen into disuse even in his own cathedral
chapter, and had been confirmed in it by the new Pope, Innocent IV, only last year. He had proceeded to apply it with such
vigour that the religious houses were already wondering that they had ever called his predecessor
omnium religiosorum malleus,
‘the Monastery-Hammer’.

In this light, it might even be accounted remarkable that Grosseteste had allowed nine years of his episcopate to elapse –
ten since Gregory had issued
Ille humani generic
– before proclaiming throughout his diocese a synodal witnessing. Yet this too was hindsight; for the
teste synodale
was hardly comparable to the ordinary visitation, even of Grosseteste’s drastic kind. In these the people were only involved
peripherally, being assembled to hear the word of
God, and bringing their children to be confirmed; inquiries into parish administration and correction of abuses came later,
after the bishop had preached, not to the people, but to the clergy.

The net of the
teste synodal
was drawn much wider. As the bishop reached each parish, the whole body of the people was assembled in a local synod, from
which Grosseteste selected seven men of mature age and proven integrity. These were sworn upon relics – of which there was
never any scarcity, though no doubt some were spurious – to reveal without fear or favour whatever they might know or hear,
then or subsequently, of any offence against Christian morals. The accused – noble or commoner, priest or parishioner – were
summoned before his archdeacons and deans, and examined under oath.

Most of the abuses which came to light during a visitation were, alas, wholly ordinary: the holding of markets in sacred places,
which had been expressly forbidden by Gregory ten years ago; the
scotales
or drinking bouts; the open celebration of the pagan Feast of Fools, on the same day as the Feast of the Circumcision, also
proscribed for a decade; the gaming in churchyards; the clandestine marriages in inns of youths no older than fifteen, valid
to be sure in canon law by vows
per os
alone, yet sinful without the Church; the paying of milk-tithes not as cheese, but as a pailful spilled on the floor before
the altar; Sunday work; the overlaying of children; the squabbles over precedence in the Pentecostal processions to the cathedral
… all familiar, all unlikely to be stamped out, few so horrible as to justify the application of the law, and none, surely,
heretical. For the people it were better to be fatherly, and seek to be loved, rather than merely to be obeyed. Nor did the
visitations find much to write against the clergy: some slackness, some simony, some embezzlement, some collecting of moneys
at Easter from those who came asking the sacrament, some exacting of corpse-presents from the dying, but again no sensible
trace of heresy; nothing, indeed, but cupidity, for
which preaching and correction might not suffice, but all the same would have to do. And nothing anywhere in all this could
have reached the ears of Henry the King by ordinary, nor interested him if it had – forbye at his most watery, he knew well
what ought and ought not to engage a king – had it not been for the
teste synodale
still blowing like a gale through the diocese of Lincoln.

With a start, Adam became aware that he had been staring for some moments at a small painted figure, at first seemingly on
some flat surface near at hand, then suddenly far away at the base of what Robert Bacon – no, it had of course been Roger,
not the stable, wise Dominican – had called ‘the cone of vision’, and now plainly in motion toward him, its footsteps beginning
to tick like dripping water in his ears. He stood up, feeling cold rills of sweat running down his ribs, trying to retake
possession of the laws of perspective which the Capito had taught him, yet unable to focus his eyes beyond the walls of the
cell in which he had been praying and hoping for all the seven hours of the ecclesiastical day; it was as though the distant
marcher had indeed stepped down from the nearest wall, still clad in the indigo and madder and mosaic gold of a fresco, leaving
behind a wall of Kirkby-Muxloe as dreadfully bare of any human touch as it had always been.

Yet the ticking went on; and in an instant the cell turned inside out to his eyes, and the reaches before him with it. At
once he saw what he should at once have seen; and could not forbear to laugh. There were no doors in Kirkby-Muxloe, only low
stone entrances which probably never had been curtained, and surely never had been closed. He had been sitting all this time
looking down a passageway, down which the revenant was coming; had he not been pondering so earnestly what he could say to
Henry, he might have been spared these tapestried illusions, and apprehended instead only what there was to be seen and naught
more: a familiar of Edmund Rich, his name unknown but his face comfortable to Adam, a mere piece of ecclesiastical furniture
– not a ghost, but only a lawyer.