Doctor Mirabilis (34 page)

In addition, the daily difficulties were mounting once more. No matter that he stood under no accusation, and that the work
he was doing was officially understood to be blameless; the disguise was wearing thin; these comings and goings of minor eminences
inevitably aroused the suspicions of the brothers once more, and coupled with Roger’s visible industry, convinced them that
something was afoot. They did not need to know what it was to conclude that Roger
had best be hindered in its prosecution.

Nothing, overtly, was changed, but his chores were enforced with great strictness, and Joannes was expressly forbidden to
go outside the convent walls without permission from above – a permission Roger knew better than to ask. In the
longueurs
of scrubbing and sweeping, and in the hours of despair over the blotted, scratched-out, interlined and cut-apart leaves of
the
Communia
, there was ample time to reflect upon the temerity of what he had done, and on the magnificent unlikelihood of its coming
to any good end, or indeed to any outcome at all.

This cloud grew month by month – irrationally, for well Roger knew that two years might pass before a busy Pope might reply
to a letter of no official urgency – no matter how urgently the writer had put his case – and the reply could find its way
from Rome to Paris. By spring he had convinced himself that Clement, had he read the letter at all, had called to mind Roger’s
failure to respond to his first mandate –which, after all,, had also been solicited – and had dismissed the matter out of
hand.

And indeed the reply was very late; it arrived on the Feast of St Ursula and Her Companions, and was dated June; had at the
best spent a long summer among the avalanches:

Dilecto filio, Fratri Rogerio dicto Bacon, Ordinis Fratrum

Minorum.

Tuae devotionis litteras gratantes recepimus: sed at verba notarimus diligenter quae ad explanationem earum dilectus filius
G. dictus Bonecor, Miles, viva voce nobis proposuit, tam fideliter quam prudenter.

Sane et medius nobis liqueat quid intendas, volumus, et tibi per Apostolica scripts praecipiendo mandamus, quatenus, non obstante
praecepto praelati cujuscunque contrario, vel tui Ordinis constitution quacunque, opus illud, quod to dilecto filio Raymundo
de Laonuno communicate rogarimus in minore officio constituti, scriptum de bona littera nobis mittere quam citissime poteris
quae tibi videntur adhibenda remedia circa ilia, quae nuper occasione tanti
discriminis intimasti: et hoc quarto secretius poteris facias indilate.

Datum Viterbii, x. Cal. Julii, anno II.

CLEMENT IV.

DEO GRATIAS. AMEN. AMEN. AMEN.

Oh, Deo gratias, amen! His day was come: Friar Bacon, the obscure, the rebellious, the exiled, the scorned and despised, had
indeed become that Magister Roger of whom he had dreamed before he had ever left home: Magister Roger, whose works were writ
for Popes!

He studied the miraculous document long and long, not only for the fiercely solemn delight with which it filled him, but also
because he was determined, equally fiercely, that it should be put to the best possible use. It was enough like the first
mandate – indeed, some of their phrases were identical –to contain many of the same traps. Clement had not only remembered
the first mandate, as was clear but had come very close to repeating it. There was the same requirement that Roger’s writings
be sent to him ‘in good letters’, which of course meant that copyists would be required; the same requirement that the work
be sent regardless of any provisions to the contrary in the constitutions of the Order; the same corollary failure to include
any instructions to the brothers for the mitigation of Roger’s menial duties; and above all, the same injunction that all
this be done in secret. Furthermore, there was again no money – either Sir William Bonecor had failed to carry that part of
the message, or he had not put the case strongly enough.

What, then, was he to do? On the face of it, a mandate from the spiritual emperor of all Christendom should be the most powerful
of instruments; yet in point of fact, it seemed to leave him very much where he had been before. He could still proceed no
further without making a thorough, indeed a drastic attempt to raise money; for this needed time, and the whole purpose of
corrective discipline, no matter who was corrected, was to fill up time which might otherwise be used for thinking or some
other mischief.

Roger sloshed his mop thoughtfully into a corner. It had not occurred to him until now, but under circumstances of this kind
the injunction to secrecy would be impossible to fulfil, no matter how faithfully he himself obeyed it. The use of outside
copyists would defeat it. If they did not pirate the work itself as it passed through their hands – the usual practice in
a university town if the work in question appeared to be of some substance, likely sooner or later to be saleable to students
– one or another of the scribes, sooner or later, would be sure to whisper to Roger’s superiors the word which would undo
his triumph, branch and root. Then he would have no choice but to show the brothers his letter from the Pope, and secrecy
of any sort would be at an end.

But there were, to be sure, different kinds and degrees of secrecy; and it might be possible, by forfeiting the lesser, to
preserve the greater. The question was: since secrecy
in toto
was impossible, what aspect of it would be the greater in Clement’s eyes? To answer that, one would have to know why Guy
had enjoined it in the first place, and not even a hint of such a reason appeared in either this or the earlier mandate. It
would have to be a reason which would be as compelling to Pope Clement IV as it had been to the Cardinal-Bishop of Sabina,
a reason which did not change and might indeed loom even larger with the donning of the Tiara.

One such which might have bulked large to a Cardinal, a reluctance to interfere with the internal discipline of the Orders,
could hardly crouch so obstinately in the way of a Pope, on whose sufferance both Orders – both founded within the lifetimes
of living men – depended for their existence. Yet young though they were, and corrupt though they were even in their youth,
the Orders had proven their value to Christendom, and no Pope could now want to see them disrupted, let alone dissolved; so
it might well be assumed that Clement, like his predecessors, would wish to avoid any move which might promote dissension
between them – such as permitting an errant Franciscan to publish in despite of the direct prohibition of his Minister General;
and publish, furthermore, an extensive work in the natural
sciences which the Dominicans were forbidden to study at all.

In so far as Roger could determine, the reasoning was sound, but the conjecture upon which it ultimately stood was a shaky
one indeed upon which to build in addition a course of action. Nevertheless, he had no better foundation; and its consequences
were that, first, what Clement would most desire would be the concealment of the nature and content of the work, not only
from the world, but from the Franciscans themselves; and, second, that in defence of this the larger secrecy, the smaller
secret of the existence of the mandate might in middling-good conscience be sacrificed. Were the conjecture to be true, then
it would follow that while the first mandate – from the Cardinal – might or might not specifically identify the work to be
prepared as dealing with the natural sciences (as in fact, of course, it did), the second – from the Pope – would not; and
this indeed was one of the major differences between these otherwise so similar documents. The logician in Roger shuddered
at the prospect of launching into these unknowable seas aboard the keelless, sailless, rudderless fallacy of affirming the
consequent; but the self whispered,
What choice?
And answered,
None, none.

He sought Out the Father Superior, and showed him the letter. The consternation it produced was gratifying, but dangerous
as well; to the demand that Roger surrender it for an examination in council and by the provincial minister, Roger refused
on the grounds that it was addressed to him and was his property, which was inarguable except on the rarefied theological
ground that as a Franciscan he had no property – an argument too tainted with Joachism to be usable here. After three days
the provincial minister was called in, to see whether by the plea to the Pope on Roger’s part of which Clement’s letter plainly
gave evidence, Roger had transgressed the fifth rubric of the Constitutions of Narbonne, which forbade any Franciscan to approach
the Pontiff without many specific permissions; but the mandate, whose authenticity could hardly be doubted, was a white-hot
iron to be thrust into the placid, indeed stagnant waters of a Parisian convent of no other account, and the charge was
dismissed on the technicality that the text of Clement betrayed no intention on Roger’s part to pass over his, superiors to
the Holy Father simply to prosecute a grievance, the main act the fifth rubric had been inscribed to prevent. In this much,
Deo gratias
, the discretion he had exercised in casting the plea had been paid back.

Suspicion, jealousy, envy, all these remained; to which was added even a certain savagery in the enforcement of his daily
tasks; but the words and the signature of the Pope could in no wise be contraverted, nor could the brothers deny him time
to go forth into the city to raise money for copyists – they being no better able than he had been to interpret otherwise
Clement’s command to secrecy.

For the rest of their malice, he had a sufficient remedy, in his heart. He wrote to Eugene, without exposing the subject:
It is the vice by which man loses himself, his neighbour, and God, which forces him to break peace with all, even with his
dearest friends. He disparages everyone with insults, and assails everyone with injuries; he does not omit to expose himself
to all perils, and is not afraid to blaspheme God.’

He had none to say to him, ‘Art aware, most Christian Roger, that thou art describing someone an enemy would say much favours
thee?’ That man was dead.

Thus armed, he went forth into the city, which he had not seen since before Rome. By the river there was a ruin which he studied
silently for a long time before his memories of both towns combined to give him understanding of what had happened: the Parisians
had clumsily piled a third course atop the aqueduct, and the whole long structure had come pouring down in a rain of ill-cut
stones, leaving behind naught but a few arches and a parade of jagged stumps, like a burlesque of cypresses. There was a monument
to ignorance that would stub toes and bark shins for centuries to come; but he had no time now to brood over it any further,
let alone teach simple Roman engineering to the rough-dressed heads of Paris. His present errand was to Louis IX, King of
France.

There was no one to tell him that this were madness, since he had broached it to no one but himself. It seemed to him to be
a simple and sensible project: it was the best visible use to which one could put a letter from the curator princeps of the
next world to a prince of this, and Louis was the best kind to read the message, as Henry III would doubtless have been the
worst. Louis loved knowledge, and had been for a long time the patron of Vincent of Beauvais, a Dominican who had written
in the domain of theology just such a work as Roger was now asked to write in the sciences; had in fact not only made Vincent
his librarian, as Luca di Cosmati had been made the librarian of Piccolomini, Marquis of Modena, but had made him teacher
and guide to his royal children.

The letter, indeed, did bring him to the king; but it also struck him dumb. Louis was remotely kind, as well as amused, but
would know what business it was of the Pope’s that demanded so much money; and seeing from the letter that this could not
be told, and from the shabbiness of the emissary, of whom he had never heard, that it could hardly be a matter of state, dismissed
Roger with such a purse as he might give to any other mendicant and turned his mind to the next petitioner.

The purse was full of clipped trash, worth perhaps two pounds after the counterfeits were shaken out: a magnificent gift for
a beggar, but a day wasted for Roger; he retreated at dusk to the convent, gloomily biting the ragged coins and spitting them
out on to the cobbles.

It seemed reasonable, nay inevitable, that the response of any other high personage who did not know Roger would be the same,
or perhaps much less gracious than that of the Saint-King had been. Such remaining quality as did know who Roger was, was
in England, effectively beyond his reach for the indefinite future; and, of course, in Rome, which was no aid either. But
wait: there was the Marquis of Modena.

But the more he considered the matter, the more reluctant he was to ask the grave scholar of Tivoli for money. Roger had not
written to Piccolomini in a dozen years; and though
there were assuredly many good and sufficient reasons for this, to break such a silence with a series of excuses directly
followed by an appeal for funds would hardly sit well with the Roman aristocrat. Yet Roger was on the Pope’s business, and
durst not let any field lie fallow that he knew might bear.

In the end, he wrote to Livia instead, explaining the circumstances frankly in so far as the mandate permitted him to do under
his interpretation of it. Then he promptly forgot about this essay, for nothing was surer than that any response would be
much delayed. If any money did indeed arrive from that source, it would not do so until he was in the concluding days of the
work; and that would be just as well, for it would be then that the copyists’ bills would be falling due one after the other.

His next port of call was the laboratory of Peter the Peregrine.

‘Roger, you know well that I am cut off from my family as of old,’ the experimenter said when he was finished. ‘Yet you gave
me money when you had it, and I’d not be such a poor Christian as to refuse you now. What to do? Well, here’s two pounds,
as a beginning’– a most poor beginning, but I am a poor man.’