Doctor Mirabilis (35 page)

‘Believe me, Peter, I take it as gratefully as if it were riches; as from you it is. Could you, perhaps, suggest where else
I might go? I have already tried the King.’

‘You have? Well, you were always bold. Belike I’d have gone to him myself, had I a mandate from the Pope in my scrip … but
I doubt it. Now let’s see.… It would be easier, had we still the same circle of students as in the old days, to whom you
gave your money; then we could simply pass a bowl around. Well, I can do that anyhow; I’ll tell those present that it’s a
special assessment, and either they pay up or school’s out. But it’ll not produce so much as it would have did they know you
and I could explain.’

‘Would it do any good, do you think,’ Roger suggested tentatively, ‘to explain it all the same, and tell them that I am
the author of all those inflammatory books they’ve been reading?’

‘No, probably not,’ Peter said, frowning. ‘They’re an anticlerical lot; what care they for the Pope’s business, especially
since I cannot say to them what precisely it is? Yet it might be as well to tell them that I am collecting the money for you.
After all, they did lose four or five of your books, the young noodles; had those parchments belonged to the University library,
the fines would have stings in them for fair; I’ll sting ’em too.’

‘I am more grateful to you than I can say, Peter.’

‘I have my reasons,’ Peter said, smiling. ‘Say me neither yea nor nay, but you prosecuting a business of the Pope’s must concern
some work of knowledge, and you being who you are, it is bound to be knowledge in the natural sciences. I can think of nothing
more worthy to be pressed upon a Pope; I have given my own life to them – what’s a few pounds?’

That interview cheered Roger for the remainder of the week; and at the outcome, he had six pounds, counting the two from the
King. Yet there was no objective reason for cheerfulness – six pounds was almost as little use as no money at all; and he
had exhausted his roster of noblemen, major and minor alike. Well then, merchants.

Here again, he knew of none but William Busshe, an Englishman; but that limitation was not without hope. It was true that
the rebels had controlled the Cinque Ports –it was at Dover that they had met Guy de Foulques on his landing as mediator from
the then Pope, and had torn the proposals he carried into a thousand bits and cast them into the sea – but they might not
control them now, after Evesham; and in any event they had wanted the ports for the revenues, to help keep their armies in
the field, and so would have had their own interest in the maintenance of shipping. What cost Roger more worry than this theory
of strategy was winning from his superiors permission to make the long trip to Wissant; he won it at last not by an exercise
of subtlety, but
by flourishing the papal mandate at them like a bludgeon.

He had no hope of finding Bushe himself, for this was not the season for it, nor had he learned to know the family of Busshe’s
hosts, during the three days that he had convalesced in their house, well enough to ask money of them. But he had with great
care prepared a letter to William to be placed in their hands against the time when the
Maudelayne
should again be in port with its packs of fells. He knew the host at least well enough, he believed, to charge him most urgently
with its cherishing, and most prompt delivery.

But Busshe was there. After some hesitation, and much whispering up and down stairs, the eldest daughter of his Flemish partner
brought Roger to him, with her finger laid to her lips.

Busshe lay in that same great bed in which Roger had once recovered from his sea-sickness. His hands, that had hauled cordage
in Channel storms, were crossed impotently in his lap, and beneath the linens lay the shadow of a torso as narrow and as lax
as a length of tarred rope. His hair, totally white, was spread out on the bolster; and in all of him there was no colour,
save for a bright-busked patch of red on each cheekbone, and the blue shadows under the closed eyes.

Below, there continued the muffled sounds of comings and goings: the host’s family, physicians, solicitors, agents, creditors,
even sailors; Roger had seen, however, no ecclesiastics as yet. After a while, without opening his eyes, Busshe whispered:

‘The plate … the plate.…’

Roger understood very well; there had been just such a vigil of kites at his father’s last illness, and Robert, who had scattered
it with brutal efficacy, had not then been too self-removed from his next-youngest brother to explain it. Roger bent and touched
Busshe’s hand gently with two fingers.

‘Dear friend,’ he said, and then was forced to swallow. ‘They cannot seize thy plate for thy debts. Thou’rt not at home.’

The dying man’s eyes opened at the touch, looking steadfastly at the ceiling. Nevertheless, he said:

‘’Tis Roger of Ilchester. Hast come to pray for William Busshe? I am thy debtor.’

There was no answer to be given; the question was as good as an indictment. The feathery voice said on:

‘I have many such. The horsemen … at Dover … took away my sarplers. Bare ‘scaped I with my ship.

‘Rest, William, I entreat thee.’

The hands stirred, fruitlessly. ‘Nay, no need. Well wis I. I be not long on live.… Thou’rt older too, Roger.’

‘Rest thee, in God’s name. How may I help thee?’

At that, William Busshe’s head turned on the bolster. His eyes glittered, but did not seem to see; it was the look of a limed
bird. ‘Pray,’ he whispered; ‘pray. We will foredo them, thou and I, Roger. Ever scrupulously fair and honest was I with them;
and now … they’re below dividing me, like … the cloak of … many colours. Seek in my chest, Roger.’

Roger looked about. ‘Good William, for what?’

‘The
Maudelayne.
The title’s there. Nay, first the key …’tis under this pillow.’

Gently, Roger extracted it, and opened the chest. In it there seemed to be nothing but a jumble of clothing.

‘The jerkin …’tis sewn flat into the right-hand corner. Thou art tonsured; say that I gave it thee to be shriven.’ He gasped,
and his eyes closed.

Roger hastened to him. The sweat-beads on the white forehead were cold under his palm. But once more, Busshe’s lips moved.

‘Now … do I thank God … that one came to see me in mine extremity.… Roger … what dost do?’

Through his tears, Roger croaked forth the best half-truth of his life.

‘I am an adviser to the Pope.’

‘Ahhhh.

The wrinkled mouth failed to close. Roger knelt; and remained kneeling for a long time.

When he was able, he closed the blind eyes with two groats, and locked the chest; and then folded the papery hands about the
key. Then he signed himself; and laying the leather
jerkin over his left forearm, quitted the cold room.

The kestrels were gathered just outside, and all up and down the staircase. Roger closed the door softly, and turned upon
them a stare all the more terrible for its blindness. He said: ‘It is ended.’

There was a ragged susurrus of breath. ‘Good friar; we thank thee,’ a heavy male voice said unctuously. ‘Wilt come below,
we’ll sign the book; and raise a goblet for the soul of the departed; and give thee somewhat for thine office, and thine holy
Order.’

‘I have this for charity, and require naught else,’ Roger said harshly, showing the jerkin, all Channel-Weathered as it was.
‘Show me thy document, and I’ll leave thee straight to thy mourning,’

Forever after, he would remember Wissant not for the rumble of its trade or the slapping of its waves, but as the dry sound
of hands being rubbed together.

Out of this revulsion and guilt he lost much, forbye he could not bring himself to pause in Wissant to sell the title of the
Maudelayne
, nor even to engage an agent, but waited for this until he was back in Paris; and so for the beaten ship realized but six
pounds – three times what Busshe had paid for her in his unrecoverable youth, but that had been before the wars, when the
pound had been the hardest coin in all of Christendom; and the journey to and from the
Maudelayne’s master
had itself cost Roger nearly a pound. The net was ten pounds.

Tragic though it had been – and selling the
Maudelayne
had been more than a little like selling one of his sisters – the success of the trip, thus qualified, led him to thinking
farther afield. Not to Rome, naturally, and certainly not to England; but since the brothers had let him go as far as Wissant,
then most of the Gallic nations should be open to him. For example (though it was the only example that occurred to him):
it had been Simon de Montfort who had brought Roger to the attention of Guy de Foulques, thus in a sense beginning all this;
or it had begun even before, when, as
Eleanor’s Confessor, Adam Marsh had arranged that marriage. And Simon’s widow was now in exile in Gascony. Why not?

The brothers produced reasons like virtuosi; Roger demolished them. The demolition would have accomplished nothing had it
not been for the precedent of the journey to Wissant, which had weakened their logic as the mandate of Clement had weakened
their authority. Roger handed his mop to Joannes, who flourished it like a banner, and set forth.

The castle in Labourd was not yet ruinous, but it had not far to go; and it was almost empty; if the man-at-arms who took
Roger to Eleanor was not the same, without his mail, who later served as her footman, they were at the very least fraternal
twins. The footman had first to drag off an enormous slavering mastiff which snarled and roared at Roger till the bare hall
rang shatteringly; the footman would have taken the beast entirely away, but at a motion from Eleanor, he instead chained
it to a ring in the near wall, where it stood straining, its snarls as steady and unsettling as the noise of an anchor-hawser
running out.

Though the clamour distracted him, Roger somewhat welcomed it too; for many years had passed since he had seen Eleanor last
– never, he recalled slowly, since Beaumont, for despite their propinquity at Westminster their paths had not crossed there.
And he had never noticed then that she was beautiful; he saw it now for the first time, as,
But she is still beautiful.

He could hardly, interpret what he meant by this, except that he knew vaguely that she was older, somewhat, than he was; which
meant that she was more than fifty
ae.
How much more mattered not in the least, for to Roger’s eyes she had not changed: tall and slender she stood as before, eyes
the colour of sheet lightning under the broad brow, hands white, tapered and smooth as an eidolon of Mercy, issuing from the
sorrowing sleeves. Looking at her, Roger’s demon self said to him, also for – alas! – the first time:
Livia too was beautiful.

‘My Lady,’ he said above the growls of the animal. ‘I … presume upon your mourning, and ask your pardon. I am about a business
for his highness the Lord Pope, otherwise—’

‘Most Christian Roger, thou’rt welcome.’ Roger took a step forward; the dog leapt against the chain, shouting. Like a girl,
Eleanor clapped her hands to her ears. ‘Oh, we shall never hear each other! Hanno, I’ll switch thee!’

She smote her hands together, once. ‘Bring him his bed – else will I never hear the friar’s holy rede I’

The footman silently brought a circular rag carpet of no particular colour and far gone in dog hairs, and threw’ it cautiously
against the wall under the ring. Hanno stepped on to it one vast pad at a time, and then turned on it as if making up his
nest, until he had created a grey lump of cloth far too small to sleep a puppy upon. On this he sat, regarding his mistress
with patient reproach, and growled thereafter only faintly, deep in his chest, when Roger raised a hand, or breathed.

With one eye nevertheless upon Hanno, Roger tumbled forth his errand. As Eleanor listened, her eyes closed slowly, until at
the end her spare strange beauty was not that of a woman, nor even of a statue, but that of the Platonic absolute of which
all beauty is but a shadow in a cave, cast by the Fire beyond fire. Hanno grumbled and lay down; Roger faltered; beyond the
embrasures, the sweet birds of Gascony faltered too.

Then her lids flew open. ‘Oh,’ she said, putting her hands to her throat; ‘oh. Sweet Roger Bacon, I am old. Oh, an I could
give thee what thou need’st! But I am not what I was – and though so praydeth Ito the Virgin, nay never could I give, but
only take. I think I must be damned.’

‘Good my lady! … None can know that to be true. Thou art noble surely, and wise; why dost despair of God? Hut not courage?
I know thou hest.’

‘But have not love?’ Eleanor said. ‘Not that? I prayed for it when I was married to Pembroke, as a little girl; prayed to
give it, that I might be worthy of receiving. And oh in what
perfect measure my lords gave it me, and so also my sons – and they are gone, all gone from me who failed them. I loved them.
I loved them, oh Mother and Bride; but it was not enough. They were all taken away.’

‘My lady.… We shall all be taken away.’

But she was already kneeling, her tears coursing over the backs of her hands. The monster coughed, but made no objection when
he knelt with her, though its eyes were smoky as obsidian.

After a while, she stood, and it was almost as though they had only just met.

‘Forgive me, Friar Bacon. I am not myself today. Now let us see what I can do for mine enemy the Pope.’

With a subdued shock, Roger realized what she meant, and raised a hand to halt her, but she would not be halted.

‘Once had I hope of those high designs of my lord of Leicester, those Mad Parliaments and new charters, those forays of peoples
against princes,’ she said somnolently. ‘I little thought the King my brother capable of withstanding Simon, strange though
the Earl’s purposes oft struck me. But the King’s course was also the Pope’s, and mayhap God’s – I took that too little into
mine accountings, and so am bereft, as now you see me; that course prospers, while my lord’s is dead with him; as you here
and now remind me in heaven’s own good time.’