Doctor Mirabilis (26 page)

‘There is, I believe, a Hebrew grammar,’ the secretary said. ‘I fear I can’t vouch for its merits, if any. But it might serve
as a beginning.’

‘There, you see?’ the marquis said, his enthusiasm visibly mounting. ‘And of course you have other studies that you might
be able to prosecute here.’

‘You would be doing Milord a favour,’ Livia said with a half smile. Her Latin was perfect to the point of elegance, a circumstance
so incredible in a woman that Roger thus far had been unable to answer her directly except in monosyllables. ‘He seldom has
anyone to talk to but Luca and me.’

‘Which is usually more than sufficient,’ the marquis retorted. ‘You will find Luca a man of parts, I assure you, friar Bacon.
In fact the Cosmati are a gifted family, all artists of stature for three generations. Luca’s brother Jacopo is even better
than he is.’

The secretary smiled without malice. Evidently he was used to this gibe. ‘Which is why you are my patron instead of his.’

‘Wait until the Church is through with him and then see how long you’ll last! But no, he doesn’t know where the books are.
And, friar Bacon, you already know that the city is a desert where books are concerned. It’s the greedy collectors who make
it so, including of course myself. Our imperial ancestors invented few new vices, but private art collecting seems to have
been their own authentic discovery. It would hardly have been possible to the Greeks.’

‘How so?’ Roger said.

‘Why, it was the old Romans who wrote into law the principle that the man who owned a painting, for example, was the man who
owned the board it was painted on, not the artist; and the same with manuscripts. Private collecting really began with that,
because it made it possible for a man to become wealthy without having done any of the work involved, simply by saving the
board until the painting on it became valuable. And so you can’t find a book today in Rome that isn’t nailed down, and with
a hugely unjust price on it. There are no libraries but private ones, and all of us scheming to unearth a new treasure and
snatch it to our bosoms before somebody else happens upon it.’

Roger laughed. ‘But this would seem to mean that there must be
some men in
Rome to whom you could talk of learning, Milord’

Piccolomini only shrugged; it was the girl who answered. ‘Father may be the only collector in the city who
reads
books.’

Once more, Roger was shocked into silence. Though Luca had used almost the same words on the Via Lata, they had then seemed
only banter.

‘Then the matter is concluded,’ the marquis said. ‘You will live with us. I am sure nothing but good can come of it. As a
beginning, let me show you the library now.’

The library was in fact a marvel, second only to the University’s own at Paris, and far superior to any Roger had seen at
Oxford, even Grosseteste’s. But it was only one marvel of many.

The beauty of the villa itself was of a nature wholly new to Roger. The omnipresent thatch-roofed pines under their multiple
spindly trunks were no novelty, but he had never seen cypresses before; here they were everywhere, marching in straight lines
right across the landscape to the horizon. Under his window, and in almost every other sheltered spot, grew low bushes with
shiny dark green leaves which bore oranges – small ones, but to Roger marvellous enough, for until now the fruit had been
only a name to him. Piccolo-mini’s vineyards were familiar enough in principle, for Roger had seen grapes aplenty around Paris
and even at home; but his father had told him often enough that the vineyards of Ilchester were the outcome of an unprecedented
century of fair weather, and that the time would surely come again when there would be no such tipple as British wine.

At Tivoli all this abundant natural beauty had been subdued into a kind of order, made to grow against and soften a backdrop
of marble arches and pillars, or taught to sweep into exfoliative Euclidean curves and aisles. The Piccolomini gardens were
not large by comparison with those of many of the marquis’ neighbours, but they had been laid out by Lorenzo di Cosmati, grandfather
of Luca, before Roger had been born, and were such a work of art as Hadrian’s villa itself could not boast: a serene and ravishing
island in which to walk in the morning, amid a purity of doves. And over it all was the Tyrrhenian sky, even more intensely
blue than it had seemed over the city proper, out of which poured sunlight in overwhelming profligacy.

And the food! Roger had never before dreamed that there
could be so many different kinds of things to eat. Northern food repeated itself endlessly, disguised only by its many sauces
and spices. Here he seldom recognized what was in his bowl, and on some occasions was sorry to have asked; he was,
exempli gratia,
more than fortunate to discover that squid was delicious before learning what he was eating. But this passed quickly; there
was too much of moment on his mind to allow him a pause in which to become also the inventor of squeamishness.

The standards of cleanliness were equally new to him, and had to be taught him, none too gently, by the attendant assigned
to him: a stout old housekeeper, once Livia’s nurse, who overcame with granite obduracy his initial scandal at being tended
by a woman, and saw to it that his linens were fresh, his sandals mended, and his feet clean. Piccolomini’s estate made its
own soap, a substance rarer than diamonds; here it was largely
lapis Albanis
, a mixture of lava and ashes, which eventually wore down to a central sliver abrasive enough to point nails, but the old
matron saw to it that he learned its use. He found himself taking more baths in a month than he had formerly taken in a year.

The housekeeper herself was harder to become accommodated to.
Pro forma
monasticism in this warm radiant air did not put up a serious battle, but his old bitter distrust yielded less easily. It
was several months before he could bring himself to accept that her warm and rather quarrelsome concern with him was totally
without predatory intent, and ran much deeper than he could in any justice have expected or asked. She had of course been
assigned to him by the marquis; Roger was her task, like any other task; but beyond that, she worried actively and constantly
about the pale English friar, often to a knife-edge beyond which he did not know whether he would shout with exasperation
or burst into helpless laughter. She was the first woman of this kind that he had ever encountered; and he awoke one dew-cold
morning to her morning scolding, after nearly half a year had gone by, with the realization that he liked it.

Livia was the second. It was through her that Roger first
came to understand the essence of her father’s loneliness, his generosity to a stranger, the curious tone of wistfulness that
perpetually underlay even his most abstract and scholarly conversations. Most of the Piccolomini fortune was founded in lead
mines – half the plumbing in modern Rome had come out of them – and no subject interested the marquis less than public works,
except perhaps lead itself, or politics. Of his surviving children there were only two, and the other was the son of whom
his wife had died in childbirth: Enea Silvio, who had fled the marquis’ bewildered hostility the moment he had come into a
marriage portion, and lived now in Siena, incommunicado and – Roger deduced – disinherited. No one was left the marquis but
Livia, whom he had given at his own hands the broad humanistic education that Enea Silvio had sullenly refused to suffer,
let alone absorb.

(‘That explains much,’ Roger said in the library, when they were alone together. ‘I have never heard a woman speaking Latin
before. It surprised me.’

(‘It explains more than I find comfortable,’ the marquis said. ‘That precisely is why Latin is only spuriously a universal
language, friar Bacon. It is never spoken to women any more. Women are confined to the vernacular, whatever that may be. On
this account alone, Latin is dying.’

(‘Surely not! It is the language of scholars, everywhere; and the only written language of note. Under those circumstances,
surely it can hardly matter whether or not it is spoken to women.’

(Piccolomini had given him a long, slow look, and at last seemed to be about to comment; but instead, again, he only shrugged.)

Nevertheless, it was not too hard to see that Livia’s learning had unfitted her as a woman, as witness her spinsterhood still
persistent in her third, decade, in despite of both her father’s wealth and her dark personal beauty. Young Roman princes
bored her, and she alarmed them; and now there was added the simple problem of age, itself a proof that there was something
amiss with the girl, a proof that grew more convincing simply by itself growing older.

None of this could matter to Roger, who found himself able after only a few months to accept her presence in the library,
and her knowledge of subjects in the scholarly province. To him, everything at Tivoli was strange and hence might well be
usual; he had no touchstones. She was inarguably well read – no match for Luca, who seemed to have vast stretches of the library
by rote, but on the other hand more than simply a reflection of her father. She not only knew the texts, but often saw into
them in a way entirely her own. After a while, Roger was taking so little notice of her sex that he talked to her in much
the same style he might have adopted with any fellow scholar, maugre the parcel of respect he owed his noble host, and was
occasionally surprised to find that he had been assuming knowledge on her part that in fact she lacked. By ordinary, this
amused her, though he could not imagine why.

She was also far more sympathetic to Roger’s interest in engineering than was her father, who was actively depressed by the
practicality of his imperial ancestors; the marquis was not precisely pleased that the Goths had cut the aqueducts nine centuries
bygonnen, but there was something in the manner in which he had referred to the incident which suggested that he thought it
had served the Romans right for being so in love with piling one stone on top of another. About this difference Roger and
his host drew nigh to real disputatiousness until Livia stepped in, diverting Roger into daytime tours of the Roman public
works and so freeing his mind for nocturnal conversations more to the Piccolomini taste. When the marquis was ill with the
Roman fever, as he was with increasing frequency as the second summer wore on, Roger and Livia walked in the garden and talked
– of the lost secret of mortar, of active geometry, of what the buried floor of the Forum might have looked like, of the crime
of quarrying ancient monuments, and other suitable subjects, while the housekeeper, Roger’s servant, kept to her marble bench
and looked up at the stars, sighing resignedly.

But there was nothing to sigh about. Roger had never
before felt so well, so young, so totally alive. The climate, the sunlight, the food, the beauty, the feast of reason, the
antiquities, the friendships, the solicitude, all seemed conspiring to make him positively sleek. Sometimes in the fluttering
evening in the Piccolomini gardens, listening to Livia’s grave melodious voice and breathing draughts of citron and other
perfumes, he would hear also through the doves’ wings a long, long story being told by a nightingale; and with it came down
around him such an imminence of the glory of God that he could not even give thanks silently, but only hold Livia’s hand until
some cough or stir from the marble bench brought back the lateness of the hour. Then they would part; there was always tomorrow;
and besides, Roger was now required to wash his feet.

Above all there was the library, and the marquis of Modena himself. It was surprising how infrequently Roger could bring himself
to think of the cipher, for all the wealth of help he now had; but somehow it never seemed to be a suitable subject for conversation.
Piccolomini’s enthusiasms lay elsewhere; he was a humanist, not a digger. Yet he would talk gladly of the sciences, so long
as Roger cleaved to Nature as a source of correction for corrupt texts, and stayed clear of aqueducts and other plumbing.
Moreover, they had early found in their joint admiration for Seneca – of whose works the marquis owned the most extensive
collation Roger had ever seen, including portions of books previously quite unknown to him – a common ground in moral philosophy
which widened and deepened with every evening’s conversation, until Roger had to invoke a fortnight’s retreat to assimilate
all this magnificence, and make it his own.

It was difficult, in part because he had written nothing in nearly two years. It was, furthermore, not a formal book that
was wanted here, but a schema, a hierarchy, which should of course be logical, but must in a sense be architectural as well,
related in all its parts like the stones of an arch. He found himself spending almost as much time drawing diagrams as in
penning argument. The struggle was protracted, for there were at least three grand elements struggling for
mastery in his mind, each of which had somehow to be reconciled to the others: First, the vision of a universal science which
had begun to haunt him ever since he had first read the
Secret of Secrets;
next, the domain of experiment versus revealed knowledge; and finally, the domain of the moral law, which could be allowed
supremacy over the other two, but only in so far as it could be shown to derive from them.

At the end he was still unsatisfied, and gave over reworking the manuscript only out of regard for his host’s patience. He
did not read it that night, however, but instead used it only as in the past he had used lecture notes. The marquis listened
attentively to the solemn friar who might have been his son; but he did not stint to ask questions.

‘First of all, we have all the several separate sciences as they have come down to us, that is, imperfectly,’ Roger began.
‘I mean to include mathematics, and then medicine, alchemy, perspective, agriculture, all the sciences of natural philosophy.
It is clear enough that they are all connected together and depend upon each other, as you can see most clearly in a science
like medicine where the physician who knows neither alchemy nor astrology cannot be a scientist at all. He must know equally
well the connections between these other sciences, as well as their relationships to his own.’