Doctor Mirabilis (27 page)

‘In what way? It seems a lot to ask. I can see that some knowledge of the patient’s auspices might be useful, and that a knowledge
of drugs is essential. But otherwise the connections are superficial, are they not?’

‘By no means,’ Roger said warmly. ‘For example, what might suffice against a disease of the kidneys, which are ruled by Venus?
It would not be enough to know in what house Venus stood when the patient was born, which is astrology; or in what house she
stands now, which is astronomy; or in what houses she will stand for the rest of the course of treatment, which is mathematics.
There are likewise herbs that are governed by Venus, which is agriculture; and so is the element copper, which is alchemy.
And the worst pitfall here is that the traditional medical texts say
almost nothing of all this. I would rather not go into it now, but I have counted no fewer than thirty-six such grave defects
in the classical teachings; I mean to write a book about it some time soon.’

‘Do so, I pray,’ the marquis said, blinking ‘I did not mean to tempt you into a divagation.’

‘Then I mean to ask, how do we know what we know? These imperfections are rampant. They are even in Aristotle, partly because
of the abominable translations we use, and partly because he concealed some knowledge for good reasons, as you can see in
his book of secrets. Here we see the defect of revealed knowledge and belief, that again there is no certitude in it.’

‘Is this not a dangerous doctrine?’

‘No. St. Augustine himself counsels us against making fools of ourselves by quoting the Word of God to deny some plain fact
of nature, because when such an apparent conflict exists, it must mean that we have misunderstood the Word. People are constantly
misunderstanding the Word – otherwise we should not be plagued by heretics. Now this brings me to my experimental science,
which is not a part of the sciences of natural philosophy or mathematics, not a “true” science in that sense, but nevertheless
is superior to them all. It unites natural philosophy with revealed knowledge because it gives them both certitude; and imparts
to each and all three dignities, which are its three prerogatives. I have written them down, thus:

‘First, verification. Until you have this in your hand, anything you “know” about natural philosophy, from revelation and
authority, is simple credulity, which is only the first stage of knowledge.’

‘Even from Aristotle?’ the marquis said. ‘Even from this mysterious book of secrets?’

‘O, that is only the other side of the same coin. I will believe anything, no matter how apparently incredible, if it comes
to me from a sufficient authority; but that means I must have faith that he has performed the experiments he says he has performed,
and observed what he says he has
observed. Aristotle passes this test – I have actually repeated some of his observations myself, and they were correct. And
this is a necessary proviso, for no man can live long enough to repeat every experiment in history; perfect scepticism. Josephus
says that the ancients lived long lives simply out of the necessity to
understand
what they had learned.’

‘I am answered. What is the second dignity?’

‘The second is the one that we have already exposed, the drawing together of the separate sciences so as to see their relationships
to each other,
quod in terminus aliarum explicat veritates quas tamen nulla earum potest intelligere nec investigare.
Again to cite an example, who has not seen sick dogs eat grass? Might not a man study the behaviour of animals to see how
they prolong their lives, and thus recover knowledge of some healing herb long lost? Here would be a plain case of two sciences
contributing to each other in a way that the man working only in one science could never hope to see. And here, most plainly,
experiment is not a separate science in the usual sense, but a leaven of power at work throughout natural philosophy. And
this represents the second stage of knowledge, which is simply experience.

‘Now at last we come to the third dignity, again emerging from experiment: The use to which all this knowledge is to be put,
for the protection of Christianity, the greater glory of God, and the greater welfare of man. And precisely here lie the greatest
difficulties, because this is the domain of the third stage of knowledge, that is, reason, which must also decide to what
uses knowledge
ought not
to be put. The man who sees the possibilities of the several sciences, and uses them as Archimedes did to make engines to
defend Syracuse, is a man of power – of awful power if the book of secrets is correct, and I myself have had certain revelations
… but of these I am still too uncertain to speak.

‘Still it is clear, Milord, that the pinnacle of this schema must be an ethics. Moral philosophy is its outcome and its king.
And it is here that I have made no progress at all. There is of course the ethics of Aristotle, but that emerges from natural
philosophy, revelation and authority
as he
knew them.
His knowledge is better than ours on most counts, but poorer on some crucial matters – most obviously, that he could not
be a Christian, but there are others as well. And this is why our converse over Seneca impelled me to the impoliteness of
all this scribbling.’

‘The study of nature is not my study,’ the marquis said gravely, ‘and on the whole I do not regret my incomprehension. But
I have believed since the death of my wife that God meant my house to be the womb of something greater than the continuance
of my line. And, praise Him, I have been allowed a glimpse of it. I might have been vouchsafed more had I not been jealous
of it, for which I beg your forgiveness.’

‘Mine? Milord Modena, your kindnesses will be remembered in my prayers all my life long.’

‘Perhaps not,’ the marquis said. ‘You see, while you were in retreat, Luca brought me a letter for you. I kept it, not wanting
to abort the work for which I might some day be remembered, if only in God’s eye. I failed to think until too late of the
injury I might be doing you, were it a letter of moment. With shame, I give it to you now.’

He handed the packet across the table, and Roger broke the seal without haste; he had already recognized the hand, that of
one of Adam Marsh’s familiars. The message was brief – a mercy, since the candles were now burning very low.

‘You have done me no harm at all, Milord. I am simply called home, and given new tasks I fear I ill deserve. It
is
good news, and in no wise urgent.’

‘I thank God,’ the marquis said. ‘Of course I knew it was to bring our visits to an end; that was fore-ordained and I must
abide it. But I am emboldened to ask a favour.’

‘Anything in my power, Milord.’

‘Then … would you leave me the book you read from tonight?’

‘Why, certainly. But Milord, it is incomplete.’

‘I know,’ the marquis said, very quietly. ‘It is a child of this house. But I would have it if you could yield it up.’

Silently, Roger laid the manuscript upon the table. Then he drew back the top leaf, and picking up a dripping quill, wrote
across the top of it:
Communia naturalium – I.

The marquis received it in a like silence, and held out his hand. As their fingers touched, a candle crackled and went out.

The housekeeper prophesied disasters as she packed him up, but he was used to that now. Why she should seem to be pitying
him at the same time was impossible to guess; for he had never been happier in his life than in these two years.

He found the courage to tell Livia so when they parted … but that too ended in mystery, for as Luca and he rode companionably
from the gate, he saw that she was silently weeping.

Going north, he had nothing left to think about but the cipher, which belatedly had almost solved itself, while he had been
thinking about the recension of the
Communia
he had given to Piccolomini. In the midst of these labours he had been vouchsafed a revelation of a kind, though a difficult
one and without any promise that he could trust. It had been simply a prompting from the long-silent self; and it said nothing
but,
Count.

After pondering this word long and long, in some bafflement as to whether or not it was itself another word of the cipher,
he had used his last days in the marquis’ library to ferret out three long books to study – books on subjects of so little
interest to him that they threatened to put him to sleep after the first chapter. (That in itself had proven unexpectedly
hard; there was virtually nothing at all in this vast ranking of manuscripts which was not wholly fascinating, regardless
of subject.) He counted every character in all three, and made up a table of how many times each letter occurred. He had intended
to go on to make more tables, the next to tabulate how many times pairs of letters occurred, next triplets, the next fours,
but he had utterly failed to anticipate how stupefying just the first task would be, and
how long it would take him; and his time was running out. He would have liked, also, to make up a congruent table for three
Greek books of similar length, and make allowances, for the differences arising out of the relative shortness of the Greek
alphabet, and the fact that one letter in Greek might often stand for groups of two or even three in the Latin; but there
was no time.

But the Greek tables did not turn out to be pertinent. With incredible swiftness the unbreakable pronouncement began to rank
itself into meaning, so fast indeed that he did not pause to consider it for sense until well past noon; it was enough to
see the words surfacing, one by one, like a procession of dolphins each bulging at the forehead with patent wisdom yet seeming
to the sailor on such seas as alike as pea-beans.

Then, famished once more without being aware of it, and almost mortally exhausted as well, he stopped and looked. He had supplied
the wolf his serpentine tail or yard, and on that model given another to LURU as a word plainly encoded on the same model;
but as he had expected, that wolf had vanished now. The man in the middle, the still unbroken
VIR
, now stood in the heart of an explosion, with saltpetre on the one shore and sulphur on the other. He had now:
Sed tam sa petr … e sulphur,
separated still by
VOPO VIR VOARCUMIA RICO
, but he was in no doubt that something enormous had already happened. Standing himself in the middle, Roger remembered the
sharp crepitating crackle of the saltpetre crystals, salvaged from his father’s dungheap, under the blow of a rock in a boy’s
hand when he tried to shape them into larger rhombs through which to look into the eyes of Beth or old Petronius or at blades
of grass, and had got nothing but that noise and a puff of pepper-smelling air for his pains; and on the other bank, there
thudded in his memory the exit of the demon from the window of his noisome room at Westminster. In the middle with him was
the dream, in which these huge ciphered words had become an explosion like nothing so much as the earthquake which shall exhume
the dead for the Last Judgment.

He began to tremble. These words were words of power. Even in the terror of the vision he had not dreamt of how much power
there was in them, nor could he yet fathom why it was being put into his hands; for he knew well enough what it was. This
was the
ignis volans,
the flying fire of the Hellenes which had been lost for all these many centuries; and Roger Bacon had been told in one single
struggle with the death how it was to be made … and of what horrors would follow. How could that be? In Simon de Montfort’s
grave words, would God allow? Yet He had allowed it to the Hellenes; and now in this age it was almost, almost come down to
a simple piece of alchemy, about to flow from the quivering tip of the quill in Roger’s hand.

Yet not quite. The rest of the anagram, it seemed, would not be broken. Again and again Roger rearranged the remaining characters,
but nothing emerged but a Satanic gabble, more impenetrable than the four remaining blocs themselves. Yet it was as sure as
death and resurrection that this was alchemy entire, and nothing more. What could be missing? Saltpetre and sulphur and …
what?

Roger went back to the tables of numbers, though they were now hard to read in the light of his candle. Wiping his eyes and
forehead, he tried again, counting, half asleep, gradually losing once more his awareness of the meanings of words, only seeking
to see in the numbers some relationship which.…

And then, in a moment of whirling delirium, he had the dream back, and with it the answer. That answer was numbers. Why had
he not seen before that all those U’s could not be told from V’s in Roman capitals? There it all was, the great fish at the
bottom of a pellucid pool:

It was painfully crabbed Latin, but certainly correct, for it was in the style of his demon self, which spoke nothing well
but English and that not often; and its meaning was totally beyond argument. With the elisions expanded, the
pronouncement said:
Sed tamen salis petre recipe vii partes, v carbonum pulvere novelle coruli, v et sulphuris.

He was versed enough in alchemy to know that nothing useful could be expected unless one began with pure substances, he had
absorbed that in Peter the Peregrine’s college; but he knew well enough how to proceed. Alongside his Arabic lessons he had
learned the test for pure flowers of sulphur, which should crackle faintly when rubbed between finger and thumb; he had known
from boyhood how to dig a pit in which fine charcoal is burned; and from boyhood too he remembered without irony that the
most refined of all saltpetre is to be found in a dungheap. Nothing remained but to go forth and procure these things.

And this white flash of knowledge took him no longer to encompass than would have sufficed him to write down the shortest
verse in Scripture; which reads,
Jesus wept.