Doctor Mirabilis (28 page)

Much had changed at Oxford, as was only to have been expected; and yet in that special world which was called into being by
its very name, the University had not changed at all; it was almost deceptively peaceful: the same streets, the same customs,
and above all the same faces, unchanged after so much had changed him. To be sure, Adam Marsh had gone quite grey about the
temples, but it did not make him seem old. Grosseteste was only just as grave and venerable as he had always been, no more;
the Bishop was properly beyond age, as though he had been canonized at birth. If the King’s aborting of his
teste synodale
– a confusing story, of which Roger heard so many conflicting versions that he gave it up as little better than a myth –
disturbed him, he did not show it, nor did he speak of it. Roger saw him but seldom, as before; and Adam, more than ever preoccupied
with the affairs of state which he loathed and loved, was at court or at Leicester for much of the year.

After the pleasures and explorations of reunions were past, Roger rather welcomed the relative solitude of the new life. He
had much to do, beginning, appropriately’, in the a’s, with alchemy. His lectures were time-consuming, for he had discovered
in himself a real passion to teach – had, indeed, discovered it in Paris; but herein lay the principal change since he was
last at Oxford, in that he was now a master, weighty with respect, and could to some extent allot his own hours. He was somewhat
at a loss to account for the obvious tentativeness with which the other masters treated him, however, until he discovered
that Richard of Cornwall had bruited it about the University that this Roger Bacon was a dangerous sciolist: at Paris he
had attended other men’s lectures and confounded them before their students with questions they could not answer.

Well, Roger had done that now and again, in particular to
a booby-headed master in Euclid’s
Elements
who had not actually known enough geometry to calculate the volume of a mousehole; and then there had been that lector on
the law of Moses, four out of five of whose statements about the chirogrillus Roger had pointed out to be wrong; that one
could count himself fortunate, since the fifth statement had been as wrong as the others. But it was a custom in Paris; Albertus
Magnus had done it to Roger once, after his debacle at Roger’s examination, though happily Albert had come out again the loser
and had immediately – and balefully – given up the sport as unprofitable.

As for Richard Rufus of Cornwall, rumour had it that he would not be making mischief for long, for he had received a permission
– in essence, an order – from John of Parma, Minister General of the Franciscans, to return to Paris to lecture on Lombard’s
Sentences.
From what Roger knew of the man, it seemed a wholly appropriate assignment.

In the meantime, Roger contentedly made many bad smells and burned himself repeatedly, to considerable profit. Within a span
of two years he had mastered most of the appalling jargon of alchemy, designed not to communicate but to conceal, and was
able to record with satisfaction the discovery of methods for refining three metals to the pure state. One of these – he had
no names for them, and the books did not know them – seemed to be a genuine element, which when blended with iron made a mixture
of phenomenal hardness perhaps promising for arms and armour. Each of the other two exploded when dropped into water, an observation
which nearly cost him his eyesight, and gave him a festering sore on one shoulder which took three weeks to heal. Since nothing
so fickle could be of any practical use, he dropped the matter there; if he needed a loud noise, he had the secret of the
cipher – the first alchemical formula he had tried. It had worked awesomely well, particularly when, as in the vision, it
was packed tightly into a parchment roll and lit with a spill at one end.

With the aid of the Arabs, whose language he now knew well enough to be able to distinguish a stylist from a plodder,
he began himself to write on alchemy: in particular a new translation of excerpts from Avicenna, centred upon such passages
as he had himself been able to test, or to enlarge upon. It did not greatly surprise him to find that knowing how the experiments
went in practice was almost as corrective of bad translation as was a knowledge of Arabic grammar; the world, it was perfectly
clear, was only the other form of the Word, and often much easier of access to its meaning. This work with the text of the
great Islamic physician sent his pen scratching into several side excursions, wholly natural to his way of thinking now, into
medicine. Among these was a revision of his first attempt at a book, made long ago at Oxford:
Liber de retardation accidentium senectutis et de sensibus conservandis
, the book on old age, undertaken this time at the request of Piccolomini, marquis of Modena, brought to Roger in a letter
from Tivoli as equally far away and long ago. It was a hair-raisingly bad book and probably could not be much improved, but
this recension, at least, would have the benefit not only of Avicenna but of the book of secrets.

Richard Cornwall stubbornly refused to disappear. His health was uncertain, and the Paris appointment had not been to his
taste. Misfortunately, Adam Marsh took his part. He wrote to the provincial minister, begging him to allow Cornwall to stay;
Oxford, he said, would be delighted to keep him. Cornwall was now spreading the word that this Roger Bacon was obviously also
a magician, in which he was aided more than a little by the notorious stinks, noises and oddly-coloured lights which emanated
of nights from Roger’s cell in St. Edmund Hall.

These sinister mutterings reached the students, as they were bound to do. The young men looked to Roger now not only for outrageous
propositions – which taste was inevitably gratified, for Roger generated outrageous propositions these days as naturally as
other men breathed, and with almost as little awareness of it – but also for miracles. He was tempted, and after a while he
fell: with the help of alchemy, small ‘miracles’ were not hard to produce, and
Roger quickly discovered that they were dramatically useful as teaching aids.

Cornwall’s sickly malice puzzled Adam sufficiently to move him to question Roger about it, but Roger’s theory – that it derived
from Albertus Magnus, whose familiar Cornwall had been for a time in Paris – would not have sat well with the lector, and
so instead he professed ignorance. In the end, Adam contrived to set it down to academic jealousy over the popularity of Roger’s
lectures on the
libri naturales;
and these indeed were now more of a success than ever, since Cornwall had indirectly led Roger to exhibit experiments in
the hall.

Nor were these the only good to emerge from that malice: for the provincial minister sent his clerk, one Thos. Bungay, to
Oxford in response to Adam’s letter, to investigate the merits of the case. Though he decided in Cornwall’s favour, that is,
that he need not go to Paris, the incessant chatter he had to endure about that sciolist and magician Roger Bacon aroused
his deepest curiosity.

Within half a day Bungay and Roger were fast friends. Thomas was an astronomer, which happened to be the next item but one
in the a’s, just after astrology. Within six months he had applied for leave to study at Oxford; within another month, they
had together leased the massive eight-sided gatehouse across St. Aldate’s Street in the walls. This blocky structure, which
was eighty-four feet high, served them as observatory. In addition, Thomas lived there; Roger, for the time at least, kept
to his quarters at St. Edmund to be near his classes, but it was already evident that he and the University would probably
benefit alike were he to take his stenches elsewhere – regardless of the fact that he was already better than half done with
alchemy.

They were, they discovered, remarkably alike in some ways. Thomas Bungay was plump and affable, but he was in his heart a
solitary man – and like all such, as ready to cleave to another of his rare kind as one lore Assyrian to another. He had the
love of knowledge, though with him it looked mostly toward the stars (still, he had recently been reader in
theology at the nascent University in the distant marsh town of Cambridge). And despite his higher rank in the Order, he plainly
regarded Roger as his teacher, deferentially playful though their manner was toward each other. He had caught the vision,
at least in part.

Also they quarrelled constantly; and drank more than was good for them; and stayed up all night, studying the stars; and planned
to live forever. They were alike ridiculous in their tonsures, tunics and talk, middle-aged and laden with learning, and all
unaware in love; two men in a desert.

‘Tonight we shall have Venus and Jupiter in conjunction in Aquarius.’

‘Good for us. Where’s the wine?’

Nothing disturbed them, though 1250 was a year of overturns. The Emperor Frederick died; they said,
Requiescat in pace
, and watched the occultation of Vega by the moon. To find a book for Thomas, Roger went briefly to Paris, where with his
own eyes he saw in the streets the leader of the Pastoureaux rebels; the sight interested him mildly, but he was in a hurry
to return home. This year, too, Adam Marsh left Oxford for good, forced to give up his lectorship to the Franciscans by the
pressure of his political duties. Roger and Bungay attended his last lecture, where he created a sensation by conferring upon
a youngster named Thomas Docking – no older than Roger had been when Grosseteste had plotted to send him to Paris – the unprecedented
honour of succeeding to the readership (though not, since the rules forbade it, to the title itself; this and its prerogatives
would be held in abeyance until a formally qualified master could be chosen; Docking’s was an interim appointment, and even
this did not wholly please the University).

The departure of Adam cost Roger a pang, but its sting too was solved by the new friendship with Bungay. Besides, the vision
was growing clearer every year; he was now occupied, as a work of preparation, with the writing of a gloss for the
Secret of Secrets
, of which he had found at Oxford four mutilated copies. Fortunately, the MS given him in Paris by John Budrys of Livonia
appeared to be perfect
– fortunately, because his money was now sensibly diminished. One of the pre-conditions of the
scientia experimentalis
, it was beginning to appear, was a bottomless purse.

He was still incubating, too, that same treatise on the causes of the rainbow which he had conceived as a member of the Peregrine
College; but no question of perspective he had ever encountered was so difficult as this. He could advance no farther than
a plateau of theoretical nihilism, represented in manuscript by nearly a score of leaves demonstrating that all the existing
explanations – even Grosseteste’s, even Aristotle’s – were inadequate. The road to a valid theory, however, remained invisible.

Cornwall was now lecturing on the
Sentences in
Oxford, instead of at Paris, and in his success seemed to tap t fresh well of slander. The new campaign finally succeeded
in annoying, not Roger, who was too preoccupied to do more than take perfunctory notice, but Bungay.

‘Thou should’st take steps against that man, Roger.’

‘O, I may at some time, meseemeth. But truly he’s so stupid that I’d have scant use for his good opinion anyhow. In the meantime
he is doing no particular harm.’

‘There thou’rt mistaken, I avow,’ Bungay said earnestly. ‘Thou hast not been in orders as long as I. He may well be damaging
seriously thine hopes for advancement. He stands higher than thou dost, and ne matter how stupid he appeareth to thee, he
hath a reputation for wisdom among the vulgar. Let me assure thee, politics among the Franciscans is quite as complex as it
is at Westminster – though eke a measure quieter.’

‘Hmm.’ This put a somewhat new light on the matter. Roger could hardly afford not to think about his hopes for advancement
in the Order, to which were tied his hopes of continuing his work; there was now no question but that the money would not
last many more years. ‘What wouldst thou recommend me? The civil law? He doubtless knoweth far more about that than I – most
of his ilk seem to think about very little else.’

‘I couldn’t advise thee there myself; like thee, I would tend
to avoid it. Nay, I was hoping thou might’st think of some way of pulling his teeth – perhaps by depriving his accusations
of some of their force.…?’

‘Nay, I’ll not do that,’ Roger said firmly. ‘These little shows of experiments are valuable to the students, and on the other
side I’ll not alter my teachings to what that ass thinketh the truth, for accommodation’s sake or any other. But thou hast
given me another notion.’

‘Good. What is it? Or canst thou say?’

‘I think so. I am going to show him that in one respect, at the least, what he is saying about me is true and correct.’

Bungay looked alarmed; but having started the juggernaut rolling, he knew better than to stand in its way.

Roger much begrudged the time he had to devote to thinking the idea through, but after a while he began to see a certain beauty
in it. It emerged, first of all, from Richard’s widely known and constantly reiterated views on the question of the plurality
of forms: the same subject over which Roger had disputed with Albertus Magnus; and secondly from Richard’s own peculiar method
of disputation. He appeared to think that his position on the matter was substantially that of Albert, but in fact he had
grossly oversimplified Albert’s stand, if indeed he had ever understood it at all; the plurality of forms, Richard maintained,
was contrary to the teachings of the saints. This was his way with the philosophers he expounded: mostly he simply denounced
them, and when he did bother to explain their views, he did so in a form not likely to be recognized by the authors. All this
had been true of him in Paris, and he had not changed.