Doctor Mirabilis

by James Blish

  ‘I guessed tha clad too fair to be but clerk,’ Tibb said. They were riding abreast now. ‘Art tha a Grey Friar?’

  ‘Nay, that’s to come, an God willeth.’ Was that the indirigible self again? He had never thought of such a thing before. But what else could have spoken this? It was hardly possible that any mood inspired by a dirty blonde peasant girl should suggest his becoming a mendicant.

  ‘What dost tha teach?

  The lie was becoming exceedingly complicated, but it was too old now to bury. ‘Logic,’ he said. ‘Have we a long ride further?’

  Nay, not in full day. But these shadows are mischancy; ‘ware sink-holes.’ Almost on the word, the cob stumbled and righted itself with a muted nicker of alarm, and Roger grasped the girl’s hand.

  ‘’Twas nothing,’ Tibb said; but she made no move to free herself. They rode side by side for a silent while. The sun was almost gone, though the sky was still half bright.

  ‘Tha’rt a strange twosome, as crossed as herring-bones,’ Tibb said. ‘A ninny scholar, a sleepy swordsman, a well-clad clerk. And a boy man.’

  ‘I am indebted to thee,’ Roger said shortly. ‘Mock on.’

  ‘I may, an it pleaseth me. Ali, go up I’

  The sharp change in her voice made Roger sit bolt upright in the saddle.

  ‘Here – what’s amiss?’

  ‘I shan’t tell tha. Yes, I shall, it’ll give tha thy turn for mockery. My garter’s fallen untied, ne more, and I’ll lose it ere we see home.’

  Roger looked away at the deepening twilight until he got his breath back. ‘Small ills, small remedies,’ he said. ‘I’ll take it up for thee.’

  ‘Not here,’ Tibb said tranquilly. ‘The Plain’s just ahead. I’d not see myself surprised out of these gullies – there are knives abroad here. Tin shouldst know that much.’

  She was not content until they were on the flat top of a rise some five minutes’ ride on to the Plain, and it was almost dark. Then, without a word, she slid rather ungracefully off the cob and sat down on the hard earth.

  She was most matter of fact in allowing her garter to be tied; and in allowing him to find deeper in her skirt a fold which needed some stitching beyond the repair of any needle she might have had with her (nor did he detect any such bodkin as she had threatened him with; only a button which gave but would never fasten). By the time all the repairs were made – it was far from the first time she had employed such a tailor, that was plain – the night was pitch black and Roger was as sweating cold as he had ever been in his life.

  Tibb tucked one leg under the other and stood up, helping him to his feet. ‘Theft a wolf cub,’ she said. ‘A fierce beginner. Tha hadst best kiss me afore I kick thee.’

  He took her around the waist, which was surprisingly small for so broad a belly and bosom, and kissed her, but this only made her laugh. ‘I thank thee,’ she said. ‘Let’s mount; there’s still another ride to take.’

  He groped his way on to John Blund and followed the sound of the cob’s hooves, not sure whether to be alarmed or assuaged, and too sleepy to be sure he should care.

  Thou’rt no beginner, Tibb,’ he said. Thou’st churned thy buttermilk to whey before this nightfall.’

  ‘T’ha’rt being over-nice for a lover,’ Tibb’s voice drifted back to him. Tha meanest maidenhead, tha shouldst say so. ‘Twas only a trouble to me in the bed; waxed cold, waxed hot; and in smalwe stead it stood me. That which will away is very hard to hold.

  And then, eerily in the cold night, she began to sing in a piping, clear, sweetly tuneful voice:

  Ye mayds, ye wyfs and witwes

  That doe now her my Songe

  Doth younge man put kyndnesse

  Pray tak it short ne lange

  Fer theyr be nat sich comfortal

  Lyk lainnage wyth a Man

  To cum Downe a down,

  To cum Downe,

  Down a down a.’

  The plaintive song died echolessly; and after a while, a tiny spark of light rose from behind an invisible hill some inch or miles ahead.

  ‘There, ’tis home. Ready thy purse, sweet goliard.’

  He heeled the exhausted horse forward and caught her about the waist.

  ‘Sweet Tibb, I was too soon for thee—’

  ‘Nay, boy. Go up. Get thyself a bed. Mayhap I’ll come to thee. Go now.’

  ‘Thine oath, Tibb?’

  ‘No oath from me – ne to no man without bed to raise horn in. Go up, and then I’ll think more on it.’

  ‘Thou art an ungrateful whore.’

  ‘Tha’rt a foraging pinchpenny. And I love thee. Let me, now. Go put thy bone to bed and mayhap I’ll cast thy dice for thee once more – ne more will I promise. Be off, coney-snare.’

  Grumbling, he helped her to dismount, and took both horses around to the back, where a mute and scrofulous dwarf, apparently recognizing Tibb’s cob, took them both without demur and began to unload the cob of its leather bottles. The inn struck him no less grimly than the mute; mostly without light and full of sprawling men who watched Roger, scratching in their patches, from under brows as dense as thorn-bushes, while Tibb’s uncle bit with an appalling yellow canine into the Philippe d’or Roger proffered for his pallet.

  Tibb came back to him some time before dawn, but she had company. No sooner had she thrown her leg over him and welcomed him home than the room was full of creeping bravoes. She fought hard to hold him down when he snatched up his sword, but evidently she had under-valued his devotion to the purse: he shucked her with one great seizure of his back-muscles; and when she sprang to block the door while they slashed at the rest of the blackness toward him, he spilled her decoy’s ouns into her polluted shift with a single cut and escaped into the morning over her, the purse slung over his shoulder and pounding against his spine, as he ran for the stables and John Blund.

  III: BEAUMONT

  It fell by the stars that, early in 1233, the Henry called Winchester who was Henry the Third, eldest son by Isabella of Angouleme of that murderous, incompetent and yet princely-hearted usurper King John, moved his royal person and his court into his father’s birthplace, for the hunting; which was published abroad. This place was Beaumont Palace, without the earthenworks and timber of the north wall of Oxford town, overlooking Osney and Port Meadow. There were boars and stags in the King’s woods there, but more was intended than hunting. Beaumont was but four years seized back by Hubert de Burgh from a traitor to the French –one whose large bones had been burned, and his knuckles, spine, fingers and toes scattered like dice, every last die unshriven for the Resurrection.

  It was by this proximity to Oxford that Adam Marsh – in default of Robert Grosseteste, who was in retirement in service of his God and naught else – was found at Beaumont with many others of church, university and town on the night of the King’s third coming of age, that being the feast of St. John; and having the skill to speak Romance of both the Norman and the Iberian kind, was taken up into a history totally undesired by him; as follows:

  That Henry III was of age could hardly be doubted, he being now twenty-nine years old and having been declared of age twice before: first by Pope Honorius III in 1223, at the instigation of Hubert de Burgh, to justify the resumption of all the castles, sheriffdoms and demesnes granted since Henry’s accession; and again in 1227, when Hubert himself declared the King of age – as by then he had become enpowered to do, having gradually married his way, one marriage after another to the number of four, to the tacit mastery of the regency left vacant by the death of William Earl-Marshal of Pembroke in 1219. That everyone sufficiently understood the lesson had been well enough attested by the sudden self-exile of Peter des Roches, the Poitevin Bishop of Winchester, Henry’s tutor and Hubert’s most bitter enemy. Should anyone be so blind as to miss the import, however, Henry was pleased to allow Hubert his homage for the title of Earl of Kent.

  Ask for this hero now and find him justiciar of Ireland, the meanest royal grant in all Christendom; for tonight Hen
ry, pale as whey and speaking out of the side of his narrow mouth so quietly as to terrify the most loyal and most noble subject of the crown, was celebrating with wine and flesh his third coming of age, the repudiation of Hubert de Burgh. The great soldier who had refused King John the blinding of the captive Arthur of Brittany, and yet had stood fast by John when some other hand of John threw that young owner of John’s crown into the Seine; who had adhered to John even after the barons had enforced on the King the Great Charter; the admiral who had sunk Eustace the Monk and all his pirates’ fleet in the straits and thus cut off Dauphin Louis’ last hope of holding any part of England; and scourge of all earls who would take from the King’s hand what was divinely and rightfully the King’s –that great soldier and administrator was tonight to be cast down.

  Nothing of this was apparent to Roger, who was too surprised to find himself Adam’s familiar (chosen, Roger supposed shrewdly, to express Adam’s forbidden rebellion against so worldly a commission – and because Roger could not only speak fair French, but also, being recently come into more than two thousand pounds, could clothe himself for such a function) and too confused by the rebounding noise, the flare and smoke of the torches, and the press and stink of so many elegants and their scarcely less elegant cup-bearers in Beaumont’s great hall. Even the dogs, of which there were a great many, seemed surer of foot and favour in this roaring cave than Roger was; he recognized no one but the King himself, and the King only by his expression – that half-lidded, pale, incontinent cast of the young man to whom alone is given the power to slay any person on whom he looks, and needs only to be jostled in the press to put that power to the proof.

  Adam, however, was not so easily confused. ‘Stay close,’ he said at once to Roger in his smooth Frankish. ‘Here’s a fine display of Latins; there’s des Roches back – and there’s his nephew, Peter des Rievaux; and there’s Simon IV’s son of Montfort … There’s Poitevins wherever you look; a fair auto dafe on Hubert! Would God we’d kept home.’

  He darted suddenly sidewise into the milling army of courtiers and servants; Roger, concerned to begin the evening, at the very least, with obedience to Adam’s command to ‘stay close’, was nearly brained by a boar’s head on a vast dish of pewter which came sculling between himself and the Franciscan as he tried to follow. When he caught up with Adam again, he was earnestly in conversation with that hawk-beautiful young Frenchman he had just previously identified as Simon de Montfort.

  ‘I think my suit goes well enough, I thank God,’ Simon was saying. ‘It’s no easy matter to find one’s self an alien in a land one has always thought of as one’s own; but this is a time of overturns. In the meantime, four hundred marks a year is what the King bath settled on me, and four hundred marks is perforce what I must suffer.’

  ‘No news of Amaury?’

  ‘Ah, there’s the heart of it,’ Simon said ruefully. ‘He’s constable of France now; why should he want an earldom, too? Yet, well I know that it is not Leicester itself he covets, but only for that brotherly rivalry we bore each other from the cradle – there’s the scar for it, and he bath a like. Were Amaury to give place, I’m the next surviving, and should do homage for the honour of my father’s shire instant upon the news.’ He smiled suddenly. ‘And, certes, also upon the look in the King’s eye, to manoeuvre for the weather-gage,’

  He turned his head suddenly toward Roger, his smile still present but no longer ironic, like a man who hopes for but knows better than to expect a pleasure. ‘And who’s this, Adam? I’ve not seen him before, I know.’

  ‘True,’ Adam said. ‘He’s called Roger Bacon, of a franklin’s family in Ilchester; a scholar with us. The Bacons suffered somewhat at Hubert’s hands, yet not so much as they might have, it appears.’

  ‘Grow thou in learning,’ Simon said in English, searching Roger’s face with alarmingly penetrating eyes. Then, in French again: ‘Yes – what think you of these proceedings, most Christian Adam? I doubt not that our Hubert’s been extortionate, else how would any armed man hold troops together? Territory’s to be lived on, and to be just with later, if time permit; and Hubert’s an old soldier, thereby rich, in the natural order of things. Is the Crown so poor it must bite coins out of its own swords?’ He gestured at the pack around them. It has not that appearance – though I speak from four hundred marks’ pension, as I grant.’

  ‘And from overlong from these shores as well, I fear me,’ Adam said. ‘The docket is far more grave than that, and far graver the exactions for it. Last year, a huge pack of robbers took from the granaries the harvested corn of the Roman clergy, throughout most of England. The corn was sold and the money vanished – much, it appears, as largesse to the poor. It’s said this was more of Robin of Sherwood’s doings; the harpers will not let that poor highwayman rest at his crossroads. But your friend Bishop Peter of Winchester—’

  ‘Not so,’ Simon said, in a voice so quiet that only Adam and Roger could have heard his words. ‘Pray exercise better taste in friends in my behalf, Adam.’

  ‘I’m glad to hear you say so. Nevertheless, Peter des Roches alleged to have captured certain of the robbers, and made them to confess that they had warrants from Hubert, and from the King, too, given them from Hubert’s own hand. Witnesses there were none, but at the end of July, Henry dismissed Hubert in favour of Stephen de Segrave –and then came this enormous letter in charges and demands: that Hubert account for the estates of Pembroke and Strigul—’

  ‘Then the second earl is now dead as well?’

  ‘Yes, two years ago; there’s another Marshal, Richard, but not of age yet. Also, Hubert was to account for all liberties, losses, taxes of the fifteenth and sixteenth part, castles and preserves withheld and restored – I cannot begin to summarize it. Following these, charges of treason, of conspiring the people to riot against the Latin emissaries of His Holiness, of seeking to become such a hero in the sight of the mob as Robin Wood was against King John, and more, and still more; so that Hubert fled his kinsmen in Ireland and took refuge in sanctuary at Bury St. Edmunds. Whence, however, the King had him dragged, naked.’

  ‘Ah no. Can there be more? This to Hubert? Would God allow?’

  ‘God thinks continually on all our sins, and waits,’ Adam said sombrely. ‘And there’s little more. They essayed to fetter him, but some common smith refused, saying he would put no irons on the man who restored England to the English – with your pardon, Simon. Hence, they closed Hubert in the Tower, till Bishop Robin of London heard how sanctuary had been breached, and as good as ordered the King to return him to Bury St. Edmunds. Where he is now; and that is all.’

  ‘I’d credit it from none but you,’ Simon said. ‘Had he no defences?’

  ‘One bad, one worse. He would have it that a charter from King John exempted him in perpetuity from any examination of his accounts – which means only that he was guilty of embezzlement, the privilege all soldiers claim, my lord, as I have just heard it from your lips. Upon this, Peter des Roches, of course, ruled that the charter died with King John – and then, by ill luck, Henry asked Hubert to produce revenues from a place called Yeo Manse, that was this my familiar’s property till Hubert took it; and there were none at all – not a groat, nor a broken brass penny for the Crown; a singular accident, but had it not come thus about, the King would have found something as suitable; Henry means to crush Hubert entire.’

  ‘I heard,’ Simon said thoughtfully, ‘that the King near stabbed him at Portsmouth four years ago – solely for want of ships to send against the French provinces’

  ‘That is true,’ Adam said. ‘I was there. Henry was mad as wolves.’

  ‘Well,’ Simon said. ‘I must think on this. Pray for me, most Christian Adam, for I need this King.’

  ‘Certes, and he needs you. Only keep my counsel—’

  ‘That I’ll not swear, for you know I shall.’ Simon bowed briefly to the stunned Roger and vanished into the crowd with a grace not even Adam could have equalled.

  �
�Is it true—’ Roger began, inadvertently in English.

  ‘’Tis true entire – and forget thou every word. Thy bag of coins is Henry’s, should he or any of his o’erhear thee. And speak no more English, or thou’lt be taken as a spy of Hubert’s, aye, and so shall I.’

  ‘But this de Montfort—’

  ‘Trust him; and hush, thou’rt being far too far a plauderer for the role I cast thee in. I brought thee here to listen; listen thou!’

  ‘Yes,’ Roger said, ‘but, Adam—’

  Adam ducked his head in a brief nod of satisfaction and began to worm his way through the gathering once more. He had only just disappeared again, however, when a blast of sackbuts and clarions froze the whole small cave world upon the instant. King Henry, having finished with feasting, was ready to begin those ceremonies by which, could he but keep his head sufficiently cool, he would complete the severance of his right arm.

  Knowing well enough what course the King’s evenings of state took by ordinary, and how to clock them by the clepsydra of the wine in Henry’s glass, Adam Marsh escaped by first intention the theatre of this proposed amputation before the heralds of it had properly tautened their lips against their instruments. This he did with some misgivings, especially on behalf of Roger Bacon left behind in the flickering underwater darkness of the feast-hall among many fish all strange to him, and not a few dangerous, too; but Adam was impelled, for he had already spied escaping before him with her ladies the King’s sister, Eleanor of Pembroke, whose confessor he was, and whom he followed forthwith in the utmost disquiet.

  He knew well enough where to find the Lady Eleanor where else she might have gone in drafty Beaumont; but once out of the hall he did not hurry, walking instead as gravely as he might in his youth through the barrel-vaulted corridors with their smoke-blackened hangings, appearing not to notice the gleam of the occasional torches against the chain-mail of the King’s sentries standing in their niches like statues of saints militant. It was his duty not to alarm his ‘penitent – she who had so much to alarm her already, though but barely turned twenty-four: not only sister of this royally incontinent King, but widow scarce two years of the son of William earl-Marshal of the realm, once holder of those Pembroke estates (which she could never convey) for the stewardship of which Hubert de Burgh had failed to account. Small marvel that she had found herself unable to stand placidly at her brother’s side while he trumpeted wrath on the beloved stern guardian of her bridal fief, the green pleasaunces of which – now nothing to Henry but money, and the heady possibility of blood – encompassed as well all the garden-ensorcelled girlhood she would ever be able to remember.