Doctor Mirabilis Read Free Page A

Justice is Love.
    And it was true. He was more distressed by the loss of his money and his problematical fame than by the loss of his kin and
     seat, and more urgent to reclaim whatever effects the unknown Wulf had hidden for him than to succour his sisters, let alone
     the serfs. Perhaps there was even somemoney left; Christopher had always been careful to conceal caches of several scores of pounds at a time about the acres during
     the invasion against just such a catastrophe as this, and did not dream even on the day of his death that his sullen second-born
     son had found the records of those oubliettes and broken the cypher which told where all but two were buried. Roger had never
     touched but one, and that one of the two not mentioned in the cypher at all, but deducible by simple geometrical reasoning
     from the positions of the others; he had lifted a heavy stone and there it was, and he bad taken from it one pound, no more,
     as an honorarium to the power of his boy’s reasoning, watched only by three snotty-nosed yearling calves – all of whom had
     died not long after of the trough fever. It did not seem likely that either a serf or a pack of de Burgh’s mailed looters
     could have had the wit to uncover even the encyphered hideyholes, let alone Roger’s deposit-lighter-by-one pound; and at the
     worst, there was still the undiscovered, unrecorded burial, which, by evidence of its highest secrecy, might well be the richest
     of all – and a problem worthy of a subtle intellectual soul as much for its difficulty as for its treasure-trove.
    And after that discovery, there were certain burials and other concealments that he had made – nothing that this Wulf could
     have known about, but as close to wealth as mark or pound might be in these times. There was, for instance, a flat glass that
     he had made from a broken wind-eye in the buttery, with a thin poured lead back in the centre of which he had dug out a peephole;
     through that chipped spot one might look in a dark room into a cat’s eye, reflecting a candle flame into the cat’s eye from
     the glass side – particularly into the eye of massive old Petronius, the black arbiter of the barn rats – and see deep in
     the lambent slitgated sphere a marvellous golden sparkle, overlaid with dusky red vessels. What might you see inside a man’s
     head with such a tool? He had tried it with the infant Beth, but there had been no light in her eyes that he could see, and
     besides, his mother had cut the experiment short with a within& In anotherpocket in the house he had hidden a small clump of nitre crystals which he had culled with reeking labour from the dungheap;
     he did not in the least know what they were good for, but anything so precisely formed had to be good for something, like
     the cylindrical bits of beryl which he had split from a prismatic rock, which laid on a page fattened the strokes and made
     even dirty minuscules easier to read. Every man has sisters; but how many men have such tools, and such mysteries?
    Suddenly he realized that he was trembling. He let go of the letter and clasped his hands back together violently. If there
     is one thing in the world I will do, he told himself in the tear-freezing darkness …. No, if there is one thing in the world
     I will not do,
Domine, dominus noster,
I will not let go. I will not let go. Thou hast taken away mine house; so be it. But Thou shalt not take away from me what
     Thou hast given me, which is the lust to know Thy nature.
    I shall never let go.
    The wind made a sudden sucking sound somewhere in the convent and poured itself up the throat of a chimney with a low brief
     moan. The corridor lightened slightly, flickeringly. The time had come; Robert Grosseteste’s door was open. Adam Marsh was
     standing in the muddy, wavering light, one long hand crooked, one deep shadow laid along his narrow pointed nose.
    ‘Roger,’ he said softly. ‘Roger? Art still there? Ah, I see thee now. Come in