John Powys - The Brazen Head

“What on earth is this, Master John?” cried Ghosta, rising to her full height and hurrying to the bed to see what the young man had deposited there. But Friar Bacon remained seated with his pen still between his fingers, and the only special movement he made that Clamp and Colin, who were both observing him closely, were able to discern, was that he began to draw some sort of Euclidian figure at the bottom of the parchment in front of him, and that this Euclidian figure was an equal-sided square surrounded by a circle.

“Father! Father!” murmured Ghosta a moment later, “do, for Heaven’s sake, look at this!” and, shaking off young John, who tried to hold her back, and advancing straight to the Friar’s chair, from the side opposite to where Clamp had already begun to watch with mute and fascinated absorption the movements of the Friar’s pen, she thrust under Roger Bacon’s eyes what clearly was the broken half of a female head, elaborately chiselled out of a block of very hard stone.

But a torrent of verbal eloquence, like the sound of a breaking wave to the splashing tune of which the Friar studied what Ghosta thrust beneath his eyes, was uttered by the excitable Colin, and accompanied by such lavish gesticulation that it was like being addressed by one of those flocks of winged angels speaking with one voice, such as in religious altar-pieces often form the flying chariot of God the Father as it descends from Heaven.

“The General of the Franciscan Order, this thrice-accurst Bonaventura,” cried Colin making his voice resound through every portion of the chamber, and it was as if the quivering sun-ray, which had removed itself altogether, had suddenly returned in a new incarnation of pure sound, “has now with the help of those ruffians from Lost Towers, whom he swears he has converted, and at the command of the Pope, whom he swears he represents, begun meddling with Master Tilton’s statue of Our Lady in that shrine he’s building!

“And do you know what this false saint has done now? He has started a shocking and wicked rumour, entirely a lie, of course, but you know how these lies spread — that Master John’s sister and his brother Tilton have been found guilty of incest! And — as if that wasn’t enough! — do you know what further lie he’s invented? He swears that our Master Tilton, heir to the Manor of Roque and to the Fortress Castle, which his mother’s family have held since the days of King Stephen, has an even greater sin on his conscience than incest with his sister! For — says this pretty saint, who behaves far worse than Judas — our Master Tilton has committed the supreme sacrilegious sin, of carving the face of Our Lady in the centre of this shrine so that she shall resemble his sister with whom he has sinned!”

“Has Bonaventura really had the gall, John my friend, to go to such lengths as this man says?”

The Friar’s voice was as steady, and his manner as quiet and collected, as if he were referring to no more than a point of propriety in some public, metaphysical debate; but Ghosta noticed that he made a slight motion of his hand as if to wave back a little both Colin and Clamp and the two or three armed men who accompanied them.

“Yes, Master, across my heart and on my life,” replied John. “That’s what he’s done! My mother is so upset that she has shut herself up with my sister and won’t allow her to go riding with Raymond de Laon, as the two of them had arranged to do today, for fear that this wretched Bonaventura, with his Lost Towers troop, might kidnap her or imprison her, or even carry her with him in a ship to Rome, as he has already done with other ladies who have been accused of various offences of the same sort.

“As for my father, he refuses to take the thing seriously. He says that Tilton ought to be hunting wild boars in the forest instead of building shrines with his own hands and using Lil-Umbra as his model for the Mother of God. But I notice that he has remained at home since the trouble started, and that he’s set a guard outside the shrine, to make sure that this mock-saint doesn’t excite his cohort of ‘converted’ robbers to destroy the whole shrine and ruin Tilton’s hard work on it for nearly a year!

“What drove me to come, most honoured Friar, to make a special appeal to you, was the fact that I chanced to hear” —young John flushed a little as he announced this, revealing the fact that he had not been able to resist the temptation to listen at his parents’ door—“to hear my father tell my mother that if they attacked the shrine again, or came anywhere near the postern-gate again, he would arm all our people, both serfs and freemen, and make such an attack on that damned Lost Towers as would settle them for ever and a day! You see, most reverend Friar, this man undoubtedly was at one time the Pope’s emissary or legate or ambassador or whatever the proper legal name is — round here they use a word for him that’s too bawdy to repeat — and no doubt at that time when he had the proper seals of office he might have been able to carry off Lil-Umbra, and Tilton too, to Rome and accuse them there. But as it is, with no official credentials from the Pope, and with no proper royal support from our sick King, I don’t believe he can do very much to hurt us, except start rumours and spread lies.”

Friar Bacon groaned, and bowed his head for a second over his pen and paper. Then he said quietly, but without looking up:

“Sit down a moment, lad, while we consider all this as steadily as we can. What woul d y ou advise us to do, Ghosta? Both John and I — that’s true, isn’t it, lad? — hold the view that at most dangerous and ticklish crises, it’s often from the feminine mind we get the best hint as to what to do.”

Ghosta didn’t hesitate a second. “How did the shock of this wicked accusation,” she enquired, “strike your sister and brother, Master John?”

“Well, to tell you the truth—” and it was clear to everybody that young John was very glad to be asked that question, “I felt proud of the way they took it! You know it was Nurse who first told us about the dastardly fabricated tale which this devilish wretch started; and we were all together up in the nursery at the top of the house when she blurted it out. Father had come up about this attack on Tilton’s shrine; and no sooner had Nurse used the word than Tilton threw his arms round Lil-Umbra’s neck, and gave her a great hug and a lot of loud kisses all over her face. ‘Don’t you mind, my darling!’ he cried. ‘If I ever tried to do such wickedness to you I’m sure the good God would strike me dead before it was done!’”

Roger Bacon’s face lit up with satisfaction, and with a certain humorous amusement too, young John thought, as he eagerly watched him; but the Friar’s words when he spoke were anything but final or conclusive:

“But now listen to me, my children both, and you two also my kind friends,” and he made a double gesture with the hand that held his pen, one in the direction of Colin, and the other in the direction of Clamp, “what we’ve got to do now is to think of some way of out-witting this self-appointed representative of the Holy Father, supported — and the thing’s not without precedent in the history of our mad purblind human race — by this local nest of rapscallions. If any better idea comes into your head, Ghosta, while I’m explaining my scheme, let’s hear it at once, and don’t mind interrupting me if you’re afraid of forgetting what you suddenly thought of!

“But this is what has just come into my mind as a good plan. A week ago I had a communication from my friend Peter Peregrinus, who is now lecturing in France, to tell me that the famous master in philosophy, Albert of Cologne — who belongs to the Dominican order, and indeed is such a loyal Dominican that, when he speaks in the University of Paris, he defends his view of Aristotle against both all the Arabian and all the Latin Averroists and completely demolishes them — is at this very moment visiting Oxford! This is an astonishing piece of news to me. I had heard that he was interested in the Summa Theologicae of Alexander of Hales, but I never thought I’d live to hear that the great Albert of Cologne should actually be in this island, still less that he should be visiting Oxford!