“Three days,” mused Douglas. “My abbot will certainly wish to reward your service. You must allow us to show our appreciation.”
“Learning is its own reward,” replied Friar Bacon.
“But you made a copy?”
“Of the more interesting portions, yes. The rest is fragmentary. Perhaps, when time allows, I shall finish.”
“May I see it?”
“I would be delighted to show you,” replied Bacon thoughtfully. “However, I must first receive certain assurances.” Before Douglas could ask what these might be, the scholar rose and went to a large ironclad box in the corner of the room. “Naturally, it would not do to allow what I am about to show you to be heralded through the streets of the city. In these difficult times, men of learning must resort to a stringent secrecy while we await a more enlightened age to dawn.” He cast an expectant glance behind him.
Suddenly the scholar’s meaning became clear.
“I am happy to provide you with whatever assurances you deem appropriate—material or otherwise,” offered Douglas. “I know how easily particular aspects of our work can be misconstrued by an uneducated and unappreciative public.”
“Alas,” mused Roger Bacon, “it is not only the public which so often fails to appreciate the nature of our more delicate investigations—many of our leading churchmen are particularly lacking in the finer faculties of discernment. Led by the twin banes of intolerance and ignorance, they too often condemn where they rightly should revere. They traduce what should be championed. They denounce what should be praised.”
Douglas knew that the eminent scholar was speaking from painful personal experience, having endured ecclesiastical persecution for some of his more daring ideas. “Pray, receive my most solemn and sacred vow that the secrets shared in this room will remain secret hereafter.”
The scientist smiled. “I knew you to be a fellow pilgrim.” He bent his angular form to the iron box and, withdrawing a key from a fold in his robe, unlocked the hinge, raised the lid, and withdrew a sheaf of cut parchment tied with a red band. “Come, let us sit by the fire where the light is better. We will read it out together.”
He led his guest to the wide hearth where a coal fire glowed.
“The most valuable piece of scientific equipment yet invented,” declared Bacon, indicating his chair beside the fire. There were two of them, one on either side of the bright-burning hearth. “They are of my own design. Please,” he said, directing Douglas to sit. “You will find it supremely conducive to mental activity of every kind.”
Douglas settled himself into what amounted to a low, straight-backed throne with wide armrests and deep cushions covered with sheep skin; the chair was tilted at a slight angle and was, he was pleased to find, eminently comfortable—a definite necessity, as it turned out, for they would spend the better part of the next three hours steeped in erudite discursion of the contents of what Roger Bacon called the Book of Forbidden Secrets.
“The identity of the author is hidden beneath a veil of wilful obscurity—I think we can agree that the name Brother Luciferus, or Light Bearer, is an all-too-obvious pseudonym. Nevertheless, the brilliance of the man’s intellect shines out with unmistakeable clarity. The vision which produced this singular document is as unique as it is revolutionary.”
“And therefore readily mistaken and censured by those of, shall we say, more prejudicial opinion,” commented Douglas.
Bacon offered a sage nod. “Hence the coarse appellation, The Forbidden Secrets, which, I suspect, is a flirting reference to another highly influential work, The Secret of Secrets. At all events, the author wished his work to remain uncensored and chose the script devised by myself to preserve his work.” He laid a long-fingered hand on the bundled parchments. “Moving on, the breadth of topics addressed in this tome is somewhat narrow in consideration of a yet greater work of which this is seen as a mere distillation—hence the title Opus Minus Alchemaie.”
The title put Douglas in mind of one of Bacon’s own works: the Opus Majus. Was Brother Luciferus really Bacon himself, hiding behind an alias?
“In the main, the subject matter concerns the author’s explorations in the science of alchemy,” continued the professor, “but he indulges in brief excursions into topics of more esoteric interest.”
“Such as?” wondered Douglas.
“Immortality,” replied Bacon, “spirit travel, the uses of earth energy, the power of human will—queries and speculations of this nature. Digressions, as I say.”
“And yet not without interest to a mind hungry for knowledge of every variety.”