“Listen,” he repeated. And then, in a perfectly calm and easy tone, while he re-possessed himself once more of the corpse of the yellowhammer. “What I want you to do, my faithful one, is to bring this Jewish maid up here to me so that I can ask her a few important questions. No! You needn’t look so scared. You’ll be here all the time she’s here! I haven’t the faintest wish to enjoy her, far less ravish her. All I want is to talk to her. But I want to be absolutely frank and open with you, old friend, and there is, I confess, one other thing I want with her — no! don’t look like that! It’s nothing whatever to do with sex. It’s only that being a virgin — for I know from my own experience that the Jews are very particular about the virginity of their maids — she’ll have it in her to give the final touch to the Brazen Head over there!”
Thus speaking, he pointed with the hand that held the feathered body towards a large alcove at the foot of his small bed — an alcove which at that moment was covered by a heavy velvet curtain hanging from a cord. Intimately well-known to every living soul in both the Priory and Convent of Bumset was that alcove in the cell of their inventive prisoner; for, of all the magical creations of this extraordinary person, his Brazen Head with the power of speech — and indeed, so it seemed to some among them, with the power of thought too — was the most astounding.
“O! of course, Doctor of all Doctors,” murmured Brother Tuck with low-breathed obeisance, “anything I can do or this Hebrew Virgin can do to help with your Head of Brass must be done; since the Head, as we all know, is what alone can save our country and our king from destruction.”
“Nothing,” thought Roger Bacon, “that I have ever done in the interest of my life’s work was more effective with the populace than when I told Fulcode, before he was Cardinal or Legate, that I was trying to make an Ark of the Tabernacle for the Nameless One of Israel that should protect us from our enemies as the Jewish Ark protected the Chosen People from the Philistines. Fulcode scattered that story about the Brazen Head being Britain’s peculiar and special magical Protector. It is Fulcode’s spreading of that tale that has protected my work from Bonaventura’s hatred more than anything else! Well! while it protects my inventions it does protect my king and my country. The Legate could have soon found out, if he made any enquiries, how completely my family ruined itself by helping the King against the Barons. Anyone who knows anything at all knows how much more liberty there has been under poor old Henry than there’s ever been under the Barons and their accurst house of De Montford!”
“Listen to me, Tuck, my dear friend,” he said aloud. “The practical question for us now is how to get this girl through the entrance-hall and all those passages and up the stairs to this room. And what I’ve thought of is this. You know how often great fish are found stranded on Weymouth sands and on Chesil Beach? Well then! Why shouldn’t I have developed a mania for trying to bring to life dolphins and porpoises and other large fish by various secret methods of my own? And why shouldn’t you explain all this to the girl and persuade her to let you carry her — wrapped up of course so that nothing of her is visible — through those front passages and up these stairs? If you did it after the evening meal, there wouldn’t be many people about, and those you did meet would be sufficiently dazed with meat and drink as not to be very observant or very astute in explanation of what they did see! Do you think you could manage to do this tomorrow night, Tuck? It would be a good night for it, because, if it’s not cloudy, this new Moon will be having a steady influence by then.”
The artful cook of Bumset Priory nodded knowingly, made a hurried sign of the cross upon the air in the direction of the small window, and had already turned to go, when Bacon exclaimed:
“O please take this, will you, Tuck, and bury it somewhere? Bury it just underground, not more than an inch or two deep — you can make a hole with a stick, or anything you find under your hand: it needn’t be deep down — but I want it to be quickly and properly eaten by worms, not flown away with by carrion-crows, or lugged off down a rat-hole! See what I mean, Tuck, my old friend? And bring—”
It was at this moment before the cook departed, and in the dead silence between them created by a simple instruction on one side and unquestioning obedience on the other, that a faint tap upon the door of the cell became audible. Being quite close to it, the departing Tuck opened it immediately, but the figure standing on the threshold surprised him so much that he hurriedly drew back to let it enter, and then, with what was clearly a strong feeling that the more closely confined to the chief participants concerned this encounter was, the better for all it would be, he cautiously and very secretively closed the door behind the intruding figure and returned into the room.
The new-comer was obviously, and both men saw it at once, of the female sex, although she was well muffled in a black mantle. But the slope of the shoulders and what was visible of the ankles and feet would have betrayed her, even if, though her hair was hidden, the delicate whiteness of her face and the size of her dark liquid eyes had not revealed a most magnetic femininity.
Roger Bacon walked straight up to her and taking off her cloak handed it to the somewhat disturbed Tuck, who kept muttering, half audibly and half inaudibly, what the Friar, and probably the girl too, recognized as the opening words of a familiar Latin collect; but who now, dragging a chair from beneath the table and carrying it to the wall near the foot of the bed, sat down with an air of patient submission to inexplicable proceedings and covered his knees with the girl’s cloak.
“I came my lord Doctor, because I had one of my presentiments that you would be glad to talk to me. As Brother Tuck may have told you, I’ve come to help in the Convent; but being — as perhaps you can see from my appearance — of foreign extraction, in fact of Palestinian Hebrew blood, I am at present without friends. But I’ve heard that there’s an armour-bearer, or whatever the name for that office may be in your country, in the Fortress of Roque, whom I once met in the East and whom I would most dearly love to meet again. He is easy to describe to you, my lord Doctor, as he resembles Goliath of Gath or Samson of Israel, being in fact what all over the world is called a giant. His lord and master here, they tell me, finds him—”
At this point Friar Bacon firmly, though very gently, interrupted her and led her to his bed, upon which, almost within arm’s length of where Brother Tuck’s chair stood against the wall, he made her seat herself.
“What did you mean just now,” the scholar enquired, standing over her with a certain judicial authority, although still very gently and kindly, “by your presentiment? Oh yes! And may I ask you at once whether I am right in calling you Ghosta? I don’t at all want, my dear daughter, to be rudely inquisitive, but would it be ill-mannered of me to ask you whether your parents gave you this unusual name?”
The girl gave him a confiding, responsive, and grateful smile. “It’s rather a long story,” she began, “and I don’t like, O most admirable Doctor, keeping you standing while I tell it.”
“O it’s good for me,” said the Friar quickly. “I’ve been sitting all day — so please go on.”
The girl took him at his word, and glancing quickly round, as if to make sure she was only keeping the learned Friar, and not the Priory cook too, in a standing position, she permitted herself to indulge in quite a long biographical narrative.
“I expect it’s Jewish ancestry,” she began, “that really explains these queer presentiments. I call them that; but I’ve been told in the Convent that I ought to give them a different name. But never mind the name! You will know, O most admirable Doctor, much better, I expect, than I do, what these things are. But you see my grandfather was a Rabbi. Both my parents”—here the girl arranged herself more comfortably on the Friar’s bed, evidently reassured a great deal by the way he was standing at ease and listening with what looked like most attentive interest—“were murdered in a crusading massacre soon after I was born. It was my great-aunt Rebecca who took care of me. She gave me my name to bear witness to her conversion to the Christian Faith; for she always believed that it was a special intervention by the Holy Ghost that led to her acceptance of Christ as her God. Great-aunt Rebecca’s belief in this has struck many people as both presumptuous and blasphemous. But knowing Aunt Rebecca so well, and having lost in her when she died the only person in the world I’ve ever understood, or indeed have wanted to understand, until I met the man they now swear to me is armour-bearer at the Fortress, it’s impossible for me to feel that her name for me was blasphemous. As for these ‘presentiments’, as I call them, though there’s a nun where I work who swears to me that ‘intimations’ would be a better word, I put them down, myself, entirely to my Jewishness. Aunt Rebecca taught me to read Hebrew, and my favourite reading all my life has always been the Books of Moses; and Moses was always being told what to do directly out of the mouth of the Nameless One who was the God of Israel, known only by the Four Mystic Letters ‘Y.H.W.H..’