by David Taylor
As he peered at his watch to check the time, a figure appeared at his side. Dr Dilworth was dressed in a black Burberry raincoat with a print silk scarf around her neck. Framed by an umbrella, her skin was a light caramel colour and finely drawn. She gave him a hesitant, noncommittal smile but a smile nevertheless that made his heart beat faster.
“Hi,” she said. “Been waiting long?”
“No, not at all, I’ve only just arrived.”
He spoke in an offhand manner, trying to disguise how foolish he felt. There were unwritten rules for a first date and he had broken them all. He had wanted to buy her flowers but what use were wilted blooms in this kind of downpour. He should have been smartly dressed, instead of wearing an old gabardine raincoat he’d acquired on eBay and, above all, he ought to have found a more romantic location for their tryst than an ecclesiastical library.
“I love Chinese puzzles,” she confided, “especially when they have to be solved in an Archbishop’s palace. It’s very British. Besides which, it will keep us out of the rain.”
He heaved a sigh of relief. Not even the English climate could dampen her spirits.
“But let’s get one thing clear. No more Dr Dilworth. Call me Sam.”
“Do you know Robert Browning’s poem ‘Home-Thoughts’, Sam?” Freddie exercised his newly acquired right. “It begins with the line, ‘Oh to be in England now that April’s there’.”
She wrinkled up her nose. “He can’t have meant a day like this.”
Freddie pulled a face. “This is about as bad as it gets.”
“That’s how Dawkins must have felt when he read your book review. You really laid into him, didn’t you?” She peeked out from under her umbrella with a mischievous grin on her face.
“Yes, and I’ve been up before the beak; warned as to my future conduct.”
Sam nodded sympathetically but he could tell she didn’t understand the English colloquialism.
“Sorry, ‘beak’ is a slang word for boss. It’s a Victorian invention.”
With that settled they strolled off towards one of London’s best-kept medieval buildings. With its massive gatehouse, tower and battlements, Lambeth Palace looked more like a fortified castle than a home for England’s spiritual overlord, the Archbishop of Canterbury. The only part of the building open to the public was the research library which housed religious documents and special collections.
They entered through a door in the perimeter wall and were escorted to the reading room where a friendly bespectacled woman in a tweed skirt examined their credentials – proof of identity, passport-style photographs and letters of introduction – before issuing them with reader’s tickets and pencils. Having completed these formalities, they were shown to chairs at a long leather topped wooden table and asked which archive they wanted to access. The tweedy lady told them Standen’s reports could be found in MS 649, a collection of Anthony Bacon’s private correspondence covering a twenty year period when he worked as a spy abroad and as the Earl of Essex’s intelligence chief. The letter they were looking for, she said, contained a curious number code no one had managed to decipher.
Freddie’s heart sank. He stared at the folder in front of him and got the dry mouth feeling that went with fear of failure. He had been silly to bring her here. Ancient ciphers were like long-forgotten graves. The past was not about to give up its secrets. Not to him at least. It was in this negative state of mind that he opened the archive, trying to recall everything he knew about Tudor penmanship. Many of the letters in this script differed from their modern equivalents.
“Remember a ‘c’ looks like an ‘r’,” Sam whispered, confident in her calligraphy.
Standen’s numerical code wasn’t hard to find. It appeared in a four-page letter the spy had written when his controller Anthony Bacon was laid up with an attack of gout. Dated 18 December 1593 and written in a flamboyantly cursive style full of curlicues and strong ascenders, the report was peppered with carefully printed numbers, sometimes fifty or more in a row. As they had not been spaced out or divided in any way it was impossible to tell whether they were separate numbers, or came in pairs or even longer combinations.
“Let’s see how good you are with the secretary hand,” she murmured, pointing to the bottom of the first page. “Read that.”
Freddie rose to the challenge. “6589 greatly altered and resolved to have sent after him if the same night he had not come as he did at which time he was cheerfully welcomed ...”
She stopped him there. “Well done. Word perfect in fact. Do you know who 6589 is?”
He told her it must be Queen Elizabeth. Standen was describing the queen’s latest row with Essex, how he had stormed off in a sulk before thinking better of it, and how they had patched things up afterwards.
The librarian was shaking her head. They were making too much noise, disturbing the other readers in the room. Freddie mouthed a silent apology and beckoned Sam to join him outside. She seemed reluctant to leave.
“Look, I’ve something to tell you.” She shivered slightly in the palace’s draughty corridor. “I know why Queen Elizabeth was given the code name of 6589.”
“How could you possibly know that?”
“Because Standen is using gematria, a Hebrew number system in which the letters of the alphabet are assigned a numerical value in the belief that words or phrases which have the same aggregate count bear a relationship to one another. Benedictine monks also used gematria in their ciphers.”
Medieval monks and mathematics had never figured on Freddie’s radar and, although she lectured in public key encryption, he hadn’t expected her to know the history of numerology.
“Why don’t we ask the librarian to photocopy Standen’s letter and get out of here,” he said. “You look as if you could use a hot drink to warm you up.”
A high-end coffee shop with freshly roasted beans was what he had in mind but things didn’t work out that way. A sudden deluge and an absence of available taxis in the Lambeth district forced them to shelter in the fuggy bacon-infused warmth of a local cafe where, like the other customers, they were shown to a plastic banquette and a Formica topped table. Nursing a steaming mug of tea and munching a thick cheese and chutney sandwich, he looked around him in disgust. It was the sort of snack bar that prided itself on its ambience, a greasy spoon with attitude. Hardly the place for a seduction, he thought, as he watched his partner chewing her way through a clog sole of a sandwich.
“Okay, why did Standen call Queen Elizabeth 6589? You haven’t explained that yet.”
Sam dabbed her mouth with a tissue and pulled a duplicate copy of Standen’s letter out of her shoulder bag. “Let’s start with the basics, shall we.” She placed the letter on the Formica surface. Her schoolmarm’s tone made him feel like a backward pupil.
The simplest conversion of letters into numbers, she explained, gave A the value of 1, B was 2 and Z 26. But the Elizabethan alphabet consisted of only twenty four letters. I and J were interchangeable and so were U and V. Therefore, on simple count, the word ‘Queen’ added up to 59. Q was the sixteenth letter in the alphabet, U the twentieth and so on. Q(16)+U(20)+E(5)+E(5)+N(13) equalled 59. By the same token ‘Elizabeth’ was 84.
“So why didn’t Standen call her 5984 instead of 6589?” He raised an ironic eyebrow.
“That would have been too obvious. Remember, he’s using cipher to conceal what he wants to say. So he starts off with 65.”
Freddie scratched his head in bewilderment. “I’m sorry. I still don’t get that at all.”
She gave him a little smile. “It’s simple mathematics really. 65 is 6 more than 59 and 89 is 5 more than 84. So that’s a 6 and a 5 and 65 is the number we started with – ergo 6589.”
Sam’s face clouded over as something else occurred to her. “Maybe there’s more to it than that. We’ve taken this four figure number and broken it down into pairs, 65 and 89, to extract its meaning in gematria. But the difference between 65 and 89 is 24, the number of letters in
the Elizabethan alphabet. That has to be significant.”
She peered again at the photocopy. Her hands gripped the Formica table so hard her knuckles turned white.
“My God, I know what we’re looking at,” she said excitedly. “6589 is a cipher key. It’s a version of the four-fold Trithemian number alphabet discovered in the third book of his Steganographia about twenty years ago.”
“Hold on a moment. What do you mean by a ‘four-fold’ number alphabet?”
“It means the letters of the alphabet are repeated four times with each letter having a higher value than the previous one. In the first reading of the alphabet A is 1 and Z is 24 while in the second reading A becomes 25 and Z 48. At the third time of asking A is 49 and Z 72 and, in its final fold, A is 73 and Z is 96. Have you got it now?”
Freddie nodded sheepishly. “Who was Trithemian?” he asked.
“Trithemius,” she corrected him, “was a fifteenth-century Benedictine abbot who was a cryptographic genius.”
“That’s a pretty odd combination.”
“Not really. Monks were always good at cipher but the abbot of Sponheim was in a league of his own. He actually disguised his four-fold number alphabet as tables of planetary data. I remember reading about this in Cryptologia when I was in the Tenth Grade.”
Once again she had lost him. Four-fold number alphabets and planetary tables were beyond his understanding. It was much easier to think of a pigtailed schoolgirl with her head in a cryptology magazine.
Sam was doing some rapid calculations. “If this four-fold number alphabet began with the letter H, the value of Z in the third and fourth folds would be 65 and 89.”
“Let’s test it out,” she said and began to read from Standen’s letter: ‘6589 greatly altered and resolved to have sent after him if the same night he had not come as he did at which time he was cheerfully welcomed 1940252234.’
“I could be wrong but I think these numbers are there to prove the cipher,” she murmured. “If we pair the numbers off as we did before and we say that H is 1 in a four-fold alphabet, what do we get? 19 would be the letter B in the second fold of that alphabet. Here, why don’t you work it out?”
She found a pocket notebook and a biro in her bag and handed them over.
Hesitantly at first but with increasing assurance he converted numbers into letters: 19(B) 40 (Y) 25 (H) 22 (E) 34 (R).
“That’s amazing,” he whooped, startling the pensioners in the next banquette. “Standen is saying Essex was cheerfully welcomed ‘by her’ – the Queen. You’ve cracked it!”
But he had spoken too soon. The cipher was full of complexities. It took several hours and three cups of tea to complete the task. The light was fading outside before she was ready to show him what she had printed in her notebook. “These numerical cipher keys are a thing of beauty,” she said.
THE QUEEN’S CIPHER
11: A 12: E 13: I 14: O
15: U 18: A 19: B 20: C
21: D 22: E 23: F 24: G
25: H 26: I/J 27: K 28: L
29: M 30: N 31: O 32: P
33: Q 34: R 35: S 36: T
37: U/V 38: W 39: X 40: Y
41: Z 44: ST 45: TH 46: SH
48: AND 49: ALL 50: BUT 52: FOR
58: HIS 62: OUR 64: THAT 65: THE
66: THAT 67: WITH 68: YOU 69: YOUR
The cipher key offered two sets of numbers for the five vowels, separate numbers for short words and syllables, plus a hieroglyphic 9 to signify repetition of the previous letter.
“How did you work this out?” he asked.
“Oh, I used frequency analysis – which letters appear most often in the English language and how that might relate to the frequency with which certain numbers appear in the cipher text – and when that didn’t work, I simply had a guess. It’s mostly trial and error.”
“You’ve given the cipher a name I see.”
“Sure, I’ve called it the Queen’s Cipher because some of the encrypted stuff is about Elizabeth. Standen is describing how the Queen’s welcome for Essex was overseen by two courtiers called Greville and Williams who were skulking around in the palace corridors. Not that I know anything about them.”
Freddie had studied Tudor history at school. “I can help you with that,” he said eagerly. “Sir Fulke Greville was a kinsman of the Earl of Essex, a typical Elizabethan courtier, while Sir Roger Williams was a rather boastful Welsh warrior for whom the Queen had a soft spot.”
Sam gave him a knowing smile. “I guess you want to know what they saw that was of such a nature that it needed to be encrypted.”
“Yes please,” he said.
She picked up the photocopy of the spy’s report and read off the numbers for Freddie to jot down and turn into numbers.
44113021223435194035183822183211403412142319153591235
STANDERS/BY/SAWE/A/PAYRE/OF/BUSSES
Greville and Williams had witnessed ‘a pair of busses changed in such a sweet and amorous manner as it was a content to behold’ and the queen had scolded them for behaving like peeping toms.
“I don’t see why a couple of kisses should matter that much,” Sam sounded disappointed.
“Because they’re not ordinary kisses,” Freddie replied. “A ‘buss’ is pretty full on.”
The literature of the period contained many references to the ‘lewd practice’ of bussing. Robert Herrick had drawn a sharp distinction between it and a normal caress. ‘Kissing and bussing differ both in this, we buss our wantons, but our wives we kiss.’
Sam wrinkled up her nose. The image of a young earl with his tongue down an old queen’s throat was less than appealing. “Elizabeth was a bit old for French kissing. She must have been sixty if she was a day.”
“Honour is due, Sam. You were right to call Elizabeth a ‘cock-teaser’ in your Verona lecture.”
He thought about the prissy historians for whom Elizabeth was Essex’s ‘indulgent aunt’ and wanted to laugh. Here was proof of what they’d talked about in Verona. A little piece of history had suddenly floated to the surface. It made Freddie want to do some bussing of his own.
Unaware of the effect she was having on him, Sam began to scowl. “We can’t be sure Standen was telling the truth. He was a spy so deception came naturally to him.”
“Why lie in cipher? It doesn’t make sense.”
“I suppose you’re right,” she said, “but what has this undoubtedly fascinating piece of gossip about the queen’s love life got to do with Shakespeare? I think Bard-lite was pulling your chain.”
“I’m not so sure,” he replied. “The Standen letter also mentions secret dispatches going astray in Scotland. They must have been about the royal succession which was a touchy subject in the 1590s.”
“Tell me about it,” she said. “My Tudor history is a little hazy.”
Freddie explained that the Essex and Cecil factions were intriguing separately with James VI of Scotland who was Elizabeth’s most likely successor. What they were trying to do was to shore up their positions at court without the queen finding out about it. It was a dangerous game to play in which agents acted as go-betweens. Who knows, he said, perhaps Shakespeare had been a freelance spy for Essex just as his rival Marlowe was for Cecil.”
Sam gave him a pitying look. “That’s horseshit.”
Freddie’s eyes glinted. “One thing we do know about Shakespeare is that he was a commoner with aspirations to be a gentleman. As soon as he had money he bought himself a big house in Stratford and sought a coat of arms from the Herald’s College. He understood the hierarchical nature of Elizabethan society; how you had to know the right people to get on in life. He needed an illustrious backer but there was a price to pay for it. Powerful patrons wanted something in return.”
The Earl of Essex and his close friend the Earl of Southampton had wanted to capitalise on post-Armada jingoism by filling the theatres with stirring histories about martial valour. This would illustrate the need for strong leadership in times of war and expose appeasers like
Cecil who wanted peace with Spain. Once the commercial theatre began to draw in the crowds, it was bound to be used for political propaganda.
Sam listened carefully to the argument before shaking her head. “No, I don’t buy that. If Shakespeare had been the Earl of Essex’s creature he would have been implicated in his master’s treason. Yet he got off scot-free. The judicial tribunal into the playing of Richard II before the Essex rebellion didn’t even call on him to testify.”
“Yeah, someone must have helped Shakespeare out. History seldom tells the whole story. That’s why we have to use our intelligence and intuition.”
“Oh, we’re back to that again. Let’s have the benefit of your inspired storytelling.”
“Don’t knock storytelling. That’s how people understand their world. There has been an upsurge in the study of narratives in the social sciences. It’s hypothetical reasoning, logic applied to information, a theory given flesh.”
“OK, I’m sorry.” Her blue eyes sparkled. “How does Shakespeare the political propagandist play? Did he feel at home in a coterie of soldiers, scholars, statesmen, spies and sodomites?”
“That’s a very sibilant sentence,” Freddie told her. “I prefer the three P’s: poverty, patronage and putting money in one’s purse. Those were the things that rocked Shakespeare’s world. He was quite materialistic, you know.”
THE IMPECUNIOUS PLAYWRIGHT
Magic might ward it off. Lucky charms could be employed. Even the physician wore a beaked mask and a dead toad around his neck. Tobacco smoking was worth a try; so too the burning of brimstone. The Church believed in the power of prayer. But whatever precautions you took, the bad air was out there, lurking in London’s crowded streets and alleyways.
The plague was hovering over William Shakespeare, driving him on in the knowledge that each word might be his last. He thought of the three Fates – one spinning the thread of human life, one measuring that thread, and the third one cutting and cancelling it with her abhorred shears. It was almost a year since the last outbreak. The disease would soon return.