by David Taylor
“So England’s best two cryptographers just happen to drop in on Dr Dee,” she injected the name with a large dose of incredulity. “I wonder what they talked about.”
THE MORTLAKE MAGICIAN
The air went cold. Dr John Dee shivered inside his loose fitting robe as the medium gazed into the black obsidian glass on the Holy Table and saw the Archangel Michael sitting on the seat of perfection.
A slight noise came from the kitchen where Dee’s three-year-old son was playing.
“Shut up your door,” said Michael.
Dee looked around in annoyance. Everything had to be just so for a spirit action. He had shuttered the windows in his Mortlake cottage, abstained from sex, avoided gluttony, trimmed his pointed white beard, cut his nails, washed his body, donned a penitent’s gown and made invocations to the four points of the compass.
Michael spoke again through the cunning man. “What would you have?”
Dee’s face creased in concentration. “The wisdom and knowledge that will enable me to serve God to his glory,” he replied.
Having devoted his life to the pursuit of truth, now, in his fifties, he was seeking a short cut, a Northwest Passage to God’s presence.
The kneeling medium nodded sagely and held the glittering crystal to his forehead. They made an odd couple: the tall, slender magus who styled himself on Merlin and the small, hooded figure with the tortured face asking God to make his good creatures appear for the furtherance of the action.
“Praise the Lord,” the scryer intoned. “A second angel stands before me now. He is dressed in emerald green with a crescent moon on his tunic.”
Dee bent to whisper in the medium’s ear. “Is it Anael that you see?”
The disembodied voice sounded deeper. “I am one of the seven angels of Creation.”
There was a commotion in the kitchen. The family dog had stolen one of the ducks Dee’s wife was cooking for dinner and the shouting woke up the baby. The spirits departed.
The frustrated magician paid off his medium before hiding his Aztec mirror, crystal ball and wax seals in a wooden cupboard. He had learned to be discreet. Felonious magic was a capital offence. Dr Dee wished it could be otherwise. Devoutly carried out, angelic communication might benefit mankind. But he couldn’t do it himself. He was no soothsayer and had to pay for his mediums, many of whom were dishonest. His wife Jane was particularly hard on his current choice. She said Edward Talbot was ‘the worst cozener of all,’ a convicted criminal who wore a cowl to conceal the fact that one of his ears had been cropped for coining.
Jane was busy in the kitchen preparing dinner. She was offering Francis Bacon and his friend spit-roasted duck, mutton in mustard, fried cakes of salted cod and strawberries in red wine. That should satisfy the healthiest of appetites. Her guests were less than a mile away. Having landed downstream they were walking along the towpath that separated the river from the asparagus fields.
Francis Bacon had dressed in a black grosgrain suit with tawny taffeta and now regretted it. His clothes were too heavy for the sultry late morning heat and he was sweating profusely into his shirt. His companion cut an unprepossessing figure in grey worsted. He was a small, thoughtful man with a wispy yellow beard and pockmarked face who looked at the world through very short-sighted eyes. The son of a customs inspector, Thomas Phillips had changed his name to Phelippes to seek distinction, only to find it in the dark arts of intelligence gathering where his ability as a codebreaker made him indispensible to Elizabeth’s spymaster Sir Francis Walsingham. They had met four years ago in the English embassy in Paris and it was their shared enthusiasm for cryptography that placed them on the winding path to Mortlake.
“How much further do we have to go?” Phelippes panted. Bacon could see the cottage now or rather its extension. Dee’s family home had been turned into an academy complete with laboratories and the largest library in England. Yet this place of learning was still a domestic dwelling. The doctor’s young wife was out in the garden feeding her chickens while the dog was barking loudly at something nearby. He clicked his teeth in disgust. A hooded figure was crouching behind the rose bushes.
The stalker was too busy with his padded codpiece to notice he too was being stalked. “Well met, Talbot.” Bacon smacked him so hard on the shoulder he fell into the bushes.
“Have you been showing the doctor the light of God or is there something else you want to show his charming wife?”
Talbot yelped with pain. Hearing the noise and looking up to see its cause, Jane blushed furiously and rushed indoors.
“The angels of the Lord will smite you for this insult, Mr Bacon,” said Talbot, bleeding from his thorny encounter. “You will know sickness and unhappiness.”
“That may well be so,” Bacon retorted, “but it will not be of your doing.”
Talbot brushed himself down; picked up his staff and limped away.
The sound of voices had brought Dr Dee to the door. “Was that my scryer you were talking to?”
Bacon managed a wry smile. “It was but a serpent, sir, slithering in the long grass.”
Dee waved a finger in reproof. “That serpent, as you call him, conjures so many spirits from the stone as to make my heart throb for further wisdom.”
Bacon looked at his mentor, torn between sparing the older man’s feelings and telling him the truth. “It is a miracle Talbot should be chosen to reveal the divine word of God.”
There was time for a guided tour of Dee’s laboratories before they ate. Here mysterious potions were being distilled from egg-shells and horse dung. It was widely rumoured that the doctor had already managed to convert pewter into silver. Dee knew what they were thinking. “As things change – seed into plant, egg into bird – it may be possible for one form of matter to change into another. Alchemy relies on the marriage of opposites.”
“You could be right,” Bacon replied, gagging on the foul stench rising from one of the stills. “But there is no proof of this, unless you can venture some. I find that clarity of expression is not a chief virtue among alchemical writers. They are dabblers who talk vaguely of calcinations, dissolutions and so forth.”
Dee nodded. “Language is a slippery beast at the best of times.”
He showed them into a library reading room littered with quadrants, compasses, clocks and painted globes where the heavily laden bookshelves lacked any recognizable retrieval system.
“Can oceans belong to earthly powers?” Dee asked, giving one of his globes a spin.
“The answer should be no but the Treaty of Tortesillas would argue otherwise.”
The magus nodded in agreement. “Spain and Portugal claim dominion over the Atlantic Ocean. I dispute this sea seizure. The voyages of King Arthur and of the Welsh prince Madoc give our sovereign queen a claim to most of the sea coast of Atlantis.”
There was a gasp from Thomas Phelippes. “You are talking of an empire.”
“Without doubt,” Dee replied, a twinkle in his eye. “I plan to colonize Atlantis, setting up plantations there where people can enjoy the political and religious freedom denied them in Europe. But that lies in the future. Tell me, Master Phillips, how is Sir Francis Walsingham? I heard he broke his ankle chasing Catholics.”
“He is well enough, sir, though his physicians talk of the stone.”
“What about your brother, Francis, how does he fare in Marseilles?”
“I am sorry to say Anthony is in bed with a fever. But he is in good heart. In his last letter he expressed the wish that he might be cured in body, mind and purse.”
“Amen to that,” Dee muttered. “We are all kept short of money in Her Majesty’s service.”
There was a timid knock on the library door. Jane was summoning them to dinner.
As they drank her stewed broth Dee talked about religion. “I am sorely perplexed by one of the gospel teachings. Why did Jesus say that a family man couldn’t be a disciple?”
“Because it would weaken his resolve,” Bacon suggested.
Apart from the slopping sound of a servant rinsing glasses, the room fell silent. Jane Dee was the first to speak. “That being so, Master Bacon, what do you think of love between a man and a woman?”
“That it is impossible to love and to be wise. It is a passion that removes reason.”
“Love is blind too,” Jane added, staring pointedly at her husband.
The Mortlake magician stroked his long beard. “My family is my purest joy. Watching young Arthur conducting a childish marriage with Sir William Herbert’s three-year-old daughter and hearing them call one another ‘husband’ and ‘wife’ was such a pleasure.”
Jane gave Dee a look in which gratitude was mixed with exasperation.
“Perhaps it has escaped your notice, my love, but neither of our children is well. Arthur has quinsy and Katherine is troubled with her teething.”
“What think you, Francis, of Phaire’s remedy for teething gums?”
“You mean rubbing them with the brains of a hare? I think very little of it. Nor do I consider making children swallow their own dung, even when it is honey-coated, to be a cure for a sore throat.”
Dee began to talk about his latest field of study. He wanted to know whether a moving Earth could be reconciled with the Bible. Bacon disputed this, arguing that if the Earth moved around the Sun, as Copernicus claimed, then the Sun would have been God’s first creation.
“You are no lover of mathematics, Francis. That much is clear.”
“The only way to understand God’s works is by making measurements and collecting evidence for, as Paracelsus says, we must turn the leaves that form nature’s codex.”
“Yet mathematics has breathed life into the dry bones of nature and lies at the very heart of our culture,” said Dee picking a tattered book off the stepped buffet. “Here is a very old riddle for you to resolve.”
8 is my true love
Do before 9
Put thereto 5
So well it will beseem
18 twice told
20 between
Phelippes stopped picking his teeth with a duck bone and squinted at the small print. “The answer is ‘Jesus’,” he said. “The verse tells us to put 8 before 9 and to follow this with 5, 18, 20 and 18 again. In our twenty-four letter alphabet H is the eighth letter but, in cipher, it is often a null, an omitted letter. The remaining numbers give us J – E – S – U – S.”
“Then why bother with the H in the first place?” Francis asked.
“A good question,” said Dee. “Perhaps Master Phillips can enlighten us.”
“The letter value of ‘Jesus’ is 70 but with the extraneous H it becomes 78 and ...”
“And 78 is the sacred number of the Christian Cabala,” Dee interrupted. “There are 78 cards in a Tarot pack.”
Jane heard this with a mounting sense of horror. What if there was no Heaven, only a spilled deck of cards. Turning to her husband for comfort she saw his lips were moving. He seemed to be counting.
“God’s teeth, Francis, you are truly the chosen one. ‘Francis’ adds up to 67 and ‘Bacon’ to 33. Therefore, the letter value of your full name is 100, which has been the perfect number since the Egyptians discovered mathematics and the Greeks refined it. It also means your name can be bound by a single letter – the Roman numeral C.”
His young protege looked inordinately pleased but said nothing. Phelippes did some hasty arithmetic and was disappointed to discover that his newly acquired surname added up to 101.
“Surely your name can also be expressed by a single letter, Dr Dee,” he wanted to know.
“Aye, phonetically that is so. I use the Greek letter Delta as a kind of shorthand.”
“I believe Queen Elizabeth has a code number for you, has she not?”
“She calls me 007 – a pair of eyes joined together by the cabalistic number 7.”
“Men say you are her chief intelligencer.”
“I have done some service in the past.”
“May we speak of that now?” Phelippes squinted at the magician. “These are dangerous times and I am anxious to know why Sir Francis Walsingham brought me all the way from Bourges to see you.”
Dee gave the short-sighted agent an approving nod. “Ah yes, you have heard of Abbot Trithemius I suppose and of his magical book of ciphers I acquired some twenty years since.”
“You found ciphers in the first two books of Steganographia but concluded the third one was pure magic based, I believe, on the seven planets and twenty-one spirits.”
“Yes, and I was wrong. I put the book aside and scarcely looked at it again until last March when the blood red skies seemed to presage an extraordinary happening in the heavens.”
“You speak of the Fiery Trigon, I presume.”
“Just so, Saturn and Jupiter are about to enter the cycle of transformation in the sign of Aries which has only happened six times since the Creation, each a turning point in the history of mankind. This will be the seventh and greatest conjunction, a momentous event.”
“What has this to do with Trithemius’ Steganographia?”
“Patience, Francis, I will come to that anon. The appearance of blazing stars in the sky was held to be an ill omen and I was summoned to court by an unusually nervous queen. I told Elizabeth what she wanted to hear, namely, that the Great Conjunction was an astrological phenomenon, not a sign of God’s wrath. But I was making an assumption and had no way of knowing whether it was correct. Acting on a whim, I re-read the third book of Steganographia and was struck by the lengthy tables of data concerning the planetary motions of Saturn. Why had the abbot devoted so much space to these obscure calculations? Could they have a bearing on the impending Apocalypse? That was how I stumbled across his cleverest invention.”
Hunched in rapt attention, Phelippes was like a child listening to a fairy story.
“These numerical tables were laid out vertically in columns with the first 160 numbers divided into four blocks of forty numbers by non-numerical signs. I dislike coincidences. So I turned these columns into rows of forty and observed that the number in the top row was always 25 less than the one below it. What this illustrated was a four-fold number alphabet with multiple entry points.”
Phelippes gave a sigh of pleasure. He had a new toy to play with. “This is far better than current number-letter substitution ciphers in that complexity is achieved through a substitution determined by a cipher key that isn’t immediately apparent. The key may be hidden in the letter’s date, determined by its grammar, concealed in a code number or even found in an entirely separate book. The possibilities are endless.”
“We live in an age of progress,” Bacon said. “But the hour is late and we have trespassed too long on your generosity.”
But Dr Dee would not hear of their departure. He wanted to tell them about his plans to colonise the northern part of Atlantis, called Novus Orbis. He had gone into partnership with the explorer Sir Humphrey Gilbert and his half-brother Sir Walter Raleigh. They shared his sense of mission. It was Britain’s national destiny to cross the Atlantic and settle this huge land mass. “A breath of fresh hope blows on us from the new continent,” he told them. “It is the wind of change that will sweep away tyranny and intolerance.”
25 APRIL 2014
Milton Cleaver never felt entirely at ease in Washington DC: too many stirring slogans and in-your-face classical buildings, too much pomp and circumstance. It was, as Charles Dickens once said, a city of magnificent intentions. What had once been a riverside marsh was now the self-important capital of American democracy.
How ironic, Milton thought, that a freedom-loving country should be given its libertarian institutions by a political elite operating within a secret society. For that was what had happened. Of the fifty six signatories of the Declaration of Independence a third were thought to be Freemasons, as were half the generals in the Continental Army; George Washington took the presidential oath of office on a Masonic bible and wore a Masonic apron to dedicate the Capito
l building while a group of Masons from Georgetown laid the cornerstone for the White House; the country’s Great Seal was awash with Masonic symbolism and even its dollar bills were engraved with an all-seeing eye, a decapitated pyramid and a six-pointed star. Not that Milton objected to Masonry. It was democracy he had doubts about.
‘Human progress is our cause, liberty of thought our supreme wish, freedom of conscience our mission and the guarantee of equal rights to all people everywhere our ultimate goal.’ Milton could recite these lines by heart but they were not the words of Jefferson or Franklin, nor those of any other signatory of the Declaration of Independence. They had been written, apparently in the seventeenth century, by a mysterious gathering of European free thinkers called the Rosicrucians and all Milton knew about them was that their idealistic beliefs had been incorporated into the creed of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite, of which he was an increasingly prominent member.
He had learned about Freemasonry from his father, joining the Grand Masonic Lodge in New York more out of filial respect than any real interest in the craft. It was only when he came to sit on a federal agency supporting the arts that he realized how socially advantageous it was to be a Master Mason. For a thousand dollars Milton had furthered his Masonic education by purchasing all the higher degrees up to and including the Thirty-Second and was now awaiting confirmation as an honorary member of the highest degree of all, the Thirty-Third. The ceremony recognizing his new status was scheduled for five o’clock in Washington’s House of the Temple.
Slinging his duffle-bag over his shoulder Milton paid off his cab and moved towards the silhouetted outline of the capital’s weirdest building. His driver called it the Martian embassy and, if not from another planet, it certainly belonged to a different age. Standing on the east side of 16th Street Northwest, between R and S Streets, the House of the Temple was an incredibly large study in sacred geometry – a triangle on top of a square. With its limestone façade supported by thirty-three Ionic columns, each thirty-three feet high, and a massive bronze door guarded by a pair of enormous sphinxes symbolizing power and wisdom, the Temple was of truly epic proportions, reminiscent of the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.