The Queen's Cipher

by David Taylor

  Caspar quickly swallowed his cocktail.

  Magnum stood up. “Call of nature, I’m afraid. Wait for me here.”

  As the man with the moustache slipped out of the room there was a commotion at the bar.

  One of the customers had fallen off his stool again.

  By the time the ambulance arrived Professor Dawkins was already dead. His heart had stopped functioning.

  5 MAY 2014

  “Well, what’s it to be, Miss Stone. I hope you’ve given your thesis subject some thought.”

  “I have indeed, Dr Brett.” The emphasis on his surname indicated her displeasure.

  Ever since the May Day party Freddie had been dreading this tutorial and she certainly wasn’t making it easy for him. She had tousled her hair, left the top buttons of her blouse undone and was wearing her shortest skirt. He shouldn’t be noticing such things and yet his eyes were drawn towards her. Keep it cool and formal, he thought.

  “There is of course a wide range of subject matter. Have you decided what to tackle?”

  Cheryl pouted prettily. “I thought it might be fun to have a go at Love’s Labour’s Lost, the courtly comedy that is, paradoxically, the dirtiest play in the entire Shakespeare canon and the only comedy without a happy ending. Jack doesn’t get Jill.”

  Freddie knew he was blushing. “W-what in particular would you like to look at?”

  “Oh, its secret agenda I think. The play is full of topical allusions and it’s the only Shakespeare play with an original plot. Normally they were nicked off somebody else.”

  “What do you think the comedy is actually about?”

  “It’s about growing up, saying things that mean something instead of just being clever.”

  “That’s right,” he enthused. “It’s about separating what is real from what is artificial. The king of Navarre and his lords vow to lock themselves away for three years, not eating or sleeping or seeing women and, of course, they can’t keep it up because it’s unnatural for young men to do without sex.”

  “Well, you’d know about that, Dr Brett.”

  She wasn’t going to let the matter rest. He would have to say something. “Can we please concentrate on your dissertation, Miss Stone, and put other considerations to one side or would you prefer to have another tutor.”

  “No way,” she replied hastily. “But I’ll tell you this for nothing. Where that American woman is concerned, you’ve got to press it to you.”

  He had heard those words before. They were code for ‘repress your urges’, taken from a track on a Gorillaz album which must have been a musical benchmark in her adolescence.

  She hadn’t finished yet. “You’d be much better off with me. We think alike. There, I’ve said it. Let’s move on.”

  And move on they did to discuss the play’s use of language. Freddie could see a trap opening in front of him. Love’s Labour’s Lost was packed with double entendres but before his eager student could sink her teeth into its sexual puns he brought proceedings to a close.

  Later, as he sat at his desk coping with his drug withdrawal symptoms, he remembered what she had said. We think alike. That was it!

  Energy restored, he picked up his briefcase and charged out of the study.

  He found Sam in the flat doing her ironing. “You’re back early,” she said. “Look, I’ve something to tell you. Bad news I’m afraid. Cleaver is terminating my leave of absence. He wants me back on campus by the end of the week.”

  Freddie’s heart sank. He’d half expected this. She had been over here for a month. Of course she had to go back. But why had Cleaver changed his mind about the time she could have off. Did he know they were having an affair?

  She was expecting him to say something and his mind was in turmoil. “Let’s enjoy the time we’ve got left together. What would you like to do?”

  Sam took down the ironing board. “Well, we could make passionate love or maybe we should take a look at that book Strachan gave us. There is obviously something in it he wants us to see.”

  “Okay, let’s solve the Shakespeare mystery,” he said with heavy irony. “Actually I’ve got an idea. It came to me at work. The engravings, Sam, the emblematic title page pictures in Cryptomenytices. If Strachan is right, one shows Bacon with the author, Duke August of Brunswick-Luneburg, and the other reveals Bacon with Shakespeare. Why create such a triangle in what is supposed to be a book about Trithemius’s ciphers? The answer must lie in Bacon’s relationship with the duke. They thought alike. They were both idealists seeking a better world, noblemen hiding their light under a bushel, writing anonymously, belonging to a secret brotherhood and with a penchant for cryptography. Bacon employs a straightforward version of Trithemius’s four-fold number code in his Alphabet of Nature while Duke August devotes a whole book to the monk’s ciphers. Wouldn’t you expect it to contain a number alphabet?”

  The logic was inescapable. “Of course you would,” she said.

  The huge volume had found a temporary home in his kitchen cupboard. As Freddie retrieved it, a small piece of yellow paper fluttered to the floor. Sam picked it up. What she was holding was a post-it on which a few words had been scrawled in biro, presumably by Strachan.

  Selenus – based on Trithemius – a square then an alphabet – Matthew 27.3

  “What do you think?” she asked. “Is this an aide-memoire or a deliberate clue for us to follow?”

  Freddie thought the latter. Writing under the pseudonym of Gustavus Selenus, Duke August had authored a book on Trithemius’s cipher systems. It seemed reasonable, therefore, to assume that Cryptomenytices outlined ciphers that took the form of a square and an alphabet.

  He leafed impatiently through the volume’s many pages until, finally, he came across a form of hidden messaging that only appeared when the surface text was squared and each letter in the passage given its own place in the grid. And following this so-called cipher square was a simple number alphabet which was said to be its clavis or key.

  “We have to assume,” said Freddie, “that Strachan meant us to find this and draw the following inferences: firstly, that the cipher square and the number alphabet are linked together and, secondly, that any hidden message has a bearing on the Shakespeare authorship.”

  “But where does St Matthew’s Gospel come into this?” Sam asked.

  “Damned if I know.” He rushed out of the room and returned, moments later, carrying a Bible. “Then Judas, which had betrayed him, when he saw that he was condemned, repented himself, and brought again the thirty pieces of silver to the chief priests and elders.” Chapter 27, Verse 3 described a dramatic moment in the Christian story but was hardly a clue to anything else.

  Freddie snapped his fingers. “We’re barking up the wrong tree. It’s nothing to do with the New Testament. The man we’re after isn’t St Matthew but Bacon’s friend, Tobie Matthew, the Archbishop of York’s Catholic son, although I don’t know what ‘27.3’ means.”

  Sam folded up her neatly ironed clothes. “Could it be a date on a letter?”

  “That’s a good idea.” He bent down and retrieved a hardback copy of Daphne du Maurier’s The Winding Stair from under the kitchen table. “Daphne is our best bet. She wasn’t just a brilliant novelist; she also wrote two biographies of Francis Bacon. This one deals with his political career.”

  The index listed several letters to Matthew, most of them undated. However, late in Bacon’s career, on 27 March 1622, he had written, ‘If on your repair to the court, whereof I am right glad, you have any speech with the Marquis of me, I pray place the alphabet, as you can do it right well, in a frame to express my love faithful and ardent towards him.’

  Freddie’s jaw tightened. “He’s telling Matthew to use the cipher square.”

  Sam wasn’t so sure. “Not necessarily. The phrase about placing the alphabet in a frame might just be a high-flown way of asking Matthew to be eloquent on his behalf.”

  There was some strength to her argument, he conceded, but Matthew was a
go-between, not a negotiator. Besides which Bacon’s words were significant. A ‘frame’ was both a square and an arrangement of words, and, according to Bacon’s Victorian biographer Spedding, he frequently called ciphers ‘alphabets’ as did his uncle Lord Burghley who once ordered a Catholic plotter to be racked in the Tower to discover the key to his ‘alphabet’ or cipher.

  “Okay,” she said, “but why all the secrecy?”

  “Because he was in disgrace,” he replied. “His dazzling political career was over. A year earlier Bacon had been both Lord Keeper and Lord Chancellor, allowed to sit in the Lords and the Commons at the same time – the only politician ever to achieve this distinction. Then the roof fell in.”

  In 1621 Bacon’s political enemies brought corruption charges against him and James I ordered him to plead guilty. He was banned from holding any state office, banished from the verge of court, fined the huge sum of £40,000 – equivalent to twelve million in today’s money – and imprisoned in the Tower. On his release he received a pardon which would only be signed when he relinquished the lease on his London home, York House, to the Marquis of Buckingham who was James’ current favourite. In other words, Bacon was being blackmailed and, as he was unable to deal directly with Buckingham, he needed an intermediary. His old friend Sir Tobie Matthew was back in favour at court so he had asked him to intercede on his behalf.

  “Isn’t that what I just said?” Sam looked confused.

  “No, you don’t understand. Bacon’s letter to Matthew already contained a cipher square. He’s asking his friend to decrypt the hidden message and pass it on to Buckingham.”

  She thought about this for a while. “The cipher square has a fundamental weakness, particularly when the surface text is only a handwritten note. It’s difficult to keep it coherent when you are trying to jockey letters into the right places to create a secret message. Now here’s the thing. If Trithemius was such a cryptographic genius, surely he’d have solved this problem.”

  “So what are we looking for?”

  Code-breaking requires intuition, sudden flashes of insight from the subconscious, but it also needs a lot of common sense. “Pattern recognition,” Sam replied calmly, “something that can act as a repeatable spacing device in a printed text or handwritten letter without arousing suspicion. And this too should be in here.”

  She skimmed through the fading leaves of Selenus’ cipher manual, grunting appreciatively whenever she encountered a particularly ingenious system.

  “This could be it,” she said in a tight voice. In Book 6, Chapter 24, Selenus demonstrated how long terminals could be used to help create cipher squares.

  By elongating the last letter of certain words an encipherer could adjust the plaintext to accommodate his hidden message. To illustrate the practice, a number of Latin words ending in a, e and m had been extended by half an inch or more.

  A tingle of excitement ran down Freddie’s spine. “We’re onto something here,” he insisted. “Find these stylistic squiggles in a passage of print and you are probably looking at a cipher square. Now, at the risk of sounding absolutely mad, I think we should look for them in the First Folio.”

  He left her open-mouthed as he fetched a battered facsimile of Mr William Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories & Tragedies from the breakfast bar and dropped it on the kitchen table with a resounding thwack. “The moment of truth,” he said with a wry smile as he flicked through the book’s early pages. It arrived sooner than he had expected.

  “How on earth can we have missed this?” he said.

  She found herself peering at the Dedicatory Epistle to the Earl of Pembroke and his brother, the Earl of Montgomery.

  It contained no fewer than fifteen elongated words. But that wasn’t all. Using a variety of different typefaces, the printers had contrived to split up, hyphenate, misspell or miss out words altogether in what were, politically speaking, the most important pages in the entire volume. Of course mistakes were commonplace in printing but these manifold errors had one thing in common: they could all be cryptic spacing devices. Sam had looked at the Folio dedication countless times without noticing any of these peculiarities. Familiarity had induced blindness.

  “Are these long terminals anywhere else in the book?” she wanted to know.

  It took an hour to answer her question. The long squiggles appeared in the Dedication and nowhere else, which strengthened the suspicion that they’d been put there for a purpose.

  Many people believe in conspiracy theories, if only to make their mundane lives more exciting, but Sam was not among them. “Surely the First Folio is the last place you’d look for a cipher square,” she said tartly. “This is the book in which Ben Jonson calls Shakespeare his ‘beloved’ author and identifies him as the ‘Sweet Swan of Avon.’”

  “Ah, but was Ben telling the whole truth?”

  Sam looked at him as if he had taken leave of his senses.

  “That was what he thought in 1623,” he explained, “but not earlier on.”

  THE DEVIL AND ST DUNSTAN

  Upstairs in the Apollo Room, the royal poet was holding court. Sitting on a specially strengthened throne, surrounded by his young literary acolytes, Ben Jonson had embarked on one of his stories.

  “I tell you Brome, it is safer to sup here than risk going to one of those poxy inns in Cheapside. Only last month, I was venturing downstairs in the Feathers when my foot slipped on a loose step and down I tumbled, landing against a door that burst open under my weight to reveal gentlemen quaffing canary. Recovering my composure, I said ‘My masters, since I have had the singular good fortune to land in your company, I will drink with you before I go.’ Which goes to show that pride can come after a fall, as well as before it.”

  When the laughter had died down, Jonson beckoned a nervous looking youth to come forward. “Tonight, I want to introduce you to Thomas Randolph, a scholarship boy from my old school of Westminster, who has promised to entertain us with verses supporting the claims of sack against small beer.”

  Randolph was big for his age and round-shouldered with a prominent upper lip from which beads of perspiration were dripping like early morning dew.

  “We care not for money, riches or wealth; Old sack is our money, old sack is our health,” he recited in a faltering high pitched voice not yet fully broken. The next lines were lost as his audience banged the tables in appreciation. “Give us then a cup of liquor; fill it up unto the brim. For then, methinks, my wits grow quicker, when my brains in liquor swim.”

  The applause was deafening and a chair pulled out for the poetic stripling. “Well done, my boy, come sit with us.” Jonson patted his huge belly and gave the hero-worshipping youth a broad wink.

  He could afford to be magnanimous. He had come a long way since his days as an apprentice bricklayer. Through sheer ability he had risen to be a celebrated man of letters whose plays filled the London theatres and whose poetry had been rewarded with the laureate crown. On top of which he was a hard-drinking jester with an ego as big as his mountainous body. His long nose and craggy features were an indispensable part of the city’s tavern life and here, in the Apollo Room at the Devil and St Dunstan, he presided over weekly meetings of his literary drinking club, the so-called ‘Tribe of Ben’, whose laws of feasting were engraved over the mantelpiece.

  “Horace!” Ben exclaimed to no one in particular, hiccupping over the word.

  “Ecce Homo! What a writer.”

  What made this larger than life character even more remarkable was his love of the classics, styling both his poetry and prose on the great Greek and Roman writers.

  “Nunc est bibendum! Carpe diem! Seize the day, my sons.”

  The tribe chorused its agreement. Even Robert Herrick nodded sagely.

  There were those, not all ill educated, not all fools, who said that Latin was a dead language, a thing of the past, sterile and unyielding, but what did they know. Ben loved Latin’s grammar, its rules, its vocabulary, its irregularities, its complexities a
nd, above all, its literature. He had begun to compose his own verses at the age of six, iambic pentameters at first, then hexameters, followed by daring experiments with rhyme and metre.

  Latin had even saved his life. An ability to recite from the Vulgate allowed him to cheat the hangman’s noose after he had been found guilty of murdering an actor in a duel. The common law escape route from execution had been a godsend. Simply by reading from the Bible – they called it the ‘neck verse’ in Marshalsea prison – he had earned his release. Not that he had got off scot-free. He looked at the thumb that had been branded with a hot iron in open court and remembered the blinding pain.

  That had been more than twenty years ago. The scrawny youth with the hungry face was no more than a fond memory. Ah me, he thought, tempus fugit. What was that line young Herrick had written? Gather ye rosebuds while ye may, Old Time is still a-flying.

  “Read Homer, my boy,” he advised Randolph. “Revel in such epithets as ‘rosy-fingered dawn’ and ‘swift-footed Achilles.’ Learn what epic poetry is all about.”

  “Talking of epic poetry, what think you of Shakespeare’s use of the rhyme royal in The Rape of Lucrece?” Robert Herrick asked innocently. “Is it not exceedingly well done?”

  “The seven line stanza has gone out of fashion, Herrick, or hadn’t you noticed,” he boomed.

  Herrick flushed as the tribe laughed dutifully at Jonson’s jibe. “Given your own humble background Master, you must admire the way William Shakespeare managed to write so many Roman plays without the benefit of a classical education.”

  His cocky Cheapside protégé was testing him. He wasn’t too drunk to realize that. Shakespeare’s name had once acted as a red flag to a bull but not anymore.

  “As you well know, Herrick, I was one of Shakespeare’s sternest critics, finding him glib and wanting in art, but now I have a much higher opinion of his worth. It is truly amazing what can be achieved by people from plebeian backgrounds.”