The Secret World of Christoval Alvarez

by Ann Swinfen

  His voice was mesmerising and for a moment I was almost carried away by it. Then I said, incautiously, ‘The men you speak of are all Englishmen, Master Poley. I am not.’

  He looked at me thoughtfully, his head a little on one side.

  ‘True, true.’

  He seized me again by the elbow and dragged me on along Tower Street to Seething Lane.

  ‘But what is this work you speak of?’ I asked. ‘I cannot see how I can be of any use to Sir Francis Walsingham.’

  ‘Code-breaking,’ he said impatiently. ‘Harriot tells me you have a true talent for the breaking of ciphers and codes. He sets them as puzzles for you, and has never defeated you yet, while you have twice defeated him with codes of your own devising.’

  ‘It is nothing but a game we play,’ I protested.

  ‘Aye, well, for Sir Francis it is a game with high stakes.’

  We had stopped before Walsingham’s town house and I knew suddenly that I did not want to enter it. I shook my arm free of him.

  ‘I have decided that I do not want this work,’ I said, though my stomach constricted when I saw a flash of something dangerous in his eyes.

  ‘Listen to me, you pup,’ he said, pushing his face close to mine. ‘You say that you are not an English man. Right on both counts. I have been watching you, young Master Alvarez. That time you glimpsed me not far from here was not the first time I have seen you coming away from those secret Jewish practices. Who knows what treason you and your like may be hatching? Those practices are illegal, treasonous, and heretical, and you could be executed merely for attending. Jews have been banned from England for three hundred years.’

  I stood very still, my heart hammering in my throat, and felt the cold sweat break out on my back.

  ‘That is one count of heresy against you. There is another. I have known it since the night you came to the Marshalsea. A heresy so foul it too could bring you to execution by burning. You flaunt yourself in the streets as a youth, and defy God’s laws, for I know that you are a girl.’

  It had come at last. God had sprung the trap.

  Chapter Three

  Poley led me round the side of Walsingham’s house, through a small door and up a back staircase. The servants we passed made no attempt to bar his entrance, nor did they acknowledge him, but turned away, almost as if they chose to look through him, like some ghost or other visitant. I followed silently, for cold panic had frozen my tongue. What harm did he mean to do me, this man with his glib smile and his cruel eyes?

  On the first floor we followed a wide corridor with polished floorboards covered in fine Turkey carpets and with walls of carved panelling, above which a number of portraits observed us gloomily. I was suddenly conscious that my hand was sticky with fig juice, and wiped it surreptitiously on the seat of my breeches. Poley’s knock on a massive oak door was answered with a brisk, ‘Enter!’

  I was thrust ahead of him into a spacious room where a man sat behind a great table covered with papers, with his back to a leaded window of clear glass. He was dressed entirely in black, except for a ruff so small and tightly pleated that it seemed hardly more than a collar. The long face, melancholy and haggard, with its perpetual worried frown and the eyes baggy – shadowed, it seemed, by late nights and long hours pouring over documents in poor candlelight – betrayed him at once as Sir Francis Walsingham, the Queen’s spymaster. I had never seen him close before, but once or twice my father had been called to attend him and he had pointed out the spymaster to me in the street. He was said to be just, patient, and ruthless, with a brilliant mind and an implacable will. With his colouring he might have come from Iberia like me. It was said the Queen called him, not altogether kindly, ‘my dark Moor’.

  Walsingham fixed me with a stern and penetrating gaze.

  ‘You are Christoval Alvarez, son to Dr Baltasar Alvarez?’

  ‘I am, Sir Francis.’ My voice sounded thin and hoarse in my own ears.

  ‘I am told you know something of the breaking and devising of codes.’

  ‘A little, sir. It has never been more than an amusement for me.’

  ‘An amusement?’ He looked as though he did not know the meaning of the word. ‘Tell me what you know of the kinds and varieties of codes.’

  ‘Well,’ I searched my memory for what Harriot had taught me and what I had discovered for myself in books of the Arabs, which I had read laboriously with my father’s help, for I had never found that the Arab tongue came easily to me.

  ‘Probably the oldest code we know of was used by the Greeks,’ I began hesitantly. He nodded encouragingly. ‘They would wind a strip of cloth or parchment around a staff, then write the message across the strips. When the cloth was unwound the letters seemed a meaningless jumble, unless you had a staff of the same diameter. This kind of code is called a skutale, but it is really only a simple form of displacement code. If you write the letters in one long line, the message will consist of, perhaps, the first letter, then the fifth, ninth and so on, till you reach the end of the sequence. After that, it continues with the second letter, the sixth, the tenth. The displacement depends on the circumference of the staff.’

  I glanced from Walsingham to Poley, to see if this was what they wanted of me. They were both listening carefully.

  ‘A skutale isn’t difficult to solve, you just need to try different displacements. Of course,’ I said slowly, for the thought had not occurred to me before, ‘if you were to use a tapered staff, it would be much more difficult, but then it would be difficult to have two staffs with exactly the same taper.’

  I caught a sudden flash of movement from the corner. There was another man in the room, sitting withdrawn into the shadows, and the movement I had seen was a stray beam of light catching his spectacles as he leaned forward, resting his arms on his knees. He was small and slender, perhaps a little past thirty, with fair hair and a beard pale as cream. His face bore the traces of smallpox, but otherwise he was not ill-looking, despite his insignificant presence. I wondered who he could be, and why he watched me even more intently than the other men.

  ‘Another method of encoding,’ I said, as they seemed to expect me to continue, ‘is to use a grid of numbers.’

  I stepped towards Walsingham’s desk. I can always think better on paper when it is a case of mathematics or puzzles or codes.

  ‘May I?’ I pointed to paper and quill, and Walsingham nodded.

  ‘Like this.’ I wrote the numbers one to five down the left hand side of the paper and again across the top.

  ‘If we take the letter I to stand for both I and J, then there are twenty-five letters in the English alphabet, and we can write them into the grid like this.’

  I quickly wrote the letters from A to E down the first column, F to K down the second, and so on until I had filled the grid. Below it I wrote:

  25 11 13 34 42 33 22 32 11 23

  The third man had risen and peered over my shoulder.

  ‘It says Walsingham,’ he said.

  ‘Yes. Of course, if you run all the numbers together it makes it more confusing. And to make it more difficult to decipher you can start the alphabet in the second column, or go from left to right or bottom to top.’

  ‘Good,’ he said. ‘Do you know any more?’

  ‘If you cannot guess the pattern used to make the code, you can look at the frequency of the code letter or number in a message. For example, the most common letter in English is E, then S. But every language is different, so if the language is unknown, this is not such a useful method. It is better to try to find the key.’

  ‘Well, young Master Christoval,’ said Walsingham, ‘you seem to have some knowledge of codes.’

  ‘Oh, but there are many more!’ I was carried away by my own eagerness, and did not recognise my own impudence in interrupting.

  ‘See, if you draw these . . .’

  I drew two vertical lines crossed by two horizontal lines, then a large X, then the pattern of lines again, then another X. I put a dot in ea
ch space of the last two drawings, then filled in all the spaces with the letters of the alphabet. This time there were twenty-six spaces, so that J was included.

  ‘Now we can use the shapes in the drawings to represent letters, remembering the dots for the last thirteen letters. Like this.’

  ‘Elizabeth,’ said the third man at once. ‘And again, it can be made more complex by arranging the alphabet differently, in some way decided upon in advance.’

  ‘Yes!’ I smiled at him, delighted that he too loved this game of hidden words. He did not smile back, but regarded me gravely.

  ‘Do you think you could work quickly, trying all the methods you know, watching out the night if necessary, to decipher codes in the interests of England and the Queen?’

  I flushed, realising how childish I must have sounded. ‘Of course, if my poor skills would be of any use to the Queen.’

  ‘And to your adopted country,’ said Poley, laying his arm intimately about my shoulders, ‘which has given you sanctuary.’

  I swallowed, my skin prickling at his detestable touch and his voice murmuring so close to my ear that his beard brushed my cheek. I looked steadily at Walsingham. He commanded here, not Poley or the other man.

  ‘Sir Francis,’ I said, ‘I would gladly be of service to you.’

  I faced him with calmness now, for I found I was less afraid of this man, for all his great power, than I was of the man beside me.

  Walsingham gave a brisk nod. ‘Yes. We will not always need you, only when there are too many documents and too little time for Master Phelippes to decipher himself. The work must be carried out in the strictest secrecy. To speak of it is treason.’

  ‘I understand.’

  ‘Very well. Thomas, you may take Master Alvarez and show him where you work. Test him further with some of the old letters already deciphered and see if he can work quickly enough for you.’

  The small man bowed slightly to Sir Francis, then nodded me towards the door. Poley, I was relieved to see, remained behind.

  It was thus that I, a Jewish girl in fear for her life, came to work for Thomas Phelippes, chief cryptographer and spymaster under Sir Francis Walsingham.

  e

  Until the summer when I was twelve, in 1582, my life was unremarkable and held no hint that I should one day find myself a part of Walsingham’s secret web of power.

  ‘I can see the house, Caterina!’ My sister Isabel was hanging out of the carriage window, her face flushed with the heat. ‘Look – there, just beyond the slope of the hill.’

  I leaned over her shoulder and saw the white gleam of the walls against the jade-dark woods beyond.

  My mother’s childhood home lay in the countryside not far from Coimbra, further inland along the Mondego river, on the edge of the beautiful and mysterious forest of Buçaco. It was here that my mother retired with my brother, my sister, and me, when the summer months became oppressive in the city. My father stayed on in our large stone-built town house near the university, coming out to the country from time to time. His students did not attend lectures in the heat of midsummer.

  ‘But diseases,’ he said, ‘know no season of rest.’

  Indeed, although coughs and infections of the lungs and chest mostly passed with the winter, the summer brought its own freight of illness, often more severe – fevers and fluxes and childhood rashes. The summer I was ten there was an epidemic of measles in the city and many children died or were left blind. My mother gave thanks to God that she had been able to move us to the country before it began.

  This year my sister was ten, Felipe less than two years younger than Isabel, so there was no great difference in age to divide us in our play. We ran wild as peasants, Isabel and Felipe and I, riding and swimming – my sister and I as free as our brother.

  ‘Let me see!’ Felipe cried now, thrusting his head under my arm and dangling so far over the edge of the window that I grabbed him by the back of his shirt and pulled him in before he turned the carriage over. I fell back into my seat and wiped the sweat from my forehead with the back of my hand.

  ‘Caterina,’ my mother frowned at me and shook her head at my coarse behaviour, but I closed my eyes and pretended not to notice.

  The months we spent at the solar every year were a joy to me. In Coimbra things were different. My father had already detected my aptitude for intellectual pursuits and was training me to be a scholar, with the assistance of two other professors who did not despise the female mind. At that time Coimbra was one of the greatest centres in the world for humanist studies. Despite the steely grip of the Jesuits, who had been given governance of the College of Arts in the university in 1558, my father and his many novos cristãos colleagues had a remarkable degree of freedom. We knew of the Inquisition, of course. It was spoken of behind locked doors and in fearful voices, but we did not think it could touch us in enlightened Coimbra.

  I loved my lessons. I learned Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, and of course French and Italian, though not English. Spanish I had spoken almost as soon as Portuguese. I excelled at mathematics and had begun the study of astronomy and philosophy. My father had initiated me into the simplest mysteries of his own profession and had inspired in me his deep and compassionate love for his fellow man. Indeed, my father truly lived to help the sick and to find new cures for diseases, spending his evenings bent over vast ancient texts of Arabic medicine. Students came from all over Portugal and Spain, even from Germany and France and Italy, to attend his lectures.

  Yes, I loved my lessons, but I was a child, and sometimes a rebellious one. When the days grew soft and the warm breezes carried the salt scent of the sea up river to Coimbra, I would begin to squirm in my seat and grow inattentive.

  ‘Caterina,’ my father would chide me gently, ‘you have not been listening. Recite for me the febrifuge herbs, which may be used for a man of choleric temperament or in cases of feverish illness.’

  So I would begin to recite the list.

  ‘Yarrow, vervain, peppermint, borage . . .’

  ‘Latin, please.’

  ‘Achillea millefolium, verbena officinalis, menthe piperita . . . um . . . borago officinalis . . .’

  Then I would break off.

  ‘When shall we go to Grandpapa’s house, Father?’

  ‘Soon, soon. You have not completed the list. Start again.’

  ‘Shall you come with us?’

  ‘For the first two weeks. Now, Caterina, I shall grow angry with you.’

  He never did. In all that we endured, I never saw my father angry.

  The horses drew the carriage up the last of the steep ascent, and there were my mother’s parents, standing before the great oak door which opened on to the cool sanctuary of the house, its stone-flagged rooms shadowy behind the shuttered windows. I forgot the heat, the dust, and the fatigue of the journey and ran up the steps to hug them.

  ‘Come, Caterina,’ said my grandmother, ‘you are almost a young lady. You should not tumble about like a wild boy.’ But she laughed as she spoke.

  My grandfather kissed me on the forehead, then held me at arms’ length.

  ‘You have grown two handspans at least since last summer, Caterina. You will be as tall as I before you are done.’

  It was my turn to laugh, for my mother’s father was more than six feet tall and still in the full vigour of life, not much older than my father, and showing in every lineament that he was born of the ancient Christian Portuguese nobility. His ancestors had wielded great power, for the magnates in their solares or country manor houses, each at the centre of its terra, were kings every one in their own small country. But the kings of Portugal had passed laws long since that gathered these powers into royal hands, and had even destroyed the solares of some of the more recalcitrant nobles. Our family had retained its large estates, however, and the rich soil of the area provided wheat fields and olive orchards on the lower ground nearer the river, along with lush meadowland where my grandfather’s famous stud of horses grazed, together with beef c
attle. Higher up, before the forest encroached, there were pockets of less fertile ground where our shepherds herded the tough little sheep. On the fringes of the forest itself the black pigs foraged on anything and everything edible.

  My grandmother was urging us indoors, away from the heat, as the carriage was driven around to the back of the house, where the servants would unload the luggage we had brought with us.

  ‘Come, sit down,’ she said. ‘There is cool fruit juice, and some of the fig pasties Isabel is so fond of.’

  While Isabel and Felipe and I drank the juice gratefully and ate the pasties with more greed than manners, she sat down with my mother and took both her hands.

  ‘You are pale, my dear. Are you ill?’

  My mother shook her head. ‘It’s nothing but the heat. It came early in the city this year. I’m glad to be home here amongst the mountains.’

  My grandmother was Jewish by descent, that is, her family belonged to the novos cristãos, those who had accepted baptism. Her ancestors had been driven from Spain by the monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella in the previous century. Like the other Spanish Jews they had been forced by King João II to pay eight crusados apiece just to stay in Portugal for eight months. It proved to be a lucrative source of income for him, for there were fifty thousand of them. Many used the short period of grace to arrange passage to more tolerant countries like the Netherlands or the Ottoman Empire. My grandmother’s grandfather was one of the few rich enough to buy permission to reside permanently in Portugal, a concession which lasted just four years before the Spanish monarchs persuaded the new king, Manuel, to expel all Jews from the country.

  My grandmother had told me all this the previous summer. Until then I had been ignorant of our family history, knowing only that we were set apart from other Portuguese, somehow strangers in our own land.

  ‘It was during the reign of Manuel,’ she said, ‘that the forced conversions of Jews to Christianity began. You are old enough now, Caterina, to understand these things. It was then my family converted, but it did not stop the persecutions and massacres, nor the coming of the Inquisition.’