The Queen's Cipher (11 page)

“Dawkins is claiming my
TLS
review exposed him to hatred, ridicule and contempt.”

“He’s quick off the mark. In our country a libel writ is preceded by an attorney’s letter demanding a published apology.”

“I’ve had one of those. Vaggers Lynch sent a pre-action protocol ten days ago.”

“What did you say?” Sam took his arm as they walked past the porter’s lodge and through Beaufort’s wisteria-covered front quad.

“I told Vaggers Lynch to stick their legal letter where the sun doesn’t shine.”

They made their way into the main quadrangle. Compared to other college gardens it was, he had to admit, a utilitarian space but at least students could sit on the grass. College gardeners decided such matters and they were a law unto themselves. One disgruntled nurseryman had actually tried to undermine the foundations of his college by planting bamboo in the front quadrangle.

As Sam dropped down beside him on the lawn a bunch of undergraduates began an improvised game of croquet. One of the players hammered his opponent’s ball into a yew hedge whooping loudly.

Freddie emptied the dregs of his polystyrene cup onto the hallowed turf. “Did you know it was an Oxford man who first drank coffee in England?”

“No, but if you say so I believe you,” she laughed, displaying her even white teeth.

“He was a Cretan, Nathaniel Conopius, one time chaplain to Cyril, the Patriarch of Constantinople, who, according to the diarist John Evelyn, brewed coffee back in 1637.”

Shading her eyes from the sun, Sam nodded wisely. There was something about the way she did this that made him wonder whether his passion for trivia was misplaced. He had already told her about Oxford’s eleven thousand students and how his own college had produced several British prime ministers, one of whom talked, perhaps unwisely, about ‘the tranquil consciousness of an effortless superiority’ which led her to question his own effortless superiority and why he felt compelled to display it.

“I wonder if Shakespeare drank coffee.” Sam was clearly bored with Conopius.

Freddie gazed at her thoughtfully. “Since Shakespeare died long before anyone tasted the beverage in this country he could hardly have had a caffeine dependency.”

“I want you to get some chalk and write on the board a hundred times, ‘I must not be supercilious.’ In any case, what you’re saying is deeply flawed. The fact that coffee drinking is first mentioned in Evelyn’s diary doesn’t prove some guy didn’t get busy with a primitive percolator a lot earlier than that. It simply means there is no evidence to support such a conclusion. Evelyn’s diary is gossip, not history.”

Stung by her scolding, he couldn’t think of anything to say.

“I have a fact for you, my friend, and it has nothing to do with Oxford. Long before Conopius started infusing his beans, the English people drank vast quantities of ale. A gallon a day was commonplace. They must have been permanently pissed in the Middle Ages.”

That’s a relief, he thought, she’s not upset with me.

“Imagine the collective hangover during the Reformation. It’s a wonder Shakespeare ever wrote a coherent sentence.”

They laughed and called a tacit truce, agreeing that Conopius probably made better coffee than the evil brew they had just been drinking. Both said so simultaneously, conceding that this too was speculative. It was impossible to know what Cretan coffee tasted like.

“I’ve checked out Hall and Marston.” Sam changed the subject. “They both took holy orders and Hall became a bishop. They were hardly...”

She broke off, aware of the hot glances she was getting from the croquet players and pulled her skirt down over her knees. Freddie felt his brain was melting.

“...dangerous subversives.” She completed her sentence. “You’ve got to wonder why their satirical verses were banned and publicly burned.”

“For much the same reason that Robert Greene’s publisher was lent on after his deathbed attack on Shakespeare was published. What today we might call a conspiracy of silence.”

“What do you make of
Groats-worth of Wit
?  It’s pretty weird.”

Here’s Robert Greene, he said, one of the cleverest men in England, the prolific writer of popular plays and best-selling pamphlets about London’s underworld, dying of the pox in a rundown tenement and reduced to such a state of penury that he cannot even pay for his funeral. So he picks up his pen and writes a final tract in which he apologises for the bad life he has led while also settling a few scores. University trained dramatists like himself were being cheated of their dues by the acting companies. Once a play had been sold to a company, the company owned it, and the playwright had no control over what subsequently happened to it. Actors were ‘apes’ and ‘rude grooms’ strutting around in borrowed feathers and the worst of these ‘painted monsters’ was an ‘upstart crow’ who had stolen Greene’s ideas, grown rich and refused to help him in his hour of need.

“‘Shake-scene’ typified the cut-throat nature of the theatre. This is the first time anyone mentions William Shakespeare and it’s to name and shame him as a plagiarist and an uncaring usurer with his ‘tigers-heart wrapped in a player’s hide’ – a parody of a famous line from
Henry VI, Part 3
.”

“But how reliable is Greene. You said it yourself; he’s an academic snob who couldn’t stand the idea that a country boy was a better writer than him.”

“I’ve changed my mind. Dying men don’t lie. Imagine Greene, listening to the blood whispering in his veins, tasting its inky blackness and smelling the sweat on his decaying body. The pox is God’s vengeance on him for his debauchery and in
Groats-worth
he attempts to set the record straight.”     

The pamphlet was a best-seller and obviously scandalised the literary world for, three months later, its publisher Henry Chettle felt obliged to issue the most grovelling of apologies. ‘Diverse of worship’ had left him in no doubt that Greene’s criticisms of ‘Shake-scene’ were without foundation. He was neither a plagiarist nor a money-lending miser but a fine upstanding man. Yet if that was true, why had Chettle published the allegations in the first place? More to the point, in an age of rigid class distinctions, why should gentlemen of quality twist the arm of an obscure printer on behalf of an actor-playwright who was only at the beginning of his career?

“So what have we got here?” Sam asked rhetorically. “In 1592, with only the three parts of Henry VI written and performed, William Shakespeare is already a figure of envy on the stage and a usurer to boot. When Greene attacks him in what turns out to be a remarkably well-read pamphlet, powerful gentlemen spring to his defence and force his hapless publisher to disassociate himself from Greene’s comments, which seems to suggest that Shakespeare was a kept man. Come on Sherlock! What does your scientific imagination tell you?”

“Elementary my dear Dilworth,” he replied, plucking a handful of grass out of the lawn and scattering it on her skirt. “First of all, I see Bacon signing up Shakespeare to write political histories for the Essex camp. Then Greene launches his intemperate attack on Shakespeare and Chettle has to apologise for it. Next, Shakespeare dedicates his narrative poems
Venus and Adonis
and
The Rape of Lucrece
to Essex’s sidekick, the Earl of Southampton, and Hall and Marston stage a satire war in which they ‘out’ Bacon as Shakespeare’s hidden co-writer, only for their works to be burned on the instructions of the Archbishop of Canterbury. Fast forward to 1601 and Shakespeare’s
Richard II
is played at the Globe shortly before the unsuccessful Essex Rebellion. The judicial inquiry into the players’ guilt does not even call on the actor-author to testify. By then, Francis Bacon has changed sides and is advising the Queen. Although there is no record of the two men even meeting, Bacon always seems to be there when Shakespeare’s reputation needs protecting. He’s the goose that is laying the golden egg.”

She picked the grass off her skirt with great care. “You may be right about that but we can’t be sure, can we? There’s no proof any of these things are connected.”

“Now you are being academic and boring. It goes back to what I said in my
TLS
review. Our leading scholars refuse to join up the dots because they point to a different Shakespeare to the one they’ve long written about.”

There was a cold breeze and Sam wriggled on the turf. “How are we going to test your theory?” she wanted to know.

“Let’s get back to basics. The Shakespeare mystery exists because there is not a shred of solid evidence connecting the man with his works during his lifetime. We said as much when we first met in Verona. Then Strachan sent me an email in which he claimed that a letter written by an Elizabethan spy contained a key that would unlock the truth. Anthony Standen’s report revealed two different kinds of cipher, a number substitution alphabet and a Hebrew system that gave letters a numerical value. In working for Essex, Standen came under the influence of the Bacon brothers.   They had to be aware of his secret codes. That being so, it would seem logical to look for gematria or a number alphabet in Francis Bacon’s published works.”

He pulled a cell phone out of his jacket pocket, unlocked its screen and selected keyboard.

“How about this?” he said moments later, trying to check the tremor in his voice as he handed her his mobile.

The search engine had located an article about a posthumous collection of Bacon’s writings called
Baconiana
that included a fragmentary
Alphabet of Nature
which had a numerical four-fold structure.

“Wow!” she said excitedly. “You’ve found it straight away.”

A croquet ball whizzed through the air narrowly missing her head. A grinning undergraduate followed the missile into the bushes, giving her the eye as he did so.

Freddie pretended not to notice.  “We’re off,” he said, helping her to her feet. “What we’re looking for will be in the Fowler Collection.”

Oxford’s Philosophy Library was housed in the Radcliffe Humanities building on Woodstock Road and here they were asked to share a reading room table with four earnest bespectacled researchers. A library assistant arrived carrying a small calfskin volume.

Baconiana
positively crackled with age as Sam turned its thin, yellowing sheets until, on page 77, she encountered
Lord Bacon’s Physiological Remains
, a fragment of his
Abecedarium Naturae,
written in Latin and Greek, starting with the Sixty Seventh Inquisition and ending with the Seventy Eighth.

Inquisitio sexagesima septima. Triplex Tau, sive de Terra.

Inquisitio sexagesima octavo. Triplex Upsilon, sive de Aqua.

Inquisitio sexagesima nona. Triplex Psy, sive de Aere.

Inquisitio septuagesima. Triplex Chy, sive de Igne.

Inquisitio septuagesima prima. Triplex Psi, sive de Coelestibus.

Inquisitio septuagesima secunda. Triplex Omega, sive de Meteoricis.

“It’s four-fold alright,” she whispered in Freddie’s ear, “and the fragment begins with one of Bacon’s special numbers, 67 or ‘Francis.’ Tau is the nineteenth letter in the twenty-four letter Greek alphabet. Therefore, in the alphabet’s third repetition it has a value of 24+24+19 or 67. On top of which, in Masonic symbolism, the Triple Tau stands for Solomon’s temple. It’s the key to knowledge. The most venerated of all secret signs. Of course, I shouldn’t really mention this. I was told in confidence by a high placed Mason who worships in Washington’s House of the Temple where adepts wear emblematic rings that feature either the Triple Tau or the number 33 set in a triangle.”

Freddie couldn’t believe it. Whether by accident or design, the number counts of Bacon’s names had been incorporated into American High Masonry. Was this an indication of some kind of wider conspiracy, one spanning four hundred years and two continents. His hands felt clammy and his heart began to pound. Sam had stopped talking and was studying the remaining inquisitions.

“Holy Moses!” she said under her breath, “These inquisitions stand for Earth, Air, Fire and Water and there’s gematria in every one of them! Each inquisition contains a word with the same number count as a Bacon signature and a couple of these are only achieved by misprinting Greek letters. It’s ‘Phi’ not ‘Psy’ and ‘Chi’ not ‘Chy.’”

He pursed his lips. “Printing wasn’t an exact art in those days. Mistakes were made.”

“Of course they were but ‘Psy’ isn’t remotely like ‘Phi’, is it.”

She opened a pocket notebook and began to turn letters into numbers. “Look at the Sixth-Eighth Inquisition,” she murmured. “‘Upsilon’ has a word score of 100, like Francis Bacon. Check it out.”

U(20)+P(15)+S(18)+I(9)+L(11)+O(14)+N(13)=100

“‘Psy’, the corrupted letter of the Sixty-Ninth Inquisition, has a count of 56 as does ‘Fr Bacon’ while ‘Chy’ adds up to 34 which is his brother’s normal signature, ‘A Bacon.’”

Aren’t you stretching things a bit?”

“Not if this is some kind of secret code. As a spymaster, Anthony Bacon was familiar with all kinds of codes and ciphers.”      

Their persistent whispering was annoying the other researchers in the room. Aware of the noise they were making, she scribbled a message in her notebook. ‘The triple ‘Chy’ concerns ‘Igne’ which also has a word score of 34. One confirms the other!’

Turning to the Seventy-First Inquisition she converted ‘Coelestibus’ into a number and did the same for Anthony Bacon’s name.

C(3)+O(14)+E(5)+L(11)+E(5)+S(18)+T(19)+I(9)+B(2)+U(20)+S(18)=124

A(1)+N(13)+T(19)+H(8)+O(14)+N(13)+Y(23)+B(2)+A(1)+C(3)+O(14)+N(13)=124

“And here’s the clincher,” she hissed. “The triple ‘Omega’ has a count of 39 or ‘F Bacon’ and is said to concern ‘Meteoricis.’”    

M(12)+E(5)+T(19)+E(5)+O(14)+R(17)+I(9)+C(3)+I(9)+S(18)=111