The Queen's Cipher (26 page)

He paused to see what impact his words were having. There was a slight tremor in her hand as she reached for his. “There’s something else,” she murmured. “I’ve loved the cipher quest, you know I have, but I don’t really care who wrote Shakespeare’s plays, be it Francis Bacon, Edward de Vere or Uncle Tom Cobley. It’s the text that matters; how each generation finds something new in the plays and sonnets. That’s the real mystery.”

“How can you say that?” he shouted at her. “Knowing the identity of the author is bound to enhance our understanding of his works.”

He could see her hackles rising. “Fuck you, Freddie, that’s not what you said in your review of Dawkins’ book. You held that Shakespeare’s personality was an irrelevance.”

“No, I didn’t,” he replied hotly. “What I actually said was this: if we must know the man behind the artist, let it be the right one. That’s natural justice.”

“No, it’s your ego talking. I’ve had enough of this.” Sam stood up. “I’m off for a run. Let tempers cool down a bit.”

He watched her receding back and felt an empty space in his heart.

7 MAY 2014

“Freddie! You have to wake up!”

He didn’t know where he was. Cautiously, laboriously, he opened his eyes and tried to focus on the figure bending over him.

“Please wake up! I’ve a train to catch this morning.”

“What’s the time?” he mumbled.

“It’s nine thirty,” she said. “We’ve slept in.”

Heaving himself out of bed he staggered into the bathroom to relieve the pressure on his bladder. His head was throbbing and the toilet flush sounded like Niagara Falls. The face that greeted him in the mirror was that of an older man with sweating skin and dilated blood vessels.

A shower, a shave and several glasses of tap water later, he returned to the bedroom to find Sam dressed and packed. The dark glasses covering her eyes was the only sign of the five vodka martinis she’d downed the previous evening when they were patching things up after their row.

She watched him climb into a pair of trousers. “You look awful.”

“Parting is such sweet sorrow. Which play is that from?” His mind had gone blank. “Would you like a black coffee? We’ve plenty of time for that.”

She said that would be nice and followed him into the kitchen. As he got busy with Conopius, the affectionate nickname they’d given the coffee percolator, she gave his arm a little squeeze. “I’m going to miss you,” she whispered.

“You don’t have to,” he replied impulsively. “Marry me instead! Say the word and I’ll find a priest. They’re ten a penny in Oxford.”

Sam started to laugh and ended up with tears in her eyes. “Don’t think I’m not tempted, Freddie. I’ve adored being with you but your future is here and mine is in America.”

“Partnerships can be made to work if there is a strong enough will. That’s with a lower case ‘w’.”

He wanted to say how much he loved her but she gently put a hand over his mouth and murmured, “Let me think about it.”

She seemed to be two different people: a warm, loving girl and a calculating careerist who wasn’t prepared to make a commitment. At least she hadn’t turned him down.

They sipped their coffee in silence; each waiting for the other to speak.

“There is something still puzzles me,” she said eventually, “the way Shakespeare’s remains are referred to as ‘the most though meanest of things’ in the Dedication. That’s a paradox.”

“Not really,” he sighed, back on more familiar ground. “The word ‘meanest’ is often misunderstood. For instance, Alexander Pope judged Bacon to be ‘the wisest, brightest, meanest of mankind’ which was assumed to be an attack on his character. Look up the word ‘mean’ in the
Oxford English Dictionary
and one of the definitions is ‘ignoble or destitute of moral dignity’ and Pope’s verdict on Bacon is quoted as a prime example. But it’s not what he meant at all.”

“How can you be sure?”

“Well, for a start, it’s out of character. Pope idolised Bacon. He called him ‘the greatest genius that England, or perhaps any country, ever produced.”

“Fair enough, but a genius can still be a pervert and therefore mean in nature.”

“Yes, but the adjective ‘mean’ also carries the sense of ‘humble’ and the
OED
illustrates this with an axiom, ‘When he is ablest, he thinks meanest of himself’ – the words of Francis Bacon.”        

“So he’s saying the more intelligent you are, the less proud you should be. Humility is a noble aspiration but not, I would have thought, Bacon’s long suit.”

As a student Sam had studied Neoclassicism: how Pope perfected the heroic couplet and had actually set out to improve Shakespeare’s verse when editing the plays. “Pope campaigned for a Shakespeare statue in Westminster Abbey. Have you seen it?”

“Yes, once.” His mood brightened as he saw how he might turn this to his advantage. With his students revising for end-of-term exams, he had time on his hands and a car sitting in the garage. “Why not go and look at the statue. I’ll drive you down to London and we can spend our last night together in a Heathrow hotel. What do you say?”

“I say it’s a splendid idea.”

“On the way down we might visit Bacon’s burial place in St Albans,” he suggested. “There’s an extraordinary marble statue of him in St Michael’s Church. It’s difficult to tell whether he’s deep in contemplation or fast asleep. Have a look at it on the internet while I put some petrol in the car.”

The website informed her that the church was regrettably closed for structural repairs. The site also supplied a potted history of its most famous parishioner Francis Bacon and a curious picture of an Elizabethan knight lying beneath his horse’s hooves.

When Freddie returned he found Sam peering at what appeared to be a wall mural depicting the death scene from
Venus and Adonis
. “Take a look at this,” she said.

In November 1985 the
Evening Standard
reported the discovery of a twenty foot mural in a St Albans pub. The owners, Benskins Brewery, asked the Warburg Institute to assess the find and Clive Rouse, the country’s leading authority on medieval wall paintings, considered it to be an exceptionally fine work of art and a major historical find in that it was the only contemporary mural to illustrate a Shakespearean subject. Despite this ringing endorsement, the heritage organisations allowed the brewery to panel over the painting and lease the room to a shop selling beds.

“If this mural is a masterpiece, why didn’t English Heritage seek to preserve it?”

“It turned up in the wrong place – in Bacon’s backyard,” he said sarcastically.

“I’m starting to smell a conspiracy, Holmes!”

Two hours later, with the scent still in their nostrils, the amateur detectives were driving down a steep hill towards St Albans cathedral. The White Hart was an old timber-framed inn opposite the abbey and there was an old publican to go with it.

“There used to be a cellar tunnel linking us to the abbey. It was very hush-hush,” he said, tapping the side of his bulbous red nose.

“My goodness, what was going on?” Sam fluttered her eyelashes.

“Don’t quote me, love, but I think the tunnel was for Masonic meetings.”

“What did you say?” Freddie asked sharply.

“Radical thinkers who wanted a new religious order used to tootle over for lodge meetings. The cathedral clergy came through the underground tunnel to avoid being seen.”

“Wasn’t an Elizabethan wall painting found here a few years back?”

The landlord poured himself a large whisky. “That’s right,” he confided. “Before my time though. The mural isn’t in the pub any longer. It’s next door at Pots of Art. If you’re going there, look out! George is holding one of his covens today.”

What they encountered next door was not a witches’ gathering but a dozen smartly dressed men and women in protective aprons painting newly glazed pots and plates in primary colours. To Freddie’s embarrassment, they all looked up when the tinkling shop bell betrayed their presence.

“S-sorry to disturb you but is George around?”

A lean man with an olive complexion strode forward. “I’m the owner. How may I help?”

Sam took over. “We’d like to look at your Elizabethan mural. Now is probably not a good time.”

“Go ahead. It’s on the far wall. Don’t worry about my pottery class. They’re Tesco managers taking part in a team building exercise.”

Weaving their way between the makeshift potters they came across a gigantic glass-covered painting depicting a dying Elizabethan hunter who had been gored by a wild boar.

“Look at the horse,” Freddie exclaimed. “It has a red rose in its mouth. It’s a Rosicrucian symbol.”

“You’re reading a lot into one rose.”

“Not if you know about Venus and Adonis.”

“I thought Adonis came back to life as an anemone.”

“I’m talking about her. The rose is Venus’ sacred flower. It symbolises love and suffering. In hastening to the wounded Adonis she trod on a bush of white roses, the thorns tore her tender flesh and her blood dyed the white rose red. But you’re right, Venus and Adonis is a fertility tale. The boar kills Adonis who is reborn the following spring. It’s a message of hope. That’s why the Rosicrucians adopted it. Out of the blood and misery of their age would come a new dawn.”

They stood in silent admiration of the mural until the Tesco managers trooped off for lunch and the shopkeeper joined them.

“Forgive me for saying this,” Sam began, “but not many small businesses have artistic masterpieces on the wall. Shouldn’t you publicise its presence?”

George nodded in agreement. “I wanted to have postcards printed showing the wall painting but the tourist people wouldn’t back the idea. They preferred to keep things low key.”

“I thought tourist boards tried to bring in visitors?”

George shrugged his shoulders. They shook hands with the Greek potter and left.

Heavy clouds were scudding across the sky when they reached Whitehall and parked the car in Great College Street. On his last visit Freddie had found Westminster Abbey a forbidding place. He had been saddened to think as a young boy that life’s ultimate ambition was to have your dust sanctified and encased in marble.

Entering at the Great North Door they bought tickets and picked up audio headsets to let Jeremy Irons’ mellifluous voice wash over them. The actor was soon telling them about the statues in the North Transept: a broad avenue of nineteenth-century statesmen: Palmerston, Peel, Disraeli and Gladstone, proudly standing on plinths, their political virtue intact.

“Tell me, Freddie, what is the collective noun for a group of politicians?”

Sam’s question stopped him in his tracks. “It might be an ‘argument’ or, better still, a ‘nightmare’ of politicians.”

Turning into the side chapel they encountered a dying General Wolfe about to receive the laurel wreath of victory. To a Christian, this memorial was a magnificent piece of secular sculpture: military glory masquerading as faith. Much the same could be said for the tombs of the medieval kings. Henry III lay within a sarcophagus of polished porphyry.

The most lavish resting place was the Lady Chapel, an architectural gem where Henry VII and his wife were buried while, off in the wings, the monumental effigy of a hawk-like Elizabeth Tudor lay on top of her half sister Mary and opposite the woman she had executed, Mary Queen of Scots.

There was something soothing about this cavalcade of tombs: all passion spent, kings buried beside those they had fought against and holy men, who’d split the land asunder with their bickering, now united in ecumenical bliss.

His introspection was ended by a hefty thump in the back. A woman barged into him as she tried to shepherd her mother away from the Coronation Chair in which every English king had been crowned since the Norman Conquest.

“Ah cud yet owt,” the old lady complained as her daughter hurried her towards the food stall in the cloisters.

“Come on, I want to see Poets’ Corner.” Sam had returned to find him.

“It shouldn’t be called that, you know,” he grumbled. “Geoffrey Chaucer was buried in the South Transept because he had been Clerk of the Works, not the writer of
The Canterbury Tales
.”

“So how did it get its name?”

“When Edmund Spenser was interred next to Chaucer. That was the start of it all, a dead poets’ society hurling verses at one another. It’s a mess really. There are poets without monuments and monuments without poets. What’s surprising is how long it took Shakespeare to be admitted to this merry band. His statue wasn’t erected until 1740.”

“Is Ben Jonson in Poets’ Corner?”

“No, he’s in the nave. He’s buried upright.”

Her face lit up with pleasure. “I’m getting to like Ben, ever the showman.”

She brushed past the burlesque statue of the famous actor David Garrick and the fluidity of the movement was highlighted by the light streaming through the abbey’s great rose window. Following in her footsteps, Freddie was lost in admiration.

He was not the only one watching Sam’s feline grace. A pair of cold grey eyes peered out of a stone recess noting her pale blue jacket and tight jeans before switching their attention to the lanky figure behind her.

They joined a group of excitable schoolchildren that had gathered around Shakespeare’s statue. Sam gave his hand an urgent squeeze. “That man keeps watching me,” she whispered.

“Lots of men look at you, love, or haven’t you noticed?”

“Not like this guy. He’s following us around.” 

“Where is he now?”

“He’s lurking behind my back, next to that impressive looking coffin.”

She meant Chaucer’s marble tomb but there was no one near it.

“He’s gone now,” Freddie told her, “just another of your unrequited admirers.”

“Not with those eyes he wasn’t. They gave me the creeps.”

By now, the schoolteacher was telling her charges that Shakespeare’s monument had been sculpted to William Kent’s design and paid for by public subscription promoted by the Earl of Burlington and the celebrated poet Alexander Pope.

“They were all Freemasons,” Freddie murmured. “You should see Burlington’s Chiswick House with its Kent murals of compass-bearing goddesses and T-square holding cherubs. As for Pope, he attended lodge meetings in the Haymarket and had an underground grotto that linked his Twickenham villa to a riverside garden. He believed in keeping a low profile but then he was only four foot six.”