The Queen's Cipher (5 page)

She pointed to a badly sprung Regency sofa with purple upholstery and gaily coloured scatter cushions on which he perched uncomfortably, sherry glass in hand.

Sir Alan Cropley bustled into the room. He was a narrow, competent man with a massive forehead and small, bright eyes that seemed to get lost behind the thick lenses of his glasses. His manner was almost apologetic as if he knew, perhaps subconsciously, that the deference he received was largely undeserved. If I had my way, he seemed to say, I’d do away with all the bowing and scraping but, for the college’s sake, we must observe the rituals of an ancient pecking order.

Freddie stood up to greet him, worrying about the shape of his mouth. He had been perfecting a bright and eager smile suitable for all college occasions.

“A word in your ear, Brett,” Sir Alan began ponderously. “The future of this college depends on its teaching staff and so far you have proved a satisfactory appointment.” This was an indirect reference to Freddie’s popularity with the student body. He found it much easier to mix with them than with his fellow dons.

“But doubts exist about the wisdom of your recent book review. Personally, I think it a trifling matter, hardly worth mentioning. In fact we might agree that the injured party is a second-rater with a turgid prose style but there is such a thing as good manners. After the Cartwright business you’d do well to remember that. Do I make myself p-plain?”

He had forgotten that Sir Alan also had a speech impediment. He stuttered on the operative word in a sentence to add weight and gravity to his utterance.

“However able you may be, Brett, there are those in this college who do not like your attitude. You are thought to lack respect for senior members of staff.”

Freddie bit his lip. Those port-swilling dinosaurs on High Table had ganged up on him. The message was loud and clear: toe the line or lose your tenure. Upholding academic authority was deemed more important than the pursuit of excellence.

“You won’t be attacking any more professors, will you Brett.”

“No, Master, you can rest easy on that score.”

“I am glad we’ve had this little chat,” said Sir Alan, standing up to go.

Freddie was seething when he left the Lodgings. Universities claimed to be democratic institutions but couldn’t even countenance criticism of a professor’s book. What had happened to freedom of speech?

The weather put a dampener on his rebellious spirit. Heavy rain soaked through his clothes as he splashed through the puddles forming in St Giles. Fortunately his Jericho flat was only a short walk away. A hundred years ago these neat red brick terraces housed Oxford’s artisan classes who, on moving out into the suburbs, left behind small well-kept gardens and a permanent billboard for ‘Lumley’s 2/6 Tea.’ The new owners and their tenants were mainly university types and, far from tumbling down, the walls of Jericho had been revitalised by this social change. Walton Lane had gone from being a back alley to a desirable mews where Freddie shared a garden flat with a bio-scientist who was seldom at home and never did any housework.

Having washed the dirty dishes stacked in the kitchen sink and cleaned out the fridge before its contents could become a health hazard Freddie made himself a cup of tea and carried it to the breakfast bar. It was time for some Dutch courage, not out of a bottle but a small plastic magenta phial. Unscrewing the top, he shook a couple of 30mg pills onto the laminate work surface and used the back of a teaspoon to grind them to a fine powder suitable for snorting. The effect was almost immediate. The drug rushed through the nasal passage and into his bloodstream, releasing dopamine into the synaptic cleft.

Now, in a state of euphoria, he was ready to face his critics: the ones waiting for him on his laptop. As expected, the tightly knit Eng. Lit community had rushed to Dawkins’ defence. His TLS review had been ‘disgraceful’, ‘wrong-headed’ and ‘lacking in common decency.’ Even Dame Julia disapproved of its unnecessarily strident tone. Among a score of emails there was only one favourable response.

Well done! I have just read your absolutely brilliant review. To find an academic challenging the biographical nonsense about Shakespeare is indeed heartening. If you want to know the man behind the artist you should start by going to Lambeth Palace Library and examining a letter written on 18 December 1593 by the spy Anthony Standen. He was a double-agent who worked for the Earl of Essex. Standen’s report contains a number code that was later used by Elizabethan writers to cast doubt on Shakespeare’s authorship of his epic poems.

What utter hogwash! There was no contemporary Shakespeare criticism containing a number code and who in their right mind would connect Shakespeare with espionage. His correspondent must be a crank. Yet perhaps he shouldn’t be too hasty.

Freddie had a gut feeling that he’d reached some kind of crossroad and that things were about to change in his life. And he was in favour of any new direction that might lead him towards the delectable Dr Samantha Dilworth. Lambeth Palace was little more than a stone’s throw away from the Globe where she was attending a theatre workshop and Bard-lite had written of a secret cipher. As she was a cryptographer, this gave him the perfect excuse to get in touch with her again. What a stroke of luck.

First though he needed to swat up on the Elizabethan spy. Find out what his story was.

THE DOUBLE AGENT

It took three blows of the axe to sever the sinews in the neck and still she wasn’t done. He could see the lips moving when her head was held up by the executioner. What was she trying to say?

Anthony Standen woke on his flea-ridden bolster with sweat pooling between his shoulder blades. He had been having one of his nightmares about Mary Stuart’s botched execution. He had talked to herbalists about these vivid dreams and been told they came from overeating. Last night he had dined at Hampton Court on stuffed roast boar with creamed almonds and venison pie. Such big feasts were only to be expected when the bony old queen with the dyed red hair was in residence. As a minor courtier he was not invited to sleep off his overindulgence in the palace and had had to ride across the river to his lodgings in Kingston; a jolting, unpleasant journey that had done little for his digestion.

Standen groaned and flexed his cramping leg in a truckle bed much too short for his six foot frame. Height was a double-edged sword. It gave him a commanding presence but made it harder for him to blend into the background. He remembered Secretary Walsingham telling him: “Her Majesty likes her spies small, submissive and Protestant at heart. You are none of these things.” And it had counted against him.

The true allegiance of an English Catholic who had taken money from the Scottish, Spanish and Portuguese governments and the Grand Duke of Tuscany would always be in doubt. Sometimes even he couldn’t remember whose interest he was serving as Pompeo Pellegrini, Andre Sandal or Monsieur la Faye. There were other aliases too, for Anthony Standen was the most accomplished actor in the secret theatre of European espionage.

He had started off with a belief in good and evil, until the good got tainted and became a lesser evil. Familiarity had bred contempt. He knew the Holy Roman Empire was far from holy; saw the veneration of Catholic saints and relics as money-making stratagems and considered the dissolution of the monasteries to be the biggest English land grab since the Norman invasion. All of which left him without a moral compass.

Easing himself off his uncomfortable mattress the extra-special agent removed his nightshirt and looked in disgust at the limp appendage between his legs. Only a few years ago he had needed an ointment of mouse droppings and lettuce leaves to conceal his ardour for Don John’s mother, Barbara von Blomberg. Eventually the Netherlands ruler had caught them at it, forcing him to quit the Low Countries in more senses than one. Now, sadly, things were very different. Not even Master Shakespeare’s lascivious love poetry had any effect on him. Venus and Adonis may be selling like hot cakes in St Paul’s churchyard but it would need more than a wanton goddess to arouse his lust.

One thing about Shakespeare though; he had the makings of a good spy, ideally suited to the dirty games of infiltration and double-dealing. His plays were full of veiled meanings for his audience to decode. They were, what the poet called, sweet poison for the age’s tooth.

Standen wrapped himself in a fur-lined gown and sharpened his quill. There was work to be done. While his gout-ridden controller was recuperating in Hertfordshire, he had been acting as his eyes and ears at court and now had two things to report. One was scurrilous gossip that might have political repercussions while the other was of a more serious nature. Both matters concerned his new patron, the Earl of Essex, who while professing an undying love for England’s queen was also courting her likely successor, James VI of Scotland. Letters written by Essex’s Scottish agent had been intercepted. Anthony Bacon would know what to do about that.

He had been passing information to Anthony since the eighties when he had been attached to the de Medici household in Florence. His greatest intelligence coup – a list of Spain’s military requirements for an invasion of England – had come through this Tuscan connection. And unlike most spymasters, Anthony stood by his agents. When the tall spy’s cover was finally blown and his life endangered, Bacon arranged a passage to England, free lodgings at Gray’s Inn and the patronage of the Earl of Essex, a political lodestone around whom he could build a new career.

To shield his sensitive correspondence from prying eyes – horse delivered mail was often intercepted - Standen thought he would use one of the ciphers devised for Essex’s intelligence service. In what had become an intellectual arms race that pitted code-makers against code-breakers, Thomas Phelippes and Francis Bacon had raised the stakes by devising a complex numerical substitution cipher for intelligence work. Anthony’s brilliant brother had flattered Standen by calling him ‘our exemplary mole’ but, like a mole, he was blind without his codebook. Where had he put it?

The spy ransacked cupboards and drawers, throwing dirty laundry in the air, before finally discovering the
Clavis Steganographia
at the bottom of an old trunk. Rubbing his calves to stave off the cold, he began the laborious task of enciphering those sections of his dispatch that should remain a secret.

Such was Anthony Standen. A man of infinite resource but no clear direction who had come in from the cold, only to end up in a draughty undersized bedchamber in Kingston.

9 APRIL 2014

“Care to run that by me again.” Simon Nicholas couldn’t believe it.

Huffing and puffing, he wove his way through a peloton of cyclists on the Banbury Road. It was hard going for one whose portly frame was unsuited to all forms of physical exercise.

“I can understand why you might want to bonk this American beauty queen,” he continued, “but there must be better ways of going about it.”

Dressed incongruously in a velvet smoking jacket and tracksuit bottoms, Freddie’s flatmate was a fat prematurely bald man in his early thirties. A poster boy, he said, for the virtues of an unhealthy diet and extreme lethargy. The only thing that had induced him to take a stroll in the Parks was his insatiable love of gossip. So far he hadn’t liked what he’d heard.

“You’re taking this Dr Dilworth on a cipher hunt in the Archbishop of Canterbury’s palace, looking up some mouldy old spy’s letter in the forlorn hope that it might cast fresh light on the so-called Shakespeare mystery. It sounds crazy to me.”

“I realize it’s a bit odd.” Freddie smiled self-consciously. “But there is method in my madness. Supposing for sake of argument, there is a connection and no one has spotted it. I could use the information to puncture the complacency of my Beaufort colleagues. How good would that be?” 

“You sly old boots,” Simon nodded appreciatively. “And here’s me thinking you hadn’t a malicious bone in your body.”

“Did I tell you I’d received a reprimand from the Master for criticizing Dawkins’ dishonest research? Apparently it was bad manners to do so.”

“Well, that’s Oxford for you. ‘Manners maketh man’ is our college motto.”

Second to none in the longevity of his student years, Simon loved every aspect of Oxford life, particularly the parties. Leaving school early he had enjoyed a short career as a stockbroker and an even shorter one as a shoplifter – his psychiatrist called it attention-seeking – before reading PPE at New College. Three years later, with a first class honours degree in the bag, he surprised everyone by swopping colleges and beginning a course in Integrative Bioscience. When asked for an explanation, Simon said animal study was far more rewarding than watching politicians at play in Westminster.

“A piece of advice, Freddie, Don’t let those conservative bastards destroy your career.” Simon stepped sharply to one side to avoid a group of ungainly female joggers. The Parks may be a bike-free area but there was no stopping the fitness addicts. They were everywhere in Oxford.

“Look at them, converting fats and sugars into aches and pains,” Simon snorted.

Although no athlete himself, Freddie did not share his friend’s aversion to all forms of physical exertion. A little exercise did no one any harm. It was a warm morning and the early spring light dappled the blue-green leaves of the giant sequoia. Squirrels scampered through its branches in search of food while aconites carpeted the ground around the tree’s massive roots. Tiring of this bucolic scene Simon turned to face his companion.

“Any sane person knows that Shakespeare is a great waste of time,” he began. “So many ridiculous plots and characters and all those drama queens drooling over them, it makes you sick. But if you’re wise, you won’t get yourself dragged into a stupid argument over the authenticity of his works or you’ll be eaten alive. In the rock-paper-scissors world of literary culture, a celebrity professor like Cleaver beats a research fellow every time.”