The Queen's Cipher (15 page)

But that was behind him now. In bright sunlight and a comparatively relaxed state of mind, watching Sam consume another blueberry muffin in the Patisserie Valerie, he had a sudden epiphany. They say your best ideas come out of the blue. His usually came in the shower.

“My God,” he groaned. “Why didn’t I think of this sooner? You told me Trithemius’s number alphabet wasn’t discovered until the 1990s. If that’s the case what were Bacon and Standen doing using his cipher system four hundred years earlier?”

Sam was silent for a minute. “Any transmission route must have begun with the German abbot,” she volunteered.

“OK, let’s look for it. Once you’ve finished here we’ll pay Oxford’s biggest bookshop a visit.”

Blackwell’s was an institution. Starting off as a tiny Victorian bookstore on Broad Street the shop had grown exponentially with three miles of shelving in its basement alone, a vast grazing area for university scholars. He led the way to the theology section where there were several books on monastic humanism.

Sam was soon enthralled. “Listen to this! The year is 1500 and the Inquisition is accusing the crafty abbot of being a black magician. So he stops writing his wicked codex and promises to be a good boy in future. But as we know,
Steganographia
was eventually published in Frankfurt, which means Trithemius carried on with his covered writing. He conned the Inquisition.”

Hustling for facts, they learned that Europe’s secular powers had spent the best part of fifty years hunting for the monk’s groundbreaking steganography. By then, his missing manuscripts had acquired the mythical status of Aristotle’s lost dialogues. Finally, in 1563, Queen Elizabeth’s magician Dr John Dee tracked down a copy in an Antwerp bookshop. Unable to take this ‘most precious jewel’ away with him, Dee transcribed the entire work on the spot and carried it back to England.

“He did it!” Sam exclaimed. “There’s your transmission route, right there.”

Freddie shook his head. “I don’t agree. If Dee saw through the astronomical data and rest of the mumbo jumbo in which Trithemius cloaked his ciphers, wouldn’t the number alphabet have been in circulation long before Standen used it in 1593.”

“Perhaps he kept it to himself and then something happened to change his mind.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know,” she snapped back. “You’re the New Historicist. You work it out.”

We’re bickering again, Freddie thought, as they climbed the stairs to the history section.

Largely because of constant television exposure, the Tudors needed a seven shelf wooden bookcase and all his negativity quickly disappeared when Sam revealed several inches of midriff as she bent down to retrieve a book from the bottom shelf.

Aroused by the sight of so much bare flesh, he had an almost irresistible urge to ravish her on the spot; even with David Starkey looking on disapprovingly from his dust jacket.

Straightening up, she rifled through her chosen book,
The Diaries of John Dee
. “Here we are! Half way down page 46, an entry for 11 August 1582. The sorcerer receives a visit from ‘Mr Bacon, Mr Phillips of the Custom House.’”

This was enough to cool his ardour. “You know who Phillips is?” he said excitedly. “It’s only Thomas Phelippes, the cryptanalyst who sent Mary Queen of Scots to the block by cracking her codes. His name was originally Phillips and he was the son of a customs official. He and Bacon met in the English embassy in Paris and shared ideas on cipher. Phelippes was Secretary Walsingham’s right-hand man, a key figure in the Elizabethan secret service.”

“So England’s best two cryptographers just happen to drop in on Dr Dee,” she injected the name with a large dose of incredulity. “I wonder what they talked about.”

THE MORTLAKE MAGICIAN

The air went cold. Dr John Dee shivered inside his loose fitting robe as the medium gazed into the black obsidian glass on the Holy Table and saw the Archangel Michael sitting on the seat of perfection.

A slight noise came from the kitchen where Dee’s three-year-old son was playing.

“Shut up your door,” said Michael.

Dee looked around in annoyance. Everything had to be just so for a spirit action. He had shuttered the windows in his Mortlake cottage, abstained from sex, avoided gluttony, trimmed his pointed white beard, cut his nails, washed his body, donned a penitent’s gown and made invocations to the four points of the compass.

Michael spoke again through the cunning man. “What would you have?”

Dee’s face creased in concentration. “The wisdom and knowledge that will enable me to serve God to his glory,” he replied.

Having devoted his life to the pursuit of truth, now, in his fifties, he was seeking a short cut, a Northwest Passage to God’s presence.

The kneeling medium nodded sagely and held the glittering crystal to his forehead. They made an odd couple: the tall, slender magus who styled himself on Merlin and the small, hooded figure with the tortured face asking God to make his good creatures appear for the furtherance of the action.

“Praise the Lord,” the scryer intoned. “A second angel stands before me now. He is dressed in emerald green with a crescent moon on his tunic.”

Dee bent to whisper in the medium’s ear. “Is it Anael that you see?”

The disembodied voice sounded deeper. “I am one of the seven angels of Creation.”

There was a commotion in the kitchen. The family dog had stolen one of the ducks Dee’s wife was cooking for dinner and the shouting woke up the baby. The spirits departed.

The frustrated magician paid off his medium before hiding his Aztec mirror, crystal ball and wax seals in a wooden cupboard. He had learned to be discreet. Felonious magic was a capital offence. Dr Dee wished it could be otherwise. Devoutly carried out, angelic communication might benefit mankind. But he couldn’t do it himself. He was no soothsayer and had to pay for his mediums, many of whom were dishonest.  His wife Jane was particularly hard on his current choice. She said Edward Talbot was ‘the worst cozener of all,’ a convicted criminal who wore a cowl to conceal the fact that one of his ears had been cropped for coining.

Jane was busy in the kitchen preparing dinner. She was offering Francis Bacon and his friend spit-roasted duck, mutton in mustard, fried cakes of salted cod and strawberries in red wine. That should satisfy the healthiest of appetites. Her guests were less than a mile away. Having landed downstream they were walking along the towpath that separated the river from the asparagus fields.

Francis Bacon had dressed in a black grosgrain suit with tawny taffeta and now regretted it. His clothes were too heavy for the sultry late morning heat and he was sweating profusely into his shirt. His companion cut an unprepossessing figure in grey worsted. He was a small, thoughtful man with a wispy yellow beard and pockmarked face who looked at the world through very short-sighted eyes. The son of a customs inspector, Thomas Phillips had changed his name to Phelippes to seek distinction, only to find it in the dark arts of intelligence gathering where his ability as a codebreaker made him indispensible to Elizabeth’s spymaster Sir Francis Walsingham. They had met four years ago in the English embassy in Paris and it was their shared enthusiasm for cryptography that placed them on the winding path to Mortlake.

“How much further do we have to go?” Phelippes panted. Bacon could see the cottage now or rather its extension. Dee’s family home had been turned into an academy complete with laboratories and the largest library in England. Yet this place of learning was still a domestic dwelling. The doctor’s young wife was out in the garden feeding her chickens while the dog was barking loudly at something nearby. He clicked his teeth in disgust. A hooded figure was crouching behind the rose bushes.

The stalker was too busy with his padded codpiece to notice he too was being stalked. “Well met, Talbot.” Bacon smacked him so hard on the shoulder he fell into the bushes.

“Have you been showing the doctor the light of God or is there something else you want to show his charming wife?”

Talbot yelped with pain. Hearing the noise and looking up to see its cause, Jane blushed furiously and rushed indoors.

“The angels of the Lord will smite you for this insult, Mr Bacon,” said Talbot, bleeding from his thorny encounter. “You will know sickness and unhappiness.”

“That may well be so,” Bacon retorted, “but it will not be of your doing.”

Talbot brushed himself down; picked up his staff and limped away.

The sound of voices had brought Dr Dee to the door. “Was that my scryer you were talking to?”

Bacon managed a wry smile. “It was but a serpent, sir, slithering in the long grass.”

Dee waved a finger in reproof. “That serpent, as you call him, conjures so many spirits from the stone as to make my heart throb for further wisdom.”

Bacon looked at his mentor, torn between sparing the older man’s feelings and telling him the truth. “It is a miracle Talbot should be chosen to reveal the divine word of God.”

There was time for a guided tour of Dee’s laboratories before they ate. Here mysterious potions were being distilled from egg-shells and horse dung. It was widely rumoured that the doctor had already managed to convert pewter into silver. Dee knew what they were thinking. “As things change – seed into plant, egg into bird – it may be possible for one form of matter to change into another. Alchemy relies on the marriage of opposites.”

“You could be right,” Bacon replied, gagging on the foul stench rising from one of the stills. “But there is no proof of this, unless you can venture some. I find that clarity of expression is not a chief virtue among alchemical writers. They are dabblers who talk vaguely of calcinations, dissolutions and so forth.”

Dee nodded. “Language is a slippery beast at the best of times.” 

He showed them into a library reading room littered with quadrants, compasses, clocks and painted globes where the heavily laden bookshelves lacked any recognizable retrieval system.

“Can oceans belong to earthly powers?” Dee asked, giving one of his globes a spin.

“The answer should be no but the Treaty of Tortesillas would argue otherwise.”

The magus nodded in agreement. “Spain and Portugal claim dominion over the Atlantic Ocean. I dispute this sea seizure. The voyages of King Arthur and of the Welsh prince Madoc give our sovereign queen a claim to most of the sea coast of Atlantis.”

There was a gasp from Thomas Phelippes. “You are talking of an empire.”

“Without doubt,” Dee replied, a twinkle in his eye. “I plan to colonize Atlantis, setting up plantations there where people can enjoy the political and religious freedom denied them in Europe. But that lies in the future. Tell me, Master Phillips, how is Sir Francis Walsingham? I heard he broke his ankle chasing Catholics.”

“He is well enough, sir, though his physicians talk of the stone.”

“What about your brother, Francis, how does he fare in Marseilles?”

“I am sorry to say Anthony is in bed with a fever. But he is in good heart. In his last letter he expressed the wish that he might be cured in body, mind and purse.”

“Amen to that,” Dee muttered. “We are all kept short of money in Her Majesty’s service.”

There was a timid knock on the library door. Jane was summoning them to dinner.

As they drank her stewed broth Dee talked about religion. “I am sorely perplexed by one of the gospel teachings. Why did Jesus say that a family man couldn’t be a disciple?”

“Because it would weaken his resolve,” Bacon suggested.

Apart from the slopping sound of a servant rinsing glasses, the room fell silent. Jane Dee was the first to speak. “That being so, Master Bacon, what do you think of love between a man and a woman?”

“That it is impossible to love and to be wise. It is a passion that removes reason.”

“Love is blind too,” Jane added, staring pointedly at her husband.

The Mortlake magician stroked his long beard. “My family is my purest joy. Watching young Arthur conducting a childish marriage with Sir William Herbert’s three-year-old daughter and hearing them call one another ‘husband’ and ‘wife’ was such a pleasure.”

Jane gave Dee a look in which gratitude was mixed with exasperation.

“Perhaps it has escaped your notice, my love, but neither of our children is well. Arthur has quinsy and Katherine is troubled with her teething.”

“What think you, Francis, of Phaire’s remedy for teething gums?”

“You mean rubbing them with the brains of a hare? I think very little of it. Nor do I consider making children swallow their own dung, even when it is honey-coated, to be a cure for a sore throat.”

Dee began to talk about his latest field of study. He wanted to know whether a moving Earth could be reconciled with the Bible. Bacon disputed this, arguing that if the Earth moved around the Sun, as Copernicus claimed, then the Sun would have been God’s first creation.

“You are no lover of mathematics, Francis. That much is clear.”

“The only way to understand God’s works is by making measurements and collecting evidence for, as Paracelsus says, we must turn the leaves that form nature’s codex.”

“Yet mathematics has breathed life into the dry bones of nature and lies at the very heart of our culture,” said Dee picking a tattered book off the stepped buffet. “Here is a very old riddle for you to resolve.”

8 is my true love

Do before 9

Put thereto 5

So well it will beseem

18 twice told

20 between

Phelippes stopped picking his teeth with a duck bone and squinted at the small print. “The answer is ‘Jesus’,” he said. “The verse tells us to put 8 before 9 and to follow this with 5, 18, 20 and 18 again. In our twenty-four letter alphabet H is the eighth letter but, in cipher, it is often a null, an omitted letter. The remaining numbers give us J – E – S – U – S.”

“Then why bother with the H in the first place?” Francis asked.