The Queen's Cipher (16 page)

“A good question,” said Dee. “Perhaps Master Phillips can enlighten us.”

“The letter value of ‘Jesus’ is 70 but with the extraneous H it becomes 78 and ...”

“And 78 is the sacred number of the Christian Cabala,” Dee interrupted. “There are 78 cards in a Tarot pack.”

Jane heard this with a mounting sense of horror. What if there was no Heaven, only a spilled deck of cards. Turning to her husband for comfort she saw his lips were moving. He seemed to be counting.

“God’s teeth, Francis, you are truly the chosen one. ‘Francis’ adds up to 67 and ‘Bacon’ to 33. Therefore, the letter value of your full name is 100, which has been the perfect number since the Egyptians discovered mathematics and the Greeks refined it. It also means your name can be bound by a single letter – the Roman numeral C.”

His young protege looked inordinately pleased but said nothing. Phelippes did some hasty arithmetic and was disappointed to discover that his newly acquired surname added up to 101.

“Surely your name can also be expressed by a single letter, Dr Dee,” he wanted to know.

“Aye, phonetically that is so. I use the Greek letter Delta as a kind of shorthand.”

“I believe Queen Elizabeth has a code number for you, has she not?”

“She calls me 007 – a pair of eyes joined together by the cabalistic number 7.”

“Men say you are her chief intelligencer.”

“I have done some service in the past.”

“May we speak of that now?” Phelippes squinted at the magician. “These are dangerous times and I am anxious to know why Sir Francis Walsingham brought me all the way from Bourges to see you.”

Dee gave the short-sighted agent an approving nod. “Ah yes, you have heard of Abbot Trithemius I suppose and of his magical book of ciphers I acquired some twenty years since.”

“You found ciphers in the first two books of
Steganographia
but concluded the third one was pure magic based, I believe, on the seven planets and twenty-one spirits.”

“Yes, and I was wrong. I put the book aside and scarcely looked at it again until last March when the blood red skies seemed to presage an extraordinary happening in the heavens.”

“You speak of the Fiery Trigon, I presume.”

“Just so, Saturn and Jupiter are about to enter the cycle of transformation in the sign of Aries which has only happened six times since the Creation, each a turning point in the history of mankind. This will be the seventh and greatest conjunction, a momentous event.”

“What has this to do with Trithemius’
Steganographia
?”

“Patience, Francis, I will come to that anon. The appearance of blazing stars in the sky was held to be an ill omen and I was summoned to court by an unusually nervous queen. I told Elizabeth what she wanted to hear, namely, that the Great Conjunction was an astrological phenomenon, not a sign of God’s wrath. But I was making an assumption and had no way of knowing whether it was correct. Acting on a whim, I re-read the third book of Steganographia and was struck by the lengthy tables of data concerning the planetary motions of Saturn. Why had the abbot devoted so much space to these obscure calculations? Could they have a bearing on the impending Apocalypse? That was how I stumbled across his cleverest invention.”

Hunched in rapt attention, Phelippes was like a child listening to a fairy story.

“These numerical tables were laid out vertically in columns with the first 160 numbers divided into four blocks of forty numbers by non-numerical signs. I dislike coincidences. So I turned these columns into rows of forty and observed that the number in the top row was always 25 less than the one below it. What this illustrated was a four-fold number alphabet with multiple entry points.”

Phelippes gave a sigh of pleasure. He had a new toy to play with. “This is far better than current number-letter substitution ciphers in that complexity is achieved through a substitution determined by a cipher key that isn’t immediately apparent. The key may be hidden in the letter’s date, determined by its grammar, concealed in a code number or even found in an entirely separate book. The possibilities are endless.”

“We live in an age of progress,” Bacon said. “But the hour is late and we have trespassed too long on your generosity.”

But Dr Dee would not hear of their departure. He wanted to tell them about his plans to colonise the northern part of Atlantis, called Novus Orbis. He had gone into partnership with the explorer Sir Humphrey Gilbert and his half-brother Sir Walter Raleigh. They shared his sense of mission. It was Britain’s national destiny to cross the Atlantic and settle this huge land mass.  “A breath of fresh hope blows on us from the new continent,” he told them. “It is the wind of change that will sweep away tyranny and intolerance.”

25 APRIL 2014

Milton Cleaver never felt entirely at ease in Washington DC: too many stirring slogans and in-your-face classical buildings, too much pomp and circumstance. It was, as Charles Dickens once said, a city of magnificent intentions. What had once been a riverside marsh was now the self-important capital of American democracy.

How ironic, Milton thought, that a freedom-loving country should be given its libertarian institutions by a political elite operating within a secret society. For that was what had happened. Of the fifty six signatories of the Declaration of Independence a third were thought to be Freemasons, as were half the generals in the Continental Army; George Washington took the presidential oath of office on a Masonic bible and wore a Masonic apron to dedicate the Capitol building while a group of Masons from Georgetown laid the cornerstone for the White House; the country’s Great Seal was awash with Masonic symbolism and even its dollar bills were engraved with an all-seeing eye, a decapitated pyramid and a six-pointed star. Not that Milton objected to Masonry. It was democracy he had doubts about.

‘Human progress is our cause, liberty of thought our supreme wish, freedom of conscience our mission and the guarantee of equal rights to all people everywhere our ultimate goal.’ Milton could recite these lines by heart but they were not the words of Jefferson or Franklin, nor those of any other signatory of the Declaration of Independence. They had been written, apparently in the seventeenth century, by a mysterious gathering of European free thinkers called the Rosicrucians and all Milton knew about them was that their idealistic beliefs had been incorporated into the creed of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite, of which he was an increasingly prominent member.

He had learned about Freemasonry from his father, joining the Grand Masonic Lodge in New York more out of filial respect than any real interest in the craft. It was only when he came to sit on a federal agency supporting the arts that he realized how socially advantageous it was to be a Master Mason. For a thousand dollars Milton had furthered his Masonic education by purchasing all the higher degrees up to and including the Thirty-Second and was now awaiting confirmation as an honorary member of the highest degree of all, the Thirty-Third. The ceremony recognizing his new status was scheduled for five o’clock in Washington’s House of the Temple.

Slinging his duffle-bag over his shoulder Milton paid off his cab and moved towards the silhouetted outline of the capital’s weirdest building. His driver called it the Martian embassy and, if not from another planet, it certainly belonged to a different age. Standing on the east side of 16th Street Northwest, between R and S Streets, the House of the Temple was an incredibly large study in sacred geometry – a triangle on top of a square. With its limestone façade supported by thirty-three Ionic columns, each thirty-three feet high, and a massive bronze door guarded by a pair of enormous sphinxes symbolizing power and wisdom, the Temple was of truly epic proportions, reminiscent of the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.

In the shadow of this bizarre edifice immaculately dressed men carrying small cases and travel bags were spilling out of black limousines and climbing up the four flights of steps to the main entrance. Joining them inside, Milton crossed a marble floored atrium flanked by green granite columns and headed up the staircase to the Temple Room where the Sovereign Grand Commander and his Supreme Council were waiting to greet their guests. Today’s list of celebrities included past Presidents of the United States, astronauts and film stars.

Masonic enthusiasts considered the Temple Room to be an awe-inspiring sight but Milton thought it a little vulgar. The chamber was geometrically square with tiered seating around its perimeter carved out of Russian walnut and upholstered in brown pigskin. The floor was of polished black marble with a huge black marble altar centrally placed beneath a soaring polygonal dome. The hundred feet high dome represented the vault of Heaven. This, too, was supposed to be symbolic but, as one of the few scholars in the Rite, he had little time for this self-serving imagery. A secret society that was hazy about its own history could hardly claim to be enlightened.

Milton was swapping jokes with a Supreme Court judge when the Sovereign Grand Commander sidled up and tapped him on the shoulder. Wearing his white cap and sash and a lot of Masonic insignia, he looked like a small man in fancy dress. Not that Elliott Manley was a mere functionary, far from it. As Director of the Folger Shakespeare Library he ran a world class research centre but, for all that, he was physically unprepossessing with receding hair, bulging eyes and a squeaky voice.

“I wonder if I might have a word, Milton,” he said. “It’s about today’s initiation ceremony. As you know, it’s an exemplified event in which one candidate represents the others. In recognition of your achievements in the arts, we are asking you to play the lead role in our ritual. That’s if you agree.”

Milton tried not to look too pleased. He enjoyed being centre stage. “Glad to help in any way I can, Worshipful Master.”

“Then you’d better go off and get changed. George will show you the ropes.”

He would later realize the irony in this remark. By then George, who looked and behaved like a night club bouncer, had persuaded him to take off his jacket, shoes and socks, roll up his left pant leg to the knee, don a long black robe, have a cable-tow tied around his neck and be led like a prize bull to market.

The room he was taken into was eerie and unsettling with serpents writhing on its walls and twinkling lights set in the dark blue ceiling to resemble the sky at night. There was a sudden hush as the ceremony began.

“What time is it?” asked the Grand Commander.

“It is the time of dawn and of the rebirth of the people,” replied one of his subordinates.

“What is the symbol of rebirth?”

“The mystic rose, placed on a cross.”

Standing in the shadows, waiting to perform his part in this ritual, Milton nodded in recognition. The rose and the cross were Rosicrucian emblems for man’s spiritual awakening. He already possessed the philosophical degree of the Rose Croix which, he had been told, emphasized the fact that the only lasting temple was in the human heart.

The Grand Commander was speaking. “Great Ceremonial Master,” he said in his piping voice, “will you make your way to the forecourt of the Temple and fulfil your duties?”

The Ceremonial Master pulled on the rope to drag Milton forward. By now he had worked out what was in store. His role in the Masonic theatre was that of the penitent who would be marched around the Temple in search of truth and self-knowledge that could only be earned when the soul was cleansed of impure thoughts and deeds. It was, in other words, ritual humiliation. A punishment dreamed up for him by Elliott Manley.

“Why are these Brothers bonded by these cords?” asked a sword-bearing elder.

“They are Knights Kadosh and princes of the Royal Secret, who desire to be initiated into the secrets of the Thirty-Third Degree. They are burdened with chains because they represent the people who are being suppressed spiritually or by temporary tyranny, the human heart that paralyzes despotism, the soul that strives for truth.”

“Why are the bands that surround them so frail that even a child could break them?”

“To teach them that people are merely weak because they do not know their strength; that they are slaves because they do not have the courage to be free.”

As he listened to all this mumbo-jumbo Milton grinned cynically. What must once have been a serious affirmation of faith in an age of political and religious oppression was now so distorted as to sound ridiculous.

The smile left his face when his rope was yanked and he was led to the altar by two men with swords and asked to kiss the book of his religion. He chose the King James Bible. If this stood for religious freedom why offer it at sword point.

After the other initiates had joined him in swearing allegiance to the Supreme Council of the Thirty-Third Degree he was once again picked out for special treatment. The Ceremonial Master handed him a human skull with wine in it. In drinking from this vessel he was required to repeat the words, “May this wine I now drink become a deadly poison to me, as the hemlock juice drunk by Socrates, should I ever knowingly or willfully violate my oath of duty.” 

Milton emptied the skull and, playing to the gallery, smacked his lips in satisfaction. The worst was surely over but not a bit of it. A skeleton sprang from the shadows to grip him in a bear hug. Caught in this ghostly embrace he and his fellow candidates were told to chant, “And may these cold arms forever encircle me should I ever knowingly or willfully violate the same.”

“Welcome, you are one of us now.” The voice came from inside the skeleton costume. It was Brother George, the Masonic heavy.

Outside, an hour later, Milton and Elliott Manley were walking through West Potomac Park. Milton shielded his eyes from the late afternoon sun. “What were we doing back there?” he asked.

Taken aback by the question, Manley stopped in his tracks. “Masonry is a chamber of imagery,” he replied defensively.

“But does it have to be a damned pantomime?”

“Surely I don’t have to teach a Shakespeare scholar the value of symbolism? Every act in a Masonic lodge is symbolic. That is how Masonry veils, and yet reveals, the truth it seeks to teach to such as have eyes to see and are ready to receive it.”