The Queen's Cipher (2 page)

Slumped in his seat pretending to listen to Dame Julia, Freddie was acutely aware of his attractive neighbour. Out of the corner of his concupiscent eye, he guessed her to be about thirty with the kind of willowy figure that had probably been earned by dieting and regular workouts. A second more prolonged glance added stylishly cut strawberry blonde hair, blue eyes and a swan-like neck to the developing picture. No wedding ring however.

Then the unthinkable happened. Dame Julia cracked a joke. The golden-haired girl smiled broadly, revealing gleaming white teeth. Either there was something special about American water or thousands of dollars had been spent in the orthodontist’s chair. Yet after her rather flirty sheep quotation she appeared to have forgotten Freddie’s existence as she peered anxiously at the notes on her lap, sucking a pencil as she did so. This disappointed rather than surprised him. With his strong but uneven features and unruly black hair, he was hardly a catch for such a beautiful girl.

Eventually Dame Julia sat down and Milton Cleaver returned to the microphone, waving to his audience like a game show host. “Ladies and gentlemen, the honour of presenting the first paper falls to someone who was once a student of mine. Now she is a Shakespeare scholar in her own right. I call upon Doctor Samantha Dilworth, Assistant Professor in Gender Politics at Mather University, to give us ‘Shakespeare and the Cult of Love.’”

To Freddie’s surprise it was the young blonde woman who rose to her feet and tottered to the rostrum on high heels. Her hands were shaking as she put her notes on the podium. She seemed disarmingly nervous. The chairman gave her a reassuring pat on the forearm. Noticing the physical contact, Freddie felt a stab of jealousy. And he was not alone in this. Judging by their expressions, many male delegates seemed to be wondering what this fragrant creature had done to deserve such a distinction.

With the hall waiting to pass judgement on her, Dr Dilworth cleared her throat. “When Queen Elizabeth died she left a wardrobe of two thousand dresses behind her. They were the costumes she wore as leading lady in a courtly drama that ran for forty-five years.”

Freddie closed his eyes and let her words roll over him. The American girl was talking about how Elizabeth dealt with the misogyny of her male courtiers. It was quite a good line to take. Not that Queen Bess was ever a women’s libber, not in a million years. She had done nothing for the sisterhood. In her day women were held to be not only physically weaker than men but morally and intellectually inferior. They had, as one poet put it, ‘fruitful wombs but barren brains.’ Their place was in the home as a dutiful wife or faithful servant, unless, of course, they were of the blood royal.

By the time he caught up with her lecture Dr Dilworth was explaining how a succession of female heads of state in Europe led to changes in the rules of chess to make the queen the strongest piece on the board. Men, she was saying in her slightly clipped New England accent, worshipped power, even when it wore a dress. Queen Elizabeth’s courtiers had been made to bow before her and shower her with compliments drawn from the period’s most passionate poetry. “Elizabeth was a terrible flirt. But she never let her relationships go beyond that. You might say she was a bit of a cock-teaser.”

There was a sharp intake of breath in the hall followed by a stunned silence that was broken by an urgent question from a Central European professor of semiotics. “What is cock-teaser, please?” he asked an equally mystified Chinese delegate. Freddie found this disparaging throwaway line rather cheap. It was an obvious attempt to shock the sensibilities of a staid, largely menopausal audience that would now consider her meretricious. And perhaps they were right to do so. She was, after all, a protégé of Milton Cleaver and that glitzy school of American scholarship.

“And so to Shakespeare,” Dr Dilworth exclaimed. “How does William fit into the artificial world of the Elizabethan court? The answer is he never did and yet he had a huge impact on how women were perceived from that time onwards. Admittedly, his family history hardly suggests a belief in female emancipation. Shakespeare’s mother could not write and there is no evidence his wife or two daughters could do more than make their marks. But like many famous men, Shakespeare should not be judged by how he behaved at home.”

Freddie was struck by a terrible thought. It was entirely possible that the women in Shakespeare’s life never read a word he wrote.

“Where Shakespeare differs from his contemporaries is in his admiration for the female intellect. Many of his heroines are almost as clever and manipulative as Elizabeth herself. Shakespeare knew women were not short of intelligence, merely worse educated. What they lacked was opportunity and he gave them a dramatic platform on which they could shine.”

She was talking about democracy and no one had a better right to do so. For all its imperfections, the United States believed in individual freedom and practised open government. Dr Dilworth stood for liberty and female emancipation and if that was sexual stereotyping, he really didn’t care.

He sat in rapt attention as she wandered around the conference stage offering textual analysis. There was nothing frail or submissive about witty, resourceful heroines like Portia, Helena or Beatrice. “The playwright clearly studied the psychology of his royal patron and gave his female characters some of her inner strength. This was Shakespeare’s homage to Elizabeth and his gift to us too. It is a noble legacy.”

As she left the lectern Freddie rose to his feet to lead the clapping and, to his relief, other delegates followed suit. He could only hope their motives were purer than his own.

Dr Dilworth’s departure from the stage marked the end of the opening session and, as delegates began to drift out of the conference hall, he caught sight of Dame Julia Walker-Roberts bearing down on him. For some reason he couldn’t fathom, Oxford’s dragon lady had a soft spot for him.

“Ah, there you are, Freddie,” she said. “Professor Cleaver is hosting a cocktail party in the Sanmicheli Suite and I would like you to accompany me.”

It was more of a summons than an invitation.

“Nothing would give me greater pleasure, Dame Julia.” Freddie bowed his head, acting out the unfamiliar role of the gallant.

An hour later he was standing on his own, empty champagne flute in hand, feeling sorry for himself as he watched his distinguished partner networking with the Chinese delegation. He had little small talk at the best of times and none at all in Mandarin.

A tinkling laugh carried across the room and there she was looking tanned, blonde and utterly gorgeous, surrounded by elderly male admirers. Dr Dilworth must have sensed his presence because she quickly excused herself and came towards him. The prospect of actually meeting her made his throat go dry. He had always been awkward around girls, even when they appeared to fancy him.

“Hi, I’m Sam,” she said establishing eye contact. He could smell her perfume: something expensive, he supposed.

“Hello, I’m Freddie Brett.” His breath was high and tight inside his chest.

“Yes, I know who you are.” Beneath her long eyelashes she was already assessing him.

“I suppose you h-heard I shopped my tutor.”

“Sure, did you realise the consequences?”

In truth he hadn’t stopped to think. The similarities had been too extensive. Whole paragraphs had been lifted, give or take a synonym or two, and most of his original ideas paraphrased. It was kill or be killed.

“I had to do it or I wouldn’t have got my doctorate.”

What had caused the trouble was a dissertation in which Freddie claimed that Hamlet was a sensitive thinker caught between two courses of action, murder and suicide, knowing that each led to the sacrifice of his immortal soul. He had shown an early draft to his supervising tutor Professor Cartwright who, eight months later, published a book called
The Poisoned Mind
advancing exactly the same thesis. When Freddie complained, his college conducted an internal inquiry which led to Cartwright being dismissed to howls of outrage from his many friends in the literary fraternity.

Then the press got wind of it. Seizing his opportunity, Cartwright played on red-top hatred of students by telling reporters about a grave miscarriage of justice in which an ambitious graduate had stolen his professor’s ideas before accusing him of plagiarism. Caring not a jot for the truth, the paparazzi had hounded Freddie, picturing him ‘scurrying off in shame.’ Humiliated by the distorted revelations and punchy headlines of the tabloid coverage, he had blockaded himself in his flat until, suddenly, the scandal went away leaving its protagonists to get on with their lives. Cartwright took a job as a television presenter while Beaufort College awarded Freddie a doctorate and a research fellowship. But this second skirmish with the mass media left its mark on him. Once again he had been stripped bare and misrepresented, making it difficult for him to adjust to other people or, more precisely, to what he believed they saw in him.

It was time to change the subject. “I thought your paper was absolutely first-rate.”

She raised an eyebrow in what seemed like a wary gesture. Then her face relaxed. “You wouldn’t be flirting with me, would you Dr Brett?”

He could feel the heat rushing to his face. “No, honestly, I thought you were t-terrific.”

Dr Dilworth looked pleased. “Tell me about Oxford. What does a British Research Fellow do?”

“Not a lot. It’s a temporary academic post which involves a certain amount of teaching but most of your time is supposed to be spent on research.”

“And what are you working on at the moment?”

“Actually I’m between projects.”

Freddie fell silent. Finding something new to say about Shakespeare was like a coal miner chipping away at a worked out seam. Not that anyone else in the Sanmecheli Suite seemed to share his opinion. The room was positively buzzing with delegates boasting about their achievements.

“Shall we wander around a bit,” she suggested. “Find out what’s going down.”

They moved around the room, eavesdropping on what their colleagues were saying. A Scottish professor was holding forth on Shakespeare and national identity only to have his carefully crafted argument interrupted by someone from Azerbaijan who claimed the Bard’s republicanism transcended state borders. Further off, a gaggle of Latin American academics were debating the principles of proportionality and balance in drama while a bearded man in a black beret raised his voice to whip up support for his internationally acclaimed ‘Shakespeare behind Bars’ programme.

“Is that what I think it is?” Freddie whispered.

“Sure, it’s a Kentucky prison theatre group whose year-long tour with
The Tempest
was turned into an experimental television documentary in which actual prisoners were allowed to cast themselves in the roles best reflecting their personal history and crimes.”

“I rather like the idea,” he said. “I believe in storytelling.”

“And what kind of stories do you tell?”

“Oh, they are mainly about historical figures. It’s revisionism really. I don’t believe there is any single, lasting truth about past events and their meaning. It’s a question of how you join up the dots.”

Dr Dilworth raised her eyebrows. “I don’t follow that.”

“Historical evidence is fragmentary. In putting the pieces together, professional scholars tend to ignore oral history and concentrate on the written record. Yet the human memory is story-based, not data-based. History is the interaction of people in their social context and, to understand that, you need to know their personal stories, what makes them tick. It’s an observational science.”

“That’s interesting,” she said in response to his tirade, “you used the present tense. Do you turn these powers of observation on the people you meet?”

“Sometimes, but I’m no Sherlock Holmes.”

The beautiful American seemed to be studying him through her champagne flute. “What, I wonder, have you discovered about me.”

It was a challenge he couldn’t ignore. “That you come from New England, probably somewhere near Hartford in Connecticut; that you’ve had many boyfriends but have never got engaged; and you are thinking seriously about laser surgery to correct your short-sightedness.”

There was a stunned silence. Dr Dilworth opened her mouth but said nothing.

“Then there’s your recent skiing accident,” he added, warming to the task.

“How could you possibly know about that?” she asked

“That’s easy. There’s swelling on your right thumb and the ligament between the thumb and the index finger is obviously tender. That’s why you are grasping your glass in your left hand.”

“How do you know I did this skiing,” she persisted.

“I don’t for sure, but such an injury occurs when a skier holds on to the ski pole during a fall. The pole gets caught in the snow and acts as a lever which forces the thumb into an extended position and this puts a lot of stress on the ligament.”

“Spot on,” she said admiringly. “People were stoned to death in the Old Testament for this kind of sorcery.”

Dr Dilworth fingered the webbing between her thumb and forefinger. “What about the rest of your character study? How did you know about the laser treatment?”

“I saw the way you were squinting at your audience when you were on the conference podium and I also noticed that you have big blue eyes and, forgive me for saying this, large eyes may be beautiful but they can also be a weakness. Do you want to know why?”

“I’ve a feeling you are going to tell me anyway.”

“If the eyeball grows too large the light focuses in front of the retina, rather than on it and this causes ...”

“Myopia,” she interjected. “Distant objects appear blurred. I’ve needed spectacles for years but I’m too vain to wear them. I guess you worked out I’d never been engaged from the smooth tan on my ring finger but I don’t understand how you knew where I grew up. For the record, it’s a town called Wethersfield just south of Hartford on the Connecticut River and I didn’t think I’d got much of an accent.”

“It’s quite subtle but in mentioning my research fellowship you dropped the ‘t’ in ‘British’. This is called a glottal stop and it’s a common feature of the slightly flat New England dialect in the Hartford region. But what confirmed my impression was the nutmeg bracelet on your wrist. People from Connecticut are nicknamed ‘Nutmeggers’ although I’ve no idea why.”