The Queen's Cipher (22 page)

He leafed impatiently through the volume’s many pages until, finally, he came across a form of hidden messaging that only appeared when the surface text was squared and each letter in the passage given its own place in the grid. And following this so-called cipher square was a simple number alphabet which was said to be its
clavis
or key.

“We have to assume,” said Freddie, “that Strachan meant us to find this and draw the following inferences: firstly, that the cipher square and the number alphabet are linked together and, secondly, that any hidden message has a bearing on the Shakespeare authorship.”

“But where does St Matthew’s Gospel come into this?” Sam asked.

“Damned if I know.” He rushed out of the room and returned, moments later, carrying a Bible. “Then Judas, which had betrayed him, when he saw that he was condemned, repented himself, and brought again the thirty pieces of silver to the chief priests and elders.” Chapter 27, Verse 3 described a dramatic moment in the Christian story but was hardly a clue to anything else.

Freddie snapped his fingers. “We’re barking up the wrong tree. It’s nothing to do with the New Testament. The man we’re after isn’t St Matthew but Bacon’s friend, Tobie Matthew, the Archbishop of York’s Catholic son, although I don’t know what ‘27.3’ means.”

Sam folded up her neatly ironed clothes. “Could it be a date on a letter?”

“That’s a good idea.” He bent down and retrieved a hardback copy of Daphne du Maurier’s
The Winding Stair
from under the kitchen table. “Daphne is our best bet. She wasn’t just a brilliant novelist; she also wrote two biographies of Francis Bacon. This one deals with his political career.”

The index listed several letters to Matthew, most of them undated. However, late in Bacon’s career, on 27 March 1622, he had written, ‘If on your repair to the court, whereof I am right glad, you have any speech with the Marquis of me, I pray place the alphabet, as you can do it right well, in a frame to express my love faithful and ardent towards him.’

Freddie’s jaw tightened. “He’s telling Matthew to use the cipher square.”

Sam wasn’t so sure. “Not necessarily. The phrase about placing the alphabet in a frame might just be a high-flown way of asking Matthew to be eloquent on his behalf.”

There was some strength to her argument, he conceded, but Matthew was a go-between, not a negotiator. Besides which Bacon’s words were significant. A ‘frame’ was both a square and an arrangement of words, and, according to Bacon’s Victorian biographer Spedding, he frequently called ciphers ‘alphabets’ as did his uncle Lord Burghley who once ordered a Catholic plotter to be racked in the Tower to discover the key to his ‘alphabet’ or cipher.

“Okay,” she said, “but why all the secrecy?” 

“Because he was in disgrace,” he replied. “His dazzling political career was over. A year earlier Bacon had been both Lord Keeper and Lord Chancellor, allowed to sit in the Lords and the Commons at the same time – the only politician ever to achieve this distinction. Then the roof fell in.”

In 1621 Bacon’s political enemies brought corruption charges against him and James I ordered him to plead guilty. He was banned from holding any state office, banished from the verge of court, fined the huge sum of £40,000 – equivalent to twelve million in today’s money – and imprisoned in the Tower. On his release he received a pardon which would only be signed when he relinquished the lease on his London home, York House, to the Marquis of Buckingham who was James’ current favourite. In other words, Bacon was being blackmailed and, as he was unable to deal directly with Buckingham, he needed an intermediary. His old friend Sir Tobie Matthew was back in favour at court so he had asked him to intercede on his behalf.

“Isn’t that what I just said?” Sam looked confused.

“No, you don’t understand. Bacon’s letter to Matthew already contained a cipher square. He’s asking his friend to decrypt the hidden message and pass it on to Buckingham.”

She thought about this for a while. “The cipher square has a fundamental weakness, particularly when the surface text is only a handwritten note. It’s difficult to keep it coherent when you are trying to jockey letters into the right places to create a secret message. Now here’s the thing. If Trithemius was such a cryptographic genius, surely he’d have solved this problem.”

“So what are we looking for?” 

Code-breaking requires intuition, sudden flashes of insight from the subconscious, but it also needs a lot of common sense. “Pattern recognition,” Sam replied calmly, “something that can act as a repeatable spacing device in a printed text or handwritten letter without arousing suspicion. And this too should be in here.”

She skimmed through the fading leaves of Selenus’ cipher manual, grunting appreciatively whenever she encountered a particularly ingenious system.

“This could be it,” she said in a tight voice. In Book 6, Chapter 24, Selenus demonstrated how long terminals could be used to help create cipher squares.

By elongating the last letter of certain words an encipherer could adjust the plaintext to accommodate his hidden message. To illustrate the practice, a number of Latin words ending in a, e and m had been extended by half an inch or more.

A tingle of excitement ran down Freddie’s spine. “We’re onto something here,” he insisted. “Find these stylistic squiggles in a passage of print and you are probably looking at a cipher square. Now, at the risk of sounding absolutely mad, I think we should look for them in the
First Folio
.”

He left her open-mouthed as he fetched a battered facsimile of
Mr William Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories & Tragedies
from the breakfast bar and dropped it on the kitchen table with a resounding thwack. “The moment of truth,” he said with a wry smile as he flicked through the book’s early pages. It arrived sooner than he had expected.

“How on earth can we have missed this?” he said.

She found herself peering at the Dedicatory Epistle to the Earl of Pembroke and his brother, the Earl of Montgomery.

It contained no fewer than fifteen elongated words. But that wasn’t all. Using a variety of different typefaces, the printers had contrived to split up, hyphenate, misspell or miss out words altogether in what were, politically speaking, the most important pages in the entire volume. Of course mistakes were commonplace in printing but these manifold errors had one thing in common: they could all be cryptic spacing devices. Sam had looked at the
Folio
dedication countless times without noticing any of these peculiarities. Familiarity had induced blindness.

“Are these long terminals anywhere else in the book?” she wanted to know.

It took an hour to answer her question. The long squiggles appeared in the Dedication and nowhere else, which strengthened the suspicion that they’d been put there for a purpose.

Many people believe in conspiracy theories, if only to make their mundane lives more exciting, but Sam was not among them. “Surely the First Folio is the last place you’d look for a cipher square,” she said tartly. “This is the book in which Ben Jonson calls Shakespeare his ‘beloved’ author and identifies him as the ‘Sweet Swan of Avon.’”

“Ah, but was Ben telling the whole truth?”

Sam looked at him as if he had taken leave of his senses.

“That was what he thought in 1623,” he explained, “but not earlier on.”

THE DEVIL AND ST DUNSTAN

Upstairs in the Apollo Room, the royal poet was holding court. Sitting on a specially strengthened throne, surrounded by his young literary acolytes, Ben Jonson had embarked on one of his stories.

“I tell you Brome, it is safer to sup here than risk going to one of those poxy inns in Cheapside. Only last month, I was venturing downstairs in the Feathers when my foot slipped on a loose step and down I tumbled, landing against a door that burst open under my weight to reveal gentlemen quaffing canary. Recovering my composure, I said ‘My masters, since I have had the singular good fortune to land in your company, I will drink with you before I go.’ Which goes to show that pride can come after a fall, as well as before it.”

When the laughter had died down, Jonson beckoned a nervous looking youth to come forward. “Tonight, I want to introduce you to Thomas Randolph, a scholarship boy from my old school of Westminster, who has promised to entertain us with verses supporting the claims of sack against small beer.”

Randolph was big for his age and round-shouldered with a prominent upper lip from which beads of perspiration were dripping like early morning dew.

“We care not for money, riches or wealth; Old sack is our money, old sack is our health,” he recited in a faltering high pitched voice not yet fully broken. The next lines were lost as his audience banged the tables in appreciation. “Give us then a cup of liquor; fill it up unto the brim. For then, methinks, my wits grow quicker, when my brains in liquor swim.”

The applause was deafening and a chair pulled out for the poetic stripling. “Well done, my boy, come sit with us.” Jonson patted his huge belly and gave the hero-worshipping youth a broad wink.

He could afford to be magnanimous. He had come a long way since his days as an apprentice bricklayer. Through sheer ability he had risen to be a celebrated man of letters whose plays filled the London theatres and whose poetry had been rewarded with the laureate crown. On top of which he was a hard-drinking jester with an ego as big as his mountainous body. His long nose and craggy features were an indispensable part of the city’s tavern life and here, in the Apollo Room at the Devil and St Dunstan, he presided over weekly meetings of his literary drinking club, the so-called ‘Tribe of Ben’, whose laws of feasting were engraved over the mantelpiece.

“Horace!” Ben exclaimed to no one in particular, hiccupping over the word.

“
Ecce Homo
! What a writer.”

What made this larger than life character even more remarkable was his love of the classics, styling both his poetry and prose on the great Greek and Roman writers.

“
Nunc est bibendum
!
Carpe diem
! Seize the day, my sons.”

The tribe chorused its agreement. Even Robert Herrick nodded sagely.

There were those, not all ill educated, not all fools, who said that Latin was a dead language, a thing of the past, sterile and unyielding, but what did they know. Ben loved Latin’s grammar, its rules, its vocabulary, its irregularities, its complexities and, above all, its literature. He had begun to compose his own verses at the age of six, iambic pentameters at first, then hexameters, followed by daring experiments with rhyme and metre.

Latin had even saved his life. An ability to recite from the Vulgate allowed him to cheat the hangman’s noose after he had been found guilty of murdering an actor in a duel. The common law escape route from execution had been a godsend. Simply by reading from the Bible – they called it the ‘neck verse’ in Marshalsea prison – he had earned his release. Not that he had got off scot-free. He looked at the thumb that had been branded with a hot iron in open court and remembered the blinding pain.

That had been more than twenty years ago. The scrawny youth with the hungry face was no more than a fond memory. Ah me, he thought,
tempus fugit
. What was that line young Herrick had written?
Gather ye rosebuds while ye may, Old Time is still a-flying.