The Queen's Cipher (3 page)

“May I interrupt?” They had now been joined by a smiling Milton Cleaver.

“Just wanted a word with my former student,” he said, putting a protective arm around Sam’s shoulder. “And I find her with the notorious Dr Brett.”

Freddie rose to the bait. “Really, so you think what I did was wrong?”

“Seeing you ask, yes. You have no respect for authority and you destroyed a good man’s career.”

The damage done, Cleaver looked to make his exit. “Will you excuse me,” he murmured. “That’s the Chilean ambassador over there. He’s sponsoring the glove puppeteers who are performing this weekend.”

Freddie grabbed hold of Cleaver’s immaculate sleeve. “Fuck the glove puppets,” he snarled. “You and Cartwright had a cosy relationship, didn’t you? He scratched your back and you scratched his, favourably reviewing one another’s books.”

Cleaver’s eyes narrowed. “That’s an outrageous thing to say. You are a real troublemaker Brett. You wouldn’t even be at this cocktail party if I had my way.”

“Well, there’s a first! The mighty Milton Cleaver can’t even control his own guest list.”

By now their raised voices were the only ones in the room as the other guests stopped talking in order to overhear the heated exchange. “You don’t really belong anywhere, do you Brett? You’re only too willing to bite the hand that feeds you.”

“You’ve got that wrong, Cleaver. I revere universities, but not professorial chairs held by people like you. You and your hangers-on are little more than a mutual admiration society.”

“At least we’ve all achieved something in our careers which is more than you’ll ever be able to say, you impertinent English half-wit!”  

“That’s enough, Milton!” Dame Julia had joined them, her eyes like gimlets. “Freddie is my guest and if you insult him, you insult me too.”

Milton Cleaver’s jaw tightened. “You’ve got strange friends; that’s all I can say.”

Dame Julia watched his receding back before departing in the opposite direction with a curt nod of her head.

“I’m awfully sorry,” Dr Dilworth said. “I’ve never known him be so rude.”

“No, it was my fault. There’s a knack to keeping quiet but I’ve never mastered it.”

“But you see what I’m up against.” Freddie spoke like a drowning man rejecting rescue. “They will never forgive me for Cartwright.”

There was a long silence which she did not attempt to fill. A waiter appeared carrying a tray of canapés. Grateful for the distraction, they grabbed a plate of mushroom vol au vents.

As they ate, she inquired after his family. He gave her a subdued answer about growing up in the medieval wool town of Lavenham where his father had been the Anglican rector. This reminded her of a piece of trivia. The last son of a Suffolk clergyman to be a whistleblower was the so-called Witchfinder General Matthew Hopkins.

“Didn’t Hopkins burn a woman in your market square?” she asked.

“No, that only happened in the Vincent Price movie although Hopkins did devise a new way of torturing women called witch-pricking.”

Sam segued from this barbaric custom into literary celebrity. As soon as heretical ideas appeared in print, she said, the authorities began to clamp down on authors. Unable to punish words or ideas, they chose to rack their creator. Torture was the first form of censorship; a way of concealing the truth.

“That’s the trouble with history, don’t you think,” said Freddie. “It’s like a shipwreck that has sunk out of sight, leaving bits of debris floating on the surface for scholars to misinterpret.”

Here was something else they could agree about. Knowledge of the distant past was based on surviving documents – state papers, birth and death registers, a letter accidentally preserved. It was like doing a jigsaw puzzle when most of the pieces were missing or wrongly assembled to protect those in power. He asked her whether she had seen
The Devil’s Disciple
, George Bernard Shaw’s play about the American War of Independence. In the third act General Burgoyne realises the American Colonies are about to be lost because of a bureaucratic blunder in London. An appalled major wonders what history will make of this and the sardonic general retorts, ‘History, sir, will tell lies as usual.’

Cover-ups in history were to be expected, he allowed, but what was more surprising for the English scholar was the tenuous connection between William Shakespeare and his works. No one had ever been so thoroughly researched and yet how little there was to show for it. Shakespeare married, had children, went to London, became an actor and a playwright, evaded taxes, loaned money, started lawsuits and made a long and detailed will that didn’t mention any books. Books were a valuable commodity and Shakespeare must have read hundreds of them but where were they? Not in his Stratford home in which his daughters grew up unable to do more than make their mark.

Dr Dilworth stared at him for a moment. “I shouldn’t be saying this but the grasping Stratford landowner with the probably illiterate family doesn’t fit the image I’ve got of the genius who wrote the plays and poems.”

Freddie gave her his crooked smile. “You can add to that the fact that Shakespeare’s death went unnoticed, no memorial verses or funereal tributes, nothing to mark his passing.”

“It’s amusing, isn’t it? A whole industry fuelled by an absence of hard evidence.”

He thought how right she was. The Victorians had alchemised Shakespeare into a gold standard as safe and sound as the Bank of England. Disseminated widely through new technologies of reproduction and manufacture, Shakespeare had conquered our education system and achieved a mass-market. A laundry list would cost a fortune at Sotheby’s if it was known to have been written by Shakespeare but no such list had been found, only half a dozen ill-formed signatures that didn’t seem to have been written by the same hand.

“My fellow American Bill Bryson talked about ‘a wealth of text but a poverty of context.’ What we actually know about Shakespeare could be written in a few pages. Yet that doesn’t stop our colleagues from churning out massive doorstoppers almost every month.”

“Too true,” said Freddie, relieved to find a kindred spirit. “It’s an unstoppable bandwagon and you’ve got to climb on board if you want a career in Eng. Lit. If we told the truth we’d have to say ...”

She interrupted him. “I’m critiquing a couple for
The New York Review
. One is called
Warwickshire Will
and the other is
Shakespeare, Man and Artist
or is it
Artist and Man
, I can’t remember. They are both hot off the press, if warmed-up leftovers can be called hot.”

They had this in common too. “I’m doing
Man and Artist
for
The Times Literary Supplement
and I’ve half a mind to say what I really think about Dawkins’ crappy book. I’m really sick of all this cultural piety. As scholars we are trained to evaluate the evidence but where William Shakespeare is concerned it’s largely an act of faith. We are like priests standing at the high altar and ...”

“You want to bring the temple crashing down on you like Samson.”

“No, I want a bit of integrity. I’m tired of listening to polished and urbane academics like Professor Cleaver saying what they don’t mean and meaning what they don’t say.”

He was beginning to sound strident. “I’m merely suggesting that we should use our intelligence and intuition. Shakespeare was a country boy trying to make a living in the theatre, not a god.”

“So we’re misleading the younger generation by deifying him.”

“That’s right, as a New Historicist I believe that every expressive action is embedded in a network of material practices, not all of which are clear to us.”

He was talking about the school of literary criticism that had swept through the university world. The pressure on students and dons to enlist in the movement was immense as research grants and academic posts came to depend on adherence to this methodology.

“I’m sorry, I don’t agree. I believe the text is what really matters.”

“And I think context is just as important. How can you exclude social and political factors from the interpretation of literary works?” Freddie could hear his voice rising. “Didn’t you say in your lecture that many of Shakespeare’s plays were an ideological attempt to reconcile Queen Elizabeth’s power with the misogyny of a male court? Wasn’t that a New Historicist argument?”

“No,” she snapped. “It’s a feminist argument. You weren’t listening properly.”

They paused to assess the damage to their relationship.

“There’s another way of looking at this,” he said in a more conciliatory tone. “Sherlock Holmes often praised the ‘scientific imagination’, the ability to go beyond the facts to see what really happened in the past. It’s a kind of inspired storytelling.”

Dr Dilworth looked at him through half-shut eyes. “Yeah,” she said slowly. “Scientists have always sought better explanations. If they hadn’t challenged the validity of the received truth we’d still believe in a flat earth and the four humours of the human body.”

“You seem to know a bit about science,” he said.

“My father was a mathematician and, when I was a kid, he gave me books on Pythagoras and Euclid rather than
Black Beauty
or
Little Women
. It paid off, I suppose, in that I now teach public key cryptography.”

Freddie gasped in surprise. “What’s that when it’s at home?”

“It’s a cryptographic system with two separate keys; one encrypts the plaintext while the other decrypts the cipher text. I’m giving a couple of lectures on the subject in London next week.  I’m also attending a workshop at the Globe Theatre. So I’ll be in your country for two or three weeks.”

It sounded like a hint. Freddie cleared his throat. “Perhaps we could meet in London while you’re over there?” His voice sounded hesitant and feeble.

“Are you asking me out on a date?”

He knew he was blushing. The colour spread across his cheeks like splashes of paint, and judging by the broad grin on her face, she had noticed this transformation.

“If you l-like, but I get awfully tongue-tied on dates.”

“In saying you are tongue-tied you are quoting Shakespeare. If you act more in sorrow than in anger, if your wish is father to the thought, if you refuse to budge an inch, if you are more sinned against than sinning, you are quoting Shakespeare.”

Two can play at this game, he thought. “If your dreams vanish into thin air, if you are hoodwinked or in a pickle or if you suffer from green-eyed jealousy, you are ....”

“They want us to leave, Freddie,” she whispered in his ear. “The party’s over.”

Most of the delegates had already left the reception suite to change for dinner and waiters were hovering, ready to collect the empty plates and glasses.

31 MARCH 2014

An old man leant over the parapet of the Ponte Pietra watching a twig bobbing up and down in the water. Fame is like a river, he muttered to himself, it bears up things light and swollen and drowns things weighty and solid. The simile was age old but it perfectly described the modern cult of instant celebrity, the reality show princesses and tabloid stars on whom so much time and emotional equity was invested. He was living in a shallow, confessional age that glorified the ephemeral.

Yet here in Verona there was a sense of permanence. The bridge he stood on predated Caesar. It had been blown up and bombed but always rebuilt to include its original Roman stones. I am like this bridge, he thought, a thing of shreds and patches. Major George Duncan at your service, tours of duty in Germany and Northern Ireland, shrapnel in one leg, now an antiquarian bookseller of somewhat threadbare appearance.

His civilian uniform consisted of a hand sewn tweed jacket with leather padded elbows, mustard corduroy trousers, shabby chocolate loafers, a Viyella check shirt and a striped public school tie. In contrast to his rather bohemian carapace, the man himself was wearing well: a full head of grey hair and a trim moustache complemented the lined but handsome face women had once found attractive.

As if to test the potency of his appeal the old warrior bestowed a twinkling smile on a pretty girl hurrying across the bridge. She seemed flattered rather than repelled by his attention and smiled back; making him believe, perhaps misguidedly, that there was life in the old dog yet. On a cloudless spring day he could feel the sap rising.

The major’s silver-topped cane beat out a staccato rhythm as he limped across the city’s cobblestones to fulfil his chosen mission. The stick turned out to be a handy weapon in the Via Capello where sightseers crowded around the Casa di Giulietta, a thirteenth-century tower-shaped palazzo. It was, of course, all smoke and mirrors, a way of boosting Verona’s tourist trade by cashing in on the popularity of Shakespeare’s star-crossed lovers, Romeo and Juliet.

Like most medieval Italian cities, Verona had had its fair share of feuding merchant families and romantic youngsters and the palazzo certainly possessed an upstairs balcony, albeit of twentieth-century construction. On cue, a Japanese tourist appeared on the not-so-ancient balcony to be digitally immortalised by his wife while, below in the courtyard, Italian men queued up to grope a bronze statue of Juliet in the belief that rubbing her right breast would make them lucky in love.

Too old for such superstitions, the major allowed himself to be swept towards a graffiti-covered wall where the lovesick had recorded their passions for posterity: so much self-conscious emotion generated by a man who had left so little of himself behind. Remembering a line from
Romeo and Juliet
, Duncan murmured, “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other word would smell as sweet.” This gave him an idea. The flower stalls of the Piazza delle Erbe were nearby.

Twenty minutes later, lounging against a marble column in the Hotel Accademia’s elegant foyer, he studied his reflection in a gilt-framed mirror and had second thoughts about his appearance. Those mustard trousers and chocolate loafers! He had overdone the old soldier in relaxed mufti mode. Major Duncan was not fit for purpose.

She, on the other hand, looked the part as she swept out of the lift and strode towards him in a dark blue trouser suit and cream silk shirt. With high cheekbones, flinty eyes and a wide, sensitive mouth, the Regius Professor of English Literature at Oxford University was a striking woman, full of poise and dignity.