The Queen's Cipher (37 page)

He swivelled around on his chair and extracted a battered cloth-covered facsimile of the First Folio from the bookcase behind him. A hunt through the shelves added a Shakespeare glossary and a photocopy of the 1598 quarto edition of the play to the growing pile of books on his desk, each of which had to be consulted before he delivered his verdict.

“When Shakespeare uses the verb ‘stay’ he means ‘detain’ or ‘keep’ and the word ‘four’ appears in both the first quarto and folio editions of the play. In any case ‘door’ and ‘four’ are rhymed and repeated thrice to drive the point home. Three plus four equals seven. The odds have been detained.”

“You’ve lost me,” Cheryl muttered, feeling very small once again.

“Have you read Montaigne’s
Essays
?”

“You may be surprised to hear that Montaigne isn’t big in the Hackney tower blocks.”

He told her books had been written about Shakespeare’s debt to Montaigne and, in particular, to an essay called
Apology for Raymond Sebond
in which the great French writer reflected on Roman superstitions, enumerating their household gods. They had ‘three to a door; to be the boards, one to be the hinges, and the third to the threshold’ and ‘four to a child, as protectors of his bandels, of his drink, of his meat, and of his suckling.’

Her eyes lit up. “I get it. The fox, the ape and the humble-bee are the gods protecting the door and the goose is the child coming out of that door.”

“There’s something else too. The same essay contains a scathing attack on virgin births. Apparently, a lot of French women had tried that one on. If they were right, Montaigne wrote, then God must have taken human form to impregnate them and yet, logically, he was as likely to appear as a goose ...”

“Holy fuck, I see where you’re going with this!” She couldn’t contain herself. “You think this jingle is about the Virgin Queen and the child she was supposed to have had.”

Her tutor was silent for once.

*

Elizabeth could feel one of her headaches coming on. There was a sharp pain behind her eyes. She had read
Les Essais
in French and knew exactly what was being insinuated in this comic riddle. In his longest and most sceptical essay Michel de Montaigne had written about the nature of scandal, ‘nothing is so firmly believed as that which is least known,’ and how true that was. Rumours about an offspring from her love affair with Dudley had persisted throughout her reign.

Now here they were again appearing in dramatic form, disguised as a riddle. The goose was a standard fertility symbol and, for the cynical Montaigne, the likeliest outcome of a virgin birth. As for the rhyme about the fox, the ape and the bee, well, that was a sly dig at her court and those closest to her. The fox was Machiavelli’s description of a court politician and the nickname given to her chief minister Lord Burghley while the ape was a popular metaphor for a courtier, one who aped his betters. And that was only the start of it. There was an old saying, one she hated, that a woman who died a maid led apes in Hell. And the ape also figured in an oft-repeated fable about a conspiracy between the bear’s creatures, the fox and the ape, to persuade the husbandman he could have good honey without keeping bees. This malicious allegory was an attack on the Earl of Leicester who displayed a bear and ragged staff on his coat of arms. Dudley had tried to suppress it but how do you fight a fable.

*

“Wasn’t Leicester supposed to have been Elizabeth’s lover?”

“There was plenty of gossip to that effect.”

Cheryl went over what she had learned. “We have a riddle about a child leaving a household; possibly because of a court intrigue involving Elizabeth’s most powerful subjects, Leicester and Burghley, and this explains a previously obscure event.”

“That’s what Armado claims, yes.”

She turned back to the text. The clown had come up with his own interpretation.

I, Costard, running out, that was safely within,

Fell over the threshold and broke my shin.

“There’s a footnote in my playbook saying that a broken shin means ‘disappointed in love.’ It’s a hard luck prison story. While he’s in the nick the clown loses the girl he’d been shagging.”

“What Costard actually says though is that it’s the act of coming out of doors, the stumbling at the threshold, which breaks his heart.”

Freddie was struck by the absurd idea that he and Shakespeare’s alter ego were sharing a confidential insight. He could feel Francis Bacon’s spectral presence in his study.

Armado: Sirrah Costard, I will enfranchise thee.

Costard: O, marry me to one Frances! I smell some l’envoi, some goose, in this.

Armado: By my sweet soul, I mean setting thee at liberty, enfreedoming thy person. Thou wert immured, restrained, captivated, bound.

“What do we make of that?” he asked rhetorically.

“Yes, well, it’s a stupid pun. Costard thinks Armado is offering him a woman called Frances. Wasn’t that the generic name for a whore in Shakespeare’s day?”

This was his cue to bury his head in the books once again. “The editors have got it wrong,” he finally announced. “The name is ‘Francis’ in both quarto and folio editions of the play. The ‘i’ becomes an ‘e’ because Shakespeare editors can’t imagine Costard marrying a man. They’re assuming that ‘marry’ means ‘wed’ when Shakespeare often used the verb to mean ‘unite’ or ‘associate.’ So the alternative reading of Costard’s line is ‘link me to one Francis.’ It makes you wonder. Perhaps Costard wasn’t the only lame goose or should I say lame duck.”

Before his university card was stolen, Freddie had borrowed a copy of the
Promus
, Francis Bacon’s personal notebook. “Listen to this,” he told her. “It’s a sentence Bacon jotted down. ‘I may be a shadow across their path without being an obstruction to them.’”

“I wonder what he meant by that.”

She heard him gasp. “The next entry is ‘To stumble at the threshold.’”

“Bloody hell, you’re not making this up, are you, Freddie?”

He shrugged his shoulders and went back to the text of the play. “Here’s more triplication, the word ‘remuneration’ is mentioned three times. Armado asks Costard to deliver a letter and offers him payment. Armado calls this ‘remuneration’ which Costard takes to be the Latin word for three-farthings.”

“That’s a small coin isn’t it Freddie? It’s mentioned again in
King John
when the royal bastard Falconbridge says he cannot stick a rose in his ear ‘lest men say look where three-farthings goes!’ I didn’t get the bit about the rose though.”

*

Queen Elizabeth gritted her teeth. She had commissioned a three-farthing coin to take the place of the silver farthing. It had an effigy of her on its obverse side with a rose behind her head. Thereafter, when gossiping about her supposed bastard, people referred to him as ‘three-farthings,’ linking man’s meanest estate with her meanest currency. The wretched coin had been minted in 1561, her
annus horribilis
in which she almost lost her crown.

This play was like a goad and, with her courtiers’ eyes upon her, all she could do was to sit and look as if she was enjoying herself.

*

“I don’t know whether I’ve told you this,” Freddie began. “In my teens I was treated for depression by a neurological psychiatrist who used images and associations to awaken my buried memories. I think that’s what is going on here.”

“Could be,” she replied. “Maybe that’s what Bacon meant when he talked about veiling the truth in parables and allegories in
The Advancement of Learning
.”

“He also said ‘The truth is so hard to tell, it sometimes needs fiction to make it plausible.’ Drama is fiction represented in performance.”

*

By Act Four she had got the message. Beneath her canopy in the Great Chamber Queen Elizabeth was seething with rage. He had turned her mythology against her. She had encouraged her subjects to worship her as the Virgin Huntress without even thinking about Diana’s other attribute as the goddess of childbirth. Yet the play’s imagery kept on emphasising this dichotomy.

The French princess was meant to be her, indulging in her favourite blood sport of deer hunting but showing a marked disinclination to kill the deer, saying she would only do so for ‘fame’s sake.’ This, mark you, from a princess who was also said to be ‘prayerful,’ ‘pierced’ and ‘pricked’ and who possessed too thick a waist to wear a virgin’s girdle. The inference could hardly have been clearer: penetration had led to pregnancy. Yet no one seemed to have picked up on it. Her courtiers were laughing loudly at the bawdy bits without questioning their hidden meaning.

The act had begun ominously with an apparently harmless exchange in which the French princess asked whether it was the King of Navarre galloping up the hillside on his horse and being told it wasn’t him. Whoever it was, the princess replied, ‘showed a mounting mind.’ It was such an old joke. She hadn’t heard this crude pun for forty years. Not since her decision to appoint Robin Dudley Master of the Horse had started off stories about her alleged lover having a ‘mounting mind.’

After the act’s false start, Shakespeare had written an incredibly lewd comic scene describing how an archer’s arrow might hit the target, giving the woman the ‘upshot’ by ‘cleaving’ her pin, before moving on to a doggerel verse about a ‘pricket’ that metamorphosed in a thicket. This was an adaptation of the Diana and Actaeon myth. Ovid was certainly working overtime in this foul-mouthed play.

Above the actors’ brittle repartee she could hear his voice talking to her. She had refused to listen to him, banning him from court, and here he was using a Christmas comedy as a coded form of communication. She knew her secret was safe with him but he obviously wanted something in exchange.

She felt faint and breathless. The room was too hot.

“Is your Majesty unwell?” The Earl of Essex had turned round on his stool and was eyeing her with dismay. “Is there anything I can do?”

No, Robert, she wanted to say, unless you can bring your stepfather back from the grave. How she missed her bonny sweet Robin.

*

“Funny thing,” said Cheryl looking at the
Folio
facsimile. “The stage direction changes at the start of Act Four. The princess of France is now described as the Queen.”

Freddie rifled through his papers. “You’re right. The same thing happens in the 1598 quarto edition. From Act Four onwards she is a queen. It’s probably a printing error.” The quizzical look in his eyes hinted at a different explanation.

“The princess has very mixed feelings about hunting. Was that common in the Elizabethan age?”

“Oh yes,” he enthused. “There was a very strong anti-hunting lobby. The forest laws, which reserved hunting rights for the ruling class, were so barbaric that anyone caught poaching on the lord’s land could be castrated, blinded or staked out to die in freezing water.”

“That’s gross, that is. Whatever happened to Merry England?”

“Merry England wasn’t a complete myth. There was dancing around the maypole and a lot of feasting and drinking but peasants had to know their place.”

“Anyway, what do you make of the princess asking where to stand to make ‘the fairest shoot’? In his reply the forester repeats the word ‘shoot’ twice. It’s the rule of three again!”

Shakespeare’s Bawdy
came off the book shelf. “The verb ‘shoot’ indicates ‘the pointing of the male towards the female generative organ’ with or without ‘a further allusion to the emission of the seminal arrow or bullet.’ That’s what it says here.”

Cheryl stretched out her arms to him. “Ooh! I do love it when you talk dirty. Why don’t you come over here and join me on the tutor’s shagging couch.”

“Been there, done that,” he said breezily. “In any case the dirty mind belongs to Master Shakespeare.”

This puzzled her. “Why do you insist on talking about Shakespeare in the singular when you think he and Bacon were a team and, in this play at least, Bacon must have been the lead figure?”

Freddie looked at her in that special way of his, warm and ironic at the same time. “But I don’t know that for sure. I imagine it’s the case because of the cipher but I haven’t proved it and may never do so. Sorry to sound so pedantic but I prefer to keep Shakespeare and Bacon separate in my mind. That way I can retain some kind of perspective.”

“Here’s my perspective. The princess goes into rhyming couplets to register how conflicted she is: unwilling to kill the deer but compelled to do so to preserve her reputation.”

And out of question, so it is sometimes –

Glory grows guilty of detested crimes

When for fame’s sake, for praise, an outward part,

We bend to that the working of the hart,

As I for praise alone now seek to spill

The poor deer’s blood that my heart means no ill.

“And there’s more triplication here. The word ‘thickest’ is repeated three times in an exchange between the princess and the clown in which she contrasts her maidenhead with the loose morals of her ladies-in-waiting. Yet this paragon of virtue has a thick waist.”

Costard: God dig-you-de’en, all. Pray you, which is the head lady?

Princess: Thou shalt know her, fellow, by the rest that have no heads.

Costard: Which is the greatest lady, the highest?

Princess: The thickest and the tallest.

Costard:  The thickest and the tallest – it is so, truth is truth.

An your waist, mistress, were as slender as my wit