The Queen's Cipher (4 page)

“Major Duncan,” she inquired, extending her hand to him. “Julia Walker-Roberts.”

“Enchanted, I’m sure.” The book dealer kissed her fingers theatrically before delving into his satchel and pulling out a bunch of short-stemmed pink roses wrapped in cellophane.

“I trust you will accept these, Dame Julia, as a small token of my appreciation.”

The gift had the desired effect. She was completely taken aback. Judging by the expression on her face she must have thought his battered leather satchel contained stale sandwiches and a hip flask.

“And now, dear lady, perhaps you’ll join me in the lounge. I’ve asked Giuseppe for a quiet table.”

Reeling from his charm offensive she could only reply, “That would be nice.”

He ushered her into a part of the hotel lobby decked out like a gentleman’s club with built-in bookcases, brown leather armchairs and low wooden tables with silver lamps. A waiter appeared carrying a tray. Balanced on it was a bowl of olives and two sparkling red drinks in frosted glasses.

“I hope you don’t mind,” said a smiling Duncan, “I took the liberty of ordering Negronis. The bar here does them awfully well and I imagine you’re having a trying day.”

Without waiting for a reply, he raised his glass to her. “I won’t beat about the bush. I have a favour to ask.”

And Julia was of a mind to grant it. “How can I help?” she asked, sipping her cocktail with obvious relish.

Duncan felt his stomach muscles tighten. “As a leading authority on sixteenth and seventeenth-century literature and a palaeographer of distinction, you are obviously an expert in the handwriting of the period.”

Julia inclined her head but said nothing.

“To get to the point, a document has come into my possession which, if genuine, is a collector’s item. Perhaps you will examine this letter. I’ve brought it with me.”

Duncan rummaged around in his satchel before handing her a buff coloured folder that contained a photocopy of what appeared to be a very old letter written in the italic hand. He watched her skim through its contents, frowning slightly when she noticed how the letter ended with a lengthy sequence of numbers signifying some kind of code or cipher.

Julia’s long fingernails clinked on the cocktail glass. “It is dated 1622 and the signature is that of Viscount St Alban. Are you asking me to confirm that this letter was written by Francis Bacon?”

“Indeed so.” Duncan nodded his head, wondering what she would say next.

“A word of caution, I am familiar with Bacon’s epistolary outpourings but I have never seen this before which raises the possibility that it is a fake. With original letters written by historic figures fetching record sums at auction, sadly, there are forgers at work.”

“I hope you don’t think I’m one.” Duncan’s raised eyebrow indicated his concern.

“Of course not,” she replied evenly, “but I confess to being intrigued by the encryption. Didn’t its recipient, Duke August of Brunswick-Luneburg, write a book on cryptography under the pseudonym of Gustavus Selenus?”

“I believe that to be the case.” He looked her straight in the eye, keeping his face as neutral as possible.

Dame Julia frowned again. “As I recall it, one of the engravings on Selenus’ title page is of a well-dressed man in a tall hat, Bacon, handing a manuscript to a rustic fellow in actor’s boots who is carrying a spear, Shakespeare. At least that’s what Baconian theorists fondly believe.”

His bushy eyebrows bristled. “Not my field I’m afraid.”

There was something about his dismissive retort that seemed to worry her. He saw her shoulders stiffen as she gave him the kind of withering stare she would normally bestow on uppity undergraduates.

“I do hope you’re not advocating some cranky theory about Bacon writing Shakespeare’s plays,” she snapped. “Like any reputable scholar I am prepared to concede that Francis Bacon was a great essayist, a prophet of the new science and a successful if corrupt politician but he was neither a poet nor a playwright. If you are trying to embroil me in some new fantasy I must thank you for the drink and beg to be excused.”

Duncan rewarded her with his most winning smile. “Rest assured, dear lady, I am an antiquarian bookseller, not a conspiracy theorist. My only interest lies in making money out of this letter.”

“Why come to Verona to seek my assistance? You could have contacted me in Oxford.”

“I was over here already, setting up a book stall in your conference centre.”

Despite her misgivings, Julia gave him the benefit of the doubt. “Quite so, you may leave your photocopied letter with me. I will do the best I can with it.”

“Perhaps you would be so kind as to send your report and invoice to my home.” Major Duncan scribbled his address on a business card and handed it to her.

“You must excuse me now,” she said, rising to her feet. “Today is our last conference day and there’s a meeting I must attend.”

Once she had gone, he heaved a sigh of relief and ordered a large whisky. The fiery spirit acted as a reality check. Authenticating the letter was only a start. Deciphering it would be the real problem. The number code was five hundred years old.

He had seen something similar in an Elizabethan spy’s report but that, too, had never been cracked. Not to worry though, something would turn up. He could feel it in his bones.

On leaving the hotel the major walked briskly to the nearest taxi rank whistling ‘Sussex by the Sea.’ His limp was forgotten.

4 APRIL 2014 •
THE TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT

Shakespeare's dark twin

Frederick Brett

Caspar Dawkins

SHAKESPEARE: MAN AND ARTIST

442pp I 6317 1226 9 Hampton & Pym £30

Why are there so many Shakespeare biographies? Hardly a week goes by without an addition to this literary mountain. His character, even his appearance, was never meant to have been important. From the very outset, in the First Folio, Ben Jonson advised us to look at the book, not at Droeshout’s picture of the unprepossessing bald man with the dangerous looking ruff. It is a piece of advice that has gone unheeded. Artists, W.H.Auden insisted, should be anonymous. Shakespeare did his best to be anonymous but we could not leave him to it.

We live in an age obsessed with celebrity. The artist has become as important as his art and the literary biography flourishes as never before. It is like a family portrait, in which, as the novelist William Faulkner once remarked, we line up the author with his dark twin, his work, to see how alike they seem. The problem with Shakespeare is he does not look at all like his twin. The gap between the artist and the man could hardly be wider.

Professor Dawkins has realised that the only way to make Shakespeare’s life as interesting as his works is to treat the latter as evidence of the former. The plays become a vehicle for self-expression, full of sly allusions to Shakespeare’s private life. To give his book greater certainty, Dawkins abandons conditional clauses and omits detailed footnotes. Honest scholarship requires a distinction to be drawn between conjecture and confirmed fact and citing sources is a fundamental requirement of good research.

Like so many before him, Dawkins is much taken with Shakespeare’s pre-eminence in two areas of dramatic expertise: his use of language and his unrivalled psychological insight. As he rightly says, ‘you can never overestimate how well the playwright assimilates new ideas into an existing cognitive structure.’ And that is where the emphasis in Shakespeare studies properly belongs, on those characteristics that can be usefully discussed. Even here, Dawkins oversteps the mark by asserting Shakespeare ‘taught us what it was to be human.’ To suggest we learned the pitfalls of love from Cleopatra and how to laugh with Falstaff is to wildly overstate Shakespeare’s cultural contribution. He was a profound observer of human nature; not the inventor of the secular soul.

What is far worse, however, is the way biographers tend to marshal their facts, leaving out things they find unpalatable. For instance, Dawkins ignores the usury charge Robert Greene levels against Shakespeare in his pamphlet Groats-worth of Wit. This attack came a few months after John Clayton, a Bedfordshire yeoman, borrowed seven pounds from a William Shakespeare at Cheapside. Dawkins mentions the transaction but argues it must have been a different Shakespeare. Yet the church of St Mary le Bow in Cheapside was the acknowledged place where borrowers and lenders ratified their financial transactions and it was within walking distance of Shakespeare’s lodgings in Bishopsgate. As Greene also tells us that Shakespeare was a moneylender why cast the Clayton loan aside?

Further proof of the less wholesome side to Shakespeare’s life in London comes in a 1596 writ of attainment in which he and three other individuals were bound over to keep the peace. Dawkins claims Shakespeare’s role in the affair is ‘shrouded in mystery’ and yet we know he was consorting with one of Southwark’s most notorious gangsters, Francis Langley, who while owning the Swan Theatre was also indulging in usury, extortion and various vice rackets, and with Dorothy Soer who rented out slum properties. This does not make ‘gentle Shakespeare’ a bad person, just a real one who kept bad company and may have been involved in organised crime. Yet biographers like Dawkins prefer to cherry-pick the facts to make them fit their preconceived idea of how a great playwright should behave.

More time has gone into researching Shakespeare’s life than that of any other human being and yet we know very little about him. It is all the more important, therefore, that we should acknowledge the evidence that does exist. If we must know the man behind the artist, let it be the right one.

7 APRIL 2014

Winter had returned to Oxford. Hailstones were falling and a cold, blustery wind whipped through the garden quadrangle. Only Matilda, the college tortoise, seemed impervious to the elements as she continued her slow progress across Master’s Field. Inside his study Dr Freddie Brett shivered and snuggled up to the two-bar gas fire that was his only comfort from the draughts coming through the wall cavities. He doubted whether the room had ever been properly heated.

By rights, the scantily clad female sitting opposite should be a mass of goose bumps but Cheryl Stone was made of sterner stuff. Her halter top and tight denim skirt were designed to make a statement, not to match the weather. Freddie hated tutorials with her. He found her absence of self-doubt unnerving.

“You know what I think,” she said, crossing her slender legs in a provocative fashion. “That Miranda is a stuck-up cow, saying like to Caliban, ‘I pitied thee, took pains to make thee speak’ and Caliban goes, OK, you taught me language and ‘my profit on’t is I know how to curse.’ Oh really? That might have been true at my school where ‘fuck’ was the first word kids learned.”

Cheryl never let anyone forget she once attended a Hackney comprehensive where English was a second language for most pupils. The way she emphasised her rough upbringing was a tiresome form of reverse snobbery. In a topsy-turvy world it had become fashionable to have common roots.

Freddie frowned. “I’m not sure what you’re getting at.”

“If Caliban had been taught to speak by Miranda he’d have a posh accent and no swear words at all. More to the point, do you think Caliban did it with her?”

“Obviously not, Prospero accuses his slave of seeking ‘to violate the honour of my child’ and Caliban admits he was prevented from doing so.”

“But if he didn’t shag her,” Cheryl persisted, flicking her russet hair out of her eyes and smiling at him, “why tell Caliban he ‘deserved more than a prison’ when attempted rape wasn’t even an offence in those days.”

It was a fair argument. When he conceded this, she wanted to know whether Miranda had been playing sex games with Caliban. Girls do that sort of thing, she told him.

“I was at this party and a guy comes up, I could tell he fancied me, and he goes, want to go upstairs? And I say, no way, the store is closed and ...”

Freddie couldn’t help blushing. “That’s enough, Miss Stone, too much information. What’s the point you’re making?”

Cheryl shook her pre-Raphaelite curls. “Simply this, Dr Freddie Brett, a girl isn’t as innocent as her dad would like to think, even when he can immobilise the phallic sword with magic dust.”

He was beginning to wonder whether there was a pornographic version of the play. “Getting back to the question I raised. Does Prospero use Caliban’s attempted rape as an excuse for enslaving him and colonising the island?”

Cheryl snorted dismissively. “Of course it’s a colonial text. Prospero cosies up to Caliban to learn the secrets of the island before employing magic to subdue and control, just as white settlers used the magic of superior technology to pacify natives in the New World.”

A clock struck the hour on Lovell Buildings. It came as a merciful relief.

“We’ll have to stop there, Miss Stone. We’ll discuss your request to change your Ph.D thesis at our next meeting.”

“Couldn’t we discuss it over a drink,” she asked, eyelashes fluttering.

“No, that would be most improper,” he replied, wondering whether he really meant it.

His graduate student had just left when the phone rang. It was the Master’s secretary. “Sir Alan would like a word with you. Can you come over to the Lodgings?”

This was an invitation he couldn’t refuse. He had been half expecting the call. A summons from the Master of Beaufort meant one of two things – either a reprimand or praise for his TLS review. Freddie hoped it might be the latter. At a recent cocktail party Sir Alan had expressed contempt for ‘time-serving academics’ who ‘cash in on the Bard.’

The Lodgings formed part of the college’s Gothic extension, a large and unlovely building tagged onto the chapel which had a depressing effect on all who entered it. A scout showed him into a fussy looking reception room where the Master’s wife bore down on him.

“Sir Alan will be with you soon,” Lady Dorothy said in her shrill, high-pitched voice. “In the meanwhile, perhaps you will partake of a glass of sherry and sit over there.”