The Queen's Cipher (40 page)

Payback time, Sam thought. Such an inept introduction will have him seething. Milton rose to his feet, smiling broadly. “A pompous speaker with a high opinion of his oratorical skills gave a rambling after-dinner speech. Afterwards, he asked his neighbour who happened to be Oscar Wilde how he would have delivered that speech. ‘Under an assumed name,’ Wilde replied.” 

Milton’s audience roared with laughter. He’s got them, Sam reckoned as she joined in the applause. For a comparatively slight man he had a remarkably sonorous voice and its magisterial boom filled the room, transfixing the dinner guests who were more aware of its tone and timbre than with what was being said. Naturally enough, he was talking about the Bard.

“Shakespeare’s plays may be man’s supreme artistic achievement yet, in the Elizabethan age, actors were treated as vagabonds and popular drama was too vulgar to be an art form. Religion lay at the heart of this. Biblical prohibitions led to boys donning women’s clothing in the theatre but this, too, was thought to be sinful. Puritans condemned cross-dressing for blurring gender boundaries and arousing homoerotic desires.”

An unhealthy flush spread across Mrs Miller’s face. It was time for Milton to move on. He turned to one of his favourite themes – Purgatory, the half-way house to Heaven or Hell, and what it meant to the common man. “That dreadful place,” he said, “where imperfect souls endured excruciating pain in the hope of eventual salvation.”

A dumpy woman in an ill-fitting tulle dress crossed herself. Milton pointed a manicured finger in her direction. “Let me tell you about the tortures our ancestors faced in Purgatory. Gluttons could expect to be bitten by toads and snakes while lechers were torn with burning hooks and hanged.”

Milton surveyed the surrounding tables and frowned. “Do any of you gossip about your colleagues behind their backs?”

He was rewarded with guilty expressions and a few giggles.

“I thought so. Well, backbiters were grilled on gridirons, the avaricious were broken on a flaming wheel and moneylenders boiled, appropriately enough, in molten metal. Lesser offenders had red-hot nails driven through their hands and feet. Ladies and gentlemen, this is Purgatory, a place born of a need to feel God’s terrible wrath.”

Sam had heard enough. She couldn’t decide whether it was his humbug or the steel-boned bodice biting into her ribcage that irritated her more. Stop looking at yourself in the mirror, she wanted to say, as he displayed his immaculately clad body, smiling and baring his perfectly capped teeth. She could scarcely conceal the contempt she felt for his posturing.

Things had come to a head earlier that evening. He had entered the hotel bedroom while she was putting on her makeup. “Love you,” he had whispered, kissing the back of her neck, to which she had replied, “There’s only one love in your life.” “And who is that?” he retorted playfully. “Yourself,” she had said. “Let’s face it, narcissists love themselves.” He had given a hollow laugh and left her to sourly contemplate her reflection in the mirror. Whatever beauty she possessed was a reflection of
his
glory. She was a thirty-one-year-old woman with few friends who had grown tired of her gilded cage: tired not only of her mentor but of those who gave him their unthinking support.

Judging by their rapt smiles, these dinner guests were bedazzled by the speaker’s literary celebrity, their eyes sparkling with the wines of France, basking in a brilliance that was about as artificial as the light bulbs overhead.

By now Milton had moved on to Hamlet. With an obvious relish he recited the Ghost’s line about being ‘thy father’s spirit doomed for a certain term to walk the night.’ Forget about Hamlet, she thought, I’m in purgatory and you put me there. Then her own father’s ghost came to her, a man she hadn’t spoken to in years, and Cameron Dilworth told her to can the self pity, she’d only herself to blame. And he was right.

As her partner expatiated on the symbolic significance of Shakespeare’s apparitions Sam realised why she was so angry. Milton didn’t need her. The young Englishman did. He had come into her life with his long face and lopsided grin and thoroughly confused her. She had been afraid to love and be loved because love removed the emotional barricades she had erected to protect her independence. All her life she had dreamed of material success but, without love, it now seemed worthless.

At that moment, late on a Friday evening, with Milton addressing his peers, she wanted to set off down a different path. She imagined an Oxfordshire village with laughter at the kitchen table and a small child on her lap complaining of a sore tummy. It was a sentimental vision but to Sam it was real enough and the weight of her losses seemed more than she could bear.

20 JUNE 2014

“It’s all about loss,” an American woman was saying with conviction. “As the play ends Prospero regrets the liberation of Ariel and sees the marriage of his daughter as a ‘loss.’ Then there’s the loss of his magical powers. That’s right, isn’t it?” She looked up for approval.

“Yes, Mrs Sedgewick, you are absolutely correct.” Much Ado’s tour guide had to raise his voice to be heard above the clamor created by a stag night celebration. “
The Tempest
is a play about the illusion of freedom. We free our imaginations by visiting Prospero’s enchanted island but it is only a temporary break from reality. At its end, Prospero returns to the workaday world. The magic is over, the revel ended, and that induces sadness and a sense of loss.”      

Members of the Maine Women’s Lobby were sitting in the Stratford hotel’s Quill Cocktail Bar nursing drinks and a mounting sense of grievance. The day’s itinerary included an after-theatre discussion of the RSC production led by Dr Brett of Beaufort College and they were damned if they were going to let a bunch of drunken Hooray Henrys rob them of that pleasure.

A thin, grey-haired woman in a cashmere jumper put her hand up to speak. “Talking about loss, I’d like to mention a character that doesn’t appear in the play, Miranda’s mother. The only time she’s referred to is when Prospero tells Miranda that he takes his wife’s word for her parentage and says she was ‘a piece of virtue.’ Why such a tortuous response? Is he a control freak who feels threatened by a woman’s ability to bear children?”

Freddie considered Margaret Muskie’s feminist agenda before answering. This was only his second outing as a theatre guide and he wanted the ladies to like him. “It’s entirely possible,” he said.

“Would you care to elaborate on that?”

“We don’t know what happened to Mrs Prospero. We know Prospero was the victim of a coup which led to his brother Antonio becoming Duke of Milan. Does his wife die before or during the coup or is she left behind when Prospero and his daughter are cast afloat on a ‘rotten carcass’ of a ship? And there’s another possibility, ladies, forgive me for raising it. Is Prospero being ironic when he talks about his wife’s virtue? Was she a party to his brother’s plan? We encounter a wicked brother and an adulterous wife in
Hamlet
, so why not here too.”

A younger woman with curly red hair, large dangling ear-rings and an imposing bust began to speak in a sharp Boston accent. “What about the other woman we never meet – Caliban’s mother

Sycorax? Prospero calls her ‘a damned witch’ for imprisoning Ariel and yet he does exactly the same thing to her son.”

Freddie squinted at her name badge. Ms Laura Lyman had the floor, ready to do some heavy lifting. “The only real difference between Sycorax and Prospero is one of sex. It is a patriarchal play in which women are men’s victims, none more so than Miranda who is represented as an essentially passive creature who lets Prospero control her chastity.”

“Hold on a minute,” Freddie couldn’t help himself. “She is Prospero’s daughter and they are living on a deserted island. Doesn’t that count for anything?”      

He received support from an old lady in a print dress. “What’s wrong with being dutiful? Better than roaring around drunk, looking like a hooker, as so many modern girls do. That’s not the future we envisaged for women when we founded our Lobby thirty odd years ago.” 

Freddie felt he was losing control. The American sisterhood was wearing him down. Think about the money, he reminded himself, three hundred pounds a night plus expenses. And having thought about the cash he felt ashamed.

Years ago, at the start of his academic career, he had dreamed of coming up with a mind-blowing idea that would shatter the stale old assumptions about Shakespeare and his art only for such hopes to fade as he failed to muster the requisite intellectual ammo. Yet now, when he had an arsenal of nuclear-tipped missiles to fire, he was frightened to approach the launching pad and was pussyfooting around with these clever ladies from New England.

“Don’t get me wrong,” he told Ms Lyman. “I believe Shakespeare has something to say to each generation and his work should be re-interpreted. But I don’t agree with forcing a meaning on the play which is not supported by the text. Take the way tonight’s director interpreted the masque in Act Four. Turning it into a Powhatan wedding ceremony with native drums and throat-singing is just plain daft, particularly if you are peddling the idea that Prospero was a white colonialist.”

Freddie glanced at his watch. “Look at the time, ladies, it’s almost midnight and I have to get back to Oxford. If you don’t mind, I will take only one more question.”

Margaret Muskie’s hand shot up. “Dr Brett, you suggested earlier that the plot for
The Tempest
was influenced by what happened to the first English settlers in Virginia. Perhaps you’d expand on that?”     

“Scholars believe it’s based on William Strachey’s confidential report on the voyage of the Sea Venture, one of the nine ships that left Plymouth to reinforce the Virginia colony. His eye-witness account was carried back to England in 1610 but the report only came to light six years later. The writer’s vivid description of the storm and how the sailors fought to keep their ship afloat, what they found on Bermuda’s barren shore and even the Jamestown insurrection all appear in
The Tempest
. If Shakespeare drew on these events, the Oxford authorship theory collapses because Edward de Vere died in 1604.”

“I have a question,” a voice announced. It was the unsinkable Laura Lyman. “If Strachey’s account only became public in 1616 how come it’s in a play first performed in 1611?”

“I suppose someone must have told Shakespeare,” Freddie replied lamely. “Word travels.”

Ms Lyman shook her ringlets and heaved her ample bosom. “That doesn’t seem likely, does it?”

“
The Tempest
is full of unresolved questions. We have to accept that. It remains, however, the summation of Shakespeare’s dramatic career.” It was a good note on which to take his leave.

As he drove back to Oxford he thought about the answer he’d given. He’d had half a mind to tell the persistent lady from Boston that Strachey’s sealed letter had been delivered to the Council of the Virginia Colony, one of whose members was Sir Francis Bacon, the Solicitor General, who advised King James on plantations. But he had restrained himself in time.

Restraint, and its limitations, was very much on his mind. He and Cheryl hadn’t slept together for several nights. A cooling-off period, he had called it, while he tried to work out what he felt for her. Was it lust or something deeper than that? He was still puzzling over this vexed question when he reached Walton Lane.

Getting out of the car to unlock the garage door, he dropped his keys on the cobbles and bent down to retrieve them. As he straightened up, someone punched him in the solar plexus. He could neither scream nor breathe properly. Further punches followed to the head and stomach. A blow to the kidneys sent shock waves through his frame and his legs crumpled. Steel-tipped boots ripped the remaining wind from his body. He tried to protect himself, curling up on the ground like a poor forked creature with his head in his hands. A boot slammed home again, breaking a rib for sure.

Through a sea of pain came a muffled voice. “Can you hear me, Dr Brett? You’re making a nuisance of yourself and it has to stop.”

Freddie didn’t answer. He was too busy vomiting.

A balaclava mask entered his blurred field of vision. Cold eyes stared down at him.

“This is what I want you to do,” an Irish voice said.  “Stick to the Shakespeare curriculum. Forget about anything else, if you know what’s good for you.”

A kick to the groin reinforced the warning.

Isolated in the darkness of his physical agony, retching bile, he tried to work out which parts of his broken body still functioned. Spitting blood through a bruised mouth he had an insane desire to engage his attacker in some kind of dialogue. Who could possibly care what he thought or did?

But if he was talking to anyone it was to himself. The street was silent.

Rain began to fall and the water mixed with his blood.

21 JUNE 2014

Pain is more than a matter of nerves and neurotransmitters. It is a solitary, subjective experience that plays tricks with the subconscious mind. He was in a deep well: hands prodding his aching skin, sticking needles in him. Bottle green phantoms flitted before his eyes, lifting him up, putting a mask on his face, helping him to breathe. Time ceased to matter – speeding up, slowing down and disappearing altogether in his coma like state.

The patient stirred in his hospital bed. It felt as if his whole body was on fire. A sledgehammer was thumping away inside his head. By keeping as still as possible he could reduce the throbbing.

“Are you able to move your arms?”

He was and all his faculties went into proving it.

“You have a visitor,” a nurse told him.

He used his one good eye to focus on the face: a cloud of coppery hair and the sensation of soft lips kissing his brow.

“Bloody hell, Freddie,” the vision said. “Leave you alone and this is what happens?”

He wanted to answer but couldn’t get his thick lips to produce a sound. Distressed by this discovery, he beckoned her closer and mimed, ‘How did I get here?’