The Queen's Cipher (46 page)

“Honest answer, I don’t know. I feel like a jigsaw, broken into pieces.”

“So where does that leave me? As a shoulder to cry on, I suppose?”

Freddie brushed the rain off her face. “It’s not your shoulder I’m interested in.”

“Oh really, is that so? I’m in pieces, Nurse Nightingale,” she pouted out her lips in apparent agony. “Drop your drawers and comfort me. A mercy fuck, is that what you’re after?”

They had their sexual fantasies now. In one of them he was an ailing patient and she a hospital nurse, there to meet his every need.

“You’re doing it again, spouting profanities when you don’t need to.”

“You know what Groucho Marx said – women should be obscene and not heard.”

He hurt himself laughing. “The trouble is you’re both – obscene and heard!”

In the relentless downpour they could just about see a red and brown brick building rising above the waterlogged streets. A flash of lightning gave them a better look at the huge tower that was their destination.

Cheryl shivered in her waterproof jacket. “This is like one of those Hammer films when the hero and his beautiful red headed heroine enter Dracula’s castle.”

“Well, you’ve got the neck for it – in more ways than one.”

They didn’t have to knock on the door. It was already open and the lights were on in the porter’s lodge. Shaking the water off like a pair of dogs they entered a tiny room made more cramped by a bulky sofa, a pile of chairs and a fat shaven-headed man in circular spectacles warming his behind in front of a gas fire.

“Come in, come in,” he shouted, his eyes twinkling behind his glasses. “Upon my soul, how wet you are. Take this my dear to dry your lovely hair on.”

The rotund figure picked up a tea towel and handed it to Cheryl. “The name is Baines, Albert Baines, here to help you in whatever way I can.”

“You can’t have been very busy today,” Freddie said casually.

“You’re the second visitors. There was someone just before midday, said he was inspecting structural defects for the chartered surveyors, not a word of thanks when he left, didn’t even look in to say goodbye. Some people have no manners. There now, I’ve said it.”

Baines showed his disgust by dropping a sodden copy of the
Daily Mail
in the trash can.

Freddie explained who they were. “I expect Mr Guest told you we were coming.”

“Indeed he did. With your permission sir, I’d like to tell you about Canonbury Tower. It was erected in the early sixteenth century as a country residence for the Prior of St Bartholomew. William Bolton was both an Augustinian monk and a clerk of works to Henry VII. He presided over the construction of the Lady Chapel in Westminster Abbey.”

“Funny country house,” Cheryl remarked. “Such a tall tower must have stood out like a sore thumb.”

“Oh, that. Astrologists predicted a great flood was coming, so Prior William copied Noah by building an ark, albeit a vertical one, and stocked it with enough food to survive until the waters subsided. The flood never happened, not until now at least.”

Baines was getting into his stride. “The English Reformation was planned here. It was Thomas Cromwell’s home for seven years before he lost his head. But what you’re really interested in is the building’s other famous inhabitant. Sir Francis Bacon acquired a forty year lease on the place when he was Attorney-General and he’s supposed to have used it for meetings of the Invisible College, otherwise known as the Rosicrucian Fraternity. The rooms upstairs all have oak panelling carved to Bacon’s specifications. Lots of Masonic symbols like the rose. Then there’s the upper chamber with its famous ‘writing on the wall.’ High above the lintel someone inscribed the names of the kings and queens of England in black lettering. Between Elizabeth and James I is a name beginning with the letter F that’s either worn away or been deliberately defaced. You’ll want to see that.”

“What about the secret passageways that Mr Guest mentioned?” Cheryl’s eyes were shining.

“She loves all this cloak and dagger stuff,” Freddie explained.

Baines cleared a place for her on the sofa. “That’s an old story. When post-war repair work was done on the second floor room one of the oak panels near the fireplace had to be replaced. Behind the panel was some kind of passage which had to be closed again because of the bad air. The builders also demolished part of the tower wall and found steps leading to a subterranean tunnel that ran all the way to St Bartholomew’s priory.”

Cheryl finished drying her hair and handed back the towel. “Thanks, Albert, you’re a real mate.”

“Would you like me to show you around?”

“Thanks all the same,” Freddie said, “but we can manage on our own. We’re just popping up to the Compton Room.”

They climbed the staircase to the second floor and entered a Jacobean chamber, panelled from floor to ceiling in oak, with richly carved pilasters raised on plinths, bell-shaped capitals adorned with acanthus leaves and a palm leaf frieze. What caught Freddie’s eye was the ornate work above the fireplace on the north wall. Trailing roses had been incised into the wooden mantelpiece.

Cheryl saw a puff of dust rising above the fireplace’s stone surround. “That’s odd,” she said. “Where is the air coming from?”

Freddie took a slim-line torch out of his anorak pocket and shone it inside the fireplace’s flat-arched opening. The flickering light illuminated a brick wall not in the least blackened by soot or smoke.

The dust stirred again beside the cast-iron grate. They looked at one another in surprise.

“There’s got to be an alcove behind the fireplace and something is moving inside it,” he whispered, trying to appear nonchalant.

Cheryl retreated in shock. Searching for historical ghosts had seemed like fun but this was much too real for her, positively spooky.

Freddie prodded, pushed and poked the wooden panels near the fireplace.

“What are you looking for?”

“I don’t know exactly, some kind of release mechanism perhaps. I once saw a priest hole in Hindlip Hall with a fireplace hearth entry point that could be raised and lowered like a trap-door.”

“Then why not look on the floor?”

“That’s too obvious. I’m convinced the lifting mechanism is somewhere in the carved wood.” 

“What makes you so sure?”

“Those who harboured priests in Queen Elizabeth’s day tended to be pretty important Roman Catholic landowners. Consequently, operating systems, latches, pulleys and miniature cranes, were deliberately hidden in costly objects that priest hunters would think twice about destroying.”

Freddie ran his hand over the trailing roses on the mantelpiece. The carvings were sufficiently raised to get his fingertips beneath them. Taking hold of a rose, he tried to turn it in a clockwise direction. It didn’t budge. He twisted it the other way but nothing happened.

“Use logic,” he scolded himself. “One of these roses must be more prominent than the others.”

Groping his way along the mantelpiece his fingers closed on the penultimate carving. It was sufficiently embossed for him to get his whole hand behind it.

He turned the rose clockwise and heard a catch release. With a grating noise, the panel nearest the fireplace swung away from the wall creating a wide enough gap for a slender person to wriggle through. The static electricity caused the hairs on his arm to rise up.

Freddie didn’t stop to think. Switching on his torch he edged his way into the narrow opening. His overriding impression was one of smell: the nauseatingly sweet odour of advanced putrefaction.

“There’s no one here,” he let her know.

“Well, that’s a relief” Cheryl’s muffled voice came out of the darkness as she squeezed her way through the narrow portal.

“Try not to stand on the dead rats.”

Shining his torch over the rough-hewn stones he showed her what was left of the rodents before moving the beam across the sloping brick walls of an eight foot by six hiding place. One of the bricks was smaller than the others. She touched it with her hand and the man sized aperture disappeared.

“Oops,” she said. “Hope we can find that again.”

“Look over there,” he shuffled to one side to let her see. The flickering light revealed they were actually standing at the open end of what seemed like a human sized tunnel.

“The way ahead,” he said drily. “People must have been a lot smaller when this was built. Want to go back?” He hoped she would say yes but Cheryl wasn’t the sort of girl to give up easily. Not when Prior William’s unexplored tunnel beckoned. “Where do you think this leads?”

“I’ve no idea but it was built for a purpose.”

He had no plan, no clear idea of what they might find. Taking a deep breath, he stuck the torch between his teeth and crawled into the tunnel’s inky black interior. The darkness sharpened his remaining senses. He could feel the slime encrusted stones beneath his hands and hear the rats scurrying around. There was a yelp behind him. One of the rats had nipped Cheryl’s jeans. The stench was overwhelming.

Hearing Cheryl retch, Freddie stopped. “There’s a handkerchief in my right trouser pocket. Tie it over your mouth and nostrils.”       

Moving forward again, their hands and knees rubbed against the sweating slime of the tunnel walls. Even the rats deserted them, disappearing into the filthiness ahead. The tunnel became more constricted. They seemed to have crawled into some kind of spiral hole.

Leading the way, Freddie had a terrible thought.  Perhaps they were in a waste disposal chute and about to fall into the bowels of a medieval cesspit. The presence of what appeared to be fossilised shit strengthened this theory. He was beginning to panic when the torchlight picked out a blue hole ahead.

“Good news,” he said. “We’re reaching the end of the tunnel.”

Their subterranean passage brought them out into a vast cavern bathed in an eerie blue light that seemed to emanate from a thin vertical shaft high above their heads before being refracted by the glowing green lichen that covered the surrounding walls. Craning his neck, he caught sight of a giant stalactite, formed by centuries of water percolating through the limestone, and could hear a steady dripping sound behind his own laboured breathing. The grotto was damp and cold. His first thought was that he had stepped into an ancient catacomb.

As his eyes became accustomed to the light and the strange shadows it cast on the shimmering walls, Freddie noticed something very odd. The grotto was heptagonal. Stonemasons with hammers and chisels had taken over where nature left off and what they had fashioned was a seven-sided vault.    He remembered the first Rosicrucian manifesto, the
Fama Fraternitatis Rosae Crucis
, and the story it told of the life and death of the mythical founder of the movement Christian Rosenkreuz who had been buried in a hidden tomb with seven sides and seven corners. Although the sun could not penetrate his sepulchre it was illuminated by a mysterious light in the ceiling and a circular altar had been placed above his perfectly preserved body.

Sure enough, as Freddie explored a dimly lit recess in the cavern, he came across a crude circular table hacked out of the rock. It was covered with a fading purple altar cloth on which stood two silver candlesticks and a brass plate engraved with strange characters and the letter T.

He stopped in his tracks, filled with a sense of awe. They were actually standing in a Rosicrucian temple. Francis Bacon and his fellow Christian scientists had met here, deep in the bowels of Canonbury Tower, to recite their psalms and prayers and share their ecumenical beliefs. He could not bring himself to touch the altar candle or the plate. It would have been like stealing a piece of history.

But were they alone? The thought flashed through his head as he heard a pebble crunched underfoot. It was only a small sound but it made his skin prickle. He felt they were being watched. Somewhere behind him in the darkest corner of the vault, a man was breathing when he breathed. Was this his mysterious attacker, the burglar who had entered his flat twice without taking anything? Fear rooted him to the spot. He didn’t know what to do.

Too late, he recalled the casual way his friend Seymour Guest had introduced the idea of a Bacon testimony and how that had led them into this labyrinth. Anything could happen here and no one would know the difference. This man-made chamber was a perfect killing ground.

Terror is contagious. Cheryl picked up on it. “Is somebody here, Freddie?” she whispered urgently.

With a wavering hand he swung his torch across the cavern walls but barely penetrated the gloom. The beam was weak, suggesting the battery was low. “You must be imagining it,” he muttered. His words echoed around the cavern mocking his deceit. “But the sooner we’re out of here the better.”

To his utter relief, the flickering torch located an exit. Dropping below the floor of the vault was a spiralling flight of narrow stone steps, worn away at the centre, that were little more than footholds in a precipitous declivity.

“Now what do we do?” Cheryl asked in a quaking voice.

He weighed up their options. Going back would be a nightmare. Going forward might be worse but at least it was progress.

“Follow the yellow brick road,” he said grimly, pointing to the steps.

“You’ve got to be joking. I’m not going down there. It’s a gaping void.”

“Do you want to turn back then? It’ll be hard crawling through that tunnel again.”

She thought about being cooped up with the rats again and shook her head.

“This is what I want you to do. Take off your heels and move to the top of the steps. We’ll go down feet first. I’ll lead so I can catch you if you slip.”

A thoroughly frightened Cheryl needed no second bidding. She threw her shoes away and heard them ricochet off the wall. In bare feet, she followed him into the abyss. The light from his torch did little more than texture the surrounding darkness as they began their perilous descent.

Feeling for every step was a physically draining, nerve-sapping experience. Muscles began to ache and minds unravel as they scrambled downwards. Freddie found himself wondering whether the fear he’d felt in the vault had been unjustified. If a man had been lurking in the shadows why hadn’t he made his presence felt. Why had he let them escape and why wasn’t he following them now?