The Queen's Cipher (48 page)

The reward was immediate. “It’s hardly a secret that Milton has secured a sizeable advance for a book rumoured to be about Shakespeare’s role in the Rosicrucian movement. You know he’s one of them.”

“Oh yes, that I do know.”

“But that’s him all over,” Manley added spitefully, “following the prevailing wind. The evidence is, at best, circumstantial but he will weave it together with his customary magic.” 

The little library director climbed off his stool and put his arm around her. “Can I interest you in a nightcap at my hotel?” he asked.

“Honestly, I’d love to, Elliott, but I’ve had a long day and can hardly keep my eyes open.”

“Another time then,” he said lurching off into the night, leaving Sam to hail her own cab.

Sitting in a Metro taxi on her way home she weighed up what she might say. It was a flimsy pretext for a conversation. But she felt compelled to make the call. There were fences to mend, huge obstacles to overcome, but it could be done. The heart was a most resilient muscle.

*

A phone was ringing in the flat. Freddie disentangled himself from Cheryl’s body and looked at the alarm clock. It was only seven o’clock. Wondering who could be calling at such an ungodly hour, he slipped on his dressing gown and went out into the hall.

Rubbing sleep out of his eyes, he picked up the receiver and heard Sam’s voice. She wanted to know whether he was planning to write a book about Bacon and Shakespeare.

“I’m thinking about it,” he replied guardedly, aware of how fast his heart was beating.

“Will it have a Rosicrucian angle?”

He couldn’t believe they were having this conversation.  Without so much as an apology, she was cross-examining him.

“What if it has?” he finally said.

Speaking rapidly to hide her nerves, Sam told him about Milton’s latest project. How he had obviously got wind of Freddie’s research and was planning to beat him to the punch by tell the world about Shakespeare’s connection to the Rosicrucian movement.

“I thought you ought to know,” she ended lamely.

Freddie gritted his teeth. The silence lengthened between them as he collected his thoughts. “What’s it matter to you what I do now. You made an absolute fool out of me.”

His words hung there, searing the telephone line.

“Do you love him or not?”

Freddie’s blunt question caught her off guard.

“Who are you talking about?”

“Milton Cleaver, of course. Or are you fucking someone else?”

At the other end of the line, Sam gasped aloud. How had he found out?

“If you want to know who told me, it was his wife.”

“Look, Freddie, you’ve got every reason to be angry but this won’t get us anywhere …”

“I asked you a question. Do you love him?”

“It’s none of your business.” Sam blustered. “And if you think you can …”

Freddie interrupted her. “If you have to think whether you love someone, you don’t.”

“Stop putting words into my mouth. I am trying to help you and all you …”

“Oh well, that’s all right then, as long as you’re trying to help me.”

Startled by the venomous crackle in his voice, Cheryl had got out of bed and was standing in the hallway stark naked. There was a worried look on her face.

“Look, if you want me to say I am sorry. Sorry. OK?”

“No, it’s not OK, you fucking hypocrite.”

It was only then that Freddie caught sight of Cheryl. “Oh, there you are love,” he said sheepishly. “Sorry to wake you up. I am just finishing off a call.”

Three thousand miles away, Sam took a deep breath. “Who are you talking to?”

“No one you know.” Tears began to run down his face.

Cheryl snatched the phone from his hand. “Listen to me, you stuck up American bitch, you’re not nearly good enough for Freddie.”

“Who the hell are you?” Sam asked.

“You had your chance,” Cheryl yelled back at her. “He loved you and you blew him away. Now he’s mine. Fuck off.”

“My goodness, you
are
a fast worker, Freddie.” Sam spat out the words. “Not frightened of women anymore …”

The line had gone dead.

5 JULY 2014

Two silhouetted gravediggers chorus a drinking song as they throw dirt and skulls out of an open grave onto an otherwise bare stage. Behind the carousing gravediggers, a castle looms out of the darkness, ominous and remote, illuminated by blood red northern lights. The night watch calls out the hour. Chained captives trudge across the stage accompanied by armed guards. The sound of hammers striking anvils establish that Elsinore is on a war footing.

One of the skulls rolls off the stage and into the lap of a startled silver-haired woman in the front row of the stalls. She gives the skull to her tour guide who is sitting next to her. Nursing a skeleton’s head is not part of Freddie’s job description. He is in charge of a party of senior citizens who have come to Stratford to see the latest production of
Hamlet
at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre.

He thinks of the play as an exam question: 'Describe, in a few well-chosen words, what makes Hamlet an enduring masterpiece'.
Although performed in timeless costume,
Hamlet
is clearly rooted in the sixteenth century. Hamlet-like heroes may have existed in Roman legends and Scandinavian sagas but Shakespeare’s character is a forward-looking Renaissance prince who attends the Lutheran university of Wittenberg, hangs out with actors, befriends commoners and is having an affair with the chief minister’s daughter when the king dies in mysterious circumstances. After that he is driven by his father’s ghost demanding vengeance on his usurping brother. Hamlet has to confront the paradoxical truth that to avenge his father’s death he must commit the very act for which he seeks revenge and the humane, introspective intellectual is hopelessly miscast for the role. ‘The time is out of joint – O cursed spite that ever I was born to set it right.’ In wrestling with this dilemma he is full of contradictions – rash yet cautious, polite yet rude, compassionate yet savagely uncaring – and it is these conflicting emotional responses that give the play its universal appeal and relevance.

A dramatic change in the stage lighting heralded the end of the first act, dragging his thoughts back to what he might say in the post-theatre discussion with his tour group. Well, for a start, he could talk about the thrust stage and the sense of intimacy it created by letting the audience surround the players. As for the production, it was the best-acted version he had seen in years. The stillness of the dark-suited prince in the opening scene when his shrewd and conniving uncle tried to persuade him to stay at court had been mesmerizing. It was as if his grief had made him heavy and listless and he remained like that until the ghost’s intervention stirred him into life. Only then did Hamlet put on his ‘antic disposition’ and feign madness in order to confuse the king and his court; saying to his friends, ‘let’s go together’, before capering off on his own, a solitary figure determined to keep his counsel.

The second and third acts confirmed the good impression made by the first. The movie star playing the prince managed to be both mercurial and melancholic at the same time; delighting in posing philosophical questions no one could answer, leading up to his existential observations about the afterlife and the practicality of self-destruction in the famous ‘To be, or not to be’ speech. Closing his eyes to listen to the words, Freddie thought he could hear Francis Bacon speaking, the prince that never was, disowned by his real mother, creating an imaginary world for Elizabethan playgoers, and here, at the start of a new reign, reminding King James of his own youthful misfortunes: how his father, Lord Darnley, had been killed in an orchard and how his mother, Mary Queen of Scots, had imitated Gertrude’s unseemly haste in marrying her late husband’s murderer. Such a tangled skein of royal intrigue and suffering brought to life in a truly magnificent play. No longer was Bacon the sad watery-eyed image of the Dutch portraits, but a flesh and blood figure with longings and frustrations, exercising massive self-control: the player king whose desire for ‘wild justice’ could only be achieved on the stage.

Freddie's Hamlet-like introspection ended with Ophelia’s entrance. Having cut off all contact with him on her father’s instructions she reminded him of his love letters and asked him to take them back. ‘Rich gifts wax poor when givers prove unkind.’ He didn’t want them or her. ‘If thou dost marry, I’ll give you this plague for thy dowry. Be thou as chaste as ice, as pure as snow, thou shall not escape calumny. Get thee to a nunnery, go. Farewell. Or, if thou wilt needs marry, marry a fool, for wise men know well enough what monsters you make of them. To a nunnery, go, and quickly too.’

Memories of Sam, those bright blue eyes and gleaming teeth, and how she had cheated on him, yet now wanted him back.
I hope we haven’t spoken our last words to one another
, she had texted. He had replied:
How can I ever trust you again
?  The last words had been hers and enigmatic ones at that.
Trust has to be earned
. But once trust was lost could it ever be restored. Much as he wanted to believe that reconciliation was possible, her betrayal had opened a chasm that seemed unbridgeable.

The interval came and with it drinks at the bar. He moved conscientiously between his senior citizens, asking each of them what they thought of the play and listening intently to what they had to say. As a liberal thinker he knew it was wrong to stereotype people – he was a stereotype himself with the stooped shoulders and loping stride of the overwrought academic - but he couldn’t help categorizing this tour group. There was the obese ex-truck driver, the celebrity conscious housewife and the older divorcee searching for a better life through plastic surgery. The woman who got the skull in her lap had had a generous amount of rhinoplasty and more than one Botox injection. She wanted to know why Hamlet ‘didn’t just get on with it’. In Act Three he had come across Claudius kneeling in prayer, raised his sword and then stopped. Freddie reminded her of the medieval superstition that anyone who died while praying would go to Heaven, his sins forgiven, but she had merely sniffed at this. ‘Yeah, I heard him say that, but I thought the prince was supposed to be a bright guy?’ A harder question came from a retired college lecturer. Why did Hamlet speak with so many different voices? The double meanings and deceptions he kept for the Court at Elsinore; the dark irony and bitterness he expressed in Horatio’s company and the vengeful rage and self-doubt he reserved for his soliloquies. It was as if he was three different people. And what about the Oedipal Complex, someone else asked, how do you explain Hamlet’s unnatural closeness to his mother?

The buzzer summoned the audience back to their seats for the second half of the play. It began in Gertrude’s bedchamber and achieved what one theatre critic called ‘a vertiginous descent into murder, mayhem and revenge.’ First, Hamlet stabbed Polonius through the curtain and then poor lovesick Ophelia went mad and drowned herself.

‘Too much water hast thou, poor Ophelia.’ Visions of the sewer came to mind. That cascade of red hair, those shrewd green eyes and the truly indefatigable spirit of Cheryl Stone, lost to him for all time. He saw her standing in his flat’s narrow hallway after Sam’s ill-judged phone call, an angry naked girl with a protruding ribcage, holding him to account for the tears in his eyes.

“You still love her, don’t you?” It was more of a statement than a question. “You’ll never get over her.” When he hadn’t answered, there had been further cries of frustration. “I’ve tried to please you,” she wailed, “I’ve cut down on the swearing, lost my piercings, even worn longer skirts.”

He had rushed to reassure her. He loved the way she looked and talked. “But you don’t love me?”

“I’ve never had so much fun with any girl,” he replied, answering a question she hadn’t asked him. He couldn’t tell her what he really felt, it was too soon to say, but his reticence was tantamount to a rejection.

“Thought so,” she had said. “Look, Freddie, we don’t belong together.”

“Yes, we do. We get on fine.”

“You mean the sex is fine but that’s as far as it goes.”

“It’s more than that …”

Cheryl cut him off. “And you’re not going to publish anything on Shakespeare, are you? You haven’t got the guts.”

She was right. He didn’t have the guts. He tried to put a gloss on his inaction by telling her he needed more conclusive proof before venturing into print. To claim the existence of a second Shakespeare on decrypted evidence would be hard enough without the further suggestion that this shadowy co-author was actually Queen Elizabeth’s love child. His academic career was hanging by a thread as it was. He couldn’t afford to go off half cock, he said.

But she wasn’t prepared to listen to such feeble excuses. “That’s garbage, that is! That’s your posh American bitch talking, not you. She’s still controlling your mind. So what hope is there for me, a Hackney scrubber? I’ll tell you, none whatsoever. I’m leaving now, Freddie, and I won’t be back.”      

She had been good to her word. Cheryl had caught a train to London that day, presumably to stay with her heroin addict of a mother in that damp, nicotine stained flat she called home. “It’s an evil smelling dump,” she had once admitted, “but Dawn can’t afford anything better and she’s got Lamar and Tats to think of.” They were Cheryl’s half brother and sister. At least she has a family, he thought, lapsing into self-pity.

As the action quickened so Hamlet’s failure to deal with his treacherous uncle seemed less excusable. He talked about revenge but did not take it: a dithering hero who thought too much and did too little. Rather like me, Freddie supposed, passive, impotent and short of hope.

While the tragedy moved towards its inexorable climax on a stage strewn with bodies Freddie had a further thought. At its most basic level,
Hamlet
was about the consequences of deceit and treachery. Claudius murdered his brother because he coveted the crown and his sister-in-law; Rosencrantz and Guildenstern betrayed the bonds of friendship by spying on the prince whose feigned madness drove Ophelia to commit suicide and Laertes to dishonour the duelling code by poisoning his rapier. One betrayal had led to another and each was devastating. The play ended in a massacre with the entire royal family poisoned to death. Was this Francis Bacon’s idea? Or was he merely trying to show in an admittedly melodramatic fashion what happened when a cover-up took place; how concealing the truth had a knock-on effect, widening the web of conspiracy.