The Queen's Cipher (54 page)

He was sitting in a high-ceilinged chamber that had formerly been a refectory for elderly nuns and now resembled a library reading room with desks, chairs and a Franciscan archivist to keep everyone in order. Through a gracefully arched medieval window he could see lengthening shadows in the Cloister of the Holy Trinity and, beyond its centrally placed statues and sculptures, a staircase leading to the document halls. Soon they would be turning on the lights.

He picked up a pile of documents with the intention of restoring them to their appropriate box and stopped short. Peeking out of some household accounts was a small black leather book. It was not much bigger than a personal diary. Freddie’s stomach felt queasy and on picking up the book he found his hand was damp with sweat.
Il mio amore per la musica e
iniziata quando ho iniziato ad andare a teatro San Cassiano
. Another disappointment: he was reading an opera lover’s diary, presumably written by the other Alvise Contarini who had risen from diplomat to doge while collecting opera scores like a philatelist collected stamps.

The overhead lighting came on. An ever-growing demand for its services had persuaded the Archive to experiment with a later weekend closing hour. Freddie looked at his watch. Don’t give up now, he told himself, there’s time enough for another box. This one had never been catalogued: a mixture of papers, diplomatic reports and handwritten newsletters, mostly in Italian. It didn’t look promising.

Picking up a report, he gazed idly at the date and signature and his whole body stiffened. A dispatch had been sent to the Doge and Senate on 26th February 1649 by Alvise Contarini, Venetian Ambassador to the Congress of Munster. This time he had the right Alvise and, although the war had ended several months earlier, he was still writing from Germany.

Il povero re d’Inghilterra ha finalmente perso sia la coruna e la vita per mano del carnefice, come un criminale commune, a Londra, prima di tutte le persone, senza che nessuno parla in suo favore e la sentenza giudiziaria dei propri sudditi. La storia offer alcun esempio di simile.

Contarini was reporting, somewhat belatedly, on the execution of Charles I and, as a republican, his passionate denunciation of the event came as something of a surprise. ‘The poor king of England has at last lost both crown and life by the hand of the executioner, like a common criminal, in London, before all the people, without anyone speaking in his favour and by the judicial sentence of his own subjects. History affords no example of the like.’

With this dispatch Contarini enclosed a copy of King Charles’s scaffold speech and a document touching on ‘other circumstances attending his death.’ Wondering what these might be, he piled more papers on his desk and in doing so something fell out of the box.

It was a rather shabby calfskin book, not more than twenty centimetres in length, with a wax stain on its cover. He turned it around and inspected the spine. The hand sewn endbands and sprinkled edges were typical bindings of the period. Bracing himself for a further anticlimax he turned the stiff, yellowing pages and saw an epigraph written in an italic hand, at once spidery and precise. He uttered a silent prayer before reading the opening line.
Of the circumstances surrounding my birth I have but this to say…

He sensed Brother Paolo’s sharp eyes were on him. Burying his head in a report on the spice trade, he waited for the archivist to look elsewhere. He could hardly believe it. Lying in front of him on the desk was Francis Bacon’s personal testimony. The treatise meant for the people!

When the friar’s attention finally turned elsewhere Freddie didn’t stop to think. Acting on impulse, he slipped the codex into the ziplock bag in which he carried his lunchtime sandwiches and hid it in his jacket pocket. This isn’t stealing, he told himself. How can you steal something that doesn’t exist? No, if he was doing anything, he was liberating the truth. He tidied up the boxes on his desk, nodded to Brother Paolo and slunk out of the Archive feeling like a thief in the night.

Once outside, in the Campo San Frari, he breathed more freely. Making his way to the canal bank he pretended to watch the ripples of light reflecting on the water’s dark surface. The book was burning a hole in his pocket but he couldn’t read it here, not with so many people milling around, many of them in masks and fancy dress.

At first he didn’t make the connection. Then it came to him. In his single-minded pursuit of the codex he had forgotten that this was the Festa del Redentore, the Saturday night in July on which Venetians traditionally celebrated the Republic’s deliverance from the plague. At dusk, as they had done for centuries, revellers climbed into small boats decked with lanterns, balloons and bunting and made their way down the Grand Canal to watch a fireworks display that lit up the city’s golden onion domes and bell towers.

Losing himself in a crowd of good-natured merrymakers, Freddie moved along the waterfront, looking for a secluded spot where he could examine his stolen treasure, cursing the fact that it was such a well-lit area teaming with ancient wrought-iron lampposts that, according to his guidebook, had been commissioned by a twelfth-century doge to cut down on street crime.

Absurd ideas entered his mind. There was something not quite right about this street party. It threatened him. Lurking somewhere in the shadows was his nemesis, waiting to do battle for the precious book he was carrying. Galvanized by this chilling thought he rushed beyond the merchant palaces and warehouses that lined the Grand Canal in search of a more discreet setting.

Eventually he came across an empty jetty lit by a single lamppost and beneath its flickering, intermittent sodium glow he extracted the codex from its polyethylene plastic casing. He could wait no longer. He had to make sure that this unpretentious notebook was his Holy Grail.

What immediately struck him was its incomplete nature. This wasn’t a finished work, more a diary than a full-blown treatise, but the style was unmistakable.

Believing I was born for the service of mankind … The entry of truth with chalk to mark those minds capable of receiving it … Fortune tumbles into some men’s laps but is denied to others … I was like a lost child left in a world of envy without place or strength … These records may escape the shipwreck of time … I was not without hope that I might get something done for the good of men’s souls … Talk is but a tinkling cymbal where there is no love … it was a thing of great reverence like Tintoretto’s Crucifixion … magpie bishops in black and white or ‘god’s spies’ as we called them in Lear … I hold every man a debtor to his profession whether he be high-born or of common stock
.

Here were Francis Bacon’s pithy comments on the importance of the stage and the creative partnership he had forged with the Stratford poet, plus guarded references to his relationship with Queen Elizabeth, couched in gentle irony. The overriding impression was of sadness and frustration. He had risen to be a great statesman and jurist, to write prose of surpassing beauty, to be the herald of the new age of science, and yet it wasn’t enough. Not for a man of such genius. And this wry, matter-of-fact account of his buried feelings had somehow fallen through the cracks of history.

Freddie stared at the book in utter amazement. People set themselves goals in life they never expect to achieve. They reach for the stars and fall short. They do everything by halves. That is the human condition. Recognizing this, he had hunted for Bacon’s testimony without really believing in its existence, let alone thinking he might find it. The sheer joy of discovery made his body tremble.

A brief sound, the merest footfall on the canal walkway, swept away the triumphalism. He could sense the presence of his stalker; feel his energy and willpower and his own mounting fear and uncertainty. He stood motionless, like a cornered animal caught in a searchlight. Try to be rational, he told himself. Either he was hallucinating or his enemy was close at hand. If it was the latter, would anyone come to his rescue? He could hear the clamour of voices but some distance off. For all practical purposes, he was alone with his adversary who was a brutal thug and almost certainly a murderer. Would he kill in order to acquire the codex? There seemed no reason why not.

Freddie glanced furtively in all directions, waiting for death to approach him. A death he had thought about ever since coming to Venice. His nerve gave way. Turning on his heel he dashed into San Polo’s maze of dimly lit back streets.

It was a journey into the dark, sprinting through narrow openings between bars and cafes that smelt of pizza and squid ink, sidestepping lovers in dark alleys, crossing bridges and tiny squares, running along canal banks searching blindly for a hiding place while hating the cowardice that drove him to it. Since turning his back on the foe, his fears had multiplied. However appalling, it was better to see what was coming rather than hear what was behind you. And he could hear them: the heavy steps, the onrushing feet.

Run faster, he told himself, as he pounded over the uneven cobblestones of claustrophobic corridors that twisted and turned seemingly at random. There were no landmarks from which to take a proper bearing. Street names changed frequently, houses went unnumbered, there was no meaningful signposting and most of the lanes dead-ended or dropped into canals. He had lost the direction of safety.

Eventually he pulled up, short of breath and dripping with sweat. Surely he had crossed this footbridge before? Wasn’t this canal familiar? On the opposite bank someone struck a match and he saw a silhouette flitting across the reflective surface of the water. He hadn’t shaken off his pursuer.

The chest pains returned. It was impossible to think clearly. Cowering in an unlit doorway he strained to catch the sound of following footsteps. And there they were. The steps came closer; their measured tread increasingly ominous to Freddie’s anxious ear.

He scuttled into another alley only to realize that it led to the edge of a canal. He had trapped himself in his haste. Desperate for any kind of cover, he felt rather than saw the recessed arch of a warehouse door and sank thankfully into its enveloping darkness. He didn’t have long to wait. First the rasping noise of a steel toecap striking ancient stone, then the whiff of a woody aftershave as a figure slid past the warehouse arch before halting on the canal bank to be lit by the faint blue glow from a casement window on the opposite bank.

Here at last, almost within touching distance, was the remorseless enemy he had been worrying about for months. It was difficult to see in such a diffuse light but he seemed to be well-built, clean-shaven and regular-featured. In his early forties, Freddie guessed, without any noticeable peculiarities. Just an average looking guy of medium height in a navy blazer and grey flannels: hardly the devil incarnate.

And that was when Freddie’s mood changed. The man’s sheer ordinariness seemed to mock his impotence. He wanted to rush forward and choke the life out of him. Since getting off the train in Venice he had known this moment would arrive. ‘If it be not now, yet it will come.’ These were Hamlet’s words. ‘The readiness is all.’

Well, he was ready or he would be once he found some kind of weapon with which to defend himself. Fortunately the warehouse archway was full of builder’s rubble. Bending down his hand closed on a half brick. This would have to do. Slipping the brick into his jacket pocket he stepped forward, heart thumping, to begin the strangest conversation he had ever had.

“Looking for me,” he said, sounding not quite as casual as he had hoped.

The man turned towards him. He was much more muscular than he had imagined and older too. “I rather think I was, Dr Brett,” delivered in a quiet, almost gentle way.

“You have the advantage of me. I don’t know your name.”

“Oh, you can call me Brennan but I don’t really have a name. Not one I’d care to share anyway.”

Brennan fixed Freddie with his grey eyes. They were like a dead fish, empty and unblinking.

“And when you’re not following me around, what do you do for a living, Mr Brennan?”

“I’m an investigator.”

“That could mean just about anything.”

“What it means, Dr Brett, is that I’m investigating you.”

“On whose behalf?” he inquired.

Brennan’s smile did not reach his eyes. “The Irish Republican Army, if you must know.”

Freddie’s jaw dropped in surprise. “Why would you do that?”

“We’ll come to that soon enough. First though, there’s something I want to say. I’ve followed your career with interest. It’s a pleasure to meet you at long last.”

Freddie froze to the spot. He had imagined many things but not a soft-spoken Irish terrorist who desired better acquaintance. Perhaps he was dealing with a charismatic psychopath. One of those unnatural monsters he had read about who somehow managed to combine cruelty and charm.

“Really, and what have I done to earn your continued interest?”

“I saw that boyhood photograph of you after the Ballymena bombing and felt sorry. Losing your parents in that way! We’re kindred spirits, you and I.”

“How do you work that out?”

“I lost
my
da when I was a kid, killed by British soldiers on Bloody Sunday. It was tough after that, as it was for you, and we’ve turned out the same way too.”

“What the hell do you mean by that?” Freddie was shocked to think that he and this killer had anything in common.

“We’ve both been brainwashed. From junior school onwards, my mind was used as a blackboard on which my Catholic teachers chalked their hatred of Ireland’s colonial oppressors. It was no surprise that I should spend my youth fighting the British when your stinking government was trying to silence nationalist demands for civil rights and equality.”

“I don’t see what that’s got to do with me?”

“You’ve also been radicalized. You are fighting against a set of outdated values without realizing it. The British Empire may be a thing of the past but its culture is more important than ever. English is almost everyone’s second language. When the world thinks today, more often than not, it thinks in English, the language of Shakespeare. Undermine him and you reduce British global influence. Scholarly sabotage, that’s what you’ve been about, my son.”