The Queen's Cipher (56 page)

Only then does the victim fully comprehend the seriousness of his situation. He loses all semblance of self-control and screams inwardly. He is in a state of shock.

He can feel himself sinking. Raising his chin above the surface he tilts back his head and gulps in as much air as possible before dropping below the static water line.

The submerged seconds spread out as he tries to hold his breath.

In the second stage of drowning the pain becomes unbearable.

His lungs are burning and his diaphragm has gone into spasm. He is blacking out.

Water floods into his bursting lungs. Hypoxia will follow and the heart stop pumping blood.

Death in Venice, he thinks, in ten feet of dirty water.

20 JULY 2014

White images flit through the cerebral cortex accompanied by whispers.
Penso che stia svegliando adesso
.

He registers the words and what they mean. They belong to this world rather than the next. Through badly swollen eyelids the patient catches a reassuring glimpse of his angel of mercy. She is wearing starched linen rather than the now familiar scrubs and the air is heavy with her sweet and musky scent. He can hear a machine pinging in time with his heartbeat.

The nurse takes his pulse and checks the IV drip. “Hello,” she says in English. “Lie still and take it easy. The oxygen level in your blood stream is still too low so I’m going to give you a mask.”

Freddie is greedy for her therapy. The gas makes him feel better, more alert.

His mind becomes elastic, stretching back to those harrowing moments in the water when strong hands grabbed his sinking body and a hollow voice told him to stop struggling before turning him onto his back. After that vague memories of being dragged out of the water and given the kiss of life. Slipping in and out of consciousness, he had heard Brennan ring for an ambulance.

“Couldn’t let you die, could I?” the Irishman whispered in his ear. “I’ve invested too much time in you for that. So where’s that book we were squabbling over.”

His sodden jacket pockets were searched and the treatise taken from its plastic covering.  “Thoughtful of you to keep it dry for me. Now I really must be going. I don’t suppose we’ll meet again, Dr Brett, but I’ll be watching your career with interest. Such a pity we couldn’t be friends.”

Blackness again, fireworks illuminating the night sky and the sensation of being wheeled down a marble corridor, lifted off a gurney and into a hospital bed where nurses stick needles into him.

Now in the early morning light, Freddie is apparently out of danger and, according to the hospital doctor, fit enough to be interviewed by the police. He tells the officers a carefully constructed story. No, he didn’t know his attacker or why he’d rescued him from his watery grave: possibly because the man didn’t want a death on his conscience. No, he couldn’t say why he had been attacked or give an accurate description of his assailant: it had been too dark for that, although he had the distinct impression that the man was young and blonde, possibly of Slavic descent. And no, nothing has been stolen.

Nothing, that is, apart from a book that describes the working relationship between two of the most extraordinary minds the world has ever known.

THE BARD OF WINDING LANE

The river stank. It had been raining for weeks. 1594 was the wettest year in living memory.

Flexing his well-developed biceps the waterman rowed through the shoal of turds that testified to the regularity of Tudor bowels. Surrounded by a swirling mass of excrement, kitchen waste and drowned rats, the fastidious figure in the back of the cushioned wherry held a cambric handkerchief to his distended nostrils and took a firmer grip on the leather codex he was carrying.

The latest squall had eased off and the sun glimmered feebly through a smoky haze of morning mist, the better to see the garbage buckets London’s citizens were throwing into this foul broth; the same water they drew for household use and in which they washed their clothes.

The grandee was dressed in a fashionable pan-European way. The cloak was Spanish, the doublet German, the breeches Venetian, the hose French, while his black beaver hat was stitched from pelts imported by the Hudson’s Bay Company. Everything about him was costly: sable, cloth of gold, velvet grosgrain silk slashed with taffeta. His gloves flashed with amber while a silver pomander filled with oranges and cloves hung around his neck as a plague-deterrent and a pungent alternative to the stench of the city.

The waterman had hardly stopped talking since his passenger boarded his rowing boat. “Sweet Jesus, your shilling is hard earned sir, rowing against the tide when this boat should have two oarsmen and used to have, by heaven, until my brother was pressed by those whoreson puttocks last Tuesday.” 

The rain lashed down again, soaking them in seconds, and the river quickened in response. It seemed to be a living thing, an elemental force that caught the skiff and sent it spinning towards the shore. Francis Bacon wriggled miserably on his cushioned perch, fighting off sickness by conjuring up Tarquin’s ‘hot burning will’ that took him past ‘night-wandering weasels’ into Lucrece’s bedchamber where ‘tears harden lust.’

He and Will were writing Lucrece’s rape in septets. The seven-line stanza or ‘rime royal’ was a superb vehicle for narrative poetry. Their first book-length poem, the erotic comedy of Venus and Adonis, had been such a best-seller their publisher had asked for more. While the boatman chattered on, his customer was carried away on a rhyming tide of ‘ababbcc’. Francis opened his eyes to find the boatman staring at him. Honest John Trubshaw was not used to being addressed in verse.

From the bear garden came the savage barking of dogs and the over-heated shrieks of an audience baying for blood. He took an iron pocket-watch out of his doublet. By now the royal physician must be on his way to Tyburn. He imagined Lopez, an aesthetic white-bearded figure with thinning hair, his bony arms lashed to a hurdle, dragged to a traitor’s death. Seeing the world from a horizontal position just above the ground, looking upwards, watching clouds scudding across the sky, feeling rain on his cheeks, terrified of what was to come. Ugly, contorted faces blotting out the sky, touching, jeering, spitting, until the hurdle halted before the scaffold. Rough hands untying the victim, pushing him up the ladder steps to the gibbet. The mighty roar as the frail Portuguese Jew was stripped of his last shreds of dignity and spun in the wind. Hung, drawn and quartered, his agony prolonged to please the mob.

The doctor was a statistic - one of eight hundred executions a year. Violent death was, after all, one of London’s most familiar features. The city was like ancient Rome – brutal, licentious and debauched. Not that he should grumble. That’s why
Titus Andronicus
had done so well.

The pull of the current grew stronger as London Bridge loomed up before them. Once again Francis thought of heads. Heads spiked on Bridge Gate, staring blindly out to Southwick; some fresh enough to supply the crows with tongues and flesh and jellied eyeballs, others reduced to grinning skulls. Only the pates of high-born traitors were displayed here as a reminder of Tudor vengeance.

“God ’a’ mercy, the Tyburn butcher must have carved up that fucking Marrano by now and not before time, if you ask me.”  The boatman said this to provoke a response but his fare paid no attention. Well, fuck him and his dainty manners!

Would foul-mouthed John Trubshaw, a Thames waterman of twenty years standing, have been impressed to learn he was rowing a former Lord Keeper’s son down the Thames? Probably not, for Trubshaw despised all nobility, particularly those dandies that kept catamites. In his opinion these rich sodomists should be castrated or have red hot pokers stuck up their bums. That would teach them.

The wherry was running better now and Francis could hear ferrymen crying ‘Westward Ho!’ as if inviting passengers on a grand voyage to the Americas instead of a penny ride across the river. In spite of its squalid contents the Thames was a noble artery, a moving forest of masts. He watched a Venetian galley inching its way through a flotilla of small craft while, further off, a boat discharged its cargo of barrels onto a wharf by means of a skeleton wheel and pulleys. Every day thousands of vessels fought for space here. The Thames allowed for the speedy transit of goods. Without it, London’s trade would be jolting unprofitably along pot-holed roads and cart tracks thick with thieves.

And rising above the river traffic was one of the finest sights in England. With its sixty foot high arches and solid stone piers London Bridge was an engineering marvel. Built in the reign of Henry II the bridge had only one weakness. By accumulating debris and silt, its brushwood starlings had drastically narrowed the distance between the bridge’s piers until every tide created a vortex of white water that was dangerous to approach. It was still possible to ‘shoot the bridge’ but only when the tide was exactly right. In practice, the Thames watermen kept their distance.

“A plague on that fucking bridge,” Trubshaw roared, spitting on his hands. “What beetle-headed bum-bailey had the bright idea of erecting a death trap on the river?”

“Actually it was Peter de Colechurch who suggested replacing the old timber bridge with a stone one for the benefit of the Canterbury pilgrims,” said his fare.

“Then fuck him and fuck Thomas Becket. We’d be far better off without it. Mark my words.”

At the landing stairs Francis paid his burly boatman and stepped ashore to be greeted by the doleful sight of criminals chained to the riverbank. Behind them were cobbled streets slimy with refuse and dark alleyways inhabited by creatures from a subterranean world. A carthorse clattered by with a wagonload of night-soil to be ripened on the Essex dung mountain until it became saltpetre.

As he walked away from the river he was greeted by a new odour – that of rotting fish. One of the stallholders in the street market wanted him to buy a conger eel, delicious when poached in strong ale, while another fishmonger offered Poor Jack which had to be dried, salted and served with mustard. And all around him was the sound of the city’s commerce - street vendors crying their wares and pedlars hawking trinkets.

The rain began to fall again as he crossed Leadenhall Street and entered Bishopsgate. Mud was everywhere, churned up by human feet and the hooves of passing animals. A ragged band of players marched along the road drumming up business. One of the actors thrust a playbill into Francis’ hand.  “A little of what you fancy, master,” he said.

As Francis approached one of the theatre yard inns, the Black Bull, where topless hostesses entertained the theatre-going gentry, he was accosted by a pretty red-cheeked girl with pert breasts and a come-hither smile. He rejected her offer with a courteous bow and knocked on his brother’s door.

Much to his mother’s dismay, Anthony Bacon had taken up residence in Bishopsgate.  In Lady Anne’s over-heated imagination her elder son was watching obscene plays and consorting with whores. Anthony hadn’t the heart to tell her the truth, namely, that he was far more interested in the boy actors.

Francis had tried to reason with her; explaining that Anthony needed to be in central London to run Essex’s intelligence service. Should Essex gain the royal ear, he could end the Cecil ascendancy and bring the Bacons back to power. Wasn’t that what she wanted? But she hadn’t really understood. Somewhat frantic in her sixty-fifth year, Lady Anne could only comprehend her son’s physical and moral welfare.

A servant opened the door and ushered Francis into the reception hall. His eye swept over the diagonally braced timber walls, the brushed stone floor and the burning coals in the open hearth, before settling on the shifty looking ancestor over the chimneypiece. The room had possibilities but looked forsaken, as if waiting for someone to take an interest in it. The new owner was nowhere to be seen.

“Begging your pardon, sir, he’s in the study,” the servant mumbled.

Judging by the hooks hanging from the ceiling the study had once been a flesh larder. A disused sink had been pressed into service as a document table and the wall cupboards turned into bookcases. Anthony sat behind a desk cluttered with papers, his emaciated face deeply furrowed, turning the pages of a report with his left hand. The gout had returned, robbing him of his right thumb and forefinger.

“Have you heard?” Francis asked. “The Chamberlain’s Men are to perform at the Theatre.”

Anthony rose unsteadily to his feet. He was a small, delicate man. “What is playing there?”

“I think it is the second part of Tarlton’s old comedy,
The Seven Deadly Sins
.”

“And which sins come in Part Two?”

“Why, envy, sloth and lechery.”

“Which means the first part must feature greed, gluttony, wrath and pride - vices with which Tarlton was all too familiar.”

Francis grinned at his brother, his dark eyes twinkling. “Our saintly mother would add an eighth sin, namely, dwelling in what she calls ‘a sink of depravity.’”

“I believe she told me so only yesterday.”

Anthony felt one of his giddy spells coming on. His knees buckled and he slumped back in his chair and began to shudder. Francis reached for the smelling salts that lay on the desk in front of him.

“I wish I could do more to ease your pain,” he murmured. “You are my comfort, my second self.”

The sharp smell of sal ammoniac made the patient cough and splutter.

“Nay, brother, it is God’s will I should be so,” Anthony replied. “The knowledge of causes concerns only Him who has the conduct of things: not us that have the sufferance of them. I am only mildly inconvenienced.”

Like most long-term invalids he had become adept at dismissing pain.

The medicine chest stood on the hall table where the coachman had left it. Francis opened the box, pulling out powders and potions as he searched for something. “It is time for the poppy,” he said.

The illnesses that had dogged the Bacon brothers since their teenage years had led them to experiment with various remedies, from nitre in milk to addictive opium compounds. Taking a jar out of the box, Francis poured its cloudy white liquid into a perfuming pan, adding the crimson contents of a small vial and a sprinkling of cloves before placing the pan on the hot coals of an open fire.