The Queen's Cipher (58 page)

“That’s what I thought but Brennan is a one-off. You can’t fit him into a neat psychological box. But what you can say is he’s greedy. He wanted the treatise simply to make money out of it.”

“Did you tell the police he’d nicked it?”

“How could I when I’d stolen it in the first place. I kept quiet about the book and gave the police a false description of Brennan. They’re looking for a blonde Slavic type.”

“A thief and a liar,” she murmured happily. “I can really pick ‘em. Right, what’s next?”

He lifted the sheet and peered at her breasts. “What would you like to be next?”

“Not that, silly,” she scolded. “What’s next?”

“I don’t know. Make a holiday of it. A few days here, fly to Florence and then on to Rome.”

“Aren’t you going to finish what you came to Venice for?”

Freddie shook his head. “That’s over. Brennan has the codex and in a few months time we’ll all be reading about the secret life of Francis Bacon. What more can I do?”

“You could try to be positive for a start. You haven’t finished your quest yet.”

“Yes, I have.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Cheryl flicked her hair angrily. “Think about it. No one in their right mind would suppose an ancient cipher had been planted in the
First Folio
to contradict what the surface text was telling you, but you did. No one would imagine that an embittered royal bastard could write a comedy full of riddles and ambiguous imagery to capture the conscience of his equally brilliant mother, yet you did. And no one, not even you, can fully explain how you managed to trace his confessional diary to the Venetian archives. Let’s face it, Freddie, you’ve shown an amazing ability to follow in Bacon’s footsteps. Is that because you are the world’s greatest researcher or is it …”

“Luck,” Freddie interrupted her. “I’d say it was luck.”

“That wasn’t the word I was going to use. People don’t get that lucky. Look, I’ve had plenty of time to think about this. Do you believe in telepathy?”

The question took him completely by surprise. “Yes, up to a p-point I do. I think information can be transmitted from one person to another without using any of the normal sensory channels, although I don’t know how it happens. I guess you have to imagine some kind of low frequency electromagnetic wave.”

“That’s right. Telepathy is the power the mind has to communicate thoughts to other people regardless of distance or any other physical barrier. We’ve always had this higher faculty without being able to harness it properly. We call it mind-reading, a magician’s trick or the close relationship that can be achieved with a loved one, but not a force that travels through space and time.”

“I know you think I’ve lost the plot but hear me out. This bedroom is humming with radio and TV signals that are all jumbled together; we can’t detect them but they are there nevertheless, operating on different frequencies. What if there’s more to it than that? What if the world is full of echoes, made up of the thoughts of people who were here before us? Don’t tell me you haven’t had that feeling when you are standing in a ruined castle or an ancient cathedral. We call it various things - a spiritual experience, communing with the past. Well, without knowing it, perhaps you’ve established some kind of psychic connection with Francis Bacon.”

“You don’t believe that, do you?” He couldn’t keep his incredulity at bay.

“I don’t discount it,” she said defiantly. “Aristotle talked about incoming sense perceptions. Somehow or other you’ve got onto Bacon’s wavelength and I reckon you should stay there.”

He had read almost everything Francis Bacon had written and felt an affinity for him. But the idea that he was being brainwashed by a ghost did not appeal.

“You want to empty your mind,” she continued. “Let him guide your movements.”

“Have you any idea what you’re saying? You sound like a flaky parapsychologist. In any case what’s the point? It’s too late to matter.”

“No, it isn’t. You’re assuming Bacon’s diary will soon be published. But what if it’s bought by someone with a vested interest in keeping it under wraps? A lot of money has gone into supporting rival theories on the authorship. Yes, they want to see the mystery resolved but only if it confirms their own predilection. Nobody wants to be proven wrong. I know that sounds dishonest but no more so than oil companies buying up alternative energy patents. So there is every reason to press on.”

“There’s nothing left to press on with. I’ve found out everything I possibly can.”

“Oh, really,” she arched her eyebrows. “Have you ever wondered why so many Shakespeare plays are set in Italy? Perhaps Bacon came here to Venice.”

He had wondered about this, listing the plays with Italian connections.
The Merchant of
Venice
and
Othello
took place in Venice; Verona was where the warring houses fought in
Romeo and Juliet
and where
The Two Gentlemen of Verona
came from; Padua was a setting for
The Taming of the Shrew
; Benedick of Padua and Claudio of Florence followed Don Pedro to Sicily in
Much Ado About Nothing
; Sicily was a location in
The Comedy of Errors
and
The Winter’s Tale
; Milan and Naples were mentioned in
The Tempest
’s back history while part of
All’s Well That Ends W
ell was set in Florence. Add the five Roman plays –
Titus Andronicus, Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus
and
Cymbeline
– and almost half Shakespeare’s dramas had strong Italian links. Yet the Stratford playwright had never set foot in the country.

Freddie gasped in surprise. He had just had a flashbulb memory of something he had read in the codex. “I had a quick peek at the diary before I lost it. In writing about the royal tombs in Westminster Abbey, Francis called Henry VII’s Lady Chapel ‘a thing of great reverence like Tintoretto’s Crucifixion.’ Those were his exact words. Do you get it?”

Cheryl shrugged her shoulders. “No, I can’t say I do.”

“Tintoretto’s
Crucifixion
is on a wall in the Scuola Grande Di San Rocco in Venice. It’s never been anywhere else. Bacon couldn’t have seen the painting without visiting the city.”

“Well, there you are then. What did I tell you? If we can prove Bacon visited Venice and met Jews and Moors that will strengthen the co-authorship case, won’t it.”

He nodded his assent. “Of course it would, but how do you uncover a four hundred-year-old trail. Not even Sherlock Holmes could do that.”

“You’ll find a way. I have confidence in you. And while you’re working it out, I’ll take a bath and prepare myself for the moonlit gondola ride you ought to have promised me.”

“You can count on it,” he kissed her freckled back as she slid out of bed.

Freddie lay back on the pillows and rested his eyes. He possessed a single fact – Bacon had seen Tintoretto’s masterpiece in the confraternity building in San Polo – but that was all. It was like trying to guess what an extinct creature looked like from a single bone.

An hour later, Cheryl poked her head around the bathroom door and found him fully dressed, peering intently at his iPhone.

“How are we getting on with Mission Impossible?” she inquired.

“Get your clothes on. We’re visiting a palace. It’s not too far from here on the Fondamenta del Soccorso, next to Veronica Franco’s hostel for fallen women.”

“Right,” she said, ransacking her case for fresh underwear, “ready in a tick.”

The Ca’ Zenobia turned out to be a monumental building with a broad façade and two large wings extending back from the canal. Once the home of an incredibly wealthy family the palazzo was now an exhibition centre and student guesthouse and, like so much of Venice, it was under renovation with scaffolding and cement mixers.

Cheryl whistled in disappointment: “I doubt if we’ll find anything here.”

But Freddie thought differently. Stepping over the paint pots and sacks of cement in the inner courtyard he made his way to a stone staircase. “Up here,” he said confidently.

The stairs led to a first floor viewing area from which visitors could study the frescoed ceiling of the Sala degli Specchi, a jaw-dropping baroque ballroom where, in long-forgotten days, ladies in sapphire ball gowns must have danced stately minuets with men in silver beaked masks and brocade jackets. Freddie looked at the empty musician’s gallery and imagined a string quartet with powdered wigs scratching out a tune.

He moved away from the balcony and into a rectangular reception room that had a very different feel to it. The walls were covered with photographs of swarthy schoolboys swinging on ropes and vaulting pommel horses. Their exploits were captioned in an Indo-European language consisting of upside down letters. At some point in the past the Palazzo Zenobia had been an Armenian college.

“This isn’t Armenian though.” Cheryl was pointing to an oil painting.

“Si, signorina, ‘The Chess Players’ is from Rinascimento.”

She was being addressed by a grey-haired Italian guide with very white teeth and broken English. “The sign say ‘Artist Unknown’ but it is probably a canvas by Tintoretto’s daughter, Marietta, and therefore quite valuable.”

“When do you think it was painted?” she asked.

“La Tintoretta’s best-known composition is self-portrait hanging in the Uffizi dated about 1580.”

She thanked the guide for his comments and stationed herself in front of the painting, intrigued by its composition. A turbaned Moroccan was sitting in a scrolled walnut chair peering at his pale faced opponent who was about to move a black bishop. The game was well advanced and the shadows lengthening across the players’ faces. Like Tintoretto, his daughter had sacrificed colour for chiaroscuro. The longer she looked at the picture the more its raw power dazzled her.

Freddie stiffened. “The guy who is playing the Moor, the one with the dark arresting eyes, does he remind you of anyone?”

Cheryl craned her neck to get a better look at the brushwork. “I can’t say he does.”

“I’ve seen that determined chin and high forehead before,” his delight was obvious, “it was in a miniature painted by Queen Elizabeth’s court artist Nicholas Hilliard. Our chess player looks remarkably like the young Francis Bacon.”

Cheryl’s hand flew to her mouth. “Stone the crows, he doesn’t have much in common with the long-faced rheumy eyed Lord Chancellor.”

“No, but neither did Bacon. Under the Stuarts, it became fashionable for court portraits to resemble the monarch and James I had a long, thin face and dribbled a lot because his tongue was too large for his mouth.”

She was too fixated on the picture to bother about drooling royals. “Perhaps you’d like to explain why you thought there would be a portrait of Bacon in this unlikely place.”

“I didn’t. It was just a lucky break. I had a hunch he might have stayed in this palace when it was owned by the Morosini family and he was an unofficial envoy for Queen Elizabeth.”

“And you worked all this out while I was having a bath.” Cheryl cocked her head in disbelief.

“It wasn’t all that difficult.”

She grabbed his hand and led him to a wooden bench. “Right, Sherlock, let’s park ourselves here. I’m a particularly dense Dr Watson and you’re the great detective.”

Freddie couldn’t help smiling. “If we’re going in for role playing, I much prefer your performance as Nurse Nightingale who is just as athletic as those chaps up there.” He pointed to a photograph of Armenian students balancing on parallel bars.

“That’s quite enough of that, Dr Brett,” she said blushing slightly. “I want to know how you reached your conclusions. And I would ask you to make yourself plain.”

“All right, if you insist,” said he. “While I was looking for the codex in the State Archives I learned that the Venetian government suspended diplomatic relations with England for most of Queen Elizabeth’s reign and only renewed contact after things had gone wrong in the republic.”

How strange, we’re back in the old routine, Freddie thought, as he gave her a history lesson. The fall of Constantinople had diminished Venice’s core trade with the Levant while the discovery of America and the opening of a maritime route around the Cape of Good Hope transferred commercial power to Spain and other seafaring nations. The second half of the sixteenth century saw Venetian military defeats, declining manufacture and private banking failures and, to make matters worse, plague struck the city in 1576, wiping out a third of the population and causing a massive loss of confidence. The question of how to halt the city-state’s decline led to a political rift in the governing council. The Venetian oligarchies split into two factions, the Giovani and the Vecchio, the young and the old. Fearing Hapsburg power and the Papacy, the Vecchio wanted to keep the status quo while the Giovani sought commercial alliances with Venice’s protestant rivals, England and the Netherlands, offering to transfer millions of ducats to the stock exchange in London. Their timing could not have been better. With its Royal Exchange and newly-chartered Levant Company, England was developing a free market economy while looking to form a Protestant alliance in Europe. Elizabeth’s Privy Council thought the Giovani’s offer should be explored, albeit unofficially.

“So you think Francis Bacon was their secret envoy?”

“Absolutely, the Venetian overture fits in with what I read in the Calendar of State Papers.”

He was trying to explain this when Cheryl cut him off. “I know you’re not one to let a sleeping word lie but can we cut to the chase. Did Francis Bacon come here or not?”

Freddie looked aggrieved. “I’ll tell you what I know. There’s an undated letter in the Bodleian Library written by Thomas Bodley to his ‘dear cousin’ regarding the cost and purpose of an overseas journey. Historians assume the ‘cousin’ was Francis Bacon and date the letter somewhere between 1576 and 1579, the years he spent attached to the English embassy in Paris. But I think they’ve guessed wrong and I’ll tell you why. Firstly, his father, Sir Nicholas Bacon, was still alive in those years and therefore perfectly capable of financing his son’s European trips. Secondly, as a minor, Francis couldn’t travel anywhere without parental approval and, thirdly, Bodley’s letter was sent from England and couldn’t have been written during those years because he was abroad.”