The Queen's Cipher (6 page)

On the rare occasions he allowed himself to be serious, Simon talked to Freddie like a well-intentioned if somewhat patronizing elder brother. “What we’re dealing with here is a theological quarrel. Shakespeare has been deified and you can’t afford to be branded as a heretic, not with your back history.”

“How do you mean?”

“Look at the way you behaved after your parents’ death, turning your bedroom into a shrine and reading everything you could about the Irish conflict to understand why they’d been blown up, when the harsh truth is that a group of thugs wanted to do a bit of killing and your father and mother chose the wrong holiday destination. Sorry to be brutal, my love, but you’ve got an obsessive nature and it’ll get you into trouble.”

“How do you work that out?”

“Whether you recognize it or not, you’re an idealistic rebel. You’d man the barricades or tilt at windmills. You are a danger to yourself and to others.”

By the time they reached the circular lily pond, full of quarrelling ducks and moorhens, Freddie’s good mood had all but evaporated. He kicked a stone into the pond and watched the ripples spread across the water.

“You’re reading too much into this, Simon. I’m simply taking a girl out on a rather unusual date.”

“I don’t believe you. You’re not doing this to get your leg over the American nor do you believe that an anonymous e-mailer knows more about Shakespeare than the literary world. So what’s your game? Whatever it is, you should prepare yourself for disappointment.”

They walked on in silence along the river bank before turning inland towards the stately Victorian cricket pavilion. Surrounded by English oak and beech the cricket pitch had a timeless quality that never failed to stir Freddie’s imagination.

“Just think of it,” he said in an awed voice. “Playing here for the MCC in 1886, W.G Grace achieved his career-best bowling analysis of 10 for 49 and scored a hundred in the same match. Not many people know that.”

“I’m not surprised,” his companion grunted.

10 APRIL 2014

They had agreed to meet on Lambeth Bridge. Freddie got there early. Paying off his taxi driver, he walked across the pavement to the downstream viewing area. On this cold, wet and misty morning the river was in full flood. Beyond its angry, swirling water he could see the blurred outline of Westminster Bridge, the London Eye’s giant wheel and the drab white tiled extension to St Thomas’s Hospital. Nearer to him on the south bank, horse chestnut trees supplied a welcome splash of colour with their light green lampshade leaves and candle-like flowers.

As he peered at his watch to check the time, a figure appeared at his side. Dr Dilworth was dressed in a black Burberry raincoat with a print silk scarf around her neck. Framed by an umbrella, her skin was a light caramel colour and finely drawn. She gave him a hesitant, noncommittal smile but a smile nevertheless that made his heart beat faster.

“Hi,” she said. “Been waiting long?”

“No, not at all, I’ve only just arrived.”

He spoke in an offhand manner, trying to disguise how foolish he felt. There were unwritten rules for a first date and he had broken them all. He had wanted to buy her flowers but what use were wilted blooms in this kind of downpour. He should have been smartly dressed, instead of wearing an old gabardine raincoat he’d acquired on eBay and, above all, he ought to have found a more romantic location for their tryst than an ecclesiastical library.

“I love Chinese puzzles,” she confided, “especially when they have to be solved in an Archbishop’s palace. It’s very British. Besides which, it will keep us out of the rain.”

He heaved a sigh of relief. Not even the English climate could dampen her spirits.

“But let’s get one thing clear. No more Dr Dilworth. Call me Sam.”

“Do you know Robert Browning’s poem ‘Home-Thoughts’, Sam?” Freddie exercised his newly acquired right. “It begins with the line, ‘Oh to be in England now that April’s there’.”

She wrinkled up her nose. “He can’t have meant a day like this.”

Freddie pulled a face. “This is about as bad as it gets.”

“That’s how Dawkins must have felt when he read your book review. You really laid into him, didn’t you?” She peeked out from under her umbrella with a mischievous grin on her face.

“Yes, and I’ve been up before the beak; warned as to my future conduct.”

Sam nodded sympathetically but he could tell she didn’t understand the English colloquialism.

“Sorry, ‘beak’ is a slang word for boss. It’s a Victorian invention.”

With that settled they strolled off towards one of London’s best-kept medieval buildings. With its massive gatehouse, tower and battlements, Lambeth Palace looked more like a fortified castle than a home for England’s spiritual overlord, the Archbishop of Canterbury. The only part of the building open to the public was the research library which housed religious documents and special collections.

They entered through a door in the perimeter wall and were escorted to the reading room where a friendly bespectacled woman in a tweed skirt examined their credentials – proof of identity, passport-style photographs and letters of introduction – before issuing them with reader’s tickets and pencils. Having completed these formalities, they were shown to chairs at a long leather topped wooden table and asked which archive they wanted to access. The tweedy lady told them Standen’s reports could be found in MS 649, a collection of Anthony Bacon’s private correspondence covering a twenty year period when he worked as a spy abroad and as the Earl of Essex’s intelligence chief. The letter they were looking for, she said, contained a curious number code no one had managed to decipher.

Freddie’s heart sank. He stared at the folder in front of him and got the dry mouth feeling that went with fear of failure. He had been silly to bring her here. Ancient ciphers were like long-forgotten graves. The past was not about to give up its secrets. Not to him at least. It was in this negative state of mind that he opened the archive, trying to recall everything he knew about Tudor penmanship. Many of the letters in this script differed from their modern equivalents.

“Remember a ‘c’ looks like an ‘r’,” Sam whispered, confident in her calligraphy.

Standen’s numerical code wasn’t hard to find. It appeared in a four-page letter the spy had written when his controller Anthony Bacon was laid up with an attack of gout. Dated 18 December 1593 and written in a flamboyantly cursive style full of curlicues and strong ascenders, the report was peppered with carefully printed numbers, sometimes fifty or more in a row. As they had not been spaced out or divided in any way it was impossible to tell whether they were separate numbers, or came in pairs or even longer combinations.

“Let’s see how good you are with the secretary hand,” she murmured, pointing to the bottom of the first page. “Read that.”

Freddie rose to the challenge. “6589 greatly altered and resolved to have sent after him if the same night he had not come as he did at which time he was cheerfully welcomed ...”

She stopped him there. “Well done. Word perfect in fact. Do you know who 6589 is?”

He told her it must be Queen Elizabeth. Standen was describing the queen’s latest row with Essex, how he had stormed off in a sulk before thinking better of it, and how they had patched things up afterwards.

The librarian was shaking her head. They were making too much noise, disturbing the other readers in the room. Freddie mouthed a silent apology and beckoned Sam to join him outside. She seemed reluctant to leave.

“Look, I’ve something to tell you.” She shivered slightly in the palace’s draughty corridor. “I know why Queen Elizabeth was given the code name of 6589.”

“How could you possibly know that?”

“Because Standen is using gematria, a Hebrew number system in which the letters of the alphabet are assigned a numerical value in the belief that words or phrases which have the same aggregate count bear a relationship to one another. Benedictine monks also used gematria in their ciphers.”

Medieval monks and mathematics had never figured on Freddie’s radar and, although she lectured in public key encryption, he hadn’t expected her to know the history of numerology.

“Why don’t we ask the librarian to photocopy Standen’s letter and get out of here,” he said. “You look as if you could use a hot drink to warm you up.”

A high-end coffee shop with freshly roasted beans was what he had in mind but things didn’t work out that way. A sudden deluge and an absence of available taxis in the Lambeth district forced them to shelter in the fuggy bacon-infused warmth of a local cafe where, like the other customers, they were shown to a plastic banquette and a Formica topped table. Nursing a steaming mug of tea and munching a thick cheese and chutney sandwich, he looked around him in disgust. It was the sort of snack bar that prided itself on its ambience, a greasy spoon with attitude. Hardly the place for a seduction, he thought, as he watched his partner chewing her way through a clog sole of a sandwich.

“Okay, why did Standen call Queen Elizabeth 6589? You haven’t explained that yet.”

Sam dabbed her mouth with a tissue and pulled a duplicate copy of Standen’s letter out of her shoulder bag. “Let’s start with the basics, shall we.” She placed the letter on the Formica surface. Her schoolmarm’s tone made him feel like a backward pupil.

The simplest conversion of letters into numbers, she explained, gave A the value of 1, B was 2 and Z 26. But the Elizabethan alphabet consisted of only twenty four letters. I and J were interchangeable and so were U and V. Therefore, on simple count, the word ‘Queen’ added up to 59. Q was the sixteenth letter in the alphabet, U the twentieth and so on.  Q(16)+U(20)+E(5)+E(5)+N(13) equalled 59. By the same token ‘Elizabeth’ was 84.

“So why didn’t Standen call her 5984 instead of 6589?” He raised an ironic eyebrow.

“That would have been too obvious. Remember, he’s using cipher to conceal what he wants to say. So he starts off with 65.”

Freddie scratched his head in bewilderment. “I’m sorry. I still don’t get that at all.”

She gave him a little smile. “It’s simple mathematics really. 65 is 6 more than 59 and 89 is 5 more than 84. So that’s a 6 and a 5 and 65 is the number we started with – ergo 6589.”

Sam’s face clouded over as something else occurred to her. “Maybe there’s more to it than that. We’ve taken this four figure number and broken it down into pairs, 65 and 89, to extract its meaning in gematria. But the difference between 65 and 89 is 24, the number of letters in the Elizabethan alphabet. That has to be significant.”  

She peered again at the photocopy. Her hands gripped the Formica table so hard her knuckles turned white.

“My God, I know what we’re looking at,” she said excitedly. “6589 is a cipher key. It’s a version of the four-fold Trithemian number alphabet discovered in the third book of his
Steganographia
about twenty years ago.”

“Hold on a moment. What do you mean by a ‘four-fold’ number alphabet?”

“It means the letters of the alphabet are repeated four times with each letter having a higher value than the previous one. In the first reading of the alphabet A is 1 and Z is 24 while in the second reading A becomes 25 and Z 48. At the third time of asking A is 49 and Z 72 and, in its final fold, A is 73 and Z is 96. Have you got it now?”

Freddie nodded sheepishly. “Who was Trithemian?” he asked.

“Trithemius,” she corrected him, “was a fifteenth-century Benedictine abbot who was a cryptographic genius.”

“That’s a pretty odd combination.”

“Not really. Monks were always good at cipher but the abbot of Sponheim was in a league of his own. He actually disguised his four-fold number alphabet as tables of planetary data. I remember reading about this in
Cryptologia
when I was in the Tenth Grade.”

Once again she had lost him. Four-fold number alphabets and planetary tables were beyond his understanding. It was much easier to think of a pigtailed schoolgirl with her head in a cryptology magazine.

Sam was doing some rapid calculations. “If this four-fold number alphabet began with the letter H, the value of Z in the third and fourth folds would be 65 and 89.”

“Let’s test it out,” she said and began to read from Standen’s letter: ‘6589 greatly altered and resolved to have sent after him if the same night he had not come as he did at which time he was cheerfully welcomed 1940252234.’

“I could be wrong but I think these numbers are there to prove the cipher,” she murmured. “If we pair the numbers off as we did before and we say that H is 1 in a four-fold alphabet, what do we get? 19 would be the letter B in the second fold of that alphabet. Here, why don’t you work it out?”

She found a pocket notebook and a biro in her bag and handed them over.

Hesitantly at first but with increasing assurance he converted numbers into letters: 19(B) 40 (Y) 25 (H) 22 (E) 34 (R).

“That’s amazing,” he whooped, startling the pensioners in the next banquette. “Standen is saying Essex was cheerfully welcomed ‘by her’ – the Queen. You’ve cracked it!”

But he had spoken too soon. The cipher was full of complexities. It took several hours and three cups of tea to complete the task. The light was fading outside before she was ready to show him what she had printed in her notebook. “These numerical cipher keys are a thing of beauty,” she said.

THE QUEEN’S CIPHER