The Queen's Cipher (8 page)

First though, he must concentrate on the staging of Talbot’s fame. A few honeyed phrases might make his fortune. The words began to flow.

12 APRIL 2014

The woman in the picture is forty. She is looking directly at the camera but her head is tilted to reveal her best profile. The gaze is steady, the eyes serious but not yet sad. She seems to be waiting for something to happen in her grainy, black and white world. The photographer’s artfully placed lights emphasise the height of her cheekbones and the width of her mouth. Ten years had gone by since Dame Julia Walker-Roberts posed for the picture that appeared on the back cover of her award-winning book,
By the Dim Light of Nature
. The book was still a classic and Blackwell’s continued to stock it for Oxford’s undergraduate intake.

Julia returned the hardback copy to the pine bookcase, keeping it as far away from the Book of the Month as possible. She didn’t want to share even the same shelf with Milton Cleaver’s latest work. Copies of
Shakespeare without Question
seemed to be everywhere. The best thing to be said for the ‘Shakespeare Criticism’ section was its proximity to the coffee shop and those tempting little pastries she really shouldn’t touch.

In search of an antidote for hunger, she wandered downstairs to ‘Modern Fiction’ and picked up a book of Martin Amis essays. She was soon laughing aloud. In reviewing Michael Crichton’s lame follow-up to
Jurassic Park
, Amis had written about the literary jungle. ‘Out there, beyond the foliage, you could see herds of clichés, roaming free.’ How very typical. She remembered an old don at Exeter College complaining about Amis’ flashy, meretricious prose and saying he should never have been awarded a Congratulatory First. Julia had disagreed. Martin had a truly original mind and there weren’t many of those around. Julia smiled one of those thin, cleverer-than-thou smiles her peers found so disconcerting.

Moving towards the ground floor entrance, she caught sight of a display table devoted to a Victorian sex guide and Melvin Bragg’s best-seller,
The Adventure of English
. She flicked through Bragg’s pages. The book’s intellectual firepower was obvious but she was suspicious of it. There was something about books based on television series that made her uncomfortable. Michael Wood’s
In Search of Shakespeare
had been particularly annoying, a soufflé of ideas suitable for peak-time viewing. Although never invited to be a TV presenter, Julia felt sure she would have turned down the opportunity. For all its administrative irritations and political backbiting the cloistered life of Oxford was infinitely preferable to the gutter of public recognition and commercial reward.

Leaving Blackwell’s shop she walked out into the bright sunlight. The Broad appeared to be full of tourists and bicycles. As a northern girl with a sheltered upbringing, Oxford had come as a surprise. Instead of dreaming spires she discovered a bustling, vibrant city that wore its history lightly. The university she had always loved. With its pervasive atmosphere of pure learning and untarnished scholarship, it had become her sanctuary; a magical place where her wish for harmony and organisation could be fully satisfied.

Julia checked her reflection in a shop window.  She had opted for a black suit and white blouse and softened her hairstyle to make herself look younger. She knew Sebastian Christie would be waiting outside the Randolph Hotel and that, on catching sight of him, her stomach would churn.

Sure enough, he was standing under the glass and wrought iron awning as if uncertain of his whereabouts: the body less muscular, the fair hair thinner now. But the smile hadn’t changed.

“Julia,” he said, “you’re looking well.” That soft Irish lilt.

The memories flooded back. Sebastian of the gentle gaze and rough student sweaters; Sebastian the Brasenose athlete bending his back in the Isis boat; Sebastian the secret lover to be hidden in her college bed at night: Sebastian, thirty years later, bowing his head and smiling a seductive welcome. He was still the boy she had once loved, just older and sadder, diminished by life’s little defeats.

They had met again at a cocktail party. She had been surrounded by admirers praising her OUDS lecture on Shakespeare’s love poetry when she noticed him standing on his own, balancing a wine glass and plate in one hand and waving with the other. The shock immobilised her. He had said her name. They had left the party and gone for a drink in the Eagle and Child.

What hung between them was the weight of history, a recollection of their last parting. At twenty-one, she had been about to embark on postgraduate studies in Rome; he a year younger was facing up to finals. They had spoken of marriage but she had ended such hopes with a short, brutal letter to which there had been no reply: a mistake on her part and his too.

At Sebastian’s insistence Julia had updated her personal story over gin and tonics. As a single woman she had avoided intimacy. This single-mindedness brought material rewards: an Oxford chair in her early forties and the respect of her peers. What she didn’t mention was her emotional emptiness. How a pillar of the Oxford establishment could be so riddled with self-doubt. If she didn’t understand it, how could anyone else.

Sebastian had been more open about his failures. After Julia left him he had wallowed in misery. The upper second in Greats came as a bitter blow. Instead of bouncing back with a doctrinal thesis or some other display of intellectual resilience, he had settled for a lectureship at Queen’s University, Belfast, where, by his own admission, he had marked time. It was only on his return to England that his luck changed. One company followed another and all did well, particularly Much Ado Tours, which promised American tourists a memorable week of sightseeing and theatre in Shakespeare country. He was now wealthy but had no one on whom to spend his money.

And here they were, having afternoon tea at the Randolph Hotel, staring at one another over a tiered cake stand full of thinly cut sandwiches, scones and cupcakes, wondering what to say next.

“How is my professor today?” Sebastian asked.

“Very well, thank you. The Verona conference was quite demanding.”

“I can imagine.” He sounded listless and ill at ease.

“What you cannot imagine is being propositioned by a Serbian professor with bad breath seeking support for his theory that Hamlet was a woman.”

“Well, that’s a first at least,” said Sebastian with a grin.

“Actually, it’s not a new idea. A nineteenth-century scholar claimed that Hamlet’s mind was essentially feminine in nature and wrote a gender-bending book about it.”

“So what did your Serb do?”

“He put a sweaty paw on my bottom and promised to teach me to hear the play with new ears. I told him there was no part of my body in need of his attention and would he kindly unhand me.”

“Mind you,” she said, biting into a strawberry tartlet, “that wasn’t the only strange thing. An antique bookseller from Sussex came to my hotel asking me to authenticate a Francis Bacon letter. Curious cove – Major Duncan, I mean, not Bacon – could have been an actor.”

“Small world,” Sebastian replied. “I ran into a Major Duncan at last year’s Frankfurt Book Fair. He was typically ex-Army, a self-important man with a clipped manner and a moustache to match.”

She looked at him in disbelief. “My man was tall and florid, probably quite good-looking in his youth, and with a very rounded turn of phrase.”

“Different chap altogether. The Major Duncan I met had a bookshop in Hove.”

“The man I saw gave me a business card but wanted me to write to his home. I thought there was something odd about his address. A marina in Shoreham is hardly bookselling territory. And I fell for it. I’ve authenticated the letter in writing.”

A dreadful thought entered her head. “My God,” she moaned, “he’s going to use my name to advance some half-baked theory about Bacon writing Shakespeare’s plays.”

Sebastian patted her hand. “Calm down, Julia. You are over-reacting. All you’ve done is to examine a Francis Bacon letter. Presumably it was genuine?”

“Oh yes, the letter was genuine but it contained some kind of cipher and goodness knows what that might reveal. This fake major is plotting something, I feel it in my bones, and it couldn’t have come at a worse time. I’m in the running to be the next Warden of Warbeck College but there’s stiff competition and the smallest whiff of scandal will be enough to ruin my chances.”

“This is what we are going to do,” he said, reaching across the table to take her hand. “Hire an investigator to find this bogus bookseller, discover what his game is and keep you out of it.”

“You’ll do this for me,” she said.

“Of course I will.”

“Then so be it.” Julia began to relax. A weight had been lifted from her shoulders. Had she known the consequences, her joy would have been short-lived.

14 APRIL 2014

He enjoyed shaving. It was a satisfying ritual that hadn’t changed much since his days on the West End stage. Applied with a badger brush, the lather from the Truefitt & Hill shaving cream softened and moistened the skin letting the triple-bladed razor glide over the greying stubble on his chin. A sprinkling of lavender water and a quick look in the mirror completed this well-rehearsed manoeuvre. The face gazing back at him was the one Dame Julia Walker-Roberts had seen in Verona but without the moustache, the neatly parted hair or the walking stick.

How he had loved impersonating the short-changing book dealer from Hove. But the time for pretence was over. Major Duncan and Bard-lite were back in the prop basket. He would greet his guests as Donald Strachan, a silver-haired man in an open-necked shirt and khaki shorts who had once been a famous actor and was now marooned on a rusty Shoreham houseboat.

He went out onto the deck to sniff the salty, sea-scented early morning air and salute the flag. Where had that woman got to? He couldn’t have her wandering off when there was so much work to be done. Then he remembered. She was collecting the mail. With a guilty start he snatched a pair of binoculars off the upper deck seating and began to search for her.

By now, dark grey clouds were gathering overhead, heavy with intention, but even in the mounting gloom he could pick out his partner sashaying out of the leisure centre on her high heels. Even in a plastic mackintosh and approaching forty, Antonia Alvarez was a stunning sight. Training his glasses on her, he saw she was studying a cream coloured envelope. Oh, my God, he thought, she’s got Dame Julia’s letter and is wondering why it’s postmarked Oxford. She’s thinking he doesn’t know any Oxford women but, then again, he hadn’t known that gardener from the Royal Horticultural Society until she caught them in the flower beds. Bollocks, she’s bound to think the worst. Why didn’t I collect the bloody post myself?

The guilty philanderer’s bushy eyebrows began to twitch and quiver as he saw how closely she was examining the letter, holding it up to the damp, misty south coast air and sniffing it suspiciously. He lowered his field glasses and prowled around the deck trying to think up an excuse. He loved his Argentine mistress dearly but hadn’t seen fit to tell her about his Italian trip. She would have wanted to know how he could afford such a luxury while living on income support. Instead, he had talked vaguely about a long day’s research in Worthing public library and she had swallowed his story.

Strachan brushed drops of rain off his face and looked at the coils of blue smoke rising from the houseboat’s chimney. It was always cold and damp on the good ship
Silly Mid On
. Antonia hated the name, which he refused to explain, dismissing the matter by saying that people who played barbaric games like polo and football couldn’t possibly appreciate the English national sport which he had graced at almost the highest level with the gnarled fingers and arthritic joints to prove it.

Having cleaned the binocular lens with his handkerchief, he scanned the marina once again. She was walking along the pier, waving her fist at a seagull defecating on a discarded crisp packet. He followed the bird’s flight inland over the railway station to downtown Shoreham-by-Sea. What were they doing in this hellhole, cooped up on a leaky houseboat, and why did she stay with him, a drunken old goat? It was a complete mystery.

Strachan shrugged his shoulders, opened the bulkhead door and ran down the steep stairs into the upper cabin, a dark book-lined room with a curtained off portion he liked to call his study. Lowering his frame into a high-backed once revolving chair, he picked up a shabby leather volume to show he had been reading. The stage was set for her return.

Her breathless, husky voice still gave him the shivers. “It is me.” It was unlikely to be anyone else since he had frightened off would-be visitors long ago. He heard a clicking of high heels on the top deck before she clambered down the steps backwards, thereby affording him his favourite view of a sexy female bottom encased in tight jeans.

“I want to ask you about this, Donald,” she said sternly, handing him the letter. “Why is it addressed to your bookseller and why does it have an Oxford postmark?” 

Strachan hunted around for a paper knife. “Oh that,” he said airily, “it’s nothing. I wrote to an Oxford professor and the silly woman obviously muddled me up with Major Duncan whom she probably met at the Shakespeare symposium in Verona. He had a bookstall there.”

Antonia looked doubtful. “This isn’t another one of your women.”

He shook his head and gave her his affectionate, wounded look, the one that had worked so well in
Comedy of Errors
. But not today; she wasn’t buying it. The memories of his past misdemeanours were too fresh. This realization brought on an emphysema-fuelled coughing fit, heightening the purple in his cheeks, inducing guilt in her damaged conscience, causing her to pummel his back and rush off for a glass of water. When she came back and held the glass to his lips he gulped greedily, stopped wheezing and began to breathe normally.

“
Como estas
?” she asked anxiously.

“I’m sorry, darling,” he apologised. “A bit over-excited, that’s all. Far from being a billet-doux this letter will help me prove Francis Bacon wrote Shakespeare’s plays. What do you think of that?”