The Queen's Cipher (25 page)

“I hated geometry at school,” he confided between yawns, “but Bacon liked its logic. He talked about marching by ‘line and level’ and we’ve certainly been doing that here.”

“Yeah, but according to you it’s Ben Jonson who is pulling the strings. Was he a Mason?”

“You would have to think so. A Masonic lodge was named after him, his long-time friend Inago Jones was Grand Master of English Masonry and was succeeded by Jonson’s patron, the Earl of Pembroke, and we know he attended Bacon’s Rosicrucian banquet at York House.”

“I still don’t understand why Ben would give Shakespeare of Stratford all the credit for the plays, calling him the ‘Sweet Swan of Avon,’ and then turn to cipher to acknowledge Bacon’s co-authorship. It doesn’t make any sense.”  

“Try this. While carrying out his instructions, namely to identify the Stratford actor as author of the works, Ben wants posterity to know the truth and employs a Masonic cipher to achieve that end.”

“God, there must be simpler forms of communication.”

“Maybe it didn’t seem such a crazy idea at the time. What if the swan and the temple of immortality were linked together in Jonson’s mind? They both feature in a fable that appears in
De Augmentis Scientiarum
, one of the books he Latinised for Bacon. Do you want to hear my theory?”    

Sam looked at the clock. It was two o’clock in the morning. Outside the kitchen window the sky was a limitless black.

“Tell me about it bed.” She took his hand and led him out of the kitchen.

ARIOSTO’S FABLE

The candle was burning low as the witching hour approached. Gresham College seemed to be at peace as Walter Marley did his nightly rounds. Bent and emaciated with rickets disease, the porter looked much older than his thirty-five years.

Marley yawned and was about to shuffle off to the warm fire waiting him in the front lodge when he heard a loud noise. Someone was singing discordantly on the north side of the quadrangle. It was probably the astronomy professor. The old ruffian had a new spy-glass.

I’ll give him a piece of my mind for disturbing honest folk, the porter thought, as he painfully climbed the stone steps to the college’s upper floor. In his opinion, the staff was more trouble than the students. The singing stopped and a gust of wind blew out his candle. Marley shivered. Had he interrupted Satan himself? When the Devil sang at night somebody was bound to die.

“Is that you, Marley?” A deep voice boomed out of the darkness. It belonged to Gresham’s most famous scholar, Ben Jonson. Marley bowed to the bulky apparition but still spat on the flagstones three times to ward off the evil eye. The Professor of Rhetoric moved out of range.

“Beg pardon, sir, did you hear dire shrieking yonder?”

Jonson shook his head. “No, upon my soul, I did not. My mind was too full of tomorrow’s lesson for which I am ill prepared.”

“Hear you’re teaching rhetoric. That’s how to talk proper, isn’t it?” the porter persisted.

“Yes, forsooth, but speaking and speaking well are two different things.”

“Aye, sir, but why converse in Greek and Latin in 1623. Isn’t English good enough for our boys?”

Jonson nodded in agreement. Latin may be the language of scholarship, the lingua franca of educated men and Mother Church, yet in all probability the future lay with English, the vernacular, the rough tongue of the unthinking masses, and it was his duty to yank it out of its mewling, puking infancy and make it, God help him, a thing of beauty.

“You say well, Master Janitor, but our language needs a classical buttress for, as Aristotle observed, rhetoric combines invention, arrangement and style to achieve the best form of persuasion.”

“Fuck Aristotle! We don’t need some cocksucking Greek to tell us how to lead our lives. Forgive my cursing, sir, I mean no disrespect. In my opinion we are best taught in the University of Life.”

“No offence taken. If a good man swears, it is not for standers-by to cut short his oaths.”

“Well, I’d best be off, good night, sir.” Jonson watched Marley hobble away. Once the porter was out of earshot he muttered, ‘A self-taught man has a fool for a master.”

Ben stumped back to his study. He had left the door open and one of the bracketed candles above his desk was dripping hot wax onto
Antony and Cleopatra
. Having repaired the damage he lit another candle and looked around him. Every available surface was covered in manuscripts.

A church clock struck twelve. Ben sighed and stroked his chin. He should be tucked up in bed rather than huddling from the cold in a thick doublet, translating Lord Bacon’s natural philosophy into Latin while simultaneously editing thirty six plays for publication. To make things worse these undertakings shared a common deadline. They were due at the printer’s in a month’s time.

To be fair, he had brought this on himself. By publishing a vanity collection of his own works he had changed the way drama was perceived. Now plays were held to be of lasting value and a folio edition the best way of preserving them for posterity. As the pioneer of this new literary form, he had been invited to edit Shakespeare’s folio and, being short of money, he had accepted the offer.

Looking on the bright side, he was now collaborating with England’s former Lord Chancellor. He had idolized Francis Bacon before he knew his secret. Not that he understood the way his mind worked. If Shakespeare’s plays were worth publishing in folio form surely they were worth acknowledging? But raise the subject with his friend and he would get an evasive answer. Did Pythagoras court the present time by committing his philosophy to writing? Did the Abbot of Sponheim publish his wisdom for all to see? A good teacher resembled a candle that consumed itself in lighting the way. It was enough to sow the seeds of truth for future ages.

Which no doubt helped explain Lord Bacon’s desire to add one of Ariosto’s fables to
De Augmentis.
Ariosto imagined that when life’s thread was cut, a medal with the dead person’s name on it fell into the river Lethe. Most of these medals sank without a trace but a few were picked up by swans and carried off to the temple of immortality. It was a pleasant metaphor for fame.

The idea occurred as he translated the fable into Latin. Chuckling to himself, he picked a manuscript off his writing desk and undid the red ribbon holding it together. A part written poem spilled out. It was entitled ‘To the Memory of my beloved The Author Mr William Shakespeare.’ He dipped his quill in the inkhorn and added a new quatrain.

Sweet Swan of Avon! What a sight it were

To see thee in our waters yet appear,

And make those flights upon the banks of Thames,

That so did take Eliza and our James!

The scratching stopped but not the raucous laughter. He loved the idea of Master Shakespeare flapping along the river bank where the playhouses had been built. Poets wrote about a swan’s death song but Pliny had refuted this long ago in his
Natural History
. Swans were mute: a delicious fate for the garrulous actor-playwright.

As for the temple consecrated to immortality, he would work that in somewhere without giving offence to the silent fraternity. The brethren of the Rosy Cross were always babbling on about temples. Some such place, he supposed, lay in all men’s hearts. The Jews had their synagogues, the Mohammedans their mosques, the Christians their churches and for the Masons it was a temple where truth and wisdom resided. Bacon had told him he was the gatekeeper guarding the entrance to Solomon’s Temple, laying the foundation for a better knowledge of the world. “For whatever deserves to exist deserves also to be known, for knowledge is the image of existence; and things mean and splendid exist alike.” Those were his very words.

Well so be it, Ben thought. I will take him literally and conceal the truth about the Shakespeare authorship in a temple. Some of these plays are of such enduring worth that his lordship’s role in them should be recognized. If he doesn’t realize this, I do.

There was a soft voice at his shoulder. “How fares my man John? I have brought fresh candles and a new paragraph to add to
De Augmentis
.”

Francis Bacon was always dropping in like this.

6 MAY 2014

There were plenty of ducks and geese in the circular lily pond but not a swan in sight as the joggers began another lap of the University Parks. The sun streamed through a gap in the Turkey oaks, temporarily blinding Freddie as he pounded the perimeter path on the Cherwell’s northern bank.

“Wait for me,” Sam panted, scurrying along behind in an elegant black tracksuit. “You can’t run away from this, Freddie. Let’s talk about it.” She pointed to a bench on the river bank. Once they were seated she wiped a bead of sweat off her brow and raised an inquiring eyebrow. “What do you think?”

He didn’t know what to think. The shock was too great. A few minutes ago, as they were completing their first circuit of the Parks, his lawyer had rung with the unlikely news that Professor Dawkins had been poisoned in a London gay bar last Saturday night. So far as the libel action was concerned, he was off the hook: dead men couldn’t sue. But that in itself was a mixed blessing. The police would want to know why his enemies kept on dying so conveniently.

“I didn’t know Dawkins was gay,” he muttered.

“Come on, Freddie, that’s hardly the point. How is his death going to affect you?”

“I can look forward to another visit from DI Owen who will tell me I am a suspect in two separate murder inquiries.”

“I wouldn’t worry about that. You’ve got a cast-iron alibi for both crimes – me. We were in bed together when Cartwright was blown up and on the night Dawkins met his end we went to the Phoenix cinema and the Indian restaurant in Walton Street.”

“But my alibi is flying back to America in two days time.”

“We’ll go to a notary before I leave and I’ll make out an affidavit.”

“Thanks, Sam, I appreciate the offer but let’s not waste our precious time together doing that.”

What he felt obliged to do was to revisit the issue that divided them. “Now that we’ve worked out the
First Folio’s
secret message, surely we should publish something, either here or in America.”

Sam watched a flock of Canada geese flying in V formation towards Parson’s Pleasure but said nothing. His shoulders slumped as he followed her tight-lipped stare.

“What’s the point of all the research we’ve done if we’re going to keep quiet about what we’ve discovered?” he asked.

“You think I’m chicken,” she burst out angrily. “Well, perhaps I am, but you are impulsive and headstrong, we both know that, don’t we. You only have to say that Shakespeare had a silent partner and everyone will be against you, all the vested interests, Shakespeare theorist as well as orthodox scholars, tearing your evidence to shreds. And you know why? Because you are saying they got it wrong. Can you name
one
reputable academic who believes there was a conspiracy to conceal the truth about the authorship? You can’t, can you?”

Freddie’s face darkened. “Of course, I can’t. They all toe the line, accepting the standard Stratford biography, however implausible it might be. You know that! And I thought you had the guts to take a stand against all the brainwashing that goes on.”

“It’s all black and white with you,” Sam snorted, “there’s no middle ground. A call to arms sounds great but not when there is so much we don’t know. Can we come up with a truly convincing reason why a self-seeker like Bacon would keep quiet about what turned out to be his greatest achievement? No, we can’t.”

“That’s with the benefit of hindsight. He wasn’t to know how successful the Shakespeare plays would turn out to be.”

“Then that goes for Ben Jonson too. So why did he resort to cipher? What you need is Lewis Carroll’s White Queen; someone prepared to believe six impossible things before breakfast.”

Her voice was trembling. Whether from nerves or rage he couldn’t tell.

“That’s an absurd remark. We’re not indulging in a childhood fantasy!”

“Which is precisely my point,” Sam screamed at him. “And you don’t have to be so self-righteous about it. The Shakespeare mystery has given us an opportunity to use our brains. We’ve loved playing detective and in the process we’ve discovered clues previous investigators missed and now we kid ourselves we’ve solved the problem. It’s no coincidence, you know, that the authorship controversy began when people started writing detective novels.”

“I never thought we could fully solve the Shakespeare mystery,” he spluttered, “that would be expecting too much. I just wanted to give people a kick in the intellect.”

His entreaty froze in the air that separated them. “That’s simply not good enough. A detective story must have a conclusion. The writer has to tell his readers ‘whodunit’. In other words, only publish when you have the answers.”

“That means never,” he reflected bitterly. Deep down, he had a suspicion she was right but his pride wouldn’t let him admit it. “Personally, I’m for striking while the iron is hot. Shakespeare authorship studies are springing up everywhere and there’s been a Hollywood movie supporting the Earl of Oxford’s claim. Times are changing. People
are
prepared to listen.”

Sam shook her head sadly. “I wonder about you, Freddie, I really do. You’re so naïve. Shakespeare, the solitary genius, is so much a part of our intellectual furniture that it’s hard to imagine him as part of a team and what’s our evidence for the silent partner theory? We publish an article about codes and keyed cryptograms and, if we’re lucky, it stirs up media interest. But no one in the university world will take us seriously and our careers are over. Is that what you want?”

“No, but I want to tell the truth. That’s what real scholarship should be about. Forget your precious academic ambitions for a moment. I want the ordinary man in the street to understand what was going on in Shakespeare’s days. How physical threats like the rack and the thumbscrew played on people’s minds to such an extent that communication was frequently in code. Elizabethans were good at keeping secrets. They had to be.”