The Last Queen of England (35 page)

“Ever thought of becoming a tour guide?” Tayte said with a grin.

Jean just rolled her eyes at him.

The crypt was open.
 
They took a stone staircase down beneath the north transept and Tayte was surprised by what he saw.
 
It was unlike most of the crypts he usually encountered in his line of work.
 
It was not the dark, eerie place he’d imagined it to be.
 
There were no cobwebs, no creeping flora starved of daylight, and for a tourist attraction he was surprised to find no dark mood lighting to set the expected tone.
 
This crypt looked more like a contemporary art gallery.
 
Monuments and inscriptions adorned the walls like paintings.
 
The pillars, walls and ceiling vaults were coloured to match the bright Portland stone and from every pillar the ceiling was lit with uplighters.

“The layout exactly matches the footprint of the upper cathedral,” Jean said as they walked.
 
“It’s the largest crypt in Western Europe.”

“Really?” Tayte said, raising his eyebrows without awareness as he continued to take everything in.

“Apparently, the mosaic floor we’re walking on was laid by convicts from Woking prison.”

Instinctively, everyone looked down.
 
Even Jackson and Stubbs.

“Tell me if you’ve had enough of the commentary,” Jean added.

Tayte turned to her and smiled.
 
“No, it’s fascinating, really.
 
You must soak up information like a sponge.”

They came to a black sarcophagus that was set out on a plinth in the centre of the crypt beneath the dome.

“Lord Nelson,” Tayte said, reading the inscription.

“The Duke of Wellington’s here, too,” Jean said.
 
“And Florence Nightingale, Kitchener, Turner and Lawrence - the list goes on.”

“Lawrence of Arabia?”

“The very same.”

They turned away from Nelson, heading to their right beneath the nave.

“Any idea where Ethelred’s buried?” Tayte asked.

“I don’t think we’re going to see much,” Jean said.
 
“It’s not really a matter of where he’s buried.
 
There’s a memorial as I recall but that’s about all.
 
It’s on the 1666 plaque.”

“The Great Fire,” Tayte said, figuring the date alone told him plenty.

Jean confirmed it.
 
“His tomb was destroyed along with just about everything else.”

When they found the memorial, Tayte just stared at it and sighed.
 
It was an unadorned grey tablet, inscribed with the names and dates of those interred at the cathedral before the fire.

“That’s it?” Tayte said.
 
“Ethelred.
 
1016.
 
King of the Angles?”

“I told you there wasn’t much to see.”

Tayte thought it amounted to nothing at all.
 
He read a few names off the plaque, none of which offered any connection.

“What are we really looking for here?
 
I mean, I know we’re looking for Queen Anne’s heir, but what form is that likely to take?”

Jean’s downturned expression gave him no encouragement.
 
He thought it through, wondering how these Royal Society Fellows intended to pass the heir’s identity on when the time came.
 
Had something been hidden in the cathedral?
 
Were they looking for a mason’s mark engraved on a stone?
 
He figured St Paul’s must be riddled with such markings but it seemed too fanciful to contemplate - the stuff of Hollywood film scripts.
 
He kept thinking, and it wasn’t until he thought about the man whom he supposed had created the ahnentafel puzzle - the Reverend Naismith - that he knew he had the answer.

“He was a genealogist,” he reminded himself, thinking aloud.
 
“We’re trying to discover the identity of an heir.
 
That, and something to confirm we’re looking in the right place.
 
It’s all we can really hope to find, isn’t it?
 
All we need to find?”

Jean indicated the plaque.
 
“Like a name on a memorial?”

“Exactly,” Tayte said.
 
“Or on a headstone.
 
In my room last night we established that the heir had to have been switched with a newborn baby from another family on one of three possible dates.”
 
He went for the piece of paper he’d written the dates on but Jean beat him to the answer.

“The first was in March 1697,” she said.
 
“There was a miscarriage in December the same year, which we’ve ruled out.
 
The next was a year later in December 1698 and the last was in January 1700.”

“Right,” Tayte said, checking his piece of paper and taking note of the exact dates.
 
He started walking.
 
“Come on.
 
We need to check the burial registers.”

Jean went after him.
 
“Wait,” she said.
 
“That can’t be right.”

Tayte stopped and Jackson and Stubbs stopped with him.
 
“I don’t see how it can be anything else.
 
What better way was there for a genealogist to send a message, or a name in this case, forward through time than on a headstone?
 
The ahnentafel led us here to St Paul’s Cathedral.
 
It stands to reason that this is where we’re going to find the name we’re looking for.”
 
He flicked the piece of paper he was holding.
 
“All we have to do is check for burials that match these dates.
 
If we find a matching birth or perhaps an infant burial -”

Jean stopped him.
 
“It can’t be right,” she insisted.

“Why not?”

She grabbed Tayte’s arm.
 
“Come with me,” she said, and she led him to the south aisle beneath the quire.
 
“Look.
 
See for yourself.”

They were standing before Sir Christopher Wren’s tomb.
 
Tayte read the epitaph on the wall behind the sarcophagus.
 
It was a Latin inscription that he didn’t understand, but beneath it was a translation.

“If you seek his memorial, look around you,” he said, and instinctively he did.

Jean sighed.
 
“Not that.
 
Wren was the first person buried here at new St Paul’s after the old cathedral burned down.”
 
She pointed to the inscription on the sarcophagus.
 
“Look here.”

Tayte read the inscription and the penny dropped.
 
“Died 1723,” he said.
 
“I guess that rules St Paul’s Cathedral out altogether, doesn’t it?”

“It does if we’re looking for a headstone dated between 1697 and 1700.”

“I’m sure of it,” Tayte said.
 
“The Fellows had to pass the heir’s identity on somehow.
 
And it had to be in such a way that would stand the test of time.
 
A headstone or some other memorial has to be the answer.”

Jean gave a humourless laugh.
 
“Then we’re in the wrong place.”

Tayte couldn’t argue with that.
 
He started walking again, heading for the exit.
 
“Let’s get some air.
 
We need to think this over.”

Back outside, standing beside the Queen Anne statue again, Tayte tried to block out the cacophony of human and mechanical traffic that was raging behind him as he stared up at the cathedral.
 
He was thinking about the ahnentafel and about Ethelred II, wondering where else, or what else, it might point to, and whether it had anything to do with St Paul’s Cathedral at all.

“They were men of science,” Tayte said to himself.

His thoughts wandered with his eyes as they strafed the tall pillars all the way up to the relief of the conversion of St Paul.
 
His instincts told him that this was not a complicated puzzle.
 
He recalled the conversation at the pub Jean had taken him to, where he’d met her history-student friends.
 
He thought about Ralph’s Isaac Newton speech.
 
Occam’s Razor.
 
Keep it simple.
 
It was another rule by which the Fellows of the Royal Society lived.
 
It made sense that they would have tried to follow it in everything they did.
 
The idea suggested something to Tayte that now seemed obvious.

“The ahnentafel was the puzzle,” he said.
 
“The rest should be easy.”

“How do you mean?” Jean said.

“I mean once the ahnentafel had been put together, our five Fellows must have wanted whoever was in possession of it to find what they were looking for, and with relative ease.
 
Getting the pieces of the puzzle together and understanding what it meant was the main thing.”

“So if the rest should be easy, why can’t we see it?”

Tayte turned back to the cathedral and returned his gaze to the central relief.
 
He cleared his mind, keeping his thoughts simple.

“The ahnentafel points to Ethelred,” he said.
 
“That’s a fact we can bank.
 
Ethelred was buried here at St Paul’s, but not at
this
St Paul’s.”
 
His gaze wandered up to the statue of St Paul himself, standing above the tympanum.

Not at this St Paul’s...

“Of course,” he said, his eyes still fixed on the saint high above them.
 
“So what we’re looking for isn’t at this St Paul’s, either.
 
This isn’t about Queen Anne’s statue or Ethelred’s tomb.
 
And it’s not about the cathedral.
 
It can’t be about any of those things.”

“So Ethelred doesn’t point to St Paul’s Cathedral?” Jean said.

Tayte spun around, his face beaming.
 
“No,” he said.
 
“He points to St Paul himself.
 
What we’re looking for is another St Paul’s - a church.”

Jean returned his smile.
 
Then her shoulders slumped.
 
“But which St Paul’s?
 
How are we supposed to know?”

“There must be a clue to that answer somewhere,” Tayte said.
 
“Maybe we’ve already seen it.
 
When we read about the executions at The National Archives, didn’t it say where the Reverend Naismith was rector?”

“Whitechapel,” Jean said.
 
She shook her head.
 
“But it was St Mary’s, not St Paul’s.”

Tayte kept thinking but nothing came to him.
 
“There can’t be many St Paul’s churches in London that fit our criteria,” he said.
 
“Maybe we’ll only know it’s the right one when we see it.”

“It would have to be a church of Anglican denomination,” Jean said.

“And there would have to be burial plots dating far enough back,” Tayte added.
 
“Is there someplace nearby where we can get a coffee?
 
We’ve got some research to do.”

Chapter Twenty-Two

T
hey found a Starbucks on Ludgate Hill, not far from the cathedral.
 
As they headed towards it, Tayte’s thoughts re-settled on the problem of how they were going to lose their escort.
 
It seemed that Jackson and Stubbs would give them no easy opportunity and he didn’t think they would get very far if they tried to make a run for it.
 
Just the same, he concluded that he would have to devise something soon.
 
If only he knew what.

He followed Jean inside the coffee shop and the place instantly struck a familiar and welcome chord.
 
The merchandise branding was the same as it was back home and the sweet aroma of coffee and pastries was just as good.
 
He drew a deep breath and was reluctant to let it go again.
 
It reminded him of home, which, with everything that had happened that week, was somewhere that now seemed further away than it ever had before.
 

They took a table by the window, where a red bus or black cab was rarely absent from the view, and Tayte noticed that the previously dominant office apparel on the people passing by began to shift with the hour to more casual attire.
 
Jean sat down and got straight to work on the BlackBerry and Tayte couldn’t see how she was going to manage on such a small keyboard and screen.

“We could try to find an Internet cafe if it’d be easier,” he said.

Jean carried on tapping the keys and flicking her thumb over the scroller.
 
“It’s okay.
 
I’m used to it.
 
I’ll have a latte,” she added without lifting her head.