The Queen's Cipher (33 page)

“We lived in a shitty flat on the sixteenth floor, still do, where privacy was as scarce as hen’s teeth. I never knew my dad. He scarpered before I was born. After that, two other men got Mum up the duff so I’ve a younger half sister and a half brother which means there’s always someone coming or going. Everything I wore as a teenager was second-hand. We must have visited every thrift shop in Hackney. I was a right sight, I can tell you. Here comes Cheryl, the young Goth, in fishnet stockings, black imitation leather miniskirt, black lipstick and witchy eye make-up. Next on the piss-stained catwalk, cool Cheryl, thin as a paper clip, in acid washed jeans and Doc Martens, described as ‘super sexy’ by her boyfriend when he wanted to get his leg over. You would not have been impressed.”

“What about your love of Shakespeare. Where did that come from?”

“When I was nine, Mum took me to see a pantomime at the Hackney Empire, only she got her dates wrong and we ended up watching a touring production of
Twelfth Night
. I was promised an ice cream if I could sit it out. At first, I was lost. Hearing characters ‘beseeching’ and ‘entreating’ one another, I went like, duh, yeah, what does that mean? But I loved the flow of words – beautiful lines like ‘If music be the food of love, play on’ and ‘make me a willow cabin at your gate.’ Straight away I was hooked, a Bard junkie if you like, spending whatever money I could scrape together on going to the theatre. I owe Shakespeare just about everything. He’s a kindred spirit. People forget that he lodged in Hackney and that some of his early plays were performed there.”

Freddie grinned at her. “What you haven’t told me is why you wanted to come to Oxford. There’s not much working-class solidarity here.”

“Right, well, I went to Brooke House Sixth Form College for disadvantaged kids from Hackney and was selected for the residential course at Pembroke College where I attended lectures, learned how to write essays and hobnobbed with undergraduates who weren’t nearly as stuck-up as I had imagined. It made me feel I could aim high.”

“You must have been one of the first successes of the scheme?”

“Yeah, Cheryl Stone, human guinea pig, at your service and ready for love. Talking of history, Shakespeare doesn’t take the credit for any of his plays until
Love’s Labour’s Lost
appears in print in 1598. Is that just a coincidence?”

“Let me stop you there. A second edition of Richard II was also published in 1598 with Shakespeare’s name on the title page so we don’t know which came first.”

Hovering over him, she made a clucking noise which he took to be a prelude to a challenging statement. “Correct me if I’m wrong, tutor dear, but didn’t Queen Elizabeth object to
Richard II
and prevent its deposition scene from being played in public. Who in their right mind would put their name on a play that had already incurred the royal displeasure?”

“The writer had no say in such matters. Plays were sold to publishers who therefore owned them and they didn’t care much about authors. Most plays were published anonymously. Maybe Shakespeare’s popularity had reached a point where it was profitable to put his name on the title page of a quarto. On the other hand, it might have been a distancing act.”

The words slipped out before he realised what he had said.

Cheryl looked at him in amazement. “Care to repeat that?”

“There might have been a political reason for sticking Shakespeare up front.”

“You’re not losing it, are you? You haven’t become a flaky theorist in your spare time.”

There was no going back now. He began to tell her about his cipher discoveries, ignoring her snorts of outrage as he did so. Eventually his persistence paid off and the cries of ‘get out of here’ and ‘you must be joking’ dwindled to a shocked silence.

“You’re serious about this, aren’t you?” she said in a small voice.

“Yes, I’m pretty convinced that Francis Bacon was Shakespeare’s silent partner.”

“What about your partner, Dr Dilworth. What does she think?”

“Oh her, she’s too busy shagging her married head of department,” he said bitterly.

“Fuck off, I don’t believe it. The famous Milton Cleaver who wrote that book on Shakespeare’s morality. What a randy old stoat!”

Freddie wished he’d never opened his mouth. He was telling this girl all his secrets.

“I want to say something,” she began. “I’ve never taken any interest in the authorship controversy. It seemed a pretty arid debate between the improbability of it being the Stratford man and the impossibility of it being anyone else. But you’ve got round that by offering me an alternative proposition – not Shakespeare versus Bacon but Shakespeare
and
Bacon. Unfortunately, your evidence is in code and, stop me if I’ve got this wrong, isn’t cipher a discredited currency.”

He nodded his head miserably. “The ciphers are genuine though,” he replied defensively.

“But there’s no conclusive proof, is there? If I saw your decipherments I wouldn’t be convinced by them but then I’m prejudiced. I don’t believe in skulduggery. You, on the other hand, obviously love a mystery and the Shakespeare Authorship Question is a bloody good whodunit. But history isn’t like fiction, it’s not as tidy, and the closer you get to the truth the more the mystery deepens about what really happened in the past.”

“Don’t you think I know this, Cheryl?”

“I don’t want anything bad to happen to you, Freddie. Honestly I don’t. Things didn’t work out too well for the curious cat. Don’t toss your career away.”

“Ta very much,” he said. Their roles had reversed. She was giving him advice.

“There’s another thing. I’m not too happy with the idea of a posh gay boy from St Albans sharing the credit for Shakespeare’s plays.”

“Hold on a minute, you’re not homophobic, are you. Sure Bacon was gay but he swung both ways as did many Elizabethan and Stuart courtiers.”

To reinforce the point Freddie mentioned another leading Shakespeare candidate, the Earl of Oxford, a notorious womaniser whose love of the stage was spiced by his desire for boy actors, and Shakespeare’s patron, the Earl of Southampton, whose active service in Ireland was largely spent in bed with Captain Piers Edmunds. Sodomy may have been a capital offence in England but King James practised masculine love. What was unnatural lust to Puritan moralists was par for the course in the Stuart Court.

“And remember, if Shakespeare wrote all the
Sonnets
he had to have been AC/DC, immortalising not only a ‘dark lady’ but a ‘lovely boy.’”

She wouldn’t let go of the argument. “Well, OK, so Shakespeare faced both ways but he wasn’t creepy like Bacon. I’ve read his
Essays
and what he wrote about love and marriage came from a cold, passionless heart. As he saw it, a woman was simply a handicap to an ambitious man.”

Freddie called a time out for drinks. She followed him into the kitchen to watch him uncorking the Chianti. As he did so he talked about Bacon’s
Essays
. They were aphoristic and analytical. Bacon set love alongside our other needs in life. Love was a two-edged sword. We were born out of love but could be destroyed by it. Shakespeare held very similar views. In most of his plays love was a disturbing element. This was greeted with a loud popping noise as he pulled out the cork.

“Take
The Merchant of Venice
for example,” he said. “In this play love is either blind or wilful. Portia’s choice in love is determined by lottery while Jessica’s love makes her a rebellious and undutiful daughter, a defector from her faith and a petty thief.”

Cheryl grimaced. “You chose an easy one. What about
Hamlet
?”

“That’s more complicated,” he admitted. “I think Hamlet and Ophelia loved one another but he could master his passion and make it ‘keep quarter.’ Ophelia was quite the opposite. She couldn’t cope with rejection and committed suicide. As for Queen Gertrude, well, ‘frailty thy name is woman.’ I rest my case. Ouch!”

She had punched him in the ribs. “Let’s get back to
Love’s Labour’s Lost
, the comedy with the miserable title and the sad outcome. I get the feeling it’s autobiographical. Was 1597 a low point in Shakespeare’s love life?”

“Who knows? It was the year in which he gave his wife Anne her own home in Stratford and a pretty grand one at that.”

“What about Bacon. I don’t suppose he was in love, was he?”

“Funny you should mention that. In the summer of 1597 he was courting his cousin, Lady Elizabeth Hatton, a wealthy and beautiful young widow who had many suitors, but it didn’t come to anything.”

“Sounds like posh totty,” she sneered. “What went wrong?”

“There were political and monetary drawbacks to the match and Bacon wasn’t helped by having a puritanical mother who believed in keeping her sons free from the sins of the flesh.”

“So this courtship is going on just before
Love’s Labour’s Lost
is first staged. Maybe that’s what the play is about – unrequited love.”

Cheryl’s hand made another foray into Brabant country. “You must tell me about it but not just yet.”

ALL SOULS DAY

To greet All Souls Day a dry, bitingly cold wind had come in from the east. Slumped in the corner of his coach with watering eyes and a churning stomach, Francis Bacon wrapped a cloak around his slender body to keep out the cold. He had swathed himself in furs and worn three waistcoats but all to no avail. He looked enviously at his young companion sprawling opposite him. Dressed only in a loose jerkin and a linen shirt thrown open to reveal his flawless skin, Henry Percy seemed oblivious to the cold. Francis had heard the whispers. His fellow servants called Percy a popinjay and a coxcomb but he got to ride in his master’s coach and they didn’t.

Francis watched the weak afternoon sun glinting through the branches until the woodland thinned out to be replaced by the brown fields of the arable farmer. Plough clods had been left for the winter frosts to break down before being harrowed and sown with seed. Cereal crops would grow here – wheat, barley, rye and oats – to feed the capital city. These tenant farmers existed on the margins of subsistence and, a year ago, in Parliament, he had raised the issue of their plight. Money, he told his fellow MPs, should be like muck, spread around for the common good. Clever words but they had fallen on stony ground.

They were travelling uphill through an oak wood that once belonged to the Benedictine order. The monks of St Albans had built a chapel here in which Catholic services were still held. Francis could see candles burning in the chapel windows and hear the solemn chanting of the mass as the congregation prayed for the passage of departed souls through Purgatory. As a good Protestant and loyal servant of the Crown it was his duty to report this unlawful assembly to the authorities but he had no intention of doing so. He might not believe in Purgatory but he could understand why others did. Purgatory was of poetic worth; a half-way house for the damaged soul, offering the distant hope of salvation.

Sometimes he wished he had his mother’s clarity of conviction. There were no half measures for her. The older she got the greater her moral certainty. Advance the opinion, however tentatively, that there should be an after-death opportunity for the soul to flourish and she would repeat Calvin’s statement that Purgatory was one of Satan’s deadly fictions. Lady Anne was against any watering down of the Reformation, filling her household with Nonconformist preachers, which only served to widen the gap in understanding between her and a forward-looking son who preferred natural philosophy to liturgical reform. It was, he supposed, a generational problem. Old people couldn’t comprehend a future in which they would have no part to play.

Francis felt guilty. He had undertaken this journey because his mother’s health was failing. Every day is a sick day, she had written in a rambling and incoherent letter. From what he could tell she had a quartan fever – a rising temperature accompanied by shivers, headaches and aching muscles – and he knew how such agues were treated. Doctors believed they were caused by an excess of yellow bile which must be drained off by attaching leeches to the patient’s body. In sucking blood out of the body, leeches were supposed to suck out the disease but, in practice, all they did was to weaken the patient by removing too much blood. Judging from what she had told him, his mother had become so muddled she thought the worms were in her drink rather than on her body.

There had to be a better treatment and he had been fortunate enough to find one while litigating a case for the Royal College of Physicians. As the Queen’s Learned Counsel he had met the College Registrar Roger Marbeck whose laboratory at Amen Corner was piled high with tablets and tobacco leaves, a revolutionary cure for most diseases.

“Tobacco is a fine purgative,” Marbeck enthused. “It conforms to the Galenic vision of four balanced elements, providing the hot and dry elements needed for good health.”

“You wouldn’t perchance have anything for a fever,” Francis had asked him.

“I have just the thing.” Marbeck pointed to a jar on the shelf above his head. “It’s a drug I acquired on the Cadiz expedition. It’s called ‘Jesuit’s Bark’ because Jesuit priests discovered it in Peru. A little of this fine powder in a glass of wine will quickly restore a patient’s health. I would count it an honour, sir, if you took some.”    

Francis checked the leather purse was still in his breeches. He would tell his mother the powder was ‘Peruvian bark’ for she couldn’t abide anything a Jesuit had touched.

Dusk was falling as the coach rattled beneath Gorhambury’s gatehouse. In the gathering gloom he could just about make out the coat of arms chiselled into the stone entrance arch. It consisted of a shield surmounted by a coronet, a wild boar and the family motto,
Mediocria Firma
, moderate things are surest. He had always thought this a fine maxim but people were laughing at it in London. John Marston had used these very words to identify him as the anonymous co-author of
Venus and Adonis
. He could only hope news of this had not reached his mother’s ears. She would die of shame if she thought her younger son had been writing erotic verses.