The Queen's Cipher (38 page)

One o’ these maids’ girdles for your waist should be fit.

Are not you the chief woman? You are the thickest here.

Freddie stroked his chin reflectively. “I think we’re into mythology now. There was an ancient Greek custom whereby, on the eve of a girl’s wedding, she offered her virginal girdle to the goddess Artemis seeking protection from the dangers of childbirth. Artemis is the Greek version of Diana the virgin huntress, an absolutely central figure in the cult of Elizabeth.”

“A huntress protecting her quarry, a pregnant virgin – that’s a crazy, mixed up goddess!”

He shrugged his shoulders. “It’s a long time since I read the Diana myth but I don’t remember her thick waist. Her height was often mentioned. She towered above her nymphs.”

But as the act progressed the focus shifted from Diana to the victimised deer. In the second scene the comic characters discussed its death and the pedant likened the animal’s blood to a ripe apple that had fallen to earth. The Latin words for sky and earth were each given three English synonyms. The rule of three once again, as Cheryl felt obliged to point out.

Nathaniel: Very reverend sport, truly, and done in testimony of a good conscience.

Holofernes: The deer was, as you know – sanguis – in blood, ripe as the pomewater who how hangeth like a jewel in the ear of caelo, the sky, the welkin, the heaven and anon falleth like a crab on the face of terra, the soil, the land, the earth.

“Look at the schoolmaster’s vocabulary,” Freddie said. “Sanguine is the Prince of Wales’ heraldic colour while the pomewater is also called a ‘pomeroyal.’ In Holofernes’ fanciful brain the stricken deer is a royal fruit that falls to earth as a crab apple, an inferior windfall.”

“Yeah, well, it’s obvious, isn’t it? A court conspiracy has led to the fostering out of a royal child whose status is reduced thereby.”

Having delivered this sweeping judgement, Cheryl began to root through the Shakespeare glossary. “Chastity is a woman’s ‘jewel’ in
Pericles
and
The Tempest
; sexual intercourse is likened to ‘a fall off a tree’ in
Henry VI
and is considered to ‘soil’ women in
Troilus and Cressida
and
Measure for Measure
. But how does the crab apple get into it?”

A book of Greek myths was removed from the bookcase. “You’re going to like this,” he told her. “A deer escaped the bow of the virgin huntress Artemis and sought sanctuary under a wild apple tree. Maybe the princess didn’t kill the deer after all. And it also says here that Artemis presided over an ancient fertility rite that culminated in a door opening to reveal either a goose or a child. We’re back to the riddle in Act Three.”   

Cheryl nodded sagely. It all seemed to fit together. “What comes next?” she wondered.

Nathaniel: Truly, master Holofernes, the epithets are sweetly varied, like a scholar at the least. But, sir, I assure ye it was a buck of the first head.

Holofernes: Sir Nathaniel, haud credo.

Dull:  ‘Twas not an ‘auld grey doe,’ ‘twas a pricket.

Holofernes: Most barbarous intimation! Yet a kind of insinuation, as it were in via, in way, of explication, facere, as it were, replication, or rather ostentare, to show, as it were, his inclination after his undressed, unpolished, uneducated, unpruned, untrained, or rather unlettered, or ratherest unconfirmed, fashion, to insert again my haud credo for a deer.

“Why is the statement that the deer was a pricket held to be vulgar and unpleasant? Is it another dirty word? It certainly sounds like one.”

“Could be,” Freddie was non-committal. “Here’s a riddle for you. What was a month old at Cain’s birth that’s not yet five weeks old?”

She didn’t need to think about it. “That’s easy. It’s the Moon.”

“That’s right, but for some reason the schoolmaster says the ‘allusion’ holds in the ‘exchange’ while the constable talks about ‘collusion’ and ‘pollution.’ That’s three levels of connivance and three mentions of the word ‘exchange.’”

Holofernes: The moon was a month old when Adam was no more,

And raught not to five weeks when he came to five score.

The allusion holds in the exchange.

Dull: ‘Tis true, indeed, the collusion holds in the exchange.

Holofernes: God comfort thy capacity, I say th’allusion holds in the exchange.

Dull: And I say the pollusion holds in the exchange, for the moon is never but a month old 

And I say beside that ‘twas a pricket that the Princess killed.

“Have you heard of the moon goddess?” Freddie asked. “She takes three forms – Luna above, Diana on earth and Hecate, the evil witch, in the underworld.”    

“So many names,” she said ironically. “It’s enough to make a poor girl’s head spin. But why does ‘the allusion’ hold ‘in the exchange’?”

“It must be the numerical exchange from five weeks to five score.”

“Why bring Adam into it.”

“Those who believed in the divine right of kings held Adam to be the first monarch. He was also, significantly, the first human being to fall from grace.”

“Umm,” she was far from convinced. “Next up, we have Holofernes reciting a rubbish poem about a pricket that contains a number riddle. What’s this about then?”

The prayful princess pierced and pricked a pretty pleasing pricket

Some say a sore, but not a sore till now made sore with shooting.

The dogs did yell; but ‘L’ to ‘sore’. Then ‘sorel’ jumps from thicket –

Or pricket sore, or else sorel. The people fall a-hooting.

If sore be sore then ‘L’ to ‘sore’ makes fifty sores – O sore ‘L’!

Of one sore I an hundred make by adding but one more ‘L’.

“Well,” he said slowly, “Shakespeare is using another of Ovid’s stories about Diana. It goes like this. She is bathing in a spring when the mortal hunter Actaeon stumbles across her and, because she is taller than her accompanying nymphs, he sees her nakedness. He stops and stares; enchanted by her ravishing beauty. She dashes water in his face. He loses the power of speech and turns into a stag whereupon his hounds tear him to pieces. And she preserves her mystery.”

“What a bitch! You can’t blame a man for looking. But the deer doesn’t die in the poem, does it?”

“It’s the number thing,” he said. “A sore is a four-year-old male deer. By adding an L it becomes a sorrel or three-year-old deer. A capital L is the Roman numeral for 50 and, therefore, two Ls equal 100 which is ...”

“Francis Bacon’s number count!”

“And what does that tell you?”

“That beneath all this convoluted imagery is the story of a queen about to give birth to a child she cannot acknowledge. If that’s what you think is going on here, why don’t you come out and say so?”

The force of her challenge seemed to surprise him. “This much I will say. The cult of Elizabeth involved worshipping her as Diana, the goddess of the hunt, the moon and birthing. The iconography in the latter part of her reign was all about the virgin mother, the chaste moon goddess. The Diana and Actaeon myth even appeared on the Whitehall Palace gates.”

“What about the yelling dogs in the epitaph. Do they belong to Actaeon?”

“I think they’re courtiers. In the Tudor menagerie Elizabeth’s advisors were known as ‘royal dogs’ and it’s the dogs that are calling for the deer to be transformed. That separates them from the ‘people’ who ‘fall-a-hooting’ – they’re just subjects reacting to what they see as a palace conspiracy.”

“What about the pricket? Holofernes mentions it in his poem although earlier he’d acted as if there was somehow shocking about the word. Then there’s the ‘thicket’ out of which the deer jumps.”

He looked up ‘pricket’ in the
Oxford English Dictionary
and found an epigram by the first-century Spanish poet Martial. ‘The pricket points the bed but not the side.’ It had been a slang word for an illegitimate baby for almost two thousand years!

As for ‘thicket’, Shakespeare often used the word figuratively to suggest the most secretive of places and, therefore, as a description of female genitalia. In
Measure for Measure
he had talked about ‘brakes of ice.’ Brake being a synonym for thicket.

“Fire and ice, passion and purity, men expect too much of women,” Cheryl reflected.

Freddie had opened another book. “Look at this entry in Bacon’s
Promus
: ‘Where harts cast their horns’! According to the play, the princess enters a thicket to shoot the royal hart but ends up transforming the creature into a hornless deer.”

Her eyes widened as she looked again at the playbook. “What about the last line of the verse – ‘Of one sore I an hundred make’ – the first person singular. It’s become personal all of a sudden.”

“It certainly has. I am 100 – the fallen man, the royal windfall, the goose crossing the threshold and the deer that jumps out of the thicket. You see how the images multiply and support one another. Our self-satisfied schoolmaster boasts of how his poetic gift is lodged in the ‘womb’ of memory. Bacon believed that extemporary verse strengthened the memory and he also claimed that men’s minds were more receptive to ideas when they were delivered by stage characters like a pedant.”

“Fair enough, Freddie.” Cheryl was suddenly tired. “How about taking a rest?”

History, she thought, was simply a version of events, collective memories about the past carefully edited to suit those in power. The single voice was seldom heard. Yet here it was, loud and clear, in a comedy first performed before the Queen.  What an incredible story, a gold-plated soap opera about a brilliant but bitter son who designed a play to stir the conscience of his royal mother.

*

Even the walls of palaces had draughts and Elizabeth shivered in the night air as she waited for the play to end. The lords of Navarre and their French ladies had gone their separate ways leaving the stage to the comic characters to perform what appeared to be the kind of seasonal songs young children might sing. Only they too were barbed.

Elizabeth had heard enough. Many years ago, when her advisors suggested the forcible conversion of her Catholic subjects, she had said she ‘would not open windows into men’s souls.’ Well, that’s what this play had done to her. Opened windows she had kept firmly shut.

As a strong believer in absolute monarchy and divine right she had absolved herself from any guilt for what had happened forty years ago.  She would have married Dudley had it been possible, of course she would, and acknowledged their child too. But it hadn’t been possible. She could only rule England if she stayed single and her weak and fractured kingdom needed her on the throne. She had reinvented herself as the Virgin Queen to see off the Catholic threat after the Pope excommunicated her and, with the passage of time, had come to almost believe in her virginity. But she could no longer do so, not with the dramatist’s words echoing in her ears – ‘Here stand I, lady. Dart thy skill at me.’ He was challenging her to face the truth.

“The words of Mercury are harsh after the songs of Apollo,” said the lisping Spaniard. The room fell silent waiting for their grim-faced monarch to lead the applause.

After a long pause Elizabeth clapped her hands and her courtiers joined in enthusiastically. While the players were taking their curtain calls a plan began to form in her mind. She beckoned the Lord Chamberlain to her side. George Carey was her first cousin and a discreet man. “George,” she said, “I would like a private word with that fellow Shakespeare. See to it.”

“A thousand pardons, your Majesty, but I cannot carry out your command. Master Shakespeare is in Warwickshire looking after a sick child.”

How very convenient, she thought, and further confirmation of what she feared. Another hand was upon this play and she couldn’t speak to him either. This, however, could be rectified by giving him the audience he craved, once she had worked out what she might say.

*

“What about these seasonal songs tagged onto the end of the play,” Cheryl asked. “They celebrate spring and winter and have been composed, we’re told, ‘in praise of the owl and the cuckoo’ which, when you think about it, is a pretty strange choice given that the cuckoo leaves its offspring in another bird’s nest and the owl has always been a bird of ill omen.”

When daisies pied and violets blue,

And lady-smocks, all silver-white,

And cuckoo-buds of yellow hue

Do paint the meadow with delight,

The cuckoo then on every tree

Mocks married men, for thus sings he:

Cuckoo!

Cuckoo, cuckoo – O word of fear,

Unpleasing to a married ear.

When shepherds pipe on oaten straws,

And merry larks are ploughmen’s clocks;

When turtles tread, and rooks and daws,

And maidens bleach their summer smocks,

The cuckoo then on every tree

Mocks married men, for thus sings he:

Cuckoo!

Cuckoo, cuckoo – O word of fear,