The Queen's Cipher (53 page)

What had rescued him from his self-destructive misery was a flirtatious waitress. With a good deal of giggling, eye fluttering and tossing of her bottle blonde hair, she told him about a potent brew made from an ancient recipe that blended together fifty six herbs, roots and fruits and how it might be fused with a carbonated energy drink to devastating effect. He had asked her to describe this spirit to him and she had mentioned Jagermeister’s licorice flavor and golden brown appearance, a bit like runny treacle, and how it was best served cold. He had slugged several ice-cold shots before the significance of her remark registered in his mind.

She had combined two abstract ideas – age and colour. If a brown liqueur was age-old then couldn’t the same be said of brown ink on a piece of paper? Granted, there were still brown inks on the market – Waterman Havana Brown and Sheaffer Brown for example – but they were few and far between. Fountain pens had gone out of fashion and those who used them relied almost entirely on pre-filled black, blue or red ink cartridges. That being so; mightn’t the ironic German word
Schachmatt
have been written long ago in an ink now turned brown with age. One more Jagerbomb for the road and he shot out of the beer cellar like a man possessed.

“I didn’t expect to see you again so soon, Dr Brett,” Heike Mittler’s eyes twinkled behind half moon spectacles as she inspected the breathless Englishman who kept breaking into her office.

“Sorry to bother you again,” he panted. “I was wondering whether I might take another peek at that piece of paper we found.”

The obliging librarian unlocked the office safe and took out the Venetian gaming box. Adjusting the anglepoise lamp on her desk so that it shone directly on the box’s secret drawer, he noticed things he had missed previously. The notepaper was covered with brown specks, like liver spots on an old person’s face, and was of a thicker, more fibrous nature than most modern paper. Also the ink seemed to have eaten into its surface; reminding him of a story he’d been told about a Venetian calligrapher whose iron-gall ink was so acidic it corroded his stationary. And the paper’s oddity didn’t end there. Although fitting snugly into the drawer, the sheet had a frayed edge.

Taking a penknife, he gently eased the sheet away from the wood and stared at it in mute surprise. The paper was folded over and imprinted on the reverse side was the stamp of a lion’s head and the letters AQ.

His companion gave a little shriek. “Do you know what this is? It’s a Venetian letter sheet. The world’s first postal stationary. And it’s numbered too.”

She sketched in the back history. In 1609 the Republic of Venice introduced a stamp tax to raise funds for flood relief and all public functionaries were compelled to use its official notepaper. And she had good news for him. As the sheet was numbered it could also be dated.

A library assistant was summoned and given her instructions. Minutes later she returned to say that letter sheet 14562 had been in official use between 1639 and 1641.

“So we’re looking for a seventeenth-century German with Venetian stationery. That should narrow the field down,” he said with conscious irony.

“No, I think you’ve got that wrong. Only Venetian bureaucrats used these letter sheets. It’s much more likely to have been a Venetian who spoke German.”

Freddie paused. “Perhaps he was a diplomat. They are usually the best linguists.”

“Good idea.” The Assistant Director seemed to be enjoying herself. “That means the Bacon treatise was stolen by a chess playing Venetian diplomat who visited Wolfenbuttel in about 1640. Now who might that be? We need a book on the Thirty Years War.”

A dozen such histories were wheeled into the Assistant Director’s office on a trolley. Freddie selected one entitled
Europe’s Tragedy
and turned to its index. There were several references to Wolfenbuttel, one of which stood out. In 1641 its imperial garrison was besieged by a Protestant army that planned to flood the town by damming the river Oker.

This must have left Duke August between a rock and a hard place. His precious library books would either be burned by imperial troops to provide the heating needed for a long siege or they would disappear beneath the rising flood water. There was only one thing he could do. He sent a messenger to the Holy Roman Emperor to call for peace negotiations and, as luck would have it, the Emperor already had an independent mediator. The skilful Venetian diplomat Alvise Contarini had been loaned to him for the war’s duration.

“That has got to be our man.” Heiki Mittler gave each word equal emphasis. “He must have gone to Wolfenbuttel to draw up a settlement.”

Freddie’s imagination clicked into gear. The Emperor’s dispute with Duke August had been over a comparatively trifling matter – ownership of Hildesheim in Saxony – and with imperial troops in his castle and death and destruction on his doorstep, the duke must have seen the sense in relinquishing his claim to the town. Once terms were agreed, Contarini stayed on in Wolfenbuttel as a guest; like so many statesmen in that age, he had a weakness for chess and wanted to test his prowess against a skilled opponent like Duke August. One day, when the two men were playing a game, the duke must have been called away on business. Contarini would recognize the Embriachi gaming box and know its secret workings. Opening the hidden drawer he extracted the codex and left the ironic one word message as a kind of IOU.

Having listened patiently to his explanation, Frau Mittler complimented him on his deductive powers but without any real enthusiasm.

He, on the other hand, had been sufficiently swayed by his own storytelling to search for the missing codex in Venice. As the Silver Arrow express snaked through the foothills of the Apennines Freddie tried to visualize the chubby-cheeked Venetian envoy feasting his eyes on the treatise. Contarini would have no interest in Shakespeare, may not even have heard of him, but any claim Bacon made to be of royal blood would certainly excite him. Here was a diplomatic bargaining chip.

Because of his stubborn belief in the divine right of kings, Charles I was in serious trouble with his parliament and, by 1641, England was already tipping over into civil war. The merest whisper that the Stuarts sat on the throne because Queen Elizabeth had refused to recognize her own son would have undermined Charles’s position even further.

On this reading, the treatise was political dynamite so why hadn’t Contarini used it to blackmail the English king? The answer was obvious. He had been stuck in Germany trying to settle the Thirty Years War and, before he could get back to Venice, Charles had been executed and the monarchy abolished. At the stroke of an axe, the codex was robbed of its political value. But Contarini would have kept it, he felt sure of that. No one willingly junks such a fascinating piece of history.

He scowled out of the window as the train pulled into Venice’s surprisingly modern concrete and stone station. For his purposes, it was arriving almost four hundred years late.

Reaching for his luggage, he tried to convince himself that he could bridge this huge time gap. Contarini’s papers would almost certainly have found their way into the Venetian State Archives. That was where he would begin his search. Thus resolved, he stepped onto the platform and crossed the busy concourse to a waiting water bus. Once he had bought his ticket and found a seat on the deck he began to relax. Here on the Grand Canal he was surely safe.

He took a deep breath. There was a trace of motor boat diesel fuel in the salty air and that was when his nerves got the better of him. What in God’s name am I doing here, totally out of my depth, competing with a murderous Irish terrorist for a book that disappeared centuries ago? The whole thing is a complete nightmare but I’m going to see it through. I’ve come too far not to.

In the hope of escaping detection Freddie had taken an indirect route to Venice but as his vaporetto left the stop he had the distinct feeling he was being watched.

19 JULY 2014

It was like a fairy tale: a love letter to a ‘Prince Frog.’

Y
ou realize, my dearest, that the greatest difficulties lie in making our people rejoice and approve. The public practice of the Roman religion so sticks in their hearts. I beg you to consider this deeply, as a matter which is so hard for Englishmen to bear that it passes all imagination. For my part, I confess there is no prince in the world to whom I think myself more bound, nor with whom I would rather pass the years of my life, both for your rare virtues and sweet nature. With my commendations to my dearest Frog.

This was the personal message Queen Elizabeth had sent to the Duke of Anjou in September 1579 and a week or two later these words were being perused by senators in Venice. What a testimony, the reader thought, to the efficiency of Venetian spying and diplomatic reporting and to Elizabeth’s outrageous flirting. She knew she could never marry the duke but that didn’t stop her from kissing him in public and exchanging rings and vows of love; stringing out the French courtship for purely political reasons.  Sam had been right. The last of the Tudors was a right royal minx.

Freddie closed the file and sighed heavily. Outside, it was a beautiful afternoon in the most romantic city in the world and here he was stuck in what had once been a convent with only a wooden table and a thick bundle of ancient papers for company.

This was his sixth day in the I Frari and the lack of a coherent mentality behind the archiving of fifteen million documents in Venice’s vast state depository and the consequent difficulty in defining a relevant body of research material had gradually worn him down. After wrestling with the
Miscellanae Gregolin
, a former archivist’s haphazard collection of commercial papers, he had turned in despair to the diplomatic archives and been rewarded with a copy of Elizabeth’s billet-doux sent to Venice by their ambassador in France.

Ironically, this tidbit and others like it had been discovered by two British historians who had been seconded to the Venetian State Archive in the nineteenth century to bring order to this bureaucratic treasure house. Between them, Rawdon and Horatio Brown unearthed a massive amount of material for a Calendar of State Papers Relating to English Affairs. Unfortunately, their calendar only reached the year 1613 which was too early for Freddie’s purposes, leaving him to the tender mercy of an unclassified collection called the
Miscellanea di Carte Non Appartenenti ad Alcun Archivo
, stored, so he was led to believe, in tens of thousands of bundles to be found on the shelves of perhaps three hundred storerooms. Like the trailblazing Browns he was in danger of dying on the job.

There was nothing for it; he would have to ask for help. Not that he liked doing so when the grey robed Franciscan curator was on desk duty. Brother Paolo was a thin man with a long beaky nose that gave his face the expression of someone constantly on the lookout, as indeed he seemed to be whenever he caught sight of the gangling English researcher. Freddie had the feeling he was being inspected to see whether he was sweating or showing any other sign of the mental stress that might precede an inappropriate act.

“
Mi scusi
,” he began in faltering Italian. “
Ho un problema
.”

“I speak English,” Brother Paolo twisted one of the knots in the white cord around his waist.

Freddie explained he was looking for the papers of the seventeenth-century diplomat Alvise Contarini who had helped to negotiate the Peace of Westphalia that ended the Thirty Years War.

“Well, why didn’t you say so earlier? What you need are the Contarini Boxes.”

The friar told him about Nicolo Contarini’s state-sponsored history of the Republic. Written in Italian, it had alienated many Venetian patricians by giving too candid an account of life at the top and in a language ordinary people could understand. The government suspended printing of the work and a chastened Contarini was left to pack away his research material in a set of boxes, some of which were devoted to his kith and kin who continued with this filing system long after his death in 1631.

Four of these large leather boxes were retrieved from an upstairs room in the convent and piled in front of Freddie. The Contarinis had been an incredibly wealthy merchant family that had supplied the Republic with eight doges, twenty two bishops, four patriarchs, many ambassadors and innumerable members of the Grand Council and, in exercising all this power and influence, they had generated a staggering amount of paperwork. Each box contained letters to doges, ambassadorial dispatches and personal correspondence dealing with everything from opera scores to suitable tortures for enemies of the Republic. In sorting through this family history Freddie found himself enmeshed in a web of political intrigue, subtle diplomacy and commercial sharp practice. The Contarinis had fingers in every pie: complaining about the quality of cinnamon; specifying how much gold and silver cloth might be purchased for 400 ducats and frequently buying votes. As highly political merchants they had to operate at two speeds, the frantic pace of the financial transaction and the slow progress of the written word, and their anger and impatience were fully reflected in these records.

Alarmingly, from a researcher’s point of view, the family kept on giving their children the same Christian names and Freddie wasted a further hour sifting through Galileo’s discourse on Venetian galleys in the mistaken belief that there couldn’t have been two Alvise Contarinis who were diplomats during the Thirty Years War. A further source of irritation was the strict censorship imposed by the Venetian Senate on sensitive political and legal documents. Many of the letters were heavily redacted and what made the job even harder was the vast array of subject matter that appeared under the heading of Negotio. This catch-all term even embraced
lettere amorose
such as the pleading note from a lady called Catarina who had lost herself ‘body and soul’ but hoped her seducer’s servant would ‘keep his tongue behind his teeth.’

Freddie sat back and flexed his shoulders. The Contarini boxes had brought him closer to Bacon’s codex in a chronological sense but that was all they had done. He had set himself an impossible task. The dead buried their secrets too well.