The Queen's Cipher (61 page)

Two strawberry and champagne mixes left Freddie philosophical about their failure. While she was inwardly raging, he seemed almost relieved to find that his psychic bridge to the past had broken down. They had come a long way in twenty four hours, before their luck ran out. It was bound to happen, he told her.

But as they left the gallery Cheryl noticed a poster advertising a forthcoming auction in Christie’s showrooms in New York’s Rockefeller Plaza and stopped to read it.  Members of the Save Venice committee were putting personal possessions up for sale with the proceeds going to the campaign. Some of the lots were listed at the bottom of the flier.

“What’s the matter, love? You look as if you’d seen a ghost.”

Unable to speak, she pointed an unsteady finger at Lot 23.

Two unsigned late sixteenth-century English letters written to a ‘dear cousin’ donated by Cristobel Carpenter. Scholars think the original recipient may have been William Shakespeare as the unknown correspondent refers to his cousin’s literary interest in Jewish traders on the Rialto.

Freddie scanned the almost empty room, looking feverishly for Cristobel. “Is she still here? Where’s she gone?”

One of the event organizers told them Signora Carpenter had gone back to her flat on the Giudecca to change. She was attending an evening gala in the Teatro la Fenice opera house.

His buried insecurities came to the fore. “You don’t think she’s already given these letters away, do you? We’ve got to get to her now. There’s no time to waste.”

*

Hours later he was sitting outside a café on the Giudecca promenade drinking his third cup of double espresso, telling himself it was a good sign that Cheryl hadn’t come back yet. She had insisted on seeing Cristobel on her own, arguing that girl talk would be the most effective approach. He had kept his reservations to himself, reasoning that if he was going to live with this mercurial female he must learn to trust her.

From here he could see across the canal to the so-called Venetian mainland. The city was a wonderful absurdity: a series of interconnecting islands that floated before the eyes like proliferating water-lilies. Flooding, sinking, yet somehow surviving for almost two thousand years.

The heat from the afternoon sun reflected off the lagoon, its refractions creating a dance of light that was at once elusive and ambiguous. He was surrounded by water. Water gave and took life; water was endlessly recycled, full of ancient secrets, whispers of the dead. During the plague years it had been a floating burial ground. With no room for mass graves on dry land, corpses had been floated out to sea.

A hand caressed the back of his neck. Freddie swung round.

Cheryl was smiling down at him. “I’ve something to show you.”

“You’ve got the letters,” he said eagerly. “How did you persuade her to part with them?” 

“I tried a novel approach. I told her the truth or most of it. We had deceived her. Our interest in the city’s spice trade was simply a cover story. You were an English academic with a theory about Shakespeare’s Venetian plays. What we were after was evidence that the playwright had come to Venice where he had met her ancestor Lodovico and, if the correspondence she possessed confirmed such a visit, you’d be prepared to give her ten per cent of the royalties on the book you intend to write plus an acknowledgement. She wants a written agreement notified by a lawyer but she’s already withdrawn the letters from the New York auction and given them to me on approval.”

He gave her a big hug. “I think you should be my agent.”

Cheryl pulled the letters out of her shoulder bag and untied the red ribbon holding them together. “They were in a suitcase under Cristobel’s bed,” she explained. “The letters are supposed to have come from Lodovico Moro’s house. That’s what her family told her. They’re addressed to ‘my dear cousin’ and end with the affected farewell, ‘yours to be commanded.’”

“Typical of the period,” said Freddie, snatching one of them off the café table.

“What do you make of this?” Cheryl read out the other letter. “‘Reminding you that you freely entered upon an undertaking to travel for the benefit and public good of the state, I cannot help but wonder why you tarry so long in Venice.’ Whoever wrote this was a long-winded git.”  

“Oh, that comes from learning rhetoric at school. It’s the language of copiousness.”

“Listen to this though!” She waved the vellum pages in triumph. “The cousin is being ticked off for consorting with ‘the usurers of the ghetto.’ That’s the Italian word for foundry, isn’t it? The Venetian Senate must have forced Jews to live beside an ironworks.”

His eyes were focused on the letter he was holding. “I know who wrote this,” he murmured.

“How can you be sure? It’s unsigned.”

“No it’s not. Look at the parting phrase.”

“I’ve already done so – ‘yours to be commanded.’ What can you read into that?”

“Look more closely.”

The penmanship was late Elizabethan, a mixture of the secretary and italic hands and quite florid in its execution. Then it dawned on her. The capital letters! 

“That’s right. He’s subscribed himself, ‘yours To Be commanded.’ Thomas Bodley usually signed his name in full but he wouldn’t do so here; not when he’d sent Bacon on a spying mission.”

“It certainly reads like the puritanical Bodley, scolding his young protege for running short of money and borrowing from a Jewish moneylender who will charge him interest on the loan!”

Freddie asked the waiter for a bottle of Valpolicella to toast their success. “We can write a pretty good article about this. There are one or two things that need checking though …”

The look in her eyes stopped him in his tracks. “Is something wrong?”

“There was another Bodley letter but it was stolen long ago by an English couple. That’s why Cristobel reacted the way she did when we mentioned Lodovico Moro.”

“And this third letter was the clincher, the one that really mattered,” he muttered. “That’s why they took it. Tell me the whole story.”

Thirty years ago when Cristobel was living on the island with her first husband, they were visited by an English student and his girlfriend who wanted to get the letter authenticated. Although she didn’t speak much English then Cristobel had the presence of mind to ask for a receipt and was given a calling card by the girl which she duly lost. However, the girl’s name came back to her years later when she was watching a movie about a prostitute with a beautiful smile.

“It must be Meg Ryan,” he guessed.

Cheryl shook her head and smiled sadly. “No, it was Julia Roberts.”

Freddie choked on his wine. He simply couldn’t believe it. The young woman who had given Cristobel her card was Julia Walker-Roberts.

28 JULY 2014

The singers were enjoying themselves. Their voices throbbed with passion as they reached the final uplifting ‘Hallelujah’ in the Bach motet.

Sitting on a pew in Warbeck chapel, Dame Julia fanned herself with the recital notes and wondered what it must have been like to live in an age of certainty when it was possible to believe in a supernatural creator.

Amazing grace! How sweet the sound

That saved a wretch like me

The choir had segued into everyone’s favourite anti-slavery hymn. Full marks to the choirmaster, she thought, for retaining Newton’s self-loathing second line rather than swapping it for the fashionable and unspeakably bland, ‘That saved and strengthened me.’

I once was lost, but now am found,

Was blind, but now I see

The transformative power of the song brought a tear to Julia’s eye. She had blindly followed her academic ambitions, sacrificing what really mattered in life.

She had often talked about taking sabbatical leave without ever believing she would ask for it. Now she had done so and all those active verbs like ring, text, mark, lecture and write would soon be disappearing from her vocabulary to be replaced by much lazier French words. She felt lightheaded, demob happy her father would have called it.

Not even the thought of an after-dinner speech, something she normally detested, could destroy her sense of well-being.  Tonight’s banquet was to welcome delegates to a symposium on ‘Spanish Golden Age Drama in Translation and Performance’ that had to be more interesting than it sounded. Julia would sing for her unwanted supper, accept the plaudits and depart. Sebastian would be waiting for her in the Bear Inn and they would spend the night together. The very thought of what was in store sent a shiver down her spine. It was ages since she had shared her bed with anyone, shared anything of consequence. The dragon lady – yes, she knew her nickname - felt like a nervous schoolgirl about to lose her virginity.

It had all happened so quickly. A week ago they had been standing by the lock gates at Iffley. The day had been a near perfect one with only a few fluffy white clouds in an otherwise bright blue sky. Basking in the warmth, ducks and geese had gathered in search of food and Sebastian was throwing them breadcrumbs. Initially amused by their antics, she could sense his mounting unease. There was something about his manner that worried her, a vague air of anxiety.

“Is anything the matter?” she had asked.

“I’ve got something to tell you,” he blurted out. “I’m selling up and moving abroad.”

His words were brutal and abrupt, as if he had no control over them. She tried to respond but her mind went numb. She couldn’t think of anything to say.

“I’ve bought a vineyard in the Languedoc. You should see it, Julia. About three hundred hectares of land in a protected area full of wild orchids and herbs.”

Julia pulled herself together. This was no time for self-pity. “You’ve always loved France, Seb, but I never knew you wanted to be a winegrower.”

“Oh, I know nothing about viticulture. The opportunity was there and I took it. The existing winemaker is staying on to show me the ropes. You won’t have heard of the vineyard. It’s called Chateau Scholastica. There used to be a convent on the site.”

“And what wines do you make?”

“Mainly reds, Cabinet Sauvignon and Syrah, but Benjamin hopes to cultivate the Merlot and Grenache grape varieties. Of course, we’ll have to enrich the soil and get the acid blend right or there will be problems with fermentation.”

She had rarely seen Sebastian so animated. He couldn’t stop talking about his new passion while all she could think about was his imminent departure and how dull her life was going to be without him. Perhaps it was self-pity that made her lash out.

“I suppose you’ve forgotten the help you were going to give me. I’ve never had any kind of report on that wretched Sussex bookseller and what he was up to.”

Sebastian was no longer smiling. “I think you are being unfair. I told you my investigator found nothing untoward.”

“And who was this wonderful investigator and why should I trust him?”

“Because he’s my half brother, that’s why.”

That was something she hadn’t expected. “My God, I don’t really know you, do I? All the time we’ve been together you’ve never mentioned a brother. How could you keep that from me?”

He had scratched his brow as he always did when she lost her temper. “I didn’t want to talk about Michael when we were students at Oxford because I resented him so much. My mother remarried after my father’s death, I must have told you that. Well, her second husband was a Catholic schoolteacher from Belfast. Shaun Kelly was an abusive cruel man and it wasn’t a happy marriage but they had a son before Shaun was killed by British soldiers in the Bogside Massacre. Michael and I grew up together on the Falls Road but never saw eye to eye. He was a wild kid, a born troublemaker who idolized the Sinn Fein militants. He was fifteen when I went to Oxford and we lost touch after that. To my surprise, Michael turned out all right, went to university and did postgraduate work in America before returning to Belfast. Then, for some reason he’s never explained, he packed in his engineering business and opened a detective agency in Birmingham. Earlier this year he came to see me and we buried the hatchet. That’s why I felt I could trust him with your delicate matter.”

“Thanks for explaining that,” she told him. “But I thought private investigators gave their clients a written report.”

“Not this one, I’m afraid. Michael said he’d put something in writing but never did. I don’t know where he is now. Gone abroad, I think.”

Feeling rather ashamed of her outburst, Julia threw her last crust to the squawking geese. “What’s happening to your tour business?”

“I’ve jacked it in. It’s a strange thing, Julia, but the richer I got the less I liked it. There’s something toxic about money.”

“Well, I’m glad you’ve found something you really want to do,” she said awkwardly.

“And someone to do it with. Why don’t you come with me to France?”

The look in his eyes had hardly been one of hope. He expected her to reject him, to say her academic career came first. Only she hadn’t said that.

“I know nothing about making wine,” was what she murmured, resting her head on his shoulder.

“We’ll learn together,” he replied, bending down to kiss her.

The shuffling of feet ended Julia’s reverie. The recital was over. She stood up to go.

What had become of Freddie Brett? He had sounded so anxious to see her on the phone. Young people could be so thoughtless.

There he was, at the back of the chapel with a redheaded girl who looked like a fashion model. He moved into the aisle to greet her. She expected some kind of apology but it was not forthcoming.

“We have to talk,” he said abruptly.

“It will have to be tomorrow. I’ve got a formal dinner and need to change.”

“No, it can’t wait. This is really urgent.”

His body language underlined his obvious discomfort. He was standing stiffly and his legs were twitching, a sure sign of tension. Something was wrong. She could sense it.