The Siren Queen: An Ursula Blanchard Mystery at Queen Elizabeth I's

by Buckley, Fiona

  “Fran and I will accompany you, madam. That at least, I insist upon.”

  “Very well,” I said.

  Gladys made the potion and it was effective. The migraine abandoned its attempts to return. I was still tired though, and was glad enough to stay on my bed until Madame Ridolfi had visited me, expressed her concern, been reassured, and agreed to go out without me. I waited until I was sure that both the Ridolfis had left the house, Roberto on his way to the City, Donna in quest of damask and brocade. Then I got up, ignoring my weariness. “Let us hurry,” I said.

  • • •

  June was at last behaving like summer. Indeed, I wished it could be cooler. Today, the sun was very hot and the Strand was dusty. However, we hadn’t far to go. There was no hindrance at Cecil’s house this time. I was admitted at once and we were led straight to Cecil’s study. The man behind the desk rose politely to his feet as I entered. I said: “But . . . er . . . ”

  The man now occupying the Secretary of State’s private study wasn’t Cecil. This individual was a good deal younger, though his grave expression was worthy of the most venerable archbishop and his black hair had already begun to recede from his temples. He was very dark altogether, hair, beard, and eyes. Even his skin had a swarthy tone.

  “Mistress Stannard! Welcome. Please come in and be seated. Tom”—he was addressing the page who had brought us—“take Mistress Stannard’s people downstairs and offer them refreshment while they wait. I am most happy . . . ”

  “One moment,” I said. “I understood . . . I mean, I came to see Sir William Cecil and I don’t know . . . ”

  “Forgive me.” He had an archbishop’s formal manners, too. “I am forgetting. We haven’t met before and evidently Sir William has had no occasion to mention me to you. I am Sir Francis Walsingham, one of the juniors of his department.”

  “I see,” I said, not seeing at all, since this was not only Cecil’s private office but was in his private house.

  Walsingham seemed to pick my puzzled questions out of the air. “On Sir William’s instructions, I have come to finish some outstanding work of his while he attends a preliminary hearing of the Norfolk case. You know of that, I believe? Thomas Howard is an honest and admirable stepfather, it seems, and Sir William is anxious to help as much as he can in the matter of the stepdaughters’ inheritance.”

  “Oh. Yes . . . yes, I knew about the lawsuit,” I said.

  “Quite. And now, what can I do for you? You may trust me as you would have trusted Sir William, I promise you. I know what kind of tasks you have carried out for him in the past.”

  In my concealed pouch, the transcripts crackled. I longed to be rid of them, but something was putting this impulse in check.

  The something, oddly enough, was the memory of the merchant Paige, a perfectly honest merchant whose customer I had been, on and off, for years. Paige was probably out of Mary Stuart’s web now, but he had been in it, very lately. Norfolk was caught in it too, and so were great men in Scotland and even here on the English royal council; Ridolfi himself was perhaps as much prey as spider. The same might even be said of de Spes. The arch spider, assuredly, was Mary.

  I didn’t know, couldn’t possibly know, how many other flies she had caught, or who they were. What it came to was that I didn’t know enough about Walsingham to trust him.

  Later, I wished I had. If I’d handed over those letters, then and there, collected my people, and made off home without delay, I might yet have averted the disasters in which the business ended. That matters could have been even worse than they were, is some comfort, but all the same, they will haunt me all my days. I still see it sometimes in my dreams. I was doing my best, but I hadn’t the knowledge I needed to judge aright.

  “Sir Francis,” I said gently, “the matter is deeply confidential and I hope you will pardon me, but I can discuss it only with Sir William Cecil. May I know when it will be possible to see him?”

  “Not today, for sure,” said Walsingham. “And not tomorrow either. The following day, perhaps. But, Mistress Stannard, I assure you that I have his full confidence and that you need not fear to talk to me.”

  “I’m sure I need not,” I said. “But nevertheless, I must observe perfect discretion in this. I am happy to have met you, Sir Francis. For the moment, however, I must say adieu.”

  “Now what do we do, madam?” Brockley asked, as soon as we were back in the street, in a disappointed group at the side of the Strand thoroughfare.

  I longed for rest but instead, I said: “We go to Bishopsgate, to Sweetplum House, where the widow Edison lets lodgings. I need someone I can call a friend, someone reliable who knows about codes. Master Harry Scrivener has just retired from Cecil’s service and Cecil vouches for his honesty. I met him at the Ridolfi house, but if he were in their toils, I doubt if he’d have encouraged my suspicions as he did; nor can I see how they could use him, since he’s no longer privy to Cecil’s secrets. I think I can rely on Master Scrivener. He just might be the answer.”

  17

  Capricious Fortune

  That wayward lady, Fortune, has a way of requiring the virtue of patience. Harry Scrivener wasn’t at home.

  We hired a boat to take us to London Bridge, the nearest point on the Thames, walked to Bishopsgate, and found Sweetplum House easily enough. It was a tall black-and-white building, fashionably timbered, with windows overhanging the street. The widow Edison was there, wielding a broom and shouting loudly but amiably at a maidservant. She was an impressive figure, beefy of build and exuding a kind of ferocious good humor. She exuded speech, too, in torrential quantities.

  Yes, that was right, Master Scrivener was one of her lodgers, though she called him Mr. because she was all for making life simple and she liked being called Mrs. in the modern way, rather than the old-fashioned mistress, which she always reckoned was for gentry anyhow. Mr. Scrivener had the big front room on the first floor. He was no trouble; she’d be sorry to lose him when he went home. But no, he wasn’t in. Who would be on such a fine day? He was in London to see old friends and maybe buy this and that for there were things to be got in London, and well she knew it, that couldn’t be matched anywhere else and she should know, being widow to a cloth merchant. But he’d said he’d be home for his dinner, if we’d care to wait. There’d be a bite to spare if we wanted it and didn’t mind her charging for it, since this was her living, and what her husband had left her was put by safe against her old age, she being childless.

  Here she did actually pause to draw breath but before any of us had time to speak, she was off again.

  Lamb steaks grilled on a spit, with peas and beans, that’s what she’d planned for dinner—half after twelve, she’d be serving it—and she could send the girl out for more steaks, and there’d be rice with honey and almonds to follow . . . only, if we were going off again till dinnertime, she’d want to be paid in advance, for if we changed our minds, there she’d be with a lot of lamb steaks that wouldn’t keep in this weather . . .

  Getting a few words in at last, I agreed to pay in advance for three dinners, did so, and then went off with the Brockleys to roam restlessly across London Bridge, looking at the shops and stalls upon it and the shipping that passed beneath, until noon, when we made our way back to Sweetplum. There, at last, in the big main room of the house, we found Scrivener, cool in shirt-sleeves, his doublet over his arm, learning from Mrs. Edison that he was likely to have company at the meal.

  “Mistress Stannard! I thought from the description that it might be you. But Mrs. Edison could not recall your name.”

  Mrs. Edison hadn’t asked it and had rolled over me like a flood tide when I tried to tell her. However, I smiled, introduced Brockley and Dale, and in a quiet voice, I said: “When we met at the Ridolfi dinner, you offered help should I ever need it. I need it now.” Mrs. Edison, having brought us inside, had gone to the kitchen and was probably out of earshot, but this matter was very private. I was cautious.

  Scrivener’s thick
iron-gray eyebrows rose, a wordless signal that he understood. “After dinner,” he said obliquely. “Upstairs.”

  We ate in the big room, which was a communal chamber. Other lodgers came in to partake as well. But once we were fed (the meal was excellent; I would have recommended Mrs. Edison’s cooking to royalty) Scrivener led us up a narrow flight of stairs to his first-floor sanctum.

  “I’m lucky,” he said, throwing the door open and going at once to pull stools out from under a writing table and plump the cushions on the window seat. “It’s a large room and sunny. There’s noise from Bishopsgate down below but it falls quiet at dusk and what of it, anyway? I like the City. I’m visiting it for pleasure this summer. I thought of taking a house, but then said to myself: what a bother. I shall have to hire servants and why trouble myself for a matter of a few months? A decent lodging where I can have privacy if I want it; that will do very well and be much cheaper. Now, what can I do to help you?”

  “It’s very confidential,” I said. “But honest. I promise.”

  “I accept that, Mistress Stannard. So—what exactly is it?”

  I produced the transcripts of the enciphered letters. “Cecil told me I could trust you. I want to decode these. Can it be done?”

  • • •

  Serious as this business was, it was amusing to see how Scrivener’s face lit up when I handed him the copies of Ridolfi’s letters. It was plain that such ciphers were the delight of his life.

  “But this is enchanting.” He spread the sheets out on his table, pushing a writing set and a pile of unused paper out of the way. “Tell me—if I may ask—where did this cipher come from? It’s rare to find one that makes use of numerals rather than letters or symbols but numeric ciphers are my own speciality. I’m even wondering if it’s one of mine.”

  Despite Cecil’s assurances, I hesitated. I had met Scrivener at the Ridolfi house and even though he was retired, he no doubt still had contact with former colleagues; he might be in a position to help Ridolfi in one way or another: by passing messages, by persuasive talk, even, simply, by helping Ridolfi write and decode cipher messages. Perhaps I had been wrong to come here.

  As though he had read my mind, Scrivener said: “We met in the house of Signor Ridolfi, did we not? Mistress Stannard, Cecil was kind enough to tell you that you could trust me, but although I have lately been his guest, I can’t in all conscience say the same of Ridolfi. We have not discussed ciphers recently, but when I met him the first time, two years ago in Florence, well—on that occasion, we did. In fact, I showed him how a cipher I had then just created would work. Therefore, I ask you once more, does Signor Ridolfi have anything to do with these?”

  Still, I hesitated, and Scrivener glanced at the Brockleys. “My companions are altogether reliable,” I said quickly. “They helped me to obtain the documents you hold in your hand.” I hesitated once more and then made up my mind. “I think I must be open with you. Cecil did vouch for you. God help us all if I’m making a mistake. You are right. Ridolfi wrote these letters.”

  “Better men than Cecil have been deceived,” said Scrivener seriously. “But not by me. You needn’t fear to be frank with me. However, tell me only what I need to know. I won’t ask precisely how you came by these. They are not the originals, I take it?”

  “No. They’re copies that we made. We were careful over accuracy.”

  “I’m glad to hear it! Well . . . ” Scrivener laid the letters down and drew his writing set and a sheet of blank paper toward him. “We can but test a few possibilities. What do you know, already, of ciphers?”

  “Very little. I have come across one, but that was something that a couple of brothers had invented privately and it wasn’t like this. It didn’t substitute letters or numbers for other letters—it used words for letters. This is quite strange to me.”

  “I’d like to hear about the one you encountered. It sounds intriguing. However, as a start, let me show you what, in all innocence, two years ago, I showed Signor Ridolfi. The point is that in the most usual ciphers, the letters in the clear, ordinary text are replaced by code letters, numbers, or symbols. The cipher is harder to break if the system lets the replacement letters—or numbers or symbols—vary. I mean, you could have a code in which the letter A was always replaced by, say, W. But it would be better if A was sometimes represented by W and sometimes by some other letter. Perhaps by more than one other letter. Or numeral. That was what I had in mind when I invented this. Look.”

  He began to write. I pulled a stool up close and watched. “First of all,” he said, “I put the alphabet across the page, like this . . . ”

  a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z

  “. . . and then, beneath it, I write numbers, 1 to 26, since the alphabet has 26 letters in it. Like this, making sure that each number is neatly placed under the letter to which it refers. Thus . . . ”

  a

  b

  c

  d

  e

  f

  g

  h

  i

  j

  k

  l

  m

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  n

  o

  p

  q

  r

  s

  t

  u

  v

  w

  x

  y

  z

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  “That’s the first stage,” he said. “It doesn’t stop there because if it did, it would be too easy to break—even if we complicated things a trifle by, say, moving all the figures along one or two places like this . . . ”

  He wrote again, showing us what he meant. The result was:

  a

  b

  c

  d

  e

  f

  g

  h

  i

  j

  k

  l

  m

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  n

  o

  p

  q

  r

  s

  t

  u

  v

  w

  x

  y

  z

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  1

  2

  “You could use any sequence of figures,” I said, interested. “I mean, you could start at—say—32, and go on from there, 32, 33, 34 . . . or begin at 105 . . . ”

  “You could indeed,” said Scrivener, regarding me with approval, as a Latin master might consider a pupil who had grasped the ablative absolute at the first attempt. “But I didn’t complicate matters so much when I talked to Ridolfi. In fact, I just showed him how to work the code using 1 for A, and going on to 26. Now, on that basis, suppose we wanted to encipher, oh, shall we say your name? Ursula. That comes out as 21, 18, 19, 21, 12, 1. Any halfway competent clerk could break that, probably inside ten minutes, but, aha!”

  He beamed at me. “Now we go on to stage two. We have turned your name into figures. On each of them, we perform a little arithmetical calculation, but not the same one every time. The
system I showed Ridolfi was that the first figure—in this case, 21—is multiplied by 3, the second by 4, the third by 5, the fourth by 6, and then you start again, multiplying the fifth figure—that’s 12—by 3—and so on. Are you accustomed to figurework at all? And can you use an abacus?”

  “Yes. I used to help my uncle Herbert with his accounts,” I said.

  Scrivener went to a chest, opened it, and brought out a box, from which he took a small abacus. It was a pretty thing, with wooden beads painted in brilliant colors. He handed it to me along with his quill pen. “Can you do it for your name? You multiply 21 by 3 . . . ”

  I tackled the task, arriving after a while at 63, 72, 95, 126, 36, 4. “The letter U occurs twice in my name,” I said. “When we did the first stage of the code, U came out as 21. But now that we’ve done a calculation on each figure, the letter U has worked out to 63 and 126. Quite different.”

  “Yes. The more different calculations you have, the less chance there is of a repetition. I found that four was the minimum if you really want to avoid that. If we’d only used three calculations, your letter U would have been 63 both times.”

  I worked this out and found that he was right. The Brockleys had come to lean over the table as well. Brockley said: “It’s difficult to keep track of where you are.”

  “In the sequence of calculations, you mean?” I said. “Yes, it is.”

  Scrivener looked slightly pained. The pupil who had done so well with the ablative absolute had taken a severe toss at the gerund. “When you write out your first stage of numerals,” he said, taking his quill back from me, “you first of all write out the numbers you’re going to multiply them by—like this.” He wrote quickly.

  3 4 5 6

  “Then,” he said, “you put the enciphered numbers, produced by your first stage, beneath them in columns. I’ll go on using Ursula as an example—see? Like this.”

  3 4 5 6

  21 18 19 21

  12 1

  “I don’t see . . . ” I began.