Queen of Ambition

by Buckley, Fiona

  “It’s a clever device,” I said. “Very hard to come at, without the key.”

  “It changed over the course of time,” Sybil said. “To start with, weather was one of the words for W, and rain was one of the words for R, but they found that they wanted to use those words freely sometimes, so they took them out of the code. They settled that R should be river or ring, and W should be weal or wander. Then, in my day, they thought of going a step further and employing words that were linked to the original ones or were more or less synonyms, like church sometimes instead of chapel. That was Roland’s idea. It made the text much less repetitive. One of the words they used to represent T was time—but they might say timepiece, or clock or even sundial as well! Those two know each other so well that they can manage like that. I’m not sure it would work between people who aren’t so close.”

  “Dear God,” I said, looking in despair at the letters on the table in front of us.

  “We have the drawings,” said Sybil. “And I was quite good at this, once on a time. Let’s just try. Roland and Giles had ways of making things easier for themselves by little secret signals. Just before a code word, they would write something carelessly, sloping upward a little instead of on a level. When you were used to it, you could recognize the signal at once. But these letters are copies and I don’t suppose the clerks copied little quirks like that …” She picked up one letter and then another and sighed. “No, they didn’t. Well, we must do without. Let’s to work.”

  “They’ve added to the words for T,” Sybil said, examining the sketches, which we had laid out carefully in rows, in the right order, with the letter each sheet was meant to represent noted in the top left-hand corner. “And to some others, I think; I and J for instance, and also T and M. The letter I was always eye, ink, or ivy. It looks as if island has been added and from the people skating, I would guess that ice has, as well. J always had jester or jest and jay or popinjay—that’s the sketch of a jester with a popinjay on his shoulder. But why there’s also a picture of a man asleep, I don’t know. The drawing for T always used to be a sundial—that was the reminder for time, clock, and the actual word sundial as well. But now there’s a woman at a table, combing her hair. The table and the hair are clearly emphasized …”

  “Table would fit,” I said. “It begins with T.”

  “Yes … yes … but I can’t understand the hair.” Sybil sipped some wine, puzzling. “Could the word actually be hair? But that wasn’t the way they used to arrive at their code words. It ought either to begin with T, or rhyme with one of the other words for T, or be an alternative for one … can you think of a word that means hair—and rhymes with one of the timepiece words, or else starts with T?”

  I thought, and couldn’t. The drawings for M, however, gave me an idea. “If the second drawing under M is new,” I said, “could it mean music? I mean the sketch with the musicians in it. Do any of the letters use the word music? I wonder.”

  Sybil took the drawing from me. “People dancing, and musicians in a gallery—yes, music could be the word. But all the people have such wide smiles. That must mean something too … mirth, perhaps! We’ll have to see if it works. I think new words have been added for the letter U as well. Because for U”—she put down the sheet for M and picked up U instead—“there are pictures that I certainly remember, of sheep—ewe was the original word, and two clasped hands for unity, and a lot of funny little stick men dotted about inside a square frame—they stand for ubiquitous …”

  “How could anyone guess that?”

  “Well, Roland and Giles didn’t guess. These are just reminders to jog their memories if they forgot any of the code words. They were so used to them that most of the time they didn’t forget. But there’s a new picture of someone chasing a child upstairs, and the child is crying. The stairs and the tears are done very plainly, in dark lines …”

  “You’ve just used the word upstairs. That starts with U,” I said. “But I don’t know what to make of the tears.” I picked up a sheet at random. “Which one’s this? It’s marked N. I can’t make this out at all. There’s a man hammering something, and above him is a clock with the hands pointing to twelve, and in the lower half of the page there’s someone reading a letter to someone else who seems to be trying to snatch it away—I must say your husband can draw!—and also, there’s the constellation of the Plow and the Pole Star!”

  “The words for N,” said Sybil, “always used to be nail, noon, north—that’s where the Pole Star comes in—and news. The man with the hammer is knocking a nail in, the clock’s pointing to noon, and the letter someone is trying to seize hold of is supposed to contain something exciting. Come. We must be methodical.” She drew a sheet of paper toward her, picked up a quill, and dipped it. “Let us list the code words for each letter, as far as we can work them out. We’ll sip our wine and nibble our pasties as we go along.”

  She gave me a smile of sudden and immense sweetness. “At Mistress Grantley’s house, all meals are very formal, even breakfast and supper. We eat sitting upright at table and the only conversation is that begun by Mistress Grantley. Most of the time, she prefers to have her chaplain read from the Bible while we eat, so there’s rarely any conversation at all. And no one ever, ever, reads to himself or herself, or writes while eating. Believe me, this is a pleasure!”

  * * *

  When we had assembled as much of the code as we could, though there were some worrying gaps, Sybil picked up one of the letters and pushed another toward me. “Let us take a letter each and just plunge in. I’ll see what I can make of this.”

  Glancing over at the letter Sybil had chosen, I saw that it was one of those that Woodforde had written from Richmond. I had read it, briefly, in Jester’s attic. The one she had passed to me was shorter, and was new to me. In Jester’s house, I had only seen the letters that Woodforde had sent to him, while this was a copy of one written by Jester himself, to his brother. When I read it through, however, I recalled that Cecil had mentioned it. Jester had bothered to hire a courier, he said, in order to complain that the girls who work in his shop giggled too much and that his furniture was getting old!

  I studied it carefully. I could see what Cecil meant.

  Dear brother,

  How are you faring, away at court? I often think of you among the great folk there. Things go on here as usual though Ambrosia and Phoebe are often too frivolous.

  I am writing this in the evening, at a table in the shop. The weather is bad and everything was veiled in rain until noon, but it is now late and upstairs I can hear the girls giggling over some jest or other.

  A thousand curses—I have just caught my hand on a nail sticking out of this bench—I must buy some better furniture. As I was saying, no doubt it is natural for young things to enjoy a jest but they have to be up early and I hope they will soon end their foolishness and go to bed. Of a verity it is well past time …

  Awkward, stilted wording. It looked promising, I thought. I knew that weather and rain were not code words and could be discounted, but the word table was there, and I had noted that veiled was a code word for V. The sheet for the letter V included a drawing of a veiled woman. Nail, noon, and jest were all there, too! As Sybil had done, I took quill and paper and set busily to work. After a few moments I had arrived, discouragingly, at TVNUJN.

  I looked across at Sybil’s efforts. “Mine’s coming out as gibberish. How are you getting on?”

  “The same.” Sybil leaned back, as though the words in front of her might look different if viewed from a distance. “I recognize a lot of code words. I am quite sure that this is a cipher letter but you’re quite right; it makes no sense. Look at this!”

  She passed her effort to me. I glanced over the letter she had been trying to transcribe, recognizing the first two paragraphs.

  My dear brother,

  My thanks for your letter. I am growing used now to being at court. I have several times seen the queen, often dressed in white or silver. The food
is nothing remarkable, though. Pease potage appears quite often at the noon meal. There is much frivolity and jesters are a ubiquitous feature. I have never liked them (except for you, my brother!). Sometimes, I think their humor is too unkind and full of pepper.

  We are well housed here. Most people on the floor where I have my quarters are of good social standing, and at dinner I am above the salt. Everyone here dresses very well. Men and women alike are as fine as popinjays, with their tresses well washed and combed.

  “The first code word here seems to be queen,” Sybil said. “That stands for Q and most people who are used to writing and spelling put U after Q, so that the next code word should stand for U, but it doesn’t. The next one is silver, which means S. Then comes pease—they used to use that for P and the drawings show a girl shelling peas—and then noon, jesters, and ubiquitous. They’re all code words. Pepper comes after that—that’s one of their words for P and that’s the next one I’m sure of, anyway—then floor—that’s F—and then there’s salt, which is another word for S, and popinjays which is another word for J. And what,” said Sybil wearily, “does all that add up to? QSPNJUPFSJ! You’re quite right, I fear. It’s gibberish.”

  We sat in silence, defeated.

  “And yet the code words are there,” I said. “The wording’s almost sprained so as to get them in! Pease potage at court, indeed! I never saw such a thing at any table in a royal palace, I promise you! It’s a complete invention and I can only think he did it to bring in a word for P. Could tresses be T, by the way? Could that be the meaning of the woman combing her hair?”

  “Possibly. But it doesn’t help, even if it is.”

  Beyond the door of the writing room, I could hear masculine voices. The Fellows must have arrived. I listened, and recognized Dudley’s familiar tones as well; he had a deep voice that was unmistakable. It suddenly occurred to me that the reason why Elizabeth was so enamored of him might be as much to do with his voice as with his handsome face. There were many handsome men at court but how many of them had deep, steady voices like Dudley’s? He was an excellent Master of the Queen’s Horse because he was very good indeed with horses. No doubt that voice soothed and reassured them.

  I wished someone now would soothe and reassure me. I did not want to fail at this and I was beginning to fear that I would, and that Sybil would, as well.

  “If your husband and his brother were discussing something very serious,” I said slowly, “could they have built a second code inside the first? A sort of second line of defense?” I remembered something. “When Cecil first had these letters tested for ciphers, and came up with meaningless sequences of letters, he asked his clerks to test those sequences again, to see if they were themselves a code.”

  “Like having a cupboard built as well as a secret room?” Sybil’s eyes widened. “It could be, yes. I remember I once heard my father talking to my husband about what he called his hidden way out. I didn’t know then what he meant. But yes, he did say he had a second line of defense. He used those very words! Perhaps Roland learned from him to think in the same way, and passed it on to his brother. How would it work with this? Perhaps each letter actually means the letter before it in the alphabet, or after, something like that …”

  “I hope it’s no worse than that, if it exists,” I said. “If it’s very complicated, we can’t do it without professional code breakers. But we could try those two possibilities. Let’s see. If we assume that each letter stands for the one that follows it in the alphabet, what does that make TVNUJN?”

  Sybil wrote. We gazed at the result without enthusiasm. UWOVKO.

  “Try going the other way,” said Sybil. “Try going one letter back instead.”

  This yielded SUMTIM. “It has sensibly placed vowels,” I said critically. “But otherwise …”

  The door latch clicked and Cecil limped into the room. We both stood up but he shook his head. “No, no, be seated.” He deposited himself on a spare stool and propped his foot on another. “The Fellows are here and so is Dudley, and I’ve left him to talk to them for a few moments. How are you progressing?”

  “We aren’t doing very well,” I told him. “The letters seem to have the code in them—the sentences and phrases are skewed, somehow, as if to bring code words in …”

  “Yes. That impression was there from the start. But it doesn’t decode into anything that makes sense?”

  “No, it doesn’t. We are wondering if there is a code within a code, a second line of defense, so to speak. We’re trying that out just now. We haven’t been lucky so far. We may have got the idea right, but if the second code isn’t very simple, it could be beyond us.”

  Cecil sighed. “Nothing is ever simple in this world, it seems to me. All I can say is, decode all that you can, whether it makes sense or not, and then we may have to bring in more help. Perhaps I can find someone among those learned Fellows with a liking for encryption. They’re all so very learned,” he added wryly, “that they frighten me. I may be their chancellor, but Dudley’s the Lord High Steward of Cambridge and of the two of us, he’s the more at ease with them. When they drift into Latin tags, he can understand them. I can only speak the tongue my mother taught me, alas. We …”

  “Latin!” I gasped. “Sybil, can your husband and brother-in-law both write Latin? Giles Woodforde can, obviously—he teaches it—and—yes! Ambrosia once said that her father understood it, too!”

  “Why, yes. Giles has Greek as well, but they both learned Latin as boys. I didn’t, though,” Sybil told me.

  “Dudley could help,” Cecil offered, but I had snatched up the short letter from Roland. “I learned Latin with my cousins!” I said. “And I’ve been studying it again with my daughter. SUMTIM—that’s what we made of TVNUJN, by shifting each letter back. They really did build in safeguards, didn’t they? A code within a code and then the whole thing comes out as Latin instead of English. Moat, walls, and then a keep within them! Sybil!” I thrust the letter under her nose. “Which are the next code words in this?”

  Sybil took the sheet from me. “Jest, I think … that’s J—let me see … ‘I hope they will soon end their foolishness and go to bed. Of a verity it is well past time’ … End!” said Sybil. “That’s the drawing of a coffin on the E page—so that’s J and E … and the next code word is verity. That’s another of the words for V—it’s a pretty little picture of a man taking an oath on a Bible. And the last one’s time—that’s T. What have we got? JEVT … are we going back or forward? I can’t remember …”

  “Back,” I said. “I,D,U,S. Sum timidus. It is Latin! I am afraid. That is the message that your husband was sending to his brother.”

  Sybil pulled the long letter toward her. “What are the dates? This looks like Giles’s reply. Yes, it must be. What have I got? QSPNJUPFSJ! Put each letter back one. PROMITOERI … if tress or tresses does mean T, then back one letter from that is S. PROMITOERIS …”

  “Promitto eris!” I yelped. “At least, there ought to be an extra T in there … which would have decoded as U …”

  “‘ … jesters are a ubiquitous feature. I have never liked them (except for you, my brother!). Sometimes I think their humor is too unkind and full of pepper …’” Sybil read the passage aloud. “I wonder—could unkind be a code word?”

  I caught up the sheet for U. “We couldn’t make out what the crying child meant. Could that be a reminder for the word unkind?”

  “It might be. So we’ve got PROMITTO ERIS …”

  “What comes next?” I said eagerly.

  “It goes on about Richmond being a beautiful palace.” Sybil went on reading aloud. “‘I woke at an early time’—time!—‘this morning and looked out on to a faery dawn. Of a verity that is what it was, with just a trace of silvery fog drifting over the Thames’ … time, faery—that’s F—!”

  “A pretty picture of an ethereal female being with wings,” I agreed, picking up the page of drawings in question.

  “And dawn, verity, silvery—both sil
very and silver can be used for S—and fog, that can stand for F, too … TFDVSF. Go back one …”

  “S, E, C, U, R, E!” I almost shouted. “Secure—safe! I promise you will be safe! The word for safe is almost the same in Latin as it is in English. I think …” I wrestled with a part of Latin that was slightly hazy in my mind “ … I think he’s used the adverb—maybe it ought to be securus—but the meaning’s clear enough.”

  “The adverb was shorter, I expect,” Sybil said. “It’s not easy, writing letters in this fashion.”

  I stared at the list we had made of the code words and laughed. “To get the letter U, they’d need the letter V. The words for that are quite difficult to drag in! Verity, veil, vinegar, vanity … I daresay neither of them would worry too much about grammar as long as the meaning was clear!”

  “I’m going to fetch Dudley,” said Cecil. “Meanwhile, continue!”

  He was some time in bringing Dudley. No doubt it was difficult to detach him smoothly from the Fellows. By the time the two of them came back, we had made progress. Dudley and Cecil joined us at the writing desk, a contrasting pair, Cecil drawn with the pain of his gout, Dudley athletic and splendid, dressed as so often in the favorite crimson that set off his dark complexion.

  He greeted me with a nod, as someone he knew well, which clearly impressed Sybil, who at the sight of him had instantly got up and dropped a curtsy, and then actually blushed when this magnificent being put out a hand and graciously raised her. Then we looked at the message that Sybil and I had decoded into Latin and that I had then translated into English, and although his brown face did not stir a muscle, I began to feel sorry for the magnificent being.

  I promise you will be safe. Consider! If Dudley dies, he cannot marry Mary. My grateful lady will love me again and I will give your wife to you.

  “I understand what this is,” Dudley said, speaking to me. “I am fully informed, Mistress Blanchard. Cecil dictated a letter to me and sent it to my lodgings this afternoon—and described the latest developments while he was bringing me up to this writing room. A disturbing account, I must say! You have had a terrifying brush with death and it seems,” he added dryly, “that the same could be said of me. We all believed that the playlet concealed a threat against the person of the queen. But it looks as though the target is myself!”