The Rose Conspiracy

by Craig Parshall

  Blackstone leaned back on the couch and sighed, shaking his head.

  “Let me just put the capstone on this,” Lamb said, “by putting it this way—Marilyn, and Beth too, decided to become Christians—to walk through that open door of Christianity for the simplest and yet the most valid of all reasons.”

  “Which would be?” Blackstone asked.

  “They discovered that it was true.”

  CHAPTER 46

  That night Blackstone nearly pulled an all-nighter. He was high-strung and bouncing off the walls. He wasn’t surprised that the discussion with his uncle about Marilyn and Beth had destined him to a night on the emotional roller coaster. His insomnia had been getting decidedly worse, not better, and his sleep medication was barely helping.

  At the same time Blackstone detested the feeling of being weak and helpless. In his view, this was all part of a life issue that should have been fairly easy to diagnose and resolve. But it wasn’t working out that way.

  When he finally fell asleep, in a short fitful bout with dreaming, there it was again—Marilyn’s face—and she was saying the same thing she always did in his dreams.

  Don’t forget.

  When Blackstone dragged into the office in the morning, he called Dr. Cutsworth at Harvard. The history scholar said that he had already formulated some tentative conclusions.

  “There are a few more sources I am going to check out to assist me with the meaning of the note,” Cutsworth said, but then added confidently, “however, I don’t anticipate they will impact my conclusions very much. I’m fairly certain I’m right on this one. I know the general message that Booth was trying to communicate, albeit in a primitive kind of poetic code—a riddle, actually. It really wasn’t very difficult to break the crude coded set of references he left in his diary.”

  Blackstone set a time that afternoon, at 3:30 p.m., with Dr. Cutsworth to be available by phone. Blackstone would set up a speakerphone in the conference room. Reverend Lamb would also be there. He would have Julia sit in too. He knew his uncle’s teaching schedule and figured it would work out with him being present. He was right.

  At 3:30 p.m. Reverend Lamb was there with his stack of books again, and his pile of notes. Julia sat on the other side of the conference table from Blackstone.

  Blackstone pushed the button on the speaker phone and dialed Cutsworth’s number. Once he had him on the line, so that everyone in the room could hear him and he could hear them, Blackstone began.

  “Dr. Cutsworth,” he said, “we are all here.”

  “Very good,” Cutsworth said.

  “What I want to do is begin with you, if we can,” Blackstone said to the Harvard professor. “You will go first and give us your conclusions about the Langley note. Then I will give Reverend Lamb a chance to respond. And my partner Julia and I may have questions for you also. Then it will be Reverend Lamb’s turn, and he will describe his findings, and you will have a chance to respond to him. Now I want both of you gentlemen—Dr. Cutsworth and Reverend Lamb—to remember that your opinions on the meaning of the Langley note, and therefore the Booth diary page, will be helpful to the defense side of this case only if those opinions shed light on the issue of motive for the murder of Horace Langley and the theft of the Booth diary pages. You may have brilliant scholarship, but what I am looking for is a way to identify the criminal culprits in this case. So, Dr. Cutsworth, are you ready?”

  “I am.”

  “Go ahead, Dr. Cutsworth.”

  “I thought,” he began in a professorial tone, “it might be good to remind ourselves what the text is that we are about to discuss. So, here it is again—the note written by Horace Langley, which I have assumed, except for the first lead-in sentence, was a verbatim copy he made of some of the text of the Booth diary pages that have recently been stolen and now are unavailable. The Langley note says this:

  A strange cipher appears in the Booth diary as follows:

  To AP and KGC

  Rose of 6 is Sir al ik’s golden tree

  In gospel’s Mary first revealed

  At Ashli plot reveals the key

  “So,” Cutsworth continued, “there it is. Let’s begin with the very first line of poetic code. The ‘KGC,’ is a likely reference to the Knights of the Golden Circle, an obscure but historically substantiated group of anti-Northerners. They were ‘copperheads,’ the Northern citizens with Southern sympathies. At the end of the Civil War, and afterwards, they most certainly discussed various conspiracies to overthrow the Lincoln administration. One plot involved kidnapping President Lincoln. That gave way to the assassination plan ultimately executed by Booth.”

  “Dr. Cutsworth,” Blackstone interjected, “do you have an opinion based on certainty as to who the ‘AP’ was who was referenced in that first line?”

  “No,” he replied. “I don’t. Not really. I could speculate, but I don’t think that is what you are after. No, I really am not certain. There could have been various conspirators, lost to history, with those initials, or maybe it was just another kind of coded reference to someone Booth preferred to keep anonymous.”

  “Does your lack of certainty about who ‘AP’ was affect the validity of your other conclusions about the poem?”

  “Not in the least,” Cutsworth said.

  Blackstone was pleased. He had been banking on that in order to make good his promise to Senator Collings to keep Albert Pike’s name out of the case.

  “Continue, please,” Blackstone said.

  “That brings us to the second line,” Cutsworth said, “which is this: Rose of 6 is Sir al ik’s golden tree. Let’s start with ‘Rose.’ I believe that refers to Rose Douglas, widow of the famous Stephen Douglas, who ran against Lincoln. After Lincoln was murdered, Rose tried to gain a pardon for Mary Elizabeth Surratt, who had been convicted as an assassination conspirator. By the way, the pardon effort failed and Mary Surratt was hung. The number ‘6’ probably refers to a subgroup of conspirators whom she was linked to. Now, who ‘Sir al ik’ is, I don’t know. I would guess it’s probably another member of the group. But the ‘golden tree’ reference is significant. It is clearly a cipher for the Confederate financing scheme. At that time, in the waning months of the war, the Confederates had managed to accumulate a storehouse of gold in Canada, which they were planning on using to fund their continued resistance to Northern domination. When the Confederate insurgency failed, the gold was obviously not used. But ‘Rose’ probably had knowledge of some clues as to where the gold was being kept.”

  “So,” Blackstone said, “that takes us to the third line.”

  “Right,” Cutsworth said. “In gospel’s Mary first revealed—that’s the next line. ‘Mary’ here would be Mary Surratt, who I just mentioned a moment ago—another figure linked, historically, to the assassination plot against Lincoln. The ‘gospel’ reference is simply an identifier that Mary Surratt was widely known to be a very religious woman. ‘First revealed’ means that the Confederates, after contacting Rose Douglas, would have needed to get the next clue on the location of the gold from Mary Surratt. The use of women as conspirators to be keepers of the secret of the location of the gold was a clever ruse, as women would have been less likely back then to attract suspicion than men.”

  “Any questions so far?” Blackstone asked Julia and Reverend Lamb. Julia shook her head ‘no.’ Reverend Lamb was busy scribbling down notes, then raised his head to say, “I’ll ask my questions when Dr. Cutsworth is finished.”

  Cutsworth said he was now going to the final sentence: At Ashli plot reveals the key.

  “This sentence is, to my way of thinking,” he said, “the most difficult to decipher, the most opaque. That is because it reveals either the location of the stored gold itself, or the place where its location would be ‘revealed’ through a map or some other device.”

  “Ashli plot,” Julia said, “any ideas where that might be? Somewhere in America? Or in Canada? Or somewhere else?”

  “Unfortunately, I simply ha
ve nothing definitive to say about that,” Cutsworth replied. “But no matter. For your purposes, Professor Blackstone, I think my interpretation is correct and historically quite viable. And moreover, as you can see, it certainly presents a motive for some criminally inclined person to get to poor Secretary Langley first, in order to get to the location of the gold before everyone else.”

  “How much gold are you talking about?” Julia asked.

  “Well,” Cutsworth said, “about a million dollars worth. I believe that is what my research on the Canadian gold of the Confederates indicates.”

  “Not very much to justify the sophistication used in this crime, though,” Julia noted.

  “Except,” Blackstone interjected, “Dr. Cutsworth, your estimates are based on the value of gold in the 1860s, correct?”

  “That’s right,” he replied. “In 1863, the value of gold was what it had been for many years—it had stayed relatively stable at twenty dollars per ounce.”

  “What are the gold rates now?” Blackstone asked. “Aren’t they over nine hundred an ounce?”

  “Yes, exactly. Actually they’ve climbed up close to a thousand per ounce,” Cutsworth said. “Which means that the Canadian gold deposit, wherever it is, might be worth some forty million at current rates.”

  “Anything else?” Blackstone asked his expert witness.

  “No, I think that covers the main points,” Cutsworth replied.

  “Julia, any more questions?”

  She shook her head ‘no.’

  “Uncle?” he said, turning to Reverend Lamb.

  “Dr. Cutsworth,” Lamb began, “you see this coded message as having to do with a way to pass on financial information among Confederate conspirators, correct?”

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  “Yet, by my count,” Lamb continued, “you’ve been unable to account for nearly half of the most critical words in the poem. You can’t say who ‘AP’ is, you don’t know what the ‘6’ refers to, you can’t identify ‘Sir Al ik,’ and you have no opinion on what ‘Ashli plot’ is. Am I right?”

  “Yes, you are,” Cutsworth said, “but those are either personal names or place names, which, from the standpoint of my forensic task here, to decipher the basic meaning of the poem, are irrelevant…just not that important.”

  “Now you say that ‘Rose’ and ‘Mary’ are names of Confederate conspirators, and that they were vested with the knowledge of the secret location of the gold because women would be less likely to draw attention or suspicion?”

  “That’s what I said,” Cutsworth replied.

  “Yet women were placed under suspicion,” Lamb said. “And in one particular case, as you noted, a woman was charged as a conspirator in the assassination of President Lincoln and was hanged. You would agree with that?”

  “Well, yes,” Cutsworth said. “But all that means is that their plan to use women because they wouldn’t draw suspicion ultimately failed. It doesn’t mean it wasn’t tried.”

  “All about money,” Lamb said. “That’s what you think the Langley copy of the Booth diary text is all about?”

  “In the end, yes,” Cutsworth replied.

  “You don’t see any metaphysical or religious aspect to any of this?” Lamb asked.

  “None whatsoever.”

  “You would agree, though,” Lamb said, “that the Knights of the Golden Circle were populated with Freemasons?”

  “That may have been true, though the evidence is scant. But the Masons were a popular social group.”

  “Booth was a Freemason?”

  “Again, he was rumored to have been—whether his name was removed from the member rolls after his notorious murder of Lincoln is open to debate. It is very much an open question.”

  “And your interpretation of ‘gospel’s Mary’ is intriguing,” Lamb said, “but I think very flawed, if I may say.”

  “Oh? Exactly how?” Cutsworth said a little indignantly.

  “Your interpretation ignores the clear syntax of the phrase. You would be correct if it read ‘gospel Mary’ perhaps, where ‘gospel’ would be an adjective describing ‘Mary.’ But it isn’t. It reads, ‘gospel’s Mary.’ The word ‘gospel’s’ is possessive. It would be better interpreted as ‘Mary of the gospel.’ Or perhaps, ‘the gospel of Mary.’ That’s the only way the sentence is meant to be read.”

  Cutsworth was laughing on the speakerphone.

  “You are assuming, Reverend Lamb,” Cutsworth said, “that John Wilkes Booth, on the run, being hunted down as a notorious murderer, was calmly sitting down in his study, penning some kind of religious treatise. Ridiculous! He didn’t care about syntax, I’m sure. I think your training as a clergyman, Reverend, if I may say so, is showing through. You are reading religion into the Langley extract from the Booth diary…historical artifact that has nothing to do with religion, or metaphysics, or any such thing.”

  Reverend Lamb turned to Blackstone and smiled.

  Then the Anglican scholar simply said, “Thank you. Those are all my questions.”

  CHAPTER 47

  Blackstone turned to Reverend Lamb.

  “Uncle, it’s your turn to give it a shot.”

  Lamb nodded his head. Then he pushed his pile of books and notes aside and folded his hands in front of him on the table.

  He paused for a few moments with his hands folded. But he said nothing. After almost a half a minute of silence, Blackstone was about to interrupt him. Then he realized what was going on.

  He’s praying, Blackstone thought to himself. That’s what he’s doing.

  Then Reverend Lamb cleared his throat and looked up.

  “Let’s begin,” he started out, “at the same place where Dr. Cutsworth started. Here is the text we are to decipher:

  To AP and KGC

  Rose of 6 is Sir al ik’s golden tree

  In gospel’s Mary first revealed

  At Ashli plot reveals the key

  “Now,” Lamb continued, “I agree with Dr. Cutsworth that the ‘KGC’ in the first line refers to the Knights of the Golden Circle. On that we are agreed. But as to everything else in his conclusions, I take issue with all of it. My conclusions are distinctly different. And I believe I am right. Furthermore, I am prepared to tell you why.”

  Lamb was now speaking from memory. Nothing in front of him. His eyes were open wide, and his fingers were now dancing a little on the table in front of him.

  “Let’s take the ‘gospel’s Mary’ reference in the third line,” Lamb continued. “What does that refer to? Even back in the 1860s it would have been known, at least among the students of esoteric religion and followers of the Gnostic tradition, that there had been a reputed ‘gospel of Mary’ attributed to the Gnostic writers in the centuries following the life of Christ. The so-called ‘gospel of Mary’ purported to describe the interactions between Mary Magdalene and Jesus of Nazareth. It was totally inauthentic, of course. There is no historical proof that whoever wrote this piece of fiction hundreds of years after Christ used any reliable sources of information to concoct this story. Which is why the early church fathers rejected it, along with numerous other ‘Gnostic gospels’ written mostly in the third and fourth centuries.

  “Remember, now, that the Christian gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, contained in our New Testament today had been written shortly after the earthly life of Christ, all in the first century—between AD 60 and 85—why, even the liberal scholars concede that point. But, here is this ‘Gospel of Mary’ which the ancient church fathers knew about and which was finally unearthed in an Egyptian desert near Nag Hammadi in the 1940s, with the Coptic text dating around the end of the fourth century. One page of the text, which is suspicious because it doesn’t seem to fit, may be from as early as the third century. But, let’s be liberal and say that the Mary writing is indeed from the third century. That still means that it was created two hundred years after the original Gospels! So—which versions do you think would be a more accurate record of the life of Christ? We
ll, in any event, here is this heretical, bogus ‘gospel’ of Mary which says that Mary Magdalene was the recipient of special, ‘secret’ knowledge from Jesus. The text of that false gospel doesn’t say what that ‘secret’ knowledge was.”

  “Excuse me, Reverend,” Cutsworth said through the speakerphone. “But what in the world does this have to do with John Wilkes Booth or his diary?”

  “I’m getting to that,” Lamb said. “So, as I was saying, we have this heretical reference to Mary Magdalene in this so-called ‘gospel’ and her supposedly ‘secret’ knowledge. That is the meaning of the reference in the Booth diary to ‘gospel’s Mary.’ Notice the next line—‘first revealed.’ In other words, whatever the core of this coded message is, it was supposedly ‘first revealed’ in this ‘Mary’ of the Gnostic gospel.”

  “And what would that core message be?” Julia asked.

  “Oh, that is where it gets good,” Lamb said with satisfaction. “According to ancient pagan tradition, Mary Magdalene was mixed up in the practice of alchemy.”

  “Alchemy, did you say?” Cutsworth blurted out.

  Blackstone rolled his eyes a little.

  “Yes, that’s what he said,” Blackstone answered.

  “Of course, the historical record is clear she was no alchemist and certainly no pagan after her faith encounter with Christ. Just read the true Gospel accounts in the New Testament and you can see that,” Lamb said. “But, in any event, that is what the ancient heretics, the perverters of the truth who rejected orthodox Christianity, wanted people to believe.”

  “Alright, so how does this alchemy theme connect everything?” Julia asked.

  “Here’s how,” Lamb replied. “Most people believe that alchemy has to do with precious metals.”

  “Converting base metals into gold,” Julia said. “Yes, I studied that in my history of chemistry classes when I was pursuing my master’s degree.”

  “Exactly,” Lamb said. “But most people don’t realize that the purveyors of alchemy—and now I am talking about those practitioners through the ages who were deeply involved in the occult practices and esoteric philosophies—that they were after something much more radical than just accumulating gold, or the chemical transference of metals. They were after the most astounding and egomaniacal pursuit of all.”