The King's Spy (Thomas Hill Trilogy 1)

by Swanston, Andrew

  When he was not thinking about home, Thomas thought about the senseless war which had brought him here. A war started by a stubborn king, who was distrusted by his people and had proved himself capable of serious lapses of judgement, and an equally stubborn Parliament which craved power and demanded the reform of government. A war which should never have happened, but which had now taken on a momentum of its own. Politics, religion, greed, fear – all were now contributing to the bloodshed. God alone knew how long it would go on and what would remain of England when at last it ended. Would brother still fight brother? Would Catholic still hate Puritan? And who would rule the country – king or Parliament, both or neither? Might the Dutch or the French grasp the opportunity to overpower a weakened foe and send their ships across the Channel? Would we have to face another Armada, and if we did, where was Drake to lead the way?

  It was a war, too, which found Thomas Hill, peaceful bookseller of Romsey, alone in an abbey room outside Oxford, having witnessed a brutal battle, having himself resorted to the violence he so hated, and having been thrown into the foulest imaginable gaol, in which he had nearly died. And having seen the body of his old friend mutilated by a vicious traitor. It was a war which affected every man, woman and child in England, and which might yet make brutes of all of them.

  On each visit, Simon also brought a cup of water into which he had mixed equal amounts of chamomile, sage and garlic, claiming that this was an ancient cure for all manner of diseases, including Morbus Campestris. Complaining that the brew tasted revolting and would do him no good at all, Thomas dutifully forced it down, and by the morning of the third day was strong enough to accompany Simon around the abbey garden. Dressed once again in a plain brown Franciscan habit and leather sandals, he carried an elm branch as a walking stick. Hooded monks worked away in the garden, carefully tending beds of herbs and flowers. They took no notice of Simon and Thomas.

  ‘Is this where that noxious brew of yours comes from, Simon?’ asked Thomas as they walked.

  ‘It is. And, noxious or not, it has got you back on your feet. We friars may seem unworldly but we know a thing or two. Which reminds me, I have found a way to get a letter to your sister. Write it today and it will go tomorrow with a troop of the queen’s guard, who are riding to Exeter. Her majesty will be travelling there to embark for France. The guard are preparing the route for her, so that she will be inconvenienced as little as possible on her journey. One of them will make a short detour to Romsey to deliver the letter. If there’s a reply, he will bring it back to Oxford. But be careful what you say. Confine yourself to telling her about your excellent health and the splendid company you keep. Messages can always be intercepted.’

  Intercepted messages, thought Thomas. Yes. ‘Thank you, Simon. If you can provide paper and ink, I’ll write a letter this evening.’ They walked slowly around the garden, which was enclosed by a high wall. The wall was old, its bricks and mortar brown and moss-covered. Near the gate, however, a short section had recently been repaired. It stood out against the rest of the wall, and caught Thomas’s eye. The bricks were new, and had been correctly laid so that the vertical lines of mortar between them did not meet. One row began with a whole brick, the next with a half, so that after two bricks in each row one could make out four vertical patterns. Thomas’s memory stirred.

  ‘You’d better bring plenty of paper and ink, Simon,’ he said. ‘And please bring the message and my working papers. I may need them.’

  As instructed, Thomas confined his letter to Margaret to assurances about his own welfare, and to earnest enquiries about her health and that of the girls. He promised to return home soon. The town, the castle, the message and the abbey would have to wait until he did so. Abraham’s murder he might never tell her about. Having finished his letter, he turned to the message. It had not, unfortunately, magically decrypted itself, and there it lay before him, challenging him to reveal its secrets. Forty-five digits – he guessed fifteen numbers of three digits each – four hundred and fifty-six letters, separated by one hundred and thirty-eight spaces, occupying ten lines on one sheet of paper. And possibly hiding something of grave importance to the outcome of the war.

  He looked again at his own text:

  O N E E Y E I S B R O W N Y E T T H E O T H E R I S B L U E

  and its encryption, using THOMAS as the keyword, as

  H U S Q Y W B Z P D O O G F S F T Z X V H T E J B Z P X U W

  There were the repetitions of BZP, coinciding with ISB in the plain text, and there was the interval of eighteen letters between the start of the first sequence and the start of the second.

  He turned back to the encrypted message. The numbers would have to wait. He would gamble on their being codewords, and therefore outside the encryption of the rest of the text. There were the seven repeated three-letter sequences – RFU, WHT, QFV, RVV, IFS, AAD, WWJ – and one four-letter sequence – WZTD, which he had marked by putting a line under them. The letter distances between all repeating sequences were divisible by five, one and themselves, but by no other number. One letter only would have meant a single shift and could be discounted. But there might be more repetitions. Finding them was laborious work, and he could have missed some. If his theory was right, however, and his simple test suggested that it was, the distances between any unnoticed repetitions would also be divisible by five, and would be repeated in the plain text, albeit with different letters. He was almost certain that the keyword had five letters.

  That evening, Simon came to collect the letter to Margaret. As usual, he brought food from the abbey’s kitchen, which they shared, and grim news from Oxford. New taxes were being levied on the townspeople, and the colleges were being forced to supply new regiments to defend the town. Even the college servants were not exempt.

  The mention of college servants reminded Thomas of Silas Merkin. He must try to contact Silas. ‘Not actions likely to endear the king and his court to the people.’

  ‘Indeed not. The queen, too, is despondent. Her mood, as ever, reflects that of the king.’

  ‘And Jane? Have you seen her?’

  ‘I have. She is well, and asks after you. An admirer, Thomas, I fancy.’

  Thomas felt himself blush. ‘Come now, Simon, I hardly think so. We get on well. Nothing more.’

  ‘Well, Jane would like to visit you. I’m reluctant to arrange it because she would learn where you are, which might be dangerous for her and for you. She’s probably being watched, and Rush must on no account learn of your whereabouts.’

  ‘It would cheer me greatly to see her, Simon. Can you not think of a safe way for her to come?’

  ‘If you wish it, I’ll try. But do not raise your hopes. Rush’s men are everywhere.’

  ‘And what of dear Abraham, Simon?’

  ‘The coroner released his body today. He will be buried in two days’ time at the Church of St Barnabas, just outside the west wall. He liked the place. The funeral is set for ten.’

  Thomas was silent. He felt guilty for not having grieved properly for his old friend, and now he could not attend his funeral. He would have to mourn in private.

  ‘Here’s the letter, Simon,’ he said, handing it over. ‘God willing, it will arrive safely, and there will be a reply.’

  The next morning, Simon did not visit and Thomas’s breakfast was brought by an elderly monk who could see little and said nothing. When he had eaten, Thomas laid out the encrypted message on the table and studied it again. It was still the same:

  URF UBD HE XQB TF KGA OEMD RRFUO TLC WMG LRB WHT R XHGORKZ IO KPW769 WA MQFV BVMF HPL ZFTD RVV57 4SEWMFREJ VGL SVKMGE 852 GTSC WZTD QE TIJG IVL GJT RA KDOE IK EOJAAQLV GGJR MQU IOIGSI GRQF HBFZG JGY ALG EE OLWEEA GJR YIFS1 82AEL2 64SGE SC AAD ZVY JP KP WXR JB JTN XBZ77 5XNW WJBS LA LWAK371 EAIH TPA AD RVV BAP TWPVV AGDN WWJ URR VUT IW EW HTI QCT WY QDT37 1IE852 769UMHT RKC CONT WSGV WMG IEN DJEE KWIHV ZW PNU EAIH371 ZV GJR YIFSS NQ DA BV NGGCVL LD SVMC IRLKW DN KMJ BS WINDU IITAE KW42177 5OX LCIVK IJM LXMV IFS PCI UT FFZ SEPI MZTNJQGCOW3 71E ZDWZTD QE SZ
GJ GYB LD 574SKIFS RVIV N GFL OX LC QFV WV AZPLCJJX NX IF TNU BG IHZA OP RJWGC

  And still it revealed nothing of itself. Having been intercepted nearly two weeks ago, it might, in any case, no longer be useful – a thought he quickly put aside. His job was to decrypt this text, whatever it turned out to be.

  Proceeding on the assumption that the keyword consisted of five unrepeated letters, Thomas wrote out each of the letters that would have been encrypted using the first letter of the keyword. Ignoring all numbers and spaces, he began with the first letter, U, followed by the sixth, D, the eleventh, B, and each following fifth letter, until he had listed ninety-two letters. In a text of four hundred and fifty-six letters, the first letter of the keyword would have been used ninety-two times, and the other letters ninety-one times. It was a painstaking task and easy to make a mistake. He worked slowly.

  Next he added up the number of times each letter had been used. He found that the frequencies ranged from nine (T) and eight (D, G, I, J) to none at all (F, M, O, Y, Z). He allowed himself a small smile. This distribution looked promising. If T represented E, the alphabetical shift dictated by the first letter of the keyword was fifteen. And when he checked the other frequent letters, T emerged as a near certainty for E. If he was right, the first letter of the plain text was F – a shift of fifteen places from the first letter of the cipher text, U, and, most important of all, revealing that the first letter of the keyword was P. So far so good. Monsieur Vigenère was smiling. He turned to the second letter.

  Again he wrote out all the letters in the cipher text which had been encrypted, this time by the second letter of the keyword, counted the frequency of each, and applied the same logic to the result. It made nonsense. If any of the most frequent letters represented E, there would be no Rs, three Qs and two Xs in the second letter sequence. Thomas threw down his quill, splattering ink on his papers, and cursed. Either he had been wrong all along, or he had made a mistake in writing down the letters or in counting them. He checked his counting. It was correct. He cursed again. He would have to work his way laboriously through the text to search for a mistake. He lit the stub of a candle and rewrote the second list of letters, starting and ending with R. When he compared it to the original list that had proved useless, his mistake was obvious. In the seventh line, he had missed the double S and jumped from listing the second letters to listing the third. No wonder the letter distribution had been chaotic. Montaigne spoke sternly. ‘If only talking to oneself did not look mad, no day would go by without my being heard growling to myself, “You silly shit.”’ ‘Merci, monsieur,’ replied Thomas.

  The first glimmers of light on the morning of Abraham’s funeral were appearing through the barred window above his bed. Thomas put his papers under his bed, splashed his face with water, and put on the habit and sandals he had worn in the garden. Taking the elm branch for a walking stick, he slipped quietly out of the door and into the courtyard of the abbey. He could hear voices in the chapel, but saw no one. All at prayer, no doubt. A prayer for Thomas Hill would be welcome, if only the monks knew who he was. The key to the monks’ door within the huge abbey gate was in the lock. Thomas let himself out, and turned east towards Oxford.

  Within the hour, having passed only a milkmaid and two boys gathering mushrooms, he saw the steeple of the Church of St Barnabas above a small copse of oaks. He was hungry and thirsty. With no money for food, he would have to rely on nature. A narrow stream ran alongside the copse. Lying on his stomach on the bank, he could just reach the water, and, with cupped hands, slake his thirst. He took a small pebble from the stream and put it in the pocket of his habit. In the copse, he found blackberries. Water and berries for breakfast. Not as good as Margaret’s bread with cheese and eggs, but it would have to do. He found a comfortable place from which he could watch the church unobserved, and sat down to wait.

  The church bell started ringing as the funeral procession approached from the direction of the town. It was a small gathering – just Silas Merkin and three others carrying the coffin, a handful of elderly mourners and Simon de Pointz. Thomas slipped the pebble under his foot, took up the elm branch, and limped around to join the back of the procession as it entered the graveyard. No one appeared to notice him. He kept his hood on and his head down, and, when they reached the grave in which Abraham Fletcher would be laid to rest, stood a little back from the other mourners.

  The service was mercifully brief. Some prayers and a few words from the parson before the coffin was lowered into the grave. Sensible, unsentimental Abraham would have approved. Thomas turned to leave. Better to be away before the others. He limped back down the path towards the graveyard gate. Glancing up, he saw two men, both armed, standing just outside it. Rush’s men, without a doubt. He could not turn back without drawing attention to himself, so he continued on down the path, hoping that the two men would take no interest in a limping friar.

  As he approached, however, one of them called out. ‘Good morning, father, a sad day. Was Master Fletcher a friend?’ Thomas said nothing. These men would have his description, and to reply he would have to raise his head. The man spoke again. ‘I asked if Master Fletcher was a friend. Do you not answer a civil question?’ With no idea what else to do, Thomas stayed silent and kept limping towards them. The two men stepped in front of the gate and barred his way.

  A hand gripped his shoulder, and a voice behind him said, ‘You must forgive Father Peter, gentlemen. He’s deaf as well as lame. He and I were old friends of Master Fletcher. I will see Peter safely home.’ Rush’s men shrugged, and let them pass. Simon kept a firm hand on Thomas’s shoulder until they were well out of sight and earshot. Beyond the copse, they stopped and Simon released his grip. Thomas bent to remove the pebble. ‘For the love of God, Thomas, what do you think you’re doing? Rush himself might have been here.’ Simon was furious.

  ‘It was necessary.’

  ‘Necessary? Necessary to be arrested and hanged? Or necessary to be thrown back into that cell?’

  ‘I was released on the orders of the queen.’

  ‘Thomas, you know perfectly well that that won’t stop Rush finding a way of silencing you. You acted rashly.’

  ‘Then I apologize. My confinement is irksome. I needed to see the sky and to hear voices.’

  ‘In that case, I will accompany you back to the abbey. You can look at the sky while listening to my voice.’

  As they walked, Simon described the mood at court. Following the death of so many loyal friends, the king had returned from Newbury suffering from a deep melancholy, which the murder of Abraham Fletcher had only made worse. His majesty now saw treachery behind every smile, and a spy in every room. Rush had protested about Thomas’s release, claiming to have absolute proof of his guilt, while the queen had insisted on her faith in Jane’s assurance of his innocence. Rush had demanded to know where Thomas was hiding, and did not believe that the queen had not been told. In his present state of mind, there was no telling what the king might do.

  ‘Did I tell you,’ asked Simon as they reached the abbey gate, ‘that Rush’s father was a gaoler in the Tower? The story goes that he took a bribe to let a wealthy merchant, accused of treason, escape, and used the money for his son’s education.’

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘We friars have ways of knowing things, Thomas, and we like to gossip. It’s our besetting sin.’

  ‘What else do you know about him?’

  ‘Only that, as a young man, he studied at Cambridge and was friendly with Hampden and Pym, both scholars at Oxford. Hampden, of course, is dead, and Pym, they say, hasn’t long to go. Let us hope that they are soon joined by their old friend.’

  ‘A trifle unchristian, Simon, don’t you think?’

  ‘No, Thomas, I do not think. The man’s evil. He should be in hell. And the sooner you decrypt the message and provide proof that he’s a traitor, the sooner we’ll send him there. Have you made any progress?’

  ‘As a matter of fact, I might have
.’ Thomas tried not to sound smug. ‘I shall know for certain by this evening.’

  ‘Good. I shall call tomorrow morning, when I trust you’ll be able to tell me more.’

  Back in his room, Thomas started again on the second keyword letter. Two letters stood out in his list – R and E – both with ten appearances. He would assume one of them represented E. He started with R. He soon found, however, that if R represented E, the second letter of the keyword would be N and the distribution of other letters was equally unconvincing. So E represented itself, and the second letter of the keyword was A, and the second letter of the text, R, was itself. He had the first two letters of the keyword, P and A, and the first two letters of the text, F and R.

  The third letter of the text, F, turned out to be O. FRO had the look of FROM. He moved speedily on to the fourth letter.

  This one looked easy. With twelve appearances, I was the most frequent letter, followed by A and Q, with eight each. He tackled I first. It worked. The fourth letter of the plain text was therefore M, and the first word FROM, as he had hoped. Thomas now had four letters of the keyword – PARI.

  ‘I do hope it’s PARIS,’ he said out loud. ‘Monsieur Montaigne would be much amused.’

  Assuming it was PARIS, he quickly decrypted the next four letters of the text, BDHE, revealing JOHN. This message had been sent by a man named John.

  Thomas was halfway through decrypting the whole message when the old monk brought his dinner. He gobbled it down without noticing what it was, and resumed his work. After another hour, he was able to write out the full text, putting his assumptions about the code numbers in brackets: