by Simon Edge
He himself has a moribund account that he once thought might help promote the Red Lion. He logs into it – thinking that he really ought to change his password-for-everything, which is still N8dine – and does a quick search for Barry Brook. Sure enough, the guy is on there too, clearly never passing up an opportunity to market himself. By the personal tone of some of the replies, it looks like it really is him.
Tim’s Red Lion account isn’t suitable for making contact. If he is serious about convincing readers of pulp thrillers that there is something special about his valley, he can’t risk anything that would source the story back to him. So he needs a nice, new, anonymous account, and it also needs to have an attention-grabbing name. Coming up with one proves easier said than done, and for a while he is stumped, staring out of the window and looking for inspiration in the sheep pasture. The name needs to say ‘conspiracy’ while also making it clear that he’s not a nutter – with maybe a hint of Victorian poetry thrown in. He sighs, doodles for a bit, stares out of the window again and is wondering if this is just a form of procrastination, when it suddenly comes to him and makes him laugh out loud. He carries on chuckling as he registers the new name. Now, identified only as @Wreckileaks, he is ready to go.
For starters, he follows Brook. It looks weird that he is only following one person, but if the guy notices, maybe it will make him feel special. Then, rubbing his hands for inspiration, he returns his two index fingers to the keyboard.
He is not used to writing in the 140-character format and it’s a shock how quickly he runs out of space. He also wants to make the tone as arresting as the name of his account, for which he reckons a degree of abruptness may be required, just to make sure the writer sits up and takes notice. And he needs to work out whether he wants Brook to believe his story, or just to come into cahoots with him. That’s difficult when he doesn’t know how the guy thinks. Is he as gullible as his readers, or as cynical as Tim is becoming?
After several attempts, and a lot of pruning to get rid of surplus words, he finally ends up with:
@barrybrook if you want to know the real secrets of the Vatican you cynical bastard think shipwrecks not geometry. Interested? More soon.
With that wording, he reckons he is acknowledging that the guy doesn’t actually believe in the nonsense he expects his readers to buy into. But by suggesting that the Vatican does have real secrets, he is planting the idea that there is a mysterious truth out there and the Holy Grail project as a whole isn’t entirely nonsense. That way he hopes he is covering both bases and he can reel in either cynical Barry or credulous Barry.
But who knows? He is running on guesswork. He stares at the screen for a few more minutes, then hits send.
And now it’s a matter of just waiting. He doesn’t know much about the etiquette of Twitter, and he has no idea how likely he is to get a reply. He does notice from Brook’s account that the guy tends to reply quite a lot to tweets from readers, even hostile ones.
At first he checks back every couple of hours, but then he remembers there’s a time difference and he mustn’t be too impatient. He forces himself to stay away and lets a day go by, and then another, without logging on. Before he knows it, he has developed a phobia of doing so. He tells himself he has been far too rude and aggressive in his approach, and Brook is bound not to reply. Why would he? He wonders if he should delete the original tweet and send a politer version. He’s not even sure if you can delete.
He finally logs on to check whether he can do that or not, and he has done such a good job of talking his own expectations downwards that he is astonished to find he has ten notifications. Barry Brook has followed him back – prompting a flurry of other random accounts to do the same – and has also sent him a direct message.
@wreckileaks, tell me more it says. The message includes a private email address.
Tim does a little jig around the kitchen. This really could happen.
He has to think about opening up the pub soon, but he also needs to plan what he’s going to say, now that he has the luxury of as many characters as he wants in a proper email message.
“There’s no need to rush into it, landlord,” says Alun Gwynne when Tim tells him the good news. “If the chap is interested, he’ll wait. Take your time over what you say to him, that’s my advice.”
Tim decides the old boy is right, and he needs to get this right.
The first task, he resolves, is to buy a copy of The Poussin Conundrum. It will nearly kill him to do it, but it’s the pragmatic option, because it will give him a clearer idea of who he is dealing with. He discovers that they have it in stock in the tiny bookshop in town – of course they do – and he spends every spare moment in the next couple of days skimming through it. At first it triggers another bout of Nadine Rage – had he really planned to spend the rest of his life with someone who thought this was a work of genius? – but by the end it starts to draw him in, which makes him even angrier. He finishes reading it at three in the morning, hating himself for not being able to put it down.
At least he now has a decent idea of what will float the conspiratorial boat. Geometry, maps and numbers – especially the kind that can be dressed up as code – are The Holy Trinity of the Gospel According to Barry. And that brings him back to the place where he started. It’s no use just asserting vaguely that the poem looks as if it might be written in code: he needs to come up with some kind of plausible demonstration of how it might be.
Alun Gwynne referred to it as cryptic, like a puzzle. That makes Tim think of crosswords, which he has always been hopeless at. He is vaguely aware that they are based on conventions which are a mystery to the uninitiated but obvious to anyone who does them all the time. That sounds far too crackable for present purposes. He needs instead to show that the words of the poem could be a kind of cipher. It could be a simple letter substitution, but he’s not sure anyone would be convinced of that: these words of the poet’s may be hard to understand, but they do at least look like proper words and sentences, which a cipher wouldn’t. One thing he does know about poetry is that the number of syllables is important. A youthful phase of composing comedy haikus taught him that, and he has learned from his nocturnal research that one of the ways the poet offended Victorian convention was the wild variation in the lengths of each line – which in poetry terms means the number of beats.
Acting on this whim he gets out his Collected Works, which now falls obediently open at the right page, and starts counting.
There are thirty-five verses, each with eight lines, and he discovers they all have the same rhyme scheme: ABABCBCA. There the regularity runs out. The eight lines of the first verse contain 5, 7, 6, 6, 12, 11, 10 and 12 syllables, whereas in the second verse it’s 4, 7, 9, 7, 11, 14, 8 and 15. It’s not always clear how many syllables there are in a word: Tim has memories of having to sing Victorian hymns at school where ‘power’ was pronounced ‘pah’ and ‘hour’ was ‘are’, and he isn’t sure if ‘lashed’ is one syllable or two. But even without those variants, it’s still totally irregular. He dips at random further in; verse 31 comes out at 9, 9, 12, 9, 15, 21, 13 and 23.
This must be a nightmare for anyone trying to make sense of the poem in a literary way. But for Tim as would-be cryptologist, it is gold dust.
He opens a fresh document and starts to create a table:
1. 5 7 6 6 12 11 10 12
2. 4 6 9 7 11 14 8 15
3. 5 8 10 6 14 10 10 16
4. 4 7 9 9 16 12 8 15
5. 4 8 9 6 11 13 9 16…
It takes a while and it’s a boring task, but when at last he concludes with…
31. 9 9 12 9 15 21 13 23
32. 9 8 13 12 13 11 5 14
33. 7 7 14 7 15 13 9 17
34. 7 6 9 8 12 15 10 18
35. 4 6 16 9 24 13 9 14
...he gazes with pride at the mesh of digits.
It doesn’t mean a thing, o
f course, but it wouldn’t be hard to convince the credulous that it does. It could be a simple letter substitution. At first glance, it looks like 8 is the most frequent, followed by 11 and 7, which means they would be the commonest letters: E, T and A or N. He starts to fill it in on that basis, to see if any words emerge, but then he remembers that this should be Barry Brook’s job. In any case, it could be more complicated than that. Instead of letter substitutions, the numbers could be map references, or bible verses. Yes, that’s more like it! You could plot each line on a graph, which might give you the profile of a hillside or the course of a path. Or what if you cut a hole in the grid for every 5 or 8 or something and overlaid it on some significant text? There’s no end to the Grail-seeking fun you could have with it, no more ridiculous than half the nonsense in The Poussin Conundrum.
Confident in his mission now, Tim is ready to draft his approach to Brook. He opens a Gmail account in the name of Wreckileaks and creates a new message:
Hey Barry
Good call, buddy. You won’t regret it.
Have you ever heard of a poem called The Wreck of the Deutschland? Well you have now. It’s your next pot of gold.
It’s about a bunch of Catholic nuns, emissaries of their order, on a mission to the New World, because everything’s going tits-up in the old one. But their journey doesn’t go well, and that’s what the poem is all about.
The poet himself is an insider. He has no literary credentials and has never been published before. He’s a member of a highly disciplined religious order, the Jesuits, where the guiding principle is obedience, and he does nothing that hasn’t been cleared on high. He is asked to write a poem about the nuns. But instead of being published, it’s suppressed. I’ve researched this myself and I can tell you his own order won’t touch it in their official magazine, and it doesn’t see the light of day for another forty years.
The official version is that the writing was too difficult and no one understood what he was trying to do. It’s certainly heavy going, as you’ll see if you’ve got it on your screen. But is that really why they sat on it?
You and I can see there may be a better explanation. If you’re looking at it now, go to verse 26 and look at the last two lines. What by your measure is the heaven of desire, The treasure never eyesight got, nor was ever guessed what for the hearing? Treasure! Not literally – I don’t think we’re talking jewels and gold doubloons, because these were nuns from a poor order who had renounced worldly possessions. I think he’s talking about metaphorical treasure, as in the ETERNAL SECRETS of the Vatican!
Think about it. If the Catholic Church believed it had suddenly become vulnerable in Europe, it stands to reason they would try and spirit some of their most valuable relics or documents out of the eye of the storm to the safety of America. But what if they got lost en route?
That’s where our poet comes in. What if he was trying to leave a message for the world, just as Poussin was? (Brilliant book by the way. Big fan!) It’s all there for anyone who cracks the code. I reckon that’s what the guy was trying to tell us when he put himself in the poem. Go back two verses, to the start of number 24. Away in the loveable west, on a pastoral forehead of Wales, I was under a roof here. That’s where he was, and that’s where I am now, just down the road from this pastoral forehead, and if you climb the next hill you can see the roof he’s talking about. That’s where we need to start looking, and the rest of the clues are all in the poem.
Check out the numbers I’m sending you, which correspond to the number of syllables in each line of each verse, and tell me that’s not intriguing! This is Victorian England, man, when poetry was supposed to be totally regular, so this stuff is totally crazy. They said it was off the wall, but what if there was a method in the madness that no one has ever noticed before? Bible references, that’s my best guess. Word to the wise: start looking in the Book of Job – that was all about a shipwreck.
If you’re looking for a subject for a sequel, trust me, it’s right here, on my doorstep.
He signs it ‘WL’ and reads the message through. It’s bloody good, even if he says so himself. The Book of Job is a particularly neat touch – for which he has to credit Alun Gwynne and his chapel background. The old boy has his uses.
He attaches his page of numbers and has just hit send when he hears a customer entering From the lack of groaning, wheezing and sniffing, it isn’t Alun Gwynne. That feels like an omen. Maybe Tim’s luck really is changing.
North Wales, 1875
There were times when Hopkins wished he could bring some of his old friends here, just so he could convince the doubters what a good life it was.
But it was undoubtedly an inward-looking one. The college routine of prayer, meditation, lectures, disputations and lottery-walks was designed to keep a theologian’s mind empty of all but what ought to be there, namely the contemplation and understanding of God’s work. Even the recreations were policed, and then there was basic housekeeping: sweeping his room with sawdust every third day, and carrying out his slops. Amid all that, ad lib moments were few and far between. You couldn’t just go and write a letter, to his initial frustration when he first entered the Society, and to the ongoing frustration of those who cared about him in the outside world.
He barely heard a word nowadays from his old Oxford friend Bridges. When he did, the letters groused about the tardiness of his last reply or about correspondence being opened. That last part was certainly true, but it was only a formality, and it was absurd to think that the Rector actually read Bridges’ accounts of treating patients or the health of his stepfather. Nevertheless, it got in the way. Although they had been drawn together in their student days by their shared interest in the High Church revival, named after their university as the Oxford Movement, Bridges had his mind firmly set against Rome and had taken Hopkins’s conversion hard. Hopkins’ decision to join the Society, against which Bridges harboured all the usual prejudices, had increased the distance between them. Naturally he had done his best to try to dispel those prejudices. But an unfortunate occasion in his early days as a novice, when Bridges had made the effort to visit him, only to be turned away because it was outside approved hours, had cemented his view that his friend was a prisoner of dangerous cultists.
The last time they had met they argued about doctrine, and the memory rankled. Perhaps it was an inevitable disappointment of adulthood that coming-of-age friendships did not last for life, however much you hoped they would.
It mattered twice over with Bridges, because a connection to him was a connection to his young cousin, Dolben. Where are thou friend, whom I shall never see, conceiving whom I must conceive amiss? Those lines that Hopkins himself had written years ago still came back to him, although he had burned the poem itself. Or sunder’d from my sight in the age that is. Had he really rhymed is with amiss? It took a particular kind of fool not to see that ‘is’ ended with a phonetic ‘z’ not an ‘s’, and if anyone else had done it, he would’ve swooped on them. His only possible excuse was extreme distress at the time, after the terrible accident.
It had been hard to mourn for the boy, because Hopkins had no position. He did not even qualify as a friend, and he would have made himself ridiculous if the depth of his grief were known. He had drafted a mean little letter of condolence to Bridges, praising Dolben’s beauty of character and person, but he had added that he found it difficult to feel the loss on such a fleeting acquaintance. He doubly regretted that now, both for the untruth itself and the denial, which felt like a betrayal of the boy in his grave.
But all that was long ago, in another life and another world.
Here, in the actual one, the college was abuzz with the prospect of the Sunday evening debate. Because it was close to Christmas, a light-hearted motion had been allowed, “the sooner the Welsh language dies out the better”. Rickaby was to be the proposer, seconded by Splaine, and the entire college gathered before supper to list
en to them. Their contributions – received with much seasonal hilarity – were full of the usual complaints that the locals spoke English perfectly well and only lapsed into their own tongue to make incomers feel excluded. Splaine got a good laugh when he produced a blackboard and started chalking up words consisting mainly of l’s, w’s or y’s, in an attempt to justify his case that this was a nation of obdurate boors whose chief pleasure in life was baffling those who relied for communication upon the occasional vowel. But Hopkins did not like the mockery. Since Clarke and Purbrick, who were meant to be opposing the motion, were also playing to the gallery with some mean-minded sneering of their own – Purbrick contended that the facility to converse in a closed group prevented the Welsh from bothering anyone else – he raised his own hand to speak from the floor.
“I hate to bring such tedious matters as logic and fairness into play and spoil an otherwise perfect entertainment,” he began, against a background of giggles and then some shushing when someone noticed the severity of his expression. “But isn’t there a basic contradiction between the proposition that our Welsh cousins are a backward people and the complaint that their language is too difficult for us to grasp?”
He had made a good point and they were actually listening now.
“I am proud to consider myself half-Welsh,” he continued, emboldened. Actually he had never found any Welsh ancestry, but his surname was surely a Celtic one, so he could be permitted the exaggeration for an honourable purpose.
“Mr Splaine is laughing, as if I had by that admission renounced my right to an opinion or my claim to an intelligence. But I may be the only man in the room with the qualification to speak on the language, since I have at least learned a little of it. I will not dwell on its euphony, because there is none for those who will not hear. Nor will I trouble you with the peculiarly complex grammar, which the ‘simpletons’ of this parish somehow manage to master from an early age. But what I hope may surprise you, if you are prepared to open your minds to it, is the richness and sophistication of the Welsh poetic tradition. For example, where we alliterate in English, we repeat the same initial letter, as in ‘Rickaby’s rotten reasoning’…”
