The Queen's Cipher Read Online Free

You and your hangers-on are little more than a mutual admiration society.”
    “At least we’ve all achieved something in our careers which is more than you’ll ever be able to say, you impertinent English half-wit!”  
    “That’s enough, Milton!” Dame Julia had joined them, her eyes like gimlets. “Freddie is my guest and if you insult him, you insult me too.”
    Milton Cleaver’s jaw tightened. “You’ve got strange friends; that’s all I can say.”
    Dame Julia watched his receding back before departing in the opposite direction with a curt nod of her head.
    “I’m awfully sorry,” Dr Dilworth said. “I’ve never known him be so rude.”
    “No, it was my fault. There’s a knack to keeping quiet but I’ve never mastered it.”
    “But you see what I’m up against.” Freddie spoke like a drowning man rejecting rescue. “They will never forgive me for Cartwright.”
    There was a long silence which she did not attempt to fill. A waiter appeared carrying a tray of canapés. Grateful for the distraction, they grabbed a plate of mushroom vol au vents.
    As they ate, she inquired after his family. He gave her a subdued answer about growing up in the medieval wool town of Lavenham where his father had been the Anglican rector. This reminded her of a piece of trivia. The last son of a Suffolk clergyman to be a whistleblower was the so-called Witchfinder General Matthew Hopkins.
    “Didn’t Hopkins burn a woman in your market square?” she asked.
    “No, that only happened in the Vincent Price movie although Hopkins did devise a new way of torturing women called witch-pricking.”
    Sam segued from this barbaric custom into literary celebrity. As soon as heretical ideas appeared in print, she said, the authorities began to clamp down on authors. Unable to punish words or ideas, they chose to rack their creator. Torture was the first form of censorship; a way of concealing the truth.
    “That’s the trouble with history, don’t you think,” said Freddie. “It’s like a shipwreck that has sunk out of sight, leaving bits of debris floating on the surface for scholars to misinterpret.”
    Here was something else they could agree about. Knowledge of the distant past was based on surviving documents – state papers, birth and death registers, a letter accidentally preserved. It was like doing a jigsaw puzzle when most of the pieces were missing or wrongly assembled to protect those in power. He asked her whether she had seen The Devil’s Disciple , George Bernard Shaw’s play about the American War of Independence. In the third act General Burgoyne realises the American Colonies are about to be lost because of a bureaucratic blunder in London. An appalled major wonders what history will make of this and the sardonic general retorts, ‘History, sir, will tell lies as usual.’
    Cover-ups in history were to be expected, he allowed, but what was more surprising for the English scholar was the tenuous connection between William Shakespeare and his works. No one had ever been so thoroughly researched and yet how little there was to show for it. Shakespeare married, had children, went to London, became an actor and a playwright, evaded taxes, loaned money, started lawsuits and made a long and detailed will that didn’t mention any books. Books were a valuable commodity and Shakespeare must have read hundreds of them but where were they? Not in his Stratford home in which his daughters grew up unable to do more than make their mark.
    Dr Dilworth stared at him for a moment. “I shouldn’t be saying this but the grasping Stratford landowner with the probably illiterate family doesn’t fit the image I’ve got of the genius who wrote the plays and poems.”
    Freddie gave her his crooked smile. “You can add to that the fact that Shakespeare’s death went unnoticed, no memorial verses or funereal tributes, nothing to mark his passing.”
    “It’s amusing, isn’t it? A whole industry fuelled by an absence of