The Queen's Cipher by David Taylor

photographs and letters of introduction – before issuing them with reader’s tickets and pencils. Having completed these formalities, they were shown to chairs at a long leather topped wooden table and asked which archive they wanted to access. The tweedy lady told them Standen’s reports could be found in MS 649, a collection of Anthony Bacon’s private correspondence covering a twenty year period when he worked as a spy abroad and as the Earl of Essex’s intelligence chief. The letter they were looking for, she said, contained a curious number code no one had managed to decipher.
    Freddie’s heart sank. He stared at the folder in front of him and got the dry mouth feeling that went with fear of failure. He had been silly to bring her here. Ancient ciphers were like long-forgotten graves. The past was not about to give up its secrets. Not to him at least. It was in this negative state of mind that he opened the archive, trying to recall everything he knew about Tudor penmanship. Many of the letters in this script differed from their modern equivalents.
    “Remember a ‘c’ looks like an ‘r’,” Sam whispered, confident in her calligraphy.
    Standen’s numerical code wasn’t hard to find. It appeared in a four-page letter the spy had written when his controller Anthony Bacon was laid up with an attack of gout. Dated 18 December 1593 and written in a flamboyantly cursive style full of curlicues and strong ascenders, the report was peppered with carefully printed numbers, sometimes fifty or more in a row. As they had not been spaced out or divided in any way it was impossible to tell whether they were separate numbers, or came in pairs or even longer combinations.
    “Let’s see how good you are with the secretary hand,” she murmured, pointing to the bottom of the first page. “Read that.”
    Freddie rose to the challenge. “6589 greatly altered and resolved to have sent after him if the same night he had not come as he did at which time he was cheerfully welcomed ...”
    She stopped him there. “Well done. Word perfect in fact. Do you know who 6589 is?”
    He told her it must be Queen Elizabeth. Standen was describing the queen’s latest row with Essex, how he had stormed off in a sulk before thinking better of it, and how they had patched things up afterwards.
    The librarian was shaking her head. They were making too much noise, disturbing the other readers in the room. Freddie mouthed a silent apology and beckoned Sam to join him outside. She seemed reluctant to leave.
    “Look, I’ve something to tell you.” She shivered slightly in the palace’s draughty corridor. “I know why Queen Elizabeth was given the code name of 6589.”
    “How could you possibly know that?”
    “Because Standen is using gematria, a Hebrew number system in which the letters of the alphabet are assigned a numerical value in the belief that words or phrases which have the same aggregate count bear a relationship to one another. Benedictine monks also used gematria in their ciphers.”
    Medieval monks and mathematics had never figured on Freddie’s radar and, although she lectured in public key encryption, he hadn’t expected her to know the history of numerology.
    “Why don’t we ask the librarian to photocopy Standen’s letter and get out of here,” he said. “You look as if you could use a hot drink to warm you up.”
    A high-end coffee shop with freshly roasted beans was what he had in mind but things didn’t work out that way. A sudden deluge and an absence of available taxis in the Lambeth district forced them to shelter in the fuggy bacon-infused warmth of a local cafe where, like the other customers, they were shown to a plastic banquette and a Formica topped table. Nursing a steaming mug of tea and munching a thick cheese and chutney sandwich, he looked around him in disgust. It was the sort of snack bar that prided itself on its ambience, a greasy spoon with attitude. Hardly the place for a seduction, he