The Queen's Cipher by David Taylor Page A

thought, as he watched his partner chewing her way through a clog sole of a sandwich.
    “Okay, why did Standen call Queen Elizabeth 6589? You haven’t explained that yet.”
    Sam dabbed her mouth with a tissue and pulled a duplicate copy of Standen’s letter out of her shoulder bag. “Let’s start with the basics, shall we.” She placed the letter on the Formica surface. Her schoolmarm’s tone made him feel like a backward pupil.
    The simplest conversion of letters into numbers, she explained, gave A the value of 1, B was 2 and Z 26. But the Elizabethan alphabet consisted of only twenty four letters. I and J were interchangeable and so were U and V. Therefore, on simple count, the word ‘Queen’ added up to 59. Q was the sixteenth letter in the alphabet, U the twentieth and so on.  Q(16)+U(20)+E(5)+E(5)+N(13) equalled 59. By the same token ‘Elizabeth’ was 84.
    “So why didn’t Standen call her 5984 instead of 6589?” He raised an ironic eyebrow.
    “That would have been too obvious. Remember, he’s using cipher to conceal what he wants to say. So he starts off with 65.”
    Freddie scratched his head in bewilderment. “I’m sorry. I still don’t get that at all.”
    She gave him a little smile. “It’s simple mathematics really. 65 is 6 more than 59 and 89 is 5 more than 84. So that’s a 6 and a 5 and 65 is the number we started with – ergo 6589.”
    Sam’s face clouded over as something else occurred to her. “Maybe there’s more to it than that. We’ve taken this four figure number and broken it down into pairs, 65 and 89, to extract its meaning in gematria. But the difference between 65 and 89 is 24, the number of letters in the Elizabethan alphabet. That has to be significant.”  
    She peered again at the photocopy. Her hands gripped the Formica table so hard her knuckles turned white.
    “My God, I know what we’re looking at,” she said excitedly. “6589 is a cipher key. It’s a version of the four-fold Trithemian number alphabet discovered in the third book of his Steganographia about twenty years ago.”
    “Hold on a moment. What do you mean by a ‘four-fold’ number alphabet?”
    “It means the letters of the alphabet are repeated four times with each letter having a higher value than the previous one. In the first reading of the alphabet A is 1 and Z is 24 while in the second reading A becomes 25 and Z 48. At the third time of asking A is 49 and Z 72 and, in its final fold, A is 73 and Z is 96. Have you got it now?”
    Freddie nodded sheepishly. “Who was Trithemian?” he asked.
    “Trithemius,” she corrected him, “was a fifteenth-century Benedictine abbot who was a cryptographic genius.”
    “That’s a pretty odd combination.”
    “Not really. Monks were always good at cipher but the abbot of Sponheim was in a league of his own. He actually disguised his four-fold number alphabet as tables of planetary data. I remember reading about this in Cryptologia when I was in the Tenth Grade.”
    Once again she had lost him. Four-fold number alphabets and planetary tables were beyond his understanding. It was much easier to think of a pigtailed schoolgirl with her head in a cryptology magazine.
    Sam was doing some rapid calculations. “If this four-fold number alphabet began with the letter H, the value of Z in the third and fourth folds would be 65 and 89.”
    “Let’s test it out,” she said and began to read from Standen’s letter: ‘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 1940252234.’
    “I could be wrong but I think these numbers are there to prove the cipher,” she murmured. “If we pair the numbers off as we did before and we say that H is 1 in a four-fold alphabet, what do we get? 19 would be the letter B in the second fold of that alphabet. Here, why don’t you work it out?”
    She found a pocket notebook and a biro in her bag and handed them