‘Take him.’ Cecil turned away from that awful stare.
Sinclair grabbed Will and propelled him towards the door.
‘This is not the end of this matter,’ Will said icily, with no further regard for his own well-being. ‘Kit’s death will be avenged. And all who stand in my way, whoever they might be, whatever position they hold, will pay.’
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The thunderous knocking had an insistent edge. Will opened the door to find an unsettled Nathaniel, who pushed his way into the chamber without waiting to be invited. From the shadows in the corridor, a solitary pikeman watched, as he had from the moment Sinclair had bustled the spy into his quarters.
‘I thought I was going to be locked out of the palace. They questioned me at the gatehouse for near an hour,’ Nathaniel said, taking off his cap and running a hand through his hair. ‘What has happened? Is the Queen’s life under threat?’
Will closed the door and guided his assistant towards the table where a meagre portion of bread and cheese and some wine had been placed by a servant. He was not in the Tower yet, so the spymaster had to treat him with a modicum of dignity. ‘The Queen is well, but it appears Sir Robert has taken my warnings to heart. Some small good may come from this night.’ He carved himself a piece of cheese and spiked it with his knife. He sighed. ‘I fear I have let my mouth run away with me.’
Nathaniel eyed his master askance as he removed his cloak. ‘You speak those words as if they are somehow new to you.’
‘This time there may be more at stake than hurt feelings. In anger, I revealed a secret I have carried with me for several years. A secret that goes to the very heart of England and the Queen’s security — and, in truth, what it means to be an Englishman and how we perceive ourselves in the world.’ The spy made to eat the cheese, stared at it for a moment and then tossed the knife and morsel on to the table. ‘And I, God help me, must defend the ideal, knowing the darkness and violence that lies behind it. Am I then as tarnished?’
‘You are too hard on yourself, as always.’
Smiling at the young man’s loyalty, Will poured Nathaniel a goblet of malmsey wine. The assistant, who rarely drank to excess, took the offering hesitantly.
‘There are plots upon plots unfolding all around us, Nat, and we can no longer trust all that we once held close. You must be on your guard,’ Will said, his face serious.
‘Is this why you are held prisoner?’
Will poured himself some wine and rested one foot on a stool as he drank. ‘It takes more than one guard to hold me prisoner.’
‘Ah, yes, I forget myself,’ the assistant said. ‘England’s greatest spy. The great Will Swyfte towers above all normal men.’ His gaze fell on the sheaf of papers set on the table in a pool of candlelight. ‘You have been reading Kit’s play.’
Will traced his fingers across the surface of the wine-stained first page. ‘Kit was a greater man than even his most ardent supporters believed,’ he said. ‘There are deep messages in this play, about our propensity for pride, certainly, but also the lengths we will go to to fulfil our own personal quests, even when we know to do so will damage us or those around us.’ Though Will knew Marlowe was writing about himself, the play was unsettlingly apt for his own situation; he could no more give up on his search for Jenny than Faustus could walk away from his deal with the Devil. He found a page and read, almost to himself,
‘Why this is hell, nor am I out of it.
Think’st thou that I, who saw the face of God,
And tasted the eternal joys of heaven,
Am not tormented with ten thousand hells
In being depriv’d of everlasting bliss?’
‘Unlike you, I am a God-fearing man,’ Nathaniel sniffed, ‘and I do not like all this talk of devils and hell. Remember: speak his name and you will summon him.’
‘You are a fortunate man, Nat, for you have found your own private heaven in employment with me,’ Will said, lightly.
Nathaniel snorted.
Will tapped his finger on the papers. ‘But in his cleverness, Kit has hidden messages here on two levels. The one in symbolic form, in the themes of the play, and that will be hard to decipher without knowing the author’s intent. But look here for the other.’
On a line halfway down the page, Will pointed to a letter O with a barely visible dot beneath it. He flicked on two pages and let his finger trail down the lines until he located a W marked with another dot. Three pages on, another highlighted letter appeared.
‘A code,’ Nathaniel said.
‘A cipher, to be exact. A code involves the substitution of words or phrases, a cipher the substitution of letters.’ Will pointed to a page where he had copied out marked letters — E, T, M, I, T, O, W, R, W, E. ‘I have not yet collected all Kit’s hidden marks, but even then I will not be able to understand the meaning.’
‘The cipher is too hard to break?’
Moving the quill and ink pot to one side, Will sat on the stool and found a clean page. ‘Kit always used what is known as a Vigenere Square,’ he said. ‘Vigenere was a French diplomat who studied the codes and ciphers of the great masters Alberti, Trithemius and Porta and then developed their work into his own system. It is remarkably strong because it uses not one but twenty-six separate cipher alphabets to conceal a message.’
Will took the quill, dipped it in the pot of ink and proceeded to draw a grid of twenty-six by twenty-six squares. Above the grid, he inscribed the alphabet, and then numbered each row from one to twenty-six down the side. ‘This is the plaintext,’ he said, pointing to the alphabet at the top, ‘where we choose the letters we want to encrypt.’
Along the first row of the grid, he then wrote the alphabet beginning with B and adding A in the twenty-sixth box. On the second row, he began the alphabet with C, adding A in the twenty-fifth box, and B in the final one.
‘The system continues, shifting the letters one space to the left on each line,’ he explained. ‘Then it is a matter of using a new row of the grid to encrypt each new letter of the message you wish to send.’
Nathaniel puzzled over the Vigenere Square for a moment and then concluded, ‘But how does the one receiving the message know which rows have been used? You have twenty-six different choices for every letter. It would take a lifetime to determine the true choices from the multitude available.’
‘Nat, you are cleverer than you appear,’ Will said with a warm smile.
Nathaniel gave a dismissive shrug.
‘The hidden message can only be understood with the use of a keyword, known to both the sender and the receiver,’ Will continued. ‘Pay attention now, for even the cleverest may stumble here.’
‘Speak slowly, master, for I am but a thick-headed country boy, and not someone who keeps the wheels of your complicated life spinning,’ Nathaniel said archly. He sipped his wine in a studiedly aloof manner.
‘Let us say the keyword is BLACK, and our message begins,
He traced his finger along the plaintext alphabet above the grid until he found the M of
Leaning in, Nathaniel thought for a moment before circling the keyword with the tip of his index finger. ‘And you are about to tell me Master Marlowe uses a different keyword for every message, and you have no knowledge of the current one.’
‘Remember, Nat, before you outgrow your boots, a little intellect is like a little gunpowder — enough to blow your hands off, but not enough to achieve anything worthwhile.’ Will poured himself another goblet of wine, realizing
