The Devil Will Come

Marlowe took the box in his hands and unlatched it. Inside was a rolled parchment secured with ribbons.

‘It is a copy of the prophecy in Malachy’s own hand,’ Dee said. ‘Keep it close to your person. Take it to Rome. We have a trusted friend there, an astronomer named Mascherino. Walsingham will provide you with good reason to be in Italy but when you are there you will, with Mascherino’s assistance, deposit the manuscript within the Pope’s Library and shortly thereafter Mascherino will, mirabile dictu, find it and make it known. Once it is read and appreciated, the Cardinals will see Malachy’s undeniable accuracy over the centuries and this will serve to make the case why they must elect Simoncelli as the next pope.’

‘May I?’ Marlowe said, holding up the parchment.

‘Of course,’ Dee nodded.

Marlowe untied the ribbons and unrolled the parchment carefully. He read in silence and for a while the only sound in the chamber came from Poley taking a poker to the logs. When Marlowe was done he let the manuscript roll itself up and re-affixed the ribbons. A smile creased his face.

‘Why the wicked grin, Kit?’ Cecil asked.

‘An idea has crossed my mind, a trifle, really,’ Marlowe said, closing and relatching the box. ‘I’m already hard at work on revisions to my Faustus play which are extensive enough to have it considered a new version. It had occurred to me that I could do more to ridicule the Pope’s Church and I am in the process of adding more meat to my third act which is set within the papal palace in Rome. I would like your permission, good gentlemen, to encrypt a message to future generations of Lemures, a message of pride and aspiration concerning the Malachy prophecy derived, perhaps, from the differences between my two versions.’

Walsingham looked to Dee, then nodded. ‘As you know, I have always had a fondness for codes.’

‘I think it’s an excellent notion,’ Cecil said. ‘By all means, Kit. I look forward to your masterpiece of encryption.’

Dee rose and straightened his robe. ‘Come, Master Marlowe, walk me to the street and let us gaze at the night sky together.’

Left behind, the other three men kept at their drinking.

‘I believe Doctor Dee liked him,’ Cecil said.

‘He is likeable enough,’ Walsingham said. ‘I don’t understand his compulsion for the theatre but his particular talents are certainly useful.’

‘Nero too had a compulsion for performance,’ Cecil observed.

That made Walsingham snigger. ‘He’s hardly a Nero! Poley, what do you think about all this? You’ve been as silent as a slug all evening.’

Poley turned away from the fire. ‘I was at the Theatre tonight.’

‘Why, pray tell? Have you become a devotee?’

‘Hardly. I’ve had my suspicions about Marlowe. I observe him from time to time.’

‘And what,’ Walsingham asked, ‘did you observe?’

‘I witnessed Marlowe and Thomas Kyd in an amorous embrace. Kyd had his hand upon Marlowe’s posterior parts.’

‘Kyd is not one of us!’ Walsingham said sharply.

‘Indeed not,’ Cecil said.

Walsingham gripped the arms of his chair in frustration. ‘Marlowe is brilliant, but he is intemperate and does not share our cautious ways. Accompany him to Rome. Make sure he accomplishes his assigned task. When he returns, we’ll let him write his plays and do our bidding. But, Poley, I want you to keep an eye on him, a very careful eye, and, as always, keep me closely informed.’

TWENTY-FOUR

ELISABETTA’S FATHER MADE Zazo and Elisabetta clear the supper table so that they could gather round the Faustus book.

‘Look!’ Carlo said. ‘There’s a difference between your copy and the one I’ve been working from.’

Elisabetta glanced at hers. ‘They’re both B texts. What’s the difference?’

‘Yours is numbered. See the numbers on the right margins? Every five lines, see? The beginning of each act resets the line numbers back to one. It’s a common notation system for plays so actors can find their lines easily and teachers can send their students to a passage. Only my copy didn’t have numbers.’

Elisabetta grew excited. ‘Yes! I see.’

‘I’ve been getting nowhere looking at this as a number-progression or a substitution code. So then it hit me: what if these tattoos refer to line numbers! Lines which differ between the A text and the B text. “B is the key.” That’s what the letter said.’

‘But there are so many differences between the two versions,’ Elisabetta said. ‘Where to begin?’

‘Exactly. I realized this could be a very difficult task, one better suited to computational power than trial and error and I began to think how I could write a program to accomplish it. But then I remembered something your Professor Harris said. Remember? The biggest differences were in Act III which was much longer in the B text and was turned into an anti-Catholic rant. On a hunch – and don’t roll your eyes, Zazo, mathematicians sometimes have hunches, just like policemen – I went straight to Act III and started playing with the line numbers. If each of the twenty-four numbers in the tattoo array corresponded to a line number then we might have the only solution that wouldn’t require a computer to sort out.’

‘Okay,’ Elisabetta said. ‘What was the first number?’

Carlo put his reading glasses on, then took them off. ‘63.’

She found the line. ‘May be admired through the furthest land. Now what?’

‘Well, again, the simplest solution was going to be taking the first letter of the first word. Believe me, I was prepared to have to dig deeper but I think it’s that straightforward.’

‘So it’s M,’ she said. ‘What’s the next number?’

‘128.’

‘And curse the people that submit to him. A.’

Zazo almost shouted. ‘Please! I’m starved! Can you please just cut to the chase.’

Carlo put his glasses on again. ‘The message is: MALACHY IS KING HAIL LEMURES.’

Elisabetta caught her breath when she heard the word Lemures. She forced her mind to skip to Malachy and barely managed to squeak out, ‘Malachy was an Irish saint, I think. There’s something else about him too. I can’t remember …’

‘Me neither,’ Carlo said. ‘And what the hell are Lemures? Anyway, I’m just the mathematician and my work is done.’ He sniffed happily, finally aware of the kitchen aromas, and said, ‘Smells good. Let’s eat.’

Elisabetta thanked God for the internet.

Without it she would have had to wait until the morning, then find a library and spend a day or more in the stacks.

After supper, alone in the apartment and waiting for Micaela to come over, she surfed her way frantically toward an understanding of the coded message.

From the myriad web pages devoted to Malachy she saw that the saint had become a newsworthy subject, particularly since the recent death of the Pope.

Elisabetta shook her head at her earlier lack of awareness of Malachy’s topicality. I’m not cloistered, she thought, but it seems that I’m out of it.

The facts were simple enough: Saint Malachy, whose Irish name was Mael Maedoc Ua Morgair, had lived from 1094 until 1148. He was Archbishop of Armagh. He was canonized by Pope Clement III in 1199 and became the first Irish saint. And he was the purported author of The Prophecy of the Popes, a premonitory vision of the identities of the last 112 popes.

Much of what was known of his life came from The Life of St Malachy, a biography