The Queen's Cipher by David Taylor

Author:David Taylor [Taylor, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Literature & Fiction, History & Criticism, Movements & Periods, Shakespeare, Mystery; Thriller & Suspense, Thrillers & Suspense, Historical, Criticism & Theory, World Literature, British, Thrillers
Amazon: B00NNLWHYK
Publisher: David Taylor
Published: 2014-09-16T00:00:00+00:00

ALL SOULS DAY

To greet All Souls Day a dry, bitingly cold wind had come in from the east. Slumped in the corner of his coach with watering eyes and a churning stomach, Francis Bacon wrapped a cloak around his slender body to keep out the cold. He had swathed himself in furs and worn three waistcoats but all to no avail. He looked enviously at his young companion sprawling opposite him. Dressed only in a loose jerkin and a linen shirt thrown open to reveal his flawless skin, Henry Percy seemed oblivious to the cold. Francis had heard the whispers. His fellow servants called Percy a popinjay and a coxcomb but he got to ride in his master’s coach and they didn’t.

Francis watched the weak afternoon sun glinting through the branches until the woodland thinned out to be replaced by the brown fields of the arable farmer. Plough clods had been left for the winter frosts to break down before being harrowed and sown with seed. Cereal crops would grow here – wheat, barley, rye and oats – to feed the capital city. These tenant farmers existed on the margins of subsistence and, a year ago, in Parliament, he had raised the issue of their plight. Money, he told his fellow MPs, should be like muck, spread around for the common good. Clever words but they had fallen on stony ground.

They were travelling uphill through an oak wood that once belonged to the Benedictine order. The monks of St Albans had built a chapel here in which Catholic services were still held. Francis could see candles burning in the chapel windows and hear the solemn chanting of the mass as the congregation prayed for the passage of departed souls through Purgatory. As a good Protestant and loyal servant of the Crown it was his duty to report this unlawful assembly to the authorities but he had no intention of doing so. He might not believe in Purgatory but he could understand why others did. Purgatory was of poetic worth; a half-way house for the damaged soul, offering the distant hope of salvation.

Sometimes he wished he had his mother’s clarity of conviction. There were no half measures for her. The older she got the greater her moral certainty. Advance the opinion, however tentatively, that there should be an after-death opportunity for the soul to flourish and she would repeat Calvin’s statement that Purgatory was one of Satan’s deadly fictions. Lady Anne was against any watering down of the Reformation, filling her household with Nonconformist preachers, which only served to widen the gap in understanding between her and a forward-looking son who preferred natural philosophy to liturgical reform. It was, he supposed, a generational problem. Old people couldn’t comprehend a future in which they would have no part to play.

Francis felt guilty. He had undertaken this journey because his mother’s health was failing. Every day is a sick day, she had written in a rambling and incoherent letter. From what he could

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