Free The Queen's Cipher by David Taylor Page A

once loved, just older and sadder, diminished by life’s little defeats.
    They had met again at a cocktail party. She had been surrounded by admirers praising her OUDS lecture on Shakespeare’s love poetry when she noticed him standing on his own, balancing a wine glass and plate in one hand and waving with the other. The shock immobilised her. He had said her name. They had left the party and gone for a drink in the Eagle and Child.
    What hung between them was the weight of history, a recollection of their last parting. At twenty-one, she had been about to embark on postgraduate studies in Rome; he a year younger was facing up to finals. They had spoken of marriage but she had ended such hopes with a short, brutal letter to which there had been no reply: a mistake on her part and his too.
    At Sebastian’s insistence Julia had updated her personal story over gin and tonics. As a single woman she had avoided intimacy. This single-mindedness brought material rewards: an Oxford chair in her early forties and the respect of her peers. What she didn’t mention was her emotional emptiness. How a pillar of the Oxford establishment could be so riddled with self-doubt. If she didn’t understand it, how could anyone else.
    Sebastian had been more open about his failures. After Julia left him he had wallowed in misery. The upper second in Greats came as a bitter blow. Instead of bouncing back with a doctrinal thesis or some other display of intellectual resilience, he had settled for a lectureship at Queen’s University, Belfast, where, by his own admission, he had marked time. It was only on his return to England that his luck changed. One company followed another and all did well, particularly Much Ado Tours, which promised American tourists a memorable week of sightseeing and theatre in Shakespeare country. He was now wealthy but had no one on whom to spend his money.
    And here they were, having afternoon tea at the Randolph Hotel, staring at one another over a tiered cake stand full of thinly cut sandwiches, scones and cupcakes, wondering what to say next.
    “How is my professor today?” Sebastian asked.
    “Very well, thank you. The Verona conference was quite demanding.”
    “I can imagine.” He sounded listless and ill at ease.
    “What you cannot imagine is being propositioned by a Serbian professor with bad breath seeking support for his theory that Hamlet was a woman.”
    “Well, that’s a first at least,” said Sebastian with a grin.
    “Actually, it’s not a new idea. A nineteenth-century scholar claimed that Hamlet’s mind was essentially feminine in nature and wrote a gender-bending book about it.”
    “So what did your Serb do?”
    “He put a sweaty paw on my bottom and promised to teach me to hear the play with new ears. I told him there was no part of my body in need of his attention and would he kindly unhand me.”
    “Mind you,” she said, biting into a strawberry tartlet, “that wasn’t the only strange thing. An antique bookseller from Sussex came to my hotel asking me to authenticate a Francis Bacon letter. Curious cove – Major Duncan, I mean, not Bacon – could have been an actor.”
    “Small world,” Sebastian replied. “I ran into a Major Duncan at last year’s Frankfurt Book Fair. He was typically ex-Army, a self-important man with a clipped manner and a moustache to match.”
    She looked at him in disbelief. “My man was tall and florid, probably quite good-looking in his youth, and with a very rounded turn of phrase.”
    “Different chap altogether. The Major Duncan I met had a bookshop in Hove.”
    “The man I saw gave me a business card but wanted me to write to his home. I thought there was something odd about his address. A marina in Shoreham is hardly bookselling territory. And I fell for it. I’ve authenticated the letter in writing.”
    A dreadful thought entered her head. “My God,” she moaned, “he’s going to use my name to advance some half-baked theory about