The Secret World of Christoval Alvarez Read online

  She smiled.

  ‘But our history is not all sadness. Your grandfather and I married for love, which was very unusual at the time. You should know that the old Christian Portuguese aristocracy had a horror of tainting their blood with any New Christian pollution, but Grandpapa inherited his estate young – he was wealthy, independent, stubborn, and in love. My own parents were unsure about the match, but I think that they felt I would be safe, married to one of the old nobility, so they allowed our marriage to take place. My one regret is that your mother is our only child.’

  ‘But now you have us,’ I said.

  ‘Indeed. Now we have you.’

  The case of my father was different. He came from an urban background, a novos cristãos family from Lisbon, wealthy merchants who traded with the Levant and along the new sea routes to east and west opened up by Prince Henry the Navigator and his successors.

  Oh, Portugal was a great nation for a time, not the sad occupied country she has become. My father’s family had always produced doctors as well as merchants so, while his elder brother entered the family shipping business, my father studied medicine, first at Salamanca and then at Bologna, before returning to Portugal and taking up his position teaching and practising medicine in Coimbra. As a child in Lisbon my father had witnessed massacres of New Christians, so he was always careful. When we attended one of the secret synagogues, we made our way in small groups, never more than three together; Isabel and I would go with our mother and then, looking down from the women’s gallery, see my father’s and Felipe’s bowed heads below us, never acknowledging them or speaking to them until we were safe at home again.

  e

  Now, in Sir Francis Walsingham’s house in Seething Lane, Master Phelippes led me into an adjoining room, smaller than the room we quitted but also laid out as an office. There were three tables, two of them stacked with packets of papers secured with cord. The third, under the window, held just a few sheets covered with writing, a pile of blank paper, an inkwell and pen-knife, an hour-glass, a pewter pot holding untrimmed quills, and one quill already neatly trimmed. Everything was lined up with rigid precision. Phelippes sat down behind this table, with his back to the window, and motioned me to a chair in front of him.

  ‘You will see why I need an assistant.’ He gestured toward the tied bundles of documents. ‘More than twenty packets of letters and other documents have been delivered this week, all in cipher and all to be transcribed and copied before they are despatched on their way.’

  I must have looked at him blankly, for he sighed, removed his glasses and rubbed his eyes. Then he hooked the wires over his ears again and clasped his hands together on the table in front of him.

  ‘As Sir Francis has explained, our work here is of the most secret nature. You must reveal nothing, nothing of it to anyone beyond this building. Do you understand? Not even to your father. To do so could result in peril to the state and to the Queen herself. And would almost certainly send you to the Tower. Do you understand?’

  I shivered and swallowed. His words were like the grip of icy hands around my throat. I understood, certainly. His manner left no room for doubt. One did not speak lightly of imprisonment in the Tower.

  ‘I understand.’ My voice croaked.

  He fixed me with a piercing gaze, then nodded, as if he was satisfied.

  ‘Very well. You will have to know something about the work in order to carry it out satisfactorily. I am told that you are fluent in both French and Spanish. The letters will mostly be written in these languages, though some will be in English.’

  I nodded, as if I understood. So they were letters. Were they perhaps despatches from the intelligencers Sir Francis was said to employ all over Europe? But then they would surely be in English. And why so many all at once?

  As if he suspected what was passing through my mind, Phelippes glanced aside at the bundles of documents, then looked back at me.

  ‘These letters have been accumulating at the French embassy here in London for nearly a year. Ever since the Scottish queen was forbidden to hold communication with the outside world in the wake of the Parry conspiracy.’

  I caught my breath in an audible gasp. It was common knowledge that the Parry conspiracy had nearly succeeded in assassinating our Queen and putting the Scottish queen Mary on the throne, backed by an invasion from France financed by Mary’s cousin, the Duke of Guise. Parry’s head, what was left of it, was one of those still spiked above the gate to London Bridge, through which I had passed a few weeks before with Simon Hetherington.

  ‘But how . . .’ I said, ‘I mean, why do you have all these letters now?’

  ‘One of Sir Francis’s agents – you do not need to know who – has infiltrated the conspiracy of Catholic exiles and priests in France who are plotting the overthrow of the Queen, with the additional aid of Spain. He has been entrusted with carrying these letters to Chartley Manor in Staffordshire, where the Scottish queen is now held. However, before they are delivered, they must all be deciphered and copied, then resealed. We have devised a method of passing the letters secretly, which Mary and her fellow conspirators believe to be safe.’

  ‘Won’t they be suspicious? If the seals must be broken . . .’

  Phelippes smiled. It transformed his face, making him look younger.

  ‘Arthur!’ he called, ‘come here a minute.’

  A door on the far side of the room opened. I had thought it was a cupboard and indeed from the glimpse I had of what lay beyond it hardly seemed more than a cupboard.

  ‘Arthur,’ said Phelippes, ‘this is Christoval Alvarez, our new code-breaker.’ He turned to me. ‘Arthur Gregory can forge and replace a seal so perfectly that even the seal-maker himself would believe it genuine. He has a fine hand at copying other men’s writing as well.’

  Gregory was a young man, younger than Phelippes. He bowed and smiled shyly as I bowed in return.

  ‘But I have no talent for breaking codes, Master Alvarez,’ he said. ‘It is a mystery to me. I believe Master Phelippes is some kind of magician.’

  ‘Nonsense, Arthur.’ I could not tell whether Phelippes was pleased or annoyed by the comment. It seemed to me he was a man whose kept his feelings well hidden. ‘Here are the three originals of the letters I have decoded this morning. Wait.’ He took back one of the sheets. ‘We’ll see how good Master Alvarez’s skills are.’

  Arthur Gregory withdrew to his tiny room and Phelippes cleared a space for me on one of the tables, laying out paper, quill, pen-knife and ink.

  ‘Let us see what you make of this. I will tell you only that it is in French.’

  I sharpened the quill, handed back the pen-knife, and pressed the paper flat with my left hand. Two symbols appeared so often I was sure they were dummies, that is, meaningless symbols dotted amongst the true symbols to create confusion. Phelippes turned over an hour-glass, then carefully lifted the seal on another letter with the tip of his pen-knife. I began to lay out the symbols in a grid, omitting the dummies. The sand trickling through the hour-glass unnerved me. I had not asked for this employment, but a certain pride demanded that I should not fail in it.

  In the end it did not prove very difficult. I could guess that certain of the words might be ‘Your Majesty’, ‘army’, ‘invade’, ‘Duke of Guise’, ‘supporters’ – all in French, of course. The sand was not yet halfway through the glass when I handed my deciphered version of the letter to Phelippes. I had written it out roughly in French, then more neatly in English. The contents were of no great moment, talking vaguely of gathering support amongst the English exiles in Paris and Dieppe and a promise of financial support from Spain (which even to my inexperienced eye looked unconvincing). The letter was signed ‘Thomas Germin’.

  Phelippes seemed surprised that I had finished so quickly. He read through both my French and English versions, then nodded.

  ‘Good. That was well done. Take the original to Arthur now, for resealing.’

  I knocked at the other door an
d went in. There was barely room for me inside, for Gregory’s desk spanned the width of the room and the door barely cleared the back of his chair. He was as meticulous as Phelippes, it seemed, for there was one neat row of seals along the back of his desk and in front of them a row of sticks of seal-wax in many different shades. Along the wall there were shelves holding more seals and a collection of blanks. An array of tiny tools – like those an etcher or engraver might use – was laid out on the lowest shelf.

  ‘Master Phelippes says this is to be sealed now.’

  ‘Did you pass the test?’

  ‘I think so.’

  He smiled warmly at me. ‘It is good work, you know. We strive to keep England safe.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Yes, I do understand.’

  Phelippes looked up from his work as I returned. ‘I will select more letters now for you to decipher,’ he said. ‘To allay suspicion we must work from the earliest dates first.’

  I looked at him in dismay. ‘But I cannot stay now. I am expected at the hospital this morning. My father and I were about to leave when Poley came.’ I would not give him the distinction of calling him ‘Master’ Poley.

  Phelippes frowned. ‘That is inconvenient, but perhaps you had better go today. Sir Francis will come to some arrangement with the governors of St Bartholomew’s. Unless I send word to the contrary, I will expect you tomorrow afternoon.’

  He turned back to his papers and I understood that I was dismissed.

  I found my way to the back stairs and out of the house, encountering no one but a scullery boy. Clearly Sir Francis’s servants were used to all manner of strange people coming and going by this back route, for he paid me no attention. I hurried back across London to home and found, as I expected, that my father was gone.

  ‘He left straight after breakfast.’ Joan looked at me curiously, clearly keen to know where I had been and what I had been doing. ‘He said you were to go to the hospital as soon as you came home.’

  ‘I’ll be off,’ I said, cutting myself a hunk of bread. I was hungry after my ordeal and it was already past midday. ‘Is there no cheese?’

  ‘Where it usually is,’ she said tartly, banging into the corner of the kitchen with her broom.

  I found the cheese in the hanging meat safe, cut a piece to top my bread, and headed out of the house, eating as I went. Although the epidemic was over, there was always much work to be done at the hospital, so I had no chance to speak to my father in private until we had eaten that evening and Joan had gone out to visit friends.

  ‘Well,’ said my father, ‘how did matters go with Sir Francis? Why did he want to see you?’

  ‘I am to work at code-breaking for him. They have a lot of documents that need deciphering. They seem to think they can take me away from my work with you. Can they do that?’

  He frowned. ‘I suppose a man as powerful as Sir Francis can do what he chooses with the likes of us. But I shall miss your help.’

  ‘Perhaps it will just be for a short time. There is a senior code-breaker there already, Thomas Phelippes. I think there is too much work for him at the moment.’

  ‘Let us hope so.’

  I did not feel that revealing Phelippes’s name was breaking my promise to keep silent about the content of the work, but I was troubled that I could not talk to my father about it. I carried too heavy a burden of secrets already and needed to share it.

  Lying awake in bed that night, my mind buzzed with the disturbing events of the day. I feared Poley. It was clear that he would use his knowledge of my disguise to blackmail me whenever he chose. If my position had been fraught with danger before, it was perilous now, with such knowledge in the possession of a man I was convinced was unscrupulous and self-serving. As for the work for Sir Francis and Master Phelippes, well, it seemed straightforward enough, even interesting. I loved the challenge of deciphering codes and the secret nature of the work did not trouble me, though I would have liked my father to know how I was to be employed. My life was composed of secrets. I thumped the pillow under my head and drew the blankets up around my ears, for my chamber up under the pitched ceiling was bitterly cold, draughts from the gaping shutters running over my face like water. In the end, far into the night, I slept.

  e

  That summer when I was twelve was long and languorous. The vividness with which it remains in my memory seems to be some special quality of that summer, and not purely because it was the last one. It must have been early June when my father took us up to my grandparents’ solar. He stayed longer than usual, I remember, as if he too were affected by the special quality of the light that year as it gilded the white-washed walls in the early morning, or grew roseate and dreamy when the sun sank in the evenings, sliding sleepily down into the unseen Atlantic. I remember sitting with him one slow evening under an ancient olive tree as bent and gnarled as an old man, a tree which my grandfather said had been planted by the Romans who once farmed this land. I was reading aloud to my father in Italian from that fearful book Il Principe by Niccoló Machiavelli, because my father believed I should understand the true motives of princes and men of power. The shadows of the olive leaves danced across the page, for a light breeze always started up in the evening, and I found that the words seemed to tremble in the uncertain light, making it difficult to read. I glanced at my father and saw that he had fallen asleep, his head propped against the twisted trunk of the tree and his mouth a little open.

  I smiled and laid the book aside, for I found it odious and boring. The breeze fanned my face, intoxicating with the scent of the new-cut hay meadows, and I tilted my head back to watch the moving pattern of leaves against the sky. Then, as if my mind had suddenly clicked into a different position, like the gears on a clock, I saw a pattern of moving sky and clouds against the fixed and unmoving leaves. This sudden new quality of vision entranced me, so that I wondered if I could work the change myself. From where I was sitting I could see my grandfather’s prize stallion down in the water meadow below. He was a creature of air and fire, of Arab breeding, scarcely seeming to touch the ground when he flew across the meadow in the sheer joy of living. But he was still now, his head up and his ears pricked forward as if he were listening to something only he could hear. His off fore was lifted slightly, with the tip of the hoof just brushing the ground. I fixed my eyes on him, his solid muscles shivering slightly under the gleaming chestnut coat, the whole, ecstatic shape of him outlined against the soft green of the meadow. I concentrated my mind on the grass that framed him, straining to turn my vision inside out, and, with that almost audible click, it happened again. The stallion became a space, an absence, and the shape of the meadow grass was solid and looming, even menacing in the urgent authority of its presence, its need to be recognised and acknowledged. My heart gave an uncertain jump of excitement, almost of fear, as I gained a first glimpse of the way substance can be transformed into shadow, shadow into substance.

  I remember other things about that summer. How I seemed to grow suddenly taller. When I walked and looked about me, I felt as if I had been transformed into some strange creature, like one of the wandering circus players who came sometimes to Coimbra to perform in the streets – fire-eaters and rope dancers and the masked characters from the Italian Commedia dell’Arte: Pantalone, Arlecchino, Pulcinella, and Il Capitano. I was like the man who walked about on stilts, for overnight the ground seemed much further away, so that I had a sense almost of flying, of being no longer in touch with the solid ground beneath my feet.

  And I remember one day of scalding heat when I took refuge in the cool stone dairy amongst the dishes where the milk was set so that the cream might settle on the surface and I watched the maids, with their bare arms freckled from the sun, languidly skimming off the cream with shallow ladles, and although they talked and laughed and even sang amongst themselves as they worked, it was as if I had grown deaf, for I could not hear them. I heard the chink of the ladles against the wide pottery bowls and I heard the silken sound of the cre
am pouring into the jugs for the house and I heard some small bird chirping in a bush of rosemary outside the open door, but I did not hear the girls, whose voices had dwindled to a murmur like a distant stream. And I wished that I could be one of these girls, at their slow and quiet work here in the cool dairy, and that I need never go back to Coimbra and my lessons and the secrecy that surrounded us there.

  One day Isabel and I went to pick flowers in the meadow where the stallion grazed. She dared me to ride him, and I did. I have never felt such unity with a horse. We galloped together across the grass, my fingers twisted in the coarse hair of his mane, my skirts hitched up around my hips, and the spicy scent of thyme and the pungent, feline scent of basil, crushed by his great hoofs, rising around me. When at last I flung myself to the ground and kissed his nose by way of thanks, Isabel laughed and held out to me a garland she had made of meadow flowers, and set it on my head like a crown.

  Strange, how some memories stay with us, clear and sharp in the mind, while others are forever lost. I can see my sister smiling as she garlanded me with flowers, feel her breath warm on my cheek, as if it had happened this morning, and not in that vanished summer.

  It was late July when my father sent word for my mother to bring me back to the town for a few days. Some famous mathematician was visiting the university from Bologna, one of my father’s old teachers, and he wanted to meet me. I do not know what my father had told him, but I was sullen and disobliging when told I must go.

  We travelled to Coimbra the next day, leaving Felipe and Isabel with my grandparents, reaching our town house in the evening. My father did not return until I had gone upstairs to bed, where my maid helped me to undress and brushed my thick curls, which I wore long and which were tangled and unkempt after my unruly weeks in the country. I did not see my father until the next morning, when he took me to meet the visitor in the garden of the university.