Queen & Country Read Online Free PDF Page A

heard the name. He had read it in the letters, carefully endorsed, over and again. Phelippes wrote a small, distinctive hand. Hew came to know the shape of it, familiar as his own, before he met the man. Some while into his stay at Seething Lane, Laurence had produced a page of script in cipher.‘Cut your teeth on this. The quick is dead and gone, the answer is no longer now of any consequence, but it is knotted tight enough to put you to some exercise. It took Phelippes months to read the Latin script. What your hot brain makes of it, I will wait to see.’
    He had worried day and night for a week upon the text, but found that he could make no shape nor sense of it. It was, he saw at once, a simple substitution cipher, play for any child. A schoolboy could have solved it, he concluded furiously. Then he understood.
    Phelippes was a Cambridge man, his Latin pure and faultless. While Phelippes was a scholar of the first degree, those Jesuits, who wrote the ciphered text, were not. Their secrets had been framed in a pattern of mistakes, in grammar so contorted, incomplete and villainous, it defied all sense, but the method in its working showed itself to Hew. Alerted to the errors there, he solved it easily.
    His courage had been lifted to discover he could read a darkly ciphered script, to hear the very heartbeat of the man who wrote it, and to know his mind.
    It was not long after that, in November of that year – 1583, and a vicious winter then – when Walsingham returned, to notice him at last. This notice stilled in him a shiver of excitement, stirred by his success, a surge of foolish pride. He smiled now to recall how supple he had been, how tender to the blade on which he would be whet, how willing to be shaped and put to sharp effect. Sir Francis had not mellowed to him, nor improved in health. His words were brief and brusque, and spoken under cover of a wafting handkerchief, as though he might breathe in some malheur of the Scots, though Laurence had equipped Hew with clean water, soap and shirts. ‘You have been in this house now, how long? Two or three months? Then tis more than time for you to earn your keep. I have found a place for you. Master William Phillips, a merchant in cloth, seeks a privy clerk to assist him with his business at his place at Leadenhall. And also at the custom house.’
    In his greenness, Hew had echoed, showing his dismay. ‘I am to be a clerk?’
    â€˜What say you, sir? Too proud? Perhaps,’ Walsingham had pricked him, cruel in his rebuke, ‘you have some other friend, to keep you in that state in which you would be found?’
    â€˜By no means,’ he had answered, ‘should I be so proud. But I had thought . . . I had hoped, that the singular learning to which your honour has put me in the past two months, might have equipped me for a more singular service.’
    At that, the man had smiled. ‘And suppose that were the case, would you have expected I should advertise the fact? “This man is Hew Cullan. I have trained him for a spy.” I should not loose you on the world, as an honest clerk, whom no one would suspect?’
    Hew had begged his pardon then. ‘I did not understand.’
    â€˜That may be excused. But what I cannot let pass, is that you let your feelings show so plainly in your face. You have much to learn. Consider this a trial. William Phillips is one of the customers for wool in the port of London. In name at least, for in the last years pleading frailty or else by idle negligence, he has farmed his post out to a series of deputies. His deputy reports a strange occurrence in the custom house; an unusual case of fraud.’
    The custom house, by common knowledge, was rife with theft and fraud of every shape and kind from the petty to the grand, with the full collusion of the officers who worked there, most of whom were merchants too, and who had little recompense for service to the Crown. It was a