‘Sir Hugh?’ Ranulf passed a hand in front of his master’s face. ‘Sir Hugh, what are you muttering about?’
‘I’m not muttering, I’m just speculating why Edward the King is so keen on Friar Roger; why he wants the Secretus Secretorum translated. Here we have a Franciscan, vowed to poverty, declaring he has spent an amount equivalent to almost one fifteenth of the entire Crown revenue on the pursuit of knowledge. Friar Roger, of low to middling birth, a scholar and a Franciscan! Where did he get such money? How on earth could he spend two thousand pounds?’
‘He’s lying,’ Bolingbroke declared. ‘He must be.’
‘Why should he lie?’ Corbett asked. ‘Shall I tell you something, William, I think Friar Roger made a mistake, he let something slip, and our King fastened on this. To disguise it, even from us, the King tried to change the text. He’s the only person who’s recently handled this manuscript,’ Corbett added grimly. ‘Look,’ he picked up the manuscript, ‘it’s obvious, indeed quite clumsy. Edward has done his best to reduce that amount. I’ve read it a number of times. First I dismissed it as a mark on the page. It was only when I borrowed Crotoy’s version that I realised what our wily royal master intends. Edward has spent treasure in his war against the Scots. He believes Friar Roger was an alchemist able to change base metal into gold. He also believes the Secretus Secretorum will demonstrate how he achieved this.’
‘I don’t believe this.’ Bolingbroke sat down on the stool. ‘I don’t believe in alchemy and the philosopher’s stone. And if our King does, why should he want to share such knowledge with the French?’
‘Ah.’ Corbett lifted his head and smiled. ‘What you don’t know, William, is that if the French are being cunning, so is our King. I am under strict instructions from Edward to compare notes with the French, to learn everything they know. I’m like a thresher in a barn. I have to separate the wheat from the chaff but make sure only the former is gathered by the King of England.’ He laughed. ‘I’m sure de Craon has received similar instruction.’
He tapped the bound manuscript. ‘I will confront the King with what I know, I’ll tell him not to be so suspicious. If he had told me this in the first place a great deal of hardship might have been avoided.’
‘Can we translate the Secretus?’ Ranulf asked.
‘Perhaps. We have discussed every single type of cipher, but there is one left, a secret language.’ Corbett paused to collect his thoughts. ‘Friar Roger wrote his Secretus Secretorum in Latin. He used that language as the basis to develop his own secret tongue, what clerks call “pig Latin” or “dog Latin”. Let me explain. To all words beginning with a vowel, a, e, i, o, u, you merely add the syllable “whey”, so the word for is, est, becomes estwhey, the word for love, amor, becomes amorwhey. It is simple enough.’ Corbett sat on the writing stool as the others gathered around. ‘Any word which begins with a consonant,’ he winked at Chanson, ‘that is, a letter which is not a vowel, the first letter is moved to the end of the word and the syllable “ay” is added at the beginning. So, in Latin, the word for are, sunt, becomes ayunts. Now,’ Corbett gestured, ‘this is a very simple version; you can change the rules to suit yourself, but as long as you know what the secret word is, in this case “whey” or “ay”, then any cipher becomes easy to translate.’ He gestured at the Secretus Secretorum. ‘Friar Roger based his secret language on that principle. If we could only find out what the key was, then the manuscript might give up its secrets and the King may have his treasure.’ He threw his quill down. ‘But it’s easier said than done.’
Corbett went and lay on the bed while Ranulf and Bolingbroke began a heated discussion about what he had told them. He stretched out, half listening to Chanson, who, bored with the chatter of clerks, had returned to mending a bit which, he claimed, could be made more comfortable for the horse’s mouth. Corbett stared up at the coloured tester above the bed. He didn’t know whether to be angry or laugh at the King’s considerable deceit, but that was Edward, suspicious and wary, a man who truly believed, though for different reasons than the Good Lord intended, that the right hand should not know what the left hand was doing.
Where had this all begun? Corbett reflected. Until late summer Edward had been engaged in trying to break the Treaty of Paris and escape the moral and legal obligation of marrying off the Prince of Wales to Philip’s only daughter Isabella. The King had worried away at this as a mastiff would a piece of meat, giving Corbett no peace. The Keeper of the Secret Seal had, in the hot months of July and August, moved to the Tower as more and more reports flooded in from his spies in France, Gascony and Flanders. Edward had prayed, lighting great tapers in front of his favourite saints, that Corbett’s spies would find some pretext for the English to repudiate the Treaty of Paris and all it entailed. Were Philip’s troops massing on the Gascony border? Would Philip hand over the disputed castle of Mauleon? Would the French pay the dowry payments? Would the French insist that the Prince of Wales be sent to Paris for a betrothal ceremony? Were French ships beginning to gather in the Channel ports? Corbett had become exasperated with the King’s constant demands for information. In the end, all he could prove was that Philip was as cunning and wily as Edward. In September there had been a respite. The King had travelled to the royal palace of Woodstock, just outside Oxford, and returned full of praise for the writings of Friar Roger Bacon. The libraries of the Halls of Oxford, Cambridge and elsewhere were ransacked as the King collected the dead Franciscan’s books. He had become fascinated with the Secretus Secretorum and indulged in a royal rage when he learnt that the University of the Sorbonne in Paris owned a similar copy.
‘Yes,’ Corbett muttered, ‘that’s when the dance began.’
‘Sir Hugh?’
‘Nothing, Ranulf, I’m just talking to myself.’ Corbett returned to his reflections. Edward had dispatched the most cloying letters to his ‘sweet cousin’ in Paris, asking if it would be possible for the French Crown to loan him their copy of the Secretus Secretorum. Philip, of course, had politely refused. Nevertheless, the French King’s curiosity had been piqued. Corbett didn’t know whether Philip had been motivated by his arch-rival’s interest or had been following a similar vein himself. Edward, of course, became deeply suspicious, and when his clerks, including Corbett, were unable to translate the cipher used in the Secretus Secretorum, the English King had given way to even darker suspicions. Was his copy of the book truly valid? Corbett had been given strict instructions to establish the truth.
He’d travelled to Paris himself to instruct Ufford and Bolingbroke. They had discovered how the French had already copied the Secretus Secretorum. Corbett had told them to ignore all other work but to steal or buy, by any means possible, the French version. Ufford and Bolingbroke had cast about, searching like good hunting dogs for a track to follow. They had been delighted when approached by someone in the University only too willing to sell them valuable information. They had been invited to Magister Thibault’s revelry and everything should have gone according to plan. They had hired the Roi des Clefs, the King of Keys, and, for all Corbett knew, even the young courtesan who had kept Magister Thibault amused, but then something had gone wrong. Thibault had disturbed them and been killed whilst Ufford and Bolingbroke had to flee for their lives. Corbett recalled the gruesome details about the Roi des Clefs: how his hand had been so badly injured that Ufford had had no choice but to cut his throat. A grisly death, Corbett reflected, for a man who had boasted that no lock could withstand his secret keys and devices. Ufford, too, had been killed, Bolingbroke narrowly escaping with his life.