My grandmother looks at the clock. It is almost half-past eight.
‘Without going into too many more details, your grandfather had a rather peculiar time in SOE. You could ask him about it when you are a bit older. But, although I have been rambling a little, I wanted to set the scene for you properly. Your grandfather is a brave man, fiercely proud and stubborn, and he never fully forgave BP for not letting him in. Of course, he ended up having a more interesting war than any of us, but he knew – we all knew – that, barring Turing and a few others, your grandfather was the best cryptanalyst in the country. After the war, I settled into the work I have been doing ever since, trying to formulate a proof for the Riemann Hypothesis and teaching mathematics. But your grandfather retained a certain anti-establishment attitude, a sort of I’ll show them all spirit. After Turing died, he became more certain that he was going to show “them”. The officials at BP – the cream of the British cryptanalysts at the time – had put Turing under severe pressure. Later, of course, he was pushed over the edge by an unfair arrest to do with his homosexuality. All of this made your grandfather all the more determined to resist authority. To him, codes and ciphers were like rules – there to be broken. He wanted to show people that he, Peter Butler, could break the unbreakable, which was why he started work on the Stevenson/Heath Manuscript almost immediately.
‘The Stevenson/Heath Manuscript had first come to your grandfather’s attention in around 1934 or 1935 but he hadn’t paid it quite as much attention at the time. The manuscript, basically a pamphlet containing an intriguing background story and then a series of strange numbers and letters, was essentially an enciphered treasure map, and, not being that interested in treasure, your grandfather glanced over the article about it in The Cryptogram noting only the important or absurd details, which I remember he told a group of us over dinner one night. I remember we were all quite taken with the whole idea of it, that, although the enciphered “map” had been available to the public for almost a hundred years, no one had yet claimed the treasure.’
‘Did The Cryptogram exist all those years ago?’ I ask. There is a pile of magazines with this title on the bookshelves and I know my grandfather gets them every few months or so from the American Cryptogram Association.
‘Oh yes. Your grandfather was one of the very first members. It was another reason that he was so annoyed about the BP affair – most members of the ACA did work on cryptanalysis during the war in some capacity or other. Anyway, the Stevenson/Heath Manuscript was to cryptanalysts and treasure-hunters what the Riemann Hypothesis is to mathematicians. Anyone who could break it would receive not only the wealth the treasure would bring, but the immortality of being the person who actually cracked it. Your grandfather has always been obsessed with the Dumas novel, The Count of Monte Cristo. Do you know the story? It is about an honest sailor called Edmond Dantés who is betrayed by his friends and sent to an island prison where he is locked on his own, in a stone cell, for thirteen years. One day, another inmate, a priest, accidentally digs his way into Dantés’s cell while trying to dig a tunnel out. They become friends, and the priest teaches Dantés to read and write and together they spend several years digging a tunnel out of the prison. The priest knows of some buried treasure and, just before he dies, he gives Dantés a map. He tells him to finish the tunnel and find the treasure. But although he warns Dantés to use the treasure for good, Dantés swears to use it for revenge. Once free, and rich beyond his wildest dreams, he concocts the most complex plans for this revenge and eventually brings down all those who betrayed him. But in doing so, he also loses everything he held dear, including the woman he loves. The moral of the story is that revenge doesn’t make you happy in the end, but your grandfather never read it like that. He started fantasising that he would solve the puzzle of the Stevenson/Heath Manuscript, find the treasure, become famous and rich and then do something crazy like buy Cambridge University and turn it into a school for underprivileged children, or a rescue-centre for animals. It was completely absurd, the whole thing, and we argued about it. Eventually he admitted that yes, he did understand that revenge was wrong and no, he wasn’t that interested in the treasure. But he still worked on that manuscript every day for about thirty-five years.’
‘Then what happened?’
‘He solved it.’
Chapter Sixteen
Francis Stevenson was at first taken to be a basket of eggs when he was found on the doorstep of the Younge family in a village near Tavistock, in about 1605. It was Mary Younge, the wife of the yeoman Thomas Younge, who found him. She thought he was eggs because he was in a tiny wicker basket covered with a piece of cloth. She thought he was eggs because Fanny Price had said she would leave some there. History doesn’t explain why this would be: the Younge family had many of their own chickens, enough to supply the whole village with eggs. Perhaps it was because Fanny had claimed to have a very particular kind of egg she wanted her neighbour to try. Perhaps it was some sort of debt. But the basket didn’t contain eggs, anyway. It contained a baby.
Mary had a fairly good idea where the baby had come from. She had recently befriended a poor young woman called Elizabeth Stevenson whom she had met at the village market. Elizabeth, heavily pregnant and desperate, was there waiting while her husband and sons tried to find work in the area, having been turned away from the Tavistock stannary. Enclosure had recently taken away their small plot of land and their cottage in a Cornish village and the family were on the move, their few possessions piled into a tiny, haphazard wagon. They had already been stopped by highwaymen three times, the last of whom had taken such pity on them that he had actually given them a few pence and spared them and their few remaining possessions. Mary had bought this poor woman some bread, and in return, heard her life story, which was just sadness itself. Mary’s own family had been small farmers but had retained their land. She knew that she was lucky. She had married well – to her childhood sweetheart – and she and her husband had land, animals and money. Her male children would soon attend school. In fact, she had hopes that the eldest, Thomas the younger, might make it as far as grammar school and then, perhaps, university. Her life, she knew, could have been a lot worse.
The Younge family opened their doors to Elizabeth Stevenson, her husband Robert and their children. Thomas found work for Robert on the farm, and the children worked as much as they could in the house and the fields. There was talk of opportunities in the town of Taunton, in the next county of Somerset, which had many new jobs in textiles and wool. Robert had also considered a life at sea but was too old, and didn’t know what his family would do while he was away. In the end, Mary never knew what happened to the Stevensons. One morning, she got up and simply found them gone. There had been a small argument the evening before – one of the Stevenson children had stolen some cheese – and this had obviously made them feel unwelcome. Mary cursed herself for even mentioning it. Why had she done such a thing? But perhaps it was time for the family to be on their way anyway. Winter was approaching and there was less work for them anyway.
She knew without a doubt that the baby that appeared on the doorstep a week later was Elizabeth’s. And she understood why she had left this child; of course she did. This tiny, blue-eyed boy’s future would have been wholly uncertain with his parents. The few certainties of their lives weren’t at all pleasant to contemplate. They didn’t have a home, or work. They might not have enough food, or adequate shelter, for many years to come. At any stage, Robert might be accused of vagrancy and put in the stocks or flogged. On their way to Taunton, or wherever they were going, they would certainly be robbed again. A baby’s chances of survival in a big town, with unsanitary conditions, was very slim – if it even arrived there safely at all. A mother has to do what’s best for her child. Mary, with her four strong children, knew she would have done the same for them in the same circumstances. By leaving her newborn at the farm, Elizabeth had done the only thing she could do for her son. She had given him a small chanc
e in life. Fresh air, food, shelter; if the Younges were kind to him and didn’t just dump him somewhere, he would have a good chance. After a short discussion, the Younges indeed decided that, as they could easily feed one more mouth, it was their Christian duty to look after the boy until such time as he could make his own way in the world. And they thought maybe his parents would come back for him one day, although they never did.
Another male child was a useful addition to a farming family, of course, and Francis grew to be a strong, useful worker. At six he was already capable of much of the work of a fully-grown man. He sowed seeds, milked cows, picked fruit, mucked out horses, tended to chickens and pigs, churned butter and helped Mary and her daughter Molly make cheese. Molly, the same age as Francis, was the youngest of the family and by the time she and Francis were nine or so, the older boys from the family were attending grammar school. The family was still doing well. The surplus from the farm was going to market twice a week or, increasingly often, it was instead being taken by carriage to distant markets where a better price could be obtained. This angered local people. The Younges had always been well-liked, and known as a good family. But now their popularity seemed to wane. Thomas the elder didn’t see anything wrong with making good money from sending his best cheeses, hides and preserves to markets in London and Bristol, but the villagers didn’t agree. It was the job of yeoman farmers to provide cheap food for local people, they maintained. There were two good arguments for this. The first was simple. Villagers had to buy food from somewhere. If the local farmer wasn’t selling it to them, how would they get it? Would they have to give up their own trades and all become farmers? If they did, who would make shoes, weave cloth, provide medicines, play the fool? Everyone had their role, and the role of the yeoman and the farmer was to sell food to local people.
There was also a wider economic argument. The villagers pointed out that Thomas and Mary didn’t buy shoes and cloth in London; they bought these items locally, in the village market. But how could they expect the local weavers and cobblers to work with no food? If the villagers were forced to buy more expensive food at market – rather absurdly brought in from farmers miles away, for much higher prices – they would have to increase the prices of their own services in order to survive. Making money from distant trade would always be a false economy, they said. The Younges might make a profit today, but tomorrow it would all even out again as prices went up to reflect what was going on. All prices would go up eventually, and for what? Far better to simply trade locally. But Thomas Younge had made agreements and was not about to go back on them now. These arguments simmered for several years.
Francis always knew his family background, but the villagers didn’t. As far as they were concerned, he was simply a member of the Younge family. He got on well with most people as a child. He was strong and friendly and, some said, rather handsome. People even said he looked like his ‘father’, Thomas the elder. One of the village girls, a physician’s daughter named Sarah Marchant, soon developed strong feelings for him. But she was always frustrated, since Francis was always to be found with his sister, Molly. However many excuses Sarah made to go over to his family’s farm, she’d always find them together, working or, in summer, messing around in hay barns or riding horses over the rough land, into some faraway, probably forbidden forest. Sarah never liked horses, and couldn’t ride. Sometimes she would hang around with Francis and Molly for a whole morning, helping with their work and sharing a lunch of apples, bread and ale, only to see them disappear on their horses all afternoon, leaving her behind on her own. She would occasionally stir trouble when she arrived home, bored and lonely: ‘Father, why does Molly Younge dress in that odd fashion?’ or, ‘Father, the Younge children really are rather wild. I fear they may turn to robbery before very long.’ Most of this fell on deaf ears, until Sarah stumbled upon the best piece of gossip she could ever wish for.
Francis knew that his position in the Younge family was unstable. Although he felt great fondness for the Younges, and they for him, it was clear that he wouldn’t be taking over the family land after Thomas the elder died. This would fall to either Paul or Thomas the younger. So what would he do? He would have to learn a trade. For that, he would have to take an apprenticeship somewhere, but he didn’t want to leave his comfortable, warm house. Every night he dreamed of this grey, rainy urban future, without his adopted parents and without Molly, and he wept. He also wept for the mother he would never know and the education he would never receive. The Younges were kind people, but their kindness did not stretch to an education for a foundling child. Francis knew he was going to have to make his own way in the world, but where and what? And when?
As he approached his twelfth birthday various things happened. Firstly, he and Molly learned to read and write. John, the most wayward and rebellious of the Younge family, had stopped attending school. Now he was at the farm during the day, he worked alongside the others, which made the work disappear more quickly, leaving the children more time to get up to mischief. Francis and Molly were able to show John how to navigate the woods on a horse, and where the local highwaymen kept their hideouts; and in return he was able to tell them how to conjugate verbs in Latin, and how to write down these verbs. A year later, John left for Plymouth to go to sea on a merchant vessel bound for Africa. But Molly and Francis had learned a lot from him. They started writing messages to each other in a strange combination of Latin and curious words and symbols that they had made up. Most people in the village couldn’t read, but even those who could would never be able to decipher this hocus-pocus text. The strange letters they sent did, of course, contain details of their love affair; not just notes about meeting places and times, but poems and declarations, sometimes five pages long. For the next couple of years they also both kept personal journals. The two of them were obsessed with writing – the only thing they cared about more was each other.
Molly was already pregnant on the day Sarah saw them kissing in the orchard, but nobody knew that. Of course, Sarah had seen all she needed to see, and had run home, feeling sick, to immediately tell her father. What she thought she had seen was incest: brazen incest, in the open air. As Francis and Molly lay half-clothed beneath the trees, they had no way of knowing that they had been seen and that this would be their last time together. You never really know what is going to happen in the next five minutes of your life. Sarah’s father would perhaps have told his daughter not to be so silly – he was one of the few people who knew of Francis’s genealogy, having tended to him as a young child – had he not been as aggrieved by the Younges’ trade practices as the rest of the village. So, despite what he knew, and despite the fact that he had been a family friend, he went to complain to the Younges about what Sarah had seen. By now, Sarah had also made up a story about Francis trying to proposition her. Was there no end to his evil? Lying with his own sister and then trying to lie with the physician’s daughter: it was too much. There were stiff penalties for this kind of thing in 1618 and Francis Stevenson had no other option than to run for it as soon as he heard what was going on. He had no desire to be lynched by the villagers. Mary was sad to see him go, but not as distraught as poor Molly. The two women helped him make his getaway as Thomas Younge and the physician sat in the parlour discussing what Sarah had seen. It was clear that Francis would soon be apprehended and accused. Mary grabbed a few clothes for him and some bread, cheese and cider, while Molly just cried. Perhaps she already knew she was pregnant with his child. Stuffing his things into a knapsack along with a small purse filled with coins, Mary told Francis to take one of the horses and put as much distance between himself and the parish as possible. He obeyed.
As he went, he called to Molly, ‘Sister, I will be back for you!’
She responded: ‘I will wait, brother.’
It hadn’t been incest, but perhaps it may as well have been.
Plymouth was as grey as a dead man’s face when Francis arrived. Wet with night-time mist, it smelled rotten. Fi
sh, sweat, blood and grime mingled in the filthy streets. Everything was encrusted with salt. When Francis licked his lips, he tasted salt. Salt even seemed to be in his eyes, making them sting. The docks were noisy, dangerous, foul. But at least he was safe, away from the village, far from the possibility of lynching. But something was making him feel uneasy. There was no colour here, and no open spaces. It felt almost as if he was being crowded into the sea.
There was one inn near the docks that Francis could afford, in theory, for a week, while he tried to get a place working on a ship. You could make good money going to sea, if you were prepared to take some risks and work hard. In a few years you could make your way up to mate, or even captain, if you did not drown or die in some other unpleasant way. The possibility of death didn’t frighten Francis now, however. He was grieving for his lost love and didn’t particularly care what happened to him. He missed his home and his adopted family but knew that part of his life was over. The long-term plan, inasmuch as he had one, was of course to go back for Molly as a rich man, possibly in disguise. But how to get to this position of riches? Much later, a wise man would say that going to sea is like going to prison with the added possibility of drowning. But Francis thought the sea would bring him his freedom. He sensed it in the fetid air around him. This was to be his life.
After two nights at the inn, Francis had learned something of what he could expect at sea, and of the fates of recent adventurers connected with this port. All Plymouth was still abuzz with stories about Sir Walter Ralegh, who had so recently been captured here and then beheaded in London on a charge of treason and piracy. Francis became rather fascinated by the story of Ralegh, the soldier who had become a sailor and then a favoured courtier, before turning sailor once more. Francis Stevenson was not old enough to remember anything of Elizabeth’s reign but Ralegh had apparently been quite a favourite of hers. The new king, James, on the other hand, didn’t feel the same way and, on a vague charge of treason, had imprisoned Ralegh in the Tower of London for thirteen years. In his time in the Tower, Ralegh wrote his History of the World, which Francis certainly later read. King James eventually set Ralegh free on the condition that he would immediately go treasure-hunting on his behalf. There were still men from this ill-fated voyage hanging around Plymouth, talking of the supposed gold mine on the great Orinoco river that was never found. Instead, of course, Ralegh and his men took the Spanish settlement of St Thomas, killing and plundering for what turned out to be only two bars of gold. Baffled and humiliated, Ralegh returned to Plymouth, only to be taken to London to be swiftly beheaded, his last words apparently being: ‘This is a sharp medicine, but it will cure all diseases’. King James was suddenly trying to impress the Spanish, it turned out, although no one seemed to have told Ralegh that. Francis Stevenson lapped up all these stories about Ralegh, beginning what would become a lifelong fascination with narratives of adventure, piracy and life on the high seas. Of course, Stevenson was to come to live this life of adventure himself. But before this life could really start, he still had to find his first job.