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‘wrong-headed’ and ‘lacking in common decency.’ Even Dame Julia disapproved of its unnecessarily strident tone. Among a score of emails there was only one favourable response.
     
Subject:
TLS REVIEW
From:
[email protected]
Date:
05/04/2014   10:36
To:
[email protected]
    Well done! I have just read your absolutely brilliant review. To find an academic challenging the biographical nonsense about Shakespeare is indeed heartening. If you want to know the man behind the artist you should start by going to Lambeth Palace Library and examining a letter written on 18 December 1593 by the spy Anthony Standen. He was a double-agent who worked for the Earl of Essex. Standen’s report contains a number code that was later used by Elizabethan writers to cast doubt on Shakespeare’s authorship of his epic poems.
     
    What utter hogwash! There was no contemporary Shakespeare criticism containing a number code and who in their right mind would connect Shakespeare with espionage. His correspondent must be a crank. Yet perhaps he shouldn’t be too hasty.
    Freddie had a gut feeling that he’d reached some kind of crossroad and that things were about to change in his life. And he was in favour of any new direction that might lead him towards the delectable Dr Samantha Dilworth. Lambeth Palace was little more than a stone’s throw away from the Globe where she was attending a theatre workshop and Bard-lite had written of a secret cipher. As she was a cryptographer, this gave him the perfect excuse to get in touch with her again. What a stroke of luck.
    First though he needed to swat up on the Elizabethan spy. Find out what his story was.

THE DOUBLE AGENT
    It took three blows of the axe to sever the sinews in the neck and still she wasn’t done. He could see the lips moving when her head was held up by the executioner. What was she trying to say?
    Anthony Standen woke on his flea-ridden bolster with sweat pooling between his shoulder blades. He had been having one of his nightmares about Mary Stuart’s botched execution. He had talked to herbalists about these vivid dreams and been told they came from overeating. Last night he had dined at Hampton Court on stuffed roast boar with creamed almonds and venison pie. Such big feasts were only to be expected when the bony old queen with the dyed red hair was in residence. As a minor courtier he was not invited to sleep off his overindulgence in the palace and had had to ride across the river to his lodgings in Kingston; a jolting, unpleasant journey that had done little for his digestion.
    Standen groaned and flexed his cramping leg in a truckle bed much too short for his six foot frame. Height was a double-edged sword. It gave him a commanding presence but made it harder for him to blend into the background. He remembered Secretary Walsingham telling him: “Her Majesty likes her spies small, submissive and Protestant at heart. You are none of these things.” And it had counted against him.
    The true allegiance of an English Catholic who had taken money from the Scottish, Spanish and Portuguese governments and the Grand Duke of Tuscany would always be in doubt. Sometimes even he couldn’t remember whose interest he was serving as Pompeo Pellegrini, Andre Sandal or Monsieur la Faye. There were other aliases too, for Anthony Standen was the most accomplished actor in the secret theatre of European espionage.
    He had started off with a belief in good and evil, until the good got tainted and became a lesser evil. Familiarity had bred contempt. He knew the Holy Roman Empire was far from holy; saw the veneration of Catholic saints and relics as money-making stratagems and considered the dissolution of the monasteries to be the biggest English land grab since the Norman invasion. All of which left him without a moral compass.
    Easing himself off his uncomfortable mattress the extra-special agent removed his nightshirt and looked in disgust at the limp appendage between his legs. Only a few