Gallup belonged to an international cabal of similarly minded cranks, who subscribed to the notion that Sir Francis Bacon was the true author of the plays and sonnets of William Shakespeare. Bacon, an English statesman and philosopher who ran Queen Elizabeth I’s printing press—among many occupations—was one of a number of Renaissance thinkers who dabbled in secret writing. In the sixteenth century Bacon had invented something called a “biliteral” cipher, with which—as he put it—it is possible to make anything signify anything. Bacon had shown that all you need are two characters or two symbols—A and B, say—to make any letter of the alphabet and spell out any word. For example, AAAAA can stand for A, AAAAB for B, AAABA for C, AAABB for D, and so forth. Communicating a full range of facts and ideas using only two symbols is slow and unwieldy, but it can be done. You could do the same with images—sun and moon, apples and oranges, men and women—or, if you happen to be a man who runs the queen’s printing press, with thin printed letters and fat ones. It was the same binary principle on which a number of more modern systems were also built: Morse, with its dots and dashes, and digital computers, with their 0s and 1s, are also binary systems.
Gallup—elderly, aristocratic, mild-mannered, fanatical—was convinced that Bacon had used a biliteral cipher to thread a message confessing his authorship through the printed type of Shakespeare’s First Folio. She had met Fabyan through a mutual acquaintance, and he had been instantly enamored of the earthshaking significance of her thesis. Gallup liked to inspect the typography of the folio with a magnifying glass, and she aimed to assemble a coterie of young women to apprentice with her and master her methods—bankrolled, of course, by Fabyan. For his part, her benefactor was fond of inviting reputable scholars to soirees at Riverbank and liked to offer lantern displays—the early version of a PowerPoint presentation—in an effort to impress them and persuade them of the Baconian thesis. It would be Elizebeth Smith’s job to help with research and to deliver these lectures, serving as the public face and PR engine of the Baconian effort. Fabyan believed that debunking William Shakespeare’s authorship would be the crowning intellectual achievement of the twentieth century and would make his own name famous for all time.
Elizebeth accepted, though the dark side of her employer soon announced itself. Fabyan insisted upon dictating what clothes she wore, compelling her to buy her hats and dresses at Marshall Field’s, the high-end Chicago department store, where the offerings were more expensive than she could afford. The Riverbank estate itself was both pastoral and Mad Hatter eccentric: Fabyan and his wife, Nelle, had purchased some three hundred acres of Illinois landscape, where they engaged Frank Lloyd Wright to renovate the villa they lived in, and installed or rehabbed other dwellings, including the “Lodge,” where Elizabeth Wells Gallup lived with her sister, Kate Wells. On the grounds Fabyan had installed a Dutch windmill, which he brought over piece by piece from Holland; a working lighthouse; a Roman-style bathing pool fed by spring water; a Japanese garden; a giant rope spider’s web for recreational climbing; and something he called the Temple de Junk, in which he stored random things he found in the unclaimed packages that he liked to buy up: shoes, bottles, glass photography plates of nudes. He had what Elizebeth described as a “passion for furniture which swung on supports.” The Fabyan marital bed was suspended from chains, as were divans and chairs in the drawing room of the villa. Outdoors were hammocks, and a hanging wicker chair installed near a fireplace that Fabyan kept lit, even in summer, to repel mosquitoes. He liked to sit in that chair, chain-smoking and poking the fire, surrounded by guests. If somebody said something he disagreed with, he would stand and, as he put it, give them hell. Fabyan, a loud man who cursed freely, called it his “hell chair.”
Nelle Fabyan had passions of her own, including animal husbandry. On the grounds were a herd of prize cattle that was always being sent off to competitions; a bull imported from Scotland that was said to have cost $30,000; an open-air zoo; and a pet male chimpanzee named Patsy. The estate was divided by a thoroughfare, on one side of which were the living quarters and on the other, the research area. A river, the Fox, ran through it.
Fabyan had little formal education, and the resulting insecurity seems to have propelled him to, as Elizebeth put it, try to “break the back of the academic world” by proving mainstream scholars wrong in any number of ways. Pathologically inclined to self-aggrandize, Fabyan liked to call himself a colonel even though he wasn’t one; it was an honorific bestowed upon him by the governor of Illinois. At the estate, he favored a costume of leather bootees and a Prince Albert riding habit with split tails on the cutaway coat, though he did not, in fact, ride. Otherwise careless of his appearance, on the train going to and from his Chicago office, he would light a match and burn off stray threads in his fraying cuffs.
His ambition in creating Riverbank Laboratories was to “wrest the secrets of nature” from not only literary manuscripts but acoustics and agriculture as well. Toward that end, Fabyan also had hired a number of young men. One of these was William Friedman, fresh from graduate work in genetics at Cornell, now engaged to conduct experiments in the Riverbank fields and gardens, sowing oats along some scheme Fabyan had read about that had to do with planting them during the dark of the moon. Friedman, the son of Jewish Russian émigrés, had studied agricultural science because it came with a scholarship, but he had other eclectic interests. He was living on the second floor of the windmill, where he had a studio and was doing experiments with fruit flies to test the Mendelian laws of heredity. A natty young polymath, he made a hobby of photography and before long was engaged to make enlargements of the folio pages, for inspection by Gallup and Smith.
In this singular setting, with its batty but open-minded atmosphere of inquiry, William Friedman and Elizebeth Smith soon sensed the absurdity of the Bacon theory. They realized that Gallup “dwelt only among those who agreed with her premise,” as Elizebeth put it, and that nobody else seemed able to spot the typographic patterns she claimed to, which in truth were just the results of printers repairing and reusing old type. But they became drawn into the world of codes and ciphers. Fabyan had amassed a rare collection of books about cryptic writings, written over the centuries by individuals who trafficked in ways of making communications secret and unintelligible to others. If the Bacon theory was a dead end, the subject of cryptanalysis itself was fully legitimate and would prove increasingly vital, thanks in large part to Elizebeth and William.