Chapter Twenty-Two #3
The colonel broke the silence once more.
“Would you care to see the code machine, Miss Elizabeth? Until we can convince Bingley back into the neighbourhood, the house is ours to command, and we may break whatever codes and cyphers we desire. We—that is, Darcy and I—would most like for you to see what your friend has accomplished.”
Shaking herself from her melancholy, she agreed. Little could be done now to mend her sister’s grief, but much could be done to learn more about the strange goings-on in Meryton. “I would be pleased, Colonel.” They returned to Longbourn and set a plan to meet early the following day.
The morning was bright and dry, and Lizzy rose early in anticipation of seeing the recreated machine that sat at Netherfield.
She required no excuse or permission to go out but took her usual walk and was late returning home, as occurred so often it was unremarkable.
That Mr. Darcy and the colonel met her with their cart where the path left the woods was of little matter to the good denizens of the area.
Mr. Darcy had installed the machine in the room Mr. Bingley had claimed as his study.
It was on the first storey of the house, with no way in or out save through the heavy oak door, and which was so often closed or locked that the few servants thought nothing of their lack of admittance to it.
Now the machine sat on the large desk, silent and foreboding in the watery sunshine.
“The outer part bears no resemblance to the original at all,” Elizabeth remarked upon setting eyes on the device.
“That is so,” Mr. Darcy’s voice was quiet.
“There is no casement for the machinery in our device, for it will not be carried through the dirt and dust of the battlefield. Without the protective box, it is also easier to adjust and maintain the inner workings. Here,” he indicated the array of discs on the cylinder, “we have repeated exactly the order and position of the discs that were on the machine in your own house. If Mr. Mendel was correct in his suppositions about the damaged sections, this recreation might give us some information.”
The colonel had been standing at attention, as still as marble and as silent, during his cousin’s speech.
His very attitude was dangerous, although Elizabeth could not quite say why.
When he spoke, his voice cracked the air.
“Shall we see what it tells us? Please, Miss Elizabeth, you may work the levers.”
She peered at the machine. There was a clockwork key at the base that wound the mechanism that let the machine work, and this she did.
Next she examined the selection of buttons and levers along the base.
“How should these be arranged? Surely they can be manipulated individually to allow the machine to do... whatever it does.” She crouched down to better see the order of cams and chains and springs.
“This is the order in which they were set at Longbourn,” Mr. Darcy explained. She nodded and released a pin, which set free the first spring and began the operation of the device.
It sounded like a rather large clock, with the faint whirring of spinning wheels and the tick of pins and levers as they took direction from the cams that formed the centre of the thing.
She watched in fascination as the motions she had imagined in her mind were now played out before her eyes, as the flywheels spun and the cams rotated and the chains and levers caused the discs to rotate, until with an audible click everything stopped.
At once, Mr. Darcy was beside her at the edge of the desk, a piece of paper in one hand, a pencil in the other. The colonel was peering over his shoulder. She stared at the line of text that appeared before her.
ADNPOLGYX
“But it has no meaning!” After so much anticipation, this line of nonsense set her heart plummeting.
“No, it appears that it does not,” the colonel added drily. “Perhaps we ought to try something else.”
He reached for a stack of papers and documents that sat on one of the shelves behind him and extracted a single sheet.
“We... some documents came into our possession, which seemed unintelligible at the time, but which we hope to decypher. Our agent suggested that the number sequence 519283704 might be of interest.” He pointed to a line on the paper and nodded to his cousin.
Mr. Darcy unclipped a pin at the end of the cylindrical part of the device and pulled off the discs, one at a time.
Each, Elizabeth could see, had a number written on its flat surface, and he arranged the discs so that they were stacked according to the numbers the colonel had read out.
When the pin was reinserted, and the discs rotated, they spun freely until they settled into a sort of order and fell into place with another click.
The order of letters on their rims was once again gibberish.
“Try that same combination of letters from before,” the colonel suggested. Once more, the result was disheartening.
“It seems not to work,” Lizzy sighed, but Mr. Darcy stayed her with a gesture.
“We have not yet found the key. Richard, what other information did your... agent supply you with?”
“We have another string of meaningless letters, but this machine may yet give them meaning. Here, try this.” He called out a selection of letters that reminded Elizabeth of the Latin lessons she did in her youth. “Now, try the levers again.”
Once more the result was nonsense. “Let us apply the same string of numbers to the levers as to the discs,” Colonel Fitzwilliam offered, and the machine set about its clicks and whirrs once more.
“By Jove!” Mr. Darcy exclaimed when the cylinder stopped rotating. Elizabeth stared with amazement. There was now a word, or almost a word, spelled out before them.
GOLXMINCH
“This looks less random! Here, allow me,” the colonel nearly pushed his cousin out of the way and began manipulating some inner workings of the machine.
“Mr. Mendel suggested this might be the case. He advised me... ah, yes.” There was another short set of clicks and a pop as the machine resumed its operations, and Colonel Fitzwilliam rose from his position with a look of triumph upon his face.
“It is remarkable!” Lizzy breathed. This was no random assortment of alphabetic symbols, but a word, and one that must be used for a purpose.
“My God,” Darcy breathed, but his voice was far from exultant and his face was white. “It cannot be... it simply cannot.”
With varying emotions, the three stared at the word that faced them on the rim of the discs.
GOLDFINCH