Chapter 1
“Discomfort is tolerable. The display of it is not.”
From the private journal of Lady Isla Scott, on witnessing Nicholas hobbling into the breakfast room after eight months of being bedridden.
* * *
Lorenzo di Bianchi was vibrating.
It was the only word for it. He had been at it since breakfast. Nicholas, who had entered the library at ten o’clock in the hope of a quiet morning with Matteo’s journals and no conversation whatsoever, had been treated to approximately seven hours of a man in the advanced stages of artistic despair.
Lorenzo did not pace. Pacing implied a certain aimlessness, and Lorenzo was never aimless. He moved between the library table and the shelves and back again. Back and forth, with the compressed energy of something wound too tight for too long and beginning to make alarming sounds about it.
He was growling, at present. At a journal. Nicholas had observed this phenomenon before. Concluded it was best not to interfere, in the same way that one did not interfere with a man who had set himself on fire. Not because one lacked sympathy, but because one valued one’s eyebrows.
Nicholas’s thigh had been making its point of view known since approximately half past nine. He had been ignoring it. He had made a decision to press on and intended to live with the consequences. The consequences, for their part, were objecting rather loudly.
Where is Angelo when one actually needs him?
Angelo Scott, his nephew but of the same age as him, was a calming influence on Lorenzo, his fellow Italian, in the same way a warm bath was a calming influence on a man who had been out in the rain. Not a solution to the underlying problem, but a remarkable improvement in immediate conditions.
But Angelo had departed Grimsfell three days prior.
He had gone to Truro with his betrothed, Isolde Fairfax, to meet Angelo’s brother Marco and Marco’s wife, Molly, to address the most pressing matter of Isolde’s wardrobe.
It, apparently, could not wait. The reason was straightforward enough.
A woman who had spent the better part of a decade living in the hidden passages of a Cornish manor house was in urgent need of several new gowns and someone who knew what to do with her hair. Before the nuptials.
Nicholas bore Isolde no ill will on this account.
He bore her wardrobe no ill will. He bore the entire expedition to Truro a genuine and entirely suppressed goodwill.
It had been diminishing at a steady rate for three days, in direct proportion to the volume of Lorenzo’s suffering and the persistence of his own injured leg.
It was currently sitting somewhere in the region of moderate resentment. With aspirations toward fury.
Lord Gabriel Strathmore and his wife, Henri, were in the study.
They had been in the study since eight o’clock this morning.
They had been in the study the morning before that, and the one before that, attending to correspondence that had apparently accumulated with some vigor during their prolonged Cornish sojourn.
And Gabriel had emerged only twice. Once to request fresh coffee and once to toss a guilty glance in Nicholas’s direction before retreating again.
Which left Nicholas, his bad leg, and a vibrating Italian. He had made worse mornings for himself, though at present he was struggling to recall when.
He glanced down at the journal open before him. Matteo di Bianchi’s cramped, ciphered hand. The columns of symbols he had been painstakingly studying since before Lorenzo arrived in this room to begin his current performance.
The other man had entered from the Room of Science through the hidden bookcase door with a very peculiar energy … that of a man who had spent a fortnight staring at a problem and had just remembered he had not yet tried shouting at it.
Nicholas had worked out the axe symbol two hours ago. He had said nothing. Partly because Lorenzo had been ranting at the shelving. And partly because there was, he felt, a certain justice in that.
His thigh made a pointed observation. He redistributed his weight and told it to be patient. It was not.
He stirred, redistributing his weight again, and returned his attention to the symbols.
Then Lorenzo slammed a book down on the table.
The sound echoed off the library’s walls with considerable enthusiasm. Nicholas did not flinch. He was of the nobility class and had been conditioned from childhood not to flinch at loud noises. Which had proved useful in ways his mother had not intended. But he did look up.
“This …” Lorenzo announced, “is impossible.”
“Mmm,” said Nicholas. He had decided, on reflection, that Lorenzo had not yet suffered quite enough to deserve a response.
“Three centuries.” Lorenzo spread his hands over the table.
The gesture encompassed the journals, the sketches, the recreated diagrams of the extraordinary temple from the Room of Science, and the full weight of the di Bianchi family’s ancestral suffering.
“Three hundred years of silence, and what has Matteo left us? Symbols. Pages and pages and pages of symbols that mean nothing … nothing! … without a key that does not seem to exist!”
Nicholas regarded the axe symbol. Then Lorenzo. Then back to the axe. He kept his mouth shut.
Lorenzo turned to him, realizing that his only available audience was not performing its function adequately.
“Amico, you are not listening.”
“I am listening.” Nicholas set down his quill with sober patience, having wanted to set it down for some time.
“I have been listening since Thursday. I have listened in English, in Italian, and during one memorable interval yesterday morning, in a combination of both simultaneously. I am …” he said, “an extremely attentive listener.”
Lorenzo stared at him for a moment. Then he pulled out the chair opposite Nicholas, dropped into it, and planted his elbows on the table with the air of a man preparing to renegotiate terms.
“Tell me,” he said, at a volume considerably better suited to the dimensions of the room, “that you have found something. Anything. Some thread we might pull.”
Nicholas considered this. He studied Lorenzo, the dark eyes and the rigid jaw and the generational distress. Then he slid Matteo’s journal across the library table.
“It is a substitution alphabet,” he said.
Silence.
Lorenzo blinked. “What?”
“The cipher.” Nicholas turned the journal to face Lorenzo and indicated the symbols with the tip of his quill.
“Matteo has not invented a new language, nor created a code in any elaborate fashion that would require specialist knowledge to unravel. He has taken the standard English alphabet and assigned a symbol to each letter. An axe for one. A vertical sword for another. The wave crest, the inner circle, the rest of them. A child’s game,” he said, “that has apparently defeated this household of educated men for the better part of a fortnight.”
Lorenzo’s expression wheeled through several stages of feeling before settling somewhere between relief and renewed fury. “You have known this and you have said nothing?”
“I have known it for approximately two hours, and you were ranting at the shelving. I did not feel it would be heard above the noise.”
Lorenzo grabbed Nicholas’s notes from beside his elbow and dragged them across the table.
His dark eyes moved rapidly over the columns, the tallies, the judicious annotations.
Nicholas grimaced at him but did not reach for them back.
Which required more patience than he generally had available, and the exercise of such, he would not be mentioning to anyone.
“How,” Lorenzo said, “did you determine this?”
“The vowels.” Nicholas leaned forward and pointed to the first column.
“I identified which symbols were recurring most frequently and isolated a group of four that must, by the mathematics of it, stand in for vowels.” He indicated the axe, the sword, the wave crest, and the circle with the inner dot.
“These four appear with the regularity that vowels demand. Everything else appears far less often.”
“But how do you know which vowel is which?”
“I do not. Not all of them. But this one,” he tapped the axe, “I am quite confident is E.”
“Because?”
Nicholas leaned forward and indicated the symbols.
“In any substitution cipher, the letters appear in the same proportion as they do in plain text. The axe most often of all, which in Italian would not mean much, since Italian vowels are democratic. In English, E is not democratic. E is a tyrant. It appears more than any other letter and far more than any other vowel. The underlying language is English. The axe is E. That is what I have.”
Lorenzo absorbed this. The fury was receding. Something else taking its place. The calm after a very bad storm had passed.
“So the journals are in English.”
“Almost certainly. Which makes sense when you consider where he was. Working for English patrons, taking his commissions from men whose native tongue was not his own. Whatever Matteo was building here, he was building it with Englishmen. He would have thought in their language.”
“So the axe is E.” Lorenzo was scanning the symbols now with new attention, a different energy coming off him. Still tightly wound but directed now, purposeful rather than frantic. “Bene. And the others? Can you determine them?”
“The vertical sword, the wave crest, the circle with the inner dot … these are vowels. Beyond that I cannot yet say with confidence. U appears least often in English text, so I have been watching for whichever of my candidates turns up most sparingly, but the journals vary enough that I would not stake coin on my conclusions. And it could just as easily be a Y, so I did not fit much mind.” He tapped his quill.
“This is the point at which I tell you something you will not want to hear.”
The Italian thought about this in silence. Which was, in Nicholas’s experience, a state Lorenzo achieved only under conditions of extreme mental exertion.