Chapter 1 #2
“But,” Lorenzo said at last, “even knowing this, even knowing which symbols stand in for vowels, and perhaps working out the consonants from there. Can you read the journals? Can you tell me what Matteo wrote?”
Nicholas was quiet for a moment.
“No,” he said, giving it a second to sink in.
“Not yet. Possibly not at all. Identifying the cipher structure is not the same as reading the text. The language has evolved over the centuries. Even with many symbols accounted for, some passages may be incomprehensible without the original substitution table … the key that tells us axe equals E, sword equals A, and so on for every letter. Without that, we are—”
“Working backward through the dark,” Lorenzo said quietly.
“With one hand,” Nicholas agreed.
The silence this time was of a different sort.
Lorenzo sat back. He pressed both hands flat against the table, and Nicholas watched the gloom settle over him, as if he were absorbing a blow he had been expecting but had hoped nevertheless would not arrive.
“Isolde’s people,” Lorenzo said softly. “Her ancestors. They built this place; they maintained whatever Matteo built within it. If anyone knew the key—”
“Her father might have known,” Nicholas said, delicately.
“But he died without passing it to her. She has confirmed she has no knowledge of any cipher. Which means it is hidden somewhere in this house. In the journals themselves. Or it is gone.” Three options.
None of them convenient. His thigh had a cutting remark to share about this which he declined to acknowledge.
“Or we must work it out ourselves.” Lorenzo raised his chin. There was a stubbornness in his face that Nicholas recognized. It was the expression that eloquently stated he had come too far to be stopped by a problem of three-hundred-year-old cryptography. “Character by character. Word by word.”
“It could take months.” Nicholas said it without the inflection that might have made it a warning. There was no point. He had known Lorenzo long enough to know that “months” was not a deterrent to a man whose family had spent centuries on the same problem.
“Then months.” Lorenzo squared his shoulders.
“We did not come this close to abandon it now. I have spent a lifetime searching for answers, and I will not be defeated by an Italian painter’s games.
” He pulled the nearest journal toward him and studied it.
“We have E. We have possibly A … or an O. We have generations of patience bred into my bones. We will find the rest.”
Nicholas regarded him for a moment. There was something rather admirable about Lorenzo di Bianchi, though he would sooner have eaten every journal on this table than say so aloud to the man’s face.
Maddening, certainly. Exhausting, without question.
Yet he could make four hours of inarticulate suffering feel like the opening act of a production genuinely worth attending.
He said nothing of this. He was not in the habit of encouraging magnificent behavior in people who were already prone to excess.
“We will need the key,” Nicholas said instead. “Work out the vowels if you like, but without the key, we are building a house from the roof downward. Keep looking. There must be a record of the cipher somewhere in that room.” He paused. “In this one, even.”
Lorenzo nodded slowly and returned to the journal. And the library settled back into the kind of quiet that was, if not exactly peace, at least not actively alarming.
Nicholas sat with it for approximately twelve minutes.
Then his thigh stopped requesting his attention and his buttock began demanding it. In the manner of a creditor who had been patient long enough. And was now prepared to make a scene.
He pushed his notes together, laid his quill across the top, and pressed both hands against the table to push himself upright.
The movement produced the usual constellation of responses from his thigh, sharp and specific and entirely uninterested in his dignity.
He met them with the stoic indifference of long habit and absolutely no equanimity whatsoever.
Angelo, he thought. Choosing ribbons in Truro while I decipher Renaissance cryptography on a bad leg with no assistance. You have a very great deal to answer for.
He reached for his cane.
The honest truth, one he had reached by degrees over the past several weeks and had not yet fully made peace with, was that Angelo’s daily ministrations with the liniment had made a more significant difference than Nicholas had anticipated. Or was comfortable acknowledging, frankly.
He had spent thirteen years with a leg that did what it liked and a physician who supplied laudanum with a generous enthusiasm that declared that he had confused the management of symptoms with treatment.
The recent discovery that the injury could be meaningfully addressed by the application of a great deal of stenchy unguent and a remarkably knowledgeable young Italian’s thumbs had been a genuinely undesired revelation.
Because now he knew it could be better. Which meant the days on which it was not better had acquired an additional layer of resentment that had previously been unavailable to him.
He limped toward the door.
“Where are you going?” Lorenzo demanded.
“To walk. To think.” Nicholas paused with his hand on the doorframe.
“To contemplate the irony of being the only person in this house who is neither in Truro selecting gowns nor in the study addressing correspondence, and is therefore the only person available to manage you.” He glanced back over his shoulder.
“Do not slam any more books. The pages cannot feel your feelings about them, and some of the bindings are very old.”
Lorenzo waved a hand in a gesture that meant, approximately, you are not my keeper and possibly not my friend in any language, and returned to Matteo’s journal.
Nicholas went out into the corridor.
The hall was cold, as it always was. Grimsfell Hall was the sort of house that was constitutionally opposed to warmth, its stones having endured several centuries of Atlantic wind and committed to them as a philosophy of existence.
He moved through it at the pace his leg demanded rather than the pace he preferred.
A distinction he had stopped fighting but not yet stopped resenting.
Past the row of stopped clocks that lined the east corridor like a cabinet of arrested time.
Past the tapestries that stirred in the draughts.
Past the room in which Gabriel and Henri were presumably still corresponding with the entire realm. He did not slow for any of it.
He reflected about E. He thought about the axe symbol.
About its frequency. About the thorough architecture of Matteo’s cipher and what it implied about a man who had lived hundreds of years ago and concealed his life’s work with such diligence that centuries later, it still required serious effort to unpick.
There had been a mind there worthy of respect.
Nicholas had a limited field of people he respected, and he was unexpectedly finding that a dead Renaissance artist was one of them.
He thought about what came next, which was less satisfying.
Without the key, without some record of the substitution table, they were doing what he had told Lorenzo.
With time, he could probably isolate four or five consonants.
With considerably more time, and a great deal of luck, and possibly divine intervention of a sort he had not previously solicited … they might eventually read a sentence.
He needed to think. He needed, if he were being honest, his thigh to stop its current protests, and someone to do something about it. But Angelo was selecting ribbons and being entirely useless to him.
He should have asked. Before Angelo left, he should have asked him to arrange for someone to continue the treatments.
But he had thought about the available options and made the wrong decision, as he had been doing with some consistency for the better part of his adult life.
The groundskeeper, Elias, who was approximately seventy.
Built like an oak stump. Hands like roughly-hewn granite.
Nicholas had concluded, with the swift certainty of a man whose pride had its limits, that he would manage perfectly well on his own.
He would rather eat glass than have Elias’s work-roughened hands anywhere near his thigh, and he was getting exactly what he deserved for that ill-advised position.
Which was the unique and fully self-inflicted suffering of a proud fool in pain with no one to blame but himself.
He stopped walking at the window at the end of the corridor and watched the Cornish dusk assembling itself over the cliffs.
The sea was pewter and restless. The sky above it, the color of cold ash.
In the far distance, a single light moved on the water.
A fishing vessel working late. Or working in the dark because it preferred not to be seen, which in Cornwall was not an uncommon preference.
His leg ached with steady persistence.
He would have his dinner brought up to his room, he decided.
He would retire early, stretch out in the dark, and rub the liniment in himself.
It would not be as effective as Angelo’s application of it because it never was.
And he would lie there cataloging the symbols of Matteo’s cipher in his mind until either sleep or the solution arrived.
One of them, at any rate, was nearly certain to come.
He turned from the window and made his slow way toward the stairs.