Chapter Seven
Seven
THURSDAY
Penelope let herself into the house, humming bits and pieces of remembered tunes.
A light was on in the afternoon parlor. Was Aunt Jo waiting up for her, after all? Penelope had told her not to do so: After the performance, she and her friends would repair to the de Blois ladies’ hotel and enjoy a late repast.
The clock on the wall told her that it was two minutes past midnight. Yes, she was late, but two minutes was a negligible amount of time, under the circumstances.
She poked her head into the afternoon parlor, except it wasn’t her aunt who sat there, but someone with a loose blond braid and a cream dressing gown heavily embroidered with poppies and buttercups.
“Miss Holmes, you are up late.”
Miss Holmes turned around. “Miss Redmayne, did you enjoy Mikado?”
“I did. I think Mademoiselle de Blois enjoyed it even more, though. She was afraid her English wouldn’t be good enough to understand everything, so she purchased a copy of the libretto ahead of time. I was worried that might ruin the fun, but she loved it.”
“Always surprising, isn’t it, what people enjoy?”
“But you never appear to be surprised at all.”
“It’s my face—takes rather a great deal of feeling to move it. Shock, rather than surprise. And while I’m frequently surprised, I’m not usually shocked.”
Now Penelope was curious. She had no idea Miss Holmes could be shocked. “So what does shock you?”
Miss Holmes thought for a moment. “I’m surprised when people are not me. I’m shocked when they are not them.”
“You mean, we are so much who we are that it’s staggering when we do something truly out of character.”
“Yes. Normally when people are shocked by someone, it’s because they didn’t know that person sufficiently well.
We are asked to judge one another on such things as parentage, attire, and demeanor, as substitutes for character.
So we know others primarily by how they present themselves in public, which is often the furthest thing from who they are. ”
Penelope opted to be cheeky. “So when you ran away from home, the only people knocked speechless were those who’d had no idea who you truly were.”
Miss Holmes did not appear at all offended. “Exactly. And those who had every idea of my character were no less dismayed, but probably thought—seethingly—Stupid woman. I knew this would happen.”
“Lord Ingram. Would he have thought that?”
Her aunt would be appalled at her forwardness. But Penelope had long ago decided that while the meek might inherit the earth, the nonmeek enjoyed far more interesting conversations—to say the least.
Miss Holmes’s lips curved. “I’d be shocked to the core if he didn’t.”
“Speaking of Lord Ingram . . .” Penelope walked up to the desk and tapped her fingers on the paper. “Is Lady Ingram still sending coded messages to Mr. Finch?”
Miss Holmes flipped the open notebook on the desk a few pages back, then nudged it toward Penelope. “I keep track of all the coded messages among the small notices. These are hers.”
The top of the page gave the construct of the cipher: Numbers 1–26 correspond to letters. Resultant letters need to be left-shifted seven places in the alphabet. Below that, each day’s coded message had been copied down and deciphered.
M, I still await your answer. A
M, I will not give up. A
M, please give me a signal. A
M, are you all right? A
“What’s in the rest of the notebook?” Penelope asked. “The other coded messages?”
Miss Holmes nodded. “So I’ll know when a new one comes up—in case Mr. Finch responds.”
“That must have taken a great deal of work.”
“It consumed some time, especially in the beginning. But the codes tend to be unimaginative.”
The latest edition of the paper was on the desk, opened to the small notices, which had been carefully marked.
The majority of them were not in code and almost all of those had a small dot next to them, likely indicating that no further investigation was warranted.
One coded message had the letter A next to it—from Lady Ingram, presumably.
Most of the other coded messages had small squares to the side, which probably marked that they were “unimaginative.”
Three notices, however, were unusual enough to merit question marks. “What’s unusual about this one?”
“The plaintext of the cipher is in German. It may not mean anything—but it’s different from the others, so I keep an eye on it.”
The second listed five different kinds of flowers. “And this one?”
“My guess is it’s code for which horses to bet on.”
The third notice was also in plaintext. And many among them shall stumble, and fall, and be broken, and be snared, and be taken. “Is that an actual biblical verse?”
“Isaiah 8:15.”
“You know that from memory?”
Miss Holmes shook her head. “I consulted a reference book that indexed all the verses in the Bible.”
“And why is the verse in the paper in the first place? Did the fire-and-brimstone crowd pay for it?”
“I can’t say.”
Penelope went to the sideboard and poured herself a glass of soda water from the gasogene. “Now I wish I’d paid closer attention to the notice columns. So much eccentricity and clandestineness in that space.”
“My sister Livia has long been a devotee. She was the one who first taught me about substitution ciphers. But she doesn’t have the patience for more complicated codes.”
“Patience is an overrated virtue. It’s much more fun to have what you want now—especially since there is no guarantee that a longer wait will produce better results.”
Miss Holmes was quiet for some time. “Do you see Lady Ingram as the patient kind?”
“No. Well, I didn’t, in any case. But I suppose she has proved herself extraordinarily patient, at least in one sense. An entire year’s wait for one fleeting look? That is downright painful.”
Penelope took a sip of her soda water—she liked how the bubbles tickled the roof of her mouth.
“Although it could be said that her arrangement was dictated by circumstances, rather than temperament. Still, if it were me, I might have grabbed Mr. Finch by the lapels when he passed by and compelled him to give me his address and whatnot.”
“I meant,” said Miss Holmes softly, “do you think Lady Ingram will wait calmly and uncomplainingly while Sherlock Holmes works?”
Penelope laughed ruefully. “Ah, that. Well, I don’t see it. She is posting daily notices in the papers, even as Sherlock Holmes works.”
“In her position I would, too. The papers have far greater reach, empirically, than does Sherlock Holmes, whose only advantage is that he is obliged to report his findings, unlike Mr. Finch, who can ignore the notices until the presses run out of ink.” Miss Holmes carefully folded the paper.
“But this makes me wonder. How does Lady Ingram manage all these notices? Surely she can’t be going every day to the papers. ”
“She can do it easily via cable. Text and money can both be wired.”
“But that would still require her to make daily trips to the post office. A woman like her attracts attention. She can’t keep going to the same post office, and she can’t use the locations most convenient to her—her code isn’t difficult to break and she would hardly want word to get out that she’s sending desperate pleas via the papers. ”
“She can send her personal maid,” suggested Penelope. “She must have one.”
The lady’s maid enjoyed a closer rapport with her mistress than most of the other servants, given that her services were of such a personal nature.
And since she typically did not follow the lady around on her calls or errands—that was the purview of the pair of footmen matched in height, for the households that could afford them—she could act with a far greater degree of anonymity.
“The lady’s maid she had when she first married had served Lord Ingram’s mother for many years,” pointed out Miss Holmes.
“Hmm, that would present difficulties, if the maid feels greater loyalty to him than to her.”
“Then again, I don’t know whether she still has the same maid. It was years ago. But in any case, does Lady Ingram strike you as the kind to trust a servant with matters that are so personal?”
Penelope drained her glass. “Not really. But we’ve learned, haven’t we, that we don’t really know her, which makes it difficult to say what would be in character for her, and what wouldn’t be.”
“You are right,” said Miss Holmes slowly. “At this moment we can’t say anything with certainty.”
SATURDAY
The table of distances was, in fact, the easier part of the deciphering.
Once Charlotte settled on the length of the keyword—five letters, in this case—she still had to test each of the five positions.
To test a given position, she started with T, the most commonly used letter in the English language.
Working backward from that, she decoded every fifth letter in the cipher text, then recorded all the letters and their frequencies, to see whether they conformed to the relative ratio of letter usage for the English language.
It wasn’t easy in theory and it was ten times more troublesome in practice, as this particular piece of text had noticeably fewer O’s than she would have expected, skewing the general proportions.
But in the end she managed. The keyword was TRUTH. After punctuation had been inserted, the deciphered text read:
MUCH THAT REMAINED IN THE ANCIENT VALLEY HAD BEEN RANSACKED BY RAIDERS IN LATER CENTURIES.
THE RUINS WERE A SAD SIGHT, DECREPITUDE SANS GRANDEUR, AN INSIPID PAST THAT INSPIRED LITTLE BEYOND A GLOOMY SIGH.
WE WERE GLAD AS WE DEPARTED, LEAVING BEHIND MOUNDS OF RUBBLE AND THAT GENERAL AIR OF MOURNFULNESS.
ONWARD! LUCKY FOR US, OUR NEXT DESTINATION, A THOUSAND YARDS EASTWARD AS THE HAWK FLIES, WAS AS MAGNIFICENT AS THIS ONE WAS INFERIOR.
THE GRANITE EDIFICE MUST HAVE BEEN A PALACE IN ITS HEYDAY AND THE TREASURES WITHIN MUST HAVE BEEN ASTONISHING.
MY FRIEND, PRAY EXCUSE MY brEVITY. LET ME DIG INSTEAD AND WRITE AGAIN WHEN I HAVE UNEARTHED ARTEFACTS AND OTHER ARCHAIC GEMS.