When he entered the library, his stomach fell. The brown paper lay open in the middle of the large central table, and the papers spread out in short stacks across its length. Each scholar huddled happily over their own portion.
Harrison rubbed his forehead with his fingers, trying to determine how to react. Anger would only raise their interest.
Martinbrook welcomed him. “Oh, MacHus, you’re here. This is very exciting.”
“We didn’t mean to open your packet. We thought it was the proofs Otley has been expecting, and we had all promised to help read them,” Nathan explained with a bob of the head.
“Yes.” “Yes.” “Yes.” Smithson’s, Partlet’s, and Quinn’s heads bobbed in agreement.
“But when we saw the note, we realized this must be your friend who wanted your help with the newspapers,” Otley explained. “And we thought it wouldn’t hurt to try our hand at your latest puzzle.”
“Note?” How could he have been so careless as to miss a letter?
“Yes, MacHus, you have a great correspondent.” Partlet adjusted his monocle. “What a lovely game.”
“Game?” Harrison tried to keep his tone level, but he was already baffled.
“Yes,” offered Quinn absently, “here’s the note that set up the rules.” The portly man pushed a sheet toward him, never looking up from some calculations with his pencil.
“We’re sure we can win . . . and wouldn’t it please Miss Livvy for us to contribute something to our holiday feast?”
“Yes, she’s always so generous.”
“Yes.” “Yes.” “Yes.” The heads bobbed one after another. He was so used to them now, he didn’t even stiffen at the reference to his wife as miss.
He hadn’t paid much attention to the letter in Mr. James’s broad, distinctive hand, but he read it once more. It began without salutation.
Here’s the puzzle I promised. I’ve sent it to the others—same rules apply. Whoever solves it first will get a Christmas ham, 50 pounds, and a box at Kean’s next performance of Lear. I’ve sent along all the materials that might help you solve it, but I make no promises that I’ve provided everything. But what sort of a puzzle would it be if I gave you all the parts?
Harrison knew Benjamin well enough to hear the frustration and sarcasm, but on the surface the note could read just as the scholars had understood it. A game with a prize.
“The prizes are very generous. Your friend should have been more careful.” Lark lowered his magnifying glass.
“Why?” Harrison scratched his head, always feeling with the scholars that he had come into a conversation already half over.
“Well, we’ve only been at it for an hour or so, and we’ve made good headway.” Martinbrook waved his grubby fingers over the pages.
“Have you?” Harrison’s interest rose. Perhaps they could discover the clue that helped break the code. “Tell me.”
“Yes. It posed some complications,” Smithson explained.
Harrison was not surprised. He’d known fewer minds finer than that of Tom Gardiner, the late Lord Wilmot. “What were the complications?”
“First, we couldn’t decrypt it using normal rules of substitution.” Quinn held out a sheaf of pages with attempted decryptions.
Otley jumped in to explain. “By that he means, we looked for the most used characters in the code then we assumed that those characters stood for the most used letters in the language. In English that’s e, t, a, o, i.”
“He must understand, Otley. Or his friend wouldn’t have sent him so complicated a puzzle.”
“Please, proceed.” Harrison knew he had to keep the scholars focused on their task, or he would hear a hundred stories about famous codes, codebreakers, the consequences of using bad codes. Oh, no, he realized with some despair, I can now predict the way one of their stories leads to the next.
“The problem is that this code frequently includes words from other languages, Latin, Greek, German, French.” Partlet wiped his monocle on his cravat.
“And those languages don’t use the same letters as frequently. In German, for example, the most used letters are e, n, i, s, r, but in Italian they are e, a, i, o, n.” Smithson twisted his thick mustache.
“Without knowing the language, we couldn’t successfully use letter frequencies.” Nathan nodded his head rhythmically. “Your friend who created this code must be very clever.”
“Yes, quite clever.” Walgrave carefully avoided any verb tense, for Wilmot had been dead for more than a year, murdered—the Home Office believed—for the information he’d hidden in his code. In a flash he remembered the day he’d met Tom Wilmot. Harrison’s first year at Harrow had been lonely, and he’d counted the days until he could go home for the holidays. When the day arrived, he’d waited all afternoon on the porch steps with his bag. But no one came. The headmaster had just informed Harrison that an outbreak of chicken pox had quarantined his estate, when the last carriage pulled up. Before Harrison could refuse, Tom threw Harrison’s valise up to the carriage driver, announcing, “My friend is coming home with us.” He’d gained fast friends in Tom and his boisterous, welcoming cousins, the Somervilles, but his youngest brother had died during the quarantine.
“So, in summary, Mr. MacHus”—Quinn fluffed his cravat—“the problem is that the code key changes with every pair of lines.”
Harrison shook off the memory, realizing he’d missed too much of the explanation. “Could we start at the beginning, gentlemen? I’m having a little trouble catching up.” He picked up a page from Mr. James’s packet. “You are telling me that this page of gibberish is a list of 101 items.”
“Use this one.” Otley held out a neatly penned sheet. “I’ve laid out each item on its own line.” The length of the lines alternated, one short row followed by a longer—sometimes much longer—row.
“How did you determine where the lines began and ended?” Harrison compared the two sheets to each other.
Fields, the mathematics scholar, said generously, “Montmorency figured that one out.”
Montmorency, always silent, looked up, nodded, then went back to work.
“Montmorency realized that the Greek letters α and Ω were sometimes symbols instead of letters,” Smithson explained. “Since in the Greek alphabet, α is the first letter and Ω is the last, we speculated that those letters marked the beginnings and ends of the individual items.”
“But how did you sort out when the Greek α and Ω were acting as symbols instead of letters?”
“Every time we found an Ω preceding an α, we assumed that marked the end of one line and the beginning of the next.” Otley showed him an example.
“We must hope that our game-builder remembered not to include any words beginning with oa.” Smithson observed.
“Yes.” Harrison shook himself as soon as the word left his mouth. Now they had him using their odd verbal tic. “I mean, I agree.”
Montmorency looked up, smiling. Perhaps he didn’t speak to avoid the constant yeses.
“So, yes, the 101 lines of text make 50 pairs. But to decrypt the first line (which isn’t part of a pair), we needed a code key,” Lark said, almost shaking with excitement. “Your friend complicated the puzzle by sending us two possible sources for that. This page.” He held up a botanical drawing, a rose in bloom being fed upon by a hummingbird. “And this one.” A second page showed an agave alongside two botanical descriptions. An agave and a rose.
“Very different plants. I saw the South American specimens of the agave at the Physick Garden in Chelsea. Impressive.”
Lark smiled indulgently, but kept talking. “To prove the theory, we began to test all the words on these pages. It took less time with all of us working together.”
“Eventually, we realized that the key was hummingbird. Probably the unlikeliness of the image was supposed to point you to the key word,” Smithson chimed in.
“Unlikely?” Harrison felt as if he were standing in front of a distorted mirror. If he moved even th
e slightest bit, his image came back warped beyond recognition.
Lark harrumphed. “No hummingbird would feed on a rose. No nectar there. It might drink water from its leaves after a rainstorm, but not feed. And hummingbirds aren’t even British—one finds them exclusively in the Americas.”
“I see.” Harrison realized that the Home Office had been approaching Wilmot’s code as spies would, but Wilmot had been a scholar. An American bird feeding on an English rose would have struck him as an obvious clue. “Now that we have the code key, we can decode the whole document.”
“No, hummingbird decodes alternate lines but only until line forty.” Lark wagged a correcting finger.
“Don’t confuse the matters yet,” Quinn objected. “Just explain how the code works.”
“Line forty?” Harrison felt himself falling behind again.
Quinn took over. “Only look at the first pair. Using hummingbird, we translated the first line to read
Charlotte Smith Celestina three fifty-four eleven five
Nathan figured out, using Sir Roderick’s copy of Smith’s book, that the other numbers indicated the volume, page, line, and position of our code key. The fifth word on the eleventh line of the fifty-fourth page of volume three is dialogue, and using that word as our new code key, we deciphered the next line. A name: Sir Walter W. Greg.”
“Does dialogue decipher the rest?” Harrison felt hopeful for the first time in months. Perhaps they were about to discover the information Wilmot had died to send them.
“No.” Quinn shook his head.
Harrison much preferred the yeses.
“For the location of the next code key, we had to go back to hummingbird. That’s how we discovered the pattern: the first line directs you to the location of the code key, and the code key decrypts the second line.”
“But only up to line forty-one.” Lark corrected, pushing his spectacles up his nose.
“Still not yet, Lark.” Otley patted the musician on the shoulder.
“I understand that something horrible happens at line forty-one.” Harrison offered a sympathetic smile to Lark. “But hummingbird gives us half the books we need. Does the library hold any of those?”
“Yes, at least five.” Partlet called out from the card cabinet that indicated which books the library owned.
“Let’s spread them out among us.”
Lark, Martinbrook, Nathan, Otley, Quinn, and Smithson each took a book. Finding the code key in each one, the men began to decrypt.
“I have translated a name.” Smithson worked faster than the others. “Sir Ronald MacKerrow.”
“He was a historian at Oxford, but he’s been dead two, three years now. Died abroad, as I remember. Some story about highwaymen,” Partlet explained.
“I have another: Sir Philip Gaskell,” Nathan called out.
“And I have Sir Fredson Bowers,” Martinbrook added. “But didn’t he die in a duel last summer?”
“Gaskell’s dead too. Carriage accident last month.” Lark began to look concerned.
Harrison felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end: four names, four dead men, five if one counted Wilmot.
“Why would someone go to the trouble to encrypt a list with the names of three dead men?” Otley asked.
“We don’t know yet what the list contains, so we can’t yet speculate. It might be that the list was made before their deaths, and they have something else in common,” Harrison replied.
The scholars grew quiet.
“Most likely, my friend knew the men were already dead, and that’s why he used them in his game. It might offend people to have their name used thus.”
The scholars looked relieved. “Yes, that makes sense.”
“Then I’m sure that’s it, gentlemen.” Harrison kept his voice light. “It’s just a game, after all. But I’d like to see if we can win the prize.”
The scholars became animated again.
“Ah, yes, that would be lovely.”
Lark grimaced. “I hate to bear the bad news, but we really must explain what happens after line forty-one.”
Otley nodded. “Go ahead, Lark.”
“Well, it’s simple really. By translating all the titles with a single code key, it makes it too easy to finish the game. You don’t have to go in any particular order. So, your friend abandoned the hummingbird code key entirely, making one pair dependent on the one before it.”
Harrison nodded. “Let me make sure I understand. With the first twenty pairs, using the word hummingbird, I can translate the book titles all at one go. As a result, if I don’t have one of the books at hand, I can simply skip that name and move on to one of the books I do have. It made the code too easy to break. All I needed was hummingbird and the help of a good library, and my friend would be paying out his prize.”
“Correct.”
“But after line forty-one, I have to translate in order. Each pair gives me the key for the next.”
“Yes!”
“Yes.”
“Yes.”
“How did you figure out that the system changed at line forty-one?” Harrison was struck by their ingenuity. “Trial and error?”
“Your friend told us. He included this line—all alphas and omegas. It signaled a change in the pattern.”
“How do we proceed?” Harrison asked. “How many more books can we find here?”
“Sadly, we’ve exhausted our resources here: Your father’s tastes led elsewhere.” Lark waved at the stacks of books in front of them. “Whoever made this game has a robust, and rather eclectic, library.”
“Or he lives near one—perhaps in London or Cambridge or Oxford.”
“If you remain here, it will take several weeks to locate all of these volumes and have them sent to you. But you might save time by making a trip to London to visit the British Museum and whatever booksellers who might sell the books you need. Doing so would increase your chances of winning,” Otley suggested.
“Forty-two books,” Smithson corrected. “We’ve completed eight of the pairs. You only need forty-two books to reveal the remaining names and win your game!”
“I suppose that’s why your friend offered a Christmas ham. He knew how long it would take.”
“Do you suppose, MacHus, you would share your box with us?” Partlet asked almost timidly. “Nathan has always wished to see Kean.”
“If this works, I’ll make sure that Miss Livvy receives the Christmas ham, and my friend finds box seats for all of you.”
The delight in the scholars’ eyes was unmistakable.
As they drifted back to their desks, Harrison shook his head. The Home Office had been working on the code for weeks, and ten scholars in a remote library had deciphered it before breakfast.
* * *
As he was drafting his letter to Mr. James, Harrison noticed the library had grown exceptionally quiet. Only Otley and two of the October scholars—Fields and Jerome—remained. Montmorency, the silent antiquarian, had slipped out shortly after the scholars had deciphered the code.
The door at the far end of the library crashed open, and Lark and Nathan, giggling, stumbled to their desks. Laughing behind their hands, each man collected a stack of paper before racing each other loudly back to the door and slamming it behind them. Drunk, both of them, Harrison thought with annoyance—and with alcohol likely purchased by the estate. Mr. MacHus might not be able to put a stop to such foolishness, but he could at least investigate.
Harrison sealed his letter and hurried onto the terrace at the back of the house. The men, arm in arm, were already far down the lawn, skipping toward the dower house. Skipping?
Harrison followed them at a discreet distance, but there was no need for any subterfuge. The men were completely focused on their own pursuits.
The dower-house door was unlocked, and Harrison followed the sound of excited voices to the kitchen at the back.
He stood somewhat out of sight, watching six of the Seven perform some experiment. In the
middle of the room on a low table sat two large tin cylinders connected with tubing and filled with liquid, and between them a glass bell. A still of some sort. He craned his ear to hear their conversation.
“Ah, yes, just as Sir Humphry Davy predicted, the experiment produces 100 cubic inches of gas, when the temperature is 55 degrees and the atmospheric pressure 30 pounds, while the gas itself weighs 75.17 grams.” Smithson recited the numbers with pleasure.
Martinbrook licked the end of his pencil and recorded the numbers in a small notebook. “Should we record the color as well? I would call that a pale green.”
“Davy calls it pale green too.”
“How much gas did we recover last time?”
“We recovered 160 cubic inches of nitrous gas—just as Sir Humphry Davy predicted.”
From his position Harrison could only hear their conversation, but not distinguish who was saying what.
“I think we have quite enough for another trial.”
“Oh, yes, that’s quite a lot.”
“Now we should test the properties of the gas itself on human subjects. Should we begin? Volunteers?”
“We need to know the dose and the temperature for each of the effects.”
“I’ve written that down here: ‘giddiness, fullness of the head . . . feelings resembling those of intoxication, feelings of a most ecstatic nature.’”
“We’ll try another round, giving Partlet, Lark, and Quinn a portion in quick succession.”
“Are you ready? Then breathe in, men.”
All seven breathed in deeply from the tubing.
“Ah, the sensation is quite thrilling. A delightful sensation in my toes and in my fingers.”
“Oh, no, for me it’s more exquisite, a pleasure akin to flying, as if I am ascending in a balloon.”
“Yes, exactly that. The air seems to have grown thinner and more potent all at once. My body feels more vigorous—as if I could run up and down the stairs for hours.”
Lark began to giggle, while Partlet and Quinn began to laugh involuntarily.
“Come now, be serious. This is an experiment, not a game.” Smithson took measurements from a series of tubes.
Tempting the Earl Page 20