The Cocoa Conspiracy

by Andrea Penrose

  Arianna’s father had been a mathematical genius, and she shared his knack for numbers.

  “I hadn’t thought about it that way,” she murmured.

  “You’ve had no need to,” replied Saybrook drily. “I, on the other hand, spent some of my time on the Peninsula working with George Scovell on cracking Napoleon’s military codes. The man was a veritable wizard.” Moving to the escritoire, he set the papers down and absently smoothed at the creases. “Let us hope some of his magic has rubbed off on me.”

  She recognized the spark that had flared in his eyes. Like a moth drawn to a flame, the earl found a cerebral challenge impossible to resist. And danger seemed to make it only more alluring.

  “They seem to be written in a different hand. Show me which one was folded together with the document from Charles’s files. I’ll start with that one.”

  “Change into your dressing gown,” she ordered, after doing as he asked. “While I fetch a blanket and shift one of the armchairs closer to the fire.”

  “I don’t need to be coddled,” he muttered.

  “Go,” said Arianna, cutting off his protest with a martial glare. “I shall send word that we won’t be joining the party for the evening entertainments, and ask that a supper tray be sent up. But in return, you must humor me by not collapsing from loss of blood.”

  “Good God, a small scratch has never slowed me down.”

  “Pride goeth before a fall,” she countered.

  “Women.” He surrendered to her demand with an ill-tempered grunt. “Hell, it is feminine fussing that will be the death of me.”

  “I profoundly hope not,” she whispered, looking down at the rusty smudge on her apron and feeling her blood run a little cold.

  The rhythmic tick of the longcase clock was the only sound stirring the deepening shadows. The embers in the hearth, silent specks of dying red, had burned down to naught but cinders, leaving the lamp as the lone flicker of light in the sitting room.

  “It’s past midnight, Sandro.” Arianna tightened the sash of her wrapper against the chill. “Come to bed.”

  “Hmmm?” Another sheet of crumpled paper joined the growing pile on the carpet. “Yes, yes, in a moment.”

  “Yes, yes, and in the same space of time, pigs will spout wings and fly to Uranus.”

  He looked up. “Hmmm?”

  “Never mind.” Too restless to sleep, she padded over to the hearth and added a few fresh logs. Infused with new life, the fire sent up a blaze of bright flames, their cheery crackling a lighter counterpoint to the regimented marching of the minutes. “Any luck?”

  He shrugged.

  A cryptic answer.

  After another quick jab at the coals, Arianna set the poker aside and seated herself on the carpet beside his chair. “You’re chilled,” she commented, slipping a hand beneath the blanket and running her fingers lightly over his leg.

  At that he looked up. “Are you trying to distract me?”

  “I doubt that I could.”

  Saybrook chuckled. “Don’t underestimate your powers.” He flexed his shoulders and massaged the back of his neck. “I would far rather wrestle with your lovely limbs than these perverse little letters.”

  “Even though I often drive you to distraction?” she teased. Leaning in for a closer look at the papers piled on his lap desk, she took a moment to study the strange diagram he was drawing.

  “What’s that?”

  “A Vigenère Square.”

  “It looks like the ravings of a lunatic.”

  His mouth twitched. “There is a method to the madness. As I mentioned earlier, all codes and ciphers are based on a logical system. One just has to be clever enough to figure them out.”

  “So it’s a game of sorts.” Arianna thought of her father and his delight in making numbers do his bidding—no matter that the equations had dire results. “A mano a mano match of Machiavellian minds.”

  Her husband gave a bark of laughter. “At times the challenge does feel personal. The code maker and the code breaker engage in an intellectual version of hide-and-seek. Competition can get fierce, for the stakes are often very high.” His pencil tapped softly against the paper. “Mary, Queen of Scots, was executed because England’s spymaster, Lord Walsingham, was able to decipher her secret correspondence with Babington and his group of Catholic conspirators. And then, of course, you have Scovell, whose skills helped Wellington drive the French forces from the Peninsula.”

  The life of a monarch, the fate of a country, the defeat of an army—strange how the fate of the mighty could be determined by a tiny, twisting hodgepodge of letters.

  Resting her elbows on the arm of the chair, she settled into a more comfortable position. “If it’s not too distracting, might you take a few minutes to explain your Square?”

  “To begin with, there are all sorts of systems for creating codes,” he answered. “A common form is a cipher code—that is, where one letter is replaced by another. Here is an example.”

  Placing a blank sheet of paper atop his notes, Saybrook wrote the words “The fox is in the henhouse.” Above it, he lettered the alphabet in one line. “Now, I’ll use a simple Caesar shift of three to encrypt the message, which means you take each letter of the original message and shift it over three positions.” He quickly wrote out a line that looked liked complete gibberish—wkh iua lv lq wkh khqkuvh.

  “The spaces are often omitted to make the text harder to decipher. Still, an experienced code breaker knows to use frequency analysis, a concept developed by the Arabs while we Europeans were mired in the Dark Ages. This helps determine what the real letter might be. For example, ��e,’ ‘t,’ and ‘a,’ are the most commonly used letters in English. So, one can begin by substituting a ‘t’ for whatever letter occurs the most frequently in the encrypted letter. It’s a matter of trial and error, of course. And the longer the message, the better the odds of the system working. Still, it helps one to make an educated guess.”

  “Fascinating.”

  “Yes, it is,” he agreed. “But that’s just the beginning. A code maker has all sorts of tricks to throw a code breaker off the scent. He—”

  “Or she,” remarked Arianna.

  Saybrook smiled. “Point taken. I suspect you would be frighteningly good at this.”

  “Algorithms,” she mused. “I can see where mathematical concepts come into play.”

  “Indeed. Mathematicians make excellent cryptographers. Oddly enough, so do poets. Chaucer was quite a good one. It has to do with imagination—which you also possess in spades.” He smiled. “But as I was saying, the code maker can use other elements to protect his text. He—or she—can insert a code word, known only to the sender and receiver of the message, which is inserted as a ‘blind’ so to speak, in order to throw the frequency off. In cryptography, we call it a key.”

  Arianna made a face. “It sounds hopelessly complicated.”

  “Complicated, yes. The permutations of a complex cipher defy the human brain. However, keep in mind that a code maker can’t get too clever or complicated. The receiver must also know the system being used.”

  “Ah, I see what you mean,” she murmured. “And yet, what you were working on seems awfully complex.”

  “I thought it safe to assume that our enemy would be too clever to use a simple text cipher, so I’m trying out a few other schemes.” He shuffled back to his original page. “A Vigenère Square seemed a good choice.”

  “What, precisely, is that?”

  “A grid invented in the sixteenth century by Blaise de Vigenère, a French diplomat posted to Rome. It’s a method for encrypting that offers a mind-twisting array of possibility.”

  He finished lettering in the alphabet both vertically and horizontally, forming two sides of a square. “You have twenty-six letters across, and twenty-six letters down, both of which begin with ‘a.’ ”

  She nodded.

  “Then you begin the next row with ‘b,’ and then ‘c,’ and continue on like that
until you have filled out the square. Now, you have twenty-six possible cipher alphabets. You can encrypt using two or twenty-two. Oftentimes, a code word is used to tell the receiver what rows to use. For example, say ‘pen’ is the code word. The receiver uses the row that begins with ‘p’ to decode the first letter of his secret message. For the second letter, he would use the row beginning with ‘e,’ and so forth.”

  Arianna blinked. “Ingenious.”

  “There are, of course, a multitude of other systems. Breaking a code requires intuition, patience, time—and most of all, luck.” He made a wry face. “The odds of stumbling upon a solution for this cipher tonight are stacked against me. However, I am familiar with the way the French cryptographers think, and if our enemy is really a man named Renard, then perhaps I shall get lucky. In any case, it is worth a try.”

  “I should like to learn more about this,” she mused. “I can see where mathematics would be a helpful skill. Probability and patterns—it’s very much like gambling.”

  “An apt analogy,” he commented. “As it happens, I brought along a book on the subject that was recently published by a don at Oxford. It is on my dressing table.”

  Arianna went into his room, returning with not only the book but also two glasses of brandy.

  “What are you going to tell Charles about this?” she asked, watching his face from over the rim of her drink. Firelight swirled within the amber liquid, the play of molten sparks dancing along the ridge of his cheekbones.

  His eyes remained shadowed. “I haven’t yet decided.” He looked tired. Pensive. “But come morning, I will have to make up my mind.”

  She fingered the wads of discarded paper, wishing that she could help. “Is there nothing I can do?”

  Saybrook shook his head. “Not at the moment. I just want to test a few more ideas . . .”

  The scratch of his pencil took up where his voice left off.

  Patterns and probabilities, intertwining with deceptions and betrayals. The brandy burned a slow, sinuous trail down her throat. She had lived most of her life within the murky netherworld of secrets and lies. Which perhaps explained why the prospect of matching wits with a dangerous traitor was more tantalizing than terrifying.

  I suppose that Charles Mellon is right to think me a very odd sort of female.

  Taking another mouthful of the spirits, Arianna savored the heat of it against her tongue as she cracked open the book and began to read.

  “Your pardon, milord.” Saybrook’s valet discreetly cleared his throat as he poked his head into the dawn-dappled sitting room. “But Mr. Henning has arrived. Shall I show him up?”

  “God yes, before he wakes the house with his bellows.” The earl yawned and stretched out his long legs. “He tends to be in an ill humor when he is hungry.”

  “Ouch.” Arianna winced as she sat up. Her muscles were stiff and knotted with cold. “I shall likely have a bruise on my shin, though it probably serves me right for being such a nodcock as to fall sleep on the floor.”

  “You had better order up a big breakfast too, Hobbs,” added the earl. “Eggs, gammon, kippers, along with plenty of rolls and jam. Henning isn’t the only one who turns snappish when his bread box is empty.”

  “Wretch,” muttered Arianna, tossing the sofa pillow at his head. “Please bring pots of coffee and chocolate as well, Hobbs.”

  “Yes, milady.” The valet disappeared.

  “I had better go and make myself presentable,” she said, rising and retying the sash of her wrapper.

  “An excellent suggestion,” said her husband drily, waggling a brow. “You did summon Henning to make an inspection of naked flesh. However, I’d prefer it wasn’t yours.”

  “As would I, seeing as most of the bodies he ogles are dead.”

  She returned—fully dressed—to find their friend Basil Henning warming his hands by the rekindled fire. His frayed clothing was rumpled and the expression on his angular face looked equally out of sorts—but that was nothing unusual. Henning always looked grumpy.

  As if on cue, he gestured at the steaming silver pot set on the side table. “Auch, Sandro, ye roust me from a nice warm bed and drag my carcass halfway to Hades, only to greet me with naught but a puling cup of coffee?” The outspoken Scotsman had been a surgeon in the earl’s army regiment, and the two men had formed a fast friendship during the long, brutal Peninsular campaign, despite the difference of wealth and birth. “Ye gods, man,” he groused.

  “It’s me you should be raking over the coals, Mr. Henning.” Arianna hurried over to brush a kiss to his leathery cheek. “Thank you for coming. We’ve ordered up plenty of hot food as well—eggs, gammon and your favorite kippers in cream sauce.”

  “Bless you, lassie,” he said, patting his bony midriff. “A man cannot survive on Highland malt alone.”

  “The marquess has an excellent malt from Dornach in his cellars,” said Saybrook. “I took the liberty of having a bottle sent up along with the coffee.”

  “Pour me a wee tipple,” said the surgeon. “Then let us go see this body of yours.”

  “It is not Sandro’s body,” said Arianna.

  “A mere figure of speech, Lady S.”

  “A cold corpse laid out on a slab seems awfully real to me,” she countered. “I say we ought to have some sustenance before we begin the task.”

  “That might not be such a wise idea, considering what we’re about to do,” drawled Henning.

  “I’ve a strong stomach,” she replied. “And I think better when it is full.”

  “A frightening thought, considering how much you consume,” quipped Saybrook.

  “Yes, yes, I know I have an unladylike appetite—along with a number of other shocking habits.”

  “Heh, heh, heh,” chuckled Henning. “Are we about to have one of yer verbal fencing matches? It’s always entertaining when you two cross tongues.”

  “Sandro has already lost enough blood without suffering any cuts from me,” said Arianna. “In all seriousness, we ought not waste our breath on jests. Over breakfast, we have much to tell you.”

  8

  From Lady Arianna’s Chocolate Notebooks

  Whisky-Soaked Dark Chocolate Bundt Cake

  1 cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter, softened, more for greasing

  pan

  2 cups all-purpose flour, more for dusting pan

  5 ounces unsweetened chocolate

  ¼ cup instant espresso powder

  2 tablespoons unsweetened cocoa powder

  1 cup boiling water

  1 cup bourbon, rye or other whisky, more for sprinkling

  ½ teaspoon kosher salt

  2 cups granulated sugar

  3 large eggs

  1 tablespoon vanilla extract

  1 teaspoon baking soda

  Confectioners’ sugar, for garnish (optional)

  1. Grease and flour a 10-cup-capacity Bundt pan (or two 8–or 9-inch loaf pans). Preheat oven to 325 degrees. In microwave oven or double boiler over simmering water, melt chocolate. Let cool.

  2. Put espresso and cocoa powders in a 2-cup (or larger) glass measuring cup. Add enough boiling water to come up to the 1 cup measuring line. Mix until powders dissolve. Add whisky and salt; let cool.

  3. Using an electric mixer, beat 1 cup butter until fluffy. Add sugar and beat until well combined. Beat in the eggs, one at a time, beating well between each addition. Beat in the vanilla extract, baking soda and melted chocolate, scraping down sides of bowl with a rubber spatula.

  4. On low speed, beat in a third of the whisky mixture. When liquid is absorbed, beat in 1 cup flour. Repeat additions, ending with whisky mixture. Scrape batter into prepared pan and smooth top. Bake until a cake tester inserted into center of cake comes out clean, about 1 hour 10 minutes for Bundt pan (loaf pans will take less time; start checking them after 55 minutes).

  5. Transfer cake to a rack. Unmold after 15 minutes and sprinkle warm cake with more whisky. Let cool before serving, garnished with confectioners’ sugar
if you like.

  Yield: 10 to 12 servings.

  “Bloody hell, that’s quite a lot to digest,” muttered Henning as he pushed away his empty plate. “Theft, treason, murder.” Shaking his head, Henning refilled his glass with whisky. “And here I thought ye were savoring the idea of a quiet, peaceful autumn.”

  “I seem to stir up trouble in His Lordship’s life,” observed Arianna.

  “A toast to Trouble,” said the surgeon, raising his drink in salute. “Ye have to admit, it keeps things interesting.”

  “If we have finished philosophizing, perhaps we could go have a look at my erstwhile assailant.” Saybrook scraped back his chair. “The body is being kept down near the kitchens—in the game room, aptly enough, though the chef is apparently not happy about it sharing the space with his dead birds and skinned rabbits.”

  “Why?” quipped the surgeon. “The room’s sole purpose is to hang carcasses until the flesh is ripe enough to peel off the bone.”

  “Thank you for the graphic explanation, Baz,” said Saybrook, leading the way into the servant stairwell.

  “No point in mincing words, laddie.”

  Arianna winced at the word “mince.”

  As they descended in the gloom, Henning checked that the small chamois bag of surgical instruments was well hidden in his coat pocket. “We’ll just have a little poke around before the formal inquest begins.”

  “Nothing overt,” cautioned Saybrook, as he peeked out from the landing to check that the corridor was clear. “I’ve enough to worry about without being accused of tampering with the evidence.”

  “Don’t worry, laddie. I’m very good at what I do.”

  Moving quietly, the three of them slipped past the pantries and entered a dark, stone-floored chamber, taking care to close the heavy oaken door behind them.