“Also, if we’d had to dig it up,” Caitlin said, “we wouldn’t have been able to evade that guy who was following us.”
“I especially like how the clay skull protected the document from the elements while it provided a neat correlation to a detail of the tale,” Leo said. “You know,” he added, looking at Caitlin, “I wonder if that guy was the same creep who came after you in the costume room.”
Before she could answer, there was a knock on the door. Leo opened it and Professor Torres entered holding a slender leather valise. She was a little out of breath.
“How did you get here so fast?” Caitlin asked.
“When I called for a cab, I took Leo’s advice and asked for your friend Annie. I must say, she’s quite a speed demon!”
Caitlin and Phil laughed. Leo seated Torres in the unoccupied armchair, served her a soda, and returned to his place on the couch. “Did you bring the first fragment?” he asked.
In answer to his question, Torres calmly reached into her valise, removed the piece of parchment, and set it on the coffee table. Caitlin placed the one they had just found beside it, and the three students watched as Carmen delicately adjusted the two pieces until their ragged edges fit together almost seamlessly.
“Ready?” she asked, looking up.
With Carmen’s guidance, the transcription went quickly, and their initial assumptions were confirmed: The two fragments turned out to form the top half of a letter. This is what it said:
xxi xii mdxcix
Dear Hippolyta and Rosalind,
Take care, lest you play at playing with one better versed in play. I am no clownish Costard, prating for your delectation. When I say ‘Not one sou more!’ I do not equivocate. Again, know well this soundest sense: that authority rules longest that need not make itself manifest. The player
Phil took a sip of soda and frowned. “What’s a ‘sou’?” he asked, pronouncing the word sow.
“Not s-o-w,” Leo said, spelling it out. “S-o-u. Sow rhymes with cow. A sou, which rhymes with you, is a denomination of money—an old French coin. Apparently Hippolyta and Rosalind have demanded payment for some sort of service rendered, and the writer is refusing to comply.”
“What kind of service could it be?” Caitlin wondered aloud.
“I think that sounds too legitimate,” Phil said. “Look at the last complete sentence. Doesn’t it seem furtive, as if the writer’s urging them to be evasive and keep quiet?”
“There certainly is a lot of ambiguous wordplay in the text,” Leo said. “And you do get the feeling that there’s some kind of covert operation afoot.”
“What about blackmail?” Caitlin suggested. “Maybe that’s why it’s addressed to two Shakespearean characters. I played Hippolyta in high school once. She’s the Queen of the Amazons in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. And Rosalind is from As You Like It, isn’t she? Those might be aliases.”
Leo stroked his chin. “Interesting point. The two quotations from the first clue were from As You Like It.”
“There are a lot of references to plays and playing and players here,” Phil said.
“No kidding,” Caitlin said. “And who is ‘better versed in play’ than Shakespeare himself?”
“Indeed,” Torres said quietly.
The three students looked at the professor, who had hitherto remained silent and pensive. Her chin rested on top of her hands as she studied the document.
Leo leaned forward. “But if these fragments are in fact from Shakespeare, why would he write a clandestine letter to two women? I thought that in his benighted day women were denied access to the stage and had little or nothing to do with money.”
“Quite true,” said Torres. “But that would make it an exceptionally valuable letter, wouldn’t it?”
Chapter 26
One Conjecture is Better Than None
Sunday
Leo sat at the kitchen table in Carmen Torres’s modest, two-bedroom cottage on Cedar Street, four blocks from campus, drinking coffee and eating a fresh croissant smeared with butter and strawberry jam. It was nine o’clock on a halcyon fall morning. Already the sun was out in full force and the bright blue sky was unblemished by clouds. There wasn’t the slightest hint of the monstrous rainstorm that, according to an article Leo had read in The Plains, was supposed to arrive by nightfall.
The kitchen window was open and the gauzy white curtains swayed in the warm breeze. Torres’s cat, an amiable tabby named Raza, sat on the windowsill basking in a shaft of sunlight. Torres studied the pattern the light made on the black-and-white checkered floor of her kitchen. Then she looked at Prospero’s third clue, which she had copied on a notepad:
O I know two O may a man undo.
“I can see why you wanted help figuring out this anagram,” she said, getting up from the table and giving Raza a loving pat. “It reminds me of those scrambled word puzzles in the newspaper, only those are rudimentary. This is much more complex.”
Torres refilled their cups and set the coffeepot back on the warmer on the counter. Then she sat down at the table again, took a sip of the dark brew, and reflected. “Solving this anagram may be especially tough because it’s also a lipogram.”
“What’s a lipogram?” Leo asked, adding a dollop of milk to his coffee.
“Any piece of writing composed without using a certain letter or letters. Did you notice that Prospero’s line has lots of a’s and o’s but no e’s?”
“Yes, I was wondering about that.” Leo poured two spoonfuls of sugar into his cup, stirred, and took a sip. “Does that mean we have to decipher both an anagram and a lipogram?”
“Oh, no,” Torres said. “A lipogram isn’t a puzzle in and of itself; it’s just a novelty, a text with something self-consciously omitted. All I’m saying is that, in this case, the fact that Prospero’s anagram has no e’s will make whatever message lies hidden in it that much more difficult to unravel.”
Leo swallowed the last bite of his croissant and wiped his mouth. “I bet it’s hard to write much more than a sentence without using an e.”
“You’re telling me,” Torres said. “But some people love to test their mental mettle. A Frenchman named Georges Perec once wrote a whole novel without ever using an e. And there was an obscure Greek poet named Tryphiodorus who wrote a version of the Odyssey that had no a’s in the first book, no b’s in the second book, and so on.”
Leo was amazed. “Why would anyone do something like that?”
“Oh, partly to be intellectually ostentatious and partly to be esoteric, I suppose.” Torres sipped her coffee, then selected a croissant from the basket on the table, set it on her plate, broke it carefully in half, and began applying butter to its fluffy center. “Wordplay is such a pleasant pastime, and a perennial one too; people have been riddling and punning probably since the beginning of language. The ancient Greeks and Romans loved palindromes—sentences that read the same backward as they do forward, like ‘Live not on evil’—and the eighth-century English poet Cynewulf artfully concealed acrostics of his name in several of his most pious works.”
Leo helped himself to a second croissant. “What about Shakespeare? He was one of the all-time greats when it came to wordplay, right?”
“Indeed. Shakespeare was such an inveterate punster that he sprinkled some three thousand puns into his plays. I pity the poor pedant who counted them all. Obviously Professor Prospero loved wordplay too or he wouldn’t have made you go to all this trouble decoding these tricky ciphers.”
Leo looked at the clue on his notepad and frowned. “I think I’m beginning to wish he hadn’t.”
Torres smiled. “But aren’t you curious about this literary largess he promised you’ll find at the end of the rainbow?”
“Of course,” Leo said. He took a long sip of coffee and sighed. “I’m just worried about how we’re going to weather the storm that precedes the rainbow.”
“Must there be a storm to reveal a rainbow?”
Leo pondered the question.
“Carmen, you know that since we started looking for this treasure, it’s been nothing but close calls and”—he gestured toward his head—“not-so-close calls.” He paused and swallowed the rest of his coffee.
Torres got up and fetched the pot, poured Leo another cup, and topped off her own. Then she sat down again and looked at him. “What are you trying to tell me?” she asked gently.
Leo glanced at Raza. She had stretched out languidly on the windowsill, her eyes half-closed, her paws dangling over the edge. She seemed so serene and content.
“I guess I’m saying that I think the storm’s inevitable, that it’s building fast, and that whatever force is driving it is trying to make sure we never get to see that rainbow.”
A few minutes later, Torres slipped on a pair of stylish reading glasses and picked up her ballpoint pen. “Okay. We’ve got eleven vowels, counting y, and only ten consonants: three n’s, two m’s, two w’s, a d, a t, and a k. An odd assortment, to say the least, but let’s see what we can do with it.”
“What do you make of this capital I?” Leo asked.
Torres looked at Prospero’s clue again:
O I know two O may a man undo.
“I’m not sure,” she said. “But the fact that there’s only one i leads me to believe that it’s going to be used the same way it is in the anagram—as a nominative pronoun. Somehow I doubt it’ll be part of a longer word.”
Leo nodded. “That’s what I’m thinking too. Shall we proceed with that working hypothesis?”
“Sure, why not. When you’re dealing with a conundrum, one conjecture is better than none, right?”
They set to work. After fifteen minutes of assiduous effort, Leo looked at what he had written and shook his head. “Well, I’ve got a sentence, but unfortunately it’s missing an a and an o, and it doesn’t make any sense.” He read the line aloud:
O no I won’t wonk a mud yam.
Torres laughed. “That gets an A for inventiveness and a B for grammatical coherence, but I’m afraid it fails dismally as a plausible solution.”
“Back to the drawing board,” Leo said.
A few minutes later Torres looked up from her notepad. “Here’s one that’s just as frivolous,” she said, and read her line aloud:
OK, I am not a woody man now.
Leo chuckled. “I won’t presume to grade the professor on her scintillating work. Let’s just say it needs refinement.”
“It could use another u somewhere too. That was the one letter I couldn’t work in.”
“I like the ‘woody,’ though. That’s innovative. Do you think there might be an allusion to a forest buried in here somewhere?”
“It’s a reasonable surmise,” Torres said. “Let’s see where it leads us.”
They tried to incorporate the word woody into a solution but met with dubious success. The best line Leo could come up with, “I am now a woody nook nut,” was again two letters short of the twenty-one in Prospero’s clue. Torres’s best offering, which still lacked a u, was equally preposterous: “I woo a woody ant man monk.”
“I’m not so sure this ‘woody’ thing’s going to work out,” Leo said.
“Neither am I,” Torres said. She leaned back in her chair and sighed. Raza interpreted the movement as an invitation to leap from the windowsill onto her lap. Torres stroked the cat’s head, then set the tabby on the floor. “Well, I guess we’ll just have to start again from square one.”
For nearly an hour they worked in intense silence.
Finally Leo leaned across the table. “Carmen,” he said quietly, “I think I’ve got something good.”
“I think I do too,” she answered without looking up. “Hold on a minute.”
He waited patiently while she finished writing. When she was done, she sat back in her chair and took a deep breath, releasing it slowly.
“Take a look at this,” Leo said, pushing his notepad across the table and turning it around so she could read what he had written.
Torres leaned forward and looked at the sentence:
Do you know I am not a woman?
“It uses all twenty-one letters, and it makes sense,” Leo said.
She glanced up at him, an inscrutable smile on her face.
“What do you think?” he asked. “Am I onto something?”
She started to nod her head, but the gesture was interrupted by an involuntary chuckle, which erupted into vigorous laughter.
This was not the reaction Leo had expected after an hour of hard work, with solid results. “What’s so funny?” he asked tentatively when she began to calm down.
Torres had laughed so hard that her eyes were filled with tears. “Oh, Leo, I’m sorry, but I just can’t believe it. This is truly amazing.”
“What is?”
“What we both came up with. I guess, as they say, great minds think alike.” She picked up her notepad and handed it to him. “Look at the last line on the page.”
Leo looked and his jaw dropped.
Do you not know I am a woman?
“My God, Carmen. That’s incredible!” he cried, slapping the table. “We came up with the same words but our solutions are antithetical.”
“Or, to be a bit more precise, antonymous,” Torres said.
“The sentences are opposite in meaning: Yours indicates the speaker is a man and mine indicates the speaker is a woman.”
“And all we did was put the word not in a different place.” Leo scratched his head, trying to fathom the coincidence.
“It’s interesting that you made the speaker a man and I made her a woman,” Torres said. “Do you think we just unconsciously displayed our respective gender biases?”
“That’s a good question for your seminar on the politics of sexuality in Renaissance literature.”
Torres laughed. “Yes, there’s fertile ground here for intellectual inquiry, I’m sure.”
Leo looked at the professor hopefully. “Carmen, do you think one of our sentences is the right solution?”
“Yes, I do.”
“Which one?”
“Let me check something and I’ll tell you in a minute.”
Torres stood up and walked out of the kitchen, her slippers slapping briskly against her heels. A short while later she returned with a book in her hand.
Leo saw the title of the volume and felt his pulse quicken. “It’s a quotation from Shakespeare’s As You Like It?”
Torres nodded as she sat down and flipped through the pages. “Here it is, in act 3, scene 2. It’s one of Rosalind’s lines.” She handed the open book to Leo with her finger pointing to a spot about halfway down the page.
Leo took the book and read the lines:
Do you not know I am a woman?
When I think, I must speak.
“So you had it right,” he said, feeling simultaneously disappointed and elated.
“But so did you, except for the placement of one small word,” Carmen consoled him.
“A small word, but of great significance.” Leo read Rosalind’s lines again and thought for a moment. “So, if I remember this scene correctly from looking at it the other night, Celia is trying to explain to Rosalind that she’s just seen Orlando—”
“Who is Rosalind’s amorous interest, as they say,” Torres interjected.
“But Rosalind gets excited and keeps interrupting her. Finally Celia grows impatient and tells Rosalind to shut up. That’s when Rosalind says, ‘Do you not know I am a woman? When I think, I must speak.’”
“Yes, and frankly, those lines have always irked me. I’ve always thought their implication was discriminatory and sexist, that Shakespeare was belittling women as shallow thinkers and impetuous talkers.” She paused. “But I suppose you could look at it another way. Since Rosalind is disguised as a man at the time, perhaps Shakespeare was being ironic, subtly scoffing at that offensive stereotype by having Rosalind denigrate or disparage women as though she were a typical male chauvinist. It’s hard to tell.”
“That�
�s interesting,” Leo said. “You know, when I checked Prospero’s Shakespeare concordance for the quotation about being in a forest, dressed in man’s apparel, and found out it was from As You Like It, for some reason it never occurred to me that it referred to how Rosalind hides in the Forest of Arden and disguises herself as a man.”
“Yes, that’s one of the many satirical moments in the play when Shakespeare pokes fun at the ideal of romantic love,” Torres said.
An amorphous notion began taking on coherence in Leo’s brain. “Carmen, remind me. Isn’t Rosalind dressed up as a character from Greek mythology?”
Torres nodded. “She assumes the guise of Ganymede, the Trojan boy Zeus took to Olympus to be the cupbearer to the gods.”
“Then that must be it!” Leo exclaimed.
“Ganymede?”
“Yes!”
“I don’t get it. How does Ganymede fit into this?”
Leo jumped up and began pacing the kitchen floor. “Prospero once donated a painting of Ganymede to the Holyfield Art Gallery. Every time I go there I see it—with that plaque beside it, thanking Prospero—because it’s hanging right in the lobby.”
In his excitement Leo almost stepped on Raza, who had reentered the kitchen for a drink from her bowl. Torres rescued her cat and set her out of harm’s way.
“I know the painting you’re talking about,” she said. “Are you implying that the clue has something to do with it?”
“Yes, and I’d bet my B.A. that the next fragment of the old letter is hidden somewhere on it or near it.” He looked around the room. “May I use your phone?”
Tooth and Nail: A Novel Approach to the SAT (A Harvest Test Preparation Book) Page 22