Surely Andrée Castine knew this code. Her apparent refusal to decipher it (or to acknowledge her decipherment) argues that she regarded her husband’s final departure from Castines Hundred in 1812 as an abandonment. She did not disclose these ciphered epistles to the twins in 1825, on their thirteenth birthday, when she disclosed to them the four “prenatal” letters; neither, on the other hand, did she destroy them. Henry and Henrietta themselves, characteristically, professed only mild surprise and equally mild curiosity when “their” son, Andrew Cook V, turned the documents up in the library of Castines Hundred in the 1890’s; if they recognized the cipher, they chose not to acknowledge the fact.
That Andrew, my grandfather, was by his own testimony an able counterfeiter but no cryptanalyst, beyond his telegrapher’s Morse: see my account of him in the letter to B., attached. Interestingly, he seems never to have mentioned the coded letters to my father, nor did my father to me. It was my mother (Andrée III) from whom I first heard of them, just after my father’s death at Alamogordo, New Mexico, on July 16, 1945. Among Mother’s gifts was a prodigious memory for dates: she remarked, in her grief, that my father had been killed on the 27th anniversary of the Bolshevists’ murder of the Romanovs at Ekaterinburg, which she had deplored despite her own bolshevism, and the 130th of my ancestor’s “second posthumous letter in the great code.” She spoke distractedly and in French; I could not imagine what she meant by “lettres posthumes” or “le grand chiffre,” and I was at the time too bereft myself — and too busy in the immediate postwar years — to inquire. During her own untimely dying in 1953 (cervical cancer), she alluded to them again, this time even more cryptically, so to speak, as “le chiffre le grand.”
1953, Henry, was the mezzo of my own cammin, a road I shall retrace in another letter. True to the family Pattern — of which I was not yet aware — I spent that orphan winter in the library of Castines Hundred, executing Mother’s estate, redefining for myself the Second Revolution, and, in both connections, reviewing like my ancestor before me the archives of our line. I did not then discover (would I had!) the four “prenatal” letters of 1812. I did find what I would come to understand, in the spring, here on Bloodsworth Island, to be les cinq lettres posthumes of Andrew Cook IV, written in what I instantly recognized as resembling “Captain Kidd’s” code in The Gold Bug: Legrand’s cipher!
After a few false starts (SLLORD looked Welsh to me, SREMAERD vaguely Gaelic; I knew neither tongue) I saw the inversion device and set about deciphering and transcribing the first letter. After half a dozen pages I could almost “sight-read” the text aloud. And indeed, as I began to comprehend what I had discovered — not so simple a matter for one who had not first read, as you have, the “prenatal” letters! — I put by my transcribing, read straight to the end… and changed the course of my life.
As shall be told. But to the letters! I found the five to be divisible into a group of two dealing with their author’s adventures in the 1812 War, another group of three dealing with his efforts in behalf of exiled Bonaparte and the Second Revolution. The first two are dated a year and one week apart: July 9, 1814, and July 16, 1815. The second three, oddly, are also dated a week apart, but over a period of six years: August 6, 1815; August 13, 1820; and August 20, 1821. Nothing in the letters accounts for this curious sequence, which I therefore presume to be coincidental, or conformable to some larger pattern unknown to their author. The additional coincidence of your note’s arriving this morning—of all mornings on the calendar! — reminds me of what another has called the Anniversary View of History; and while I don’t yet know what one is to do with such coincidences (beyond tisking one’s tongue), it will be convenient for me not to resist so insistent a pattern. Unless therefore, as I profoundly hope, you interrupt me by appearing and demanding the originals, I will summarize for you les lettres posthumes over the coming weeks on the anniversaries of their inditing, and (poor second choice!) post them to you when you deign to give me your address.
Some similar constraint must have obtained in the case of the first of our ancestor’s letters, the date of whose composition you will have remarked to be not “posthumous” at all, but a full two months and more before the British attack on Baltimore. Yet the annals of Castines Hundred (in this case, a memoir of Andrew Cook V, my grandfather) declare that no word from Andrew Cook IV reached there until well after the news of his death at Fort McHenry. The explanation is that the letter headed Off Bermuda, July 9, 1814 has a brief postscript dated Fort Bowyer, Mobile Bay, February 1815, in which the writer explains, not altogether convincingly, why it has taken him nearly two years to write to the wife he said au revoir to in 1812, and (what I pray may not be the fate of this) another seven months to mail the letter!
Drolls & dreamers that we are, he begins, we fancy that we can undo what we fancy we have done. He had left Andrée and the newborn twins early in June 1812, with the object of hurrying (by the standards of the age) to aid Joel Barlow’s negotiations with Napoleon: the same he had previously tried to obstruct. Thoroughbred Cook/Burlingame that he is, he decides that the most effective, perhaps even the swiftest, course is not to take ship for France directly, but to rush first to Washington and expose to President Madison or Secretary Monroe the fraudulent nature of the Henry Letters, urging them additionally to negotiate in person with Tecumseh and to dispatch himself by fast frigate to Paris as a special diplomatic aide to Barlow. To our modern ears the mission sounds absurd; but this is 1812 (the numerical equivalent, I note, of AHAB), when our high elected officers were almost bizarrely accessible, and such white whales as this of Andrew’s were occasionally harpooned. No matter: Joel Barlow has already reported from Paris that the “Comte de Crillon” is an impostor; the Henry Letters, authentic or not, have done their bit to feed the Hawks; Cook reaches the capital on the very day (June 18) that Madison signs the Declaration of War passed by the Congress on the day before.
He is dismayed. He dares not permit himself to wonder (so he wonders plainly on the page!) whether a fortnight’s-shorter pregnancy at Castines Hundred might have aborted the War of 1812. The War Department, he learns, has already ordered General Hull to invade Canada from Detroit; incredibly, the orders have been posted to Hull in Frenchtown by ordinary mail! Cook knows that Tecumseh and General Brock will hear the news at least a week earlier, via the network of John Jacob Astor’s voyageurs, which Cook himself has organized. He considers intercepting the mail, forging counterorders to Hull; he considers on the contrary sending counterinformation through the fur trappers to Brock. Shall he rush to aid Tecumseh? Shall he promote the secession of New England, the defeat of Madison in the coming election? Shall he sail for France after all and help Barlow juggle the delicate balance of international relations? (Still annoyed at Napoleon’s Berlin and Milan decrees, the Congress came within a few votes of declaring war on France and England together; only Barlow’s assurances to Madison — that a treaty indemnifying U.S. shipowners for their French losses is forthcoming — has made England the sole enemy. The British cabinet, in turn, are confident that America will revoke its declaration of war when news arrives that the Orders in Council have been repealed; perhaps even now it is not too late…) Or shall he do none of these, but return to Castines Hundred and be the first father in our family to parent what he sired?