Jane’s hand went to the bruise on her cheek. ‘Captain Fayne. So that’s it. And what exactly has discomfited you, if I may ask?’ Her voice was suddenly sharp.
‘It is not my affair.’
‘Indeed it is not. For your information, however, I have known Captain Fayne since we were children. Our families were neighbours.’
‘You were more than neighbourly when I saw you together in the town.’
Jane jumped off the bed and looked furious. ‘Have you been spying on me? How dare you!’
‘Certainly not. I happened to see you in High Street.’
‘Did you now? Well, you won’t be seeing me again.’ She threw the Essais on to the bed and stormed out.
Thomas stood and stared at the door. You handled that well, Thomas, he thought. You clod. Although I’d wager it was Fayne who gave her that bruise.
Not many minutes later, there was another knock on the door. Not daring to hope that she had returned, Thomas opened it. She had not returned. Captain Fayne had, and he was smirking.
‘I saw your visitor leaving, Hill. Seemed upset. Take the advice of a man who knows, and take her for a run while you may.’
‘Go away, Fayne. You are offensive.’ He made to close the door, but Fayne held it open.
‘Why don’t you go and sleep in the stable, Hill? The mare might join you there. She enjoys a morning gallop. Then I can have my room back.’
With a shove, Thomas closed the door and locked it. God in his heaven, what next?
What next came as a surprise: Silas’s boy with an urgent message from Abraham. Thomas was to come at once.
In his rooms, Abraham was waiting impatiently. When Thomas knocked, he was summoned brusquely in. ‘Thomas? You’ve work to do.’
‘Good day, Abraham. Why so urgent?’
‘This is why,’ said the old man, holding up a rolled document. ‘It arrived this morning from London. It was found on a man known to be one of Pym’s most trusted messengers, leaving the city at night on the Cambridge road. Quite by chance, the man was apprehended by a troop of our dragoons, and thoroughly searched. They found this hidden inside the lining of his hat.’
‘What is it?’ asked Thomas.
‘That is what I want you to find out. It’s quite long, and it was hidden. A double precaution. A very fortunate interception, which might be important. Hidden messages often are, more so the longer ones. The messenger was no help. They got nothing out of him before he died. Here it is.’ Abraham handed Thomas the roll. ‘Can you start at once?’
‘I can. I’ll give you the plain text as soon as I can.’
‘Good. I have another young man who can do all the routine work. I want you to concentrate solely on this. And, Thomas, be particularly careful. Say nothing to anyone but me. And do not make any copies. We don’t want this falling into the wrong hands. I sense that it is valuable.’
CHAPTER 6
Thank God for the dragoons who found this. Something promising at last. Thomas laid the document on his table, smoothed it out and studied it. Good rag paper, an unremarkable hand.
URF UBD HE XQB TF KGA OEMD RRFUO TLC WMG LRB WHT R XHGORKZ IO KPW769WA MQFV BVMF HPL ZFTD RVV57 4SEWMFREJ VGL SVKMGE 852 GTSC WZTD QETIJG IVL GJT RA KDOE IK EOJAAQLV GGJR MQU IOIGSI GRQF HBFZG JGY ALG EE OLWEEA GJR YIFS1 82AEL2 64SGE SC AAD ZVY JP KP WXR JB JTN XBZ775XNW WJBS LA LWAK371 EAIH TPA AD RVV BAP TWPVV AGDN WWJ URR VUTIW EW HTI QCT WY QDT37 1IE852 769UMHT RKC CONT WSGV WMG IEN DJEE KWIHV ZW PNU EAIH371 ZV GJR YIFSS NQ DA BV NGGCVL LD SVMC IRLKW DN KMJ BS WINDU IITAE KW42177 5OX LCIVK IJM LXMV IFS PCI UT FFZ SEPI MZTNJQGCOW3 71E ZDWZTD QE SZGJ GYB LD 574SKIFS RVIV N GFL OX LC QFV WV AZPLCJJX NX IF TNU BG IHZA OP RJWGC
He started counting. On a single sheet there were twelve lines of text, made up of four hundred and fifty-six letters, forty-five numbers and one hundred and thirty-eight spaces. This intercepted message was not just longer than any other he had seen: the combinations of letters, spaces and numbers had a different feel to them. Ignoring all spaces, which would almost certainly have been inserted at random, the numbers appeared in sequences of three or six. That suggested that they were probably codewords, perhaps for names. If so, the text was a nomenclator — a mix of code and cipher — which would make it more difficult to break than a plain cipher, but still breakable. There would be clues somewhere.
Despite the length of the text, the sender did not reveal himself at all. Thomas studied the writer’s hand and tried to visualize him. He tried fat and thin, short and tall, old and young. He tried divining the man’s nature — mean, generous, kind, cruel. Nothing. After he had stared at the text for an hour, the man who had encrypted it remained hidden. Thomas’s magic, for once, was not working.
‘So much for art,’ he said aloud, ‘time to try science.’ Once again, he wrote out the letters of the alphabet across the top of a sheet of paper. Then he counted the number of times each letter appeared in the message. He wrote this number below each letter, and E, A and T under the highest numbers; then he examined the juxtaposition of each to other letters, found three instances of double letters, and concluded which encrypted letter represented each of them. He repeated the process to find the letters I, O, S and R, and tentatively applied this to the first few lines. For this exercise, all numbers were ignored. The result was nonsense. As he had expected, this was not a straightforward alphabetic cipher, either shifted by a keyword or mixed by a system of substitution. At least two substitutions had been used, perhaps more, and there was still the matter of the numbers. A double or even triple alphabetic substitution would eventually yield to close analysis and a little intuition, but it would take time. And Thomas’s instincts were shouting at him that this decryption was going to require all his skills. Hoping that sustenance would bring more success, he put down his quill and went to find food.
Fortified by an excellent mutton stew from Silas’s kitchen and half a bottle of claret from his cellar, Thomas lit a cheap tallow candle and started again. This time he attacked the forty-five numbers. He still suspected that they were codes for names, but needed to be certain. Assuming that the numbers were actually in sequences of three digits, the sixes being two names together, he found eight separate numbers, of which 769, 574, 852 and 775 were repeated once, and 371 occurred four times. That made a nomenclator almost certain, and decoding 371 would be a huge step forward. After two more hours, however, and four more candles, he had made no further progress. He had identified not a single word from the letters or numbers, and had no more idea what secrets they held than when Abraham had handed the paper to him. Beyond the facts that a complex system of encryption and encoding had been used, and that the message must be important, he still knew nothing about it. Without bothering to undress, he lay down and slept.
Next morning, Thomas went first to visit Abraham, hoping his old friend would provide an insight into the problem. He described the text in detail — forty-five numbers, 456 letters and 138 spaces. He told Abraham how he had approached the task, the old man nodding encouragingly as he did so, and finally he told him that he had learned nothing. They discussed poly-alphabetic substitutions, nomenclators, variable Caesar shifts, homophonic substitutions, keywords and codewords. At the end of the morning, they had agreed only that this was not a message intended to be decrypted quickly, even by someone with the key. It was too complex. So it was not a standard military despatch, and, although important, would not be battlefield-urgent. That made it of strategic rather than tactical value. There was no context, and there were no other clues. They still had no idea what it was about, who had written it or for whom it was intended. Abraham could tell from Thomas’s voice that he was tired and frustrated.