The Intrigue at Highbury

As much as Mr. Dixon apparently wanted to keep it secret.

Twenty-Six

“She will never lead any one really wrong; she will make no lasting blunder; where Emma errs once, she is in the right a hundred times.”

— Mrs. Weston to Mr. Knightley, Emma

Emma was beginning to dread the arrival of the post.

Each day brought something more vexing. First the charade. Then the riddle. Now a word puzzle of yet another sort.

GRAL IRNIE DNOMHC

VEIHTTS HTSASE LYE DEVI

EWDEH LL MADE GNO

What vexed her most was not the challenges presented by the puzzles. It was the fact that their continued accumulation rendered it increasingly unlikely that Mrs. Elton had authored all of them.

When the third note arrived, addressed solely to Mr. Knightley, Emma had at first ascribed it to Mrs. Elton along with the others. The infuriating woman had, after all, brought up the subject of the puzzles only the day before, as Miss Jones prepared to tell her fortune. Like the first two, this latest bore a local postmark. But each puzzle had become successively more difficult to decipher; Mr. Knightley and Mr. Darcy still awaited a response regarding the second one from the friend they thought might be of assistance. They were not even entirely certain as to the nature of the third.

“I believe it is a cipher puzzle.” Mr. Darcy cast it back onto the writing table in Mr. Knightley’s study. “Though I cannot begin to guess how we are to determine the key.”

“There may be no method to it at all,” Elizabeth said. “The arrangement could be random — a simple anagram.”

“Not so simple when one is trying to work out the solution.” Mr. Knightley picked up the note and scanned it once more. “If it is indeed an anagram, one cannot form ‘Churchill’ or ‘murder’—there is no U.”

“That is why I favor the cipher,” Darcy replied.

Cipher or anagram, Emma grudgingly conceded to herself that Mrs. Elton could not possibly have created all three word puzzles. The woman was simply not that clever. Which meant that Emma had been wrong.

Emma despised being wrong. Particularly when in the process, her husband was proved right. Emma loved Mr. Knightley beyond expression, felt blessed indeed to be the recipient of not only his affection, but also his wisdom and experience. But she could not help wishing that events would prove her correct on occasion.

As the Darcys deliberated solution tactics, Mr. Knightley noticed Emma’s state of glum contemplation.

“I daresay Mrs. Knightley has more experience with word puzzles than any of us. Last year she and a friend compiled a book of riddles, conundrums, and so forth. Emma, what strategy would you recommend for solving this?”

The question drew her from her brooding. “The original letters could have been systematically rearranged, such as moving the first letter of each word to its end,” she said. “Or they might have been substituted one for one — A becomes B, B becomes C, and so on. I propose that we each copy out the lines and work independently on different methods. Perhaps the gentlemen could attempt to determine a substitution alphabet, while Mrs. Darcy and I experiment with rearranging the existing letters.”

It was agreed. Three copies of the message were made and, equipped with pencils and large sheets of foolscap, all four of them settled down to apply themselves.

Elizabeth, wanting no distractions, retired to the library to work.

As she had in Mr. Knightley’s study, she stared at the message again. This time, however, she thought not of the letters on the page, but of the unknown person who had arranged them.

This was not a conundrum in a book, written to amuse and entertain. It was a communique, written to deliver information. The puzzle’s author wanted the message to be deciphered, or he would not have sent it. If his goal was to challenge, not to thwart, the solution might not prove as difficult as they anticipated.

The most sensible way to begin, she decided, was to simply write out the puzzle backwards. There must, after all, be some method to the placement of the letters and “words” as arranged — mustn’t there? She need not put herself through mental contortions if the author had not.

Reversing the first line, however, revealed only that the solution would require more effort. “Chmond einri larg” made even less sense than elevated religious houses and gatherings of braggarts. Nevertheless, she reversed the rest of the puzzle to see whether any patterns emerged.

CHMOND EINRI LARG

IVED EYL ESASTH STTHIEV

ONG EDAM LL HEDWE

When finished, she allowed her gaze to drift over the letters, giving the words an opportunity to reveal themselves. “CHMOND” drew her attention, for it composed most of the word “Richmond,” the city where the Churchills had been living when Mrs. Churchill died. In fact, the “RI” needed to complete the name was on the same line — preceded by “IN.”

Something in Richmond. The remaining letters on that line spelled LARGE.

Large in Richmond. Whatever could be the sense of that? But the phrase was formed by rearranging the reversed letter groupings — not the individual letters — and then merely adjusting the word spaces: LARG EINRI CHMOND… LARGE IN RICHMOND.

Excited, she tore slips of paper and wrote a grouping on each so she could rearrange them more easily. She had been right: the solution was not as difficult as she had first imagined.

HEDWE LL EDAM ONG STTHIEV ESASTH EYL IVED LARG EINRI CHMOND

But now… what did it mean?

Emma set down her pencil and rubbed her temples. She, too, had left Mr. Knightley’s study to better concentrate, and had chosen the drawing room. Now sheets of paper covered in cross-outs and false starts lay strewn on the card table, and pencil lead darkened her fingertips.

She had nearly given up, had even risen to rejoin the others in the study and admit defeat. But then her gaze had landed upon her nephews’ box of alphabets, still not returned to the nursery.

She had removed the letters she needed, supplementing the tiles with small pieces of torn paper to create necessary duplicates. Three D’s. Eight E’s. Then she had spread them out upon the table, arranging and rearranging letters in seemingly endless combinations until something of sense began to form.

Now the solution stared back at her.

She counted the letters once more, again checking them against the original message to ensure she had used each one the proper number of times.

Then she reached for a fresh sheet of paper, dipped her quill in the inkpot, and wrote out the message to share with the others.

“ ‘He dwelled amongst thieves as they lived large in Richmond.’ ” Darcy handed the paper to Mr. Knightley and regarded Elizabeth with admiration. “Well done.”

“Indeed, very well done,” Mr. Knightley echoed. “Mr. Darcy and I were having a miserable time attempting to work out a substitution scheme. I must go find Mrs. Knightley. She will be pleased that you discovered the solution.”

Elizabeth appreciated their praise, but felt it only half earned. “Discovering the solution is one thing,” she said. “Interpreting it is quite another.”

“Given that the previous riddle holds a clue to the murder of Churchill, ‘they’ almost certainly refers to the