“A lamp was dropped, but the flames were quickly put out, Miss,” the constable told her, then continued. “But just before then, towards the end of the fracas, when the men attending the meeting was dispersing, I received a blow to the stomach and then this here paper was pushed inside my tunic. At first I thought I was stabbed, but then I found this piece of paper. Because I was bent over I did not see who put it there. I decided to give it to the Sergeant in case it was important.”
“Bravo,” Charles said, and took the piece of paper. “Did you see anything of the man who gave this to you?”
Constable Duckett hesitated. “Not really, I was bent double. He may’ve had a missing finger. Something like that.”
Constable Duckett then returned to his place by the door, as the Madeira wine arrived. As Ada sipped hers, the young constable met her glance equably, then looked away awkwardly. He’d not been offered refreshments; was that because he was only a constable?
“Look here, Ada, what do you make of this?” Charles said. He spread the paper on his work table and together they bent over it. Immediately she saw a pattern. There were four quadrants, each with its own distinct features. The upper left was composed of hieroglyphs, the upper right and lower left were what seemed to her random groups of letters. The lower right was some sort of equation with complex polyhedrons on one side, symbols and a rhyme on the other. Underneath were two shapes.
“It’s four — ”
“Yes indeed, those hieroglyphs will be quickly read. I have a book — ”
“The letters will need application of the code-breaking — ’
“Indeed, we can begin with the simple frequency system and go on from there — ”
“But those equations — ”
“Yes, Ada, they will prove troublesome, but I’m sure we can do it.”
Clark had stopped his nervous prowling and had been excitedly listening to their interplay. “Then you think it does mean something?” he interrupted.
“We won’t know till we’ve cracked some of it, but, yes, I think this is a coded message.”
As the two men talked, Ada stared down at the paper, allowing the pictures, letters and symbols to flow, reform, break up, so that her mind could explore and absorb without direction. On another level, she was aware that Constable Duckett was saying, “I don’t know why I was chosen, or whether I was mistook for someone else.” And Clark replying, “It feels as if we are being played with.” Charles countered with, “We have no certainties until we uncover the true meaning of the codes or ciphers.”
“Wanstead Abbey,” Ada heard herself saying.
All three men stopped speaking and stared at her. She pointed to the three lone symbols at the bottom. “Surely that’s a gryphon, and, beside it, what could be a lake, and the sign of a cross.”
“It could be any ecclesiastical building,” Charles said gently. “And those three symbols may be related to the context of the other codes — ”
But Clark had seized on her words. “Wanstead Abbey? But that’s where — ”
“I know, my … Lord Byron lived there.” She sounded as indifferent as she could. “It’s all I know about him.” She turned away and drank some more of the rich wine. It was William who’d described to her — in the most romantic terms — the now ruined Abbey where her father had once lived, and near which he was buried.
“It all falls into place!” Clark was saying. “This must be the focus for Republicanism, the hidden face behind the philosophical unionists and their talk of Charters and Rights. Is it Irish Home Rule, or some more sinister form of Radicalism? We must find out. I was right to take this seriously. It is either a warning to us, or we’ve intercepted a message destined for another conspirator. Mr Babbage, will you bend all your powers to unravelling these codes, and put everything else aside? We must know what it says. For the safety of the realm.”
On the carriage ride back home to Fordhook, Ada studied the copy she’d made of the coded message, with the Under Secretary’s permission. She knew Charles was right. They should not necessarily interpret those three symbols as meaning Wanstead Abbey. There had been no rumours, no whispers, of a movement using that name as their rallying cry. And the composer of the message could not have known that she, or anyone of her family, would see it. Until the answer was found, they must be open-minded. At home she had her own pamphlets and notes on hieroglyphs — it would be a race between her and Charles how quickly these could be translated. But she did not have the key to the rest. She hoped to learn from Charles.
Was Under Secretary Clark over-reacting when he feared a threatening conspiracy to overthrow the government and establish a republic? She sighed. Her mother was not the only one to worry about such things. Would a republic be such a bad thing, she brooded? No Englishman could feel proud of their recent monarchs, though William IV was not as embarrassing in his excesses as George IV. Lady Byron often remarked that the Court set a terrible example and did not command respect. But then she said the same thing about Members of Parliament too. Only the Duke of Wellington, now their Prime Minister, escaped her criticism, but those who hated the way he’d let the Reform Act go through were not republicans!
I must listen carefully at Lady Conway’s Ball tonight, she thought, and pay attention to what is being said about politics and the matters of the day, instead of just enjoying myself showing off my costume and dancing. At least I have the advantage in that my mind is trained to notice such things.
She put the paper away in her purse — made of matching red silk and decorated with a black transfer-printed motif of the Tower of London — and found herself thinking of Constable Robert Duckett. There had been an honesty about him, and his manner was neither subservient nor insolent. Why did he make her think of William? She managed to hide it from her mother and the Furies, but she still felt pain at the thought of the young man who would have been her husband for the past eighteen months, if their elopement had not been thwarted. They’d barely managed to make it down the driveway that night. Where was he now? She hoped he’d managed to obtain another post as tutor, and was comfortable somewhere. But, a tiny part of her acknowledged, it had been a lucky escape. His energy and ardour had not matched her own.
Not that she thought of Robert in the same way. He was only a constable, albeit good-looking and someone with initiative. A girl would be happy to be seen on his arm.
Robert pulled his coat closer around him against a squally burst of rain. What a dreary night to be out without my snug uniform, he thought. It was strange to be out without it. When he’d first joined the Metropolitan Police, freshly recruited from Bristol, he’d felt very conspicuous wearing it at all times, as he was pledged to do. Now he felt vulnerable without it.
He paused. Looking up and to his right he could make out, through the foggy gloom, the dome of St Paul’s in the distance. He was headed, though, for somewhere godless — or so people said — towards St Giles and the Rookery. One of those warrens of alleys and courts, with ancient houses that jutted out above till they almost touched, tottering and in danger of collapse. Not a week went by, it seemed, than one old house or another collapsed in a cloud of choking dust, killing anyone unfortunate enough to be asleep inside. The Old Mint, Turnmill Street, Saffron Hall, whatever the warren was called it was always the same, as densely packed with humanity as a sewer with rats. Sometimes two families occupied just one room, sleeping space on stairways was hotly contested, and spots in hallways rented out.
These people might scratch some kind of living in an honest job, but the vast majority were engaged in some form of criminal activity or another — from as young as an orphan boy who could pick pockets, to the ancient ones, bent-backed and grey. Whole courts were devoted to such trades as pick-pocketry, swindling, or confidence- trickstering. And nowhere could you escape the smell of unwashed bodies and clothes, of open drains and sewers and the dankness of regular flooding in the cellars from the River Thames, kindly returning the sewage that had been dumped in her earlier. He took an experimental sniff now, and nearly choked, his stomach churning.
What a contrast he thought, turning up his collar, from his visit to Mr Babbage’s house in Marylebone. The new houses in the West End were built of smart stone, the streets were wide and well paved and lit with the new gas-lighting at regular intervals. Not only there but all over London was the feel of a town making goods, selling goods, importing and exporting them, inventing them and advertising them. As well as sewers, there was a smell of money. The chasm between those with money and the huge number who lived in worse conditions than a pig in its sty seemed to grow bigger every day, especially as the numbers of poor were swelled continuously by those arriving from a failing countryside, their rural lives even harder than those in the towns.
Robert was one of the lucky ones though, even if his job might be dangerous at times, like tonight. “Duckett,”
