Secrets of a Lady

Charles tilted the lamp close to the penstrokes imbedded in the ink blotter. Melanie tugged at a side drawer that refused to open completely. It gave way with the crack of splintered wood. She reached behind the drawer, scraped her hand on the broken wood, and felt the crinkle of paper. She drew it out. A piece of folded paper, sealed with red wax, with no imprint and no direction written on it. She broke the wax with her nail. A handful of banknotes spilled onto the desk.

“Payment to his minions,” Charles said.

Melanie smoothed out the paper wrapping. The inside was covered with writing. QAWMW UGCC EW DSMVAWM OWCYX. PWW QI GV NYLB OIWPHQ OMGHB YCC QNGP. AWCC AYTW QGFW WHISRA QI OI QAYV UAWH QAGP GP OIHW.

She showed it to Charles. “Recognize it?”

“A simple substitution code, I suspect.” He pinned down the curling edges of the paper with his fingers. “It’s not long, but hopefully there’s enough to break it. He hasn’t troubled to run all the words together, which makes —”

Raoul came back into the room. “The rest of the house is empty. He only seems to have used the kitchen and one of the bedrooms. There’s some food in the pantry, a change of clothes and shaving things in the bedroom. Captain Fraser’s having a closer look, but I doubt we’ll find anything. No sign of a letter to Bow Street, either. You’ve done better?”

“Perhaps.” Melanie looked up from the paper. “We’ve found a payment and a coded message, presumably prepared for the people holding Colin.”

Raoul strode into the room and stared down at the cipher. “If Carevalo had this ready and waiting, he must have been expecting a messenger.”

Charles looked up and met his gaze. “Quite.”

Raoul nodded. “Melanie’s better at ciphers than I am, and you were brilliant at them even as a boy. I’ll keep watch in the hall with your brother.”

Melanie looked back at the coded message. The image of Colin’s severed finger swam before her eyes. This must be how Carevalo had sent the instructions. But if this was the next message he meant to send, then the twenty-four hours between messages were not yet up. She sat in the desk chair, back straight, picked up the pen, and reached for a sheet of writing paper. “W seems to be the most frequent letter,” she said.

“It is,” Charles said. “So assuming he’s writing in English, W must be e.”

They had both devised and decoded countless substitution ciphers in the Peninsula and later in Vienna and Brussels. It was a simple enough code, used when one wanted to conceal the message but was not expecting a serious attempt at decoding. One chose a key word (treason had been a favorite of Raoul’s) and matched the letters of the word with the first letters of the alphabet. The rest of the alphabet was then displaced by the number of distinct letters in the key word. It was impossible to determine how the letters were displaced without knowing the key word and the number of letters it contained. But there were ways to break the code. E was the most commonly occurring letter in the English language, so the most commonly occurring letter in a cipher written in English was almost certainly translated as E.

“W must be the fifth letter in the key word.” Melanie copied out the cipher with e filled in in lowercase for all the Ws.

She stared at the paper before her and forced her mind to focus down to those black strokes of ink. The first word was now simplified to QAeGe. “I’d hazard a guess the first word is ‘there.’ Or ‘where,’ but it seems more likely he’d start a letter with ‘there.’”

Charles pulled up a stool and sat beside her. “The second word is a four-letter word without an e and with a double letter at the end. Followed by a two-letter word with e as the second letter. There will be?”

“Let’s try it. If you’re right, that gives us t, h, r, w, i, l, and b.” She rewrote the cipher with those letters filled in.

there will be DSrther OelYX. Pee tI it NYLB OIePHt OriHB Yll thiP. Hell hYTe tiFe eHISRh tI FI thYt wheH thiP iP OIHe.

Melanie studied the message. “That fourth word must be ‘further.’ Or ‘farther.’ So D equals f and S equals u or a. And the first word in the second sentence almost has to be ‘see.’ P equals s.”

Charles leaned forward, elbow on the desktop. “In the second sentence there’s a two-letter word starting with t. That can only be ‘to’—so I equals o. And then we have a three-letter word ending in a double l. ‘Ill’ or ‘I’ll’ or ‘all,’ but i is already taken, so Y must equal a.”

“Which means the fourth word is ‘further’ and S equals u.” She pulled the paper closer.

“Wait a bit, Mel, where are we on the key word?” He reached across her and turned up the lamp. “If Y equals a, we’ve got YEL-W-AG. Looks suspiciously as though we’ve got a two-word key and it’s ‘yellow something.’ Skipping the second l, that makes O equal d.”

Melanie took a clean sheet of paper and copied out the message again.

There will be further delaX. See to it NaLB doesHt driHB all this. Hell haTe tiFe eHouRh to Fo that wheH this is doHe.

She chewed the tip of the pen. “What does Carevalo want them to ‘see to’?” A welter of uncomfortable images crowded her mind.

Charles rested his hand on her shoulder for a moment. “Patience, my darling. Whatever it is, he can’t do it anymore.” He squeezed her shoulder, then looked down at the paper. “The last word in the first sentence must be ‘delay.’ X equals y.”

Melanie forced her attention back to the text. “And I suspect that word at the end is ‘done,’ making H equal n. Wait a bit, Charles, we almost have it. Look.”

There will be further delay. See to it NaLB doesnt drinB all this. Hell haTe tiFe enouRh to do that when this is done.

The fingers of her left hand cramped as her grip on the pen tightened. “‘NaLB’ must be a person. What were the names of the men Roth mentioned who matched the description of the man Polly saw? Stephen Watkins was the one he thought most likely. But there was also—”

“Jack Evans, a former prizefighter.” Charles’s eyes glinted with triumph held in check. “The one who was spotted drinking in a tavern in Wapping. Which I suspect was called—?” He pulled the sheet of paper with the key- word letters toward him. “YELOW DRAGN. The Yellow Dragon. Of course. The name of Jack Evans’s favorite tavern is a key Carevalo could count on them remembering.”

Fingers trembling with the relief of the finish line in sight, Melanie filled in the rest of the code and wrote out the whole message.

There will be further delay. See to it Jack doesn’t drink all this. He’ll have time enough to do that when this is done.

“Not a very profound message,” Charles said. “But it does tell us who.”

“But not where.” She threw down the pen. “Damnation.”

“We know the general area—somewhere close to a tavern called the Yellow Dragon in Wapping. And we know how to communicate with them. Perhaps—”

A crash sounded from the hall. They ran to the door and flung it open to see Edgar sitting on the chest of a prone man, while Raoul stood over them holding a pistol.

Edgar seized his quarry by the throat. “Where is he? Goddamnit to hell, where is he?”

“Who?” The man’s voice was thin and reedy. “I only came here because the gentleman asked me.”

“Let him go, Edgar.” Charles pulled his brother off the man and helped the man to his feet. He was more of a