Chapter Thirty-nine
WITCH TRIAL ENDS IN GUILTY VERDICT
Actress Eleanor Reynolds was found guilty of use of magic and, with unexpected lenience, sentenced to an indefinite term as a guest of Her Majesty’s Scientific Laboratories. Sir Philip Amory, who represented Mrs. Reynolds, had no comment. Illegal betting on the outcome of the trial was reported to be fierce.
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QUALITY OF MERCY STRAINED, SAYS FOREIGN CRITIC
The opinions of our peers from other nations is always instructive. Pietro Costanzo, Conte del’Arco and learned commentator on the Continental judiciary, has been in London during the arrest and trial of the celebrated dramatic actress Mrs. Eleanor Reynolds. His official observations of the one-day trial are as yet unwritten, but in conversation his opinion is nothing short of scathing. “The charges are based solely on a trunk of props left in her house after her company’s last production of
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HILLIARD HOUSE
Evelina was slumped over her desk, her head in her hand. Her stomach felt queasy, as if she had eaten a bucket of grease, but it was actually a constant, barely manageable case of nerves. She needed sleep. She needed to not be worrying about Uncle Sherlock, who was lying in a bedroom down the hall. She needed to lose herself in a problem so she would stop thinking about the fact that one or both of them had narrowly escaped death.
She was cradling the cube in her lap like a cat. It seemed happy there, as if physical contact was necessary to the metal thing. Mouse and Bird were playing tag on the bed, getting tangled in the pillows and coverlets. The window was open to the garden, the cool morning fresh and sunny. It would have been idyllic except for the constables roaming through the garden, trampling any available clues.
With an effort, she dragged her attention back to the coded letter. Every time she had attempted a solution, she’d given up in despair. This time looked to be no more successful. She had her uncle’s pamphlet open on the desk, the letter, and a piece of notepaper in front of her. In the middle of the desk, she’d pulled out her copy of the coded message with spaces below it for the key.
She patted the cube absently.
She paused, thoughts bumping together to make a new combination. She got up, setting the cube on her dresser, and opened her wardrobe. With one thing and another, she hadn’t yet sent the silk dress she’d worn at the dinner party to be cleaned. She rifled through the clothes until she saw the familiar rose-colored fabric. A search of its pockets produced what she wanted. She returned to the desk with the card that had spit out of the longcase clock. She had put it into her pocket when she’d been helping Nick back to her room after Dr. Magnus had left.
It was the one other cipher that she’d seen recently. She studied the card and compared it to the note from the gold, but that was a pointless exercise. Perhaps her uncle might have seen similarities and differences, but they both looked like a jumble of letters to her. But what had Magnus said? The cipher from the clock was one that both he and Bancroft knew.
So she could point to two people who knew a cipher. A twinge of satisfaction brought a half smile to her lips.
Evelina furrowed her brow, inching the problem forward a degree. She didn’t know what the deva in the cube could perceive, or whether it was more or less than Mouse and Bird because they could understand the cube no better than she could. But for the moment, she would assume it had a similar range of perceptions. Therefore, if the people writing the ciphered message had been in the warehouse, and the cube was in the warehouse, it could easily have seen or heard them use the key. That opened up possibilities.
“Helen,” she murmured.
The whole idea of Helen as divine truth was something of a hobbyhorse of Magnus’s. In addition, the cube kept calling her by that name. It might have been the cube’s way of trying to help.
While it was unlikely that a mysterious metal box possessed by an ancient spirit would give her the key to a coded message, not much that had happened in the past week could be construed as terribly logical. There was nothing to lose by trying, so she wrote in Helen as the key.
The typical way of decoding these ciphers was to find the letters of the cipher text at the top of the table and the letters of the key along the left-hand side. Where that row and column met in the table would spell out the solution. Evelina followed this method for a while and simply got more nonsense. She was ready to give up in disgust, but there was one last trick to try. Uncle Sherlock’s book pointed out that sometimes those positions were reversed, and the key to the code was found in the columns, and the letters of the message itself along the rows, so she tried that.
She found
“Cannot copy chest please advise,” she said aloud, and then said it again. “Cannot copy chest. Please advise.” Copy? That opened up more questions—many, many more.
She picked up the cube, staring at it. “Are you Athena’s Casket?” she asked.
She felt it pondering the statement, struggling with how to make itself understood. Inspired now, she set down the cube and returned to her desk and quickly decoded the message on the clock’s card. It read, “Beware the untruth.” She made an impatient noise. That was about as specific as a fairground fortune-teller. One couldn’t throw a dinner bun in London without hitting a liar.
There was a frantic knocking on the bedroom door. Mouse and Bird dove into the bed cushions. Alarmed, Evelina shuffled away her papers and all but tossed the cube into her wardrobe before she unlocked the bedroom door.
Imogen rushed in, her face streaked with tears. “Evelina, have you read the newspapers?”
A rush of fear made Evelina clutch at her friend’s arms, pulling her close. “No, what’s happened?”
Imogen thrust a copy of the
Before she did anything else, she drew Imogen inside and made her sit on the bed. The girl was shaking. Mouse and Bird emerged from the cushions, curious to see what was going on. Evelina turned her desk chair
