But de Groot was moaning where he lay and shuffling his feet, and Jack and Doyle were already heading toward the door that led out onto the bridge. Tubby followed, the three of them making their awkward way, high above the courtyard, the boards beneath their feet bobbing and swaying. Tubby lifted his hat to a young woman walking below, and then the three of them went through the open door and into the shadows, where they stopped for a moment to look back. There was movement through the broken window of the penthouse, and the sound of someone calling out tentatively – the soldier quite possibly, not wanting to offend de Groot, perhaps, by bursting in unannounced.
Doyle led the way downward and out into the alley again, the three of them moving away to the west as hurriedly as they could without calling attention to themselves, out onto Whitechapel Road and away toward Smithfield.
“Lord Moorgate, certainly,” Jack said, shuffling through the papers. “Mr. de Groot seems to be privy to the man’s most particular business. But what the devil is Moorgate up to?”
“Skullduggery, I don’t doubt,” Tubby said. “I have nothing but respect for your typical politico, and very damned little of that. I wish Doyle would work his magic on that cipher. I’m clemmed. I could eat a cow. We’d best be on our way as soon as he translates it, and so I’m leery of waiting breakfast on the man. We might all go hungry, which would be criminal.”
As if in answer, Henry Billson came out of the kitchen carrying a plate on which sat a stuffed pastry shaped like a circular Greek temple, with columns around the outside and a fleur-de-lis atop. It was baked to a golden brown, and the steam smelled of goose liver and bacon. Billson set it atop the table in front of Jack and Tubby and dusted his hands.
“Strasburg pie,” he said, “and kickshaws just finishing in the oven – Welsh rabbit, curry tarts, and, as another remove, a plate of cold oysters that Henrietta brought back from Billingsgate just this instant. I figured that you gentlemen might be peckish, but perhaps I should wait on the kickshaws until Mr. Doyle returns, if I can keep ’em hot.”
“God bless you, William,” Tubby said, “but Mr. Doyle might be hours yet. And he’d sooner starve than abandon his work. Bring out the lot of it, along with a spoon, if you will, so that Mr. Doyle can scrape up the crumbs if he comes too late for the feast. And send poor Hopeful out with an ewer of the Half Toad’s best ale, if you would. We’ve got a long day ahead, and we need sustenance. We’re bound for the Cliffe Marshes to exterminate vermin.”
When Billson had gone off to the kitchen, Jack said, “What I read in the news about Lord Moorgate leads me to believe that he’s no good, but I don’t know quite why. He seems a pompous ass to me, prating on about other people’s faults as if he has none of his own, and with no apparent goal but to puff himself up at another’s expense. He despises Gladstone; that much is evident.”
“His brand of Whiggery can’t tolerate Gladstone’s concern for the Irish,” Tubby said. “I know him from White’s. He’s a bottomless pit of stinking lucre. He once wagered three-thousand pounds that Morris Whitby, the Drury Lane agent, would be sick at the stomach within a quarter of an hour. Said he could tell from the pallor of the man’s face and the look in his eye. Lord Bingham took the bet and lost it again before they’d sunk their first glass of champagne. Poor Whitby began to act the part of a cat puking up a hairball and then set in to spewing his guts. Disgusting business. Krakatoa ain’t in it. I heard from Wickham that Moorgate had dosed Whitby’s gin to set it up, although Moorgate denied it, all the time grinning like a devil. Whitby threatened to sue, but there was no evidence. I wouldn’t play cards with the likes of Moorgate, but then he wouldn’t play cards with the likes of me, I suppose. I can easily imagine him consorting with Narbondo, although it would be the end of his reputation if it were known.”
The ale appeared, nearly a gallon of it, and they breakfasted on the Strasburg pie and made inroads into the heap of oysters, which were indeed cold, Billson having the wonderful habit of layering the shells atop foundations of chipped ice.
“Perhaps we can set about destroying Moorgate’s reputation if there’s something damning in the cipher, which there must be, given that it’s signed ‘Guido Fox,’” Tubby said. “‘Guy Fawkes, ’twas his intent, to blow up the King and Parliament,’” he recited. “But they can’t be serious about blowing up the King, because there ain’t one.”
“Even if there were something to implicate Moorgate in de Groot’s papers, he would claim that the ‘Guido Fox’ signature was a mere lark. And in any event nothing means anything unless Moorgate is particularly identified in it, and if it’s evidently criminal.”
“The signature is too clever by half. The police love the clever ones, Jack. It’s the plain, stable sort of criminal who confounds them – the cheerful gent who lives in a cottage by day and turns into a murderer by night. Clearly this bunch has explosives on the mind, however – anarchy, perhaps, or this fabulous scheme of Narbondo’s to hobnob in Hell, if we can credit it.”
“St. Ives credits it, or at least believes that some such thing is coming to pass, and that’s good enough for me.”
“Then I’ll celebrate your sagacity by sampling the tarts and the Welsh rabbit, if only to make sure that they’re up to Billson’s usual standard. I suppose it’s only fair that we lay aside a crumb or two for poor Doyle, given that he’s doing the real work.”
“Here’s our man now,” Jack said, nodding in the direction of the stairs.
Tubby poured ale into Doyle’s glass and said to him as he sat down, “Jack was hungry as a wolf, and I was forced to prevent him from swallowing the entire breakfast and then eating the table into the bargain. What did you discover?” He heaped food onto Doyle’s plate and handed him his fork.
“It was a simple transposition cipher,” Doyle said, giving each of them a sheet of foolscap with two paragraphs written out on it. “The letters were separated into five lines and were often mingled with musical notes, which was confounding at first, but they gave the business away when I realized that they must be transposed along a five-line staff, do you see, like a piece of music, and not the usual three-line arrangement.”
“Fascinating,” Tubby said. “Eat up, old man. Time is passing.”
“The notes were superfluous to the meaning,” he said, “meant to confuse, although I saw something in them, and I suspected that ‘Guido Fox’ was a little too proud of himself. The notes were transposed in a manner of their own, distinct from the verbiage, but when it was all shifted along the five-line staff, you could sing the result in the manner of the old Irish Guy Fawkes song, ‘The Ballynure Ballad.’”
“I haven’t had the pleasure of hearing it sung,” Tubby said, “and I’m not sure I have the stomach to hear it sung now, so I’m happy you’ve written it out plain like this. Have one of these capital curry tarts, Mr. Doyle, and a glass of ale, and give us the gist of it.”
“The gist of it,” Doyle said, swallowing a mouthful of tart, “isn’t plain. It was sketchy enough so that I can only guess at the meaning, although no doubt it’s obvious to both Lord Moorgate and the person who sent it – this self-styled Guido Fox. They mean to cause an outrage, probably explosive, and not on the fifth of November. Soon, I believe. There’s no mention of a date and we don’t know when the cipher was composed, but there is a reference to a Tuesday, which, as both of you are aware, is the very day of the week that Guy Fawkes was to blow up the House of Lords.”
“Tomorrow!” Jack said.
“If it’s not next week,” Tubby put in. “Tuesdays come along with some regularity.”
“Here’s a reference to a ‘Colonel W.O.,’” Jack said, looking at the paper that he held in his hands. “What do we make of that? A man’s initials, I suppose. He seems to have assured Mr. Fox that his men will see to the ‘crowd’s cooperation when the dust begins to fly, along with the martyrs,’ and that the stated sum is acceptable.”
“How many colonels with the initials W.O. can there be in London?” Tubby asked. “Seems to me that it would be impossible to run them all to ground in order to ask them if they’re involved in a crime. Flying martyrs! Have another of these Welsh rabbits, Mr. Doyle.”
As he shifted his plate so that Tubby could slide the morsel onto it, Doyle said, “As Jack pointed out, the initials might mean anything: ‘War Office,’ for example. What that would tell us is that there are soldiers involved, and that they’ve been bribed.”
“There were four with de Groot this morning,” Jack pointed out.
“It’s a restful day in London when no one’s being bribed,” Tubby said.
