After the lecture, Sarah saw Lord Markham approach with a gorgeous dark-haired woman on his arm. She put on her most welcoming expression. “Good evening, my lord.”
He smiled at her. “Miss Brecknell, may I introduce you to my fiancée, Lady Alyse Templeton.”
Alyse gripped Sarah’s hands warmly in her own. “So you invited us! I’m so pleased to meet you.”
Surprised by the genuineness of the gesture, Sarah asked, “Did you enjoy the lecture, Lady Alyse?”
“It was marvelous. I want to go to Egypt posthaste!”
“Perhaps it would make a good honeymoon,” Sarah suggested.
Alyse’s face lit up. “I never thought of that. What an idea. Have you ever been to Egypt, Miss Brecknell?”
“No,” Sarah said. “I have never been abroad at all. In fact, I’ve never been further away from London than Kent.”
“So you live in town? How splendid. How have our paths not crossed yet?”
“I have not been particularly social of late,” Sarah said, subconsciously glancing down at the somber color of her gown.
Alyse’s face fell as she took in the significance of the color.
“Miss Brecknell was engaged to my old friend Mr Wolverton. You remember him,” Theo explained in quiet voice.
“Oh.” Alyse’s eyes widened. But then she smiled and said, “You know, my family is hosting a little party in a few days. I think it’s dreadful to be all alone on a winter’s night. Won’t you come? I’ll have an invitation sent round to your home.”
Sarah knew the other girl was only being polite, but it would be extremely bad form to refuse. “That is most kind of you,” she said. “I should be glad to.”
“Oh, good. Wear your prettiest dress! I shall introduce you to everyone!”
After a few moments, Alyse glanced toward the stage. “If you’ll excuse me, I was going to go up to Mrs Heath and ask her a few questions, if she’ll spare me the time.”
Theo laughed a little. “When has anyone not found time for you?”
“Well,” Alyse pondered, “I’m sure I could think of one instance. Do excuse me.” She went off to find Mrs Heath.
“So that’s your intended?” Sarah asked, strangely jealous. Alyse was as bright and pretty as a flower, perfect in her petite figure and curling dark hair.
“We’ve known each other practically our whole lives,” Theo said, looking fondly after Alyse. “We grew up together, and I knew from a very early age that she would be my wife.”
“You’re lucky,” Sarah said, thinking it one of the most romantic things she’d ever heard.
Theo turned back to her. From his expression, she could tell he was about to apologize for what might have seemed a callous statement, considering Sarah’s own dashed hopes.
“Please don’t say anything,” she warned him. “After all, we have more important things to worry about. Let’s see if there’s a space here that might suit our purposes.”
“It’s your domain, Miss Brecknell. Lead the way,” he said.
They waited until no one was watching, then slipped past the heavy oak door to the main part of the library.
Sarah knew the layout of the Athenaeum well, and she had a place in mind almost as soon as Theo suggested the idea. On the top floor, there were several partially finished rooms. They had been built in anticipation of more scholars needing space, but the fact was none of them were needed yet, and so the whole floor was largely disused.
Sarah led the way up the back stairs, Theo trailing behind her. Once on the top floor, they investigated the rooms until she found one that boasted a small stove for heating, and a window to the street. A single table and chair occupied the center of the room.
Theo looked in and nodded in satisfaction. “This will do. We won’t have to whisper.”
“I’ll bring up some coal, so the room will be at least tolerably warm,” Sarah said. “And I’ll bring another chair in for you.”
A dark shape at the doorway caught her eye, and she stepped back further into the room.
“What?” Theo saw her movement and immediately whirled around.
“Oh,” Sarah said with relief. “It’s just Cassius.”
“Cassius?”
“Yes. When we first found him in the alley, he had a lean and hungry look.”
The black cat slinked closer, sniffing at Theo’s feet. Then he deliberately bumped his head against Theo’s shin.
“He wants attention,” Sarah said.
But Theo was already bending down to scratch the cat’s ears. Cassius immediately started purring loudly. “Speaking of attention,” he said, pulling a notebook out of his chest pocket, “I want you to look at this.”
She reached over to take the notebook from Theo, who was still close to the floor. Cassius made a sound of irritation when Theo stopped paying attention to him for a bare second.
“Oh, hush,” Sarah said absently to the cat. She’d already opened the book and was scanning the pages. “This is Charlie’s handwriting,” she said.
“Do you understand any of it?” Theo gathered the cat in his arms and stood up, watching her.
“Give me a moment.” Sarah pulled out her silver-rimmed spectacles and put them on.
Theo laughed.
“What?” she asked.
“Nothing,” he said. “When I picked Alyse up before we arrived, she wished for a pair of spectacles in order to blend in. I see she was right.”
“A common ailment of the scholarly. We all ruin our eyes eventually.”
“They suit you.”
“Hmm.” Sarah sat down on the one chair in the room.
With nowhere else to sit, Theo leaned against a wall, still holding the cat. He seemed content to wait while Sarah looked through the pages.
She guessed he was testing her. “You know that reading a code is not like reading another language,” she said. “It’s more like deciding which mathematical formulas to use, then putting the coded words through and seeing if you’re correct.”
He grimaced. “Mathematics.”
“Not necessarily advanced, though. Some codes are simple, such as Caesar’s cipher. It’s quite basic, in fact, but effective in a world where so few people could read at all. It’s just a shift of three letters. In English, you would replace a B with an E, for example. If one doesn’t know what to expect, the words would appear to be gibberish.”
“That’s what Georgia called the notebooks when she gave them to me.”
“Exactly. In her case, the code worked perfectly.”
“How do you know all this?”
“I’ve read about it. In books, you know.”
“Don’t get salty. But you must admit it is unusual. You’re obviously more educated than the typical girl of your class.”
“Yes. My father was impressed by the argument advanced by Mary Wollstonecraft that girls should be educated and could be rational creatures if taught the same lessons as boys. I read her Original Stories from Real Life many times as a child. I had tutors in mathematics and classics. When I got older, Mama did feel I was overly bookish, but it was too late. I was always meant to be a bluestocking.”
Theo shook his head. “No, no. You don’t escape that easily. It’s one thing to be a bluestocking. It’s quite another to study codes.”
“I’ve always found cryptography fascinating. And steganography, too, naturally.”
“Um…that’s what?”
“Cryptography is when one encrypts a message so another can’t read it. Steganography is even more tricky: it’s hiding the message so someone else doesn’t even know there is a message to be deciphered. Combined, the two disciplines can protect even the most sensitive information.”
“That makes a lot of sense.”
“Your group,” she said hesitantly, knowing Theo didn’t like to talk about it, “You never use such things? Aren’t you encouraged to study it?”
“The Zodiac uses codes and cryptography occasionally. But I’ve never had to devise a code on my own. It appears Charlie did exactly that.”
“Yes,” Sarah said. “And I’m afraid he was good at it. Ideally, what we need is his key book.”
“Which is?”
“A place where he recorded all the code words and phrases he might need while either drafting or decrypting a message. It might be among the notebooks you have.”
“We’ll find out when I bring them to you. But you said you knew of some of Charlie’s codes already.”
“In a way. You see, a code doesn’t always mean you change the letters of words. Sometimes, it could be a picture, or even a whole phrase. It was a game we played when we first met. I would send him a letter with a phrase only he would understand. Some were silly. There is a dragon in Jerusalem meant my grandmother was in town. She never liked Charlie. But some phrases were more dire.”
“Such as?”
“Oh, let me remember. That’s right. If I wrote she wore a long ribbon last night, it meant ‘Come quickly, I’m in danger.’”
“That does not sound like a call for help,” said Theo. “It sounds mundane.”
“Well, that’s the point. The best codes don’t even look like codes. In any case, I never had occasion to use that one. I don’t know if Charlie would have even remembered what it meant.”
“You had to keep them in your head?”
“It’s what makes it a strong code,” she said, speaking faster as she grew more enthusiastic. “Because only the sender and the receiver know the significance of the phrases, no one else can possibly break it—there’s nothing to break. But obviously, it’s limited in scope. One can only memorize so much, and it must be agreed upon beforehand, and you must always communicate with the same person. Of course, you could have a number of people share the phrases—a Zodiac’s worth of people, for example. But the more people who know a phrase, the less strong the secret is. In cryptography, everything must be balanced. Ease of use nearly always means a weaker code…I’m babbling, aren’t I?”
He smiled at her. “It’s not babbling. It’s expert knowledge.”
“I hope so. But all the same, it will take a while to make sense of these. And I don’t have long till I have to meet that man and give him something to convince him to leave me alone.”
“I have faith in you, Miss Brecknell.”
Sarah merely nodded and kept skimming the notebook for anything familiar. She looked up after a few moments to see Cassius putting a paw on Theo’s face.
“He likes you,” she said.
Theo said, “I imagine he likes anyone willing to indulge him.”
“That’s not true, actually. Cassius is rather particular. He nearly clawed that man’s face off when he showed up in my office.”
“The man’s name is Matteo Rossi, by the way,” Theo said.
Sarah was surprised. “You found that out quickly!”
“Finding things out is essentially my job.”
“How did you manage it?”
“I asked around. Your description helped considerably.”
“Oh, you asked around,” she repeated. “I’m sure I wouldn’t have been able to get the same results.”
“That’s why we’re working together,” Theo said. “You decode, I do everything else.”
“What if I can’t do it?” she asked anxiously. “Whatever he wrote in here, he didn’t want anyone to read. And I was hardly his confidante.”
“Bryony told me you two were almost inseparable.”
“Bryony is a very romantic young girl,” Sarah said. “I assure you, Charlie separated himself from me whenever he wished. Partly, it was his work. I know he traveled. But there would be weeks when I didn’t see him or get any letters. And he rarely talked about other parts of his life.”
Sarah’s tone had grown bitter by the end. She knew it, and she saw when Theo’s eyes softened in pity. Abruptly, she held the notebook out. “Here. I know you want to keep it safe. Tomorrow, I’ll have more time and can make a proper go of decoding something. I really do understand the process, my lord.”
“I don’t doubt you, Miss Brecknell.”
“Why not? I’ve proven nothing thus far.”
“I think you have,” he said. “And you’ll have a better opportunity tomorrow.”
He let Cassius jump down, then collected the notebook from Sarah. For a moment, they were standing very close to each other. She then remembered that being alone with him was utterly forbidden by every set of rules she knew…and she wasn’t nearly as scared of that as she ought to be.
“How long will Lady Alyse be distracted?” Sarah asked.
“Alyse?” he echoed, as if he had completely forgotten her. “I don’t know. She was very keen to talk to Mrs Heath. And she can charm nearly anybody into talking for hours.”
“Still, we shouldn’t stay here too long,” she said. “My parents indulge me, but I must not attract any attention.”
“That would not do at all, or I’ll have to break into your house to exploit your cryptography skills.”
“Please don’t even joke about that.”
Theo leaned a little closer. “I’m not joking. If you’re the key I need to solve my problem, nothing is going to stop me from getting to you.”
“I suppose,” Sarah said, feeling rather breathless, “that’s what got you into the Zodiac.”
“Well, it certainly wasn’t my charm.” But then he smiled at her, disproving his statement. “Come. Let’s get back downstairs,” he said, putting a hand on her back to walk her out of the room. “After all, you’re too valuable to let wander out alone.”