Chapter ELEVEN

The rear door of the house slammed shut, making Creighton start in alarm. He yanked the cloth back into place and stepped away from the table. But no one approached the printing shop. Perhaps Sophie had only been tossing dishwater or scraps out the door.

Creighton took up the ink and the roller and quickly spread a film of ink on the type. Then he laid down a blank sheet of paper, and with a clean roller, pressed it against the type. When he peeled the paper away, it bore an impression of the page that was, if not flawless, at least readable.

He wiped the type clean, covered it, and placed the wooden bins on it. When the printed page had dried, he folded it into a small square and tucked it into the pocket of his waistcoat. His uncle would be pleased to learn that he had discovered the source of the rebels’ propaganda. Creighton was rather pleased, too, that he had proven himself so adept at spying.

But at the same time he felt a strange and unexpected twinge of something like regret . . . or was it guilt? He’d experienced regret often enough—for example, when he’d foolishly bet money he didn’t have on a winning hand of cards he didn’t have. But he wasn’t quite so familiar with guilt.

What his mother called his “wild behavior” had never bothered his conscience much. Neither had his failure to excel at school, or the times he’d taken money or valuables from his mother. Why, then, should his conscience choose to trouble him now?

The fact that Franklin had taken him in and trusted him and treated him with kindness didn’t mean he owed the old man any sort of loyalty. It would take far more than a little kindness to make him forget that it was Franklin’s countrymen who had killed his father. Besides, he wasn’t deliberately trying to harm Franklin; he was only doing his uncle’s bidding so the colonel wouldn’t leave him behind.

To calm his conscience further, he set about correcting the mistakes Sophie had made when she reassembled the page he had disassembled. It was harder than it looked, locating one misspelled word among all the others and then selecting the proper letters from the bins. He had redone only five or six words before Sophie appeared to summon him to dinner.

When she saw him bent over the completed page and not the new one, she frowned. “You do not need to correct my errors, Creighton. I will do it.”

“I just thought I’d save you the trouble.” He wiped his brow. “It’s not easy.”

She came up next to him and glanced at the paper he had proofread. “You did not circle the words that were wrong?”

“No. I just—”

“I see. You made little marks.” She scanned the columns of print and grimaced. “Dieu!” she said softly. “So many mistakes!” She shoved the paper aside in disgust. “I never made so many before. Before—” She broke off.

“Before I came?” Creighton finished. “I’m sorry, but I don’t make them, I only find them. It’s not my fault if you can’t read properly.”

She glared at him. “I read le français well enough. And I am working at English, with Dr. Franklin’s assistance. As I say, it is a stupid language.”

“A stupid language,” Creighton said simultaneously. “I know. But if you can’t read it, how do you—I mean, how can you possibly—” He waved a hand at the thousands of backward letters and punctuation marks that filled the forms and the bins.

She shrugged. “It is not so very difficile. Though I may not know most of the words, I know what the letters look like, and where to find them.”

“But how do you do it so quickly?”

Sophie lifted her chin haughtily. “I suppose I am just naturally douée . . . gifted.”

“And so modest, too.”

She blinked at him innocently, but with a hint of mischief in her eyes. “Maw-dest? I am afraid I have not yet learned that word.”

Creighton grinned. “That’s odd, considering that, in French, the word is exactly the same.”

Non, it is not,” she said primly. “Ours has an e on the end.”

“And so,” Creighton reminded her, “does humilité.”

She winced and hung her head, like a schoolgirl who has forgotten to study her lessons. “Eh bien. There are some things at which I am not so naturally gifted. However,” she added brightly, “cooking is not one of them. So come and eat.”

———

Before Creighton retired to his room that evening, he asked Sophie for a candle to read by. He didn’t bother to mention what he’d be reading.

Most of the half-completed page of The Liberty Tree was occupied by an essay that urged inhabitants of Kentucky and the western territories of America to secede, ally themselves with Spain, and form a new nation free from British rule.

The author of the essay wasn’t identified. At the end of the piece was the word Anonymous, followed by the number 29. Creighton doubted that Franklin had written it; the tone was too strident, too humorless.

At the top of the second column of type were more numbers, a long sequence of them that went on for five lines. They were divided into clumps, like words, usually four or five numerals to a clump, but occasionally three or six. Creighton recognized it at once as a code of some kind.

Before he and his schoolmates took to playing Hangman so avidly, they had been equally enthusiastic about codes and ciphers. They had exchanged scores of secret messages that, written in the usual fashion, would have been hopelessly ordinary and inconsequential. But because they were written in vinegar and could be read only by holding the paper over a candle flame, they seemed mysterious and exotic.

Creighton knew his uncle would want a look at the paper as soon as possible, but he couldn’t resist the challenge of trying to decipher it. Besides, wouldn’t the page be more valuable once it was translated?

There were half a dozen common keys that might unlock the secret of the code. He started with the simplest: Each numeral stood for a letter of the alphabet—1 for A, 2 for B, and so on. When he applied this formula, printing the letters lightly with a pencil, the first three words proved to be MRYG, PUPAH, and SHVEN. Interesting, but not very informative. They might be words from some obscure language, but that didn’t seem likely. He was sure that most Americans had trouble enough reading English, let alone Sanskrit or Prussian.

He tried again. Perhaps the matching of numbers and letters wasn’t so obvious and orderly. The most commonly used letter was E, and the number that appeared most often in the message was 4, so he replaced every 4 with an E. One of the three-number clumps, 724, now ended with an E—probably the word THE. That meant every 7 was a T, and every 2 was an H. But when he penciled these in, he ended up with one word that was spelled EHHH. The word eh? pronounced with a Yankey drawl, perhaps? No. He wiped out his efforts with a piece of India rubber and started over.

After two hours of failed attempts, Creighton flung the paper aside in frustration and sank back on the bed, rubbing his weary eyes. Who would have thought the backward Yankeys could come up with a system that was so difficult to decipher? It must have been Dr. Franklin’s doing.

He was about to give up and blow out the candle when he remembered another sort of code he and his schoolmates had once used. Most of the boys had tired of the whole business after a week or so. But Creighton and two other boys, inspired by the romantic exploits of a French footman who had been hanged for stealing state secrets, devised a more sophisticated—and deliciously sacrilegious—method of sending coded messages, using the Holy Bible as the key. For example, the cipher G43193 meant Book of Genesis, chapter 43, verse 19, word 3. It was a cumbersome system, but it had the advantage of using a book that could be found almost anywhere. They tried just citing a particular page and line, but that wasn’t reliable; there were too many different editions of the Bible.

Then one Sunday during Bible study, the pastor intercepted a message that concerned the neckline of a certain young lady’s dress. Threatening the note’s author with hellfire, the pastor pried from him the details of the code. Their experiments came to an abrupt end.

The clumps of numerals in Franklin’s message might refer to page, line, and word—but of what book? It had to be something that would be found in nearly every household . . .

Creighton sat up in bed. On his nightstand, next to the candle, lay the almanac he had borrowed from Franklin. He raised the mosquito netting, snatched the booklet, and let the netting drop so quickly that no more than ten or twelve mosquitoes invaded his sanctum.

The first cipher on the paper was 1143. Creighton turned to page one of the almanac. It was a calendar for the month of January, with brief weather predictions. Line one didn’t contain forty-three words. On line fourteen there were no words, only astrological symbols. He tried page eleven, line four, word three: ALL. He sighed with satisfaction. At last, an actual, sensible word. Creighton penciled it in and eagerly tracked down the next word: ATTEMPTS.

Certain that he had the key now, he raced on. The process went much faster once he discovered that, in clumps of three or more numerals, the first two always represented the page number. In no more than a quarter hour, he had translated the entire message—with the exception of one word:

ALL ATTEMPTS BY SONS OF LIBERTY TO LEARN WHERE _________ IS BEING HELD HAVE BEEN UNSUCCESSFUL IF ANY PERSON HAS INFORMATION ON THIS MATTER PLEASE DIRECT A MESSAGE IN CODE TO CAFÉ OF EXILES NEW ORLEANS

The one cipher he couldn’t solve contained just two numerals—a 4 and a 6. It couldn’t denote page, line, and word. It must be a code within the code, a number used in place of someone’s name. That would also explain the two-digit number that appeared after the word Anonymous.

There was no way of knowing what number signified what member of the self-styled Sons of Liberty. But that was a small matter. The important thing was, he’d successfully broken the Yankeys’ code—which meant that no message they sent from now on would be secret.

Creighton smiled smugly. His uncle had had the gall to call him useless and incompetent. Well, he’d make the man eat his words. The smile turned into a yawn. Wearily, he folded up the paper, returned it to his waistcoat pocket, and blew out the candle. His uncle could wait until tomorrow.

As he lay there in the dark, Creighton felt his sense of triumph slowly slipping away, and he realized that there was another secret, cryptic message he would have to examine and decipher the meaning of; it was coming from his conscience. He shook his head as though to clear it. His conscience, too, would have to wait.

———

In his dreams he and Sophie were being pursued by wild Indians. Though Indians were said to move soundlessly through the woods, these must belong to some particularly clumsy tribe, for Creighton could hear them pounding along only a few yards behind him. Sophie had evidently turned her ankle; she was limping badly and calling “Doctor! My ankle! Doctor! My ankle!”

Just before the Indians caught them, Creighton woke, gasping and drenched with sweat. The room was dark. From out in the foyer he heard the pounding that he had mistaken for footfalls, and a voice shouting “Dr. Franklin! Dr. Franklin!”

Groping about in the dark, he located his breeches and pulled them on. Then he opened his door and peered into the foyer. Someone was beating on the door to Dr. Franklin’s chambers. From the size of the figure, Creighton guessed it was Peter. “What’s wrong?” Creighton demanded groggily.

Peter turned toward him. “I need Dr. Franklin’s help, but I can’t seem to raise him!” Just then the door swung open. The old man poked out his nightcap-clad head and was very nearly knocked senseless by Peter’s huge fist. “Dr. Franklin! You need to come at once!”

Franklin yawned and held up one hand. “Just a moment.” He removed a lump of what looked like candle wax from each of his ears. “That’s better. Now, what is it?”

“It’s General Arnold!” Peter replied frantically. “He’s gotten himself into a duel!”