“Lady Byron, a message for Miss Ada.” The footman, John, had entered carrying a silver tray on which lay a small white envelope.
Ada knotted her fingers together under the table and squeezed them, starting to count backwards from one hundred, to stop herself from feeling faint. She was not angry that her mother now read all her invitations first – “It really is for your own good.” She felt herself flush at the memory of last year’s folly. She felt again William’s caresses, his kisses – the adventurous thrill as they planned their elopement. Quickly, having counted back to one, she focused on The Times’s headlines, reading upside-down: “October 1834”, she read, then made out the words “King William and the Royal Party … Wellington …”
“It’s from our friend Charles Babbage.” Her mother’s pursed lips had broken into a smile. “He requests your company today to stimulate his mind in the discussion of logarithms and calculus.”
Ada held her breath and squeezed her fingers even tighter.
“I suppose I can let you go today. It is Saturday, and you are far enough ahead in your studies, your tutors tell me. But tonight is Lady Conway’s Ball, a fancy dress masque, so be sure you’re back in plenty of time to prepare for it.”
Ada managed to hold in her shriek of pleasure, but couldn’t stop herself clapping her hands. “Shall I wear my new red dress, Mama?”
“It goes well with your dark hair, and you might be seen while in the carriage, so, yes.”
What have I done to deserve such a day, Ada wondered as she left the breakfast room, giving a skip as she crossed the threshold. She was wanted, she was needed, and by the one man in whose company she could release all her passion for mathematics and know she would be understood. They could share their love for the arithmetical world. Furthermore, she would wear her new dress, and tonight there was her favourite – a fancy dress ball.
As she passed through the drawing room, her eyes slid over the painting above the fireplace which was covered by a green curtain. It was a portrait of her father, but she had never defied her mother’s wishes and looked at it. She did not want to gaze into the face of that wicked darkness …
*
“Welcome, welcome, my dear Ada.” Charles Babbage held out his hands in greeting and she felt their warmth coursing through her. His black wavy hair framed an attractive face with a fresh complexion. He was of medium build, with strong shoulders. “Is that a new dress? Most becoming.”
Ada smoothed down the folds of red silk decorated with yellow flowers. The sleeves were fashionably widely puffed at the shoulder and the skirt flared from the high waist, finishing just above her ankles. It had not creased in the journey from Mortlake to Marylebone.
“Let me ring for refreshments – hot chocolate? – and then I’ll show you the equations I’ve been working on, which only my mathematical muse will be able to fully appreciate.”
Ada took a chair beside the glowing mahogany table which was strewn with Charles’s papers. One wall of the room was lined with books covering all the sciences. There was a miniature cosmology on a side table, given to him by his friend the astronomer Herschal, showing the position of the planets around the sun. Around the room were various inventions both abandoned and in progress, such as the shoes for walking on water, and instruments for examining eyes. But towering above them all was the Difference Engine, awaiting its move into the new building next door, created especially for it and paid for by public funds. Solid and foursquare, with its brass columns and cogs, its ivory numbers and black plates, it seemed to Ada to be a machine in waiting, longing to have its mechanisms clicking and slotting into place and providing answers at astonishing speed to those mathematical sums it took the human brain so long to work out. If only Charles could persuade the government to release more money for its development.
As soon as she’d heard about it – the machine that was the talk of London society – she’d longed to see it, but her mother had at first refused. Then, finally, when she’d gone to see it on one of Charles’s Open Days, she had understood it instantly, and she and Charles had recognized each others’ passion for the world of numbers. And now she had another dream. She was eighteen, soon to be nineteen, but when she was twenty-one – surely, then, he would hire her as his official assistant.
As they bent their heads over pages of diagrams and figures, forgotten chocolate congealing in its cup, Ada sensed that this was as much an escape for Charles as it was for her. He grieved still for the loss of three of his sons – following that of his wife – and very recently her namesake, his daughter Georgiana. But in the pure precision, the light and air of mathematics, they were given respite from worldly emotions. Charles Babbage, inventor, mathematician, astronomer, and – yes, surely – his able assistant, Ada.
The knock on the door made them both jump.
“Mr Clark, Under Secretary to the Home Secretary, wishes to see you.” Barely had Charles’s manservant spoken, than a tall thin man was pushing his way past him, followed by a young stocky man in the dark blue uniform of the Metropolitan Police. When he saw Ada, the young man removed his tall hat and placed it under his arm, and then took up a position standing at ease beside the door.
“I apologize for intruding Mr Babbage,” Clark said. There was a gleam of excitement in his pale blue eyes and this, with an agitation in his manner, gave a sense of urgency. “We met at dinner at the Prime Minister’s house.”
“I do recall it, yes. Some Madeira wine perhaps?” Charles nodded to his manservant, who withdrew. “Sit down, sit down.” Charles waved a hand towards a chair, but Clark continued striding about the room, casting glances at the Difference Engine.
“I need to consult with you over a Government matter,” Clark said. “Can it be now?” He looked at Ada.
“May I introduce Miss Ada Byron, my assistant in all things?”
“Miss Byron!” Clark took her hand and bowed his head. “I am sure I can speak freely in front of you,” he said, then rushed on. “I remember well how you talked about ciphers and codes, Mr Babbage, and how you are amassing notes to write a book on them.”
Charles exchanged glances with Ada, his face lighting up. “Indeed. I have a short paper in preparation already, and I exercise my mind regularly by attempting to decipher the codes used in The Times personal column. Some messages are easily solved, but others prove wonderfully challenging.”
“I knew you were the right man to see this, and to tell us – is it some kind of code, or is it gibberish? And if it is indeed a code or cipher, can you break it to reveal its secrets? I thought perhaps the Engine could help us.”
Ada held her breath. Charles could be very touchy on the matter of the Difference Engine. But he laughed. “The purpose of my machine is to help us with speed and accuracy in reaching mathematical answers. It cannot make those leaps of judgement that the human mind can. And at the moment, it cannot even make those mathematical sums. I am thinking of a new Analyser but without the money that—”
“What codes are you talking about, Mr Clark?” Ada interrupted him, to distract Charles from the subject of research funding.
“Ah yes. Constable Duckett, step forward and give your account of last night’s events at the White Hart tavern near Holborn, and give Mr Babbage the piece of paper.”
Ada noticed that the young policeman was not intimidated by his surroundings. He was clean-shaven, and he’d made an attempt to slick down his springy brown hair. His eyes were a darker blue than Clark’s.
“That was the Union meeting where there was a fire,” Ada said. “Mama was reading about it in the paper this morning.”
“A lamp was dropped, but the flames were quickly put out, Miss,” the constable told her, then continued. “But just before then, towards the end of the fracas, when the men attending the meeting was dispersing, I received a blow to the stomach and then this here paper was pushed inside my tunic. At first I thought I was stabbed, but then I found this piece of paper. Because I was bent over I did not see who
put it there. I decided to give it to the Sergeant in case it was important.”
“Bravo,” Charles said, and took the piece of paper. “Did you see anything of the man who gave this to you?”
Constable Duckett hesitated. “Not really, I was bent double. He may’ve had a missing finger. Something like that.”
Constable Duckett then returned to his place by the door, as the Madeira wine arrived. As Ada sipped hers, the young constable met her glance equably, then looked away awkwardly. He’d not been offered refreshments; was that because he was only a constable?
“Look here, Ada, what do you make of this?” Charles said. He spread the paper on his work table and together they bent over it. Immediately she saw a pattern. There were four quadrants, each with its own distinct features. The upper left was composed of hieroglyphs, the upper right and lower left were what seemed to her random groups of letters. The lower right was some sort of equation with complex polyhedrons on one side, symbols and a rhyme on the other. Underneath were two shapes.
“It’s four—”
“Yes indeed, those hieroglyphs will be quickly read. I have a book—”
“The letters will need application of the code-breaking—’
“Indeed, we can begin with the simple frequency system and go on from there—”
“But those equations—”
“Yes, Ada, they will prove troublesome, but I’m sure we can do it.”
Clark had stopped his nervous prowling and had been excitedly listening to their interplay. “Then you think it does mean something?” he interrupted.
“We won’t know till we’ve cracked some of it, but, yes, I think this is a coded message.”
As the two men talked, Ada stared down at the paper, allowing the pictures, letters and symbols to flow, reform, break up, so that her mind could explore and absorb without direction. On another level, she was aware that Constable Duckett was saying, “I don’t know why I was chosen, or whether I was mistook for someone else.” And Clark replying, “It feels as if we are being played with.” Charles countered with, “We have no certainties until we uncover the true meaning of the codes or ciphers.”
“Wanstead Abbey,” Ada heard herself saying.
All three men stopped speaking and stared at her. She pointed to the three lone symbols at the bottom. “Surely that’s a gryphon, and, beside it, what could be a lake, and the sign of a cross.”
“It could be any ecclesiastical building,” Charles said gently. “And those three symbols may be related to the context of the other codes—”
But Clark had seized on her words. “Wanstead Abbey? But that’s where—”
“I know, my … Lord Byron lived there.” She sounded as indifferent as she could. “It’s all I know about him.” She turned away and drank some more of the rich wine. It was William who’d described to her – in the most romantic terms – the now ruined Abbey where her father had once lived, and near which he was buried.
“It all falls into place!” Clark was saying. “This must be the focus for Republicanism, the hidden face behind the philosophical unionists and their talk of Charters and Rights. Is it Irish Home Rule, or some more sinister form of Radicalism? We must find out. I was right to take this seriously. It is either a warning to us, or we’ve intercepted a message destined for another conspirator. Mr Babbage, will you bend all your powers to unravelling these codes, and put everything else aside? We must know what it says. For the safety of the realm.”
On the carriage ride back home to Fordhook, Ada studied the copy she’d made of the coded message, with the Under Secretary’s permission. She knew Charles was right. They should not necessarily interpret those three symbols as meaning Wanstead Abbey. There had been no rumours, no whispers, of a movement using that name as their rallying cry. And the composer of the message could not have known that she, or anyone of her family, would see it. Until the answer was found, they must be open-minded. At home she had her own pamphlets and notes on hieroglyphs – it would be a race between her and Charles how quickly these could be translated. But she did not have the key to the rest. She hoped to learn from Charles.
Was Under Secretary Clark over-reacting when he feared a threatening conspiracy to overthrow the government and establish a republic? She sighed. Her mother was not the only one to worry about such things. Would a republic be such a bad thing, she brooded? No Englishman could feel proud of their recent monarchs, though William IV was not as embarrassing in his excesses as George IV. Lady Byron often remarked that the Court set a terrible example and did not command respect. But then she said the same thing about Members of Parliament too. Only the Duke of Wellington, now their Prime Minister, escaped her criticism, but those who hated the way he’d let the Reform Act go through were not republicans!
I must listen carefully at Lady Conway’s Ball tonight, she thought, and pay attention to what is being said about politics and the matters of the day, instead of just enjoying myself showing off my costume and dancing. At least I have the advantage in that my mind is trained to notice such things.
She put the paper away in her purse – made of matching red silk and decorated with a black transfer-printed motif of the Tower of London – and found herself thinking of Constable Robert Duckett. There had been an honesty about him, and his manner was neither subservient nor insolent. Why did he make her think of William? She managed to hide it from her mother and the Furies, but she still felt pain at the thought of the young man who would have been her husband for the past eighteen months, if their elopement had not been thwarted. They’d barely managed to make it down the driveway that night. Where was he now? She hoped he’d managed to obtain another post as tutor, and was comfortable somewhere. But, a tiny part of her acknowledged, it had been a lucky escape. His energy and ardour had not matched her own.
Not that she thought of Robert in the same way. He was only a constable, albeit good-looking and someone with initiative. A girl would be happy to be seen on his arm.
*
Robert pulled his coat closer around him against a squally burst of rain. What a dreary night to be out without my snug uniform, he thought. It was strange to be out without it. When he’d first joined the Metropolitan Police, freshly recruited from Bristol, he’d felt very conspicuous wearing it at all times, as he was pledged to do. Now he felt vulnerable without it.
He paused. Looking up and to his right he could make out, through the foggy gloom, the dome of St Paul’s in the distance. He was headed, though, for somewhere godless – or so people said – towards St Giles and the Rookery. One of those warrens of alleys and courts, with ancient houses that jutted out above till they almost touched, tottering and in danger of collapse. Not a week went by, it seemed, than one old house or another collapsed in a cloud of choking dust, killing anyone unfortunate enough to be asleep inside. The Old Mint, Turnmill Street, Saffron Hall, whatever the warren was called it was always the same, as densely packed with humanity as a sewer with rats. Sometimes two families occupied just one room, sleeping space on stairways was hotly contested, and spots in hallways rented out.
These people might scratch some kind of living in an honest job, but the vast majority were engaged in some form of criminal activity or another – from as young as an orphan boy who could pick pockets, to the ancient ones, bent-backed and grey. Whole courts were devoted to such trades as pick-pocketry, swindling, or confidence-trickstering. And nowhere could you escape the smell of unwashed bodies and clothes, of open drains and sewers and the dankness of regular flooding in the cellars from the River Thames, kindly returning the sewage that had been dumped in her earlier. He took an experimental sniff now, and nearly choked, his stomach churning.
What a contrast he thought, turning up his collar, from his visit to Mr Babbage’s house in Marylebone. The new houses in the West End were built of smart stone, the streets were wide and well paved and lit with the new gas-lighting at regular intervals. Not only there but all over London was the feel of a town making g
oods, selling goods, importing and exporting them, inventing them and advertising them. As well as sewers, there was a smell of money. The chasm between those with money and the huge number who lived in worse conditions than a pig in its sty seemed to grow bigger every day, especially as the numbers of poor were swelled continuously by those arriving from a failing countryside, their rural lives even harder than those in the towns.
Robert was one of the lucky ones though, even if his job might be dangerous at times, like tonight. “Duckett,” Sergeant Cummings had said five days after the meeting at Babbage’s house, his little sandy moustache bristling, “That government man has sent for you again. A special job he says. Mind you do your best.”
“I will Sarge,” Robert had promised.
He’d arrived at an address not far from the new General Post Office building near the church of St Martin-in-the-Fields. From not far off came the sounds of hammering and construction, as the fire-blackened ruin of the old Houses of Parliament was removed, to make way for the new grand building designed by Barry.
He was shown into a small, cold windowless antechamber painted cream, one wall being devoted to leatherbound volumes of law. Under Secretary Clark joined him in there, and began his usual agitated walking as he spoke in a breathless way.
“I could’ve called upon one of the old Runners – most’ve them have gone into private investigations, and it really is no good that we have no detecting force now, though I intend to put forward ideas to change that – but I decided the fewer who know the better. You’ve not been talking?”
“No, only me and the Sergeant know and we don’t even talk to each other.”
“Good man, good man. I have news. Mr Babbage has made some progress, in fact he sounded almost disappointed that the first quadrant of code was so easy to crack.”
Robert was still. “What does it say?”
The Mammoth Book of Historical Crime Fiction Page 31
