by Ross King
The horse overtook the ragtag procession on the bridge, barrelling past the carts and dray-horses and cantering into Charles Street. Here on the opposite side of the river their route suddenly became more circuitous and involved, their pace even quicker. Sir Ambrose split away from the herd, kicking the horse to a gallop and guiding it through a succession of darker and narrower streets that wound deeper into the Old Town. Emilia, a poor rider, teetered out of her balance and had to grasp handfuls of his cloak to keep from tumbling into the street. The hilt of his sword pressed against her hip. It was one of those curved blades, wide at the tip, that she knew from her reading was called a scimitar-something else that Sir Ambrose must have brought back from Constantinople. She could also see a pistol tucked into a holster on his belt and another in his boot. She closed her eyes and tightened her grip.
The artillery on the mountain had fallen silent, its task complete. Now there was only the rattle of iron shoes on stone and, far in the distance, the odd bark of a musket. When she dared to open her eyes she saw the castle shunting in and out of view beneath a single volute of smoke. Much closer, scrawled on the side of one of the buildings across the street, barely legible, she glimpsed something else, a single hieroglyphic chalked on to the sooty nogging:
The image looked familiar. She had seen it quite recently but couldn't think where. On another wall? Or in a book? She turned her head as they passed it, then quickly ducked as they flew under an arch.
They rode for the next quarter of an hour, back and forth through the streets, bowling north along by-roads parallel to others down which the horse had pelted south a minute earlier. The gutters were frozen, the muck and mud hard with frost. She wondered if they were lost. They seemed to be travelling in circles, doubling back on themselves. She had never crossed the bridge before, never entered the Old Town or the Jewish Quarter, through whose deserted streets they also galloped, passing prayer-schools and synagogues.
At some point on the edge of the Jewish Quarter there came from the street behind them a loud burst of gunfire. The horse reared at the report, then lunged forward into the next street. Emilia, too, started at the sound. Had the Emperor's soldiers breached the gates and reached the Old Town so soon? There was another burst and a wasp buzzed past their heads, striking an alms-box in the wall of a synagogue and rattling its coins. By now she could smell the acrid stink of gunpowder on the wind. As the horse bolted forward she turned her head to see three horsemen in the street behind.
At first she thought they were Cossacks, the fiercest and most brutal warriors in Europe, the subject of dozens of fearful rumours in the palace's sculleries and kitchens. But the trio was not in the dress of Cossacks-the long coats and the tall astrakhan hats. They wore livery instead, cloaks and breeches as black as a Puritan preacher's but trimmed on the sleeves with a gold brocade that glinted as they flew past a rush-lit tavern. She had never seen such garb before, neither in Prague nor Heidelberg. Nor had she seen such hideous faces. Swarthy and bearded, they were twisted like gargoyles' with murderous intent. Gold brocade flashed as one of them raised his pistol. But Sir Ambrose had already pulled his own pistol from his boot and twisted round to return fire. There was a brief hiss before the match smouldered and sparked, then flashed barely six inches from her nose. Another acrid stink. Blinded, she cried out in alarm. Sir Ambrose fumbled for the pistol in his holster, spurring the horse into the next street.
She closed her eyes again, clinging desperately to Sir Ambrose. But there were no more pistol shots. A few minutes and many turns later their pursuers on their faster mounts were somehow shaken loose. When she opened her eyes the foam-flecked horse was clattering into a wide courtyard with a twin-towered church and a clocktower. They had reached the Old Town Square. Dozens of horses and pack-mules were milling about on the cobbles. Men in uniform were shouting instructions in English, German and Bohemian, while others scrambled about like dock workers.
Sir Ambrose drove the horse into their midst, cutting diagonally across the cobbles before reaching a row of arcaded houses with skinny bay windows ablaze with light. There he reined in the winded animal in front of one of the larger houses and swiftly dismounted before handing Emilia down and seizing her elbow. As she landed on the cobbles, his face, grimacing, suffused with shades of carmine and orange, looked less like that of Amadís of Gaul or the Knight of Phoebus and more like those of the black-clad pursuers. Had she been rescued, she wondered, or captured?
The house with its prettily painted façade was a confusion of swooping flambeaux and darting figures. Sir Ambrose led her to the arcade through archipelagos of dung and heaps of baggage that seemed to have been washed against the columns by a forceful tide. Donkeys were braying and flames ruffling through the air. Where was he taking her? She felt like the game-bird caught in the jaws of the retriever. She struggled briefly-her first show of resistance. Then, as they passed by an upheld torch, she saw how he was clutching something in his other hand. The gauntlet had been removed and his fingers were stained with ink. It took her another second to recognise the object as a book, the one from the library: the lone, leather-bound parchment that had been sitting on Vilém's desk. Again she tried to twist free, but then the door swung open and she was swept inside.
II. The Interpreter of Secrets
Chapter One
Nonsuch Books was not in the chaos I expected it to be in when I returned home, exhausted, after the arduous journey from Crampton Magna. As Phineas deposited me on London Bridge I caught a glimpse of Monk through one of the polished windows. He was bent over the counter, and behind his bowed head the books were ranged in soldierly ranks along their shelves, the afternoon sunlight lambent on their bindings. Everything was in its proper place-including, at last, me. My exile had ended.
On disembarking from the coach, I stamped my boots on the tiny cobblestones as if ridding them of the dirt and decay of Pontifex Hall. I paused to wipe my brow and inhale several lungfuls of the acrid breeze from the river. It was nearing six o'clock in the afternoon. Crowds were returning from the markets with their suppers, passing over the bridge and into Southwark. Shins of beef, wrapped in brown paper, and silver-finned fishes with wide, sardonic grins protruded from baskets as wives and servants pushed past me along the footway. I stepped forward and opened the green door with a grateful sigh and a promise to myself-soon violated-never to leave London again.
'Sir! Good afternoon!' Monk leapt from his seat like a singed cat, then helped me scrape the trunk across the threshold. 'How was your journey, Mr. Inchbold? Did you enjoy the country?' He was giving the trunk a peculiar look, I suppose because he expected it to be filled to bursting with books, which he rightly supposed were the only possible inducements to my departure. 'Was the weather fine and dry, sir?'
I patiently answered these questions and a half-dozen excited others. By the time I had finished, the bells of St. Magnus-the-Martyr were striking six o'clock, so I raised the awning, fastened the shutters and locked the door. I performed these operations with a certain reluctance, because I was eager to immerse myself in the waters of beautiful routine; to see my regular customers streaming through my door; to have the familiar sight of their faces and sound of their voices dilute the disturbing memories of the past week. Monk saw me spot my mail in a neat pile on the counter. The letter from Monsieur Grimaud, he explained, had at last arrived from Paris.
'Come, Monk.' I was reading the letter as I climbed the turnpike stair. Vignon's edition of Homer had eluded us after all, but not even this disappointment could dampen my reviving spirits, for by now I had caught a reassuring smell of food and heard the familiar clatter of pots and pans in the scullery. 'Shall we see what Margaret has prepared for our supper?'
But of course I knew that, today being Wednesday, a rabbit from the market in Cheapside would, as usual, be roasting on the spit, next to a boiling pot of sweet potatoes purchased in Covent Garden. And, also as usual, Margaret would have uncorked a bottle of Navarre wine, from which I would allo
w myself three purple inches as I sat in my upholstered armchair and smoked my two bowls of tobacco.
***
My immediate task, as I then saw it, was to solve the riddle of the cipher. The copy of the manuscript could wait, at least for a day or two. I cannot say why I felt this to be the order of priority. Possibly I thought the two mysterious texts-the one I possessed and the one I sought-were in some way connected, and that the former, unriddled, might lead to a solution for the latter. Since Sir Ambrose was himself a cipher-to me, at least-I reasoned that by decoding the piece of paper I might learn something more about him than the paltry information vouchsafed by Alethea. The opposite would prove the case, of course, for the cipher was not, as I believed, my golden thread, and instead it was to lead me ever outward from the centre of the labyrinth. But I could know nothing of this at the time, and so it was that as I finished my supper I was resolved to take a stab at the cipher, using for my assistance the books on steganography, or 'covered writing', found among my shelves. I had further decided to write a letter to my cousin Erasmus Inchbold, a mathematician at Wadham College in Oxford.
I climbed the steps to my study and lit a tallow candle. By this time Monk had retired to his garret and Margaret to her hovel in Southwark. Outside, the bridge had fallen silent except for the outgoing tide chuckling between its piers. Inside, the last light of the day lit the casement, whose prospect of the river had long ago been blocked by piles of books. The study was a tiny affair, the first of the rooms above the turnpike stair to suffer the encroachments from below. Every horizontal surface was now aswarm with books, a pile of which I had to clear from the bureau before there was room enough for my candlestick.
Before studying the cipher I looked for a moment at the other slip of paper from Pontifex Hall, the one Alethea had given me: The Labyrinth of the World. A Hermetic text? I was more puzzled than ever by my task. Ours was an age of reason and scientific discovery, not of the so-called secret wisdom of the Corpus hermeticum. Nowadays we read Galileo and Descartes instead of wizards such as Hermes Trismegistus and Cornelius Agrippa. We performed blood transfusions and wrote treatises on the composition of Saturn's rings. We admired and sought to imitate the beautiful forms of the ancient marble statues shipped back from Greece by Lord Arundel. We fought wars not for religious reasons but in the interests of trade and commerce. We had founded a university in New England and, in London, a 'Royal Society for Improving Natural Knowledge'. No longer did we burn witches or perform exorcisms. No longer did we think that an affliction such as a goitre might be cured by the touch of a hanged man's hand, or the pox by prayers to St. Job. We were, above all, a civilised people. And so of what concern to any of us was the obscure learning, the bogus wisdom, of the Corpus hermeticum?
After a minute I set the paper aside and took up the cipher. This was even more mysterious. I held it to the light of the candle to study the watermark. Those imprinted on the pages of Ortelius's Theatrum orbis terrarum had been fool's-caps, the symbol used by the Bohemian papermaker in 1600. However, the cipher was printed on paper whose manufacturer had marked it with the motif of a cornucopia, on either side of which was an initial: a J to the left, a T to the right.
My heart lifted. I recognised the motif, of course, just as I knew the monogram. Both were those of John Thimbleby, a papermaker whose factory stood east along the river, in Shadwell. This meant that the leaf must have been inserted into the Theatrum at a much later date than 1600. But this was my only clue to the paper's identity and probably a useless one at that, since Thimbleby was one of the biggest suppliers of paper in the country and had been in business for more than a quarter of a century. Still, it would be worth paying him a visit to find out which printers he supplied, Royalists or Puritans, and whether he had ever sent any consignments to Dorsetshire.
I turned the leaf over, sniffed at it, then touched it with the tip of my tongue to discover if it had been marked in any other way. I knew that even the most amateur cryptographers had a half-dozen ingenious methods of concealing messages by means of what was called 'sympathetic ink'. Onions, wine, aqua fortis, the distilled juice of insects-it seemed that almost anything could be used. I was surprised that Alethea with her strange concern for secrecy had not resorted to the tactic. But I supposed it was just as well. I had no wish to tinker in my study like an alchemist or an apothecary, fiddling with pans of water and coal-dust from the scuttle. Because that's what it took to decipher one of these secret messages. Letters written in a special ink made, for instance, from dissolved alum-a substance more usually used to stop bleeding, make glue or taw leather-couldn't be read until the paper was submerged in water, which caused crystals to form on the page. Others written in inks made from goat's milk or goose fat were invisible unless the page was first sprinkled with mill-dust, which magically brought the letters back from oblivion. Another devious method was to use an ink distilled from a putrefied willow tree-a kind that was visible only in pitch-black chambers, much like that made from another recipe that involved, I seemed to recall, the juice of the glow-worm. I had even read somewhere of a batch made from a mixture of sal ammoniac and rotten wine. Letters written with this foul-smelling concoction supposedly remained invisible unless the recipient had wits enough to hold the paper to a candle flame.
But I could find no evidence of any such tampering on my scrap of paper, so I set aside the leaf and took up the first of my books on decipherment.
Well, perhaps our age with its scientific spirit was not quite rid of the old trickeries after all. I sold an alarming number of books on decipherment, most of which titles were also on the shelves at Pontifex Hall. Indeed, had not a whole shelf been devoted to the art of steganography? Now, as I sat with a pile of the books spread before me like braces of grouse ready for plucking, I saw that many of them had been reprinted in London during the past twenty years. Yes, ours was evidently an age that prized the preservation-and the revelation-of secrets. And who could blame us, I suppose, after so many years of war and intrigue?
I had discovered on my shelves the Steganographia of Johann von Heidenberg, alias John Trithemius, a Benedictine monk who had supposedly raised the spirit of the dead wife of the Emperor Maximilian I. There was also the Magia naturalis of the occultist Gian Battista della Porta, who had founded an 'Academy of Secrets' in Naples, along with De cifris, written by Leon Alberti, whose greatest invention was a 'cipher disk', two copper wheels, one inside the other, that rotated forwards and backwards. I owned also the work of an English author, John Wilkins, whose wife was Oliver Cromwell's sister. And I had a copy of the most famous cryptographer's manual of all, Blaise de Vigenère's 600-page Traicté des chiffres, ou secretes manières d'escrire, first published in Paris in the year 1586. A copy of this particular work, I recalled, was likewise on the shelves at Pontifex Hall.
For two whole hours I sat hunched over the paper, shaking my head in dismay as I tried to make sense, first of the volumes, then of the cipher, to which I applied their obscure precepts. The concept of a cipher is simple enough. It consists of a series of masqueraders: a number of characters beneath which others, the true characters, hide their faces. The faces of these hidden characters have been changed according to some arbitrary and prearranged convention called a code, the 'language' in which the cipher is written. Like any language, a code consists of a network of connections governed by its own particular rules and conventions. Deciphering therefore involves knowing or else discovering these rules and conventions in order to reveal the true identities of the impostors occupying their places. The problem, naturally, is through what method these masqueraders should be unmasked. Ordinarily the recipient solves the mystery by means of a key, a sort of grammar explaining the language in which it is written. The key might stipulate, for instance, that the true characters are replaced by those two places down the alphabet, thus:
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z A B
I
n this case-a two-letter shift to the right-the cryptographer simply replaces the letters in the top line with those below, while the decipherer moves two letters backwards instead of two letters forward. This fairly crude system is known as the 'Caesar Alphabet', since it was first used by Julius Caesar in his communications with his troops in Spain and Syria. Such a system may be cracked, the books on my desk explained, by a little guesswork. For example, according to type-founders' bills the most common letter in the English alphabet is E, while the second most common is A, then O, then N, and so forth. The most common word is, of course, the definite article, 'the'. Now, given this small bit of information, the decipherer should first determine whether one particular letter occurs more than the others. Presumably the letter will not be E, because, like the other letters, the E will have been occulted beneath its impostor. Should he find one-the letter X, shall we say-it will become his candidate for the letter E. And should this letter frequently occur in conjunction with two others, he will have reason to suspect the trio together represents the definite article-and he will moreover have solved the identities of two more letters.
Or so he hopes. But he must proceed carefully. Snares may have been laid for him as he blunders along. The word may be spelled backwards or otherwise transposed. Or perhaps nulls-letters of no value-will have been inserted to throw him off the scent. The key might stipulate, for example, that the letter Y is a null and therefore is paired with nothing whatsoever in the plain-text. Or else the key might stipulate that every fifth letter in the cipher should be ignored, or that only the second letter in each line should be accounted. Or perhaps the definite article, or even the letter E itself, will have been omitted from the cipher altogether.
