The two of them talked for a while longer, but never once did they discuss the true reason for her father’s death. After the events of the night before, Cleo did not have the emotional energy to discuss it and the Earl did not bring it up. When the conversation finally came to a lull, the Earl arose to take his leave. “I will bid you adieu for now, but I hope to see you again quite soon, Miss Wallace. Please do not hesitate to send word to my estate if you are in need of anything at all.”
“Thank you, My Lord, for your kindness. I only wish my father were here so that you might share the memories of your father together.”
“As do I.” The Earl bowed over her hand, placed a kiss upon the back of it, then left the house. “Until we meet again, Miss Wallace.”
Cleo shut the door, then walked to her father’s study. She sat down behind his desk and stared down at the papers from the day before.
“Kh wkh juhdw,
kh zkr sxoohg
vzrug iurp vwrqh,
iru grrphg oryh
kh vzdoorzhg iluh,
wkh wuxwk brx ilqg
ehqhdwk klv ihhw.”
She tried a wide range of techniques in an attempt to decode the scramble but came away with nothing more than when she had started. Running her hands over her face, she arose and took a turn around the room, coming to stand in front of her father’s bookshelves. She smiled at the sight of the books lined up in nice neat rows, each bearing the author and title on the binding for clear identification. Not every book had been printed thus, but her father had taken the time to label each one himself.
Her eyes fell upon a grouping of volumes bound in red leather that caused her to pause. She reached out and pulled one of the books from the shelf. “The Gallic Warsby Julius Caesar,” she read the title aloud. It had been just such a text that had brought the Earl of Dustshore comfort upon his father’s deathbed. She ran her fingers over the leather and opened the cover to reveal a handwritten note on the inside.“To my friend and charge, Henry Wallace, on the day of your graduation. From your patron and partner, the Earl of Dustshore.”
Cleo smiled.I should show this to the younger Earl of Dustshore upon his return.
Cleo walked back over to the desk and sat down, setting the book aside to show Dustshore at a later date. She turned her attention back to the paper and studied the scribble with a wary eye. She drummed her fingers on the red leather binding of Caesar’s book as she thought. She thought of the indomitable leader and wondered what he would have done in her place. “He would have killed the man who did this without hesitation. He probably could have figured this out by now.”
At that thought, Cleo froze in realization. “It is a Caesar Cipher! How did I not see this before?” The Caesar Cipher was a method of code that the Roman leader had used in his own correspondence. “I must find the key, the number of letter shifts, but once I do, I will be able to translate the message!” Cleo was so excited that she could hardly bear it.
Rereading the lines with a Caesar Cipher in mind, she noticed a pattern of three words to every line but the second to last one.
“Kh wkh juhdw,
kh zkr sxoohg
vzrug iurp vwrqh,
iru grrphg oryh
kh vzdoorzhg iluh,
wkh wuxwk brx ilqg
ehqhdwk klv ihhw.”
“What if the key is the number three? Three shifts over from what letter? And is it left, or is it right?” She squinted down at the paper in concentration as she picked up a quill and a clean sheet of paper. She wrote out a line made up of every letter in the alphabet in order, then counted three right from ‘A’ and got ‘D’. She attempted to use the method to crack the code, but only came up with more gibberish.
Tapping the feathered end of the quill against her chin in thought, Cleo studied the line of letters in front of her once more. “What if I reverse that and count three left from ‘D’? In that case, ‘D’ becomes ‘A’, and so on and so on.” Cleo translated the first word, ‘Kh’, using this method and came up with the word ‘He’. “That is better than what I had before,” she mused. She moved on to the next word, ‘wkh’, and got ‘the’ as a translation. “Well, this is progress.”
She moved on the next word, ‘juhdw’, and emerged with the word ‘great’ before the comma.“He the great,”she read aloud.“He the great…the great what? The phrase is not grammatically pleasing, but I suppose such things as riddles seldom are,” she mused as she moved on to the next line.“He who pulled,”she murmured over the three words, then seeing there was not a comma to break up the two lines she continued on,“sword from stone…”
Cleo sat up straight in her chair and her eyes turned to the crate filled with Arthurian lore. “King Arthur!” she proclaimed to the empty room. “Who else is known to have done such a thing? Not anyone that I can think of.” She turned her eyes to the next two lines not separated by a comma.“For doomed love he swallowed fire…what could he possibly mean by that? To my knowledge, King Arthur never swallowed fire. Doomed love I can see if one thinks of Guinevere and Lancelot, a sad story to be certain.”
Sighing at the thought of such a miserable end as what met the three lovers, Cleo moved on to the last two lines.“The truth you find beneath his feet.”Cleo frowned. “Whose feet? King Arthur’s feet? And where might those be?” She read the full text in the proper cadence.
“He the great,
