Mrs. Watson cast fretful glances in her direction once in a while. Charlotte had kept to her room a great deal, even taken her suppers there once or twice. And when she did appear for meals, she had been happy to let Miss Redmayne take charge of the conversation, and spoke rarely unless first spoken to.
Mrs. Watson no doubt believed she had been preoccupied by thoughts of her half brother’s disappearance, Lord Ingram’s marriage, and the connection between the two. Certainly, from her perspective, it should be difficult for anyone to think of anything else.
But at the moment Charlotte wasn’t thinking of those things at all.
The decoded text of the Vigenère cipher. Something about it compelled her to examine it more closely. This minute.
“If you will excuse me, ladies. There is something I must attend to.” She barely remembered to shake Madame and Mademoiselle de Blois’s hands, before pivoting around for Mrs. Watson’s house.
In her room, she took out the deciphered text again. What was it that kept scratching at the back of her head? Ah yes, the wordsas the hawk flies. If the author wished to convey that the place was a thousand yards distant in a straight line, then why not sayas the arrow flies? Oras the crow flies, since hawks wheeled and circled, but crows were said to take the shortest path?
Not to mention, no one measured distances in thousands of yards.
The noticeable lack of O’s came to mind—instead of constituting around seven point five percent of the letters, the O’s in this passage accounted for just under three percent. What ifhawkhad been selected because the writer of the message hadn’t wished to put a word that contained the letter O at that particular point in the passage?
She picked up a pen and underlined all sixteen of the O’s. Theyseemed most heavily clustered around the middle of the passage. But if there was a significance to the pattern of their distribution, it wasn’t obvious. She stared at the passage for several more minutes, then took a blank sheet of paper and copied the text, but this time all in lowercase.
Sometimes a different perspective helped. Not this time.
She tried various methods—it wasn’t as easy to hide a hidden message in plaintext, but it could be done. She examined the cross bars on the t’s and the dots on the i’s to see whether they formed legible Morse code. They didn’t. She looked at the punctuation marks she had added and varied them to see if they signaled anything. They signaled nothing.
She got up and walked about the room. When that failed to trigger any fresh perspective, she went down to the kitchen. Madame Gascoigne was pulling a batch of madeleines from the oven—a treat for the ladies when they returned from their walk.
Charlotte absconded with half a dozen of the madeleines. She sat down at her desk and examined the plaintext message again, stuffing the first still-hot madeleine into her mouth. As the little cake disappeared into her stomach, her brain suddenly... sprouted.
Of course. Now she saw the error of her ways. She had been so consumed by the Vigenère cipher that she—horrors—hadn’t been eating properly. A quick glance at the mirror told her that she was down to only one point three chins. No wonder her brain was so slow and unwieldy, like a steam engine on the last shovel of coal.
Two more madeleines and she felt like a new woman.
The O’s. What if they weren’t letters? What if they were instead numbers?
Zeroes.
And if they were zeroes, that would make the I’s or the L’s ones.
According to her notes, I’s were overrepresented, acceptable giventhat the other vowels must compensate for the shortage of O’s. But L’s, like O’s, were underrepresented. And when she thought about the distance measured in thousands of yards... What if the cipher writer had been trying to avoid more reasonable units such as miles or furlongs, which would have put an L where it did not belong?
She made a fresh copy of the plaintext and underlined all the L’s and the O’s.
Much that remained in the ancient valley had been ransacked by raiders inlater centuries. The ruins were a sad sight, decrepitude sans grandeur, an insipid past that inspiredlittle beyond a gloomy sigh. We were glad as we departed,leaving behind the moundsof rubble and that generalairof mournfulness.Onward!Lucky for us,our next destination, a thousand yards eastward as the hawk flies, was as magnificent as thisone was inferior. The granite edifice must have been a palace in its heyday and the treasures within must have been astonishing. My friend, pray excuse my brevity.Let me dig instead and write again when I have unearthed artefacts andother archaic gems.
The L’s and O’s, once converted into ones and zeroes, respectively, made a string of numbers thirty-one digits long: 1111101001100110010100001001010
She translated it into Morse code, dashes for ones and dots for zeroes. But no matter how she parsed the resultant sequence of dots and dashes, they refused to make any sense. And if they, too, were a code, then she didn’t have a long enough sequence for decoding.
Deciphering, a science and art only for those with no fear of ending up in any number of blind alleys.
She nibbled on the next madeleine, hoping this wouldn’t turn out to be a six-madeleine problem, because she had hopes of stowing away the last two for a late-night snack. But what else was she to do with a passel of ones and zeroes?
She stopped midchew. Ones and zeroes, when used in a binary system, could convey other numbers. The calculation might be a bit tricky. To convert a thirty-one-digit binary number, she would need to calculate powers of two up to the thirtieth, which promised to be a sizable number. Nevertheless, it would be much, much easier than cracking a Vigenère code—orders of magnitude easier.
But what purpose would the resultant number serve?
She could take out any passage from any book or newspaper, underline the L’s and the O’s, turn them into ones and zeroes, and arrive at a binary number.
Her gaze went around the room and landed on an item she had recently bought, a well-made object at once beautiful and very, very useful.
Hmm. She might just know what to do if she hadtwonumbers.
