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 allow 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.