Was it any wonder that I generally avoided the streets of London? I pushed along the pavement, through an obstacle course of rickety stalls and market porters struggling under the flayed carcasses of goats. The path was also blocked by old men trundling oyster-carts and others bearing trays heaped with combs and ink-horns. I stepped aside to let a pair of them pass but, pushed from behind, thrust my foot into a fresh heap of turd in the gutter. Scraping my boot on the kerb, I nearly came to grief beneath the hoofs of a lumbering dray-horse. Amid a chorus of rough laughter I cursed aloud and leapt to safety.
Not even these familiar humiliations, however, could quite manage to dampen my spirits. I may even have begun to whistle. For the night before-or, rather, at four o'clock the next morning-I had discovered the keyword and decrypted the mysterious leaf from Ortelius's Theatrum orbis terrarum.
Not having received a reply from my cousin after four days, it occurred to me that he might be on his long vacation, which invariably he spent in the Somersetshire countryside, at Pudney Court, a venerable wreck that served as the ancestral seat of the much-depleted Inchbold clan. So after closing up shop the previous evening I had decided to take the task of decipherment upon myself. Once again I sat in my candlelit study with the copy of Vigenère propped on one side of the desk, the leaf on the other, and a sheaf of paper in between. I had digested enough of the Traicté by the time the sentry was announcing one o'clock to satisfy myself about the operations of the substitution table, but also to appreciate that, ingenious as it was, without the keyword the table would be useless.
By two o'clock I had tried a great number of likely-and, increasingly, unlikely-words and phrases, beginning with Sir Ambrose's name and eventually even Alethea's, which I realised with a start must have been derived from alhqeia or a-letheia, the Greek word for truth, a concept which for the Athenian philosophers meant a process of unveiling, of flushing something into the open from where it lies coiled in hidden crevices. Yet even this promising name revealed no hidden truths as far as the cipher was concerned, only further nonsense, and I barely stopped work long enough to contemplate the curious irony of its connotations when applied to Lady Marchamont, who was hardly one to unveil anything. Hour after hour I hunched over the desk, humming and cursing, doodling endless figures, lighting the wick of each new candle from the stump of its predecessor. This was impossible, I kept telling myself, absolutely impossible: all of these hair-pulling labours. The decipherment could take months, and even then the scrap of paper might not have anything intelligible to say.
At last I had leaned back in the chair, exhausted, and watched the latest candle expend itself, hissing and spitting like a kitten. A warm wind was gusting through the window, rattling the shutters and guttering the flame. All at once I felt more tired than ever. I closed my eyes and for an instant, half asleep, glimpsed rising before me the outline of Pontifex Hall framed in its monumental arch, the inscribed keystone above cast in shadow and maculated with moss and lichen, the words barely visible beneath. ITT. LITTE. LITTER…
In retrospect-in the days that were to follow-the keyword would strike me as almost too easy and obvious. After all, it seemed that almost every second stone at Pontifex Hall was carved with Sir Ambrose's peculiar motto, which had also been stamped on to his many thousands of books. But for the moment I was merely disappointed not to have discovered it hours or even days earlier. From that point onward, deciphering the paper became a simple process of filling in the blanks, of finding the intersections between the cipher-text and the keyword and then watching the plain-text-the hidden message-steadily emerge. I took the letters from the motto, that is, and superimposed them on those in the cipher-text, like so:
L I T T E R A S C R I P T A M A N E T L I T T E R A
F V W X V K H W H Z O I K E Q L V I L E P X Z S C D
And so forth, one letter of the epigraph for each one in the cipher-text. Using Vigenère's table, I then substituted the letters in the plain-text alphabets suggested by the legend for those in the cipher-text, converting the values of each of them until a pattern soon emerged-one so tantalising that, after the first few words appeared, I could barely hold my quill steady in order to continue the task:
L I T T E R A S C R I P T A M A N E T L I T T E R A
F V W X V K H W H Z O I K E Q L V I L E P X Z S C D
U N D E R T H E F I G T R E E L I E S T H E G O L D
'Under the fig tree lies the gold.' I stared at the words, incredulous, wondering if there was a fig tree at Pontifex Hall and if perhaps my first instincts had been right after all: that at the start of the Civil War Sir Ambrose had concealed his treasures somewhere on the estate, leaving behind only this piece of paper, carefully coded and hidden, as the indicator to their whereabouts. Well, if there was a fig tree at Pontifex Hall, then Alethea would undoubtedly know something about it.
But as I made further substitutions the clues grew less and less intelligible as a reference to a trove of buried gold. I worked quickly, feeling like Kepler or Tycho Brahe bent over his scribbled calculations, seeking through an endless series of mathematical combinations the universal laws of cosmic harmony. At the end of forty-five minutes the following four lines had appeared:
UNDER THE FIG TREE LIES THE GOLDEN HORN
FABRIC OF MYSTERY AND SHAPES UNBORN
THAT SETS THE MARBLE ON ITS PLINTH
AND UNTWISTS THE WORLDS LABYRINTH
My elation at the discovery of this peculiar verse was diminished only by the fact that-beyond the heart-stopping allusion to The Labyrinth of the World-it made little more sense than the group of scrambled letters from which it had been extracted. The fig tree, the golden horn and the labyrinth obviously constituted another code of sorts: a contextual one for which, alas, the great Vigenère had no methods or answers, and one which referred to the topography of Pontifex Hall, if at all, only in the most elliptical fashion. Before going to bed I spent another hour trying to make sense of the lines. At first I thought they might be from a poem or play and went scrambling for Jaggard's folio edition of Shakespeare and then Ovid's Metamorphoses with its story of the Labyrinth in Crete. I could not recall a golden horn, however, in the story of Theseus and the labyrinth. A golden thread, yes, but a horn? Still, the reference to the labyrinth made me suspect that the message had something to do with Sir Ambrose. The golden horn-the skein that the bizarre verse promised would 'untwist' the labyrinth-also seemed to strike a familiar chord. It appeared to be, like the fig tree, an allusion to some episode in classical history or mythology.
It was only the next morning, as I awoke from three hours of scratchy sleep, that I remembered where I had seen a reference to a golden horn. In a cursory search through various editions of the Hermetic texts I had come upon enough references to Constantinople-that magnificent centre of learning where the monk Michael Psellos had compiled from Syriac fragments most of what we now know as the Corpus hermeticum-to become curious about the city. I had begun rooting about on the shelves devoted to geography and travel, where at last I found what I was looking for, Strabo the Stoic's gargantuan Geography. I had leafed halfway through the enormous volume, as Monk prepared a breakfast of kippers, before I finally found the passage I was looking for. In Book VII, part of which describes the geography of the borderlands between Europe and Asia, Strabo alludes to the 'Horn of the Byzantines', a gulf of water shaped like a stag's horn, one whose topography and location he depicts with reference to another harbour called 'Under the Fig-tree'.