And having wept, let us proceed — straightforwardly, sans ruse or stratagem — to the second stage of your conversion. No need to rehearse to you, of all people, what our Revolution is about, or wherein lies its peculiarly revolutionary character: I know you know it intimately well, and I well know you oppose it utterly. But I know too that while it may well come to pass without your aid — even despite your best efforts to thwart it — I have small interest in its realization, the consummation of our history, if you are not its Consummator-in-Chief.
My son, I love you. You are 29, about to commence your second “Saturnian revolution.” You approach that point—“nel mezzo del cammin,” etc. — where many a journeyer before you has strayed right off the map, to where (Homer tells us) “East and West mean nothing,” nor any other opposites. What follows is propaganda, meant to win you to me. How franker can I be? But it is as loving propaganda as ever was penned. I do not expect you to take this letter on faith: you are a Burlingame! But read it, read it — and come to Bloodsworth Island for confirmation!
Read what? (I stall. I dawdle. Why do you not appear in midst of this parenthesis, as you have more than once astonished me by appearing, without sound or apparent vehicle, as if materialized from ether, with your mother’s eyes, your mother’s accent?) Why, read my digest of my decipherment of the first of Andrew Cook IV’s “posthumous” letters: three removes from an original (before me) whose author’s own wife would not accept it as bona fide!
Read on. I said decipherment. Andrew Cook IV was reported killed by an errant Congreve rocket just before dawn on September 14, 1814, during the British bombardment of Fort McHenry in Baltimore harbor. The five letters which arrived at Castines Hundred over his initials in the seven years thereafter were all in what their author himself refers to — in code — as “the simple family cipher.” (I exclude a sixth letter, the 1827 one from “Ebenezer Burling” of Richmond to Henry and Henrietta V, inviting them to join their father in Baltimore; it is in as plain English as this.) The code is simple, by cryptological standards: a systematic anagrammatizing of individual words, usually by mere inversion, followed by the substitution of numbers and other symbols for alphabetical letters. The phrase Drolls & dreamers, for example (which opens the first letter) is “scrambled” into SLLORD & SREMAERD and ciphered)00‡(†&)(8958(†. With a little practice, one can read and write it readily as English. Omit the first step and you have the code cracked by William Legrand in Edgar Poe’s story The Gold Bug (1843): a coincidence I cannot explain beyond observing that young Poe was “Ebenezer Burling’s” traveling companion in 1827 and that he met the Burlingame twins in Baltimore five years later.
Surely Andrée Castine knew this code. Her apparent refusal to decipher it (or to acknowledge her decipherment) argues that she regarded her husband’s final departure from Castines Hundred in 1812 as an abandonment. She did not disclose these ciphered epistles to the twins in 1825, on their thirteenth birthday, when she disclosed to them the four “prenatal” letters; neither, on the other hand, did she destroy them. Henry and Henrietta themselves, characteristically, professed only mild surprise and equally mild curiosity when “their” son, Andrew Cook V, turned the documents up in the library of Castines Hundred in the 1890’s; if they recognized the cipher, they chose not to acknowledge the fact.
That Andrew, my grandfather, was by his own testimony an able counterfeiter but no cryptanalyst, beyond his telegrapher’s Morse: see my account of him in the letter to B., attached. Interestingly, he seems never to have mentioned the coded letters to my father, nor did my father to me. It was my mother (Andrée III) from whom I first heard of them, just after my father’s death at Alamogordo, New Mexico, on July 16, 1945. Among Mother’s gifts was a prodigious memory for dates: she remarked, in her grief, that my father had been killed on the 27th anniversary of the Bolshevists’ murder of the Romanovs at Ekaterinburg, which she had deplored despite her own bolshevism, and the 130th of my ancestor’s “second posthumous letter in the great code.” She spoke distractedly and in French; I could not imagine what she meant by “lettres posthumes” or “le grand chiffre,” and I was at the time too bereft myself — and too busy in the immediate postwar years — to inquire. During her own untimely dying in 1953 (cervical cancer), she alluded to them again, this time even more cryptically, so to speak, as “le chiffre le grand.”
1953, Henry, was the mezzo of my own cammin, a road I shall retrace in another letter. True to the family Pattern — of which I was not yet aware — I spent that orphan winter in the library of Castines Hundred, executing Mother’s estate, redefining for myself the Second Revolution, and, in both connections, reviewing like my ancestor before me the archives of our line. I did not then discover (would I had!) the four “prenatal” letters of 1812. I did find what I would come to understand, in the spring, here on Bloodsworth Island, to be les cinq lettres posthumes of Andrew Cook IV, written in what I instantly recognized as resembling “Captain Kidd’s” code in The Gold Bug: Legrand’s cipher!
After a few false starts (SLLORD looked Welsh to me, SREMAERD vaguely Gaelic; I knew neither tongue) I saw the inversion device and set about deciphering and transcribing the first letter. After half a dozen pages I could almost “sight-read” the text aloud. And indeed, as I began to comprehend what I had discovered — not so simple a matter for one who had not first read, as you have, the “prenatal” letters! — I put by my transcribing, read straight to the end… and changed the course of my life.
As shall be told. But to the letters! I found the five to be divisible into a group of two dealing with their author’s adventures in the 1812 War, another group of three dealing with his efforts in behalf of exiled Bonaparte and the Second Revolution. The first two are dated a year and one week apart: July 9, 1814, and July 16, 1815. The second three, oddly, are also dated a week apart, but over a period of six years: August 6, 1815; August 13, 1820; and August 20, 1821. Nothing in the letters accounts for this curious sequence, which I therefore presume to be coincidental, or conformable to some larger pattern unknown to their author. The additional coincidence of your note’s arriving this morning—of all mornings on the calendar! — reminds me of what another has called the Anniversary View of History; and while I don’t yet know what one is to do with such coincidences (beyond tisking one’s tongue), it will be convenient for me not to resist so insistent a pattern. Unless therefore, as I profoundly hope, you interrupt me by appearing and demanding the originals, I will summarize for you les lettres posthumes over the coming weeks on the anniversaries of their inditing, and (poor second choice!) post them to you when you deign to give me your address.
Some similar constraint must have obtained in the case of the first of our ancestor’s letters, the date of whose composition you will have remarked to be not “posthumous” at all, but a full two months and more before the British attack on Baltimore. Yet the annals of Castines Hundred (in this case, a memoir of Andrew Cook V, my grandfather) declare that no word from Andrew Cook IV reached there until well after the news of his death at Fort McHenry. The explanation is that the letter headed Off Bermuda, July 9, 1814 has a brief postscript dated Fort Bowyer, Mobile Bay, February 1815, in which the writer explains, not altogether convincingly, why it has taken him nearly two years to write to the wife he said au revoir to in 1812, and (what I pray may not be the fate of this) another seven months to mail the letter!