“For acting as go-between to William of Orange.”
“Why, that is treason-you should’ve been half-hanged, drawn, and quartered for it! But you were kept alive why?”
“Because I am a witness to the birth of the Prince, and as such, may be useful in attesting to the legitimacy of the next King.”
“If Jeffreys has now decided to kill you, what does that signify then?”
“That he is giving up on the King-my God, on the entire dynasty -and getting ready to flee. Yes, I understand your reasoning now, thank you for being so patient with me.”
“Mind you, I’m not asking you to take up arms, or do anything else that ill suits you.”
“Some would take offense at that, Sergeant, but-”
“E’en though my chief grievance may lie with Upnor, the first cause of it was Jeffreys, and I would not hesitate to swing my spadroon, if he should chance to show me his neck.”
“Save it for Upnor,” Daniel said, after a brief pause to make up his mind. In truth, he’d long since made it up; but he wanted to put on a show of thinking about it, so that Bob Shaftoe would not view him as a man who took such things lightly.
“You’re with me, then.”
“Not so much that I am with you as that we are with most of England, and England with us. You speak of putting Jeffreys to death with the strength of your right arm. Yet I tell you that if we must rely on your arm, strong as it is, we would fail. But if, as I believe, England is with us, why, then we need do no more than find him and say in a clear voice, ‘This fellow here is my lord Jeffreys,’ and his death will follow as if by natural law, like a ball rolling down a ramp. This is what I mean when I speak of revolution.”
“Is that a French way of saying ‘rebellion’?”
“No, rebellion is what the Duke of Monmouth did, it is a petty disturbance, an aberration, predestined to fail. Revolution is like the wheeling of stars round the pole. It is driven by unseen powers, it is inexorable, it moves all things at once, and men of discrimination may understand it, predict it, benefit from it.”
“Then I’d best go find a man of discrimination,” muttered Bob Shaftoe, “and stop wasting the night with a hapless wretch.”
“I simply have not understood, until now, how I might benefit from the revolution. I have done all for England, naught for myself, and I have lacked any organizing principle by which to shape my plans. Never would I have dared to imagine I might strike Jeffreys down!”
“As a mudlark, Vagabond soldier, I am always at your service, to be a bringer of base, murderous thoughts,” said Bob Shaftoe.
Daniel had receded to the outer fringes of the light and worried a candle out of a bottle on his writing-table. He hustled back and lit it from Bob’s candle.
Bob remarked, “I’ve seen lords die on battlefields-not as often as I’d prefer, mind you-but enough to know it’s not like in paintings.”
“Paintings?”
“You know, where Victory comes down on a sunbeam with her tits hanging out of her frock, waving a laurel for said dying lord’s brow, and the Virgin Mary slides down on another to-”
“Oh, yes. Those paintings. Yes, I believe what you say.” Daniel had been working his way along the curving wall of the Tower, holding the candle close to the stone, so that its glancing light would deepen the scratchings made there by prisoners over the centuries. He stopped before a new one, a half-finished complex of arcs and rays that cut through older graffiti.
“I do not think I shall finish this proof,” he announced, after gazing at it for a few moments.
“We’ll not leave tonight. You shall likely have a week-maybe more. So there’s no cause for breaking off work on whatever that is.”
“It is an ancient thing that used to make sense, but now it has been turned upside-down, and seems only a queer, jumbled bag of notions. Let it bide here with the other old things,” Daniel said.
From Monsieur Bonaventure Rossignol, Chateau Juvisy
To His Majesty Louis XIV, Versailles
21 November 1688
Sire,
It was my father’s honor to serve your majesty and your majesty’s father as cryptanalyst to the Court. Of the art of decipherment, he endeavoured to teach me all that he knew. Moved by a son’s love for his father as well as by a subject’s ardent desire to be of service to his King, I strove to learn as much as my lesser faculties would permit; and if, when my father died six years ago, he had imparted to me a tenth part of what he knew, why then it sufficed to make me more nearly fit to serve as your majesty’s cryptanalyst than any man in Christendom; a measure, not of my eminence (for I cannot claim to possess any) but of my father’s, and of the degraded condition of cryptography in the uncouth nations that surround France as barbarian hordes once hemmed in mighty Rome.
Along with some moiety of his knowledge, I have inherited the salary your beneficent majesty bestowed upon him, and the chateau that Le Notre built for him at Juvisy, which your majesty knows well, as you have more than once honored it with your presence, and graced it with your wit, as you journeyed to and from Fontainebleau. Many affairs of state have been discussed in the petit salon and the garden; for your father of blessed memory, and Cardinal Richelieu, also were known to ennoble this poor house with their presences during the days when my father, by decyphering the communications passing into and out of the fortifications of the Huguenots, was helping to suppress the rebellions of those heretics.
Than your majesty no monarch has been more keenly alive to the importance of cryptography. It is only to this acuity on your majesty’s part, and not to any intrinsic merit of mine, that I attribute the honors and wealth that you have showered upon me. And it is only because of your majesty’s oft-demonstrated interest in these affairs that I presume to pick up my quill and to write down a tale of cryptanalysis that is not without certain extraordinary features.
As your majesty knows, the incomparable chateau at Versailles is adorned by several ladies who are indefatigable writers of letters, notably my friend Madame de Sevigne; la Palatine; and Eliza, the Countess de la Zeur. There are many others, too; but we who have the honor of serving in your majesty’s cabinet noir spend as much time reading the correspondence of these three as of all the other ladies of Versailles combined.
My narrative chiefly concerns the Countess de la Zeur. She writes frequently to M. le comte d’Avaux in the Hague, using the approved cypher to shield her correspondence from my Dutch counterparts. As well she carries on a steady flow of correspondence to certain Jews of Amsterdam, consisting predominantly of numbers and financial argot that, read, cannot be decyphered, and decyphered, cannot be understood, unless one is familiar with the workings of that city’s commodities markets, as vulgar as they are complex. These letters are exceptionally pithy, and of no interest to anyone save Jews, Dutchmen, and other persons who are motivated by money. Her most voluminous letters by far go to the Hanoverian savant Leibniz, whose name is known to your majesty-he made a computing machine for Colbert some years ago, and now toils as an advisor to the Duke and Duchess of Hanover, whose exertions on behalf of united Protestantism have been the cause of so much displeasure to your majesty. Ostensibly the letters of the Countess de la Zeur to this Leibniz consist of interminable descriptions of the magnificence of Versailles and its inhabitants. The sheer volume and consistency of this correspondence have caused me to wonder whether it was not a channel of encrypted communications; but my poor efforts at finding any hidden patterns in her flowery words have been unavailing. Indeed, my suspicion of this woman is grounded, not on any flaw in her cypher-which, assuming it exists at all, is a very good one-but on what little understanding I may claim to possess of human nature. For during my occasional visits to Versailles I have sought this woman out, and engaged her in conversation, and found her to be highly intelligent, and conversant with the latest work of mathematicians and Natural Philosophers both foreign and domestic. And of course the brilliance and erudition of Leibniz is acknowledged by all. It is implausible to me that such a woman could devote so much time to writing, and such a man so much time to reading, about hair.