Page 65 of The Art of Theft
He exhaled. “Thank you, Miss Yarmouth. You made the correct decision to tell me first.”
“Thank you, my lord.” She flushed with pleasure.
He inclined his head. “If you’ll excuse me.”
?Lord Ingram spent the rest of the afternoon with his children, until they were led to their bath. He had an early dinner with his brother and sister-in-law, then returned to the nursery to put the children to bed.
Carlisle, after a long, full day, dropped off soon. Lucinda, whohad obviously been waiting for that moment, clutched Lord Ingram’s hand. “Papa, Mamma came to see us.”
Her eyes shone. Lord Ingram’s heart pinched. He brushed away a strand of hair from her face. “Miss Yarmouth told me. You must have been happy to see her.”
“I told her all about our visit to the Natural History Museum when we were in London. And about me playing Margaret of Anjou in a game of Yorks and Lancasters.”
Despite his mounting unease, he smiled. “Margaret of Anjou, eh?”
Not exactly the most beloved figure of her time.
“She was busy—I like that,” said Lucinda. “But I had to remind Mamma who Margaret of Anjou was—Mamma said she couldn’t tell those kings and queens from four hundred years ago apart. I think she was sad when I got to the part about Margaret of Anjou being exiled to France so I told her that later Margaret became queen again.”
He did not want Lady Ingram to return from her exile to hold court in their lives again. Then again, even Margaret of Anjou couldn’t hold on to her reclaimed throne for very long.
“Did Mamma say how she is?”
“She said she was fine.”
He did not doubt that. “Did she mention why she came to visit you?”
Lucinda knocked him gently on the forehead. “Silly, of course it was because she missed us.”
His temples throbbed. He didn’t know why he believed he’d be able to find out something by talking to Lucinda. As precocious as she could be at times, she was still a child. “You’re right. Of course.”
Lucinda sank a little deeper under the covers and yawned. “She cried when I gave her the page of pressed flowers I made for her.”
When Lucinda had told him about making pressed flowers, he’d thought it would be years before mother and daughter reunited, not mere days.
In fact—
Something gonged loudly in the back of his head. “Pansies,” he said weakly. “You were going to make pressed pansies.”
“Yes, purple pansies. A whole page of them. The duchess even gave me a frame for it.” Lucinda smiled dreamily, her eyes closing. “It looked so pretty. Mamma said she’d take it with her everywhere she went and look at it every day.”
?Charlotte considered herself skilled enough as a cryptographer, but she didn’t always enjoy a cryptographer’s work. Decoding a Vigenère cipher, for example, was analogous to hitting herself repeatedly on the head with a mallet. She could only hope that the code Lord Ingram had obtained from the bowels of Château Vaudrieu would not prove quite as trying.
She had memorized the code on the rail journey back to London and could see the entire sequence of dots and dashes in her mind’s eye. The problem was, without any indications on how to group the symbols, there were too many possibilities—too many futile paths to follow.
A light knock came at her door. It was Livia, in her dressing gown, her hair in one long plait. “Are you working on the cipher, Charlotte?”
“Reluctantly.” Charlotte extended the paper on which she’d copied the code. “You can help me.”
“Me?”
“Why not you? You were the one who first taught me about coding and decoding messages.”
Livia scoffed. “Caesar ciphers that every five-year-old can do.”
“When I was a five-year-old, yes. But don’t forget you alsolearned about and constructed all the subsequent ciphers I decoded, too, all the way up to the Vigenère cipher.”
Old habits were hard to break. Their mother had always put Livia down, and Livia, in turn, had learned to put herself down even faster.
