Page 59 of The Spy Who Loved Her
It was a long walk toward the appointed room, fraught with the awkwardness that seared the air between them, with the long, uncomfortable silence that was so thick with her hurt and his shame.
She had been working in here, he realized, as he crossed the threshold. A desk had been positioned up against the wall, strewn with scattered papers. Ambrose’s journal lay atop it, resting open.
Rafe made a scathing sound deep in his throat, stalking across the room to slam the journal closed, lifting it in his hand. “You do not leave this lying around, open and vulnerable to theft,” he said.
The traces of that lingering diffidence fled from Emma’s face in the shock of being so reprimanded, and a hot flush of fury suffused her cheeks straight on its heels. “Well, really!” she snapped. “It’s safe enough. Kit said so.”
“A damned hard won safety, Emma. One I do notexpect to last indefinitely, most especially if you’re foolish enough to leave such things out in the open where anyone might see them. Gossip spreads quickly, and you do not want to make yourself the subject of it.”
“You do not chastise me in my own home!” Emma returned, planting her fists upon her hips, her chin lifting in stubborn challenge. But even her anger was preferable to that mien of grief she had worn.
“I do when you deserve it,” Rafe responded. “I don’t take you for a fool, so do not behave as one.” He thrust the journal in her direction, and she snatched it from his grasp. “Sir Roger would killto get that from you if he knew the truth of it, and it would not cause him so much as a twinge of distress. I have seen him order such things done.”
The color swept from her cheeks in a startling wave, a curious pallor sliding in behind it. Her fingers clenched around the leather binding of the journal, knuckles whitening. The deep blue of her eyes sharpened, her gaze sliding toward the window as if to search out some unseen threat that might even now be lingering without the house. “Do you—do you think he—”
“There is no reason to think so,” Rafe conceded, mollified by the reaction. “Atpresent. But it would take a competent thief only a few minutes at most to pick any particular lock. Even I never required a key,” he said.
Her jaw tensed as if she had clenched her teeth to bite back some caustic remark. “Then why did you accept one?”
“Because a key might as well be an engraved invitation. It meant my presence within your home was not suspicious, nothing worth remarking on or giving much notice to. That key opened more than your terrace door—it opened every door within your home simply by being in my possession.” Rafe let his gaze slide away from Emma’s face, which had gone quite bleak at the stony, taciturn words. He’d let himself be provoked into anger, had let himself forget, however briefly, that he was not the injured party here. She had every right to her resentment, and he—he hadearnedit. “I’m sorry,” he said, modulating his voice carefully. “That was unfair of me. Pray tell me for what purpose you have called me here so that I need not inflict my presence upon you any longer than necessary.”
Her brows pinched together at the phrasing, but at last she drew in a deep breath and seemed to shake herself that terrible desolation, papering over it with a mien of icy reserve instead. “I don’t understand your notes,” she said in a crisp, cool tone. “And I should not like to make unnecessary work for myself. It’s all rather tedious.”
She didn’t have to tell him that; he’d spent weeks mired in the tangle ofit, doing his damnedest to crack a cipher he well knew to be indecipherable without the corresponding key. Orkeys, as it were. “Sit,” he said, gesturing to the chair at the desk as he began to sort through the mess she’d made of his notes. Buried beneath the mountain of it, he found at last the ciphering table he’d meticulously printed by hand in tidy rows, encompassing the whole of the page, which he set to the side, atop the rest. “How much do you know of ciphers?”
“Very little,” she confessed as she sank into the chair as he had indicated. “I expect that is not so unusual.”
It wasn’t, but she was going to have to acquire an education in them swiftly if she was to have any chance of breaking it. “Most early ciphers,” he said, “eventually became quite simple to break. Perhaps the most famous was a substitution cipher which Caesar employed to pass secret messages during times of war. It was a simple alphabetic shift, replacing the letter to be ciphered with one three letters earlier in the alphabet. ‘D’ would therefore become ‘a,’ and ‘e’ would become ‘b,’ and so on, thus rendering the ciphered text unreadable.”
“Oh,” she said. “That’s clever, I suppose.”
“It was, but it was also quite easy to break. Even if one did not know the exact number by which to shift the letters, it required at most twenty-five attempts to break it. Eventually, this particular cipher—commonly called theindecipherable cipher—was born. It’s been in use for hundreds of years, and still it has proved impossible to break without the key.” Rafe snatched up the table he’d drawn up and placed it before her. “This is the tool one uses to cipher the text,” he said, gesturing toward the neat rows and columns.
“I have understood that much,” she said. “What I do not understand iswhy. It seems needlessly complex, when it is just the same alphabet spread out over so many rows.”
“It’s the alphabet offset by one letter per row,” he corrected. “And as each letter of the intended message is ciphered separately, it cannot be broken simply by the brute force of shifting the letters. You write out the message to be ciphered, and then select a key—a word, a phrase; anything at all, really. Then you match each letter of the key with each letter of the text to be ciphered, repeating the key as many times as necessary. Where those two letters intersect upon the table, thatletter becomes the ciphered text. If—and onlyif—one has the key can the text be deciphered in the reverse.”
“This is an exercise in futility,” Emma said, rubbing at her eyes as if to soothe away a headache. Probably, given the state of the salon, she’d beenattempting to sort through his notes for some time now, wasting as many hours upon the venture as had he. “Even with the proper key, it could take days—weeks, perhaps—to decipher the whole of the journal.”
“Yes. I’ve worked on it for weeks, with no success,” he said, rummaging through the scattered pages strewn across the surface of the desk. “Countless hours of work.”
“Wasted, it seems.”
“Not wasted.” A ragged laughed eked from his throat. “My God,” he said, with a slow shake of his head. “You can be forgiven for your ignorance, since you lack the proper context to understand it. This effort is never wasted, Emma. Lives have been saved by such work. Lives have been lost over it, as well. As distasteful a thing as you may find it, people like me do work such as this so that people like youcan sleep soundly at night. I might have dirtied my hands in the doing, but I was willing to make that sacrifice if others might be spared the ugliness of it.” A blight upon his conscience to save hers, and others like her.
He heard the soft inhale, the scrape of her breath in her throat, as if it had gone a bit too tight for comfort, but he did not bother to turn to see if she had taken offense. Instead he stacked the loose pages into some semblance of order, waiting for her to fill the uncomfortable silence that had fallen between them.
And she did. They always did. “I hate knowing,” she admitted in a hoarse rasp. “Every bit as much as I hate having been lied to for so many years. I can’t quite make myself decide which is worse.” A hollow, toneless laugh followed. “Ignorance is bliss, I suppose.”
“‘Where ignorance is bliss, ‘tis folly to be wise,’” he corrected. “I imagine many would prefer to remain blissfully ignorant of such things, did they have to face the consequences of knowing them.”
“Consequences,” she murmured reflectively. “Yes. It is a sort of hell to have so much to say and no one at all whom I can tell.” And then, after a moment of hesitation, she inquired, “Does your family know?”
“No. They never have. They never will. Out of necessity, it is a burden borne alone.” One he had now given to her, a restriction which he well knew would chafe.
“To whom do you speak of such things?”
“No one. It is the way of these things. There are things I can never speak of, things I can never admit that I know. I must always guard my words, mind my actions, and even modulate my expressions lest I inadvertentlyreveal something best concealed. I do not enjoylying, Emma, and I make every effort to evade a deliberate untruth whenever it is possible. I deflect and dodge to avoid it when I can. But it is occasionally a necessary evil. It has saved my life on more than one occasion.”
