Page 86 of Romancing the Scot
The envoys had been astounded when Hugh told them that she had the document, but both Captain Rivenhall and Sir Rupert Elliot were also clearly affronted by the viscount’s refusal to trust them. Still, according to their own account, they’d set out on what might have been a wild goose chase. They’d come to Baronsford clinging to a thin hope, and now they needed to be satisfied that she had it. If only she did have the list.
She looked at Hugh, sitting at his desk. “How am I going to produce such a thing when they come back tomorrow? I arrived with nothing but the clothes I was wearing and that diamond.”
“Didn’t you say that the murderers were searching the rooms at the inn when you went back upstairs?” he asked.
The memory rushed back, fresh and painful as the day it happened. She turned to the window. Her father, sick and suffering, had been making plans for her. While Grace had been consumed with caring for him, Daniel Ware was setting into motion schemes to secure his only daughter’s future.
“Yes, they were tearing the room apart. But they must not have found it.” She looked back at Hugh. “Mrs. Douglas didn’t want the diamond. She engineered that plan to kidnap me because she thought I had the list.”
“Her name—or the name of someone close to her—must be on that document,” he agreed. “Perhaps even her husband’s name.”
Grace started pacing again. “My father kept correspondence in his chest. But he was carrying nothing that he seemed overly concerned about. Nothing he mentioned or seemed extraordinarily protective of. In fact, every letter he had with him I’d read to him. And I had written every response at his dictation.”
Hugh was leaning back in his chair, his hands steepled before him. He watched every step she took, but she knew his calm demeanor was a façade. His mind was working as fiercely as hers.
“Your father was an experienced military man,” he began. “No successful commander approaches a battle without a clear objective. He surveys the field, considers the scouting reports, applies what he knows of the strategies of the enemy, and develops his tactics. He always has a primary and a secondary tactic to employ. That was the reason Daniel Ware sent two identical messages to the British government.”
Grace came to a stop before Hugh’s desk. “He feared one might be intercepted. He wanted to make certain that his letter reached the appropriate people.”
“Again, as an experienced commander”—Hugh paused, his gaze locked on her face—“he would only entrust the delivery of the final dispatch to his most capable officer.”
“His final words to me . . .” A knot formed in her chest. “‘What a fine officer you’d have made.’ Those were his very words to me on that day.”
Hugh pushed to his feet, his hands planted on his desk. “With your unmatchable memory, there was no need to carry a physical letter. What he knew, what was to be transcribed and delivered, he’d intended to pass on to the British through you.”
Her talent, Grace’s father called it. If what Hugh said was true, why couldn’t she recall it? She closed her eyes and pressed her fingers to her temples. But there was so much in there. Information, names, faces. All the correspondence that she’d written out for him during the last months of his life.
“Too much. I don’t know where to start, what to look for,” she said. “He never dictated any list. Nothing that he said that would lead me to such a document.”
Hugh came around his desk and took her by the hand. “Think of anything that might have pertained to the war. The envoys said these spies operated during the Peninsular campaign. He was drawing on knowledge from those years.”
Rivenhall and Elliot had referred to the names of British subjects. Code names.
A chill ran down her spine. She remembered.
Her fathers “orders.”
“I know what it is!” she exclaimed. “What they’re looking for! I thought it was the effects of the laudanum on him. When we were sailing from America, his mind continued to wander back to his fighting days in Spain.”
“What did he say?”
“He wanted me to remember his ‘directions.’ It was as if I were a member of his staff. He insisted that I memorize his orders. They wereencoded.”
Hugh laughed as he swept her into his arms. “If Napoleon had only known the treasure of your mind, we would never have defeated him.”
He pulled up a chair to the desk and sat her down, setting pen and paper before her.
“Write down what you recall.”
Grace closed her eyes for a moment, trying to push the irrelevant information out of the way. The page came into sharp focus. Letters and numbers spilled out of her mind onto the paper. They made no overt sense, but she recorded the sequences exactly as they were stored in her memory.
When she was finished, Hugh went to his bookshelves and returned with a thin, bound manuscript that he placed on the desk.
“A treatise on cryptography by a friend of mine who worked in the Foreign Office. It’s a fascinating study.” He looked at the series of letters and numbers on the paper. “I hope this isn’t the Great Paris Cipher. If it is, it could take us weeks to solve it. There are over 1,400 numbers that could substitute for words or parts of words in a million permutations.”
Grace knew of the failings of the French Army’s use of encoded messages. Her father had complained of it many times over the years. The Great Paris Cipher had been devised as a replacement for the failed Portugal Code.
“It’s the Portugal Code,” she told him. “I remember my father telling me that several times. He said so even that last day as I went down to the street to see about our carriage and trunks.”
