“No, no.” Ainsley motioned at the pen and parchment, looked to Sheridan as if expecting him to say something. Squeezed his eyes shut for a moment. And then shouted, “Scytale!”
Lady Abbie shook her head. “Really, Ainsley. How is it Italy?”
“Ah!” Sheridan slapped a hand to the table now and spun from Ainsley to Beth and back again. “Not ‘it’s Italy,’ Abbie. Scytale. You know, the encryption tool.”
Abbie blinked at him. “I’m not sure I do.”
“Of course you do.” He sounded nearly as exasperated with her as he had when she made his list moot.
Though, for the record, Beth had slipped his list off the table when his back was turned and read it, and it had made her heart positively sing.
“Sparta, remember?” He reached for the slip, though he paused before just taking it from her. Beth relinquished it with a smile. “We learned about it four years ago during our dig there. Surely you recall—you loved that trip, both of you. Even Ainsley. Remember, we had that delicious amygdalota—you’d have loved them, Telly. They’re an almond biscuit—”
“Sheridan.” Beth, laughing, rested a hand on his arm. “Biscuits later. Scytale now.”
He grinned at her. “Right. It was a really simple method of encryption. One would wrap a thin piece of paper around a cylindrical object, like a stick or stylus.” He carefully wound the parchment around his own pen, lining it up so that there were no gaps between the coils. “Then one would write straight across as usual, scrolling the paper up a bit like we do in a typewriter these days. But when you unwound it again, all those letters were out of order.”
Simple indeed, and they could probably work out the meaning simply by trying to rearrange the letters that were a set distance apart from each other. Though it would require quite a bit of trial and error.
Telford leaned forward. “And Rupert would have known about this method?”
Sheridan scoffed. “Of course he would have. He was considered an expert in cryptography in his day. And it was a simple enough method that he quite reasonably could have left it with his bride, knowing she could decode it. All she’d need is a cylinder of the right diameter.”
Beth’s pen slipped from her fingers.
“So, we have only to gather up cylinders of varying widths.” Oliver gathered a few of the pens and pencils lying about and pushed them toward Sheridan.
“None of those are going to work, Ollie.” Beth smiled. “We already know what it should wrap around.”
Sheridan blinked at her. “We do?”
“We do.” She looked over to where Senara leaned against one of the shelves. “The key to your future, remember? Your key, Senara. Or the shaft of it, anyway.”
Senara winced a bit at all the attention suddenly leveled on her, but she’d always been a good sport. With a fluttery “Oh . . .” she pulled her pendant out from its usual place under her blouse and slipped the whole necklace off her head as she walked over to Beth’s chair. “Do you really think so?”
Beth accepted the key, its metal warm from where it always rested above her friend’s heart. “One way to find out, and easy enough to try, isn’t it?”
Sheridan slid the parchment back toward her, too, and she picked it up with a long inhale.
It took her a minute to determine how best to start coiling it. A minute in which a thousand questions crowded her mind. What if it said nothing important? What if it clearly wasn’t a message intended for Briallen? What if it was in German or something and she wouldn’t even know when it was producing words?
What if this was just one more clue that amounted to nothing, as so many had before?
It took her a few tries to coil it properly and for the letters to line up. But line up they did, row after row. She anchored each end with her thumbs and spun the whole key around to try to determine where a message might begin.
“There!” Sheridan halted her hands with a gentle touch. “Words—‘fro . . . from where Ik’—obviously not. ‘I kissed you goodbye.’ ‘From where I kissed you goodbye.’” Eyes ablaze, he grinned at Beth. “Flip it over. I think we must have begun with the second part of the sentence.”
She obliged, her own hands shaking a bit now. And the parchment, having curled in one direction, fought her a bit in trying to curl the opposite, but she won and lined it back up. “Here we are. ‘On then’—no, ‘on the norths’ . . . ‘the north shore of Gugh, due south.’”
Sheridan was scribbling it down on a clean sheet of paper. “‘On the north shore of Gugh, due south from where I kissed you goodbye.’ Ha! I knew it. Definitely a message to his bride.”
“And quite possibly instruction on where she could find something she might need for her future, like coins or jewels.” Letting the parchment unravel, she handed the key back to Senara with a smile.
Her friend took it, but her brows were furrowed. “There’s just one problem, Beth. How in the world are you to know where he kissed Briallen good-bye?”
26
Senara trailed her fingers down the familiar chain, along the familiar iron scrolling, over the familiar shaft. Familiar . . . yet all this time it had been part of a secret she never could have guessed at. Never. Not in a million years.
She’d taken part in the conjecture all through the afternoon and evening, feeling for the first time that she wasn’t just an overseer, a governess—she was an actual part of this story. How could she not be, when it was her key that had proven to be, well, the key?
But as darkness fell, she slipped away from the group and came out here, to the spot on the hill where she’d once brought Morgan and Ollie and Beth when she was in charge of them. She sat on the grass and set her eyes on the water, dark but for where the moonlight danced over its surface in flashes and ripples. Magic, that’s what it looked like. The Scillies made it easy to believe in all the fairy stories that Mr. Gibson so liked to tell. And yet, she’d always had a practical core. She’d always known they were just stories.
It’s what she’d always thought Beth’s mother’s anecdotes of noblemen falling for island girls had been too. But there was truth to the tragic tale. Truth that somehow saturated her own family history as well as the Gibsons’.
Truth playing itself out again now. Senara closed her eyes and let the ever-present breeze off the water caress her cheeks. Perhaps Beth wasn’t quite as common an island girl as Briallen had been—she had Tremayne blood, too, after all, and noble connections, thanks to her grandmother. And Lord Sheridan wasn’t quite nephew to the king. But even so, it had echoes of that first tale.
Echoes that she prayed, even now as she clutched the key in her palm, would fade away before any tragic endings could repeat themselves. She couldn’t bear to think of Beth and her lovestruck young lord having only a single taste of happiness before life separated them.
Praise God that the Howe sisters had accepted her so quickly, and with such enthusiasm. That would pave the way to a happy future. But . . .
But still Senara couldn’t help the worry that had buried itself in her heart. Beth was so young. And she had turned so quickly from anger with Sheridan to love. Which was, yes, perfectly in keeping with her personality. But what if her affections turned again? Or what if Sheridan’s faded? She didn’t know him well enough to say they wouldn’t. What if he . . . if he simply used Beth, toyed with her heart, and then left, as so many noblemen before him had done with girls not quite suitable for their wives?