David Liss - The Whiskey Rebel

“I have wronged you and then ridiculed you for that wrong. I apologize, though I know an apology will offer you little satisfaction. Instead, I offer you what you have long wished for. I shall meet you in accordance with the code duello at the time and place of your choosing. Dorland, I accept your challenge.”

“Well, now,” said one of his friends.

“I never would have thought it,” said another, at almost the same time.

Dorland, however, held up his hand in silence. “Do you mock me?”

“Not anymore. I am done with that, and I won’t place my friends in danger any longer.”

He shook his head. “I don’t believe you, Saunders, and if I did, it would still be too late. You had your chance for honor. Now it is time for an ignominious end.”

“That is not your choice,” said Leonidas. “You must honor the code.”

“I’ll not take lessons in honor from a nigger,” said Dorland.

“Then take the lesson from me,” said one of his friends. “He has accepted your challenge. You cannot refuse to meet him on the field of honor.”

“He has no honor,” said Dorland.

“That doesn’t matter,” said another of his friends. “He has accepted your challenge.”

“You must do it,” said the third.

“One moment,” said Dorland. “You are supposed to be with me on this. Macalister, you swore you would aid me.”

“Because he would not duel,” said the first man who had spoken. I recalled him kicking my side in the Helltown alley. “You asked me to be your second, and I agreed. Now he says he will duel, and you must agree.”

Dorland’s plump face quivered. “But he is a veteran of the war. I would have no chance against him.”

“You mean you will not duel?” asked Macalister.

“Let us deal with him here and now,” said Dorland.

And then the most astonishing thing happened. The one called Macalister walked away, and the others followed. Dorland called after them, but they did not look back. There had been four of them, and suddenly it was a dark alley, and Dorland stood alone with me and Leonidas.

“Well,” I said. “This is what I believe is called a reversal.”

Leonidas took a step closer to him, and Dorland ran fast and hard. I cannot even begin to guess when he noticed that no one ran after him.

In the war, it often happened that messages of vital import would need to be carried through dangerous lines. Various methods could be employed to preserve the secrecy of the message. It could be written in code, it might be carried by an unassuming courier, it could be well hidden away. But what happens when the courier is captured, as must sometimes transpire? One method was to carry the message, written in a tiny hand upon a tiny piece of paper, housed within a little silver ball. If the courier was captured, he could swallow the ball and then, once free of the British (for he would have nothing else upon his person to incriminate him), could retrieve the ball at his own unpleasant leisure.

That the people involved in this scheme, whatever it might be, used such methods frightened me. Whom did they fear? What must they communicate that required such secrecy?

I dared not open the ball in public, but once Leonidas and I returned to my rooms I pried it open and looked at the tiny parchment inside. It read:

W qcas tfca R. ozz cb eqvsrizs vsfs. Ies qcbhoqhe hc qcbtwfa voa eiegsqhe bc-hvwbu. Kwhvcih vwe wbhsftsfsbqs, PIE kwzz tozz pm aofqv.

“It’s nonsense,” Leonidas said.

“It’s a cipher,” I told him, “and a fairly simple one. This is quite clearly what is called a Caesar code, so named because it was allegedly invented by Julius Caesar himself. Each letter stands in place of another. If you can break one letter, you can usually break them all.”

“How can you do it?” he asked.

“It can always be done, merely by finding patterns common in writing,” I said. “Given time, a simple Caesar code can always be broken, which makes them of limited value. This one can be broken more easily than most, however. The people writing this code are not nearly so clever as they wish to think themselves, and they made a number of mistakes. There are, for example, a limited number of words in our language that consist of two letters that can be reversed to make another word. I am guessing on and no. And look at this: a word of a single letter. It must be A or I. And all these words end with two identical letters. It is likely that Z is an S or an L. Bring me a pen and paper. There you go. Also, they are foolish enough to use I as a discrete word, which gives me everything I need to break the code.”

With pen, ink, and paper at my disposal, I began to set up my key, matching the words I believed I could crack with those I could not, substituting letters as I went. It was tedious work, and the whiskey made my vision waver, but I drank it all the same. Soon the puzzle pieces fit together, and I looked at the message. I could scarce believe what I saw, yet there it was.

I come from D. All on schedule here. Use contacts to confirm Ham suspects nothing. Without his interference, BUS will fall by March.

I stared at the note, hardly daring to comprehend it. Leonidas looked over my shoulder.

“What is BUS?” he asked. “Who is D?”

I had my suspicions about D-Duer?-though I was still too early in the game to say for certain. BUS, however, was another matter. It was the institution that was upon everyone’s minds, upon everyone’s lips. It was the thing that had elevated Hamilton to unimaginable power and made him, to some, an unspeakable demon. It was the thing that, it now seemed to me, for good or ill, defined our moment in time, much as the Revolution itself had defined the world half a generation ago: the Bank of the United States. What I held in my hands changed everything, for this was not a matter of a missing gentleman and a pushy Irishman. Cynthia was right. Whatever had happened to her husband had something to do with the bank, but it was a far more sinister something than I could have suspected. There was a plot at work, a genuine plot to destroy Hamilton ’s bank. It was a plot to alter, for good or ill, the future of the American government.

Summer and Autumn 1789

The half-face camp built that day proved but a poor shelter, yet shelter it was, and though we endured a few rain showers that rendered it near useless, it was, at most times, not so terrible. To be sure, our difficulties were eased by the help of our new neighbors. Mr. Dalton developed a particular attachment to my husband that first night, and he proved to be a good friend. We learned that his companion, Mr. Jericho Richmond, was generally praised as one of the great marksmen in the region, and in that period of adjustment we would have starved had it not been for their regular gifts of game. Two or three times a week, as sunset approached, we would see the two of them enter our clearing, some great beast stretched over Mr. Richmond’s shoulders or, if too large, dragged in a cart. They brought us deer and bear and once a small panther, quite sleek in form and beautiful in its tan color.

“Can panther be eaten?” I inquired, skeptically eyeing the felled beast.

“Panther’s good,” answered Jericho Richmond, in his terse and soft-spoken manner.

“What does it taste like?” I asked.

Mr. Dalton considered this question. “Tastes a lot like rattlesnake.”

I laughed aloud. “You cannot expect me to know what rattlesnake tastes like.”

Dalton answered by strolling toward the thick growth of forest. Richmond stared at his back, and then, when Dalton was gone from view, Richmond stared at me. He seemed to have nothing to say, and yet his look held an accusation I did not understand. I attempted conversation-nothing of great complexity, for most of what I said involved speculation upon what Mr. Dalton might be doing-but Richmond would not speak to me. And so we stood there, Richmond as quiet and inscrutable as an Indian, I confused and not knowing how to excuse myself. So we remained until Dalton returned ten minutes later, the limp body of a rattlesnake dangling from one hand, its lifeless head peeking out from above his fist. He held it out to me.