Tom McCarthy - C

Widsun stays at Versoie for more than a week. Each morning, over eggs and kippers, he peruses the Times’s personal notices.

“It’s amazing that these fools still think they’re safe conducting their illicit business in rail-fence cipher. Break it before my egg goes cold, what?”

“What are they saying?” asks Sophie.

“Hmm, let’s see. It’s a three-line rail-fence, a, d, g… d-a-r-l… Got it: ‘Darling Hepzibah’-Hepzibah? What kind of name is that?-‘Will meet you Reading Sunday 15.25 train Didcot-Reading.’ Reading you all right, you idiots.”

“Do you think they’re eloping?” Sophie says.

“Ladies don’t ask those kinds of questions,” Maureen tells her as she clears her plate. “Or drink three cups of coffee.”

“This one’s using atbash, at least,” Widsun continues.

“Tell me what he’s saying!” Sophie chirps, creaming her dark cup and sliding from her chair to wander over to his.

“V for e…” Widsun mumbles. “Q as null-sign… Give me one tick…” Sophie leans on his broad shoulder, peering over him into the page as his pencil flicks between the encrypted text and a row of letters scrawled in hangman-style beneath it, adding, crossing out. “Righty-ho: ‘Rose. Smell of your bosom lingers on my clothes and spirit. Must meet again next week. Advise when Piers away using this channel.’ The saucy scoundrel! I’ve a mind to give him a reply.”

“Oh, let’s!” she squeals, patting her hands across his back. “You can teach me the code.”

“My delightful child, nothing would give me greater pleasure.”

He whisks her away to his room and they spend the whole morning there, poring over lines of Scytale, Caesar shift and Vigenère. Widsun hovers over her, his chin above her hair, correcting the odd letter here and there. Serge tries to join in, but the sequences, their transpositions and substitutions, are too convoluted for him to keep track of. After an hour he’s reduced to sitting at the escritoire in Widsun’s room and playing with Widsun’s personal seal and ink set, stamping the man’s signature across the sheets of headed government paper that he’s brought with him from London, and then, when these give out, his own forearm.

“Leave us alone,” says Sophie. “Go and do something else.”

“You can’t tell me what to do,” Serge snaps back. “And besides, Papa wouldn’t let you do this if he knew.”

It’s true. Carrefax hates the notion of codes, ciphers and encryption. “Goes against the whole principle of communication,” he harrumphs to Widsun over post-lunch brandy and cigars one afternoon.

“Secure communication,” Widsun replies, stabbing his cigar precisely as though plugging its lit point into some invisible telephone exchange socket in the library’s air.

“Secure-what? Secure from whom?”

“Your enemies.”

“Are hearing people deaf ones’ enemies?”

“Ah, yes,” taking a puff. “Your muted flock. In a way, that’s what I-”

“Muted no longer once they’ve been here for a stretch.”

Widsun mouths silent acknowledgment of this, blowing a smoke-ring from his lips. “You know I’m working for Room 40 now?”

“Room 40?”

“At the Ministry. Signals.”

“Ah: they got you, did they? Consummatum est, and Homo fuge branded on your body. I wondered what the secretive tone in your letters was about.”

“Carrefax, listen: things have changed since I was last here.”

“Too damn right they have! When you were last here I was beavering away at wireless, only to get pipped at the post. When was it? ’Ninety-seven? ’Ninety-eight? Best part of a year before the boy was born, at any rate.” He gestures vaguely at Serge, who’s sitting quietly in the corner holding the guillotine with which the men have allowed him to cut their cigars. “Now we’ve got seven RX stations in Masedown alone.”

“No, I mean that-”

“Happens every bloody time. You work on it, prepare its way into the world, then some other bastard sneaks into the nest and steals your egg.”

“Politically, old friend: I mean politically. There’ll be a war.”

“Be a-what? War? Nonsense! The more we can all chatter with one another, the less likely that sort of thing becomes.”

“If only that were true,” sighs Widsun dolefully. He sips his brandy, lets out a measured, spirit-heavy breath and continues: “We were hoping-my colleagues and I-we thought we might pick your brains about the sign language your pupils use when-”

“You’ve come to the wrong place, old chap! It’s banned here from day one. We teach them language here, not secrecy and silence. That’s what leads to wars!”

“I’ve seen old Bounder doing it…”

“Bounder?”

“Your gardener.”

“Oh, Bodner! Blast that fellow. My damn wife insists on keeping him around. He came with the estate; been with her since she was born. Special connection, you see, what with his mouth…”

“That kind of communication will become important when-”

“When I first came down here to teach her to speak I tried to get him to do it too-but he was having none of it, the stubborn ox.”

Serge, still fiddling with his guillotine, pictures Bodner’s mouth again: the undulating lips, the shrivelled trunk of tongue. He thinks of oxtongue, sliced and laid out on a plate. It makes him swallow, and his spit taste bitter.

Sophie prances into the library and straight up to Widsun.

“I’ve found seven of them!” she sings, thrusting a spread palm and two fingers from her other hand right up against his face.

“Seven of what?” her father asks.

“He puts messages in the papers every day, and I have to crack them and reply in the same code,” she announces in a voice that’s guilty and defiant at the same time.

Carrefax looks daggers at his guest.

“I’m training her up as a spy,” Widsun confesses. “Good mental exercise, you must admit, if nothing else…”

“I’ll be a double agent,” Sophie purrs, bunching up her hair, “a double-double agent. If I’m caught, I’ll poison myself before the enemy can make me spill the code. I’m even working on the potion. Before you leave-” to Widsun, this, snaking her arm along his broad shoulder again-“I’ll give you a whole bunch of different poisons to take back to your Ministry. And in two years, when all your other spies are dead, I’ll come and be the greatest spy of all. Oh: apples!”

“Apples-what?” her father asks her.

“From the garden; Bodner; don’t you worry; need the pips, Papa; pip-pip!”

And she’s off again. She spends the next few days scurrying between her lab and Widsun’s room, clutching pages filled with columns of letters, numbers and other, indeterminate ciphers scrawled and crossed out in her own hand, not to mention lighter pages hand-torn from the Daily Sketch and Daily Herald, from the Globe, Manchester Guardian and Times, the Star, the Western Mail and Evening News. Serge, no longer allowed into Widsun’s room with her, hears shrieks and squeals each time she finds or breaks a cipher, mixed with Widsun’s deep roars of approval. Occasionally she passes him in the corridor as she emerges with her hair messed up and ink spattered and smudged across her face.

Pageant Day starts out unsettled. Clouds scud by swiftly; Carrefax monitors them anxiously, his head cranked back to watch them slide out from behind the house’s ivy-covered chimneys, elongating and unravelling as they drag patches of shade across the Mulberry Lawn-patches that wrinkle as they dip into the stream, then shorten as they make their way up Arcady Field, contracting right down to thin lines that slip away over the brim of Telegraph Hill. Staff and pupils lighten and darken as they move through these, hurrying from spinning sheds to schoolrooms, schoolrooms to Mulberry Lawn, house to spinning sheds and back again. The décor is being finished; women balance on the top rungs of stepladders, hanging leaf-tresses over wooden posts. In front of these, children lay out chairs in rows across the grass. Off to the side, Maureen and Frieda set up tea and coffee urns on trestle tables while their girls carry out plates laden with pyramids of cucumber and chopped-egg sandwiches, moving over lawn and gravel in an unbroken ant-like chain. Spitalfield slinks around among them, hoping for scraps. At the top of the lightly sloping path, Mr. Clair ties to the open gate a sign which bears, in both conventional and phonetic script, the text that most of Lydium’s tradesmen, clergy, civil servants, farmers, housewives, shopkeepers and misc. have already found slipped through their letter boxes in leaflet form during the past two weeks: