Enys looked horrified. “But…”
“Mr. Enys,” said Lady Hunsdon, “You are, I fear, in a war with Heneage and his men. If you weren’t prepared for it, you shouldn’t have got into it.”
Enys said nothing as the Hunsdons processed stately fashion up the stairs, lit on their way by servants carrying candles.
***
Enys had gone meekly to his bedchamber and Carey and Dodd were sitting up in the Lesser Parlour over a flagon of brandywine and a pile of papers, the contents of the bag Carey had raided out of Heneage’s house earlier. Carey had set up as clerk with clean paper and an ink bottle and pens, plus a large candelabra of expensive wax candles.
“Walsingham had me taught something of this art by Thomas Phelippes when I was in Scotland with him all those years ago,” said Carey picking up a piece of paper covered in code and putting it neatly to one side. “Of course, at the time I had no idea why…” He laughed softly for a while as if recalling a very great joke. Another piece of paper, this time mostly in ordinary writing, went to a different pile. A third piece, all over with numbers except for a sequence of letters at the top, and a third pile begun.
Dodd watched the piles grow with Carey setting a few letters aside, wondering what was nagging him, why he was sure he had forgotten something.
“Now then,” said Carey, picking up the first of the letters in clear and taking a gulp of brandywine. He held it up against the light of the candles, shook his head and then put it back in the bag. Several more letters followed.
“What are ye looking for, sir?” Dodd asked at last, thinking about another pipe but then deciding against it. He didn’t like the way his chest had felt tight when he ran and it couldn’t be blamed on his doublet because he had undone the buttons in what Carey called the melancholik style. He poured himself brandywine instead.
“Oh…I’m not sure. Something to do with Cornwall. Something about Richard Tregian or Harry Dowling or whoever the poor soul in the Thames may be.”
“Ay sir, but they’re both dead. What’s the point?”
“Good question.” Carey had taken off his kid gloves the better to handle the papers, and he now put up an elegant but nailless finger. “Imprimis, Richard Tregian was judicially killed in the place of another man-the Jesuit called Fr. Jackson. It’s certainly an alias. So where is Fr. Jackson? Did he escape? Did he turn his coat and then get released? In which case why go through all the palaver of having Tregian hanged, drawn, and quartered in his place. Normally when a Jesuit turns, the Cecils trumpet it abroad so why hide this one so lethally? And why Tregian? He’s a respectable gentleman, even if he is Cornish. If you were going to murder the man, you would be better advised to slit his throat in an alley and blame it on a footpad, as you pointed out before. It’s not as though there’s a shortage of them in London.”
“Ay sir, though I’ve not been troubled recently.”
Carey grinned. “No, Dodd, good news like you gets out quickly.”
“Ay,” said Dodd, wondering if this was a compliment.
“Secundus, we have a corpse from the Thames that might be Mrs. Briscoe’s brother or not, yet nobody else has claimed yet despite my father having had the announcement cried at Westminster and in the City and offering a reward for information.”
Dodd nodded.
“There’s something odd about the corpse though I can’t place it.” Carey frowned and stared into the fire in the fireplace for a moment. “Very irritating.”
“Ay,” said Dodd.
“Tertius, and possibly not connected at all with any of this, we have Enys who mysteriously turns up and offers to be our lawyer just when we need one. He has a Cornish name. His brother, he says, has disappeared and must have gone at roughly the same time as the corpse wound up in the Thames, but he says the dead man isn’t his brother.”
Dodd thought back to that. “Ay sir, but he didnae say he didn’t know the man.”
Carey nodded. “No, he didn’t, did he? Hm.” He paused and put up a fourth finger, this one still with its nail. “And item, we have mysterious land-deals happening in Cornwall, a Godforsaken place good for nothing but tin-mining, wrecking, and piracy. My mother likes it there, but I do not see the likes of the Earl of Southampton going and farming sheep or mining tin for that matter. It’s too far from London. Riding post and hoping not to be waylaid on Bodmin Moor, you’d feel pleased if it only took you three days to get there. If they had post houses in Cornwall, which they haven’t. A ship is a better option, frankly. More comfortable, the Cornish probably won’t rob you or wreck you if you’re sailing in an English ship, and it only takes a week.”
He paused, thoughtfully and put up the thumb. “And item, of course, we have my esteemed lady mother’s interest in the whole matter which I frankly find very worrying. As does my father. The connection to our family of Richard Tregian is close enough to be dangerous under the wrong circumstances. Also the connection to my Lady Widdrington’s family-her father is the Trevannion who holds Caerhays Castle.”
Dodd nodded politely. It always got back to Lady Widdrington somehow.
Carey blinked at his spread fingers, then closed them into a fist. “Topcliffe running about the city with an armed band of men. My father here instead of going back to Oxford where the Queen still is-though she ought to be coming back to London in October despite the plague. She’ll probably stay in one of the outer palaces like Nonesuch or Greenwich, well away from the city.”
“Why did the judge ask about court faction?” Dodd asked from idle curiosity. It had been like the question a sensible juror would ask on the Borders-is there a feud here? And then take tactfully sick if there was.
“Good question. Why did he? What’s he heard about, or been told.”
He looked down at the pile of papers. “We’ll have to give these back at some stage and I don’t have time to copy them all out.”
For some reason that was the thing that tripped Dodd’s memory. He fumbled in his belt pouch and brought out the folded pieces of paper he had found wedged behind the bookshelf in Tregian’s chamber at the inn. He explained where it had come from as Carey passed the paper under his nose, smiled, and held it near the candle. Soon the brown numbers appeared written in orange juice and Carey had Dodd calling them out while he copied them out carefully. All were numbers except for a letter at the bottom which Dodd read out as a letter A, upside down.
As Carey dipped his pen and wrote them down, he paused. “Hang on,” he said, and pulled one of the other papers towards him. Two of them were also covered with groups of numbers and the same letter at the top. An A, upside down.
Immediately he dipped his pen and started copying them out as well, ending with three sheets of paper entirely covered with groups of numbers.
“D’ye know what they say, sir?” Dodd asked, fascinated.
“No, not yet. But I know how they’ve been coded,” said Carey with satisfaction, wiping off his pen and sharpening the nib.
“Ay?” said Dodd, very unwilling to admit how little he knew about codes and ciphers.
“Well, you see, these are just number substitution codes-where you write out the alphabet and then replace each letter with a number. There’s two ways of doing it. Either you do it in a pattern-say call A a 1, B 2 and so on, or you do it at hazard where A is 23 and B is 4 or whatever. Follow me?”
“Ay,” said Dodd cautiously. It seemed a lot of work to be sure nobody could read what you wrote-why write it down at all then?
“Of course the random one is better than the one in a pattern because believe me, someone skilled in the art like Mr. Phelippes or Mr. Anriques can find a pattern like that in a matter of minutes and then they can read all the correspondance you think is so secret-that’s what happened with the Queen of Scots.”
“Ay,” said Dodd, who felt he was now on more familiar ground. Hadn’t he gone into town with his father and all his brothers and sisters to have a good gawk at her while she was being kept at Carlisle? Carey had told him before how Walsingham had trapped her, twenty years later.