Second, all who saw her on the Nijmegen-Hague route agree that she had practically nothing with her. She had no luggage. Her personal effects, such as they were, were stored in the saddlebag of one of her German companions. Everything was soaked through, for in the days before her appearance at Nijmegen the weather had been rainy. During the voyage on the canal-ship, she and the two Germans emptied the saddlebags and spread out their contents on the deck to dry. At no time were any books, papers, or documents of any kind observed, and no quills or ink. In her hands she carried a small bag and an embroidery frame with a piece of crewel-work mounted on it. There was nothing else. All of this is confirmed by d’Avaux’s informants in the Binnenhof. The servants who furnished the Countess’s suite there insist that nothing came off the canal-boat save:
(Item) The dress on the Countess’s back. Mildewed and creased from (one assumes) a lengthy journey in the bottom of a saddlebag, this was torn up for rags as soon as she peeled it off. Nothing was hidden beneath.
(Item) A set of boy’s clothing approximately the Countess’s size, badly worn and filthy.
(Item) The embroidery frame and crewel-work, which had been ruined by repeated soakings and dryings (the colors of the thread had run into the fabric).
(Item) Her handbag, which turned out to contain nothing but a scrap of soap, a comb, an assortment of rags, a sewing-kit, and a nearly empty coin-purse.
Of the items mentioned, all were removed or destroyed save the coins, the sewing-kit, and the embroidery project. The Countess showed a curiously strong attachment to the latter, mentioning to the servants that they were not to touch it, be it never so badly damaged, and even keeping it under her pillow when she slept, for fear that it might be taken away by mistake and used as a rag.
Third, after she had recuperated for a day, and been supplied with presentable clothing, she went to the forest-hut of the Prince of Orange that is out in the wilderness nearby, and met with him and his advisors on three consecutive days. Immediately thereafter the Prince withdrew his regiments from the south and set in motion his invasion of England. It is said that the Countess produced, as if by sorcery, a voluminous report filled with names, facts, figures, maps, and other details difficult to retain in the memory.
So much for d’Avaux’s work. He had given me all that I could have asked for as a cryptologist. It remained only for me to apply Occam’s Razor to the facts that d’Avaux had amassed. My conclusion was that the Countess had made her notes, not with ink on paper, but with needle and thread on a work of embroidery. The technique, though extraordinary, had certain advantages. A woman who is forever writing things down on paper makes herself extremely conspicuous, but no one pays any notice to a woman doing needle-work. If a person is suspected of being a spy, and their possessions searched, paper is the first thing an investigator looks for. Crewel-work will be ignored. Finally, paper-and-ink documents fare poorly in damp conditions, but a textile document would have to be unraveled thread by thread before its information was destroyed.
By the time of my arrival in the Hague, the Countess had vacated her chambers in the Binnenhof and moved across the Plein to the house of the heretic “philosopher” Christiaan Huygens, who is her friend. On the day of my arrival she departed for Amsterdam to pay a call on her business associates there. I paid a cat-burglar, who has done many such jobs for d’Avaux in the past, to enter the house of Huygens, find the embroidery, and bring it to me without disturbing anything else in the room. Three days later, after I had conducted an analysis detailed below, I arranged for the same thief to put the embroidery back just where he had found it. The Countess did not return from her sojourn to Amsterdam until several days afterwards.
It is a piece of coarsely woven linen, square, one Flemish ell on a side. She has left a margin all round the edges of about a hand’s breadth. The area in the center, then, is a square perhaps eighteen inches on a side: suitable for an opus pulvinarium or cushion-cover. This area has been almost entirely covered in crewel-work. The style is called gros-point, a technique that is popular among English peasants, overseas colonists, and other rustics who amuse themselves sewing naive designs upon the crude textiles they know how to produce. As it has been superseded, in France, by petit-point, it may be unfamiliar to your majesty, and so I will permit myself the indulgence of a brief description. The fabric or matrix is always of a coarse weave, so that the warp and weft may be seen by the naked eye, forming a regular square grid a la Descartes. Each of the tiny squares in this grid is covered, during the course of the work, by a stitch in the shape of a letter x, forming a square of color that, seen from a distance, becomes one tiny element of the picture being fashioned. Pictures formed in this manner necessarily have a jagged-edged appearance, particularly where an effort has been made to approximate a curve; which explains why such pieces have been all but banished from Versailles and other places where taste and discrimination have vanquished sentimentality. In spite of which your majesty may easily envision the appearance of one of these minute x -shaped stitches when viewed closely: one leg running from northwest to southeast, as it were, and the other southwest to northeast. The two legs cross in the center. One must lie over the other. Which lies on top is a simple matter of the order in which they were laid down. Some embroiderers are creatures of habit, always performing the stitches in the same sequence, so that one of the legs invariably lies atop the other. Others are not so regular. As I examined the Countess’s work through a magnifying lens, I saw that she was one of the latter-which I found noteworthy, as she is in other respects a person of the most regular and disciplined habits. It occurred to me to wonder whether the orientations of the overlying legs might be a hidden vector of information.
The pitch of the canvas’s weave was about twenty threads per inch. A quick calculation showed that the total number of threads along each side would be around 360, forming nearly 130,000 squares.
A single square by itself could only convey a scintilla of information, as it can only possess one of two possible states: either the northwest-southeast leg is on top, or the southwest-northeast. This might seem useless; as how can one write a message in an alphabet of only two letters?
Mirabile dictu,there is a way to do just that, which I had recently heard about because of the loose tongue of a gentleman who has already been mentioned: Fatio de Duilliers. This Fatio fled to England after the Continent became a hostile place for him, and befriended a prominent English Alchemist by the name of Newton. He has become a sort of Ganymede to Newton’s Zeus, and follows him wherever he can; when they are perforce separated, he prates to anyone who will listen about his close relationship to the great man. I know this from Signore Vigani, an Alchemist who is at the same college with Newton and so is often forced to break bread with Fatio. Fatio is prone to irrational jealousy, and he endlessly schemes to damage the reputation of anyone he imagines may be a rival for Newton’s affections. One such is a Dr. Waterhouse, who shared a room with Newton when they were boys, and for all I know buggered him; but the facts do not matter, only Fatio’s imaginings. In the library of the Royal Society, Fatio recently happened upon Dr. Waterhouse sleeping over some papers on which he had been working out a calculation consisting entirely of ones and zeroes-a mathematical curiosity much studied by Leibniz. Dr. Waterhouse woke up before Fatio could get a closer look at what he had been doing; but as the document in question appeared to be a letter from abroad, he inferred that it might be some sort of cryptographic scheme. Not long after, he went to Cambridge with Newton and let this story drop at High Table so that all could know how clever he was, and that Waterhouse was certainly a dolt and probably a spy.