Tearing her gaze from his profile, she forced a careless shrug. “One other thing. It may mean nothing, but one of the kitchen maids mentioned that Talleyrand is expecting a special guest for next week’s gala Carrousel, and apparently it’s a matter of great secrecy. According to her, the person is a general, however she didn’t remember his name . . .” Her brows pinched together. “Save for the fact that it has something to do with water.”
“A general,” repeated Henning. “That’s hardly a notable personage these days. After a decade of constant wars, they are as common as cow dung.”
“Water,” she mused, then repeated the word in several different languages. “Anything strike a bell?”
Henning shook his head.
Preoccupied with the coded letter, Saybrook didn’t answer.
“Sea . . . Spring . . . Creek.” Each elicited a negative response from the surgeon, so she abandoned the effort. “Perhaps something will come to us later. In any case, it’s likely not important.”
At that, Saybrook grunted, showing that he had been listening, if only with half an ear. “We’ve enough word games to occupy our attention.” He rose and went to the desk to fetch his notebooks, which contained the other coded document. “It’s been a long day. Why don’t the two of you get some rest.”
“What about you?” asked Arianna.
Saybrook picked up a pencil. “I want to work for a while longer. Now that I have two samples, I might see something new.”
“Can I help?”
“I don’t know.” His temper sounded dangerously frayed.
Arianna was about to retort when all of a sudden, she spotted the uncertainty in his eyes.
He’s not angry at me—he is angry at himself.
“Don’t be so hard on yourself, Sandro,” she whispered as Henning bid them good night and headed off to the spare bedchamber on the floor above.
“Ah, yes—it’s only a matter of life and death,” he replied, his voice sharp with sarcasm. Unknotting his cravat, he tugged it off and tossed it onto the sofa. “Sorry,” he muttered after expelling a low oath. “This whole damnable mission has me feeling as if I am dancing on a razor’s edge.”
“While playing blind man’s bluff,” she added.
A ghost of a smile flitted over his lips. “With two grenades in my outstretched hands, the fuses cut short to explode at any moment.”
“Is that all?” She waggled a brow. “And here I thought you were trying to do something difficult.”
He laughed.
“Come, get some rest.”
“I will.” His gaze had already slipped down to the papers. “I’ll just be a little while longer.”
Arianna woke several hours later, her mind too restless to sleep any longer despite the bone deep fatigue of her body. A hazy gray glow had begun to lighten the horizon. Clouds hung low in the pewter skies, heavy with the promise of rain.
Stifling a yawn, she pulled on her wrapper and padded out to the parlor.
The candles had burned out and in the murky shadows, she saw that Saybrook had fallen asleep in his chair. Tiptoeing across the carpet, she stood over his chair and watched the steady rise and fall of his breathing.
“Sandro.” The word was a whisper that barely stirred the air. She pressed a palm lightly to his unshaven cheek, feeling the rough stubbling of his skin, the faint thud of his heart. Shadows, dark as charcoal, hung in half moon smudges beneath his closed eyes, and the hollows in his cheeks made his face look even leaner.
When Arianna had first met her husband, he had been thin as a cadaver and living on a diet of laudanum—a pernicious mix of liquid opium and precious little else. It was a wonder that he had survived the dangerous web of intrigue that had first drawn them together.
Actually, it’s a wonder that either of us survived.
Grentham . . .
No, she would not think of Grentham. The tangle of deceptions and betrayals was twisted enough here in Vienna. If the threads, once unknotted, eventually led back to the inner sanctum of Whitehall, they would deal with that when the time came.
Slipping the coded papers out from beneath Saybrook’s sleep-slack fingers, Arianna carried them over to the desk.
“Patterns, patterns,” she murmured to herself, feeling a bittersweet smile tug at her lips on recalling her late father’s admonitions.
See the patterns and you see the logic, poppet, he would always say. Then it’s simple to solve the problem.
Oh, what a sad disappointment she must have been for him. Here he had passed on his gift for mathematics, only to have his own flesh and blood refuse to join him in a business partnership of manipulating numbers into profits.
Resolutely setting aside such distracting thoughts, Arianna smoothed out the two coded sheets. The past could not be changed, but the future lay here under her gaze, waiting, waiting.
Waiting for a look to unlock its secrets.
She began counting the frequency of individual letters within the seemingly meaningless string of gibberish. As Saybrook had pointed out, having two examples should increase the chances of cracking the encryption.
Her pencil point tapped against the blank sheet of foolscap she had set between the two coded messages. Tap. Tap. For the next hour she worked in methodical silence, save for an occasional tap, drawing up grids and testing her hunches.
Damnation. Frowning in frustration, she sat back for a moment to rub at the crick in her neck. If only the letters were numbers, she thought. Equations seemed so much more straightforward.
“Speak to me,” she crooned, hoping to coax some stirring of inspiration from her own muzzy brain.
A tiny draft curled through the window casement and tugged at the corner of the paper she had found in the chocolate book. Arianna was about to press it back in place when another gust lifted it higher and a ray of early morning light skimmed across the page.
The wind blew again, and the paper fluttered anew, forming a soft, creamy curve that brought to mind the shape of a ship’s sail. A bizarre flight of fancy, stirred by fatigue ? Arianna wasn’t sure why the momentary image triggered a sudden thought.
She closed her eyes and pictured Rochemont’s desk. The polished pear wood . . . the fancy pens . . . the crystal inkwell . . . the single leather-bound volume prominently positioned on the leather blotter.
The Corsair. A wildly romantic poem by Lord Byron.
She had thought it odd, for Rochemont didn’t seem the type of man who read poetry. And yet, the ribbon bookmark had been set at a certain page of Canto II, and a word in one of the stanzas had been underlined with several bold slashes.
Demons.
It had stuck in her mind because it had seemed such a strange choice to highlight.
“Demons,” she murmured aloud.
At the sound, a prickling of gooseflesh raced down her arms.
No, the idea was absurd—a figment of an overwrought imagination.
But as Arianna tried to dismiss it, a niggling little voice in her head reminded her that Sandro always stressed the importance of intuition. Trusting a hunch was key to solving conundrums.
With rising excitement, she pulled out a fresh sheet of paper and quickly drew in a rough Vigenère Square. Using “Demons” as the key word, she worked through the conversions. It was a slow, tedious process, but when she was done, the result was no longer gibberish.
After checking and rechecking, Arianna was sure she hadn’t made a mistake.
Setting down her pencil, she hurried over to give his shoulder a shake.
“Sandro, wake up! I have something to show you.”
20