The Rossetti Letter (v5) (31 page)

“E
VEN THOUGH THIS
,’ word,
is harder to read”—Francesca indicated the smudged Arabic word on the first letter—“the meaning is clearer. An
araba
is a wagon.”

“A wagon?” asked Claire.

“An ancient wagon, a type that’s been around since biblical times.”

“What was it used for? Goats or livestock or something?”

“No, for transportation. It’s a small wagon, pulled by donkeys. People stand up in it. It looks much like a chariot.”

Claire exchanged a glance with Andrew, who looked as perplexed as she felt.

Francesca picked up Alessandra’s second letter, dated March 5. “This one,
is a little more difficult to translate. It means someone who is alone…who is a loner. It also has a secondary meaning, which seems odd—someone who eats nothing but honey.”

“Like John the Baptist,” Andrew said.

“Yes, perhaps that’s what it means—a wise man, a philosopher, or a kind of saint or sage, but most important, someone who lives outside of society.” Francesca smiled apologetically. “That doesn’t help much, does it? If you like, I can call the professor I studied with and ask her if she could look at this for you. She might be able to tell you more, but I don’t know how soon she could do it, perhaps not until next week.”

Andrew looked askance at Claire. This was your idea, he seemed to be saying, it’s your decision.

“No, it’s not necessary,” Claire said to Francesca. “We thought…well, I’m not sure what we thought, but I don’t believe another translation would make a difference.”

They took the letters back to their table and sat down, silent and thoughtful. Claire was disappointed, even though she couldn’t say for certain what she’d been hoping for. She felt a peevish frustration; the morning had started out so optimistically, but all their work had been a waste of time. Worse than a waste of time, actually; translating Alessandra’s letters had only helped to make the hypothesis her dissertation was based on look rather flimsy. She wished she hadn’t asked Andrew Kent to help her.

“You didn’t really believe it was going to be some sort of code breaker, did you?” he asked.

How could he read her so easily? “I know it’s far-fetched, but Venetians were known for the ingenious methods they used to encrypt their correspondence. And not just official government correspondence. Merchants used codes in their business letters, too, to protect their trade secrets and their financial transactions. Alessandra’s father was a merchant. If she learned Arabic from him, she might have learned some encryption techniques as well.”

“Yes, except that Alessandra’s letters are not encrypted. If they were written in code, it would be obvious—it would all be gibberish.”

“Encryption wasn’t the only way to pass secret messages. The late sixteenth and the early seventeenth centuries were a time of intense intelligence gathering: Walsingham in England, Cardinal Richelieu in France, the Council of Ten here in Venice. A wide variety of methods were employed, and the spies—who often served as diplomats—were always looking for new ways to keep their secrets secure en route. And consider this: if Alessandra sent out a letter written in code, it would be obvious to anyone who intercepted it that it contained a secret message. Even if it couldn’t be deciphered, it would still arouse suspicion, wouldn’t it? Perhaps that was too risky. Perhaps she had to make them seem like normal letters.”

“I think we’ve just officially gone through the looking glass of historical research. By your account, nothing is what it seems: the diaries are an elaborate hoax, and the letters contain what—invisible ink between the lines? Tell me, if we read the Rossetti Letter backward, will it say, ‘Paul is dead’?”

“Now you’re just being absurd.”

“I’m being absurd?” Andrew picked up the letter dated March 1. “I don’t know very much about ciphers, but I just don’t see how this could be some sort of secret message—unless it was a huge anagram, which would have been enormously difficult to create.”

“There were much simpler methods than that. For instance, some people used a template, which was essentially a piece of paper with holes cut out of it. When you placed the template over the letter, the words that showed through the holes comprised the secret message.”

“So both the sender and the receiver had an identical template.”

“Yes.”

“And without it, it’s not possible to decipher the letter.”

“Not reliably. I admit I was hoping the Arabic word would be some sort of instruction.”

“Like, read only the words beginning with
q
?”

“Something like that, I guess.”

“But why put the key right in the letter?”

“Venice was a cosmopolitan city, but there couldn’t have been that many people between here and Padua who read Arabic. Maybe she felt using a foreign language was disguise enough. But if it really is a key, then I suspect that this word, ‘wagon’—and whatever the other word is—may have meant something only to the two of them. It could refer to something else that is actually the key.”

“In which case, there’s no way for us to uncover any code contained herein.”

“No.”

Andrew rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “I just remembered something…do you know the story about Sir John Trevelyan?”

Claire shook her head. “No.”

“He was a royalist who was held prisoner in Colchester Castle after being sentenced to death by Oliver Cromwell. While he was there, he received a letter with a hidden message that told him how to escape. I think the method used was every third letter after a punctuation mark—when he put them all together it spelled out ‘panel at east end of chapel slides.’ He requested an hour of solitary meditation prior to his execution, and obviously used his arcane information wisely, as he made a successful escape and lived to tell the tale.”

“I thought you didn’t know much about codes.”

“I don’t, but I’ve always remembered that anecdote because it’s one of the few instances in which we can say with certainty that prayer saved a man’s life.” He paused. “It’s still a bit of a mystery, though. To this day, no one knows who sent Trevelyan the letter, or knows how he knew the encryption method.”

“It sounds as if he knew the method in advance of receiving the letter, which may well be the case here.” She looked at Alessandra’s two letters and sighed. “Without the correct key, there’s really no way to decipher them. We could try it a dozen different ways—the third letter following punctuation, the fourth letter following—and come up with a dozen different results. But we could never be sure if any of them were right.”

“Or even intended, in the first place.”

“Have you been humoring me?”

“No, I was honestly curious, and I like puzzles. It would have been exciting if we’d found something, wouldn’t it? And it was a lot more interesting than reading her diaries.” He glanced at his watch. “Good lord, it’s after four already. What do you say to an extremely late lunch?”

“It really wasn’t a bad idea,” said Andrew as they stood at the bar of a tiny corner café a few blocks from the Piazza.

“What wasn’t a bad idea?” Claire scanned the gleaming bottles of liqueurs and spirits along the back wall of the old-fashioned bar and wondered if she should try a shot of something with her ham and cheese
panino.
It might take some of the sting from her disappointment.

“Reading the letters.”

“I don’t know how you can say that. It didn’t produce anything worthwhile, and we wasted a whole day.”

“You had a hunch—a good one, I think—and you followed through on it. As for not producing anything—that’s the way it happens, more often than not. I didn’t think it was such a bad way to spend the day. I got to avoid working on my lecture.”

“You mean you don’t know what you’re going to say tomorrow?”

“Not entirely, no. Like you, I had a hunch—that the Rossetti Letter wasn’t exactly what it appeared to be—but I haven’t found enough evidence to support it.”

“What will you do?”

“Talk about what I know for sure, and hope that the Q and A will be brief.” Andrew stopped to pull a ringing cell phone from his coat pocket. “Yes? Oh, hello,” he said, with some surprise. “I’m sorry, I forgot to call you earlier. Did you have a good day at the conference?”

Gabriella, Claire guessed. She felt uncomfortable eavesdropping, so finished her cappuccino and wandered across the small lane to look in the window of the shop directly across.

“No, I spent the day in the Marciana…” His voice drifted faintly across the lane. “I’m going to work on it now. I’m afraid I won’t be able to join you right away…perhaps later…”

Claire wondered how Gabriella would react to being stood up for the evening. Probably not well. Judging from the apologetic tone of Andrew’s voice, not well at all. She peered through the shop window at a jumbled array of Venetian arts and crafts and New Age paraphernalia: carnival masks, string puppets, and perfume bottles from Murano were mixed with winged cherubs, Buddha statues, Asian gongs, and Tibetan prayer wheels. Meredith would like one of those perfume bottles, she thought, slipping through the curtain of beads that covered the doorway, and into the shop’s patchouli-scented and slightly mystical atmosphere.

As Claire’s eyes adjusted to the dimly lit interior, she scanned the small, one-room boutique for a display of perfume bottles, but her attention was caught instead by two colorful posters hanging on the back wall. At first, she was engaged by the medieval-style art; not until she walked closer did she realize that she was looking at reproductions of the sun and the moon cards from a tarot deck. Next to the two posters was a bookshelf filled with tarot decks of various design, and next to that, a third poster, which depicted, in smaller size, each of the twenty-two major arcana cards from the same medieval-style deck.

Of course.
A smile spread across Claire’s face as she turned and ran outside.

“Where’d you disappear to?” Andrew asked.

“Come with me.” Claire beckoned, and Andrew followed her into the store.

“What’s going on?” he asked.

“There.” She led him over to the tarot posters, and pointed at the third one, with the twenty-two cards pictured on it. “It’s from the tarot. Look at this.” She pointed to a card in the second row from the top.

“‘Il Carro,’”
he read. “The Chariot.”

“And this one,” she said, pointing again, “the Hermit. Doesn’t that fit Francesca’s translation of
baran
?”

“Yes, I see, but how does knowing what the word refers to make any difference?”

“The cards are
numbered
.” Claire pointed to the bottom of the two cards, where the numbers seven and nine figured prominently, then took a deck from the shelf and put it on the counter in front of the cashier.

Andrew understood her intention. “The library closes in twenty minutes.”

“Then we’d better hurry.”

“H
OW DO YOU
want to begin?” Andrew asked. “Every seventh letter, or every seventh letter after a punctuation mark?”

They sat next to each other, Alessandra’s two letters to her cousin and the tarot deck between them, the green glass lamps at each end of the table softly gleaming. Francesca worked quietly behind the counter, alone in the only other circle of illumination in the darkening room, her face aglow with the aquatic light emanating from her computer monitor. It hadn’t been easy to persuade her to bend the rules to keep the library open for them, but in the end she had, somewhat reluctantly, agreed to give up a few hours of her Friday evening in support of their quest.

“Why don’t we start with words instead?” Claire suggested. “Say, the seventh word in each line?”

“Not all of the lines have seven words.”

“Just the ones that do, then.”

He quickly wrote down the translation:
delay bounds and not wanting it time or for myself.

“Even if the words were moved around, it doesn’t seem like it would make much of a message, does it?” he asked.

“No,” Claire had to agree. “What about every seventh word from the beginning?”

Again, it took only a few minutes for Andrew to translate:
such delight bounds between moments travail only garden not best for pear and climbing.

Claire’s heart sank. She’d felt so excited, so certain that the tarot cards held the key to the code. “Are you sure that’s right?”

Andrew sensed her chagrin and looked at her sympathetically. “Yes, I’m sure. It’s not newsworthy, but it is kind of poetic, isn’t it?”

“Like a badly written fortune cookie.”

“We can still try individual letters,” he proposed.

Claire studied the document.
Talk to me, Alessandra.
“Try every seventh word without the salutation. Start here, at ‘My apologies.’”

Andrew put pen to paper once more. When he was done, he sat back in his chair, his hand raking through his hair in a gesture of amazement.

“Oh my god,” Claire whispered as she read what he’d written:
delay your journey Venice not safe your sanctuary may be needed: Nico, Bianca, myself.

Claire turned to him. “Are you sure that’s right?”

“Are you going to ask me that often? Because if you are, you could do this by yourself, you know.”

“I just want to be certain.”

“That’s every seventh word.”

“But could it be some sort of fluke? A coincidence?”

“Let’s look at the other letter.”

Claire scrutinized the tarot cards spread on the table. “The Hermit is the ninth card.”

“Nine it is, then.”

She watched over his shoulder as he wrote.

Meet…

Marghera…four…

With each new word, she felt her excitement increase; when the message was finally written out in its entirety, they looked at each other, stunned and perplexed.

Meet us at Marghera night of March sixth transport for four no allegiance to a cause only to a

“Only to a
what
?” Claire asked. She pulled the letter closer. “Where’s the last word?”

“It’s not there. Look,” he said, pointing to the last line. “‘
But I am not the
only
recipient of your gracious generosity—is it possible
to
count them all? Until next we meet again,
a
kiss to you—Alessandra.
’ There are only four words after it, not nine.”

“It doesn’t make any sense. Are you absolutely
sure
—”

Andrew shut her up with a look. “Maybe the last line doesn’t make sense, but the rest does. I should have realized before that the bit she wrote about ‘summer in Marghera’ was odd. No one ever spent more time in Marghera than was absolutely necessary; it wasn’t a retreat like Burano. Marghera was just a dreadful little
terraferma
village where people hired boats to row them over to Venice. It was one of the main points of departure from the mainland, and the main point of entry, especially if one were going to Padua.”

“And March sixth—that can’t be a coincidence.”

“Yes, the same date as the Rossetti Letter.”

“Which does make sense. She drops the letter in the
bocca di leone,
then leaves town right away, because she knows as soon as the council reads it—”

“All hell will break loose.”

“And she’ll be in danger from Bedmar and his cronies. This is amazing. With these two letters, I’m sure I can prove that there really was a Spanish conspiracy, and that Alessandra was the one to expose it!” Claire’s exultation came to an end as soon as she saw the expression on Andrew’s face; it was rather as if someone had pulled a chair out from under him just as he was sitting down. Suddenly she didn’t feel like gloating. “I’m sorry, I wasn’t thinking.”

“You have nothing to be sorry about,” he said evenly. “One of us was going to be right, and the other was going to be wrong. Honestly, I’ve suspected for some time now that I was heading toward a dead end.”

“Do you think Alessandra went to Padua?”

“This seems to indicate that, but we can’t be sure this letter was received, or even sent. It doesn’t have any postal markings, as do the others.”

“And why transport for four?” Claire asked. “In the earlier letter, she mentions sanctuary for herself, Nico, and Bianca. Do you have any idea who the fourth would be?”

“No. I was wondering about that, too.”

They traipsed over to the counter to retrieve their other materials. They looked in vain for Arabic words on the other letters, then Andrew cracked open Alessandra’s second diary. “The last entry’s dated March second,” he confirmed. “So it’s possible that she left town on the sixth.”

“Or someone killed her.”

“So now you’re certain she was murdered?”

“Hoddy insisted that he read something in Fazzini about a courtesan being murdered around the time of the Spanish Conspiracy. It could have been Alessandra.” Claire opened up Alessandra’s earlier diary, hoping that at least some of it had been encrypted like the letters, then quickly snapped it shut, suppressing a strong desire to scream. She turned from Andrew and slowly opened the book just a little, as if she might see something different from what she’d seen the first time. No, it was no different.

Claire stood up and, carrying the diary, walked a few paces toward the librarian’s counter, then peered hard at the shelves on the wall behind it. The place where her books and documents had been held was completely empty; so was Andrew’s. She looked back to the table: no, there was nothing on it that looked like the diary she held in her hand. She walked over to the wall of windows where there was more light and opened the diary again.

Instead of Alessandra’s spidery script, Gwen’s round, girlish handwriting met her eye.
…I saw T. today after algebra, he said hi hope everything’s cool with you. He was wearing that blue shirt…Horton gave us so much homework today…T. sat at my table at lunch he was with his friend Danny…T. is the cutest boy I’ve ever…

She snapped the diary shut again and turned around. How in the world had Gwen’s diary ended up in place of Alessandra’s? Claire thought back to the day before, when Gwen had switched Alessandra’s two diaries for the second time, as Andrew was leaving the library. After Gwen had returned the diary they’d taken from him, she’d slipped Alessandra’s first diary into her backpack. Claire hadn’t asked for it until they were leaving, then she’d added it to her stack of books and given it back to Francesca. Gwen must have had this, her own diary, in her backpack, also—and had mistakenly handed it to Claire. Gwen’s and Alessandra’s diaries were just close enough in appearance that no one had noticed the mix-up. Unfortunately, this meant that Alessandra’s first diary was still in Gwen’s backpack.

It was an exceptionally bad place for a four-hundred-year-old book owned by the Italian Republic. Claire imagined it crammed in among the chocolate candy and the sticky tubes of hair gel and lip gloss; it would probably sustain more damage during its few hours in Gwen’s backpack than in the previous three hundred years of its existence. The only thing worse would be if she had somehow lost it. And who was going to believe that they’d taken it out of the Marciana by accident? What had Andrew said—steep fines and a lengthy imprisonment?

Claire found herself back at the table, standing over Andrew, Gwen’s diary gripped tightly in her hands.

He looked up. “Haven’t found anything new so far,” he said. “No Arabic words, anyway. Anything interesting in that one?”

“Just the same old boring stuff,” Claire said with a little laugh, which sounded unnaturally shrill to her ears. She hid the diary behind her back. Andrew looked at her strangely. “May I borrow your phone? Need to call Gwen,” she explained.

“Haven’t you called her three times today already?”

“I told her I would check in again.”

He gave her his cell phone and she backed away from the table. “Don’t want to disturb,” she added, turned and sprinted to the library door, then went out into the hall.

Claire felt somewhat calmer once Gwen had confirmed that Alessandra’s diary was where she had thought it was, but she hadn’t expected Gwen to be so opposed to the plan she suggested.

“But it’s my diary! I don’t see why you have to leave it there.”

“Because if I don’t, someone might notice that Alessandra’s diary is missing. Not a word to Stefania about this, okay? It’s only for one night. We’ll bring Alessandra’s diary back first thing in the morning and switch them.”

“I don’t want anyone to read my diary.”

“No one’s going to read it, not even me.”

“’Cause it’s personal,” Gwen went on. “Personal and private.”

“Yes, I understand.” She didn’t add that she couldn’t be less interested; no doubt the whole diary was filled with stories of her beloved “T.” T for Tyler, of course.
T for Tyler.

“Gwen, I have to go,” Claire said. “I’ll be over there to pick you up in an hour or two, okay?”

“But, Claire…” Gwen stopped, and Claire heard Stefania’s voice in the background. “Stefania says that Giancarlo called. He left a message for you at the hotel.”

“I’ll call him,” Claire said distractedly. “See you soon.”

T for Tyler.
Claire felt strangely lightheaded with the beginning of an idea so shattering it hadn’t quite formed into words yet.
No allegiance to a cause, only to a…
If she was right, it would change everything, her own theories and Andrew Kent’s. Earlier accounts of the Spanish Conspiracy would be turned upside down, around, and be regarded in an entirely new light.
No allegiance to a cause only to a…
If she was right—and she had a sudden certainty that she had never been more right about anything…

She rushed back to the table where Andrew was still working and picked up Alessandra’s letter of March 5. She read it through once, quickly, but that was all she needed.

“It’s not ‘a’ cause,” she said.

Andrew looked up from the manuscript he was reading. “What?”

“The Italian word for ‘a’ is
‘un.’
What if this isn’t meant to be read as a word, but as initials? ‘No allegiance to UN’s cause, only to UN.’”

“U N…” Andrew mused. She could almost see the gears turning. The light of comprehension was just beginning to dawn in his eyes when she spoke.

“Utrillo-Navarre.” Claire took the chair next to him, and they looked at each other steadily, as the implications of what she had said settled over them.

“Alessandra knew Antonio Perez,” Claire said quietly. She looked at the letter once more.
Allegiance only to un.
“Not only did she know him, she was in love with him.”