Page 35 of The Duke's Wicked Widow
Blackrose claimed to be working in Britain’s interests, but he was using the information to line his pockets and dispose of rivals. When his agents became suspicious, he started eliminating them. His primary method was to plant evidence that one had turned traitor, and send another agent to assassinate him.
This was how Ellie’s brother-in-law, Demon Hayle, now Duke of Lickwick, had been so badly scarred. His best friend—Rourke Lindsay, now Duke of Exingham—had been assigned to kill him.
“—and murder, and kidnappings, and, and, androbberies, and all sorts of bad things—”
Rourke had failed in his attempts to kill Demon, and had been badly wounded. His now-wife, Sophia—another of Blackrose’s agents—had been the one to reveal the truth to the ex-agents.
Now Rourke and Demon and Thorne—the third of their trio—along with another agent and Olivia andoh, who knew how many others, had spent over a year trying to lure Blackrose back to England.
“Ellie?”
And now, with Father’s death, Uncle William would inherit Bonkinbone and wouldhaveto return to claim it.
On her lap, Merida was holding the scrap paper, turning it this way and that, as if trying to make sense of the letters. “If the man who was getting these messages is evil, then the messages are evil too, right?”
Sighing, Ellie shrugged. “I do not know. I assume it had something to do with their evil business, but until I can crack this code there is no way of knowing.”
“Are you going to crack it?” Merida squirmed around in excitement, facing Ellie. “I know you can.”
The woman smiled sadly. “I would like to—it would certainly help.” Plus, it gave her something to think about, other than Fawkes, which was the topic her mind seemed intent on focusing on these days. “But so far, I have had no luck.”
“Well,” announced Merida with all the certainty of a six-year-old who’d been told she’s smart, “if the messages are evil, then the men wouldn’t want anyone else to read them, right?”
“Yes, that is logical.”
The girl plopped the paper on the desk and smoothed it out. “So that means it’s going to be hard. Hard for other people, I mean. What have you tried?”
Pleased to have something to distract her, Ellie picked up her pencil and began to write as she spoke. “You see how there are no numbers in the message, and it has been separated into chunks of letters? That is helpful, because it tells us this is a substitution cipher. That means, in its simplest form, one letter is substituted for another letter. For a while I thought it might be a fencepost cipher, which means the letters in the original message are jumbled up, then smooshed together and divided into arbitrary—that means random—lengths to make them look like new words.”
“But it’s not that?” Merida asked with a frown, clearly trying to follow along.
“I spent time trying to find ways to rearrange each of the messages, but was unsuccessful. That is what makes me believe it is a substitution cipher, though not a simple one.”
“What’s a simple one look like?”
The pencil raced across the paper, sketching out the alphabet. “The simplest is just reversing the alphabet, or moving it over a few spaces. In the first case, A would become Z, B would become Y, C would become X,et cetera.”
“I don’t know whateggs extrameans, Ellie.”
Smiling, Ellie placed a kiss on the little girl’s temple. “It just meansand so on. But that is the simplest substitution. Here, you crack this code for me.”
She jotted down the lettersROLEVBMF, then handed her stepdaughter the pencil.
Merida bent forward, trying to match the letters to the key Ellie had drawn. A smile tugged at her cheeks when she realized the girl chewed on her lip while deep in thought.
Just like Ellie.
“Got it!” Merida declared, underlining the answer. “ILOVEYOU.I love you!”
“You did it!” Ellie gave her a one-armed squeeze. “I thought I would make it trickier by not putting in spaces, but you figured it out.”
“I’m smart.”
“Youare. Did you notice any patterns?”
The little girl frowned at the paper. “Um…ObecameLandLbecameO…”
“Right, and the same with E and V. That is interesting, is it not? It happens because all we did was reverse the alphabet. It would become a bit harder if we shifted the bottom answer keyoverby one or more, instead of just reversing it.”
