Dragonfly in Amber - Diana Gabaldon [136]
“Surely you could still have composed music, if you’d married?” I asked curiously.
Mother Hildegarde spread her hands, grotesque in the lamplight. I had seen those hands wrench loose a dagger embedded in bone, guide a displaced joint back into alignment, cup the blood-smeared head of a child emerging from between its mother’s thighs. And I had seen those fingers linger on the ebony keys with the delicacy of moths’ feet.
“Well,” she said, after a moment’s contemplation, “it is the fault of St. Anselm.”
“It is?”
She grinned at my expression, her ugly face quite transformed from its stern public facade.
“Oh, yes. My godfather—the Old Sun King,” she added casually, “gave to me a book of the Lives of the Saints for my own Saint’s Day when I was eight. It was a beautiful book,” she said reminiscently, “with gilded pages and a jeweled cover; intended more as a work of art than a work of literature. Still, I read it. And while I enjoyed all of the stories—particularly those of the martyrs—still there was one phrase in the story of St. Anselm that seemed to strike a response in my soul.”
She closed her eyes and tilted back her head, recalling.
“St. Anselm was a man of great wisdom and great learning, a Doctor of the Church. But also a bishop, a man who cared for the people of his flock, and looked after their temporal needs as well as those of the spirit. The story detailed all of his works, and then concluded in these words—‘And so he died, at the conclusion of an eminently useful life, and thus obtained his crown in Paradise.’ ” She paused, flexing her hands lightly on her knees.
“There was something about that that appealed most strongly to me. ‘An eminently useful life.’ ” She smiled at me. “I could think of many worse epitaphs than that, milady.” She spread her hands suddenly and shrugged, an oddly graceful gesture.
“I wished to be useful,” she said. Then, dismissing idle conversation, she turned abruptly back to the music on the rack.
“So,” she said. “Plainly the change in the key signatures— the note tonique—that is the oddity. Where can we go with that?”
My mouth dropped open with a small exclamation. Speaking in French as we had been, I hadn’t noticed before. But observing Mother Hildegarde as she told her story, I had been thinking in English, and when I glanced back at the music it hit me.
“What is it?” the nun asked. “You have thought of something?”
“The key!” I said, half-laughing. “In French, a musical key is the note tonique, but the word for an object that unlocks…” I pointed to the large bunch of keys—normally carried on her girdle—that Mother Hildegarde had laid aside on the bookshelf when we came in. “That is a passe-partout, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” she said, watching me in puzzlement. She touched the skeleton key in turn. “Une passe-partout. That one,” she said, pointing to a key with barrel and wards, “is more likely called a clef.”
“A clef!” I exclaimed joyously. “Perfect!” I stabbed a finger at the sheet of music before us. “See, ma mère, in English, the words are the same. A ‘key’ gives the basis of a piece of music, and a ‘key’ unlocks. In French, the clef is a key, and in English, the ‘clef’ is also part of the musical signature. And the key of the music is also the key to the cipher. Jamie said he thought it was an English cipher! Made by an Englishman with a really diabolical sense of humor, too,” I added.
With that small insight, the cipher proved not too difficult to unravel. If the maker was English, the ciphered message likely was in English, too, which meant that the German words were provided only as a source of letters. And having seen Jamie’s earlier efforts with alphabets and shifting letters, it took only a few tries to determine the pattern of the cipher.
“Two flats means you must take every second letter, starting from the beginning of the section,” I said, frantically scribbling down the results. “And three sharps means to take every third letter, beginning at