The Book of Air and Shadows - Michael Gruber [201]
“No,” said Mary Peg, “try Jesus.”
“This is religious advice, my dear?”
“No, the word. You said you ran the key against the complete works and come up empty?”
“Yes. Aside from some purely random runs of pseudosense.”
“But he wrote one thing that’s not in his published works. His epitaph.”
She ran to a shelf and pulled out Schoenbaum’s Shakespeare’s Lives, and there it was on the first page:
Good friend for Jesus’ sake forbear
To dig the dust enclosed here.
Blessed be the man that spares these stones
And cursed be he that moves my bones.
“On second thought,” she said, “it should be with the archaic spelling. I think it’s in Wood’s book.”
It was. Klim entered the old spelling into the Vigenère solver and it worked, giving us:
fromguystowrheadingeduesout
hseteightysevendegreeseachsyd
esheliethfourfadomsandfoot
belowcopyngeintheeastwall
“This seems plain enough. One stands upon a place called Guy’s Tower and sets Bracegirdle’s instrument so that the zero point in the center is pointing due south by the compass set in it. Then the arms are placed at eighty-seven degrees, and then I suppose one must have a man with a flag walk out, and one looks in the eyepiece until the two images of the flag join and there is your distance and direction. Then when you find this well, one lowers oneself down on a rope with a candle stuck to one’s head with hot grease and there at a depth of…what is a fadom?”
“A fathom,” said Mary Peg. “Six feet.”
“Yes,” said Klim, “so at a depth of let us say seven point six meters in the east wall of this supposed well we shall find your play. Or an empty hole. If we knew where this ‘Guys Towr’ was.”
“It has to be Warwick Castle,” she said confidently. “Bracegirdle wrote that you could see the castle from the ruins of St. Bosa.”
A moment on the Internet confirmed that there was indeed a Guy’s Tower on Warwick Castle, and on the south side too. I said, “That’ll be an interesting experience. Trying to sight off the top of a major tourist attraction while a man with a flag walks through the suburbs.”
But Klim’s fingers were already flying on the keys, and in a few minutes the screen showed a view from above the tower battlements of a castle. It appeared to have been taken from about twenty feet up.
“Very impressive,” I said. “This is a commercial satellite picture?”
“No, it is U.S. military. I have accessed it through an anonymous link but still we cannot stay on it very long.”
“How did you do that?” I asked.
“He’s a spy,” said Mary Peg with something like pride.
“I am a retired Polish spy, perfectly harmless. But I retain some knowledge of this sort of thing. America has the worst security of any nation, it is well known in those circles, a kind of joke in fact. Now we shall use some tools to drop a smart bomb on Mr. Shakespeare’s play.” More clicking and a red grid appeared over the picture and a palette of drawing tools sprang up along one edge of the screen. He said to Mary Peg, “My dear, if you could just measure that device?”
“Three feet exactly,” she replied after some manipulation of a tape measure.
“So…let us see, ninety-one point forty-four centimeters, which we center on the north-south diameter of this tower…so…and we then draw a line from either end at eighty-seven degrees from that base and we generate two lines which intersect…so. As you say, X marks the spot. We need not go up on the tower and bother the tourists. Thank you, United States Air