The Scottish Prisoner - Diana Gabaldon [6]
“For what the observation is worth,” Grey said, gingerly picking up the hot sheet, “I don’t see why Carruthers would trouble himself with encoding this particular document. Given the rest of it, I mean.”
Hal compressed his lips but nodded. “The rest of it” included specific denunciations of a number of men—some of them powerful—who had been involved in Siverly’s defalcations. If Carruthers trusted Grey to handle such incendiary stuff, what might he have balked at?
“Besides, Charlie knew he was dying,” Grey said more quietly. He laid the sheet on top of the others and again began to tidy them into a square. “He left this packet addressed to me. He expected me to use it. Why would he have tried to conceal some part of the information from me?”
Hal shrugged, acknowledging the argument.
“Then why is it here? Included by mistake?” Even as he suggested this, he was shaking his head. The packet itself had been meticulously assembled, with documents in chronological order. Some of the papers were Carruthers’s own testimony; some were statements signed by other witnesses; some were original army documents—or perhaps copies made by a clerk. It was impossible to tell, unless the original had borne a stamp. The whole bundle spoke of care, precision—and the passion that had driven Carruthers past his own weakness in order to accomplish Siverly’s destruction.
“It is Carruthers’s hand?” Unable to let a puzzle alone, Hal reached out and took the sheet of gibberish from the top of the stack.
“Yes,” Grey said, though that much was obvious. Carruthers wrote a clear, slanted hand, with oddly curled tails on the descending letters. He came to look over Hal’s shoulder, trying to see if the paper provided any clue they could have missed.
“It’s laid out like verse,” he observed, and, with the observation, something fluttered uneasily at the back of his mind. But what? He tried to catch a glimpse of it, but the thought skittered away like a spider under a stone.
“Yes.” Hal drew a finger down the page, slowly. “But look at how these words are repeated. I think it might be a cipher, after all—if that were the case, you might be picking a different set of letters out of each line, even though the lines look much the same in themselves.” He straightened up, shaking his head. “I don’t know. It could be a cipher that Carruthers stumbled onto in Siverly’s papers but to which he hadn’t the key—and so he merely copied it and passed it on in hopes that you might discover the key yourself.”
“That makes some sense.” John rocked back on his heels, narrowing his eyes at his brother. “How do you come to know so much about ciphers and secret writings?”
Hal hesitated, but then smiled. Hal smiled rarely, but it transformed his face when he did.
“Minnie,” he said.
“What?” Grey said, uncomprehending. His sister-in-law was a kind, pretty woman, who managed his difficult brother with great aplomb, but what—
“My secret weapon,” Hal admitted, still smiling at whatever thought amused him. “Her father was Raphael Wattiswade.”
“I’ve never heard of Raphael Wattiswade.”
“You weren’t meant to,” his brother assured him, “and neither was anyone else. Wattiswade was a dealer in rare books—traveled to and from the Continent regularly, under the name Andrew Rennie. He was also a dealer in intelligence. A spymaster … who had no sons.”
Grey looked at his brother for a moment.
“Tell me,” he begged, “that her father did not employ Minnie as a spy.”
“He did, the scrofulous old bugger,” Hal replied briefly. “I caught her in my study one night during a party, magicking the locked drawer of my desk. That’s how I met her.”
Grey didn’t bother asking what had been in the drawer. He smiled himself and picked up the decanter of sherry from the tea tray, unstoppering it.
“I gather you did not immediately have her arrested and taken before a magistrate?”
Hal took a sherry glass and held it out.
“No. I had her on the hearth rug.”
The decanter slipped from Grey’s fingers, and he caught it again by pure luck, splashing only a little.
“Did you, indeed?