“Here.” Tommy ducked behind a sofa.
Philippa joined her at a gap between the bookshelves.
Together, they managed to tug the iron strongbox free from its snug hollow. Tommy fit the key into the lock. Nothing happened. Philippa wrung her hands to stop them from trembling. If they had come all this way, only for it to be the wrong box or the wrong key—
Tommy wiggled the key again, more forcefully this time, and the lock sprang open.
Philippa sagged with relief. Of course it was the right box, and of course Tommy would be able to open it. Tommy probably could have picked the lock with a quill from a porcupine if it had come to that. Knowing Jacob, releasing porcupines down the chimney had probably been the contingency plan. Luckily, the key had worked. Philippa leaned forward.
Tommy lifted the lid to the strongbox. Because the volume was too wide to lay properly on the bottom, the priceless illuminated manuscript was stuffed inside at a diagonal. Its gilt spine was shoved against one corner and the painstakingly illustrated pages were curled and bent.
“Thatnodcock.” Philippa reached for the poor, abused manuscript. She ran a gloved finger lightly along the edge that had borne the weight against the side of the iron box and did her best to straighten the bent sections. “If one does not know how to treat books with care, one should not have them.”
Tommy nodded gravely. “This is why I don’t own any books.”
Philippa shook her head. “You would take care of something that mattered to you.”
Tommy snorted. “Have you seen my map collection? Graham swears he spends half of his time piling them back on the shelf whenever there’s a strong breeze from the open windows. Is the manuscript as you hoped?”
Philippa set the volume on the shelf with the glass tumblers in order to examine the markings along the edge. She pulled Marjorie’s reproductions of the other manuscripts’ edge illustrations from her reticule and held the copies of volumes two through four next to Northrup’s volume one.
“It isexactlyas I hoped,” she replied with satisfaction. “I won’t have to destroy perfect bindings in search of hidden letters after all. We have everything we need to share Agnes and Katherine’s talent with the world.”
Tommy held up loose papers from the bottom of the strongbox. “Do you recognize these?”
“They look like instructions for the cipher.” Philippa frowned. “Damaris exhorted us to toss the directions into the fire once we’d memorized the trick.”
“Some don’t seem like Damaris’s handwriting.” Tommy handed her the papers.
Philippa flipped through them. “You’re right. The instructions are incomplete. This one skips a line. And that one is even worse. They must belong to Captain Northrup.”
Damaris’s uncle must not have paid close attention when he’d copied his niece’s ideas in order to present them as his own.
Her foot bounced with excitement. “We canprovehe didn’t invent a thing.”
She shot to her feet to glance wildly about the library.
Tommy leapt to her feet as well. “What are we looking for?”
“Paper,” said Philippa. “A desk, an escritoire, a writing slope, quill and ink,anything.”
There was nothing of the sort.
This was truly the worst library Philippa had ever seen.
Tommy pulled a pencil out of Great-Aunt Wynchester’s white wig and handed Philippa the paper with the map. “Can you use the back of that?”
Philippa moved wine and sherry bottles to create a writing surface. She paused every few characters to consult various pages of the manuscript as she filled out a careful grid.
Tommy peered over her shoulder. “What in the world is that?”
“A simple substitution cipher,” Philippa answered. “Made exponentially more complex by writing the letters in a diagonal. Unless you know the pattern as well as the sequence of characters used as punctuation, it’s all but impossible to decipher.”
33
Philippa tucked the code inside the illuminated manuscript and rose to her feet. Her chest swelled with satisfaction. “Today, justice will be served. Damaris, Agnes, and Katherine are brilliant women who will finally receive the credit they deserve for their indispensable contributions.”
“Not today,” Tommy said. “Tomorrow morning. Graham has associates inside printing offices in every corner of England. You and Damaris can draft the perfect exposé, which will be at the top of every newspaper in the morning.”
