Several gentlemen at the table made a show of reaching for the letter, peering at it with exaggerated scholarly frowns before dissolving into fresh laughter and passing it along like a party favor. A young viscount pretended to translate it as a recipe for pudding, to general hilarity.
The letter made its way around the table, mocked and dismissed by half a dozen people who had clearly never troubled to learn anything more difficult than the steps of a quadrille, until it came to rest, quite by accident, near the edge of the table closest to the shadowed window seat where Eleanor sat with her book of Latin verse.
Alexander's eyes, scanning the room for his next victim of amusement, landed on her.
"And what of you, Miss Marsh?" he said, and there was an edge to it now—cruelty dressed up as jest, the particular meanness of a man taking out his own humiliation on the person least likely to be able to answer for it. "You are always tucked away with your books. Perhaps a companion's education stretches further than a duke's solicitors. Have a go. Why not? It would make for an excellent story at breakfast tomorrow, whichever way it falls out."
The laughter that followed was worse than the earlier laughter because it had teeth in it. Eleanor felt the heat rise in her face—the old, familiar sting of being made small in front of a room, a sensation she had spent three years teaching herself to absorb without flinching, the way a stone absorbs rain.
She closed her book of Latin verse with slow, deliberate care, marking her place with a ribbon, and looked at the Duke of Blackwood with an expression that gave away nothing at all of what she felt.
"May I see it, Your Grace?"
The room, which had expected her to shrink, or blush, or beg off with some mumbled excuse, went very quiet indeed. Alexander, who had clearly expected the same, blinked at her for a moment before recovering his composure enough to slide the letter across the table with a mocking little flourish.
"By all means, Miss Marsh. A thousand pounds awaits if your Latin verse has taught you anything useful at all."
Eleanor rose from the window seat and crossed to the table. She did not sit. She stood in the candlelight, unfolded the letter with careful fingers, and studied it in silence, while every eye in the room fixed on her plain, unremarkable face—waiting, Eleanor understood perfectly well, for her to fail so that the evening's entertainment could be complete.
The letter was a single sheet, densely covered in a cramped, looping hand, entirely without recognizable words—a scattering of numbers interspersed among the letters in a pattern that would have looked to most eyes like the ravings of a man losing his wits.
To Eleanor, it looked like something else entirely. It looked like coming home.
Her father, Professor Josiah Marsh, had spent the better part of his life as a fellow of a small, unfashionable Cambridge college, teaching classical languages to young men who mostly did not want to learn them, and privately in the evenings indulging a passion for cryptography that had begun, as he told it, when he was a boy of ten discovering a book on ancient Roman cipher systems in his own father's library. He had taught Eleanor everything he knew, not because he expected it to be of any practical use to a daughter he could not afford to dower, but because it was the only inheritance he had to give her. And he had given it freely on winter evenings by a thin fire, working through substitution ciphers and transposition grids as other fathers might teach their daughters embroidery.
Eleanor recognized the pattern in the Duke's letter within the first thirty seconds of studying it. It was a Vigenère cipher built on a repeating keyword—the same elegant sixteenth-century system her father had taught her to break before she was fourteen years old using a technique of frequency analysis he had drilled into her with the patient, exacting rigor of a man who believed his daughter's mind deserved every bit as much cultivation as any son's.
She could still see him some evenings, more clearly than she cared to admit, sitting across the small deal table in their rented rooms above the chandler's shop on Trumpington Street, his spectacles pushed up into his thinning hair, a single tallow candle burning low between them, while he explained again and again with inexhaustible patience why a letter that appeared eleven times in a hundred words of English prose was very probably an E, and why a cipher that hid its keyword cleverly enough could withstand a century of careless eyes and yield in the end only to someone patient enough to count.
He had never once told her the lessons were useless for a girl with no fortune and no prospects. He had only ever told her that a mind well-trained was the one inheritance no creditor could seize. And she had believed him absolutely, right up until the fever took him in a single terrible fortnight and left her with nothing but his books, his debts, and the truth of exactly how little his belief had been worth to the rest of the world.
"It will take me perhaps an hour, Your Grace," Eleanor said without looking up from the page, "possibly less if the keyword is not overly long. May I have paper, and a quiet corner, and something to write with?"
The laughter in the room had entirely died away. Alexander stared at her, his brandy-flushed face gone suddenly, oddly pale. "You can read it?"
"I can attempt it, Eleanor said. Whether I succeed depends on your father's ingenuity, not mine. But I recognize the cipher, Your Grace, and that is considerably more than nothing."