15. In Which a Cipher of the Heart is Broken

Grace washed and dressed in time for breakfast. She tried to imagine chatting with Luke now. It felt impossible. Still, somehow polite convention tended to kick in and pull one through.

So she would go to the breakfast room. She would eat enough to ensure she would not mortify herself by swooning in front of the majority of England’s aristocracy. She would respond when spoken to. She would smile at Luke.

At the last moment, she lost her bravery. She approached the door to the room, the Oxford scientists munching toast, excited for the opening, chatting with Aunt Amelia, and, right there, washed, fresh shaven, smartly dressed, hair beginning to curl in rebellion against the neat combing he’d subjected it to, Luke. Sipping coffee. Eyes a thousand miles away.

Grace kept walking.

When she passed the open door to the gray parlor, she slowed, realizing Philip was inside, at the desk.

She saw that his head was in his hands. She saw pain on his face, and feared he was having another attack.

“Philip.” She stepped in, closing the door behind her.

He lifted his eyes, and she realized his countenance was not the same as when in the throes of his affliction. He was somber, and pale, and his eyes were glistening and very deep. His expression showed some fleeing tenderness.

Seeing her approach, he straightened, inhaled, and rubbed his face. When he spoke, he was Philip as she’d always known him. Charming, light. “Little Grace. Did I give you a fright? Only daydreaming. Shall we to breakfast?”

He rose from the desk, looked at her more closely. “My, but your eyes are bright this morning.”

“I went to the greenhouse. It was lovely.” She’d almost said vivarium, but Philip knew Luke’s morning schedule, so it seemed wiser not to.

“Ah.” He smiled, a little sadly. “Charlie would have loved that.”

Philip offered his arm, and together they walked out of the room.

It was the second time Grace had been struck by lightning, standing in the same spot. The second time she’d realized how to solve a cipher.

As with the first time, she would not let Philip know. Not yet.

Because if she was correct, then what she had realized was very tricky indeed.

Grace ate breakfast quickly with eyes on her plate, swallowed a few gulps of tea, and smiled her goodbyes as she left the table.

She’d have preferred not to look at Luke, who was sitting at the othe r end of the table, but she couldn’t help brushing her eyes over him. He was watching her, troubled, curious in spite of h imself. He knew something was buzzing inside her.

When her eyes caught on his, he smiled . As if to say all else aside, it’s nice to look at you.

Her heart was going to emerge from this week a pile of ash or else so resilient, she could drop it from a mountaintop and find it worked perfectly when she plopped it back in. She wasn’t sure which.

Grace excused herself from the table and went to crack the final cipher.

Philip Theodore Walters Denton .

It was lucky indeed that Grace recalled that long ago conversation with Arabella, in which her friend mentioned that each male member of the Denton family carried a second middle name.

Even luckier that Grace happened to recall both of Philip’s.

Grace now knew what was wrong with the key—why it would not unlock the small, leather notebook. It was because particular letters in this journal had their own, separate key.

The letters of Philip’s name.

Standing with him in the Gray Room, Grace had known two things at once: how to decode the journal, and the reason for its unusual cipher.

First, she caught a glimpse of what Philip had been looking at when she walked into the room. A miniature in a frame fashioned to close like a book. Philip had closed it before he stood, so she would not see it. But she’d already seen it, the last time they were together in the gray parlor, when she went to fetch him his glass of bourbon.

It was a painting of the late earl. A good likeness, capturing the spark of his eyes, the mischievous tilt of his chin, the noble good looks that weathered with age but did not fade.

She wouldn’t have thought anything of it. Everyone in the house was grieving the earl. She would have assumed that Philip felt the sadness of losing a close friend.

But then he called the earl Charlie.

In answer to your question, I hope you will never cease to call me Charlie, Dear Grace, he’d written, in one of his final letters. It is a diminutive I have rarely heard since my youth. My family stopped using it long ago. The only other person who calls me Charlie now is as special to me as you are, though in another way. If the world were very different, my life would be entwined with theirs. But the world is as it is, and instead of giving all of my heart to one, I give pieces of it to many. I save the best bits for those who call me Charlie.

Just after breakfast, Grace began decoding the journal. She employed the Golden Ratio key, but for the letters of Philip’s name, she tried the Atbash Cipher. And, as if to reward her for the hundreds of useless, wrong keys she’d generated this week, she was right on the first try.

When she looked up, she had completed a stack of pages, and it was late afternoon. She could hear the sounds of staff preparing for this evening’s events, of the Oxford men returning to their rooms to change into formal attire.

She’d been crying, on and off, for hours. Laughing, too, of course. Their relationship, at its best, was a joy to read about. Charlie loved to challenge Philip to try new things. Foods, drink, strange brews that made one hallucinate. They would engage in elaborate pranks at the expense of others in their traveling party. They had a long-standing tradition of giving one another birthday gifts only on days that were not their birthday.

And then there was all the carnal adventuring. A professor friend had gifted Charlie with an illustrated erotic text translated from the French; Philip jokingly suggested they work their way through every position, and Charlie responded by declaring it his birthday wish that they do so in serious.

The museum was Charlie’s idea, but the secret passage built into a bookshelf in a corner of the library was Philip’s. Philip had suggested the titles of Charlie’s last three books. He’d even insisted on packing a special steamer trunk for Charlie’s last journey, because he would not be there and he was concerned that Charlie would fall into despair if he ran out of exactly the paper, quills, ink, and bourbon he preferred.

They fought a lot. Small things seemed large, because their time together was limited and because so much of how they behaved with one another in public was a lie.

He infuriates me, Charlie wrote. What some mistake for friendliness is a mildly malevolent irony. Everything is a joke to him. What is of utmost importance to me, he sees as a flight of fancy.

Later in the same entry, Charlie admitted, I cannot stop thinking about him. I want to press his body against the wall, bury my face in his neck. Breathe him in until he is as much a part of my body as my own skin, my spine, my imbecilic beating heart.

T hat took Grace’s breath away. My imbecilic beating heart. She wanted so badly to take his hand, to look into his sweet eyes.

Please don’t be so hard on yourself. My heart is an imbecile, too, Charlie.

Other tim es, Charlie was more philosophical. Grateful that Philip had married, that he and his wife shared a warm relationship. At least I know he’s looked after. He deserves a family, children, the public life he wants, the sort we cannot have.

He did not let himself lament his own solitude for long. I have the work. I have the whole world. He sounded a bit as though he were trying to convince himself, sometimes. And other times, he truly seemed at peace with it. Eternal happiness only exists in tales. The once-calm sea will swallow one whole. All is well in the field until something venomous bites an exposed ankle. The weather grows too hot, or too cold, or the day is perfect but it ends.

Charlie realized Philip was ill before Philip did. He wrote that he was determined to find a cure. If he lets me, I will take him to China. The medicines there are very powerful. He stayed with Philip when pain kept him up all night. Once, when Philip could not walk for two days, Charlie bathed and clothed him.

Charlie detailed their worst arguments and most intense nights of passion. He brainstormed lists of gifts. He fantasized about a time when they would be together always, even though he knew it could only ever be a dream written in code in his diary.

Still, I cannot agree with Philip that I would be happier with another family than with none. I prefer to feel my pain simply and clearly. I prefer to be alone, and to miss him. I prefer to have no one if the alternative is anyone else.

I prefer empty space in the shape of him.

Tomorrow, Grace was returning to a life that did not offer her that option. But it was what she would have preferred, too.