“Indeed,” said Arthur. “But back to the subject of medieval ciphers.”
“I’m afraid if you’ve tried frequency analysis and checked for transposition you’ve reached the end of my knowledge. But I’m sure it’s got to be either simple substitution or transposition. Unless you’ve got the date wrong. It could be polyalphabetic, but even a late medieval version of that is fairly easy to break. I could take a look at it, but I doubt I’ll see anything you haven’t.”
“If it keeps giving me trouble, perhaps I’ll bring it by,” said Arthur, but he was already worried that consulting Peabody had been a bad idea. The last thing he wanted was for word to spread around town that he was trying to break a medieval cipher. The precentor knew everyone in Barchester, it seemed, and Arthur had no wish to arouse the salmon’s suspicion. “I’d appreciate it if you’d keep this confidential,” he said.
“I’ll have forgotten all about it by the time you’re halfway down the hall,” said Peabody, and Arthur suspected this was true.
—
Arthur sat in his usual pew waiting for Evensong to begin, still troubled by the cipher. Bethany’s attendance at Evensong had been fairly regular over the past few weeks, and he missed her presence beside him. He supposed she had spent an extra day in Wells. He never spoke to her before the service, but afterward they always sat together listening to the organ postlude. Sometimes she rushed off without so much as a “See you later, Arthur,” but often they sat for a few minutes after the quire had emptied and talked about the music or the weather or nothing in particular. But today he sat alone and almost didn’t notice the service, so cluttered was his mind with alphabets and substitutions and transpositions. He stood for the Magnificat and the Nunc Dimittis only because his body was programmed to do so.
Something Peabody had said kept running through his head—that Enigma was like a substitution cipher in which the key word and the order of the alphabet changed with every character. Arthur understood just enough about substitution ciphers to know what he meant. In the case of a simple substitution cipher, all one needed to decode a passage was the key word. But what if the key word was constantly changing? Then frequency analysis wouldn’t work, because every time the key word changed, the frequency of each letter would change. But if Arthur couldn’t figure out one key word, how could he figure out scores or even hundreds of them?
He had no idea how long he had been sitting in the pew after the postlude, trying to think what he was missing. The slamming of a door in the north transept finally brought him back to reality, and when he stood to go, the service bulletin fluttered to the floor. Arthur stooped to pick it up and read, at the bottom of the page, the words “Psalms XXII–XXIII.” He was sorry he hadn’t paid attention—he had always liked the Twenty-third psalm. “The Lord is my shepherd,” he repeated softly, “therefore can I lack nothing.”
And he solved it.
—
Arthur took the steps to the library two at a time and arrived breathless on the landing to see the door ajar. Bethany stood at the far end of the library. She was not busily moving books from the real world into the digital world; she was simply standing.
“Good weekend?” Arthur called out when he had caught his breath, but she only stood there, arms slack at her side, a cell phone cradled in one palm. Only when Arthur had covered more than half the distance between them did he realize she was sobbing. Not gently tearing up like someone who has read a particularly moving passage of Dickens or watched an advertisement for greeting cards, but honest to God, eyes red, cheeks wet, nose dripping, shoulders shaking sobbing, like someone who had lost a spouse.
“Bethany, what is it?” said Arthur. He knew almost nothing of her home life, he suddenly realized, but he couldn’t imagine anything less than the death of her mother could bring on such a reaction.
“I was just talking to her yesterday,” said Bethany in between gasps for air. “She was fine. She was home. Oh, Arthur,” and without warning she ran to him and threw her arms around him and began sobbing even harder, if such a thing was possible, on his shoulder. Arthur hadn’t the slightest idea how to react. He tried patting her on the back, but she only squeezed him tighter, so finally he put his arms around her and squeezed back. They stood that way for what seemed an awkward eternity to Arthur. He felt his foot go numb, but thought it impolite to shift his weight—as if this might betray his impatience—so he stood as still as he could until at last he felt Bethany’s shaking abate and her sobs turn to sniffles. Only then did she slacken her grip and slowly step back from the embrace. In the space of a few seconds she looked at him with agony, then puzzlement, then sympathy.
“Oh, Arthur, you haven’t heard, have you?”
“Heard what?” he said. Was it Gwyn? Had something happened to Gwyn?
“Evelyn.”
“Evelyn?” Arthur racked his mind for any mutual acquaintance named Evelyn.
“Oscar’s mother, Mrs. Dimsdale, Evelyn. She . . . she died.”
“Oscar’s mother died?” Arthur’s first reaction was a spasm of guilt—he had promised to go visit Mrs. Dimsdale and he hadn’t done it, and now it was too late. And of course he was sorry for Oscar. But Mrs. Dimsdale had been in her eighties and Bethany could hardly have known her well. Arthur couldn’t imagine the reason for such an emotional outburst.
“I didn’t see her today. I could have gone to see her but she was out of the hospital and Oscar said she was doing fine, so I said I’d stop by tomorrow afternoon. I never thought . . .”
“What . . . what happened?” said Arthur.
“Heart attack maybe,” said Bethany. “My train was late and I was going to sneak in for the end of Evensong and then Oscar called and said . . . said she took a nap this afternoon and just didn’t . . . didn’t wake up.”
“How’s Oscar?” said Arthur.
“Oh, you know Oscar,” said Bethany. And Arthur suddenly realized that he didn’t. He knew Oscar’s taste in books and what Oscar did for the cathedral, but he had no idea how Oscar would react to his mother’s death.
“He’s putting on a brave face,” Bethany continued. “But he’s crushed. He lived with her almost his whole life. I just hate to think—”
“We’d better go . . . I don’t know, go be with him,” said Arthur. What did one do for a friend whose mother had died, he wondered. Some sort of action was required, but what? He had no idea, but he felt certain Bethany would know.
“Right,” said Bethany, drawing a sleeve over her eyes and taking in a deep breath. “I suppose you boys will all put on a British stiff upper lip or whatever, so I’ll do my best, too, for Oscar’s sake. He’ll need help with . . . well, probably with everything. You’re right, the first thing is just to go be with him.”