For Your Arms Only by Linden, Caroline (best fiction books to read .TXT) 📗

change that.” She looked at her brother as she spoke. The anger that had once heated her words about Alec was gone, replaced by something more like resignation.

Cressida shifted uncomfortably. She alone knew Alec’s secret, it seemed. She longed to defend him, to justify and explain to Julia why he had been so silent. She longed to tell Julia that whatever his family had suffered, Alec had endured far, far worse, not just from the wounds that scarred his chest but from the damage to his character that still followed him, damage he had tried but been unable to repair. And most of all she longed to tell Julia that it was her duty as his sister to accept him anyway, whether he told her his secret or not. Cressida knew that if her father were to stroll into the room this moment, even after all she had learned about him and his actions, she would still run to embrace him and her heart would leap with gladness that he was well, because he was her father. For all Papa’s faults, she couldn’t help loving him. How much might it have meant to Alec if his sister had been able to set aside her hurt and anger, and do the same?

The guests were Mr. and Mrs. Wallace from London, stopping in for a few days on their journey north. Mr. Wallace was brashly charming, easily falling into conversation with everyone. His wife was quieter, but unsheathed a sharp wit when she did speak, her voice inflected with a lilting French accent. Mrs. Wallace was seated next to Alec, and whenever she spoke, he paid strict attention to her every word. Mr. Wallace spared them no mind; at the other end of the table he was busy regaling the two Mrs. Hayeses and their daughters with tales of his native Scotland.

Cressida found herself watching Mrs. Wallace after dinner. There was something quietly watchful and alert about her, quite unlike her husband. That gentleman seemed to have a hundred tales and humorous stories, and he kept them all laughing. Although, for all Mr. Wallace’s loquaciousness, neither he nor his wife had revealed much about themselves. Rather like Alec had done when he first returned to Marston…

The thought stopped her. Could they be, like Alec…? But no; surely spies did not pay social calls on other spies. She glanced at Mrs. Wallace again, so darkly beautiful and polite as she listened to Mrs. Hayes. Could that delicate lady be a spy? Cressida tried to picture her in the part, then smiled at her own imagination. As if she even knew what spies did, let alone how the typical spy looked.

Thankfully the company retired early. The Wallaces had spent the day traveling, and John and his family were to depart on the morrow. After stopping to say good night to Granny, Cressida and Callie returned to their room.

“You’re not planning to work on that now, are you?” Callie wrinkled her nose as Cressida took out the journal again after getting ready for bed.

She shrugged. “For a little while. I think I’m about to solve it. I can feel it.”

Her sister sighed. “You and puzzles! Well, don’t let me disturb you.” She got into bed and opened a book.

Cressida pulled the chair up close to the writing desk and opened the journal. In a few minutes she had picked up where she left off earlier.

The code was frustrating her to no end. It appeared to be simple, and it surely was; more than once, she thought she had it solved only to see things fall apart as she applied her key to larger sections of the journal. If Papa’s code had changed over the years, she wryly acknowledged, she might never get it. But she pressed on, tinkering with different passages and trying to fit the information into one encompassing model.

She had learned about codes from her father. Papa had an ear for languages, and whenever he came home he would try to teach her and Callie what he had picked up. Instead of telling them what he was saying, though, he would just speak to them in a Spanish dialect or Flemish. She learned to map some words by their proximity to other words, deducing “sister” by how often it occurred before or after Callie’s name. This, she decided, was much the same. She had drawn up a list of battles and places to correspond to the dates, and had thus picked out a number of words, mainly places in the Peninsula that shed little light on the rest of the journal. But those small successes did reveal a few letters, and she had covered pages and pages with tentative translations that all ground to a halt eventually.

With a sigh, she picked up the journal and tried to look at it as a whole. It had its own language; perhaps she just needed to listen to its flow a bit more, and stop concentrating on the individual words. She let her eyes drift across the lines as if she were reading. One word kept snagging her eye, “sg.” There were quite a few instances of it, and she thought it meant “an.” She couldn’t think of another two-letter word in English that occurred so often. But that implied some things about the words that followed it, and she hadn’t been able to make that work. Cressida huffed in impatience, and rolled her head from side to side to stretch her neck. If only it were three letters. Then she would think it represented “the,” which would eliminate so many of the problems she was having with vowels…

She raised her head as the thought sank in. What if…? Her hand shaking with excitement, she tore another page from her sketchbook and tried it. Once she quit trying to force “an” from “sg,” things fell into place. She counted letters again and realigned her mapping of them. And when she applied her new key to a