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

paragraph chosen at random, the whole thing made sense. She made some corrections to her code—it seemed “sg” didn’t always translate directly to “the,” but only when it stood alone—and tried another paragraph. With a thrill, she realized that one also made sense, and she slapped her hands down on the desk and exclaimed in triumph.

Now all thought of sleep vanished. She opened to the beginning of the journal and began translating. In front of her eyes, the curtain lifted on her father’s life in the army. He described the dirt and the heat, the drenching rainstorms and the paucity of good food. He wrote of the horrific slaughter of thousands of horses at Corunna as the British navy whisked the army away from being crushed by the pursuing French. He wrote of his fellow soldiers and the officers who sometimes led them, and sometimes sent them to certain deaths through sheer stupidity. He wrote of pomegranates and port wine and long brown Portuguese cigarettes, and the startling carnage created by Shrapnel shells. Every so often she had to make another small addition to her key, but overall the code was broken. When Cressida’s hand cramped and she had to put down her pen, she was shocked to realize hours had gone by since she sat down to work.

Callie had blown out her lamp and was fast asleep. The house was quiet. Cressida simply had to tell someone, though. She pulled on her dressing gown, snatched up her papers and the journal, and slipped from the room, heading straight for Alec’s study.

To her immense relief a line of light glowed under the door. She tapped gently, then pushed the door open at his muffled summons.

He rose from the wide mahogany desk, his hair rumpled and his cravat pulled askew. The desk was covered with papers and open books. “Come in,” he said at once. “Is something wrong?”

She came into the room and closed the door behind her. “No, nothing is wrong. I’ve just made some progress in solving this code, and…well, I wanted to tell someone,” she said with an embarrassed little laugh, catching sight of the clock. It was very late. He would think her demented over this journal. “I didn’t realize it was so late. I don’t want to be a bother.”

“No, no, of course not. Since John is leaving, there’s just more to be done.” He pushed aside some of the clutter on his desk and motioned for her to come over. Cressida hurried forward to lay the book in front of him, eagerness banishing her hesitation.

“I realized it’s a fairly simple rearrangement cipher,” she said, leaning down to show him her notes. “At first I tried to match the letters to those that appear most often in English, but that always got snarled in the end. Just tonight I discovered a twist: not all these words map exactly. For instance, ‘sg’ represents ‘the.’ I’ve checked it through several pages and it seems to hold true unless the letters ‘t-h-e’ are part of a larger word, like ‘other,’ and then it reverts to the rearrangement scheme. But I was able to translate two separate passages into sensible English, and then began in earnest. I think this is the correct key.” She laid her much-annotated key on top.

Alec was frowning at the scribbled notes. “You mean the letters are simply out of order?”

She shook her head. “No, not quite. Think of it instead as a reassignment; an ‘e’ now means a ‘k,’ for example. Well, not always, but usually. I can see that he got better at it as time went on. In the beginning of the book”—she flipped open to a page near the front—“every letter is formed individually, as if he had to keep checking the key. But later, the words are written almost as if he knew this different alphabet by heart and didn’t need to think before writing.” She turned to the middle to show him.

He leaned forward, cocking his head as he studied the page. “What does he write of?”

Cressida pulled out the sheets where she had begun translating. “Army matters, and any other thing that interested him. Who has been promoted, rumors, battles, who has been killed. An argument between officers, and a soldier whipped for desertion. But I have only just begun, on entries from years ago. He talks of Corunna and Oporto.”

“A decade ago.” He sighed and propped an elbow on the desk. “How relevant is that?”

Cressida fell silent. In her excitement at solving the code, she had lost sight of the real purpose of the task. How could an army diary a decade old help find her father now? And, to be truthful, did she really want to anymore? What she did not tell Alec was the deeper implications in Papa’s writings. He hadn’t just kept a journal, he had kept notes on others. She couldn’t help noticing that his remarks seemed to center on dishonorable activities, scandals and failures and incompetence. And one little note, so brief she hardly knew what to make of it, even appeared to hint that Papa might have been paid to keep quiet about those things.

It was possible that happened only once, when Papa interrupted some soldiers abusing a pair of local women and stealing from their farm. He had noted the penalty for their actions would be a fierce lashing, but then added, “they secured my discretion quite reasonably.” She had first thought nothing of that, assuming the men were friends of Papa’s whom he didn’t want to see punished. But as she worked her way into the book, Cressida got the uncomfortable feeling that Papa’s discretion had been secured more than once with money, and for larger and larger sums. And when it became a habit rather than a single instance, there was only one word for the person selling his discretion: blackmailer.

She hated even to think that word. He was her father, for heaven’s sake, who loved her and her