The Printer's Devil Read Free

back, followed by a chicken tikka with some of the other ringers, it was nearly midnight when Alan finally got home. He decided to go straight to bed, since Kim was away on location until mid-week.
    Although they had met in a ringing-chamber, she had little time to pursue that hobby these days; which was a pity, as she had always been keener, and better, than Alan. Her being musical had a lot to do with it, he felt, as music is kin to mathematics and mathematicians often make accomplished ringers.
    In the morning, after breakfast, he put Verdi’s Otello on the stereo and headed for his bookshelves. The first thing he looked up was the village, and here he struck gold at once:
    ‘Fenstanton: Fenstanton Abbey (ruined). A house built c.1660 for Roger Southwell, reputedly a magician. It stood empty for some years after his death in 1697 and has never been occupied for any length of time; around 1800 it was described as “derelict”. Southwell himself lies buried in an interesting tomb outside the churchyard of the redundant church of All Saints, reputedly because he was excommunicated for wizardly activities.’
    Confident that further research would yield more information about Southwell, Alan took his notepad from his pocket and looked at what he had written the previous day.
    LIBER ARCANI. Secret book, presumably. Or - book of secrets? He wrote ‘The book of hidden things’.
    HICDIVITI LEGET. ‘Here reads (he reads?)’ What was ‘divitix’7
    Putting down his pen, Alan went to hunt for his old Latin dictionary. Eventually he found it in the glory-hole under the stairs, sandwiched between a hymnbook stamped in purple ink ‘Priory Grammar School. Do not remove’ and a 1960 Ford Anglia manual.
    ‘Here he reads of riches,’ he wrote a moment later, and eventually, with the help of the dictionary, he translated the captions to all the frames.
    The others read: They have set a guardian (he knew ‘custodia’); The reward of avarice; The power of God’s holy saints; and finished with something Alan vaguely thought was a quotation: ‘Auri sacra fames’, accursed hunger for gold.
    And now, he thought, what about that strange string of letters? Looking at them anew, Alan was certain they constituted a cipher, but how to break it?
    GZNUZNZLPVTOVLFOGUHLSGZDVSMRMVWG
    The first thing he noticed now was the frequency of Gs and Zs, one of which must presumably stand for E, the commonest letter in the English language.
    Alan sighed, stood up, fetched a beer from the fridge, and stared out of the window for a while. There was no easy solution to the code: that was plain. Also, it was Sunday, so libraries were shut. Either he’d have to try and solve it without help, or - wait.
    Since waiting was out of the question:
    ‘Okay,’ said Alan to himself, ‘you’re a bright lad. You’ve been known to ring Stedman Triples. You can’t let a little thing like a code bamboozle you.’
    He turned up the stereo, fetched a garden chair from the shed and put it outside in the sun, then settled down with paper and a pen.
    Somewhere he’d seen codes grouped into equal numbers of letters - four or five. He added up the letters and found thirty-two, so wrote them down in fours.
    GZNU ZNZL PVTO VLFO GUHL SGZD VSMR MVWG They looked more manageable like that, anyway.
    All right. There were four Gs, four Zs, and four Vs as well, so maybe these stood for E, T, and A, the commonest letters in English. He played around with this possibility for a frustrating half-hour, convinced that Z stood for A, simply because of the juxtaposition:
    TANU ANAL PETO ELFO TUHL STAD ESMR MEWT
    Something he’d read stirred in his memory then, and he rearranged the letters, taking the first of each group, and then the second, and so on.
    TAPE TSEM ANEL UTSE NATF HAMW ULOO LDRT
    Now he had to guess. The two TSE combinations were almost certainly THE, but that didn’t help much. There were two Os together, and Ls round them, and another L, which made three. Whatever