Pascale Auber & the Ruritanian Riddle

LXIII Office - 2

I sat at my brother's desk, his notebook and two sheets of paper in front of me. I used my own pencil, taken from my reticule, and began to attempt to decode Blaise's writing. I know my brother. He has no true secrets; he would have written in code for privacy, or because this particular code was quick and familiar, not as a serious attempt at security. Also, despite is considerable mathematical skill, I doubted that he had the patience for complex encryption.

When we were children, Blaise always favoured a certain type of simple cipher. The Caesar cipher, so-called for its habitual use by that ancient notable, is a basic, monoalphabetic substitution cipher where you shift your choice of letter down the alphabet – if "A" becomes "D", "B" becomes "E" and so forth. Certainly a Caesar cipher can be broken brute-force, but why waste the time? These sorts of codes are extremely easy to break, especially if you are confident as to the language in which the encoded material is written. 

Blaise is well-educated; he was forced to study Latin and Greek and French, of course, but again, I know my brother. He writes in English, and only in English. Despite its grotesquely irregular spelling, written English is a very predictable language. Certain letters occur more often than others, and certain combinations occur with more regularity than others. The most common letter is the letter "E"; short words of three letters are often "the" or "and". Vowels appear in every syllable of a word, and plurals and grammar mean that word endings are often "s", "er", "ing" or "ly". Given this knowledge, transcribing even a short sample of text back into its normal spelling is a trivial exercise.

For once, though, Blaise had not used his beloved, if childish, method. He had created an entire alternate alphabet. A quick inspection confirmed that, while the text likely was English, it did not use a letter-for-letter substitution. The writing appeared to be a form of shorthand, simplified writing with which one may take notes very quickly. It was not, of course, any of the standard forms of shorthand; I knew five of these as used in four European languages. It appeared to be something Blaise himself had developed.

It would make sense for Blaise to have developed his shorthand for scholarly note-taking, and, knowing him personally, I had the benefit of recognizing some of his handwritten letter forms in the symbols he had developed. It was a slog, but fortunately the text was reasonably long, with multiple repeated words and a tendency to use a symbol to represent a syllable, rather than a whole word. An hour later, I had a completely decoded message, and insight into my brother's confused brain. Unfortunately, the text I had transcribed was useless, if charming – Blaise had been composing a poem.

My brother might be practical, but there is certainly a heady strain of romance him his soul. The fact that his second job is as a professional musician is proof enough, even in the absence of his mooning about outside of girl's dressing-rooms with roses. That said, it had been years since I had seen him write a poem – and what a poem! It was clearly an attempt at love-poetry, if terribly cliched. Blaise compared the girl's fair skin to alabaster, her lips to rubies, and her voice to the voices of the angels. It crossed my mind that my brother should have tried to impress his young lady with mathematics, instead.

I set my pencil down with a sigh. This diverting exercise did not tell me where to find Blaise. A silly poem about giving a singing maiden a flower did not -

I looked at the poem again, at the line about having an angelic voice, and the rose once again intruded into my brain. I could feel a blush blooming on my cheeks – surely he hadn't spent the entire night out, had he? I grabbed my things. I was going to the Aosta.