The Cocoa Conspiracy (10 page)

1. In a saucepan over medium-low heat, simmer cream, milk, sugar and salt, stirring occasionally until sugar dissolves.

2. In the bowl of a food processor, pulse chocolate until finely chopped. Add one cup hot cream mixture and process until smooth.

3. Transfer to a large bowl. Slowly pour in remaining hot cream mixture and the whisky or rum, whisking constantly. Place bowl in refrigerator or set in an ice bath to chill.

4. When cold, pour into the bowl of an ice cream machine and churn according to manufacturer’s directions. Transfer to a container and freeze until solid, at least 2 hours. Let sit at room temperature for 5 to 10 minutes before serving, or in refrigerator for 15 to 30 minutes.

Yield: About a quart.

“A
book.” Saybrook took it from her and thumbed through the pages before adding, “Quite a lovely book, in fact. But delicious as it is to us,
Theobroma cacao
is not something that ought to attract the violent interest of others.”

“It’s not the book,
per se
.” Arianna drew a deep, unhappy breath, knowing her revelations were about to entangle them in a new web of secrets and lies.
Spiders and serpents.
Sinister, silent predators.

The thought of them made her skin crawl.

“But I had better start at the beginning.” She quickly recounted what had happened in the bookstore, and the unexpected encounter with her assailant the previous evening.

“You didn’t think an attack on your person was something I ought to know about?” he interrupted softly. “Or the fact that the man who assaulted my wife is present here?”

“The book was meant to be a special birthday present, Sandro. Any mention of the incident would have spoiled the surprise,” she answered. “And besides, I thought Davilenko was simply one of those eccentric, obsessed book collectors that you mentioned to me. A boor and a bully, but not any real threat.” The papers seemed to hiss and crackle beneath her fingertips as she pulled them out from behind the marbled endpaper.
Is it my imagination, or did a whiff of brimstone suddenly taint the air?
“Until I found these hidden in the binding.”

Saybrook stared at the folded sheets for a long moment before reluctantly holding out his hand. “I take it they are not recipes,” he muttered.

“Not unless you are looking to cook up chaos.”

One by one, he carefully unfolded them, his face remaining expressionless as he read over the contents. The only sign of emotion was a tiny tic in the muscle of his jaw. But even that was quickly controlled.

Arianna waited for a reaction, but he simply reshuffled the sheets and appeared to begin a second round of study.

Finally, when she could stand the silence no longer, she cleared her throat. “Well, what do you think?”

The earl didn’t look up. “If you are asking whether I think my uncle is capable of betraying his country, the answer is no, I don’t.”

“Nor do I,” she said tightly. “But someone with access to his confidential files is.”

“Renard?” During their previous investigation, they had uncovered a rumor about an elusive French spy called Renard.
The fox
. If the whispers were true, he was a very cunning individual who moved within the highest circles of Society.

“The name certainly leaps to mind when speaking of documents stolen from the inner sanctum of Whitehall.” She paused. “Do you think he actually exists? We had only a criminal’s word to go on, but . . .”

“As a matter of fact, I do believe Renard is more than smoke and specters,” answered Saybrook slowly. “A few months after our investigation was over, I met with a former comrade in the upper echelon of military intelligence, who confirmed that the government had linked the name with several other instances of espionage. But then, Napoleon abdicated and the war was over, so I assumed that the threat had disappeared.”

“And yet it’s possible that Renard is still running free, teeth and claws as sharp as ever,” said Arianna.

“Yes, it’s possible,” he replied. “But so are a myriad of other speculations, ranging from the plausible to the absurd.”

Arianna didn’t blame him for sounding so sardonic. Regardless of his innocence, Mellon’s reputation would be blackened by her discovery—or worse. The evidence was awfully incriminating. Two of the papers seemed to be written in a secret code, but the third bore the official stamp of the Foreign Office. Written in Mellon’s hand, it summarized the progress of highly secret negotiations taking place with one of the German states. Knowing such privileged information would give any enemy of England a potent weapon at the upcoming Peace Conference in Vienna. The diplomatic jockeying for power would be intense as borders were redrawn, alliances reformed. And so, Europe was like a giant powder keg.

“Then we shall have to find solid proof of who is the real culprit,” said Arianna. “Or . . .” She hesitated, wondering whether to admit that her thoughts had sunk to such a shameful depth. “Or deal with it in a different way. I confess, I was sorely tempted to throw it all into the fire.”

That Saybrook said nothing was in itself eloquent of his own inner turmoil.

“It’s something to consider,” she went on in a near whisper. “We could warn your uncle of the danger, and together work discreetly on setting a trap for the traitor. Nobody else need be privy to the problem until the traitor’s capture is a
fait accompli
. Think on it—in many ways it’s the most logical tactic. The fewer people who know that the betrayal has been discovered, the better. A wary fox is harder to catch than one who thinks the henhouse is unguarded.”

“Like your sinfully seductive confections, your well-reasoned arguments are tempting, my dear,” replied the earl. He lifted his chocolate-dark eyes from the pages and she couldn’t quite see what lay beneath the shuttered gaze.
A soldier must make himself impenetrable in order to survive,
she reminded herself.

“
Too
tempting,” he added. “What you suggest would be easy, and I fear that there is going to be nothing easy about this affair.”

“Then what do you intend to do?” asked Arianna.

“I am not sure.” Saybrook carried the papers to the leaded window and angled them into the light. “It depends partly on what I can learn from these coded pages that you found enclosed with the document written by Charles.”

She had guessed as much, but how the disjointed words could be turned into a meaningful message was its own puzzle. “They look like an opium eater’s wild ramblings,” she said. “It seems an impossible task to try to make sense of them.”

“I am surprised that you think that.” For the first time since he had returned from the moors, her husband allowed a small smile. “Codes are all based on a logical system. Some may be more complex than others, but the underlying principles are the same. As in mathematics, you simply have to see the patterns.”

Arianna’s father had been a mathematical genius, and she shared his knack for numbers.

“I hadn’t thought about it that way,” she murmured.

“You’ve had no need to,” replied Saybrook drily. “I, on the other hand, spent some of my time on the Peninsula working with George Scovell on cracking Napoleon’s military codes. The man was a veritable wizard.” Moving to the escritoire, he set the papers down and absently smoothed at the creases. “Let us hope some of his magic has rubbed off on me.”

She recognized the spark that had flared in his eyes. Like a moth drawn to a flame, the earl found a cerebral challenge impossible to resist. And danger seemed to make it only more alluring.

“They seem to be written in a different hand. Show me which one was folded together with the document from Charles’s files. I’ll start with that one.”

“Change into your dressing gown,” she ordered, after doing as he asked. “While I fetch a blanket and shift one of the armchairs closer to the fire.”

“I don’t need to be coddled,” he muttered.

“Go,” said Arianna, cutting off his protest with a martial glare. “I shall send word that we won’t be joining the party for the evening entertainments, and ask that a supper tray be sent up. But in return, you must humor me by not collapsing from loss of blood.”

“Good God, a small scratch has never slowed me down.”

“Pride goeth before a fall,” she countered.

“Women.” He surrendered to her demand with an ill-tempered grunt. “Hell, it is feminine fussing that will be the death of me.”

“I profoundly hope not,” she whispered, looking down at the rusty smudge on her apron and feeling her blood run a little cold.

 

The rhythmic tick of the longcase clock was the only sound stirring the deepening shadows. The embers in the hearth, silent specks of dying red, had burned down to naught but cinders, leaving the lamp as the lone flicker of light in the sitting room.

“It’s past midnight, Sandro.” Arianna tightened the sash of her wrapper against the chill. “Come to bed.”

“Hmmm?”
Another sheet of crumpled paper joined the growing pile on the carpet. “Yes, yes, in a moment.”

“Yes, yes, and in the same space of time, pigs will spout wings and fly to Uranus.”

He looked up.
“Hmmm?”

“Never mind.” Too restless to sleep, she padded over to the hearth and added a few fresh logs. Infused with new life, the fire sent up a blaze of bright flames, their cheery crackling a lighter counterpoint to the regimented marching of the minutes. “Any luck?”

He shrugged.

After another quick jab at the coals, Arianna set the poker aside and seated herself on the carpet beside his chair. “You’re chilled,” she commented, slipping a hand beneath the blanket and running her fingers lightly over his leg.

At that he looked up. “Are you trying to distract me?”

“I doubt that I could.”

Saybrook chuckled. “Don’t underestimate your powers.” He flexed his shoulders and massaged the back of his neck. “I would far rather wrestle with your lovely limbs than these perverse little letters.”

“Even though I often drive you to distraction?” she teased. Leaning in for a closer look at the papers piled on his lap desk, she took a moment to study the strange diagram he was drawing.

“What’s that?”

“A Vigenère Square.”

“It looks like the ravings of a lunatic.”

His mouth twitched. “There is a method to the madness. As I mentioned earlier, all codes and ciphers are based on a logical system. One just has to be clever enough to figure them out.”

“So it’s a game of sorts.” Arianna thought of her father and his delight in making numbers do his bidding—no matter that the equations had dire results. “A
mano a mano
match of Machiavellian minds.”

Her husband gave a bark of laughter. “At times the challenge does feel personal. The code maker and the code breaker engage in an intellectual version of hide-and-seek. Competition can get fierce, for the stakes are often very high.” His pencil tapped softly against the paper. “Mary, Queen of Scots, was executed because England’s spymaster, Lord Walsingham, was able to decipher her secret correspondence with Babington and his group of Catholic conspirators. And then, of course, you have Scovell, whose skills helped Wellington drive the French forces from the Peninsula.”

The life of a monarch, the fate of a country, the defeat of an army—strange how the fate of the mighty could be determined by a tiny, twisting hodgepodge of letters.

Resting her elbows on the arm of the chair, she settled into a more comfortable position. “If it’s not too distracting, might you take a few minutes to explain your Square?”

“To begin with, there are all sorts of systems for creating codes,” he answered. “A common form is a cipher code—that is, where one letter is replaced by another. Here is an example.”

Placing a blank sheet of paper atop his notes, Saybrook wrote the words “The fox is in the henhouse.” Above it, he lettered the alphabet in one line. “Now, I’ll use a simple Caesar shift of three to encrypt the message, which means you take each letter of the original message and shift it over three positions.” He quickly wrote out a line that looked liked complete gibberish—
wkh iua lv lq wkh khqkuvh
.

“The spaces are often omitted to make the text harder to decipher. Still, an experienced code breaker knows to use frequency analysis, a concept developed by the Arabs while we Europeans were mired in the Dark Ages. This helps determine what the real letter might be. For example, ��e,’ ‘t,’ and ‘a,’ are the most commonly used letters in English. So, one can begin by substituting a ‘t’ for whatever letter occurs the most frequently in the encrypted letter. It’s a matter of trial and error, of course. And the longer the message, the better the odds of the system working. Still, it helps one to make an educated guess.”

“Fascinating.”