The actual words he works out, within reasonable limits, later. Most conspicuous are the repeated sequences vs and yejr; given that y is the only character to appear four times, he anticipates Edgar Poe and calls it e, but can make nothing likely in either French or English of the result: _ _ _ _e_ _ _ _ _. . _ee _ _ e _ _ _, _. The character r, which appears three times (no other appears more than twice, but in a text so short the table of frequencies is unreliable) makes a more promising e (_ _ _e_ _ _e_ _. . ._ _ _ _ _ _ _ _e, _), especially given the conventions of epistolary salutation and close. Assuming the final character in each phrase to be the first or last initial respectively of addressee and author, and remembering Mme B.‘s first and last to be the same, we have: _ _Be_ _ _e_B. . _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _e, _.), the repeated yejr is then surely love (_ _ Belove_ B. . _ _ _ _ _ Love, _.); which gives us _ _ Belove_ B. . _ ll _ _ Love, _.; which is surely My Beloved B. . All my Love, _. Only the mysterious terminal blank (G in the cipher) remains to be filled.
But the real key is not Andrew’s sorting of frequencies and correspondences, which leads after all but to that crucial lacuna. It is in the calligraphy of that very G, as it were an aborted or miscarried flourish from its final serif: the first thing that struck him as familiar, but which he cannot be certain he has accurately duplicated. From Galveston to Yucatan, Yucatan to Tobago, he does his Napoleonic homework and covers every available scrap of paper with uppercase G’s; a fortuitous stroke on the aforementioned anniversary—Jean Blanque is pitching terrifically in the storm that will carry off her foremast and half a dozen Baratarians with her square-sail yards — delivers him the key.
And show’d me at once, he writes, that my errand was very likely a wild-goose chase. That were it not for the necessity of deceiving Jean Lafitte, I should spare myself that endless voyage & elaborate imposture, and make straight for Rome, for the Palazzo Rinuccini, & for the clairvoyant “Mme Kleinmüller”… But there is no help for it: key in hand, he is obliged to postpone for nearly three-quarters of a year its urgent application to the lock — unimaginably protracted suspense! — while he sails thousands of miles down the map, from Tobago to the Rocks of Saint Peter and Paul, to Ascension Island, to St. Helena. And (it must be) in order to give Andrée some sense of his massive frustration, the impatience which no doubt contributes to Jean Lafitte’s suspicions of him, he withholds this key for many a ciphered page to come (I myself skipped ahead at once to Rome and the answer, Henry; you may do likewise), until he meets — on May 5, 1821: the day, as it happens, of Napoleon’s death — the writer of that coded letter.
In mid-January they raise St. Helena, looming sheer and volcanic from the southern ocean; they lie to for several days just below the western horizon, out of sight of the telegraphs, and seize the first small fishing smack that wanders into reach. Its crew are regaled, handsomely bribed for the imposition, promised more if all goes well, and threatened with death, pirate-style, if all does not. Two of their number are comfortably detained as hostages, obliged to switch clothes with Cook and Lafitte, and closely interrogated. They agree that despite the Admiralty’s semaphore telegraphs and strengthened fortification of the island’s four landing places, fishermen come and go as usual from footpaths down the cliffs, which rise in places twelve hundred feet straight out of the sea. Aside from vertigo, there should be no problem in getting ashore. They even know a concealed vantage point from which to survey Longwood, a favorite leisure pastime among them. But on the question whether their celebrated new resident is the former emperor of the French, there is no consensus: one vows he is, though “much changed” by captivity and systematic poisoning; another swears he was replaced a year ago; a third that he was never on the island.
