"My family has wealth; had I been a man, no doubt I would have been a musician." She spoke simply, with no trace of regret.
"Surely you could still have composed music, if you'd married?" I asked curiously.
Mother Hildegarde spread her hands, grotesque in the lamplight. I had seen those hands wrench loose a dagger embedded in bone, guide a displaced joint back into alignment, cup the blood-smeared head of a child emerging from between its mother's thighs. And I had seen those fingers linger on the ebony keys with the delicacy of moths' feet.
"Well," she said, after a moment's contemplation, "it is the fault of St. Anselm."
"It is?"
She grinned at my expression, her ugly face quite transformed from its stern public facade.
"Oh, yes. My godfather—the Old Sun King," she added casually, "gave to me a book of the Lives of the Saints for my own Saint's Day when I was eight. It was a beautiful book," she said reminiscently, "with gilded pages and a jeweled cover; intended more as a work of art than a work of literature. Still, I read it. And while I enjoyed all of the stories—particularly those of the martyrs—still there was one phrase in the story of St. Anselm that seemed to strike a response in my soul."
She closed her eyes and tilted back her head, recalling.
"St. Anselm was a man of great wisdom and great learning, a Doctor of the Church. But also a bishop, a man who cared for the people of his flock, and looked after their temporal needs as well as those of the spirit. The story detailed all of his works, and then concluded in these words—‘And so he died, at the conclusion of an eminently useful life, and thus obtained his crown in Paradise.' " She paused, flexing her hands lightly on her knees.
"There was something about that that appealed most strongly to me. ‘An eminently useful life.' " She smiled at me. "I could think of many worse epitaphs than that, milady." She spread her hands suddenly and shrugged, an oddly graceful gesture.
"I wished to be useful," she said. Then, dismissing idle conversation, she turned abruptly back to the music on the rack.
"So," she said. "Plainly the change in the key signatures— the note tonique—that is the oddity. Where can we go with that?"
My mouth dropped open with a small exclamation. Speaking in French as we had been, I hadn't noticed before. But observing Mother Hildegarde as she told her story, I had been thinking in English, and when I glanced back at the music it hit me.
"What is it?" the nun asked. "You have thought of something?"
"The key!" I said, half-laughing. "In French, a musical key is the note tonique, but the word for an object that unlocks…" I pointed to the large bunch of keys—normally carried on her girdle—that Mother Hildegarde had laid aside on the bookshelf when we came in. "That is a passe-partout, isn't it?"
"Yes," she said, watching me in puzzlement. She touched the skeleton key in turn. "Une passe-partout. That one," she said, pointing to a key with barrel and wards, "is more likely called a clef."
"A clef!" I exclaimed joyously. "Perfect!" I stabbed a finger at the sheet of music before us. "See, ma mère, in English, the words are the same. A ‘key' gives the basis of a piece of music, and a ‘key' unlocks. In French, the clef is a key, and in English, the ‘clef' is also part of the musical signature. And the key of the music is also the key to the cipher. Jamie said he thought it was an English cipher! Made by an Englishman with a really diabolical sense of humor, too," I added.
With that small insight, the cipher proved not too difficult to unravel. If the maker was English, the ciphered message likely was in English, too, which meant that the German words were provided only as a source of letters. And having seen Jamie's earlier efforts with alphabets and shifting letters, it took only a few tries to determine the pattern of the cipher.
"Two flats means you must take every second letter, starting from the beginning of the section," I said, frantically scribbling down the results. "And three sharps means to take every third letter, beginning at the end of the section. I suppose he used German both for concealment and because it's so bloody wordy; it takes nearly twice as many words to say the same thing as it would in English."
"You have got ink on your nose," Mother Hildegarde observed. She peered over my shoulder. "Does it make sense?"
"Yes," I said, my mouth gone suddenly dry. "Yes, it makes sense."
Deciphered, the message was brief and simple. Also deeply disturbing.
"His Majesty's loyal subjects of England await his lawful restoration. The sum of fifty thousand pounds is at your disposal. As an earnest of good faith, this will be paid only in person, upon His Highness's arrival on the soil of England," I read. "And there's a letter left over, an ‘S.' I don't know if that's a signature of sorts, or only something the maker needed to make the German word come out right."
"Hmph." Mother Hildegarde glanced curiously at the scribbled message, then at me. "You will know already, of course," she said, with a nod, "but you may assure your husband that I will keep this in confidence."
"He wouldn't have asked your help if he didn't trust you," I protested.
The sketchy brows rose to the edge of her wimple, and she tapped the scribbled paper firmly.
"If this is the sort of endeavor in which your husband engages, he takes considerable risk in trusting anyone. Assure him that I am sensible of the honor," she added dryly.
"I'll do that," I said, smiling.
"Why, chère Madame," she said, catching sight of me, "you are looking quite pale! I myself often stay awake far into the night when I am working on a new piece, so I tend to pay little attention to the hour, but it must be late for you." She glanced at the hour-candle burning on the little table near the door.
"Gracious! It is growing late. Shall I summon Sister Madeleine to take you to your chamber?" Jamie had agreed, reluctantly, with Mother Hildegarde's suggestion that I spend the night at the Couvent des Anges, so that I need not return home through the dark streets late at night.
I shook my head. I was tired, and my back ached from sitting on the stool, but I didn't want to go to bed. The implications of the musical message were too disturbing to permit me to sleep right away, in any case.
"Well, then, let us take a little refreshment, in celebration of your accomplishment." Mother Hildegarde rose and went to the outer room, where I heard the ringing of a bell. Shortly one of the serving sisters came, bearing a tray of hot milk and small, iced cakes, and followed by Bouton. The serving sister placed a cake on a small china plate and set it on the floor before him as a matter of course, laying beside it a bowl of milk.
While I sipped my own hot milk, Mother Hildegarde set aside the source of our labors, laying it on the secretary, and instead placed a loose sheaf of music manuscript on the rack of the harpsichord.
"I shall play for you," she announced. "It will help to compose your mind for sleep."
The music was light and soothing, with a singing melody that wove back and forth from treble voice to bass in a pattern of pleasing complexity, but without the driving force of Bach.
"Is that yours?" I asked, choosing a pause as she lifted her hands at the conclusion of the piece.
She shook her head without turning around.
"No. A friend of mine, Jean Philippe Rameau. A good theorist, but he does not write with great passion."
I must have dozed, the music lulling my senses, for I woke suddenly to the murmur of Sister Madeleine's voice in my ear, and her warm, firm grip under my arm, lifting me to my feet and leading me away.
Looking back, I could see the broad span of Mother Hildegarde's black-swathed back, and the flex of powerful shoulders beneath the drape of her veil as she played, oblivious now to the world beyond the sanctum of her chamber. On the boards near her feet lay Bouton, nose on his paws, small body laid straight as the needle of a compass.
"So," Jamie said, "it's gone a little further than talk—maybe."
"Maybe?" I echoed. "An offer of fifty thousand pounds sounds fairly definite." Fifty thousand pounds, by current standards, was the yearly income of a good-sized duchy.
He raised one eyebrow cynically at the musical manuscript I had brought back with me from the convent.
"Aye, well. An offer like that is fairly safe, it it's contingent on either Charles or James setting foot in England. If Charles is in England, it means he's gotten sufficient backing from other places to get him to Scotland, first. No," he said, rubbing his chin thoughtfully, "what's interesting about this offer is that it's the first definite sign we've seen that the Stuarts—or one of them, at least—are actually making an effort at mounting a restoration attempt."
"One of them?" I caught the emphasis. "You mean you think James isn't in on this?" I looked at the coded message with even more interest.
"The message came to Charles," Jamie reminded me, "and it came from England—not through Rome. Fergus got it from a regular messenger, in a packet marked with English seals; not from a papal messenger. And everything I've seen in James's letters—" He shook his head, frowning. He hadn't yet shaved, and the morning light caught random sparks of copper among the auburn stubble of his beard.