The name of the English squire was Holmes.

  Of the fourteen paintings in the crate, three were by Carle Vernet: a furious battle of lunging horses, raised swords, and spotless uniforms; a fabulously glossy and long-tailed Arabian stallion; and the small, affectionate portrait of a young woman with arched eyebrows and frothy blonde eighteenth-century curls. Most of the rest were by his massively prolific son, Horace, and ran the gamut from a pair of arch-necked greys in a field to a ship under fire and an unfinished study of an African soldier. The nicest one showed three proud men on caparisoned camels with the servants well hidden behind them. The man in the lead was tucking his head down, as if sharing a jest with the painter.

  Then I pulled out the portrait of a face I knew.

  Not personally—she’d died half a century before I was born, but the brooch Holmes had given me on my eighteenth birthday held a miniature of this same woman, his grey-eyed grandmother, Camille Vernet-Lecomte. It had been painted by her brother Horace. And though I was no expert, it looked to me as if this was by the same hand.

  Either Damian had not recognised her, or he’d had his own reasons for leaving his great-grandmother Camille in the box rather than propping her on the mantelpiece.

  At the end of the row of paintings, I arranged a trio of pieces that lacked signatures, whose styles were beyond my skill at identifying. One was a dark and melodramatic study of Napoleon, slumped in a chair, which I suspected had been painted in the years just prior to the emperor’s 1815 exile. The next was a kitten curled up before a fireplace, an unlikely piece of domesticity after all the race-horses and battle scenes. The last showed a grey-haired woman seated looking out of a window, the head of an infant tucked into the side of her neck. The distinctive curtains declared it a pair to the Émile Vernet-Lecomte painting of the two women on the sitting-room wall, although this one was neither signed nor dated.

  I stood it at the end of the row. It drew my eye as the furious horses, Egyptian countryside, and sleeping kitten did not. I wondered why he had not shown the women’s faces in either painting. Perhaps they were not commissioned portraits, leaving Vernet-Lecomte free to explore the eloquent pose of the women, here with the child’s head, in the other one with the younger leaning into the older, the echo of their hair colour and garments in the room’s background details. Indeed, the prominence of some of the objects suggested a significance I could not begin to decipher.

  After a while, I shuffled backwards so I could survey this gallery of art by no-longer-fashionable painters. I could see absolutely nothing that was worth breaking through a window to steal.

  I decided to leave out the overlooked picture of Camille to show to Damian. The rest I began to return to the crate, but when I tried to slide the tallest of them back into place—a Horace Vernet desert scene of a seated falconer—it stuck up above the rest. The excelsior must have gathered into a clump at the bottom, I thought with irritation, and pushed my arm down to dig the stuff out.

  Only to have my fingers hit something more solid than wood shavings.

  My hand came up with a small, soft, leather-bound note-book. The thongs that held it shut hadn’t been worked open for many years, but eventually they came loose before the dry leather broke. I blew away the lingering wisps of wood, and opened the covers.

  It was a journal—a memoir, as its introductory words said: Ce livre d’images est en guise de mémoire. I thought at first the strong, clean handwriting belonged to a young man, but by the end of the first paragraph, I had changed my mind. A woman, almost certainly. As I read further, her words made my eyebrows rise, so that I turned the page with considerable interest.

  The second page had been written by the same assured hand, but instead of formal French, I was looking at tidy rows of complete gibberish: they were letters, yes, but drawn from several alphabets. And some of the shapes were from no writing system I knew.

  It had to be some kind of code. Grammatical marks were the usual mix of commas, periods, and French quotation marks. Paragraphs began with indentations—unless the space at the front of some lines had some other meaning. Every so often, the text would break off before the end of a page, and the next page would begin with two lines of header, as if some form of Chapter One followed by a title or descriptor.

  I turned through the pages, and found that everything after that French introduction was a methodical, incomprehensible mix of letters and shapes. If not code, it was the work of a madwoman—a remarkably precise madwoman.

  I jerked as a sound broke the long hours of silence. Before I could raise myself from the stool, it was followed by the housekeeper’s voice.

  “Madame? Êtes-vous ici, Madame?”

  “I’m back here, Mme LaRue,” I called.

  The journal, I discovered, fit nicely into a pocket, and the last two paintings slid easily into their crate. When Mme LaRue came in, the only signs of my intrusion were the assembled image-lamp and the painting of Camille Vernet.

  Only when she flipped on the light switch did I notice how long I had sat here—and with the realisation, my foot began to pound, my back threatened a cramp, and my inner self called out for sustenance.

  Fortunately, she had brought a dinner over for me, and when I was settled—at the actual dining table this time, no longer in the informality of the kitchen—she also took care to pull up a low stool with some cushions for my foot.

  As she came and went, she assured me that Holmes had caught the train for Nîmes, and that M. LaRue had taken the drawing to the photographer in Délieux for reproduction. He would pick up the prints in the morning. I in turn reassured her that there was no need to provide a cooked breakfast for me, and that indeed, I was equally happy with either a midday dinner or a cheese-and-bread luncheon, whichever was simpler for her.

  The latter brought a tut to her lips, the idea that today’s emergency rations might be taken for the norm. And I did enjoy her cooking.

  Once the dishes were clean, every kitchen surface was sparkling, and every window locked and shuttered, she exhorted me to rest my foot, which looked as if it pained me, and used her key to lock the kitchen door.

  I lingered over my coffee, and my thoughts.

  They went, first, to Holmes. One would think I’d be well accustomed to his sudden absences, but I did feel them. And I did worry, just a little, when he went off without someone to watch his back. Someone who, unlike Damian, did not allow bitterness to taint her affection, and might not become so totally engrossed in work that she could overlook monkeys, bugles, and barking dogs.

  Perhaps I was not giving Damian sufficient credit. He’d survived nearly four years as a soldier in the front-line trenches after all. And even considering the burden of shell shock that followed most soldiers home—which in Damian’s case brought severe claustrophobia—his experiences would have left him not only alert to threat, but also prepared to defend his family.

  However, there was a world of difference between open battle and stealthy attack. He was different from Holmes in so many ways, oblivious to matters that did not bear upon his art.

  How much of that difference was due to their upbringing? I wondered. Damian was eighteen when Irene died, while Holmes lost his mother at eleven, and lived after that with a distraught father. There was a reason Holmes kept clear of his family’s home. Damian, on the other hand, was happily making his mother’s house his own. He would not be doing so were it not a place of good memories.

  Which circled my thoughts back to Holmes: he claimed that he had come to terms with Irene’s decision to push him away, leaving him in the dark about the existence of a son. But how could any man be at ease knowing that a woman he loved had made that key decision for him, had deliberately chosen to free him for his work rather than tying him down to paternity? He had to feel that he had ultimately failed her. Failed to win her trust.

  So much about the man and his past that I did not know—and those things I did know, how much I did not truly understand.

  My cup was empty, so I left it in the kitchen sink and climbed into my night-clothes, raising up my throbbing extremity on a pillow at the end of the bed. I switched on the bed-side reading lamp, and opened the coded journal in hopes of inspiration.

  And woke at dawn to birdsong, the light still burning, the book lying open on my chest.

  Chapter Eight

  No telegraph flimsy awaited me, no telephone call had broken my sleep. I told myself as I dressed that Holmes had no reason to interrupt his rescue mission to reassure me.

  Sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of French coffee as thick as motor oil, I opened the journal again. It seemed less of a code than a personal cipher, reminiscent of those that Holmes and I occasionally used. The previous day’s survey had left me with the impression that it was built primarily out of four alphabets: the Latin one used by all European languages; Greek, which might be expected of someone with an education; Arabic, less likely; and Devanagari, a script used only in India. This last gave me pause: Holmes is not the only one to mistrust coincidences.

  Now I spotted some letters that could be Cyrillic or Coptic, along with a pepperpot sprinkling of Greek lambdas and neat plus marks that stood unconnected with other letters—the sort of obvious abbreviations any undergraduate would employ, a quick way of writing “the” or “and.” But what to make of the occasional squiggle? Were those runes, Pitman shorthand, or simply an uncharacteristically clumsy pen nib? Plus the occasional astrological symbol, mathematical mark, and three different characters that could be hieroglyphics.

  When I had finished my breakfast—I’d been pleased, but not surprised, to find fresh bread, fruit, milk, and a newspaper left on the table for me at heaven only knows what hour—I armed myself with pencil, pad, and foot-cushions, and got to work.

  I had read the introduction twice the day before, its French as clear, elegant, and old-fashioned as the handwriting itself, but this morning, with a fresh mind and a lovely day building outside, I read it again, translating it into a note-book as I went:

  This book of images is by way of a memoir, and an explanation. Perhaps also a request for forgiveness, although I cannot see what I might have done with my life other than what I did. For any harm this has brought, I am sorry. Nonetheless, I swear it is nothing to the harm that would have been done, had I chosen another path.

  I am well aware of the dangers inherent in committing my story to the page. I am certain that, despite all the years and all the distance, watch is still kept. At least, it was when this journal of images was written, and I imagine that, considering what is involved in the matter, it will take time for interest to fade. Memories are long when greed and resentments combine.

  So, my compromise: I will set down a series of key events from my life, concealed in a manner few people will be able to unlock. Even then, this is not an autobiography, merely twelve detailed images with long gaps between them. I trust that “those that have eyes to see” might interpret them as a sequence.

  If you, reading this, bear me and mine no ill will, then I can only wish you a pleasant hunt for meaning—even if you are not one of those for whom it was intended.

  A woman’s handwriting, definitely, strong, even, and controlled, with touches of decorative emphasis on the up-strokes. French in training rather than English or American—my brief thought that this was Irene Adler speaking, in a journal crafted for Holmes’ eyes that had somehow ended up in the crate, died a quick death. There was a degree of formality that pointed to careful tutelage some long time ago, indicating that she was of the leisured classes, but one of the rare families that thought the education of women a good thing.

  Her own native intelligence shone from every letter and word.

  She used a good pen that left no stutters or gouges. The ink looked as black as the day it was set down, and the leather cover was supple apart from the ties, suggesting it might be contemporary with the later paintings it had been stored with—those of the 1890s—rather than those from a century earlier. The paper was thick, expensive, and very white. When I held the page up to the window, I could see a watermark, and made a mental note to sketch it when the sunlight was strong against the glass.

  But what of the message itself? When a woman of intelligence, breeding, and education spoke of threat—the French word she used was “menace,” not “risque” or “danger”—I thought it as well to pay attention.

  I suspected that it was a basic letter-substitution, since the characters were grouped in ways that resembled written words: the two lines at the top of the first page, for example, held a grouping of eight characters, a space, then five. Below it, a phrase (?) of four “words” was broken into two, seven, three, and eight “letters.” And then the text itself began.

  When Mme LaRue’s key sounded in the kitchen door some five hours later, I was still struggling to prise any meaning at all out of the initial lines of text.

  I laid down my pen gratefully, swearing to myself that, if it turned out this unknown woman of intelligence and education had been playing some elaborate game, I was going to hunt her down—hunt down her grandchildren, if need be—and give them a piece of my mind.

  Holmes tends to regard meal-times as an irritant inflicted on him by landladies and other simple-minded folk, but in fact, an interruption can be useful when one has been pounding one’s head against an obstinate piece of work. This particular interruption consisted not only of nutrition, in the form of Mme LaRue’s fragrant casserole and all the accompanying dishes, but also of M. LaRue’s report on the photographic reproductions of Damian’s would-be burglar.

  “I had him print twenty copies, as you said,” he told me, laying a small stack on the table. “But I’ve left some of them there, in Délieux, with shopkeepers who have windows on the main streets, and did the same here in the village.”

  “Excellent, thank you.” I took a copy from the stack, finding it as crisp and clear as I’d hoped. The photographer had added a telephone number at the bottom. “Whose number is this?”

  “It rings here, or to our house if the family is away. Madame la docteur thought to have a line installed, in case someone needed her.”

  I’d seen the device on her desk, new-looking though without a rotary dial—no automated exchanges, here in the countryside. “I shall listen for it,” I assured him.

  “If you miss a call, les Maries will be happy to re-connect you. Our operators,” he explained. “Both named Marie. They are there from first light to perhaps seven in the evening. If you try and they don’t pick up, give them a few minutes to finish their coffee or return from the garden.”

  “One hopes there are not many medical emergencies at night.”

  “Oh, we bang on their door,” he said, as if that was self-evident. “We all know where they live.”

  The LaRues left me to my meal, using their key to lock up behind them.

  The food was as good as its odour had promised. I drank a glass of the wine M. LaRue had set on the table, and when I had finished, I transported the dishes into the kitchen without catastrophe and poured a cup from the pot of coffee Mme LaRue had made. I eyed the doorway, with its two steps down to the garden, and left the coffee to go back into Dr Henning’s surgery.

  As I thought, she had a collection of medical props leaning in the corner, including three lengths of canes. I traded my crutches for one, and gingerly hobbled back down the hallway. Having one hand free meant that I could carry my coffee into the garden, barely spilling any, and sit, letting the sun beat down on my upturned face.

  An interruption, a new position, a change in surroundings. Even with eyes closed, my body knew it was not in an English garden. The odours were different, the sunlight against my eyelids more intense. The bells tracing the passage of time from the nearby church steeple sounded flat to ears accustomed to the full-throated swing of Anglican bells. The rise and fall of a half-heard conversation was not the rhythm of English; the creaks and hoofbeats from a passing cart were subtly foreign; a distant dog’s monotonous bark seemed to have an accent.

  Though the neighbour’s cockerel sounded the same.

  The woman’s code used none of the standard cipher techniques—at least, not only one of the standards. Letter-substitution would not account for the odd scattering of symbols or marks. I’d tried ignoring everything that was not an actual letter, but what was left gave me no discernible patterns. Picking out the sequences based on the alphabets—Roman letters copied onto one page, Greek on another—had left me with sheets of unrelated letters. And if she’d been using a combination—say, letter-substitution with a random smatter of extraneous symbols—how were the eyes of her intended audience supposed to pick them out?

  I could see no method to the lines on the page.

  Perhaps it was in fact madness, despite the clear control in the handwriting. Or a complicated joke from a woman with far, far too much time on her hands. It reminded me of the codex snatched up by the collector Wilfrid Voynich from under the noses of the Vatican Library, just before the War. The codex was centuries old, and so many generations of scholars had flung themselves at it, only to bounce off its impenetrable pages of flowing and illuminated script, one could only reach the conclusion that the beautifully decorated text was in fact a cheerful and elaborate hoax.

  Still, one had to begin with the assumption that it would make sense, once the clue to it appeared. That was the first thing Holmes had pointed out about ciphers, back in the early days when I was his apprentice: there is little reason to put something into code if no one can ever figure it out. The key is the key—something that the intended audience will either know or have to hand. This could be a pattern, a piece of knowledge, or the page of a book held in common, but whatever unlocks the cipher, it has to be something the desired reader has, while an unwanted intruder does not.