“It’s green, all right? Green. The green of your eyes.”
“Thank you, princess,” she said, her voice a little rough. “I’m excited to wear it.”
Cosima’s brow furrowed, a ripple across its mirror pond, but then she smiled, politely, looking down at the guest book. Shecleared her throat. “I think I know what to do with this. The cipher Agatha made. If you’re interested.”
Edie glanced through the door that led to the kitchen, but Morag had bustled out of view.
Edie and Cosima had compared notes on what they knew about Agatha Llewellyn. She had written about a dozen moody, gory mystery and thriller novels in the seventies and eighties that were runaway bestsellers but that no one read much anymore. She was rumored to be a recluse, and her fans complained about her failure to complete the last story in her best-known series. What had brought her to Gregory Place or made her decide to pen a cipher in the guest book in 1977 was a mystery.
“You have to pay attention when I explain.” Cosima put her hand over the page with the cipher, frowning at Edie.
“I will try my hardest if you ignore my distracting stimming behaviors.” Edie stood up to change her position at the table.
“I don’t mind your squirming and wiggling.”
Cosima’s eyes went wide, and Edie laughed. She slid onto the pew bench next to Cosima. “What have we got?”
“Do you know about the Cistercian monks? The medieval sect. They broke off from the Benedictines around the twelfth century.”
“Oh. I only know about theotherCistercian sects. Not the medieval one.”
“I can’t tell if you’re being serious.” Cosima wrinkled her nose.
“These are the guys into manual labor and who invented their own math, isn’t that right?” Morag had appeared out of nowhere, making Edie jump. She sat down where Edie had been with a large mug of tea.
“Good god, announce yourself, old woman.”
“Yes,” Cosima said to Morag, ignoring Edie’s comment, “though they didn’t so much invent their own math as their own numbering system. They used variations on a vertical line to represent every number between one and nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine.” Cosima pointed at the symbols they had noticed on the message portion of Agatha’s signature.
“Those are Cistercian numbers?” Edie inspected the long row of lines. They looked like dozens of number ones, except each had a little appendage in a different place. Some looked like flags. Some like a stick figure with no head. “What’s the number?”
Cosima folded up the page, and the squares cut out of the paper each framed a Cistercian number. Now, next to every tiny window, there was a letter. “You can see how this is assigning letters to go with the Cistercian numbers.”
“Yes.”
“First, I had to write down what letter in the alphabet each Cistercian number went with.” Cosima flipped to a page in the notepad and showed it to Edie. “Then it was simply a matter of looking up what Cistercian number corresponds to what Arabic number, and then assigningthosenumbers to the alpha order letters. You’ll see that the reference cipher gives us three is A, six is Z, and so on.”
“Indeed simple. Ridiculously so.”
“Edie.” Cosima said this with a warning in her voice.
“Quite clever, lovey,” Morag said, taking a long sip of tea. “You won’t need sudoku to keep you sharp like I do.”
Edie took a deep breath. “Could you tell us what it says, Cosima?” she asked in a rush, holding her hands clasped as though begging.
“But I haven’t shown you how I cross-referenced both alphanumerical reference codes to crack what Agatha wrote.” Cosima flipped through several more pages.
Edie gently placed her hand over Cosima’s holding the notebook. “I do have limits.”
Cosima sighed. “Demeter mundum vastat sine filia Proserpinae, quam Hermione in saxum vertit, donec Perdita redit.”
“What it? Reddit?”
“I caught ‘Demeter’ and ‘Persephone,’” Morag said. “Is this about the myth?”
“Oh!” Edie raised her hand. “I do know that myth! The supplier I bought grape leaves from was called Demeter’s, and there was the entire story on their label. Demeter is the goddess of agriculture—”
“Well, actually—” Cosima interrupted.
