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"Friends of Alec's," Julia murmured, coming up beside her. "They arrived unexpectedly a few hours ago."

"Oh." Cressida watched as Alec strode into the room. He glanced around, his eye catching and lingering a moment on her. He gave her a tiny, almost imperceptible smile before going to his mother's side and greeting the new guests.

"They came from London. Mother’s been in a frenzy of curiosity about them, but she'll never ask. Alec can do no wrong in her eyes."

"Julia," murmured Cressida.

Her friend put up one hand, watching her brother. "I'm not angry, Cressida. I just don't know what to think about him anymore, and I believe he prefers it that way. He's decided to keep his secrets, and there’s nothing I can do to change that." The anger that had once heated her words about Alec was gone, replaced by something more like resignation.

Cressida shifted uncomfortably. She alone knew Alec's secret, it seemed. She longed to defend him, to justify and explain to Julia why he’d been so silent. She longed to tell Julia that whatever his family had suffered, Alec had endured far, far worse, not just from the wounds that scarred his chest but from the damage to his spirit that still followed him, damage he still struggled to repair. And most of all she longed to tell Julia to trust him, to believe in him. He was her brother. Cressida knew that if her father were to stroll into the room this moment, even after all she had learned about him and his actions, she would still run to embrace him and her heart would leap with gladness that he was well, because he was her father. For all Papa's faults, she couldn't help loving him. How much might it have meant to Alec if his sister had been able to set aside her hurt and anger, and do the same?

The guests were Mr. and Mrs. Wallace, stopping in for a few days on their journey north. Mr. Wallace was brashly charming, easily falling into conversation with everyone. His wife was quieter, but unsheathed a sharp wit when she did speak, with a lilting French accent. Mrs. Wallace was seated next to Alec, and whenever she spoke, he paid strict attention to her every word. Mr. Wallace spared them no mind; at the other end of the table he was busy regaling the two Mrs. Hayeses and their daughters with tales of his native Scotland.

Cressida found herself watching Mrs. Wallace after dinner. There was something quietly watchful and alert about her, unlike her husband. That gentleman seemed to have a hundred jokes and humorous stories, and he kept them all laughing. Although, for all Mr. Wallace's loquaciousness, neither he nor his wife revealed much about themselves. Rather like Alec had done when he first returned to Marston.

The thought stopped her. Could they be, like Alec. . . ? But no; surely spies didn’t pay social calls on other spies. She glanced at Mrs. Wallace again, so darkly beautiful and polite as she listened to Mrs. Hayes. Could that delicate lady be a spy? Cressida tried to picture her in the role, then smiled at her own imagination. As if she even knew what spies did, let alone how they looked.

Thankfully everyone retired early. The Wallaces had spent the day traveling, and John and his family were to depart on the morrow. After saying good night to Granny, Cressida and Callie returned to their room.

"You're not planning to work on that now, are you?" Callie wrinkled her nose as Cressida took out the journal again after getting ready for bed.

"For a little while. I think I'm on the brink of solving it. I can feel it."

Her sister sighed. "You and puzzles! Well, don't let me disturb you." She got into bed and opened a book.

Cressida pulled her chair up close to the writing desk and opened the journal.

This code was frustrating her to no end. It appeared to be simple, and it surely was; more than once, she thought she had it cracked, only to see things fall apart as she applied her key to larger sections of the journal. If the code had changed over the years, she wryly acknowledged, she might never get it. But she pressed on, tinkering with different passages and trying to fit the information into one encompassing model.

She had inherited her love of puzzles from her father. Papa had an ear for languages, and whenever he came home he would try to teach her and Callie what he had picked up. Instead of telling them what he was saying, though, he would just speak to them in Spanish or Portuguese. She learned to map some words by their proximity to other words, deducing "sister" by how often it occurred before or after Callie's name. This code, she decided, was probably much the same. She made a list of battles and places with corresponding dates, and had thus decoded a number of words, mainly places in the Peninsula which shed little light on the rest of the journal. But those small successes did reveal a few letters, and she had covered pages and pages with tentative translations that all ground to a halt eventually.

With a sigh, she picked up the journal and tried to look at it as a whole. Perhaps she just needed to listen to its flow a little more, as if it were its own language, and stop concentrating on individual words. She let her eyes drift across the lines as if she were reading. One combination kept snagging her eye, "sg." There were quite a few instances of it, and she thought it meant "an." She couldn't think of another two-letter word in English that occurred so often. But that implied things about the words that followed it, and she hadn't been able to make it work. Cressida huffed in impatience and rolled her head from side to side to stretch her neck. If only it were three letters. Then she would think it represented "the," which would eliminate so many of the problems she was having with vowels. . .

She raised her head as the thought sank in. What if. . . ? Her hand shaking, she tore another page from her sketchbook and tried it. Once she quit trying to force "an" from "sg," things began to fall into place. She counted letters again and realigned her mapping. And when she applied her new key to a paragraph chosen at random, the whole thing made sense. She made some corrections to her code—it seemed "sg" didn't always translate directly to “t-h-e,” but only when it stood alone—and tried another paragraph. With a thrill, she realized that one also made sense, and she clapped her hands together in triumph.

All thought of sleep vanished. She opened to the beginning of the journal and began translating. In front of her eyes, the curtain lifted on her father's life in the army. He described the dirt and the heat, the drenching rainstorms and the paucity of good food. He wrote of the horrific slaughter of thousands of horses at Corunna as the British Navy whisked the army away from being crushed by the pursuing French. He wrote of his fellow soldiers and the officers who sometimes led them to victory, and sometimes sent them to certain deaths through sheer stupidity. He wrote of pomegranates and port wine and long brown Portuguese cigarettes, and the startling carnage created by Shrapnel shells. Every so often she had to make another small addition to her key, but overall the code was broken. When Cressida's fingers cramped and she had to put down her pen, she was shocked to realize hours had gone by since she sat down to work.

Callie was fast asleep. The house was quiet. Cressida simply had to tell someone, though. She pulled on her dressing gown, snatched up her papers and the journal, and slipped from the room, heading straight for Alec's study.

To her immense relief a line of light glowed under the door. She tapped gently, then pushed the door open at his muffled summons.

He rose from the wide mahogany desk, his hair rumpled and his cravat pulled askew. “Come in,” he said at once. “Is something wrong?”

She came into the room and closed the door behind her. “No, nothing is wrong. I’ve just made some progress in solving this code, and. . . well, I wanted to tell someone,” she said with an embarrassed little laugh, catching sight of the clock. It was very late. He would think her demented over this journal. “I didn't realize it was so late. I don't want to be a bother.”

“No, no, of course not. Since John is leaving, there's just more to be done.” He pushed aside some of the papers on his desk and motioned for her to come over. Cressida hurried forward to lay the journal in front of him, eagerness banishing her hesitation.

“I realized it’s a fairly simple rearrangement cipher,” she said, leaning down to show him her notes. “At first I tried to match the letters to those that appear most often in English, but that always got snarled in the end. Just tonight I discovered a twist: not all these words map exactly. For instance, ‘sg’ represents ‘the.’ I’ve checked it through several pages and it seems to hold true unless the letters ‘t-h-e’ are part of a larger word, like ‘other,’ and then it reverts to the rearrangement scheme. But I was able to translate two separate passages into sensible English, and then began in earnest. I think this is the correct key.” She laid her much-annotated key on top.

Alec was frowning at her scribbled notes. “You mean the letters are simply out of order?”

She shook her head. “No, not quite. Think of it instead as a reassignment. An ‘e’ now means a ‘k,’ for example. Well, not always, but usually. I can see that he got better at it as time went on. In the beginning of the journal”—she flipped open to a page near the front—"every letter is formed individually, as if he had to keep checking the key. But later, the words are written almost as if he knew this different alphabet by heart and didn’t need to think before writing.” She turned to the middle to show him.

He leaned forward, cocking his head as he studied the page. “What does he write of?”

Cressida pulled out the sheets where she had begun translating. “Army matters and any other thing that interested him. Who’s been promoted, rumors, battles, who was killed. An argument between officers, and a soldier whipped for desertion. But I’ve only just begun, on the first entries from. He talks of Corunna and Oporto.”

“A decade ago.” He sighed and propped an elbow on the desk. “How relevant is that?”