Free The Boleyn King by Laura Andersen

available but not obvious, most likely amongst her personal belongings. We need to search the chamber.”
    Minuette bit her lip, and Dominic prepared to overcome her scruples about privacy and the ethical ramifications of rifling through a dead friend’s belongings. But then she said decisively, “Wait here and I’ll be back.”
    She didn’t wait for a reply, and Dominic was left awkwardly alone. He did at least stand up, since he was all at once aware of sitting on the bed where she slept. When his mind strayed to a fragmented image of her thin Greek dress and bare arms, he took to pacing like William. Although, could it be called pacing when he could take only four steps before hitting the window and having to turn to take the four steps back to the open door? Maybe he should close the door. Would it not cause comment if he was seen in here?
    He was still debating the matter when he heard Minuette’s footsteps. They sounded triumphant, and her face, when she reached him, was bright with hope.
    “Here.” She handed him a book, a volume of Petrarch’s sonnets in Italian. “I don’t know precisely what a list of keywords looks like, but Alyce gave us the hint herself.”
    “She did?”
    “In what she wrote to me.” Minuette plucked the covering letter from Dominic’s hands and read the postscript aloud. “ ‘Thank you for the loan of Petrarch. If I forget to return the volume, you may retrieve it yourself from my chest.’ ” She smiled. “This book was never mine. I don’t know where she got it, but it wasn’t from me.”
    Dominic whistled softly. “That does indicate this book is the key. Alyce was clever.” And frightened , he thought.
    “Can you solve it?”
    “Probably. May I take these with me?”
    “Will you promise to let me know what they say?”
    So much for keeping her out of all this. “Give me a few hours, and I’ll let you know what I find.”
    It took two hours for Dominic to locate the first keyword. The volume of Petrarch—all 365 sonnets written to his adored Laura in Italian—yielded a handful of randomly underlined words scattered widely throughout the text. Working on the assumption that Alyce had kept her messages in chronological order, he matched the first underlined word— mirabil in the second line of the fourth sonnet—to the first message, but it yielded only more nonsense.
    He sighed. It was going to be a long afternoon.
    He moved on to the next underlined word ( amor in line six of the twenty-third sonnet) and through two more unsuccessful attempts before he had it. The keyword for the first message was venir , in the first line of the forty-seventh sonnet. Quickly, the random jumble of letters in Alyce’s message gave way to plainness: What does she say of Mary?
    Refusing to ponder the possibilities, Dominic moved on to the second message, prepared to go through another ten attempts at trial and error to decipher them all. But as he looked at the list he’d made of the underlined words and the sonnets they’d come from, he was struck by an idea. The first keyword had been in the first line of its sonnet. Was it the line order, rather than the sonnet order, that revealed the right keywords?
    He went back to the fourth sonnet and mirabil , which came in the second line. Sure enough, using that word the second message was easily deciphered. The remaining nine messages revealed themselves just as quickly following that pattern until he had complete translations of every ciphered letter Alyce de Clare had been hoarding.
    Success gave him no pleasure. When he was finished transcribing, he put his head in his hands and rubbed his aching temples. Then he reached inside his doublet for the folded paper he’d been carrying on him since last night.
    He smoothed it out gently, for it was quite old and yellowed, with hints of foxing from damp. But the broadside—the sort affixed to buildings around the city as a means of news and persuasion—was only too