Free C by Tom McCarthy

every night they get to watch Kinetoscope projections. It becomes a ritual: as soon as supper’s over the bedsheet’s hauled up, chairs laid out and reel after reel fed into the mechanism. Serge carries the sounds of the celluloid strip running through its gate to bed with him, clicking and shuffling in his ears long after the machine’s been put to sleep, more real and present than the trickle of the stream or chirping grasshoppers. Each time Widsun racks up a new spool and starts running it, Serge feels a rush of anticipation run through the cogs and sprockets of his body; his mind merges with the bright bedsheet, lit up with the possibilities of what might dance across it in the next few seconds, its outrageous metamorphoses as moths’ and mosquitoes’ shadows on the screen turn into jumping hairs and speckles, then the first unsteady pictures, empty linen springing into artificial life.
    Widsun stays at Versoie for more than a week. Each morning, over eggs and kippers, he peruses the Times ’s personal notices.
    “It’s amazing that these fools still think they’re safe conducting their illicit business in rail-fence cipher. Break it before my egg goes cold, what?”
    “What are they saying?” asks Sophie.
    “Hmm, let’s see. It’s a three-line rail-fence, a, d, g … d-a-r-l … Got it: ‘Darling Hepzibah’—Hepzibah? What kind of name is that?—‘Will meet you Reading Sunday 15.25 train Didcot–Reading.’ Reading you all right, you idiots.”
    “Do you think they’re eloping?” Sophie says.
    “Ladies don’t ask those kinds of questions,” Maureen tells her as she clears her plate. “Or drink three cups of coffee.”
    “This one’s using atbash, at least,” Widsun continues.
    “Tell me what he’s saying!” Sophie chirps, creaming her dark cup and sliding from her chair to wander over to his.
    “ V for e  …” Widsun mumbles. “ Q as null-sign … Give me one tick …” Sophie leans on his broad shoulder, peering over him into the page as his pencil flicks between the encrypted text and a row of letters scrawled in hangman-style beneath it, adding, crossing out. “Righty-ho: ‘Rose. Smell of your bosom lingers on my clothes and spirit. Must meet again next week. Advise when Piers away using this channel.’ The saucy scoundrel! I’ve a mind to give him a reply.”
    “Oh, let’s!” she squeals, patting her hands across his back. “You can teach me the code.”
    “My delightful child, nothing would give me greater pleasure.”
    He whisks her away to his room and they spend the whole morning there, poring over lines of Scytale, Caesar shift and Vigenère. Widsun hovers over her, his chin above her hair, correcting the odd letter here and there. Serge tries to join in, but the sequences, their transpositions and substitutions, are too convoluted for him to keep track of. After an hour he’s reduced to sitting at the escritoire in Widsun’s room and playing with Widsun’s personal seal and ink set, stamping the man’s signature across the sheets of headed government paper that he’s brought with him from London, and then, when these give out, his own forearm.
    “Leave us alone,” says Sophie. “Go and do something else.”
    “You can’t tell me what to do,” Serge snaps back. “And besides, Papa wouldn’t let you do this if he knew.”
    It’s true. Carrefax hates the notion of codes, ciphers and encryption. “Goes against the whole principle of communication,” he harrumphs to Widsun over post-lunch brandy and cigars one afternoon.
    “Secure communication,” Widsun replies, stabbing his cigar precisely as though plugging its lit point into some invisible telephone exchange socket in the library’s air.
    “Secure—what? Secure from whom?”
    “Your enemies.”
    “Are hearing people deaf ones’ enemies?”
    “Ah, yes,” taking a puff. “Your muted flock. In a way, that’s what I—”
    “Muted no longer once they’ve been here for a