The Book of Air and Shadows

walked off.
    Mary Peg bid her son good-bye and said, “That’s awful about your kids. Your wife must be in agony. Shouldn’t you be over there with her?”
    “I should, but she doesn’t want me. She blames me for the whole affair and she’s right. And I have a sense that the kidnapping is not what it seems.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “I’d rather not say just yet. But I’ve been putting some things together and I don’t think that they’re in any immediate danger. In the future, who knows, but not now, provided we can locate this thing.”
    “Oh, it’s perfectly clear where it is.”
    I expressed astonishment. “Yes,” she said, “they tossed it down that well he mentioned, you know the one where Bracegirdle followed Shakespeare and his goon into the forest and they saw the recusant service. That ruined priory…” She shuffled through the printouts and found the page: “Saint Bosa’s Well. Where else would it be? He says they went up to Stratford and the well is just half a day’s ride away.”
    “Maybe,” I said, “but where is the well? Bracegirdle said it was a secret even in Shakespeare’s time. It could be under a factory or a housing development.”
    “True. And in that case we’ll have to announce it publicly and turn the whole mess over to the authorities. Which I sometimes think we should have done from day one. But”-here an uncharacteristically wolfish expression appeared on the Map of Ireland-“I sure would like to find that play. So we can only hope that the well is still bubbling away, forgotten for centuries.”
    After that she made more coffee and we drank it with Jameson whiskey in it. We talked about family, I recall, and children, and their joys and discontents. I rather regretted not liking her son and decided that it was an aspect of my craziness and resolved to be more agreeable to him in future. After some time had passed in this desultory fashion, Klim emerged with a glum look.
    “I am sad to say that this ciphertext does not generate plaintext from any writing of William Shakespeare that is recorded by history. This is not deadly for us, because as I believe I have said earlier, we can run guessed probable plaintexts along the ciphertext and see if we get something intelligible and this I have started to do, but I desired to have some of your Irish coffee at this time.”
    This was provided, and I asked him if he had found something intelligible yet.
    “Yes, of course, we start with the commonest words in English and see if the ciphertext gives us, let us say, a
the
in either direction using a standard tabula recta. Of course Bracegirdle could have used a nonstandard tabula, but he has not before this, so let us suppose he is hurried and wished to stay simple. So we use the computer to query if any three letters of the ciphertext will generate a
t-h-e
trigram as part of our key, and you see here that we do: both
TKM
and
WLK
give us
the
, and when we run that key back against this ciphertext it gives us
ADI
and
DEG
, which fortunately are both trigrams common in English. Similarly running
and
gives us one hit and the plaintext
FAD
, which is also a good English trigram. Running
be
gives two hits, and we get
ENDF
for the plaintext and also a little bonus, because the first
be
comes right before that
the
we have already discovered, and so we know that
be the
is part of the key text. And so we go on from here. Each little advance gives us more of the plaintext and more of the key text and the two decipherings reinforce each other, which is why the running key based on a book is so weak. For this reason the KGB only used almanacs and trade reports with many tables of numbers, so the entropy is higher. Now the next word we try should be
is
or
of,
I believe…”
    “No,” said Mary Peg, “try
Jesus
.”
    “This is religious advice, my dear?”
    “No, the word. You said you ran the key against the complete works and come up empty?”
    “Yes. Aside from some purely random runs of pseudosense.”
    “But he wrote one thing that’s not in his published works. His epitaph.”
    She ran to a shelf and pulled out Schoenbaum’s
Shakespeare’s Lives
, and there it was on the first page:
    Good friend for Jesus’ sake forbear
To dig the dust enclosed here.
Blessed be the man that spares these stones
And cursed be he that moves my bones.
    “On second thought,” she said, “it should be with the archaic spelling. I think it’s in Wood’s book.”
    It was. Klim