The Princess looked wary. “What is it?”
“Well, how would you and Princess Margaret like to have your own ultra-secret code to communicate in? That no one, not even Crawfie or Alah, could read?”
“Oh, yes, yes, please, Maggie.”
“Then let’s get started, shall we?”
It took a while, but Lilibet created a cipher. Maggie had a decoder, a giveaway from a long-ago jar of Ovaltine. It might have been a toy intended for children, but it was a descendant of the cipher disk, developed in the fifteenth century by Leon Battista Alberti. The center wheel had a circle of numbers, which turned to match a stationary outer circle of letters.
Maggie gave it to Lilibet, who took it with a sort of awe, twisting the dial this way and that.
“The decoder—really a cipher disk—can be used in one of two ways,” Maggie said. “The code can be a consistent monoalphabetic substitution for the entire cipher—or the disks can be moved periodically throughout the cipher, making it polyalphabetic.”
“What?” Lilibet said, knitting her brows.
“Hmmmm …” Maggie remembered her young charge was only fourteen. “The sender and the person receiving the messages would need to agree on a cipher key setting. The entire message is then encoded according to this key. You also could use a character to mean ‘end of word,’ although this makes the code less secure.…”
Lilibet looked concerned.
“Oh, come on, we’ll make one up and then you’ll see how fun it is,” Maggie said.
After a bit of thinking and moving the rings, Lilibet dipped her pen in a bottle of Parker Quink Black and wrote her first note, in code, to Margaret. The code was set for the 1 to indicate the start of the alphabet, set at E, for Elizabeth. “+” was to indicate the end of a word.
And so, “Meet me in the garden” became “9 1 1 16 + 9 1 + 5 10 + 16 4 1 + 3 23 14 26 1 10”—and by twisting the dial, and remembering the E setting, Lilibet could get to the correct letters to spell out the message.
“May I go and show Margaret, Maggie? Please? It will make her laugh, and she loves to laugh so much.”
“Of course,” Maggie said. “We’re done for the day. And be sure to teach her how the code works, so she can write back to you.”
“Maybe I could use the code when I write to—” the Princess began. Then she stopped herself.
“Write to …?” Maggie prodded.
“Well,” Lilibet said, blush staining her cheeks, “there’s this boy we all know. His name is Philip.”
“Oh?” Maggie said. Her lips twitched as she realized Lilibet had a crush.
“He’s a bit older than I am, and in the Royal Navy. But we’ve been writing to each other. Mummy and Daddy know, of course.” Her face creased with concern. “It’s all very proper.”
“I’m sure it is. And this Philip—he writes back?”
“He does!” Lilibet exclaimed. “Funny, witty letters with little sketches and doodles. He’s about to be made midshipman!” she said proudly.
“Well, he must be quite a good sailor, then.”
Lilibet’s blue eyes were large. “Oh, he is—he’s the best sailor the Royal Navy has,” she said. Maggie could see how deep the Princess’s feelings were for this young man. Then she started. “Do you have someone special, Maggie?”
Maggie was momentarily flustered. The Princess sensed her discomfort instantly. “It’s all right if you don’t want to talk about it. I shouldn’t have asked. Oh, now you’ll think I’m terribly rude.”
Maggie laughed. “Of course not. It’s just hard to talk about. But I do have someone special.” I did, Maggie thought. No, still do.
Lilibet leaned in. “What’s his name?”
“John. John Sterling. He used to be head private secretary to Mr. Churchill—we worked with each other at Number Ten Downing Street last summer.”
“And you fell in love?”
“Well, at first we didn’t. I didn’t even like him much—or so I thought. And I thought he couldn’t stand me. We used to bicker all the time.”
“Ah …” Lilibet sighed.
“But, you know—” Now it was Maggie’s turn to blush. “Eventually, we came to admit our, er, high regard for each other.”
“ ‘High regard’?”
“We, you know, we were in love.”
“Were?”
Freudian slip, Maggie? “He joined the Royal Air Force. I didn’t support him—I wanted him to stay at Number Ten.…” Tears filled her eyes, and Lilibet searched in her pocket and pulled out a handkerchief, which she handed to Maggie.