The Sixth Key(103)

He looked at it:

Jevousle gue cetindice dutres or qui apparti entaux seign eursderen nes etce stlam ort. Lefeur evele

EWOWSZZKQGKAQBEWZHCSOZVX

XOTDQTKWZIGSDGZPQUCAESJ

MQTGYDCAFZVYMFUAQBUWPNDGZRLEURZ

MQTGYDCAXSXSDRZWZRLVQAFFPSDAPW

POEKXSXDUGVVQXLKFSVLXSSWLI

PSIJUSIWXSMGUZVVQZRVQSJKQQYWDQYWL

‘It’s a cipher!’ Rahn said.

‘It was a simple cipher, at least the first part of the parchment. Still, it took Saunière some months to work it out, but once he found one word, seigneur, the rest began to form a recognisable pattern, and each word he picked out revealed other words in French, until he had deciphered the entire first part. It read: I bequeath to my successor this clue to the treasure that belongs to the lords of Rennes. It is death. Fire reveals it.

‘Saunière was an ambitious man, and the thought of treasure was enticing, but he could not understand the jumble of letters in the rest of the cipher. It vexed him terribly and he became obsessed with decoding it, without luck. Finally, he resolved to ignore the cipher entirely, convinced that the treasure had to be hidden somewhere else in the church. He took note of the words “It is death” and searched in the niche created at the foot of the altar wherein he suspected were buried relics as was customary in churches. When the niche was opened, he was emboldened by the fact that on the underside of the stone cap there was a depiction of the knightly lords of Rennes, however he found nothing except a few scraps hardly worth his trouble. He then took to the altar itself because altars are traditionally places of sacrifice. He looked in the pillars that held it up and again he found nothing, so he began to tear the church apart, under the guise of renovation.

‘Despite months of searching he failed to find anything, and yet he continued, for he had come too far. He then turned his attention to the ancient crypt, which he knew held the sepulchre of the lords of Rennes. Telling his parishioners that he wanted to shore up the foundations of the church, he began looking for a way down. He was convinced that the treasure was hidden in the crypt below the church and that there must be a hidden way to it. He did find the crypt eventually, but it had been ransacked, and was empty of anything valuable. Even this did not dissuade him. He continued his search and discovered a tunnel and at the end of it a wall. This, he was certain, led to the crypt of the dames of Rennes. The night he began to dismantle the wall, there was a downpour and the crypt flooded with water, as it no doubt did last night. He only just managed to escape with his life. After that, one could say, Saunière became slightly mad. Rather than wait for the floodwater to recede, he began looking in the cemetery late in the night for another entry into the crypt.’

‘Did he find it?’ Eva asked.

‘Yes, there was an entry near the church concealed by a gravestone inscribed with the words Et in Arcadia Ego.’

‘So he did use the crypt for magic rituals?’ Eva asked.

The woman gave her a whisk of a glance. ‘That is not important. What is important is that he never found what he wanted in that crypt and it ate away at him until finally, at his wits’ end, he decided to tell his friend about the parchment.’

‘Abbé Boudet?’ Rahn said.

‘Yes, of course.’ She smiled as if he were an orphan and she had just adopted him. ‘Boudet suggested that Saunière go to the Bishop of Carcassonne, a certain Billard. The Bishop was very interested in what Saunière had to say and he even gave him money to travel to Paris, to see if someone could solve the cipher.’

‘To whom did he take it?’ Rahn asked.

‘Why, to Association Angelica, of course, who are based at Saint Sulpice.’ She sat back, with narrowed eyes. ‘You see, Bishop Billard also belonged to the same order that Boudet belonged to – and Bigou before him. Billard understood clearly the significance of the parchment and he told Saunière to go to Saint Sulpice, to see Abbé Hoffat who was a senior member of that same order, and whose knowledge of all things occult was unsurpassed. The man realised instantly that the note was related to the secret their order had been safeguarding for many years and he set about trying to decipher it. He worked out that in the second part of the note he was dealing with le chiffre indéchiffrable – a Vigenère cipher. Do you know what that is?’

Rahn nodded, thinking that he wasn’t going to tell her how many reports on ciphers he had written for Himmler.

‘Then you will know, Monsieur Rahn, why the Vigenère cipher is called indecipherable. Without the master word, it was impossible to unscramble the message and therefore find the treasure. And they did not have the master word. They tried every word in the first part of the cipher and a number of combinations of words but even with his vast knowledge, Hoffat failed to find the solution! After that, Saunière contacted those with whom he had a special connection from his early days in Narbonne, thinking they might be able to help him.’