Eighteen Ninety Four

Day 7 - Musical Cryptogram

Magda felt her heart skip slightly at their words. She looked swiftly back at the Ghost, Vernet, still dripping, crossing the gap to look too.

"You think that there's a clue in there?" Magda asked them, trying to not sound too excited.

"One of the lesser known facts about Johannes Sebastian Bach is that he used to regularly used musical cryptograms in his music," Vernet stated, looking at the page with renewed interest. "The BACH motif runs through his work, it's the pattern of B flat, A, C, B natural."

"Why B natural?"

"Because in German music, B natural is noted as H," The Ghost explained before Vernet could.  "Many other musicians also included their names in their works, but not many were as successful with it as Bach, given that his name leant to being included."

"Exactly," Vernet glanced at Madga. "It might be that some-one dressed this book up deliberately to look like one of Bach's notebooks in order to imply the inclusion of a musical cryptogram. Stenography is an old trick, I believe the Greeks were the first to implement it, so it could be the first hint."

"But how are you meant to make it work if you have 26 letters of the alphabet and only 8 notes in an octave?" Magda asked slowly. "Not including the sharps and flats?"

"Well, Bach used the German method, which does rely on using the named notes," Vernet glanced around. "Do you have a spare piece of paper?"

The Ghost stood and replaced the book on the table in the centre. His golden eyes swept the surface and within seconds he had swiftly pulled a piece of paper and a pencil out of the mass of objects and paper. Taking the implements with a nod, Vernet drew out a table as below;

A B C D E F G

H I J K L M N

O P Q R S T U

V W X Y Z

Magda looked at it, then back at him.

"This is the French style of musical cryptograms, which is much more like a normal cypher," Vernet stated. "The many-to-one mapping of this method makes it more difficult to extract possible motifs from the musical score, but it would explain your multiple octave jumps if they've used each line of this table as a new octave."

Vernet began to sketch the notes on the piece of paper, then made a disgusted noise as he only churned out nonsense. The Ghost glanced at Magda, with an almost humorous expression on his large features, folding his arms across his chest.

"I did think that might be a little obvious," The Ghost remarked with a definite tone of amusement in his voice. "I think there might be a secondary cipher involved, although I'm not sure how best to locate it."

"Is there going to be a Vigenére table involved?"

Both the Ghost and Vernet looked up at her in surprise. Under the weight of their glances, she shrugged nonchalently.

"In all honesty, I don't have the first clue about ciphers," She admitted. "But one of my cousins, the honourable Ronald Adair, bored me solid for them the last time we met and I invariably retain some bits of information from conversations. At least this particular monologue was marginally less mind-numblingly boring than the hour long presentation on bridge the previous time. The man should stand for parliament with his complete lack of brevity."

Disregarding the last part of her sentence, Vernet looked down at the page, rubbing a thumb over his upper lip as he considered it.

"If you're right and it is a polyalphabetic cypher, then it's theoretically unbreakable," Vernet remarked. "We'd need to know the keyword that corresponds with it."