I was eager to learn what secrets the notes were hiding and I did not sleep well, rising well before dawn. It was futile to attempt to go back to sleep, although I tried for quite some time, and eventually I ceded defeat, dressing and descending the stairs to the sitting room.

I had expected the room to be blue with smoke from Sherlock Holmes's tobacco, but the air was clear. Obviously a window had been opened at some point to allow some fresh air into the room. Holmes was still staring at the notes, though his pipe had been set aside. "Good morning, Watson," he commented distractedly as I entered.

I glanced at the clock over the mantelpiece, trying to decide if I should try Mrs Kendrick or not. It was early, but she had already proven herself to be a very early riser. "She is asleep as yet," Holmes commented, observing my gaze alternating between the clock and the closed door. I nodded and settled myself in the armchair. I would not wake her. The puzzle of the notes would have to wait until she'd roused herself. "I should not think that she spent an easy night."

Although the floor was nearly always littered with stacks of Holmes's personal papers and with documents pertaining to recently solved cases, the area around Holmes was carpeted with crumpled and discarded sheets torn from his notebook. "Have you managed it yet?" I inquired, picking up a piece and smoothing it out over my knee. It was filled with scribblings and lines of dots and dashes.

Holmes sighed and shook his head. "Although I thought I had, I unfortunately did not get quite enough information from Mrs Kendrick to get much further than half a notebook of unsuccessful attempts," said he. "But it is an ingenious system that allows three distinct messages to be contained within one short passage of text. It is quite remarkable and something that Brother Mycroft should love to take his hand to."

I examined the page I had smoothed out and could manage to make no more sense out of it than a series of numbers circled and underlined in a seemingly haphazard manner. It took a moment to remember what Mrs Kendrick had said and reason that the numbers must be the number of letters contained in each word of each line of the poems. The myriad number of possibilities that could be contained within such a system was enough to make my head spin. "Never have I seen anything like this," I commented.

"I should have liked to have met these three men that came up with this," Holmes responded with approval. "Although at least two of the three are still alive and are here in London, I should have liked to have met the group together."

"Those two men are the survivors then?"

Holmes nodded shortly. "I begin to hear stirrings from the other room. Perhaps you would care to see to Mrs Kendrick and we shall have our mystery resolved for once and all," he suggested.

I had not noticed the sounds coming from Holmes's bedroom, but once my attention had been drawn to them, they were easily apparent. I nodded my agreement and crossed to rap lightly on the door. "Mrs Kendrick," I called very softly, just in case she was still not awake.

"You may enter if you wish, doctor," she answered with a clearly audible sigh.

I pushed open the door, entering the room and immediately closing the door behind me. I knew that Holmes had seen her more than once clad only in a nightdress and dressing gown, but I still intended to preserve as much of a sense of propriety as could be salvaged considering the current situation.

Mrs Kendrick lay in bed, as I had ordered, with the bedclothes drawn up beneath her arms. Her face bore the telltale signs of tears having been shed the previous night, but I made no comment. Instead I made a few inquiries into her state and deemed it safe for her to dress and join Holes and I in the other room. I had a few misgivings, but she reminded me of her nursing experience and vowed to exercise discretion and alert me if she began to feel ill in any way.

I returned to the sitting room so that she could dress and Holmes and I waited eagerly for her to join us. Holmes undertook preparations, recopying the four notes on separate scraps of paper so that both he and Mrs Kendrick could have their own sets to work from. He added on both the number of letters that appeared in each word, consulted one of his references to ensure that he had the Morse alphabet copied properly, and sat back, obviously unable to continue any further without guidance.

Mrs Kendrick was out with us before long and Holmes settled her in a chair with the materials that he had arranged. "Would you like something to eat before we begin?" I inquired of her before Holmes had a chance to say much of anything.

"Not at this moment, thank you, doctor," she told me, taking up the first of the notes. "I would rather reach the solution to this problem."

Holmes leaned in closer and waited for her to explain the details of the code so that they could get started on the notes before them. I took up my own notebook and made notes, for I record all of Holmes's cases that I am involved in, although the vast majority are never intended for publishing, this counted among that number.

The final cipher was quite simple for all of its subtleties and complexness. As we had initially noted, there was a second message contained within the two rhyming couplets. That message was the key for the next step in the decoding. As an example, I have reproduced the decoding process of the first note we received.

The full text, with the number of letters per word noted at the end, runs:

Round about the world does go – (5 4 3 5 4 2)
Be men such fools they cannot know – (2 3 4 5 4 6 4)
What ancient laws they do now tempt – (4 6 4 4 2 3 5)
None among them we shall hold exempt – (4 5 4 2 4 4 6)

The key in this is: They hold. Both words of the key contain four letters. Words with the same number of letters as a word in the key become dashes, while words containing differing numbers of letters become dashes. However, only those lines containing words of the key have this treatment applied to them to yield the telegraphed message.

With this information, it may be seen that the above poem is translated to:

From this point, the decoding becomes a matter of logic to determine the breaks between the letters and reveal the final message. In this case: K NEE CR

Although I had observed as Mrs Kendrick and Holmes worked through to this step, I found the end results to be less than illuminating. In order, the four messages yielded the following results:

K NEE CR

NG K NW IT

REV 1 11 TM1 6 7

TO C AT MAN

Once the messages were down to this form, a fair amount of time had passed and I was becoming quite ravenously hungry. Neither Holmes nor Mrs Kendrick, however, appeared much inclined to take a break at this point, so I resigned myself to it and waited for them to reveal the final messages hidden underneath the layers of cipher.

"I can only assume that the first one references me," said Mrs Kendrick with a sigh, looking over the four short sentences. "Kendrick née Cr. My maiden name was Corlett."

"These messages are being used to pass information between parties," Holmes noted excitedly. "Obviously more than one message is being passed, otherwise they shouldn't bother with such a complicated and time-consuming system."

"Or the messages go through a middle-man who is to receive some information, but not all of it," Mrs Kendrick suggested. "It is a simple enough matter to find the first hidden text, but it is the second that becomes more difficult."

Holmes nodded and passed across the second message. It looked like complete gibberish to me, but it obviously made some sense to Mrs Kendrick for she looked at it for only a few minutes before explaining, "NG was always 'no good'. K must be the same reference again. NW was now, because it was often difficult to get all of the dashes together in a row for the O without making the letter itself sound too forced."

"No good. Kendrick now it," I read out.

"We must be missing pieces of the correspondence," Holmes noted with a raised eyebrow. "It may be that we are intercepting, or that we are being passed information," he murmured to himself. He continued, noting a few other things, but those were not audible from my position and I did not know what he concluded.

"What of this next one?" I questioned instead, pointing to the third line. It was quite unlike the other three in that it contained numbers. "It doesn't fit the pattern of the others."

"In more than one way," Holmes commented. "And that is only to be expected considering it was written by an entirely different person. We'll come back to that one," he declared.

"To C at man," I read from the final message. It was plain enough to read. "But who is the man?" I inquired.

"I would guess that they refer not to a person, but rather to the Isle of Man," said Mrs Kendrick. "My father's family has lived there for generations, but he made his shore home in Herefordshire, for the sake of my mother, who had never lived elsewhere. I still have one uncle who resides there, a long-retired ship's carpenter, along with man more distant cousins."

"This problem was quite the span for so narrow a solution," Holmes remarked, leaning back in his chair with satisfaction.

"Have you solved it?" I asked eagerly.

"It is not wise to come to conclusions before all of the facts are known," Holmes commented offhandedly. But his manner plainly suggested that he had all the facts he needed at this juncture. However, I knew well his predilection for knowing the full set of circumstances surrounding any issue and knew that he would not lay anything aside until he had all the details.

"What is this final message?" I questioned, looking down at the only remaining line. "It looks almost like Biblical references," I noted in surprise after I'd studied it for a moment.

"It would look like references," Holmes replied, "for that is what they are. It is a custom of naval captains to use various verses to communicate amongst one another, although it is a rare skill for a mere sailor to be able to use the same methods. But then it is a rare sailor who is sufficiently conversant in the same references."

"I can only imagine that it is also a rare sailor who can devise such a complex cipher system," said I. "So it is not so surprising that they should also be able to utilize the latter system."

"No," Holmes agreed. "It is not."