Letters

Having verified sometime later that same night that his Key letter had been “delivered,” Cook quickly drafted the postdated one above, also in cipher. I was meant to receive it (that is, to find it aboard Baratarian) after I believed him accidentally killed at Fort McHenry: proof that, like his ancestor, he was in fact still alive and remotely monitoring my execution of “our” plan. Instead, I took the letter off his dead body in Baratarian’s tender (Surprize) during the so-called Diversion sequence, just before seeing to the destruction of both that body and that tender.

In short, except that it is now genuinely posthumous, this letter, like its author, is a fraud.

So too are the “lettres posthumes” of A. B. Cook IV: forgeries by his eponymous descendant. (A few details will suffice to discredit “Legrand’s cipher” as “Captain Kidd’s code”: Kidd himself used only numbers; Edgar Poe added 19th-century printer’s marks nonexistent in Kidd’s time; “A.B.C. IV” added further symbols—W and S, for example — not to be found in “Legrand’s cipher.” And the procedure in serious encoding, as even Poe realised, is to make the deciphered message as enigmatic as the ciphered, intelligible only to the initiate: “A good glass in the bishop’s hostel in the devil’s seat,” etc.) Cook IV’s “prenatal” letters are perhaps authentic, but disingenuous: an appeal to his unborn child to break the Pattern so that that child—i.e., the twins Henry and Henrietta Cook Burlingame V — would in fact embrace it, rebel against what they took to be their father’s cause, and thereby (since he has altogether misrepresented that cause) effectively carry on his work. Cook VI’s own exhortations to me — indeed that whole elaborate charade of discovered and deciphered letters, the very notion of a Pattern of generational rebellion and reciprocal cancellation — is similarly, though more complexly, disingenuous.

The man who called himself Andrew Burlingame Cook VI listed, for example, “for my edification” (in the letter you will not receive), what he called “the vertiginous possibilities available to the skeptic” vis-à-vis his own motives, by way of inducing me to simple faith. They are in fact the simple permutation of a few variables: his true wish concerning the Second Revolution (its success or failure), his true conception of himself (a “winner” or a “loser”), his true conception of me (ditto), and his prediction of my inclination with respect to him (whether I shall or shall not define myself against him). Which variables generate (given his public reactionism on the one hand and, on the other, the open secret of his connexion with various radical groups) such equally reasonable-appearing conjectures as the following:

1. He wishes the Revolution to succeed and hopes that I shall support it, since he believes me a “winner”; therefore

a. he works for it himself, because he considers himself also a “winner” and does not believe that I shall rebel against him; or

b. he works against it, because he regards himself (as he regarded his namesakes) as a “loser,” and/or because he believes that I shall work against him.

2. He wishes the Revolution to succeed and hopes that I shall oppose it, since he believes me a loser; therefore

a. he works for it himself, considering himself a winner and trusting me to rebel against him; or

b. he works against it, believing himself a loser and trusting me not to rebel against him.

3. He opposes the Revolution and wishes me to do likewise, inasmuch as he considers me a winner; therefore

a. he works against it, believing that he is a winner and that I shall not rebel against him; or

b. he works for it, thinking himself a loser and that I shall rebel against him.

4. He opposes the Revolution but wants me to support it, believing me to be a loser; therefore

a. he works against it, thinking himself a winner and that I shall rebel against him; or

b. he works for it, thinking himself a loser and that I shall not rebel against him.

Et cetera. Such displays confuse only the naive. To Cook, as to me, the actual state of affairs is as easily sorted out as the ABC’s, no more finally equivocal than the authorship of this letter, or its postscript.