Cyphers
Letter From Penny
Warning This Section Does Contain Spoilers
Penny's letter contains some letters that are bolded and some that are not in two sentences. This is easily identified as a Francis Bacon cypher. She also gives us two clues to what type of cypher it is by saying "France is"... Francis and by telling us where she hid her photos of her husband and son. She hid them in a book titled The Advancement of Learning and when we look this book up we find it is written by Francis Bacon. First we must identify the letters as we do below (I have also italicised the bold letters to better identify them):
the prettiest at dawn. This morning I woke up to the sound of bicycle bells ringing and the smell of fresh bread.
Next we remove punctuation and group the letters into groups of five as below:
thepr ettie statd awnTh ismor ningI wokeu ptoth esoun dofbi cycle bells ringi ngand thesm ellof fresh bread.
Using the 26 letter system for the Francis Bacon cypher as below:
A=AAAAA B=AAAAB C=AAABA D=AAABB E=AABAA F=AABAB G=AABBA H=AABBB I=ABAAA J=ABAAB K=ABABA L=ABABB M=ABBAA N=ABBAB O=ABBBA P=ABBBB Q=BAAAA R=BAAAB S=BAABA T=BAABB U=BABAA V=BABAB W=BABBA X=BABBB Y=BBAAA Z=BBAAB
The bold/italicised letters represent a B and the and the regular font letters represent an A. So for the first set of five letters we have
bold, regular, bold, bold, regular = BABBA = W
bold, regular, bold, bold, regular = BABBA = W
bold, regular, bold, bold, regular = BABBA = W
regular, bold, bold, bold, bold = ABBBB = P
regular, regular, bold, regular regular = AABAA = E
regular, bold, bold, regular, bold = ABBAB = N
regular, bold, bold, regular, bold = ABBAB = N
bold, bold, regular, regular, regular = BBAAA = Y
regular, bold, regular, regular, regular = ABAAA = I
regular, bold, bold, regular, bold = ABBAB = N
regular, bold, bold, bold, bold = ABBBB = P
regular, regular, regular, regular, regular = AAAAA = A
bold, regular, regular, regular, bold = BAAAB = R
regular, bold, regular, regular, regular = ABAAA = I
bold, regular, regular, bold, regular = BAABA = S
regular, regular, regular, bold, regular = AAABA = C
regular, bold, bold, bold, regular = ABBBA = O
regular, bold, bold, regular, regular = ABBAA = M
This leads us to the following site: