A doctor buys an old schooner, finds parchments and seven dead men aboard, and follows a sixteenth-century secret into a Rutland village where somebody is already waiting for him. William Le Queux wrote spy scares and treasure hunts by the hundred and claimed, not always truthfully, to have lived them. The cipher is worked out properly, which is what makes it hold. Fifty-five plates, among them Whistler's Thames in ice and ten Cate's views of Bury, follow the story from river fog to the streets where the secret waits.
