So much for d'Avaux's work. He had given me all that I could have asked for as a cryptologist. It remained only for me to apply Occam's Razor to the facts that d'Avaux had amassed. My conclusion was that the Countess had made her notes, not with ink on paper, but with needle and thread on a work of embroidery. The technique, though extraordinary, had certain advantages. A woman who is forever writing things down on paper makes herself extremely conspicuous, but no one pays any notice to a woman doing needle-work. If a person is suspected of being a spy, and their possessions searched, paper is the first thing an investigator looks for. Crewel-work will be ignored. Finally, paper-and-ink documents fare poorly in damp conditions, but a textile document would have to be unraveled thread by thread before its information was destroyed.