CHAPTER IV
JONATHAN HARKER’S JOURNAL
28 May.—There is a chance of escape, or at any rate of being able to send word home. A band of Szgany have come to the castle, and are encamped in the courtyard. These Szgany are gipsies; I have notes of them in my book. They are peculiar to this part of the world, though allied to the ordinary gipsies all the world over. There are thousands of them in Hungary and Transylvania, who are almost outside all law. They attach themselves as a rule to some great noble or boyar, and call themselves by his name. They are fearless and without religion, save superstition, and they talk only their own varieties of the Romany tongue.
I shall write some letters home, and shall try to get them to have them posted. I have already spoken them through my window to begin acquaintanceship. They took their hats off and made obeisance and many signs, which, however, I could not understand any more than I could their spoken language…
I have written the letters. Mina’s is in shorthand, and I simply ask Mr. Hawkins to communicate with her. To her I have explained my situation, but without the horrors which I may only surmise. It would shock and frighten her to death were I to expose my heart to her. Should the letters not carry, then the Count shall not yet know my secret or the extent of my knowledge…
I have given the letters; I threw them through the bars of my window with a gold piece, and made what signs I could to have them posted. The man who took them pressed them to his heart and bowed, and then put them in his cap. I could do no more. I stole back to the study, and began to read. As the Count did not come in, I have written here…
The Count has come. He sat down beside me, and said in his smoothest voice as he opened two letters:—
“The Szgany has given me these, of which, though I know not whence they come, I shall, of course, take care. See!”—he must have looked at it—“one is from you, and to my friend Peter Hawkins; the other”—here he caught sight of the strange symbols as he opened the envelope, and the dark look came into his face, and his eyes blazed wickedly—“the other is a vile thing, an outrage upon friendship and hospitality! It is not signed. Well! so it cannot matter to us.” And he calmly held letter and envelope in the flame of the lamp till they were consumed. Then he went on:—
“The letter to Hawkins—that I shall, of course, send on, since it is yours. Your letters are sacred to me. Your pardon, my friend, that unknowingly I did break the seal. Will you not cover it again?” He held out the letter to me, and with a courteous bow handed me a clean envelope. I could only redirect it and hand it to him in silence. When he went out of the room I could hear the key turn softly. A minute later I went over and tried it, and the door was locked.
When, an hour or two after, the Count came quietly into the room, his coming awakened me, for I had gone to sleep on the sofa. He was very courteous and very cheery in his manner, and seeing that I had been sleeping, he said:—
“So, my friend, you are tired? Get to bed. There is the surest rest. I may not have the pleasure to talk to-night, since there are many labours to me; but you will sleep, I pray.” I passed to my room and went to bed, and, strange to say, slept without dreaming. Despair has its own calms.
The problem with the Vigenère cypher is that you need to send two separate letters, right ? One with the key and the other with the encrypted text. Considering Dracula authorized Jonathan to send only three letters, he would have found it suspicious if he had sent two letters to the same correspondant. So Jonathan would have to hope that Mina would contact his boss by herself. And Dracula just gave Jonathan a few minutes to write his letters in front of him, so I don’t know…
For my personal use, I tried to buy a SFEA method but it’s almost impossible to find. The easiest method to find in France is apparently the Prévost-Delaunay method but it seems overcomplicated. I found this comparison on r/shorthand.
No, you establish the key ahead of time, before you leave. It should not be communicated via the same means that the message itself is being communicated.
You could go even further and use a massive one-time pad. In theory, that would be even more secure (because a Vigenère key is basically a very short OTP that you reuse over and over again even within the same message), but because you cannot memorise the OTP, it would necessitate carrying the pad around with you, adding a security risk if your host should find the pad.
In Vigenère, you take your key and rotate each subsequent letter by an amount corresponding to the key, like a Caesar cypher where each letter has a different value. So if my key was “key”, the first, fourth, seventh, 10th, etc. letters would be rotated by 10 spaces (it’s typically zero-indexed, so A = “don’t rotate”), the 2nd, 5th, 8th, 11th, etc. letters would be rotated 4 spaces, and the 3rd, 6th, 9th, 12th, etc. letters would be rotated 24 spaces (or rotated backward 1 space). OTP is the same, but instead of a real word or phrase as the key, you have a long pad shared between both participants, which has at least as many letters as all messages to be communicated. The letters are usually chosen at random, so in addition to the security advantage of avoiding repetition, you get an extra advantage of the letters having no correlation with each other.
I think you may be confusing events slightly. On 19 May, Dracula asked him to pen three letters which he would give to Dracula, and that Drac said he would send on certain fixed dates. Basically saying “hey, I’m leaving soon”, “hey, I just left”, and “hey, I left a few days ago and am now at Bistritz”.
Then, the very next entry in the book (but not in the chronological reading) on 28 May, Jonathan hands some letters he wrote in secret to the Romani. One to his boss in plain English, saying “speak to my fiancee, please.” And one to Mina, in shorthand. If things had gone according to plan, Dracula never would have known either of these letters existed.
There’s also an earlier entry on 12 May where Dracula tells Jonathan to write to his boss to say “Drac wants me to stay longer than our original plan”. It is at this time that Jonathan decides he’s going to write in secret, but he doesn’t execute this plan until the 28th.
Ah yes you’re right !