A note from the Doorkeeper
On Wednesday the Society did something it has not done before: it posted a Crossing in the open feed and declined to say what the answer was.
If that is how you arrived here, welcome. You were promised the workings, and the Society keeps its promises with the same care it keeps its secrets. They are below, every step of them.
If you solved it on Wednesday and have spent four days feeling quietly superior, that is also entirely permitted. It is one of the chief pleasures of membership.
Mr Peregrine Fitch, Membership Secretary
The Crossing, as posed
Two clues, crossing at a single shared letter, as ever. Six letters across, six down. They meet at the second letter of the across word, which is the third letter of the down word.
1 across (6). Cost broken with hard: he counts for nothing
1 down (6). New picture developed into a mystery
The workings follow. Look away now if you would rather wrestle with it first.
The workings
1 across. Cost broken with hard: he counts for nothing (6)
The answer is CIPHER.
Every cryptic clue says the same thing twice: once honestly, once in disguise.
The honest half here is "he counts for nothing", and it is the part almost everybody misreads. The word cipher sends the mind straight to codes and secrecy, and the Society's whole manner encourages exactly that reading. It is the wrong one. A cipher is also a zero, and by extension a person of no consequence, a nonentity, a nobody. "Counts for nothing" is doing triple duty: a nought, a nonentity, and the old arithmetic sense of ciphering, which simply meant doing sums.
The disguised half is an anagram with a letter added. "Cost" gives PRICE. "Broken" is the signal to rearrange it. "With hard" adds an H, the same H that sits on the side of a pencil. PRICE, broken, with H:
PRICE + H → CIPHER
1 down. New picture developed into a mystery (6)
The answer is ENIGMA.
The honest half is "a mystery", sitting at the end where definitions like to sit.
The disguised half is the same machine again, run the other way round: a letter, then an anagram. "New" gives N, one of the little letter-words the Dispatch wrote about a fortnight ago. "Picture" gives IMAGE. "Developed" is the anagram signal, and it is a fine one, because the whole surface reads as an ordinary sentence about a darkroom. That is what a good surface does: it gives you a perfectly sensible picture to look at while the real instruction walks past you.
N + IMAGE, developed → ENIGMA
And the crossing
The I of CIPHER is the I of ENIGMA. Solve either one and it hands a letter to the other: the small kindness the Society is named for. A cipher and an enigma, crossing in public, in a puzzle whose answer was itself withheld for four days. The Society trusts the setter knew what he was about.
The Doorkeeper's Question, answered
Dispatch No. 2 asked you this:
Stink, sent back, makes jumpers (5)
The answer is KNITS.
"Stink" gives STINK. "Sent back" tells you to reverse it. STINK reversed is KNITS, and knits are jumpers. Definition, signal, wordplay, all three present and all three agreeing.
This week's Doorkeeper's Question
For those who like something to carry about with them:
Some evening in Naples, the drink (3)
The answer appears in the next Dispatch. Do not write in. Discretion is expected.
The Society of Crossed Words publishes a daily crossing for those beginning, and a course in four volumes for those continuing. societyofcrossedwords.com