Paper hidden in Wilmott's boot

Paper hidden in Wilmott's boot is a slip of paper that conceals a tracing, its meaning revealed only after water brings out the design. Hidden in the lining of a boot connected to the American Ambassador's passage aboard the Nomadic, it passes from an apparent religious text to a suspected plan of harbor defences. Its changing appearance turns an overlooked scrap into evidence of a possible espionage operation.

Discovery and concealment

A passenger aboard the Nomadic, later identified as Cicely March, saw Miss O'Hara inside the American Ambassador's cabin with a man's boot. O'Hara used small scissors to slit the lining and appeared to push something inside. When a doctor and another man came down the passage, she dropped back onto a couch and groaned as though she had fainted. March had already seen her before this performance and believed she had not actually felt faint.

The boot was not merely a hiding place observed from a distance. Afterward, March entered the empty cabin and examined it, curious about what O'Hara might have concealed. She drew a folded slip of paper from the lining, then hurried away when she heard a steward approaching. The boot's ordinary appearance had masked an alteration made within it; the paper itself, removed from that concealment, initially offered no obvious explanation.

A message disguised as scripture

In her own cabin, March examined the slip and thought it contained verses from the Bible. She could not understand them, and at the time supposed they might be the work of a religious maniac. Because the paper did not seem important, she did not return it to the boot. She kept it without giving it much thought, separating the hidden document from the object in which O'Hara had placed it.

The paper's apparent meaning was not inherent in the visible marks alone. Its disguise worked well enough that March regarded it as a peculiar religious text rather than a plan, and the evidence gives no indication that she then understood why O'Hara had concealed it. This mistaken reading delayed recognition, while the paper's removal from the boot left it in March's possession and ultimately allowed it to surface again.

The design appears

The clue emerged by chance when March used the paper to make a boat for her little nephew to sail in his bath. As the paper became wet, a strange design appeared across it. She quickly took it from the water and smoothed it flat, whereupon she could see a tracing resembling the mouth of a harbor. The water transformed an apparently legible but baffling slip into a concealed image.

March connected the discovery to an advertisement she had read and sought out Tommy. He recognized the tracing as probably the plan of important harbor defences. In his reconstruction, O'Hara had stolen the plan, feared that someone was following her, and used the boot as a hiding place rather than conceal the paper among her own belongings. He further inferred that she later obtained the bag in which the boot had been packed, only to find that the paper was gone. These are Tommy's deductions from the evidence, not an independently confirmed account of O'Hara's actions.

Recovery and significance

March had not brought the paper with her to Tommy. She kept it at her place of business, a Bond Street beauty parlour where she worked as an agent for the Cyclamen preparations in New York. Believing the paper might matter, she had locked it in the safe before going out. Its survival depended on this practical precaution as well as on the accidental bath-time discovery that revealed the tracing.

Tommy judged the matter important and asked whether March had brought the paper; when she said it remained in the safe, she proposed retrieving it and taking it directly to Scotland Yard. The episode thus moves the paper from an improvised hiding place, through an innocent observer's hands and a child's bath, toward official investigation. Its significance lies in the contrast between its modest, easily misread form and the potentially sensitive military information Tommy believes its revealed design contains.