On the Toymaker's bench is a spindle and 10 transparent rings.
The rings are of two sizes allowing them to be placed as nested pairs upon the spindle.

Each ring can be moved independently of its partner.

Each ring is engraved with 5 letters evenly separated and spaced so that it has 10 possible display faces.

The Toymaker lost the solution and cannot immediately place the rings correctly upon the shaft.

He has grouped the rings by their size:

Order (his)	  A                        B
 
   1       |S  D  O  G  A  |      |  C  E  I  B  L| 
   2       |C  A  M  I  I  |      |  I  G  O  L  W| 
   3       |N  H  L  O  R  |      |  O  P  I  O  S|  
   4       |F  R  O  S  N  |      |  S  L  I  E  T|  
   5       |Z  A  D  U  R  |      |  R  I  U  E  A|  

No ring is beside its pair and no ring is in the position it would occupy on the spindle although rotational alignment is possible.

A pair of A and B rings might therefore read:
RELPXESUP?   or PERPLEXUS?
or
some other arrangement of the example rings which read:
|P  R  L  X  S  |  and |  E  P  E  U  ?| . 
These, "|", are arbitrary breaks to allow each ring to be presented as a flat entity.  

Considered as a meshed pair they would be:

                          
    \  _   _   _   _   _  \
    /?|P|E|R|P|L|E|X|U|S|?/
    \                     \

What is the text that reveals 'the Mistress'?

Note: Text will form a 10 by 5 array.

No computer grids here, but I did manage to brute force the following combinations:

2A + 4B = ITISCLAIME
5A + 1B = DLUCREZIAB
1A + 5B = ORGIAUSEDA
3A + 2B = HOLLOWRING
4A + 3B = FORPOISONS

Or: "It is claimed Lucrezia Borgia used a hollow ring for poisons."

Posted by Jyqm on 2006-10-28 13:59:14