Chapter 1 The Postbag

The bag was heavier than it looked, and Temperance Hall knew it the way she knew everything about weight, which is the way a girl who has carried her dead brother's coat over the Bath road for two years knows what a thing costs to hold. It was leather, the size of a loaf, and it held a sheet of paper that had been taken off a courier at Dôver six days earlier by a man who had paid him eleven pounds and told him to forget the colour of the horse. She had not read the contents and she had not wanted to. What she had been told was that the contents named a column on a road in Belgium and that a column moving on the seventeenth could be made to move on the eighteenth instead, and that the eighteenth was the day after tomorrow, and that the difference between the two was the whole of what nine days of hard riding was for. "You will carry it to Bath," said Mr Ashcombe's man, in the room behind the harness shop, with the shutters not opened. "You will not open it. You will not lose it. And you will not be asked to understand one word of it." "And if I'm stopped?" "Then you are a post-runner with a bag that has somebody else's name on the outside, and you will show the seals and let the man count them, and the count is what protects you. Eight now. Nine when it reaches Bath." He put the bag on the table. "Nine seals, and a chain of eight houses between here and the Bath road. Every house adds one and takes the bag forward. If the bag is whole, the ninth goes on at the Chute and the bag is finished. If the chain breaks anywhere on the road, the paper inside is worth nothing at all, because there is then no proof the paper in your hand is the paper that left London. That is the whole of the law of it. There is no law in England about the paper. There is a law about the wax." She had been passing as a post-runner since the November that Josiah died. It was not a hard thing to pass as at eighteen, with the right coat and the right vocabulary, and it had been a very hard thing to pass as for the first four months, because every man she rode up to asked her the same three questions in the same order and every man she had ever known in her life answered them wrongly. Josiah had carried that coat. That was the part she had not been ready for. He had carried it two years, and the shoulders had gone into it in a shape that was not hers, and she had had a tailor take the shoulders in and the elbows out and she rode in a coat that was not made for anybody. She had been at the Chute Inn once, with him, in the autumn of 1813, on a day that had nothing to do with any of this. She remembered the post-master's name because he had given her a cup of small beer and refused money for it, and because Josiah had made a joke about it that she did not understand and had never asked about. Marlowe. His name was Marlowe, and he held the ninth stamp at the Chute, and in four days she would stand in front of him across a table and watch him do the thing she had seen him do once. "Nine days," said the man behind the shuttered window. "Six are gone. You have three, and the three are the hard ones, because the Bath road turns twice in one day and there is no posting house between the Devizes road and the water." "Then I shall want a fresh horse at Marlborough and I shall want it early." "You shall have what the road has. It is not a cart service." It was not a cart service. She rode out of the yard behind the harness shop in Southwark at four in the morning on the ninth of June with the bag lashed behind the cantle under a strap and a spare shirt, and the man in the shuttered room had watched her go and had not offered her a name, and she had not given him one. That was correct. She was Thomas Reeve of the Bath road, aged twenty-two, out of Devizes, three years on the road, and the man in the window would have said so if anybody had asked him, and would have been believed, because he had been paid to have the answer ready. The sun was not up. There was mist in the low ground by the river and the road went up out of it, and the bag was against her back and the wax on it was cold, and she did not stop at the first milestone and she did not look back at the town, because both of those are things a man does not do on his first stage, and she had learned that in the November and not in the June. Three days. Eight seals. And a piece of paper in a bag that was worth nothing at all unless it arrived with the wax unbroken, which meant that the entire value of the next three days sat in eight small blobs of tallow and sealing-wax on the flap of a leather bag the size of a loaf, and could be destroyed by one man with a thumbnail. She had thought about that every day since the sixth of June and she had not found a way to stop thinking about it, and the reason she could not stop was that she had tried, once, on the night Josiah died, to find out how little it could matter. That was the whole of what she had, and the road, and the wax.