Chapter 10 The False Dispatch

She learned eleven lines in a barn at the water between two and five in the morning, in the cold, with her coat open and the wet sheets against her chest, and by the time the sky came up grey over the Chute road she could say them backwards, which is the only test of a thing like that worth having. She could not read them. That was the part nobody had thought about. The ink had run wherever the water had got into the folds and two words in the fourth line were gone entirely and one word in the ninth was a blot that could have been a place or could have been a number, and there was no copy of it in the world, because the copy was in a room in Brussels and the copy had been bought for eleven pounds off a courier at Dôver by a man in a good wig. So she learned it as it came, which meant she learned one wrong word in the ninth line, and she knew it was wrong, and she spent two hours on that one word on the road to the Chute with the bag under the saddle and the eighth seal in her hand like a coin. The barn was a cart shed and there was straw in it and the horse stood well. At about four she worked out what she actually had. Eleven lines. A place on a road in Belgium. A date, the seventeenth. A number of guns, thirty-one, and she was certain of the thirty-one because it was the only figure on the sheet with a comma in it and a man writing fast in a room with a fire would put a comma in the thirty-one. A name, which was the eleventh word on the sheet and which she had heard once, in a room behind a harness shop in Southwark, from a man who had said *he is in Brussels and he is forty-one and he does not write to his wife twice in a year*. And the last line, four words long. She had it by five. She had all of it by five, and she had one wrong word in the ninth line, and she could not find anybody on the road to ask what the right word was, because that was a question with a city in it. The Chute was a mile up the road and the inn stood back off it with a yard and a stable and about eleven rooms, and she got there at six in the morning on a grey that is called a wet grey and does not become a lighter grey, and the yard was full up because it was the third of June and there were people in Bath for the water. The man in the shallows was in the taproom. He was asleep on a bench with his boots still on and his stick across his knees, and he had been paid nine pounds ten and he had earned every penny of it, and nobody in the inn had asked him a question because he had said he was a drover and drovers come in from the Salisbury road wet. The post-master was called Marlowe and he was in the taproom too, and he was the first man on the whole of the nine days who looked at her face. "Well," he said. "Nine days, and here's the end of it, and you're the worst-disguised rider I've had off that road in twenty years and I'll tell you so for nothing, because you'll not get another chance to be told it by a man who doesn't want anything." "Eight," said Temperance. "I counted eight off you an hour ago when you came in, and I've counted eight a good many times." He took her bag and looked at the flap and did not touch it. "And there's a hole in the ribbon and the wax's gone soft along one whole seam, and I'd know a bag that's been in the water at the ford from a mile off, and I've had one this morning and I've been told it came off a rider and not off a man who lost it, and I've believed that, because it is not my business to know whose bag it was." He set it down. "So the eighth is not on it, and there is no ninth coming off me, and you can stand there all morning and it will not change." "I know." "Then what are you doing at the Chute?" "I came for a bed," said Temperance, "and I have not got money for a bed, and I have had three days of the road and the eighth went in the ford at six o'clock last night." Marlowe looked at the bag on his table, and then at the taproom, and then at the door. "There's a room over the stable," he said. "There's no bar on it and there's a bolt on the door and I bolt it at the front, which is not to keep anybody out. It's the only room I've got that nobody in this house has a key to, and I have put four people in it in nine years and one of them was a man who was running to Bristol and I never said so and never asked, and he left me a shilling on the table which I have still got in the tin because I never spend it." He picked the bag up and gave it back to her. "You'll leave that bag here, because it is a ruin and it is a thing that people have been asking me about since six o'clock, and a bag that a woman brought in at six in the morning is a bag that will be in a dozen mouths by noon. And you'll take the paper out of your coat, and you'll burn it in the kitchen range, and I will not see you do it and I will not be told about it." "You've given me that speech on purpose." "I've given you nothing at all, miss," said Marlowe. "I've said a post-master would not leave a bag unattended. Go up."