Chapter 12 The Pump Room

The Pump Room at Bath is a building with a colonnade and a great many columns, and at eight in the evening on the ninth of June there were two hundred people under them, and the whole of the west end of the colonnade was given up to a man in a baron's coat who was drinking Spa water with a woman in a shawl. Temperance stood at the east end with a ruined bag over her shoulder and a paper against her chest that had been in a river, and she had been in Bath since four in the afternoon, and she had asked four people the same question, and three of them had told her that Major Dunmore was not to be troubled and one of them had told her nothing at all. The woman in the shawl had been the second of the four. She had been the only one who had looked at the bag. "You're the ninth seal," she said. "Of course you are. Everyone's been talking about the ninth seal since noon and there is not one of these people who knows what it's for, and now I have looked at it and it is ruined, and now I know." She turned the shawl over. "You are a day late and you are on foot from the water, and I am not going to ask you a single question, and I am going to tell you three things and then I am going to leave you, because a woman in a shawl and a rider in a man's coat standing in this colonnade for ten minutes is a thing two hundred people will have seen." "Tell me." "First: he is not here. He was here at noon and he will be here tomorrow at the same hour, and he comes for the water and not for the people, and he does it every day at noon whether or not there is a war in Belgium." "That leaves me a night." "It leaves you a night, and the night is a great deal better than the day, because he does not have a room at the inn on account of a woman." She looked at her. "Do you know that you have lost your bag?" "I lost it in a river." "You lost it in a river because somebody stood in four feet of water and put a thumbnail into it, and you are telling me about a river, which is a thing I have been hearing for nine days from every post-master between here and Marlborough, and it is a very good river and it has covered a great deal." The woman pulled her shawl round. "There is a man who will be at the Ashcombe gate on the east road at eleven tonight with a lamp. He is not a servant and he is not a soldier and he will not ask you a word. Say the ninth seal at the gate and he will take you in by the yard, and there is a room at the back of that house that has a fire lit in it and no one in it, and I have put paper and a pen and a candle on the table because somebody in this city is going to want to write something down tonight, and I would rather it was you than the man in the baron's coat." "Who are you?" "My name is Netherfield and I have been in Bath for thirty-one years and I know every person in this colonnade," said the woman in the shawl, "and I have never once in thirty-one years been asked a question about the seals by anybody but you." She walked away into the crowd and was gone in the noise, and Temperance stood under the east end of the colonnade for some time longer, because it was warm there, and because she had not been warm since the sixth of June. The man at the Ashcombe gate was Edward Ashcombe's man, and he had a lamp, and he did not ask a single question, and when she said the ninth seal he put the lamp up so that she could see the step and did not offer to take the bag, and the bag was over her shoulder and the paper was under her coat and neither of them was of any use whatever. The room at the back of Ashcombe House had a fire in it and a table and a chair and paper and a pen and a candle, and the pen was a good one and the paper was not post-master's paper, it was writing paper, and there was a straight edge and an inkstand, and somebody had thought about it properly. She did not write it down. That was the thing she had been turning over for three days and it was the whole of the errand, and she had it in a barn at the water and she had it in a head that had carried it for thirty-one hours. If she wrote it down, then there were two copies, and two copies is a thing that can be taken off a person. If she did not write it down, then there was one, and it was her, and eleven lines in a head is not a thing a man in a wig can get at on a road. She sat at the table with the candle and the good pen and the writing paper and she did not touch the pen. Instead she wrote four lines, and they were not the eleven. *Nine days. Bag lost at the ford the evening of the eighth. The paper was in my coat and the paper is dry and the paper is in this house. If this is found, no one but me can say what it says. I have it and I have had it since two o'clock on the morning of the ninth and I have not written it down and I am not going to. Look for the man with the memory and not for the paper.* She signed nothing, and she put the four lines in her coat, and then she took the fire and the chair and the good pen and she did what she had been doing on the road since the fifth of June, which was to say the eleven lines over, out loud, in a room, twice, to an empty house, at a table, at a quarter past midnight. It is not the same as knowing. She had been told that once by a man at Marlborough and had not believed him. It is not the same. It is slower and it is harder and it leaves a noise in the room, and at about half past one in the morning on the tenth of June, on the ninth day, in a room at the back of Ashcombe House, with a fire and a good pen and a table to put them on, she said the eleven lines over a fourth time and the ninth line was still wrong and the tenth was still right, and the thirty-one was still thirty-one with its comma, and the last line was still four words long.