Chapter 13 The Nine Seals

There is no law in England about the paper. She had that from four men on a road and one of them was a lawyer's clerk and one of them was the man in the shallows and one of them was a post-master who wrote everything down, and they all said the same thing in different words, and she had believed none of them until she was standing in a room with a fire in it being unable to find a fifth thing to say. There is no law about the paper. The paper is a sheet of paper. What the law knows about is the bag, and the bag is a piece of leather with a ribbon across the flap and a row of blobs of tallow and sealing-wax down the ribbon, and the blobs are the whole of the law, and there is no other court in England that will look at eleven lines in a wet sheet at all. "A man in Brussels will put your paper beside his copy and they will agree," said Lady Anne, at nine in the morning, "and then a clerk will ask him how he knows yours is the same paper, and he will be obliged to say, because a courier at Dover saw the other one, and the courier at Dover was paid eleven pounds and has not been heard of since, and there is nothing else in the world to connect the two sheets." "So it is the wax." "It is the wax and it is the eight men and it is the nine, and there is not one atom of it in the paper." Lady Anne was at the table with her hands round a cup. "Think of it as a chain of nine links where every link is a man who has said out loud in front of another man, *I saw that bag go past my counter, and I put my own seal on it.* Nine men. And a man in Brussels turns round and asks, how do you know the courier who brought it is the courier who took it, and the answer is, because nine men said so, and eight of them do not know the ninth and all of them can be proved separately and none of them can be proved together." "And now there is no chain." "Now there is no chain," said Lady Anne. "There is a river, and a bag with a hole in it, and a woman in my dairy at Tedbury's memory who remembers two words in the fourth line, and that is a very different thing, and it is worth exactly nothing in front of a clerk in a court house in London." "Then it is over." "No," said Lady Anne. "It is over if you are carrying paper. There is a second thing and I have been turning it over since half past four yesterday and I have not had it out in front of anybody because it is a hard thing to say out loud in a kitchen and it is the reason I have spent two years not asking you questions." She put her cup down. "The wax proves where the paper has been," she said. "It does not prove what is in the paper. And a man who is looking for a bag with eleven lines in it is looking for a bag, because that is what everybody looks for, and if you walk into Bath on a road with a sealed bag under your saddle, then a man will take it off you at the water or the bar and he will open it, and he will find paper, and it will be the right paper, and he will take it to a man in a wig in Brussels and there is nothing whatever you can do about it, and all your memory and all your four days will not come back the paper afterwards." "So the wax proves the chain. And the chain means somebody can find the paper." "The chain means somebody can find the paper, and the paper is what they want, and the paper is inside the bag, and there is no law on earth that says a bag cannot be opened in a public street by a man with a warrant from nobody." She looked up. "But nobody on earth has ever opened a bag and found it empty and then reported that he had opened it, because a man who tells a magistrate that he stopped a rider and found nothing is a man who has admitted standing in a public street with a stick, and that is an admission that costs him more than the errand pays." "You have not said the thing yet." "I am going to say the thing now," said Lady Anne, "and I want it understood that I have thought about it for a night and a half and that I have not said it to Mr Ashcombe and that I shall not." "Then say it." "Get a second bag," said Lady Anne, "with a proper chain on it, and carry it into Bath, and let it be taken off you. And have nothing in it." "A man stops me at the ford with a stick and a crown in his pocket and opens a chain of eight and finds a bit of lining paper and a pound of lead shot." "Yes." "He'll take the bag. He will not take the shot. And he will have to go up the road and tell a man in a wig that a rider came down nine days and got to the ford and the bag was empty, and that man will have to write that down, and a man in a wig in Brussels will have to read it and believe it." She turned her cup a quarter turn on the table. "And that is a whole day, at the very least, and probably three, because a man in Brussels does not believe a thing like that the first time anybody tells it to him." "And on the tenth of June I walk into Bath with eleven lines in my head and a bag that is already a story in three counties." "On the tenth of June," said Lady Anne, "you walk into Bath with nothing at all, which is the only way anybody has ever carried anything into Bath, and the reason it has taken two years and a dead girl at Chippenham and a river to work that out is that nobody in this business will ever think of it, because a bag with paper in it is what they are paid to stop." She was quiet for a moment. "There is a price and I will pay a good deal of it and I want you to know both halves of it before you say yes." Lady Anne did not look up. "The bag has to come from this house. It has to be a bag that has been in this county since before you were at the ford. And a man at a barrier is going to take a bag off a rider at a water crossing in June and go through everything in it, and if there is anything in that bag of mine then the man in Brussels will have it, and that man has had a courier at Dover bought for eleven pounds and there is no reason whatever to suppose that he is a worse man than me."