Chapter 5 The Fourth Station

The post house at Hungerford kept a plain and a tap and a woman who came out to the yard without a coat on, which told Temperance more about the temperature than the barometer had. "Seals," the woman said. Seven and eight. "Mistress Nye." She said it before she was asked, which was not a thing post-masters usually did. "You'll be the fifth, then. Marlborough was the fourth, Devizes the third, Winchester the second, and this bag came out of London with one already on it. I'm the fifth, and there are four after me, and then the Chute." "You've been keeping the count." "I've been keeping the count since Tuesday, same as everybody between here and the water." She went along the flap with her thumb, and the gesture was the same, and Temperance was beginning to understand that the thumb was a signature and not an inspection. "You'll want the grey and not the brown. The brown's got a plate." "Why not the brown?" "Because you're on a bag with seven on it and you'll go like the brown goes off the top of Amesbury, and I'd have to walk down the road after you." She put the halter over the grey's nose. "Twenty-two years I've done this and I've twice had a bag stop on my stones, and both times it was a man who wanted to be at Ludgershall before dark and the road's not that long." "Have you had a bag with nine on it before?" "Yes. A dozen times. And I'll tell you the thing nobody tells you, which is that nobody in the whole of this trade has ever handed me a bag and watched me seal it. They watch the first two and then they go and stand at the gate, because watching a man put wax on a bag is not a thing anybody ever wants to watch." She was right about the grey and she was right about the plate, and she was right about the gate, and when Temperance came off the stones at the road she looked back once and saw Mistress Nye standing in the yard door with her arms folded, watching the road east, at a man who was sitting on a wall in the mist about two hundred yards off with his horse's head down. "Two of them," said Temperance, to the horse. It was three by the time she got to the ford at the Chute, because the man on the wall had a mate a mile further on at the turn to the water, and the mate stood up as she came up to him and did not speak and sat down again. At the ford there was four feet of water and the crossing stones under it and a man called Mogridge who kept the chain across, and Mogridge came out in his shirtsleeves in water to the knee. "You're the Bath bag." "You've heard." "I've heard of a Bath bag, which is the same thing said slower." He took the rein and led the grey down into the water himself rather than let her, and the grey was a swimmer and took it well. "The ford's up to the second stone since Tuesday. There's four foot on the top of it and it's running like the Kennet in March. I'll take you across for a penny and I'll tell you now that you did not hear it from me and that a good many people are going to tell you tomorrow that I did." "Noted." "And I'll tell you the other thing, which is that it is not a ford any more. It is a river. There's a difference and it costs a man his bag." The water was up to the grey's belly. "Two nights back a man came off the Salisbury road wanting the Devizes road and he had a bag, and I don't know what was in it, and I took him over and he did not pay me the penny and I said it out loud after him, and he stopped in the middle to argue about a penny." "Did he go in?" "No. He stopped in the middle of four feet of moving water to argue about a penny with a man holding his rein." Mogridge brought the grey up the far side and the water came off her in sheets. "And I have thought about that every day since, and I don't know what it means, and I've been keeping a trade secret for you the same way, so we'll be quits, except that you're a woman and I'm not, and I'd not say that in front of my wife." "Which of the two will be in trouble?" "Neither. Both. The one who is going to get in the water." He let go of the rein and stood in the shallows up to his own thigh and did not appear to consider it. "It's you, my lass. You can put a bag over your head and keep it dry and a man can open it in the water, and if a man opens it in the water then the wax's done and there's no law left about it at all. That's the thing nobody tells you about a ford. The wax's no good wet, and a bag's no good wet, and the whole chain's no good wet." "I shall go round by the bridge." "Aye. Everyone goes round by the bridge. The bridge's nine miles." He was already wading back. "Missus, I have said a great deal too much to a stranger and I would be obliged if you would remember I was cold and it was dark and I am a simple man with a chain." She rode on up the Bath road with the bag dry and the rain starting, and she thought about what he had said, and about a man stopping in four feet of moving water to argue about a penny, and about how a person does that.