Chapter 7 The Sixth Station

Herring at Chippenham wrote everything down and was glad to be asked. "Bath bag," he said. "Five and six. Reeve, of the Bath road. Twenty-two. Three years. Came in off the Salisbury road at half past two with a bad grey that needs the plate looked at." He had it on the slate before she had the bag off, and then he came out of the office to the yard to get the wax and the stamp and a candle-end for the heat, and Temperance stood in the middle of his yard and understood that a man who writes things down is a man who can be made to prove something, and that this was the first station on the whole road where the count ran in her favour. "You'll be the sixth seal, then," he said, counting. "The sixth. There's two after you, and the ninth is at the Chute." "Two after me. Vane at Corsham, and Ledger at Bradford, and then Marlowe at the Chute, and the ninth is his." He set the bag on the office desk and went along the flap with his thumb, and the thumb was slower here than it had been anywhere else, because Herring was reading the wax rather than feeling for a break. "That's good wax. That's Bath company wax, that's not local, and I will tell you something for nothing, which is that it is a different colour from the wax on a Salisbury bag and a man who knows what he is looking at can tell which road a bag came off in nine days after it left London." "You know what you are looking at." "I know the difference in a wax. That is not a secret and it is not clever, and if it were clever nobody would do it." He took the candle-end and gave it to the stamp. "Mind you, the man who opens bags is not opening them for the wax. He is opening them because he has been told to open them, and a man who has been told to open them does not care in the slightest what colour it is." "Then what is the wax for?" "For after." Herring pressed his seal into it, and blew on it, and did not hurry it, and it was good work. "After the man has opened it and taken the paper and put his own back, and the paper goes on to Bath in somebody else's coat, and it arrives at Bath and somebody opens it in front of witnesses and it is the right paper in the right hand. And by then somebody has to be able to say that this bag came down the road unbroken. And that somebody is me." He set the seal down and looked at it. "I have never had to do that and I have wanted to for eleven years." "Everybody says the wax is the law. It isn't, is it. It's a man's memory and a slate." Herring's face did something she had not expected from a man who kept a slate. "Now you have got it," he said, "and I am going to make you a free gift of what it costs, which is that a man with a slate is worth exactly as much as the paper he is willing to stand in front of. I have written down four hundred and eleven bags. If anybody ever asks me whether the ninth on a given bag is mine, I can say so, and I will be believed, because I have never once in eleven years said so about a bag I had not sealed. And that is the only capital I have and it is eleven years old and it is made entirely out of not lying." She got the bag back and it was a different bag to the one she had brought in. That was the trick of the trade and she had never seen it done before: the same leather, the same size, the same ribbon, but the fifth seal was Herring's and the sixth would be Vane's, and a man who stopped her in the road and opened it would find a chain with a Chippenham wax in the middle of it and a rider in a wet coat and a post-master two miles behind who would say yes, that is my impression, put on the fourth of June, and the boy was in and the weather was wet. "You've given me a shield," she said. "I've given you four miles," said Herring. "After Corsham it is the Bradford road and the Bradford road has no houses on it, and I have never once in eleven years been able to make a man say a thing about a bag that went off the Bradford road." "Mogridge at the ford said there were three of them and that the third rides with two men who don't speak to them." "Mogridge at the ford is a better source than the whole of the Bath office and I have said so in writing to the Bath company twice." He was closing the office. "You'll find the third is a man called Ash, and he is not on the road for the money, and the two with him are not on the road for anything at all, and I would not go back to the ford if I were you, and I would not go forward either without somebody who knows the way from the Bradford road down to the water." "There is nobody. There is Chute and the ninth seal." "Then you'll want to see the ford," said Herring, "and I will tell you the reason, and then you will go and do whatever you are going to do, because I have a bag at four tomorrow and I have said more to a stranger this afternoon than I have said to my own apprentice in a year." He looked out of the office window at the road. "The third one is riding to the ford," he said, "and he is not going to be there on the fourth of June. He is going to be there tomorrow, and there will be four feet of water on the crossing, and a bag that goes into that is a bag nobody ever opens again."