第20章 The Second Cordial

The letter came in the March, and Ned Trigg brought it in with the post and made a face at the seal, because the seal was a ring with a lamp inside it, and he had not seen that lamp since the winter and had hoped not to see it again. Prudence turned the letter over. It was addressed to her by name, and the name was spelled correctly, which was rarer than it should have been, and the paper was good, and the hand was a clerk's hand, and the postmark was a town forty miles away and on the far side of the moors, a town she had never been to and knew only by the name of its market. She opened it with the letter knife while Ned watched, and she read it standing. *Dear Madam,* *I write to you because your name has come to me through the county paper, and because I do not know who else in England it would be safe to write to. I am the clerk to a friendly society in this town, of a kind you will understand, and for three quarters now I have been keeping two sets of figures in my head, because our fund does not close, and because our levies have been falling, and because in the last six months we have had eleven deaths among our members, all on the sick list, and every one of them certified as gastric fever by a physician who signs at our table. I am not a brave man, and I have said nothing, and last week a young woman of our house died in the same way, and I have not slept since.* *But that is not why I write. I write because of the cordial.* *Our society distributes a free cordial to the sick, as yours did, and I have looked at the bottle, and the bottle bears on the shoulder a small mark in the wax, a stroke with a hook, and the mark is not our visitor's and not mine and not our secretary's, and I have seen it on the bottles for three years and never once asked what it was. I am asking you because you are the only person living who has asked the same question of the same mark and made a town answer for it.* *I am enclosing a list of the dead, and the day and hour of every bottle I could account for, and the name of the maker of our cordial, which is a man named Mr. Rowland Pinnock, who came to us three years ago with excellent references from a society in the north, and who keeps our accounts and our cordial in the same room, exactly as your man did.* *I am also enclosing a scrap of paper found in our dispensing room, wrapped round a twist of white powder, which I did not give to the constable because the constable is the secretary's cousin. On the paper, in a hand I do not know, there is a list of four names, and at the head of the list, in a smaller hand, there is a word that I do not understand and that I have copied exactly, because I think you will.* *The word is* Cinderthorpe. Prudence set the letter down and sat for a long moment without moving. Ned said, from the doorway, in a voice that had gone a little flat, "Miss Ruddock? Is it bad news?" She looked at the scrap of paper that had come folded inside the letter, the twist of white powder still faintly staining it, and at the four names beneath the word, and at the small hand at the head of it, the hook and the count, the mark of a man satisfied with his tally. It was not Skell's hand. Skell had had his own hand, and Skell was in the ground under the county gaol. But it was the same mark, and the same twist, and the same arithmetic, and the same word, and the word was the name of her own town, which meant that whoever had taught Barnaby Skell to fold a powder in three folds, and to write a mark in wax, and to keep a cordial and an account in the same room, had gone on doing it elsewhere, in other societies and other towns, for years, while she had been proving the guilt of one man and thinking she had come to the bottom of it. She thought about that for a long while, and the more she thought, the colder it got, because it fitted a thing that had never fitted before. Skell had been a good clerk and a poor inventor. A man does not rise from an honest dispenser to a poisoner of eleven in one winter; a man is taught, and a man is placed, and a man is given a method by somebody who has used it and improved it and moved on. The paper twists, the wax, the mark, the choice of the members who could read a return, the way the poison was put into one bottle at a time so that a whole town would drink the proof and call it charity: it was a method, and it had a maker, and the maker had left a signature in Cinderthorpe the way a joiner leaves his mark in a roof beam, and had gone on to the next town, and the next, taking his excellent references with him. Four names, the letter said. Four names at the head of a list, under the word Cinderthorpe, in a hand that was not Skell's and not the clerk's and not the visitor's. She did not know what they were. They might be dead already. They might be the dead of the town over the moors, waiting in their poor ground for somebody to come and ask what they had been given. She sat for a time with the balance in front of her and the two pans level, the old brass steady at the beam. A balance does not care who is standing at it, or what is written about her in a county paper, or whether a kingdom has found a register with a place in it for her name. It answers one question, and it answers it the same whether the hand that set the weights has a licence or not, and that, she had come to understand, was the whole of her standing in the world, and it was enough to be going on with. She went through to the shop and found Ned Trigg scrubbing the counter the way she had taught him, in circles, with his sleeve rolled up, and she stood in the doorway until he looked up. "Ned." "Miss Ruddock." "There is a coach at eight in the morning, and I am going to take it, and I do not know when I shall be back." She said it plainly, because he had earned plainness. "The shop will stand shut while I am gone. I will give you money for your mother and a letter for her that says you are kept on, and I want you to take the box out of the balance drawer on the third evening and carry it to Mr. Cope's rooms and tell him that I have gone over the moors, and then go home and say nothing to any soul, not for money and not for trouble. Can you do that?" Ned put down the cloth. He was fifteen now and had grown into his shoulders, and he looked at her the way a soldier looks at an order he has already decided to obey. "I can do that," he said. "Miss Ruddock, will there be a cordial where you are going?" "There is a cordial wherever I am going," she said. "That is the whole difficulty." She stood up and went to the shelf and took down her father's notebook, and opened it at the back, at the page with the tests, and found the sentence she had read a hundred times and understood in her bones only now, in this second winter, with eleven more names in her mind and a town she had never seen waiting somewhere over the moors for the same fever and the same free comfort, and she read it again, and then she sat down at the balance and began, very carefully, to write. There was a coach to the market town at eight in the morning. She would need her good coat. She would need the jars, and the foils, and the tin box, and the second lamp, and she would need, above all, to arrive before the man who had signed his name in a living clerk's margin, and who had left his mark in a dead town's wax, learned that she had learned his alphabet at last.