第11章 Lady Anne

Ashcombe House stood a mile off the Bath road behind a wall and a line of elms, and Temperance did not go to the front door, because she had a bag that said Reeve on it and a road that knew a woman was carrying it. She went round to the farmyard and put her hand on the wall and waited, and a girl of about fourteen came round with a bucket and stopped dead. "I'm not here for the dairy," said Temperance. "I'm here because a man on a wall at the ford said Lady Anne Ashcombe would stand in front of a magistrate and say a thing she saw on the Salisbury road in April." The girl put the bucket down. "Mother," she said, and shouted it, and then said, "There's a rider at the wall and it's a woman." Nothing happened for long enough that Temperance thought the girl had gone for nothing. Then the kitchen door opened and a woman of fifty-five came out with a cloth in her hand, and she did not hurry, and she looked at the rider, and then at the coat, and then at the rider's hands, and then she went back inside and came out again with a shawl over her arm. "Horses go in the yard," she said. "There is water in the trough and there is no one in this house who is going to say anything about you, and I would like you to understand that I am saying that first, before anything else, because you are standing in my yard in a man's coat having been in a river, and I would like the whole of the morning to be on the table before we start." She took Temperance into the kitchen and put a cup of something hot in front of her, and did not sit down, and stood at the window with her back to the room for a while. "Say the seals," she said. "There are none," said Temperance. "The eighth went in the ford at six o'clock last night. There is a bag in a miller's barn at the water and it has a hole in the ribbon and no wax on one seam and Marlowe has kept it so that nobody asks about it, and I have got the paper inside my coat and it is wet through and two words are gone off it and I have learned it by heart and one word in the ninth line is wrong and there is nobody alive who can tell me the right one." Lady Anne turned round. "You have it by heart." "Eleven lines. I can say them backwards. The ninth line has one word wrong and it is either a place or a number and I am certain it is a number." "Then it is a number, and you will not need it said, and you have told me a great deal in about ninety seconds and you have told it to me in the order a person tells a thing when they are frightened and not in the order a person tells a thing when they are managing somebody." She sat down at last. "Now sit down, and drink that, and tell me about Josiah." Temperance put the cup down without drinking it. "Two years and a month," said Lady Anne. "And there is a man in Brussels who was forty-one in 1813 and who is not forty-one now, and I have known about that man for a great many years, and I did not tell you one word of it, and I am not going to apologise for it this morning because you have a paper against your chest and a woman's life on the road and an apology is worth nothing to either of us." "You knew." "I knew you were carrying something. I have known since the Tuesday after you were put off the Salisbury road in the autumn, and I did not know what, and I did not ask, and I have been not asking in a very careful and deliberate way for two years, and I would like to tell you why, and then I would like to tell you about the ninth seal, and then you can decide what you think of me." "Tell me." "In the April a woman came off that road who had no business on it, and she was good at it, and she was in my dairy at Tedbury for forty minutes and she told Ellen Small the whole of it because Ellen Small was the only person on that road who had ever been kind to her." Lady Anne's hands were flat on the table. "And Ellen Small has never in her life repeated a word, and she has gone on being exactly who she was, and she told me in May that there was a girl dead in a workhouse at Chippenham and nobody knew her name. And I have thought about that every day since, and I have thought about the fact that I knew the whole of it and did nothing, and I have thought about the fact that a woman on a road in a man's coat is only safe as long as nobody has any reason to look twice at her." "Somebody looked twice." "Somebody looked twice in June of 1814 and a man in a good wig has spent a year and a great deal of money finding out about it, and he has not found me, and he has found out about you instead, and you are eighteen years old and you are on the Bath road with a wet coat." She said it flatly. "So that is the whole of what I have. I have not helped you and I have not harmed you and I have been extremely careful, and a man on a wall at the ford has told you I sent him to count bags, and that is true, and I sent him because I wanted to know whether a rider was coming down that road who had been counted and could not prove it." Temperance said nothing for a while. "And the ninth seal," she said. "There is no ninth seal," said Lady Anne. "Marlowe is a good man and he will not put his stamp on anything that came in out of the ford, and he is right, and there is nothing in that room at the water that can be got back." She got up and took a folded paper out of a drawer and put it on the table. "There is another seal. It is the Bath company seal and it is a week old and it is on a bag that has been in a locked room at Ashcombe House since the second of June, and it has one impression on it, and that impression was made by a man in the buttery at this house on the second of June and he is seventy-one and deaf and has not left the county since 1808." "You have made a bag with a seal on it." "I have had made a bag with a seal on it, and it is the first thing I have ever done that I could be hanged for, and I would do it again this morning, and I would like you to hear me say that before you say thank you." Lady Anne did not sit down again. "And you are not going to take it, are you."