第17章 The Second Chance

She rode back to Bradford on the tenth of June, which was the wrong direction, and she did it in daylight, on the road, in front of everybody, because a woman who has lost a bag in a river and turns back the way she came is a woman with nothing to hide, and a woman who turns back in the dark is a woman with something. Ledger kept the eighth house at Bradford and he was the only man on that road she had never had an argument with. "I counted you in on the sixth," he said, when she came off the horse. "Seven and eight, and the eighth was mine, and I have been sitting here since Friday with a slate and a bad conscience." "The eighth is gone." "I know it is gone, I heard at the Chute on Sunday night from a man who was in the river, and he was in the river because somebody paid him, and I have had three days to think about that and I have not come up with one thing I could have done." He put the slate down. "So. What do you want." "I want a bag." Ledger did not move. "I want a bag with your seal on it," said Temperance, "and I want it to go forward to Bath on the night post tonight, and I want it to be taken off a rider at the water, and I want whatever is inside it to be nothing at all." "That is a very odd errand to bring into a post house." "It is the only errand there is." She put the saddlebag down on the counter between them, and it made no noise, because there was nothing in it. "You have a bag in your back room that came off the Salisbury road on Tuesday with a Lincolnshire job in it that never got looked at because the man who had it went to Devizes by another road and told you so. I have been in your back room twice this week. Take that bag out and let it go forward with a false address on the paper and let it be the ninth seal in a chain, and let the man who opens it find a bill of lading for wool and a guinea of lead shot." Ledger put both hands flat on the counter and did not say anything for a long moment. "You've been in my back room twice this week," he said at last. "Once, and I opened the door." "You opened the door and you had a good deal of time in it for a woman with a dead errand." He was not angry; that was the thing that undid her. "Very well. I will do it, and here is exactly what it costs, and I will not do it and have you thank me for it later. There is a house in Bath that has been buying post from this office for forty years and there is a man in it, a clerk, and he has had four bags off me this year and opened none of them, and the reason is that he is lazy and because a man in his position does not open bags he was not told to open. If I send a bag to that address on the night post he will take it up and put it on a shelf, and it will go on a shelf, and it will not be opened at all, and that is the wrong outcome for you." "Then who opens it?" "Nobody. That is the wrong outcome." Ledger came round the counter and took a sheet of paper and folded it, and it was the folding of a man doing a thing he had thought about. "The ninth has to be put on by a man at Bath who is frightened of it, and the eighth has to be mine, and the two have to be in the same chain, and that chain has to go up the road in daylight where a man with a stick can see it. So it does not go by night post. It goes on the road, tomorrow, on the Thursday, in the ordinary way, with an address on the paper that a man with a stick can read at a water crossing." "And you will seal the eighth and put the address on the paper and I will carry it up." "I will seal the eighth and I will hand it to you and I will go back to my counter and I will write in a slate that a bag went forward on Thursday morning for Bath, and that is a lie in a document, and I have written four hundred and eleven true lines in that slate in nine years and I am going to write one false one, and I would like it noticed that I have thought about it for about ninety seconds and I have decided to do it." "Why ninety seconds?" "Because I have a daughter at the Marlborough grammar school who was going to be examined in September," said Ledger, "and because I have been a post-master for twenty-six years and I have never had one moment in twenty-six years that I have wanted to remember, and this is it, and I would rather have it than not have it." He did the wax and the stamp and it was good work, and it took him four minutes, and the eighth of the new chain was in the ribbon of the new bag and it was a Bradford wax and it was on a bag with a bill of lading for wool in it and a guinea of lead shot in a twist of paper. Then he wrote the address out on a sheet and gave it to her, and she read it twice, and it was the address of a laundry in Upper Borough Street that shut in the winter and was taken in March. "Nobody will take in a bag at a laundry that shut in March," she said. "Two men in Bath will," said Ledger. "One of them is a man who takes anything that comes, and the other is a man who will take anything at all if it's a bag off a rider and the rider's in a hurry. I have met the second one. He has a booth at the water and he has been buying sealed post off riders since 1809 and he has never once been told to and never once been caught, and I have never reported him, and I have a very good reason for never reporting him which I am not going to tell you." He put the bag in her hands. It was a Salisbury bag with a Lincolnshire job in it and it was the lightest thing she had carried in nine days. "There's no ninth on that," she said. "It's eight and a bill of lading for wool." "It is eight, and at the water a man with a stick will open it, and he will find wool, and he will put it back together, and he will carry it up the road to a man in a wig and say, *it was nothing, it was a Salisbury bag with a Lincolnshire job in it and the fellow said it was for a laundry that shut in March*," said Ledger, "and every word of that will be true, and it will take him a day and it will take the man in the wig three, and in three days you will be a long way from the Bath road with nothing at all in your saddlebag and a great deal in your head." He walked her out to the yard and stood at the gate with the slate under his arm. "Miss Hall," he said. She stopped. "It is Ledger," he said, "and I have known it since you came in on the sixth, and I have known it since Friday when the man in the river told the story at the Chute and called the rider Reeve, and I did not need to be told twice and I would have written the eighth on a bag with a wrong name on it if you had asked me, and I would not have said anything at the time." He put the slate under his other arm. "Ride on. And when it is done, come back through here and tell me, and I will not believe you, and I will be glad."