第2章 The First Station

The relay house at Winchester was a slate-roofed building with a yard behind it and a man in the yard who was not expecting anybody, because the Bath road bag was not due at Winchester until the second week of June and it was the ninth. He came out of the stable door wiping his hands and looked at the bag before he looked at the rider, which was the correct order and the reason she had chosen this road. "Seals," he said. One. He counted it twice, the way a man counts who intends to be asked whether he counted them twice, and then he went along the flap with his thumb, and she watched him do it and let her hands stay on the reins. "Crag," he said, looking up. "I'm Crag. You'll have your dinner here and you'll not have a bed, and you'll be mounted again at four." "Reeve," she said. "Bath road." "You'll be what you need to be, Reeve." He went in under the arch and came out with a fresh horse on a halter, a brown gelding with a bad quarter and good feet, and he noticed her looking at the quarter. "He goes uphill like a cart and downhill like a bird. You'll find he's honest at the pace you'll want to go at." "How long have you had him?" "Two years. He came off the Salisbury road." Crag led the animal round and put the reins in her hands. "You'll be at Devizes tomorrow inside of noon if you keep the milestone and don't stop for the beer. There's a place halfway that will put a cup in front of a man that looks like water and costs like wine, and it's a very good idea to ride past it." She thanked him and did not say anything else, and he went back under the arch, and she noticed that he had not once looked at her face, and she noticed that he had looked at her hands. That was the cost of the thing, and it was the whole of the cost, and it was not a cost that anyone would have believed: not the road, which was only long, and not the disguise, which was only a coat and a change of voice. It was that men looked at her hands. "Reeve." Crag had stopped in the arch. "You will find the tap on the Salisbury road is shut for repairs and has been shut since Candlemas, and the man who tells you different is telling you what he would like to happen. Do you understand me?" "I understand you, Mr Crag." "Good." He came out again. "There was a woman on this road in the spring with a bag, and she was stopped at the Old Sarum turnpike and they took her bag off her and she did not have the chain for it, and the paper in it went to a man in Southampton who was very pleased with it. I am not telling you that to frighten you. I am telling you because the road will be watching for her, and because you have got her way of holding a bag, and because I would rather give you the reason now than have you find out about it at Marlborough with a constable's hand on your collar." "Who was she?" "Somebody's daughter, from the other side of Devizes." He went in. "We never had her name. She were about your age. She were not so good at it as you, and the not being good at it is the only part of it that I am sorry for, because the rest of it is only a coat and a voice, and the poor devil died in a workhouse at Chippenham in the spring. That's what I hear. So you ride with a straight back and a light hand, and if anybody stops you then you are a man with a bag and the law is the wax." He was gone before she could ask anything else, and she stood in the yard of a relay house in Winchester with a bad-quartered horse and a bag with eight seals on it, and the mist had gone off the low ground and the road to Devizes was up the hill in front of her. The horse did go uphill like a cart. It was the worst two hours of the nine days and afterwards she could not remember a mile of it except the milestones, which came at what felt like enormous intervals, and the two fields, and a crow on a post. At about eleven she was still four miles short of the top and she had been sitting the horse at a walk for twenty minutes because it would not be pushed, and she was in the middle of thinking that a horse which cannot be pushed is a horse that decides the pace, and a horse that decides the pace is nine days or it is not nine days at all. A man came up on the left, on foot, off a lane, and he was about sixty and carrying a bundle. She did not want company on the top of that hill and there was nowhere to go, so she went past at a walk and he put a hand up to his hat, and then he said: "You're the Bath bag." "No," said Temperance, which was the first time she had ever denied it, and she heard herself say it, and she understood in the same breath that the man had asked a question and not made a statement, and that she had answered it wrong in front of a person who was not the police and would remember the answer. The man looked at the bag behind the cantle, and then at the seals, and then up at her. "Nine days," he said. "You'll not make it in nine. There's four foot of water at the Chute bridge and they've the ford down since Tuesday, and a man goes in up to his waist there and the bag goes under and the paper's gone, and if the paper's gone you'll have ridden nine days for a man to say sorry." He shifted the bundle. "I'm going to the mill. There's a bridge at the mill if you've a half-crown for the toll." She had a shilling and fourpence and she had counted it that morning because she had known she would have to. "Who told you I was the Bath bag?" "Marlowe," said the man, "or Marlowe's boy, and it was in the taproom at the Chute on Tuesday with a glass of small beer in front of it, which is Marlowe's way of making a thing public in a place where a thing can be heard. So you'll forgive me. It isn't a secret, Reeve. It's a nine-day errand and everybody from here to the water knows a body's carrying it, and the only mystery is which body's carrying it, and I'd not be a man if I thought you were the one."