第20章 The Night Before

The man with the booth at the water had not been there on the Thursday, and the man with the stick had not been there either, and Temperance went up the Bath road with a Salisbury bag full of wool and a guinea of lead shot in a twist of paper and nothing whatever to be afraid of, and she had the whole of the day to be afraid of instead. The booth man was on the Friday. He came out of a shed by the lock with a ledger under his arm and looked at the bag and then at her, and she said the address out loud before he asked her for it, which is a thing that riders do not do. "Upper Borough Street. Laundry." "There's no laundry on Upper Borough Street," said the booth man. "It's shut since March." "Then that's why there's no laundry." He took the bag off her. "Nine is the last one, miss. You'll get it at Bath if there's anything in it worth having." He took it behind the shed and she heard the ribbon go, and then a considerable silence, and then the noise of a man breathing out through his nose, and then he came out with the bag and gave it back to her and said, "Wool. And shot." "Salisbury to Bath, addressed wrong." "Salisbury to Bath, addressed wrong," said the booth man, "and I have opened four bags this month and three of them were for this laundry and one of them was for a man in a good wig, and I do not know which of the two you are and I have not the curiosity to find out, and if you stand there another minute I'm going to have to look at your face." She stood there another minute. "You've missed one," he said. "Ninth was a woman on the ford road the other night and a man in the shallows and there's not a soul left on that stretch that I know of." He got his ledger open. "You'll not be stopped again before the water." So she came into Bath at four in the afternoon on the eleventh of June with a bag of wool under her saddle, which was the ninth seal and was worth nothing to anybody in the world, and eleven lines in her head, which were worth everything to nobody at all. She found the Pump Room empty at the appointed hour. Not empty of people. There were two hundred under the colonnade on the Friday as there had been on the Wednesday, and a man in a baron's coat was drinking Spa water and a woman in a shawl was standing at the east end. But the west end of the colonnade, where the Baron's man stood on the Wednesday, was empty, and there was a table brought out to the edge of the pavement with a cloth on it, and there was nothing on the table. She put the wool bag down on the table. It was the only bag in Bath that day with a whole chain of eight on it and no ninth, and it lay on a cloth on a table under a colonnade for about a quarter of an hour while two hundred people went past it and not one of them looked at it twice, and that was the second chance working, and she had not known when it was going to work and it had not worked at the ford at all. At twenty past the hour Major Dunmore came up the colonnade from the west. He was not a young man and he was not in the baron's coat, and he went to the east end, and the woman in the shawl said something to him, and he looked at the table, and he came across to it, and he read the address on the paper that was still pinned to the outside of the wool bag. "Upper Borough Street," he said. "It shut in March." "So it did." He turned the bag over. It had eight seals on it and a hole in the ribbon where the water had been, and he put his thumb along the row and counted them, and Temperance watched a professional do the thing she had watched nine men do on that road, and he was slower than any of them, and he did not say one word while he did it. Then he lifted the bag off the table. "There's no ninth on this." "No, sir." "And there's no ninth on it because there was never a ninth on it, and you have carried a bag with eight seals and a wrong address into the only town in England where anybody would care, on the eleventh of June, at four in the afternoon, on a day when a great many people knew that a woman in a man's coat had lost a bag in the ford at Chippenham on the eighth." He set it down. "Who sent you to me?" "Nobody, sir. The Bath company." "The Bath company has had my name on a list since February and has never once sent anybody, and I have been expecting somebody every day for nine days." He looked at her. "What have you got?" "I have eleven lines, sir." "Then say them." "I have said them over four times in a room with a fire since Wednesday morning, and I can say them backwards, and there is one word wrong in the ninth line and it is either a place or a number and I am certain it is a number, and I have been certain of that for three days and I have nobody in England to ask." Major Dunmore stood under a colonnade in Bath on the eleventh of June and looked at a girl of eighteen in a man's coat. "Say them," he said. She said them. Eleven lines, and the place on the road in Belgium, and the date, and the thirty-one with its comma, and the name, and the four words at the end, and her voice did not go once, and she did not stop once, and when she came to the ninth line she stopped for the length of a breath and then said the word she had been carrying since a barn at the water on the morning of the ninth of June. "That is right," said Major Dunmore. "It is the only thing in the whole of it that I could not have told you, and it is the reason that the errand is worth eleven days and not one, because a man in Brussels has been waiting nine days for a word he is perfectly certain of and a courier who is not certain of it, and there is nothing in this world more useful to him than a courier who is sure." He put the wool bag down on the table again. "Thirty-one guns, the seventeenth, and that name, and the four words," he said. "That is a column that does not move on the eighteenth, and there will be a great many men in Belgium tomorrow who are alive because of it, and not one of them will ever know there was a girl in Bath with the whole of it in her head, and that is the correct arrangement, and I would not have it any other way, and you will not be paid for it, because nobody pays for this and I have not got the authority to pay anybody for it." "I don't want paying, sir. I want the man on the Bath road stopped riding at night, and the woman at Tedbury left alone, and a man called Ledger at Bradford left with his slate." "Ledger has a daughter," said Major Dunmore. "Yes, sir." "Then Ledger has a daughter," said Dunmore, "and so has every man I have ever ruined, and I have never once found that a useful thing to say, and it has never once stopped me." He picked up the bag. "This will go in my own bag. And you will go home." The post road stretched behind her, west through Devizes and up past Marlborough, and the Bath road stretched behind her too, and the whole of it was nine days and eight houses and a river and a miller's barn and a dairy and a bad grey with a plate. She stood on the pavement under the colonnade for a while after he had gone, with nothing in her saddlebag, and she could not have told anybody, including herself, which of those two things was the heavy one. It was the seventeenth of June at about six in the evening, and there was nothing at all on the front of the Times except the name of a battle that had happened four days before, and nobody in Bath was talking about anything except the water, and the whole of the world was a day out of step and had been a day out of step since the Friday before last, and nobody had noticed, and it was the whole of what she had come down the road for.