第3章 The Second Station

The Devizes house was a coaching inn with a yard big enough to be called a yard and a landlord who had been told by somebody what was coming, because the horses were out of the stable before she was off the road. Foss was his name and he was fifty and he had a way of standing that made the yard feel smaller. "Inside," he said. "Not in the yard." The parlour was cold and there was a fire that had been laid and not lit, and he shut the door and turned round and put his thumb on the table. "Seals." She gave him the bag. He counted eight and went along the flap with his thumb, and it was the same gesture as Crag's at Winchester, and she understood that the gesture was not a courtesy but a habit of the trade, and that a man who did not do it would not be trusted and a man who did it wrongly would be watched. "You came from Winchester inside of noon." "I came from Winchester at half past ten." "Half past." He set the bag down. "You've lost a day somewhere and you'll not get it back. Who put you on at Winchester?" "A brown gelding. Bad quarter." "Crag's bad brown. He rides it hard, that horse. Half past at Devizes is a good ride and you'll do it again." He went to the door and shouted for a boy and the boy did not appear, and Foss shut the door again and said: "Now. I am going to tell you a thing and you are going to hear it and you are not going to thank me for it, and both of those are correct." "Sir." "There is a man come into this yard at four yesterday afternoon off a chestnut pony, and he put a horse up stable and he asked the boy whether a Bath bag was coming down this road and in what week, and the boy said he didn't know, and the man left." Foss sat down on the other side of the table. "That is all. That is a man asking a boy a question. It is not a constable and it is not a Frenchman and it may be a man who is minded to buy a horse. But I have been on this road twenty-two years and I have not had a man ask that question in a yard since 1809, and I have had that twice." "Twice in 1809?" "Once in 1809 and once in 1812, and both times it was about Waterloo both times, if you can credit it. Nobody in England knows what is happening in Belgium, and everybody in England knows that something is, and the men who go and are mixed up in it mostly are not French and are not spies. They are men who have been told there will be a great deal of prize money and who have found a way of getting at the paper." He put his hand flat on the table beside the bag. "I am not going to detain you and I am not going to write anything down, and I am going to put a fresh horse on you at four and give you a man on the Marlborough road, which will cost the Bath company eleven shillings and which I shall put on my own sheet and settle with them in August." "Why do that?" "Because if they open the bag on the Marlborough road the paper is worth nothing and the wax is worth nothing and every man between here and the coast is out of work for a fortnight, and I have a wife and a yard and eleven horses." He almost smiled. "And because you have not asked me a single question about the paper, and a person who does not ask has either been told not to or has more sense than most, and I have a preference for the second and a respect for the first." "Then tell me what the second is." "There is no second. There is a man on the Marlborough road and he will walk his horse beside you as far as the turning, and he will not speak to you, and you will not speak to him, and if anybody comes up that road behind you, the man will put a hand on your stirrup and you will turn about and go back down to Devizes at whatever speed the animal will do." Foss took a folded paper out of his coat. "That is a service the Bath company pays for and the Bath company has never once asked what it is for, and I have never once told them." She rode out of Devizes at four with a fresh horse and a man on a grey cob beside her, and the man was about fifty and had a scar on the left side of his jaw and did not speak for four miles. At the fifth mile he put his hand on her stirrup and she turned the animal about and went back down to Devizes at whatever speed the animal would do, which was not fast, because the fresh horse was fresh. The man on the chestnut pony was on the road at the turning, half a mile behind, and he had got off his horse and was standing in the gateway of a field, and he had a glass in his hand. "Ten minutes," said the man on the grey cob. "He was sat in that gateway from two o'clock. He's had a glass and he's not drunk, and when we come round that bend he'll be on his pony and he'll follow us to the Marlborough turn, and that is as far as he dares, because at Marlborough there are men who'll take a purse." "How do you know that?" "Because I have been the man in the gateway. Twice." The grey cob turned for the Devizes road. "Go on to Marlborough, Reeve. And when you're on the down side of that hill, look at the guideposts, because they've been painted wrong, and paint on a guidepost is a thing that means something and a whitewash on a white gate does not." She looked at the guideposts two miles on. Both of them had been freshly painted. Both of them were wrong.