第6章 The Fifth Station

There was no posting house between the water and Chippenham, so the fifth seal went on at a dairy at Tedbury, and it went on because the post-mistress came out into the yard in a checked gown with a milking pail in one hand. She was perhaps forty-five and she was the first person on the whole of the road who had asked Temperance nothing whatever. "Seals," she said. Five and six. She did not go along the flap with her thumb. She set the bag on the milking stool and looked at it and said, "That's a Bath bag. That's a Bath bag and you've ridden it wet off the ford and you're stood in my yard at four in the afternoon wanting a seal and I've a cow to milk and no man in the house." "Small," said Temperance, and then, "Mistress Small." "Ellen Small. And I'm not putting a seal on it." The pail went down on the step. "Not because I won't. Because I have to be able to say that I didn't, and I could say it, and if I put the fifth on it I couldn't say a thing at all when the man comes asking." "What man?" "Whichever of the three comes asking, and there's three, and they're not the same three as yours." She wiped her hands. "The two you've had off the road since Marlborough are a man called Quill and he is not a lawyer's clerk and never has been, he's a man who lost a trade and hasn't found another, and the other one rides with two men and doesn't speak to them. That's three on this stretch alone and I've counted them, because I count." "Counted them how?" "By the milk." She was filling the pail as she talked, and the milk came into it and settled. "There's four dairies between the water and here and every man that comes off that road into a dairy in June of 1815 comes into a dairy in a wet coat with a horse that has not been dried, and I've had my own man say what I ought to earn for that, and I've earned it. So I know a courier's in the county. I don't know where he's carrying to." Temperance sat the grey and did not move. "You'll not be surprised," she said, "and you'll not remember it." "No," said Ellen Small. "And I will say this, which is a thing I have not said to a living soul: I am not sealing that bag because a woman came to my dairy on the road to Devizes in the spring, in April, and I was glad to see her because she was the first person on this road for a month who was not a man, and she was so pleased to be spoken to that she stood in my yard and told me the whole of it, and I thought it a great pretty tale, and I have thought about it every day since, and she was gone in the spring and I was told in the summer that there was a girl dead in a workhouse at Chippenham and nobody knew her name." The yard was very quiet except for the cow in the byre. "How long have you known it was a woman?" "Since Marlborough, when Pryce said it out loud like a fool and could have been reported for it." Ellen Small set the pail down. "And I've known since Marlborough and I've sat here for three days deciding what to do about it, and what I have decided is that I will not put a seal on a bag that a man with three riders behind him is going to open in the next ten miles, because the seal is the only thing you have." "Six is the sixth. After me there are two, and then the ninth is at the Chute." "I know the count, I've had it since Tuesday, and the ninth is Marlowe and Marlowe is a good man and he is the only one of the lot of you who will ask a rider to stay the night." She picked the pail up. "And here's what you'll want to decide for yourself, and I'd not have you decide it at my dairy because a dairy's a poor place to be told what to do by a woman with a pail. You'll want to decide it at Chippenham, where there's an inn with a landlord in it, and Herring is a fool but Herring is a man who writes things down." She came out of the yard with the bag and did not seal it, and the wax on it was still hard and cold and the ribbon was still tight across the flap, and she carried it out to the gate and put it on the saddle and stood with her hand on the cantle. "You'd want to know why," she said. "Yes." "Because I have been a woman on a road on my own for twenty years, and I know the arithmetic, and it is not a hard one." She took her hand off the saddle. "There's a woman in a county full of men who'll swear to anything and one of you that can be believed. That's not a small thing and a great many people have been killed for a great deal less. And a woman in a wet coat on a dark road in June is a thing that gets noticed, and a noticed thing gets written down, and a thing that's written down is a thing a man with three riders can buy with a crown." "I'm not going to take off the coat." "No. I know you're not. I've had a coat on me for twenty years that I'd not take off in front of a magistrate if my life were in it, and I'm not asking you for it." She turned for the byre. "I'm asking you for the seal, and you'll not give it to me, and I'll not have said anything about it that could be used." She stood in the yard and listened to the milk going into the pail, and she counted, because she had said she counted and she was not a woman who says a thing and does not do it. Five seals. And three houses after this one, and one of them a fool who wrote things down, and one of them a man who would ask a rider to stay the night, and a man riding with two others who did not speak to them, who was somewhere on this road and had been on it since Marlborough.