第8章 The Seventh Station

Vane at Corsham was a young man and he had been a post-master for two years and he was so frightened of the errand that he had prepared for it in advance, which she learned about afterward and not at the time. "Five and six," he said. "Reeve, of the Bath road." "Six is the seventh," said Temperance. "It is, yes." He put the bag on the office table and went along the flap with his thumb, and the thumb went slower than any thumb she had met on the road, because Vane was counting the seams as well as the wax. "There is a thing I ought to say to you and I would rather say it than not say it, and if you want to ride on with a dirty bag that is your business and my business is the count." "Say it." "There is a man come into this yard at eleven o'clock this morning and asked the ostler what time the Bath bag came down the road, and the ostler told him noon because the ostler is a fool and believes a man in a good coat." Vane went and looked out of the office window. "And then he asked whether the bag would be going on to the ford that afternoon, and the ostler said he supposed so, and the man said that was a pity, because the ford was up, and went away. And I have had the boy out on the road twice since and there is no man on it." "Then he is not on the road." "He is on the ford road," said Vane, "and he is not on it yet, and he will be on it when you get there, and he will be there because a man told him where the water is." She looked at the bag on his table. "You have not put the seventh on yet," she said. "I have not." "Why not?" Vane came back from the window and stood in front of the table and put both hands flat on either side of the bag, and he was twenty-six years old and he had been two years in the trade and he was about to do the only sensible thing and he knew it. "Because you rode in off the Salisbury road with five on it," he said, "and the sixth went on at Chippenham this afternoon by a man called Herring, who writes everything down. And if I put the seventh on now, then in three days there will be a chain of seven houses that all say they saw a bag go past, and a chain of seven houses is worth exactly what a chain of seven houses is worth." He took his hands off the table. "It is worth nothing, because every one of those men saw a bag, and not one of them saw what was in it, and the man who wants to open it does not care in the least about your seven houses, he cares about the paper." "Then what are you telling me to do?" "I am telling you that there is a ninth seal and a man called Marlowe at the Chute, and that Marlowe is the last of the chain, and that whatever happens to this bag between here and the water, the ninth seal goes on at the Chute by Marlowe's own hand or it does not go on at all." He got the wax and the stamp out of the drawer. "And I am going to put the seventh on because it is my office and I have never in two years refused an office, and I would like you to understand that I would have said no if you had asked me to." "I would not have asked you to." "I know. That is what I have been thinking about since eleven o'clock this morning." He pressed the seal in and it was good work, better than Herring's, and he did not hurry it, and he set it down and looked at the row. "So that is six houses," he said, "and there are two more, and the ninth is at the water. And there is a man on the ford road who is going to be there when you are, and he is not a man with a pistol, and I have thought about that for two hours and I cannot make it come out any better than it is." "How do you know he has not a pistol?" "Because a man with a pistol does not ask the ostler what time the bag comes down," said Vane. "A man with a pistol waits. A man who asks questions is a man who has to be sure, and a man who has to be sure is a man who has not done this before, and God help him." She took the bag and it was heavier than when she came in, which it always was, and which nobody on the road ever remarked upon, and which she had come to think of as the entire subject of the errand. "Get off the road at the two mile post," Vane said. "Go by the coppice and come out on the water side of it. It adds half an hour and it puts you in at the ford from the east instead of the west, and a man who has been sat on that west bank since noon will have been looking up the road the whole time and will have watched you come down it." "How long have you been a post-master?" "Two years in June." Vane was already shutting the office. "And I have been told twice this year to say nothing about a rider on the Bath road, and both times by men who were not the Bath company, and I have said nothing, and I would like it noticed that I have said nothing and that I have also put the seventh seal on a bag this afternoon and that both of those are true." At the two mile post she took the coppice on a bad grey with a plate, in the dark, half an hour longer, with a bag against her back and the water noise getting louder on her left the whole way. She was off the road and behind a hedge on the east side of the ford at about half past six, sitting the horse quiet in the dusk, and the man with the stick was on the west bank where Vane had said he would be, and he had not moved, and he was not alone. There were three of them. One was on his horse. One was standing in the shallows up to his knees with his trousers rolled, and he was holding a stick out in front of him like a man feeling for the stones.