第9章 The Eighth Station

The man in the shallows took the bag off her in the water and she let him, and that was the whole of the disaster and it took four seconds. "You'll not want to do that," she said, from the horse, above him. "No," he said. "I do want to do that." He had the bag by the throat of it and he had it up out of the water and he was standing in four feet of moving water on the top of a crossing stone with his trousers wet to the thigh, and there was no possibility of anything at all. He got the flap up with his thumbnail. Temperance did not watch. She sat the horse and looked up the road east at the hedge line and counted to sixty, and behind her she heard the wax go, which is not a loud sound. It is a small sound. It is the sound of a thumb going into a bead of tallow and it is over in a second and it is the end of everything. "Eight," said the man in the shallows. "I counted eight going up past the post. Where's the ninth?" "The ninth is at the Chute," said Temperance. "There's a man on the west bank says the ninth is at the Chute and says you've no business carrying it that far." He had the flap of the bag open and he was looking down into it. "Paper?" "Paper." "Paper's no use to anybody, miss," said the man, "without the chain. That's not me saying it, that's everybody. That's what the wax is for. You could carry that paper in your boot." She got off the horse. She got off the horse in four feet of water on a crossing stone with a bad plate, and she waded, and the water took her to the thigh and then she had it round her waist and she came the last three feet on the stones. "Where is it," she said. He showed her. It was a wet rag with a thing inside it that was the worst paper she had ever handled in her life, which is not difficult, since she had once handled a bladder. "Mind the wax," he said, "it's foul." "Mind your own." She got it out. It was folded in eight, not in thirds, and the water had got into the folds and turned it to pulp at the corners, and she shook it out on the stone and got it open and there were two sheets and a strip of oiled paper between them, and the two sheets were writing and the oiled paper was blank and had been folded in with them to keep the ink off the fold. She read it standing in the river up to her waist with a man on the bank waiting to be paid and a man on the far bank who had not moved in three hours, and she read it twice, because the first time she read it she was not certain she had understood a word of it and the second time she read it she understood all of it and that was worse. It was eleven lines. It gave a place on a road in Belgium, a date, a number of guns, and a name she had heard once in her life in a room behind a harness shop in Southwark, and the eleventh line said that a column would move on the seventeenth and that the person named was to ensure by every means that it did not move on the eighteenth, and the reason given was the reason for the whole of it and it was four words long. She got out of the river and up the stones and put the two wet sheets inside her coat against her chest, and she took the bag off the man in the shallows, and it was empty and it was ruined and she kept it because eight houses on a post road is a thing that can be asked about. "Right," said the man in the shallows. "You'll be wanting to know what that costs." "You'll be wanting to be paid." "I'm to be paid eleven pounds by a man I've never seen and there's nine in it, and if I go back to him and say I opened it in the water and it was paper gone soft, he'll give me the nine and that's the end of it." He wrung his trouser leg. "And that's the whole of my thinking, miss, and I'll tell you why I'm telling you. If I take the paper off you, then there's a man in a good wig in a room in Brussels with eleven lines in his hand and nothing on this river to match it to, and he'll know within a week that it was a woman did it, because it was, and everybody from the water to Marlborough will have seen a woman out of Bath in a man's coat and a bad grey in June." He put his hand out. "Nine pound ten and I'll say I never saw you and I'll say you went through west." She gave him the money. He counted it and put it away and went up the bank without a word, and the man on the west bank came off the wall at last and stood in the road and looked at her, and after a while he said: "He's gone up to the Chute. He'll be there an hour before you and he'll be drinking, and he'll say nothing to anybody, and you'll be sat in a cold room at the water with a bag nobody can count and a coat with nothing in it." "I'm aware." "You're carrying it in your coat. I can see the shape of it." "Then I am." The man on the west bank looked at her for a while longer, and then he said: "There's a woman at Ashcombe House who'll stand in front of a magistrate and say a thing she saw on the Salisbury road in April, and she'll say it about a man called Reeve, and she'll say it so that nobody's ever called into question whether Reeve was a man or a woman, and if she's stood in a room and said a thing like that once she will say it again for whoever's standing in front of her, and I don't suppose she's doing it out of the goodness of her heart, and I don't suppose she doesn't know what she's doing either." "How do you know her name?" "Because she sent me down here," said the man, "and a fortnight ago, to stand on this wall and count bags."