They sat together in the quiet back office of the Tram depot. Meanwhile, the afternoon sun slanted through the broad four-paned window. He cast amber squares across the scrubbed pine boards of the work-table.
The depot outside had quieted for the mid-afternoon lull. The heavy shunting bells on the tram tracks were still. The wagon drivers were resting their teams in the lower shade beneath the brick viaduct. And the only sound competing with the mountain breeze was the distant, rhythmic hum of the grain-mill waterwheel down on the canal branch. A fine haze of wood dust drifted in the sunbeams, stirred by the draft that blew under the cedar door.
Len reached inside his grey wool tunic with his uninjured right hand. From the deep inner pocket, lined with oilcloth to protect against road sweat and mountain rain, he drew out the folded packet of parchment.
The paper was heavy, raw, unwhitened mountain linen, five inches wide by seven inches long, folded twice into a formal courier’s packet. Its edges were browned and brittle with seven years of trapped cellar air, and the outer folds bore a faint, dark smudge of stone lamp oil from a Survey upkeep lantern. On the back, closing the three-sided flaps, sat a disk of dark scarlet sealing wax. It was stamped with the obsolete, pre-war seal of the Tern Road Posthouse. Three galloping horses harnessed abreast beneath an open horizon.
