The autumn squall broke two hours before sunrise, swept eastward by a high, dry alpine gale that scoured the valley floor clean of fog.
By seven o’clock on Thursday morning, the basin of Rookvale was drenched in a hard, diamond-pure light that turned every puddle on the road into a mirror of polished silver. The hoarfrost was melting from the telephone wires and the telegraph lines that linked the posthouses, hanging in sparkling, crystal-clear beads along the copper strands before dropping into the dry ditch grass.
Len Vey walked the climbing grade of the Western Terrace, the main road that climbed from the River basin toward the agricultural plateaus of the Orchard Ward.
His canvas courier pannier carried twenty pounds of mail. Sixteen packets of regional circuit summonses, forty-eight private letters from the outside counties, and four heavy linen bags of winter spelt seeds consigned from the Highfield cooperative to the nursery foremen.
The road rose at an unbroken twenty-five-degree pitch, carved directly into the grey dolomitic limestone of the terrace wall.
Under ordinary conditions, a courier hauling twenty pounds up an eighty-foot grade would have been leaning his torso forward at thirty degrees, his neck spine arched backward to see the turn ahead, his upper back muscle muscles knotted into iron cords. His lungs wheezing as his chest muscle fought against the squeezing of the pack-straps. That had been the stance of postal runners for sixty years. A stance that guaranteed a rounded back, chronic sciatica, and a cane…
