The south sorting room of the Highfield posthouse was warm, quiet. Then he filled with the gentle, rhythmic music of ordinary morning labor.
The room smelled of dried lavender sprigs, beeswax floor polish. The clean, sweet smoke of seasoned birch splits burning in the stone hearth. Across the whitewashed walls, the morning sun cast long, golden rectangles of light that shifted slowly as the day climbed above the mountain tree-line.
Len Vey sat at his regular work-table beside the large eastern casement window.
The window had been built by their grandfather sixty years ago, during the first spreading of the northern postal exchange. A broad, twelve-paned casement of clear, thick glass set into an oiled white-oak frame. It looked out directly across the front garden, the stone well-head with its mossy cedar bucket. The broad, dry gravel expanse of the northern highway where the mountain coaches turned.
Above the work-table, on a shelf of seasoned pine, sat the historical route books of the Tern Road postal network. Four massive, calfskin-bound folios containing eighty years of daily route logs. In the earliest volume, their grandfather had lettered the first entry in faded brown dark oak-ink: Month Five, Day Twelve. Road opened from Highfield to the River weir. Three letters carried. Weather fair. In the third volume, their father Deren’s handwriting marched across twenty years of mountain crossings. Bold, upright, and increasingly hurried as the emergency surcharges began to choke the trade.
