The letter came inside a loaf.
A lodger courier from the Lantern Ford toll brought it up the river road in the last hour of the afternoon, a thin man with a limp and a canvas bag, who did not give his name to the gate-watch and did not wait for an answer. He left the loaf on the step of the gatehouse with a note tied to its crust in a bit of tarred string, and walked away down the Lowgate path without looking back. Tallow found the loaf when he came out to check the gate-chain at dusk. He carried it inside by the crust, holding it at arm’s length, as a man might carry a fish he was not sure was dead.
The letter was wrapped in oilcloth, folded flat, pressed into the middle of the bread where the crumb was softest. Somebody had cut a neat slot in the loaf with a sharp knife and put the letter in the slot, and then pressed the crust closed again, and the cut had been done so carefully that only the faint pale line gave it away. Tallow admired it. He admired the craft of it the way he admired a well-ruled ledger, and then he took out the letter and unfolded the oilcloth on the gatehouse table, under the lamp, and forgot the bread entirely.
