The rumour always arrived first, and usually got it wrong

There is a particular kind of footnote I collect and can never use. It is the one where a town knew a thing days before the official word arrived, and knew it slightly wrong.

In 1815, the story goes, a banking house in London heard the outcome of a battle in Belgium before the government did. That one is famous enough that people still argue about it. I am more interested in the quieter version, the one that happened everywhere, all the time, for most of recorded history: a carter, a sailor, a woman selling eggs at the gate, carrying a half true account of something enormous while the sealed dispatch was still three days out on a bad road.

News had a speed, and it was walking pace

We forget that information used to have a physical body. It sat in a saddlebag. It waited for the tide. A declaration signed in one capital might take a fortnight to mean anything in a provincial market, and in the gap between the signing and the knowing, people went on living inside a world that had already changed without telling them.

I find that gap unbearably human. A man mends his roof on a Tuesday, not knowing that on Monday, four hundred miles away, the price of everything he owns was quietly decided for him. The treaty is real. The roof is also real. He is living in the old world and the new one at the same time, and only the roof knows it.

The rumour filled the space the news left empty

Into that gap climbs the rumour, which has one great advantage over the truth: it travels light. It needs no seal, no courier, no confirmation. It needs only a listener who would rather have a wrong answer now than a right one next week.

So the egg woman says the king is dead, and he is not, or he is but not for the reason she gives. The sailor says the city has fallen, and it has, but a month ago. For a few days the town runs on this. It buys and sells on it, prays or celebrates on it. By the time the real dispatch arrives, dull and precise, the feeling has already been had, and the official version is almost an anticlimax.

The truth came by road. The rumour came by mouth, and it never once waited for the tide.

Why I write the egg woman and not the dispatch

When I sit down to a chapter, the temptation is always to write the dispatch: the clean sentence, the date, the outcome anyone can look up. But the dispatch is not where people lived. People lived in the days before it landed, acting on the best wrong information they had, which is, if you think about it, exactly what all of us are still doing.

The machines are faster now. A thing happens on the far side of the world and I know a version of it before I have finished my coffee. What has not changed is that the version I get is a little early and a little wrong, shaped by whoever was quickest to speak rather than whoever knew most. We have swapped the egg woman for a glowing rectangle. The structure of the day is identical.

That is the footnote I can never use and will not throw away. History is not the moment the news arrives. It is the long, ordinary hours before it does, when the roof still needs mending and nobody has told you yet.

The bad news in Seven Enemy Ships comes in a king's letter: around 1190 BC, the ruler of Ugarit wrote that seven enemy ships had burned his towns.