Mamzelle Marie wasn't the only person in town to have her spies. Almost certainly she paid H?lier for information, little guessing what the water seller made of the knowledge he collected himself or to whom else he sold it. I should have guessed. Their informant as to who was safe, who had family, whose neighbors were gone, would almost have to be black or colored. Servants wouldn't gossip with a white man.
He was trembling with anger, though whether at H?lier or at himself he did not know.
Why did that make it worse? Men are men and make their livings how best they can.
He should have suspected H?lier, with his spite against those whose lives were more comfortable than his own. He could hear it now in the water seller's voice, and in Roarke's as the Irishman coaxed and praised his accomplice: praise that might, January thought, be as treasured as the money. Even if H?lier himself were ill or missing, those he worked for would still know the names and houses of those he'd chosen, like a farmer choosing lambs for the pot.
It was his pity for the man's infirmity that had blinded him. Pity? he wondered. Or the assumption that as a cripple he was helpless-in itself the contempt H?lier despised.
Along the attic's swamp-side wall January found half a dozen cardboard boxes that scuttered at his approach with a stinking confusion of fleeing gray bodies. He crouched for a better look, and slipped back the lantern slide. The boxes contained nothing very remarkable. It was the implication of what he saw, rather than the objects themselves, that made his hair prickle with a renewed fever-wash of rage.
What they held were only rough trousers of osnaburg cloth, new and stiff as boards, unworn, the kind made cheaply for laborers or slaves; and the cheapest calico dresses and headscarves available.
"Consarn!" exclaimed a voice in Kaintuck English almost directly beneath his feet. "I never seen sech a place for water! Ever' damn buildin' leakin' like Noah's flood!"
"Shut up." Roarke's voice, deadly soft. January felt their silence. Silence in which the thunder of the rain seemed overwhelming, but not loud enough to cover the slow drip of his soaked clothing on the ceiling boards.
He could almost feel them looking up, and froze like a deer: It's only a leak. It's only a leak. But the flimsy walls vibrated with even the stealthy opening of the door that led to the attic stairs, and at the first shudder of ascending feet, he bolted. His own thundering footfalls along the joist brought the men below pounding up the stairs with no further thought for surprise; January flung open the window shutter as someone yelled behind him; the crash of a gun filled the attic's hollow as he dove through.
Rain streamed in his face, slicked the shakes of the kitchen roof as he scrabbled for his balance on the steep slant. A second shot barked. To his right and down he saw men in the yard, Roarke's height and white coat and fair hair plastered straight, rendering the Irishman visible through the rainy murk and dark jostle of bodies. January flipped himself over the top of the roof-ridge and fell three or four feet to the slanted roof of the service wing on the other side, ran along it, keeping low, headed for the basin. A moment later Roarke's voice roared, "There he goes, lads!" and another shot cracked. The ball sliced a burning track across the muscles of his thigh.
Roarke and three men were now on his left, behind St. Gertrude's-Cut through the kitchen, thought January. The two buildings are connected.
He reached the end of the service wing, the men clamoring beneath him like possum hounds, a glister of eyes and teeth in the sudden flare of lightning. When he leapt up onto the kitchen building again he was skylighted against the rainy blackness, and another ball passed close enough over his head that he could hear it whistle. There were men on that side, how many he couldn't tell.
From the end of the kitchen, if he remembered rightly, it was about four feet to the cutting of the basin's bank. No wharf, no steps, no boat.
He reached the kitchen end two strides ahead of his pursuers. There was no time to think, almost none to feel fear, and in any case fear was beside the point. He knew he was a dead man. As he flung himself outward into blackness something passed across