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Damian went through the coatees with his clumsy hands. He knew his own the instant he touched it. Scarlet gone the color of old brick. His rank still on it. The left shoulder scorched, shredded, and black-brown with what had splattered out of his wound.

He stood holding it longer than he could afford to.

Then he dressed. A dead man’s shirt, because his own was nowhere and this one was clean enough. The linen dragged over the seam like a rasp. He bore it.

His own gray overalls. His own boots, third in the row. Their feel was the first thing all night his body recognized.

The ruined coatee over everything.

His fingers could not manage the buttons at first. They fumbled and slipped. He stood in the dark and made them learn, one button at a time, all the way to his throat.

He needed to be covered more than he needed to breathe freely. He did not explore why.

There was a wooden box at the end of the stack. The rest of what dead men carried lay inside it. Coin. French and Dutch and English silver together. Rings. A crucifix on a broken chain. A locket fell open in his palm. A young woman’s painted face looked up at him. He shut it and put it back more carefully than his hands had done anything else all night. It was grotesque to steal from the dead, and he felt the need to be respectful, having recently been one of them himself.

He took the coin. Two plain gold rings. A snuffbox that would sell. He had seen men flogged half to death for stripping the fallen. He had stood by and approved the sentence. The thought stayed at his shoulder now, whispering, you know the word for this. He knew it. He took the money anyway. The coin was passage. Passage was England. England was the only thought he could hold onto.

Near the bottom, his fingers closed around a watch. He knew its weight before he knew anything else. He turned its cracked face toward the candle.

His own face reflected back.

Stopped.

He did not look at where the hands stood. He simply put the watch in his pocket and steeled himself.

He ordered his limbs into cooperation so he might climb the stair. The latch lifted for him, and there was no lock. Who locked in the dead?

Beyond it, the passage was stone-flagged and dark. A line of light showed under a far door. Behind it came the clink of spoons, the scholar’s voice running on, the servant’s silence. The house smelled of onions and tallow and lives being lived.

Damian went the other direction. One hand on the wall. His borrowed muscles learned the work at every step. He found the outer door by its draft. Eased its bar out of its keeper and stepped through into the storm.

Rain hit him like grapeshot. The yard was mud and roar and flying water, black as the inside of a gun. Then lightning turned it white. He saw the farmhouse whole for the first and, he hoped, the last time. It was ordinary. A farm like ten thousand farms, except for the iron rod standing up from its roof-ridge into the churning sky. The wire came down from it, stapled neatly along the wall, and went in under the stones to the cellar.

He contemplated it for exactly as long as the lightning lasted.

Then he turned his back on it and walked, the wind on his ruined cheek. Through mud that pulled at the dead man’s boots. At his boots, for he was the dead man in question. The nightmare stayed behind him at the edge of the yard like a dog at the end of its chain. The slab. The seams. The singing wire. The voice pleading with a corpse.

Ahead of him, in the dark where the rain came down, his mind hung a picture and would not take it down. Hartleigh in summer. Green going on forever. A soft rain falling on it. English rain. Gentle rain with no argument in it. His brother, Edward, standing in it bare-headed, complaining that Damian never wrote.

Get home to Hartleigh.

That was the entirety of the thought. Everything else must wait.

He walked away.

* * *

Luc Morel came down the cellar stairs with the lantern. The master would want the work seen to now that the storm had moved off into the night. The house still smelled of wet plaster and the iron on the roof.

A servant knew a house by whether it was as he had left it.

Something was wrong before he could say what.

He had hauled every corpse down these stairs. He did not have to be told. He had carried them down into this. He knew how many. The count sat in his back and in the last trip.

The pile was not as it ought to be.

It was not the slack of dead men settling in the damp. There was a gap, a place where a shoulder had been, and was not. He stopped, scrutinizing his surroundings. The clothes against the far wall had been gone through. The dish of coin was not as he had left it when he had last come down to fetch the master to eat.