Voyager - Diana Gabaldon [186]
Madame Jeanne blinked once or twice, crossed herself, and turned without a word, to disappear through the concealed doorway, which swung to behind her with a muffled thud.
I was beginning to shake, as much with reaction as with the cold. Accustomed as I was to emergency, blood, and even sudden death, the events of the morning had been more than a little harrowing. It was like a bad Saturday night in the emergency room.
“Come along, Sassenach,” Jamie said, putting a hand gently on the small of my back. “We’ll get ye washed.” His touch worked on me as well as it had on Madame Jeanne; I felt instantly better, if still apprehensive.
“Washed? In what? Brandy?”
He gave a slight laugh at that. “No, water. I can offer ye a bathtub, but I’m afraid it will be cold.”
It was extremely cold.
“Wh-wh-where did this water come from?” I asked, shivering. “Off a glacier?” The water gushed out of a pipe set in the wall, normally kept plugged with an insanitary-looking wad of rags, wrapped to form a rough seal around the chunk of wood that served as a plug.
I pulled my hand out of the chilly stream and wiped it on the shift, which was too far gone for anything to make much difference. Jamie shook his head as he maneuvered the big wooden tub closer to the spout.
“Off the roof,” he answered. “There’s a rainwater cistern up there. The guttering pipe runs down the side of the building, and the cistern pipe is hidden inside it.” He looked absurdly proud of himself, and I laughed.
“Quite an arrangement,” I said. “What do you use the water for?”
“To cut the liquor,” he explained. He gestured at the far side of the room, where the shadowy figures were working with notable industry among a large array of casks and tubs. “It comes in a hundred and eighty degrees above proof. We mix it here wi’ pure water, and recask it for sale to the taverns.”
He shoved the rough plug back into the pipe, and bent to pull the big tub across the stone floor. “Here, we’ll take it out of the way; they’ll be needing the water.” One of the men was in fact standing by with a small cask clasped in his arms; with no more than a curious glance at me, he nodded to Jamie and thrust the cask beneath the stream of water.
Behind a hastily arranged screen of empty barrels, I peered dubiously down into the depths of my makeshift tub. A single candle burned in a puddle of wax nearby, glimmering off the surface of the water and making it look black and bottomless. I stripped off, shivering violently, thinking that the comforts of hot water and modern plumbing had seemed a hell of a lot easier to renounce when they were close at hand.
Jamie groped in his sleeve and pulled out a large handkerchief, at which he squinted dubiously.
“Aye, well, it’s maybe cleaner than your shift,” he said, shrugging. He handed it to me, then excused himself to oversee operations at the other end of the room.
The water was freezing and so was the cellar, and as I gingerly sponged myself, the icy trickles running down my stomach and thighs brought on small fits of shivering.
Thoughts of what might be happening overhead did little to ease my feelings of chilly apprehension. Presumably, we were safe enough for the moment, so long as the false cellar wall deceived any searching excisemen.
But if the wall failed to hide us, our position was all but hopeless. There appeared to be no way out of this room but by the door in the false wall—and if that wall were breached, we would not only be caught red-handed in possession of quite a lot of contraband brandy, but also in custody of the body of a murdered King’s Officer.
And surely the disappearance of that officer would provoke an intensive search? I had visions of excisemen combing the brothel, questioning and threatening the women, emerging with complete descriptions of myself, Jamie, and Mr. Willoughby, as well as several eyewitness accounts of the murder. Involuntarily, I glanced at the far corner, where the dead man lay beneath his bloodstained