Page 31 of Who Will Remember (Sebastian St. Cyr Mystery #20)
Jamie didn’t like being this close to magistrates, constables, bailiffs, and their kind.
Standing across the street and down a ways from the Great Marlborough Street Public Office, he shifted nervously from one foot to the other as he waited for Viscount Devlin to emerge. He didn’t want to think about what Father would say if he knew Jamie was here, following the Viscount. Watching him. But Jamie couldn’t just wait; he had to know . He didn’t understand how Father could be so—so “accepting” was the word Father used. “Cold-blooded” was more like it, Jamie’d always thought. But then he supposed watching your mother, father, and brother all get their heads chopped off would make anyone’s blood run cold.
“I don’t understand,” Jamie had said to him once. “Why’d ye go and watch?”
“Because I owed it to them, to be there for them.”
“Weren’t ye afraid? Afraid somebody’d recognize ye? Afraid they’d be cuttin’ off yer head, too?”
“Yes.”
Whenever he was afraid, Jamie would try to imagine he was like young Father Ambrose, brave enough to stand in the rain watching that blade rise and fall, rise and fall. Except of course there was a big difference between being there for your doomed family and doing what Jamie was doing now.
He realized he had let his attention wander and sucked in a deep, frightened breath when he discovered the Viscount had appeared on the front steps of the public office. And instead of looking to where he’d left his tiger with his curricle, Devlin was staring down the street, straight at Jamie.
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” whispered Jamie. Pushing against the brick wall at his back, he took off at a run.
He heard Devlin shout, heard the clatter of the Viscount’s bootheels behind him, but kept going. Dodging a stout water carrier and a shaggy brown dog nosing something smelly on the pavement, he careened around the corner into an older, quieter street of smaller houses and shops that stretched out before him like a long, empty shooting gallery.
“Dia,” he breathed in dismay, clamping one hand to the crown of his hat as a cold wind gusted up the length of street. The mouth of a narrow lane opened up to his left and he darted down it . Please don’t let this be a dead end, please don’t let this be a dead end , he prayed.
His heart singing with joyous thanks, Jamie erupted into the colorful, motley turmoil of a small market square filled with vegetable and fruit sellers, butcher shops and fish stalls, their tattered striped awnings flapping in the wind. The air was thick with the pungent smells of raw meat, earth-encrusted carrots and turnips, and fish. Dogs barked; a donkey brayed; someone shouted as Jamie tore across the square, leaping over the outstretched long handles of a half-empty barrow and swerving around a fruit seller who was beginning to pack up. His feet slipping and sliding on a mush of fresh manure, pungent cabbage leaves, and rotten tomatoes, Jamie didn’t dare take the time to look back. But he knew the Viscount was still behind him, could hear the vendors calling out to him, recognized the clatter of his vaguely uneven gait on the square’s worn old cobblestones.
It wasn’t until Jamie reached the entrance to the lane that opened up on the far side of the market that he risked throwing a quick glance back over his shoulder. He felt his breath catch in his throat when he saw that, if anything, the Viscount had gained on him. For one frozen moment, Devlin’s intense, furious gaze caught Jamie’s, and Jamie found his step faltering. Then a stall-keeper staggering beneath a heavy bin swung around without looking, knocking the Viscount off-balance to send him careening into the rickety fish stall behind him. The stand collapsed with a crack of splintering wood and an outraged howl from the infuriated fishwife.
“Sweet and merciful Jesus,” whispered Jamie, and took off.
?Half an hour later, Sebastian drew up before his Brook Street house. He was sorely out of temper, bruised, and smelling strongly of fish.
“See to the chestnuts,” he told Tom. “Then I want you to do what you can to find that damned boy, Jamie Gallagher. But I want you to be careful,” he added as the tiger scrambled forward to take the reins.
Tom looked vaguely insulted. “Careful of a boy ?”
“Yes, of a boy,” said Sebastian, grunting when he hopped down from the curricle’s high seat and landed with most of his weight on his bad leg. “I’m not entirely convinced his part in all this is as innocent as he would have us believe.”