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     the light. He lay for some minutes before realizing there was daylight outside.
    Carmichaels — the dispossessors, they had everything now.
    The bell had not sounded.
    Others were stirring. He got up quickly, and went outside where it was
     snowing — the stony yard was covered with pure white stuff. No footprints yet. The
     fire unlit. He hurried to try the gates, but they were locked. The gatekeeper’s
     lodge was deserted.
    Emerging from the sleeping halls, paupers stood about the yard, rangy and
     nervous as cattle in changing weather.
    There was no one in Mam Shingle’s room. No sacks of meal in the
     storeroom. The last keepers had fled during the night, taking all rations.
    Fergus saw Murty Larry pacing up and down by the iron gate. They had been
     abandoned by Mam Shingle and all the other keepers, who had fled and locked the gate
     behind them, deserting with the keys.
    Murty looked wilder then ever, pacing by the gate. Some spirit in the
     orange boy was strong enough to keep him on his feet. Even if it was only fear of the
     black room.
    A fox in a trap would bite off its own leg to get
     away.
    A female pauper clanged the warden’s handbell for a long time as
     though the sound itself might summon rations. In pewter light Fergus climbed the rock
     pile and stared out across the walls at the snowy roofs of the town.
    You might set for rabbits nicely, in such snow. See the tracks neat.
    He could scrounge lumber off the black room slide, find nails and tools,
     build himself a ladder, and get over the wall that way.
    Hearing a squeak, he looked up and saw the gable window of the black room
     swinging open. A body was being shoved out through the window, feet first, onto the
     wooden slide. It was the little beetle man, Warden Conachree.
    Whoever was inside let go of the ankles, and the warden’s corpse
     flew down the slide and tumbled soundlessly into the pit at the bottom.
    A spade of powdered lime, flung from the window, clouded the air before it
     began to settle over the pit. The window closed.
    Excited shouting at the gate caught his attention. Hurrying over, peering
     through the iron bars, he saw a company of dragoons mounted on black horses clattering
     and steaming in the road.
    Paupers howled through the bars at the soldiers, begging for food. The
     dragoons were escorting a miller’s cart piled with fat burlap sacks of Indian
     meal. An English officer was braying orders. Fergus watched two soldiers on horseback
     uncoil rope and throw two lines over the top of the gate, snagging the iron bars. They
     began spurring their black horses. The lines sung taut, the gate began to flex, and he
     heard the iron twisting, screeching on its hinges.
    â€œNo good, no good,” Murty Larry groaned. “Them sojers
     want to crush us all.”
    The gate snapped off its hinges with a loud twang and clattered down on
     the pavement. Looking around, Fergus saw pauper women already fanning a fire. The
     miller’s cart, driven by a frightened-looking boy, rumbled over the flattened gate
     and into the workhouse yard, dragoons crowding in behind, their massive horses creaking
     with gear and leather.
    Murty Larry bowed low, sweeping his arm toward the open gateway and the
     snowy street outside, in a gesture of magnanimous invitation.
    Fergus looked back at the fire where a dragoon was piercing sacks with his
     saber and pauper women were already sluicing yellow meal into the kettle. The inmates
     stood about anxiously like cattle waiting to be milked.
    Looking through the opening in the walls he saw Murty
     Larry running away down the white street, already a dim figure in the mist, leaving
     black footprints on the snow.
    The scent of the raw meal — sweet, dusty — was tempting.
    You might stay, get yourself a ration.
    The road, the road.
    Red soldiers, famished inmates.
    Rations might keep you alive, but they were all you’d ever get, and
     you wanted more.
    Phoebe,