When Falcons Fall (Sebastian St. Cyr, #11)
C. S. Harris
Acknowledgments
My profound and heartfelt thanks, first of all, to my agent, Helen Breitwieser, who has stuck with me through thick and thin for twenty years now. And to my amazingly insightful editor Ellen Edwards, who guided this series through its first eleven books; you have taught me so much, and you will be missed more than you’ll ever know.
Thank you, Danielle Perez, who has enthusiastically picked up where Ellen left off. Thank you, Gene Mollica, for your wonderful cover art, and for so generously permitting me to use your images on my Web site. Thanks to publicists extraordinaire Loren Jaggers and Danielle Dill. Thank you, Claire Zion, Kara Welsh, Sharon Gamboa, Adam Auerbach, Daniel Walsh, and the rest of the great crew at NAL/Berkley. And a huge shout-out to the wonderful folks at Garden District Book Shop in New Orleans, Murder by the Book in Houston, Poisoned Pen in Phoenix, Powell’s in Portland, and Seattle’s Mystery Bookshop; thank you for everything you do.
Thank you to my daughters, Samantha and Danielle, for putting up with my bouncing plot ideas off you since before most children know what a plot is. Thank you to the Monday-night Wordsmiths—Pam Ahearn, Rexanne Becnel, Elora Fink, Charles Gramlich, Steven Harris, Farrah Rochon, and Laura Joh Rolland—for years of friendship, conversation, laughter, advice, encouragement, and commiseration.
And finally, thank you again to my husband, Steven Harris, for being you.
Say, will the falcon, stooping from above,
Smit with her varying plumage, spare the dove?
. . .
Admires the jay the insect’s gilded wings?
Or hears the hawk when Philomela sings?
—ALEXANDER POPE
Chapter 1
Ayleswick-on-Teme, Shropshire
Tuesday, 3 August 1813
It was the fly that got to him.
In the misty light of early morning, the dead woman looked as if she might be sleeping, her dusky lashes resting against cheeks of pale eggshell, her lips faintly parted. She lay at the edge of a clover-strewn meadow near the river, the back of her head nestled against a mossy log, her slim hands folded at the high waist of her fashionable dove gray mourning gown.
Then that fly came crawling out of her mouth.
Archie barely made it behind the nearest furze bush before losing the bread and cheese he’d grabbed for breakfast.
“There, there, now, lad,” said Constable Webster Nash, the beefy middle-aged man who also served as the village’s sexton and bell ringer. “No need to be feeling queasy. Ain’t like there’s a mess o’ blood.”
“I’m all right.” Archie’s guts heaved again and his thin body shuddered, but he swallowed hard and forced himself to straighten. “I’m all right.” Not that it made any difference, of course; he could say it a hundred times, and word would still be all around the village by noon, about how the young Squire had cast up his accounts at the mere sight of the dead woman.
Archie swiped the back of one trembling hand across his lips. Archibald Rawlins had been Squire of Ayleswick for just five months. It was an honor accorded his father, and his father before him, on back through the ages to that battle-hardened esquire who’d built the Grange near the banks of the River Teme and successfully defended it against all comers. One of the acknowledged duties of the squire was to serve as his village’s justice of the peace or magistrate, which was how Archie came to be standing in the river meadow on that misty morning and staring at the dead body of a beautiful young widow who had arrived in the village less than a week before.
“’Tis a sinful thing,” said Nash, tsking through the gap left by a missing incisor. “Sinful, for a woman to take her own life like this. The Good Book says, ‘If any man defile the temple of God, him shall God destroy; for the temple of God is holy, which temple ye are.’ And I reckon that’s as true for a woman as for any man.”
Archie cleared his throat. “I don’t think we can say that yet—that she took her own life, I mean.”
Constable Nash let out a sound somewhere between a grunt and a derisive laugh as he bent to pick up the brown glass bottle that nestled in the grass at her side. “Laudanum,” he said, turning the bottle so that the POISON label faced Archie. “Emptied it, she did.”
“Yes, I noticed it.”
Archie stared down at the woman’s neatly folded spencer. It lay to one side with her broad-brimmed, velvet-trimmed straw hat, as if she had taken them off and carefully set them aside before stretching out to—what? Drink a massive dose of an opium tincture that in small measures could ease pain but in excess brought death?