When Blood Lies by C. S. Harris EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Name: When Blood Lies
- Author: C. S. Harris
- Language: English
- Genre: Amateur Sleuth Mysteries
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Price: Free
Paris, France
Thursday, 2 March 1815
One more day, he thought; one more day, perhaps two, and then . . .
And then what?
Sebastian St. Cyr, Viscount Devlin, walked the dark, misty banks of the
Seine. He was a tall man in his early thirties, lean and dark haired, with the
carriage of the cavalry captain he’d once been. For two weeks now he’d
been renting a narrow house on the Place Dauphine in Paris, near the tip of
the Île de la Cité. He was here on a personal quest, awaiting the return to
the city of his mother, who had abandoned her family more than twenty
years before.
Waiting to ask for answers he wasn’t sure he was ready to hear.
The night air felt cold against his face, and he thrust his hands deeper
into the pockets of his caped greatcoat, his gaze on the row of fog-shrouded
lanternes that ran along the quai des Tuileries before him. The great ancient
city of Paris stretched out around him in a sea of winking candles and the
dull yellow glow of countless oil lamps. He could hear the river slapping
against the stones of the embankment beside him and the creak of an oar
somewhere in the night, but much was hidden by the mist.
Ironic, he thought, how a man could strive for years to achieve a goal
and then, once it was almost within his grasp, find himself shaken by
misgivings and doubts and something else. Something he suspected was
fear.
He turned away from the dark, silent waters of the river and climbed the
steps to what had been called the Place Louis XV before it was renamed the
Place de la Révolution. It was here that the guillotine had done some of its
deadliest work, whacking off well over a thousand heads in a matter of
months. The blood had run so thick and noisome that in the heat of summer
the people who lived nearby complained of the smell. Not about the roaring
crowds or the haunting pall of death that even today seemed to hang over
the enormous open space, but about the smell.
Pausing at the top of the steps, he stared across the vast lantern-lit
intersection, still surrounded by the stone facades of its once-grand
prerevolutionary buildings. Even at this hour the place was crowded, the air
ringing with the clatter of iron-rimmed wheels on damp paving stones, the
clip-clop of horses’ hooves, the shouts of frustrated drivers mingling with
the cries of street vendors selling everything from sweet-smelling pastries
to pungent medical potions. The guillotine was no longer here, of course. At
the end of the Reign of Terror, they’d rechristened the space the Place de la
Concorde—the place of harmony and peace.
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