When Falcons Fall by C. S. Harris EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Author: C. S. Harris
- Language: English
- Genre: Historical Mystery, Thriller & Suspense Fiction
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Price: Free
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.
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