Who Cries for the Lost by C. S. Harris EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Author: C. S. Harris
- Language: English
- Genre: Historical Mysteries
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Price: Free
London
Tuesday, 13 June 1815
The dead man smelled like fish. Rotting fish.
Pale, bloodless, and faceless, he lay on the stained granite slab in the
center of Paul Gibson’s ancient stone outbuilding, filling the small room
with a foul stench. But then, bodies pulled from the Thames did have a
nasty tendency to reek of fish. Fish, brine, tar, and—if it was warm and
they’d been in the water long enough—decay.
The outbuilding stood at the base of a newly planted garden that
stretched out behind the medieval Tower Hill house where Gibson kept his
surgery, and he paused now in the doorway to suck in one last breath of
fresh, rose-scented air before entering the room. The morning was damp
and chilly, the sky a low, menacing gray, the ache from Gibson’s truncated
left leg sharp enough that he winced as he limped forward.
Irish by birth, he was thinner than he should have been and younger
than he looked, his dark hair already heavily laced with gray, the long
grooves that bracketed his mouth dug deep. Pain had a way of doing that to
a man—pain and the opium he used to control it.
There’d been a time not so long ago when he’d served as a surgeon with
His Majesty’s 25th Light Dragoons, honing his understanding of the human
body on the bloody battlefields of Europe. Then a French cannonball tore
away the lower part of his leg, and though he’d tried to keep going, in the
end the phantom pains from that vanished limb became too much. And so
he’d come here, to London, to open this humble surgery in the shadow of
the Tower, share his knowledge of anatomy at the city’s teaching hospitals,
and conduct postmortems like this one for the local officials.
But lately there were times, such as this morning, when the demands of
even that simple routine could come close to overwhelming him. The
lingering effects of yesterday’s generous dose of opium had left him shaky
and clumsy, and he found it took him three tries with a flint before he
managed to light a lantern against the gloom and hang it from the chain
suspended over the stone slab. The swaying golden light played over the
ghostly flesh and shattered face of the unidentified corpse before him and
cast macabre shadows across the room’s bare stone walls in a way he did
not like.
Tall, well-formed, and probably somewhere in his thirties, the dead man
had been delivered just after dawn by a couple of constables from the
Thames River Police. “An East Indiaman in the Pool pulled him up with
their anchor,” one of the constables had said when they heaved the halfnaked body up onto Gibson’s slab.
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