When Falcons Fall Read online

  The Sebastian St. Cyr Series

  What Angels Fear

  When Gods Die

  Why Mermaids Sing

  Where Serpents Sleep

  What Remains of Heaven

  Where Shadows Dance

  When Maidens Mourn

  What Darkness Brings

  Why Kings Confess

  Who Buries the Dead

  OBSIDIAN

  Published by New American Library,

  an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014

  This book is an original publication of New American Library.

  Copyright © The Two Talers, LLC, 2016

  Penguin Random House supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin Random House to continue to publish books for every reader.

  Obsidian and the Obsidian colophon are trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  For more information about Penguin Random House, visit penguin.com.

  eBook ISBN: 978-0-698-16788-9

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA:

  Names: Harris, C. S., author.

  Title: When falcons fall: a Sebastian St. Cyr mystery/C. S. Harris.

  Description: New York, New York: New American Library, [2016] | Series:

  Sebastian St. Cyr mystery; 11

  Identifiers: LCCN 2015041045 | ISBN 9780451471161 (hardback)

  Subjects: LCSH: Saint Cyr, Sebastian (Fictitious character)—Fiction. | Great

  Britain—History—George III, 1760–1820—Fiction. | BISAC: FICTION/Mystery &

  Detective/Historical. | FICTION/Mystery & Detective/General.

  | GSAFD: Regency fiction. | Mystery fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3566.R5877 W474 2016 | DDC 813/.54—dc23

  LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015041045

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Version_1

  Contents

  The Sebastian St. Cyr Series

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Author’s Note

  In memory of Banjo, Scout, and Indie, my three forever-kittens

  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?

  It was the obvious conclusion. And yet . . .

  Archie let his gaze drift around the clearing. The meadow was eerily hushed and still, as if the mist drifting up from the river had deadened all sound. The young lad who had stumbled upon the dead woman’s body at dawn and led them here was now gone; the creatures of forest and field had all fled or hidden themselves. Even the unseen birds in the tree canopy above seemed loath to break the silence with their usual chorus of cheerful morning song. Archie felt a chill dance up his spine, as if he could somehow sense a lingering malevolence in this place, an evil, a disturbance in the way things ought to be that was no less real for being inexplicable.

  But he had no intention of uttering such fanciful sentiments to the gruff, no-nonsense constable beside him. So he simply said, “I think you should put the bottle back where it was, Nash.”

  “What?” The constable’s jaw sagged, his full, ruddy cheeks darkening.

  Archie tried hard to infuse his voice with a note of authority. “Put it back exactly as you found it, Constable. Until we know for certain otherwise, I think we should consider this a murder.”

  Constable Nash’s face crimped. His small, dark eyes had a way of disappearing into the flesh of his face when he was amused or angry, and they disappeared now. But he didn’t say anything.

  “There’s a viscount staying in the village,” said Archie. “Arrived just yesterday evening. I’ve heard of him; his name is Devlin, and he works with Bow Street sometimes, solving murders. I’m going to ask for his advice in this.”

  “Ain’t no need to go troublin’ no grand London lord. I tell ye, she killed herself.”

  “Perhaps. But I’d like to be certain.”

  Archie readjusted the tilt of his hat and smoothed the front of his simple brown corduroy coat. Standing up to the village’s loud, bullying constable was one thing; Archie had only to call upon some six hundred years of Rawlins tradition and heritage.

  But approaching the son and heir of the mighty Earl of Hendon and asking him to help a simple village squire investigate the death of a stranger was considerably more daunting.

  Chapter 2

  Apicturesque cluster of half-timbered and stone cottages huddled in the shadow of a squat, timeworn Norman church, the Shropshire village of Ayleswick lay just to the southwest of Ludlow, near the banks of the River Teme. Once, it had been the site of the Benedictine priory of St. Hilary, famous along the Welsh Marches as a pilgrimage destination thanks to its possession of an ancient wooden statue of the Virgin, said to work miracles.

  But the priory was long gone, its famous statue consigned to the flames and many of the stones from its sprawling monastic complex sold or hauled up the hill to build a grand Tudor estate known as Northcott Abbey. The once-bustling village had sunk into obscurity and now boasted only one decent inn, the Blue Boar, a rambling, half-timbered relic that fronted both the village green and the narrow, winding high street.

  Sebastian St. Cyr, Viscount Devlin, stood at the window of his chamber at the inn, his view of the misty green below rippled by the casement’s ancient leaded glass. The impression was one of bucolic peace, of innocence and harmony and timeless grace. But Sebastian knew that all is often not as it seems, just as he knew that those who probe the secrets of the past risk hearing truths they might wish they’d never learned.

  He dropped his gaze to the mechanical nightingale he held in his hands. It had been purchased for an old woman Sebastian had never met, by a man who was now dead. And so Sebastian had come here, to the old woman’s village, to deliver her dead grandson’s gift.

  He heard the soft whisper of fine muslin skirts as Hero came to slide her arms around his waist and rest her dark head against his. Tall, statuesque, and striking, she’d been his wife for a year now. Their infant son slept peacefully in his nearby cradle, and Sebastian loved both mother and child with a passionate tenderness that awed, humbled, and terrified him.

  She shifted to take the nightingale from his hands, wound the key cleverly concealed in its tail feathers, and set the bird on the deep windowsill before them. The nightingale’s gilded wings beat slowly up and down, the jewels in its collar sparkling in the early-morning sunlight as a cascade of melodious notes filled the air.

  She said, “Shall I come with you?”

  He hesitated, his attention caught by a young country gentleman in an unfashionable corduroy coat who was striding toward the inn’s door. “You don’t think a simple, aged countrywoman might find a visit from the two of us a bit overwhelming?”

  “Probably,” she said, although he saw the faint frown that pinched her forehead. She knew that the nightingale was only part of what had brought him to this small Shropshire village, just as she knew that what quickened his pulse and tore at his gut was the possibility that the unknown elderly woman might possess the answer to a question that had shattered his world and forever altered his understanding of who—and what—he was.

  An unexpected knock at the chamber door brought his head around. “Yes?”

  A spry middle-aged chambermaid with a leprechaun’s face and wild iron gray hair imperfectly contained by a mobcap opened the door and bobbed a quick curtsy. “It’s young Squire Rawlins, milord. He says t’ beg yer lordship’s pardon, but he’s most anxious to meet with you, he is.” She dropped her voice and leaned forward as she added, “I’m thinkin’ it’s on account of the lady, milord. Heard Constable Nash tellin’ Cook about it, I did.”

  “What lady?”

  “Why, the one they done found down in the water meadows, just this mornin’. Dead, she is!”

  He and Hero exchanged silent glances.

  On the windowsill, the mechanical nightingale wound down and stopped.

  “The young Squire’s a tad new to being justice of the peace, I’m afraid,” confided the chambermaid as she escorted Sebastian down the stairs. “Took over from his father just a few months back, he did. A real tragedy, that; the old Squire died on the lad’s twenty-first birthday.”

  “Tragic indeed,” said Sebastian.

  The chambermaid nodded. “Drank three bottles of port and then tried to jump his best hunter over the stone wall by the pond. The horse made it, but not the old Squire. Broke his neck.”

  “At least the horse survived.”

  “Aye. Would’ve been a shame to lose Black Jack. He’s a grand hunter, that Black Jack. Best
in the Squire’s stables.” She tut-tutted and shook her head as they reached the inn’s old flagged entrance hall and turned toward the small parlor to the left of the stairs. “Here ye go, milord.”

  He found the new Squire Rawlins standing before the parlor’s empty hearth, his hat twisting in his hands. He had a smooth, boyish face reddened across the tops of his cheeks and the bridge of his nose by the summer sun, and looked more like sixteen than twenty-one. Of medium height only, he was thin and bony, with a jerky way of moving, as if he’d yet to grow accustomed to the length of his own arms and legs.

  “Lord Devlin,” he said, surging forward as the chambermaid dropped a curtsy and withdrew. “I’m Archibald—Archie—Rawlins, Ayleswick’s justice of the peace. I beg your pardon for intruding on you without a proper introduction, but there’s been a rather peculiar death in the village, and since I know you have experience dealing with these matters I was hoping you might be willing to advise me on how best to go about things. My constable thinks it’s suicide, but I . . . I . . .”

  The young man’s rushing tumble of words suddenly dried up.

  “You find the death suspicious?” suggested Sebastian.

  Archie Rawlins swallowed hard enough to bob his Adam’s apple up and down, and nodded. But Sebastian noticed he didn’t say why he thought it suspicious.

  Sebastian knew the urge to tell Squire Rawlins that what he asked was impossible, that Sebastian was in town for a few days only and would soon be gone. The last thing he wanted was to get involved in some village murder.

  But then he saw the mingled uncertainty and earnestness in the young man’s eyes and remembered the good-humored derision in the chambermaid’s assessment of the village’s new justice of the peace. Which was how he found himself saying, “Hang on while I fetch my hat and gloves.”

  Chapter 3

  “Her name is—or I suppose I should say was—Emma Chance,” explained the Squire as they followed a shady path that led from the far end of the high street, down through a thick wood of oak and beech, to the river. “She’s a young widow—only arrived in the village last Friday.”