Who Cries for the Lost

TITLES BY C. S. HARRISWhat Angels FearWhen Gods DieWhy Mermaids SingWhere Serpents SleepWhat Remains of HeavenWhere Shadows DanceWhen Maidens MournWhat Darkness BringsWhy Kings ConfessWho Buries the DeadWhen Falcons FallWhere the Dead LieWhy Kill the InnocentWho Slays the WickedWho Speaks for the DamnedWhat the Devil KnowsWhen Blood LiesWho Cries for the Lost BERKLEYAn imprint of Penguin Random House LLCpenguinrandomhouse.comCopyright © 2023 by The Two Talers, LLCPenguin 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.Poem excerpt on p. vii copyright © Charles Gramlich. Used by permission.BERKLEY and the BERKLEY & B colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataNames: Harris, C. S., author.Title: Who cries for the lost / C.S. Harris.Description: New York : Berkley, [2023] | Series: A Sebastian St. Cyr mysteryIdentifiers: LCCN 2022037534 (print) | LCCN 2022037535 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593102725 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780593197042 (ebook)Subjects: LCGFT: Detective and mystery fiction. | Novels.Classification: LCC PS3566.R5877 W47852 2023 (print) | LCC PS3566.R5877 (ebook) | DDC 813/.54--dc23/eng/20220808LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022037534LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022037535Cover design by Adam AuerbachCover image of cloaked man by Roy Bishop / ArcangelAdapted for ebook by Molly JeszkeThis is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. The author’s use of names of historical figures, places or events is not intended to change the entirely fictional character of the work. In all other respects, any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.pid_prh_6.0_143149737_c0_r0 ContentsCoverTitles by C. S. HarrisTitle PageCopyrightDedicationEpigraphMapChapter 1Chapter 2Chapter 3Chapter 4Chapter 5Chapter 6Chapter 7Chapter 8Chapter 9Chapter 10Chapter 11Chapter 12Chapter 13Chapter 14Chapter 15Chapter 16Chapter 17Chapter 18Chapter 19Chapter 20Chapter 21Chapter 22Chapter 23Chapter 24Chapter 25Chapter 26Chapter 27Chapter 28Chapter 29Chapter 30Chapter 31Chapter 32Chapter 33Chapter 34Chapter 35Chapter 36Chapter 37Chapter 38Chapter 39Chapter 40Chapter 41Chapter 42Chapter 43Chapter 44Chapter 45Chapter 46Chapter 47Chapter 48Chapter 49Chapter 50Chapter 51Chapter 52Chapter 53Chapter 54Chapter 55Chapter 56Author’s NoteAcknowledgmentsAbout the Author_143149737_ For Aaron Cook,real estate agent, fix-it man, knight in shining armor, friend Who speaks for the restless and the damned?Who cries for the lost?—CHARLES GRAMLICH Chapter 1LondonTuesday, 13 June 1815The 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 half-naked body up onto Gibson’s slab. “Otherwise he probably wouldn’t have surfaced for another two or three days—if ever.”“Who took his clothes?” asked Gibson.“Whoever tossed him in the river, I s’pose,” said the older of the two men with a wink as they turned to leave. “That’s the way he come up—wearing his shirt and that one sock and nothin’ else.”It was a fine shirt, Gibson thought now as he put up a hand to still the swaying of the lamp. Expertly tailored of the best linen, with its long tails reaching halfway down the man’s bare, well-muscled thighs. A shirt like that would fetch a good price from one of the innumerable secondhand clothing stores that filled the city. So why had someone taken the dead man’s coat, boots, and breeches, yet left his shirt?And what the devil had they done to his face?A blunderbuss or even a pistol would do that, Gibson decided, hunkering down to