Page 2 of Who Cries for the Lost

“We Irish are a stubborn lot,” he said with a crooked grin, exaggerating his brogue.

“That’s one word for it.”

Their gazes met, and something flared between them, something filled with the echoes of much that had been said in the past and more that remained unsaid. Then she pushed away from the doorframe and stepped forward. “If you’ll lift him, I’ll strip off the shirt.”

Levering his hands beneath the corpse’s cold shoulders, Gibson raised the dead man’s limp torso as she reached for the shirt’s long tail and yanked it up.

“Jesus, Mary, Joseph, and all the saints,” he yelped as the man’s groin came into view. Whoever had shattered the unidentified corpse’s face had also emasculated him.

Alexi paused with the shirt bunched at the man’s taut stomach. “You didn’t know?”

Gibson shook his head. “No. I was too busy looking at the ruin of that face.”

Wordlessly, they finished peeling the brine-stiffened shirt over the dead man’s head. She said, “Who would do something like that?”

“Someone who was either very angry or very sick. Or both.”

Gibson was easing the dead man’s torso back down on the slab when he heard Alexi’s breath catch in a strange muffled hitch. Looking up, he found her standing with her elbows cupped in her palms, hugging her arms close to the shawl-covered bodice of her plain muslin gown as she stared down at a pattern of saber scars on the man’s chest, left arm, and neck.

“What is it?” he asked, and somehow a part of him understood that what she was about to say was going to shatter his world.

Her head jerked up, her lips parting, her loamy brown eyes liquid with what looked very much like fear. “I know who he is.”

“Who? Who is it?”

She had to suck in a quick, jerky breath before she could answer. “It’s Miles.” She hesitated, and Gibson felt the earth spin oddly around him as he waited for her to add, as he somehow knew she would, “Miles Sauvage. My husband.”

Chapter 2

The last lingering wisps of the early-morning mist were drifting up from the river to cling to the leafy branches of the ancient elms and chestnuts overhead as two men cantered their highbred horses along the southern boundary of Hyde Park, the thunder of their hooves muffled by the soft surface of the nearly deserted Row. One man was older, in his seventies now, his eyes a deep, piercing blue, his once heavy shock of white hair beginning to thin even as his big barrel-chested body thickened more and more with each passing year.

His companion was younger, in his early thirties, lean and dark haired, his eyes a strange feral yellow, his seat on his elegant black mare that of a cavalry officer accustomed to spending long hours in the saddle. They were known to the world as father and son, although they were not. The events and painful revelations of the last several years had strained their relationship, but they were slowly working their way toward a new understanding. Lately they had taken to meeting frequently for these early-morning rides in the park—although every time they somehow ended up having what was basically the same argument.

“You’re pushing that wounded leg too hard, too fast,” said the elder man, Alistair St. Cyr, the Fifth Earl of Hendon. “And you know it.”

His companion and heir, Sebastian St. Cyr, Viscount Devlin, swallowed the angry retort that rose to his lips and forced himself to keep his voice light. “I didn’t realize you’d taken up medicine in your spare time.”

“I don’t need to be a doctor. I can see it in your face. It hasn’t been three months since you nearly got that leg shot off, and I doubt there’s more than a handful of surgeons in all of England who wouldn’t have insisted on taking it off completely.”

“Then I suppose I’m fortunate to have been shot in Paris,” said Sebastian, and heard the Earl growl in response as they reined their horses in to a walk.

“You’re fortunate Napoléon decided to let you go,” snapped Hendon, “rather than holding you and Hero hostage.”

“He was hoping for peace, remember?”

“So he said. But he’s not getting it, is he?”

“That he’s not.”

They continued along in silence for a time. The air was cool and damp and heavy with the fecund smell of the wet tan mixed with gravel beneath their horses’ hooves, but the sounds of the city stirring awake around them were beginning to intrude on the countryside-like calm of the park. Hendon said, “You do realize that it doesn’t matter how hard you press yourself. You’re never going to get that leg strong enough to rejoin your old regiment and fight Napoléon in July.”

The words caught Sebastian by surprise, for it was the first time either of them had acknowledged precisely why he was pushing himself so hard. He found he had to pause to swallow the bitter taste that rose to his mouth. “I doubt it’ll be July.”

It had been over three months now since Napoléon Bonaparte had sailed away from Elba, the tiny island off the coast of Italy to which he’d been banished after his defeat in the spring of 1814. Landing on the southern coast of France, he’d been welcomed back by his people with joy, while the Bourbon King Louis XVIII—so recently restored by the armies of France’s enemies—simply fled Paris before him in the dark of night.

Installed once more in the Tuileries Palace—without a shot being fired—Napoléon had issued a stream of proclamations, reassuring the people of France and the world that all he wanted was peace. But the bitter, frightened crowned heads of Europe—many of them only recently restored to their wobbly thrones—were determined to crush forever the dangerous philosophies of liberty and equality that the French Revolution had unleashed upon the world. Already gathered in Austria for the Congress of Vienna, the representatives of Russia, Prussia, Austria, and Great Britain had declared Bonaparte an outlaw and signed a series of new treaties in which they pledged to raise an army of six hundred thousand men and not lay down arms again until Napoléon was destroyed. The lesser states of Europe hastily joined them.

“It’s the date Wellington has set for the invasion of France,” said Hendon. “So what are you saying? You don’t think it will happen until August?”

---