Where Serpents Sleep Read Online Free PDF Page A

part of their faces were carefully raking their way through the ruins. A small crowd of ragged women and children had gathered at a nearby corner to watch, their faces drawn and solemn. Even the baker’s boy was silent, his tray of cooling buns hanging forgotten from its band around his neck.
     
     
    Sebastian spotted Paul Gibson crouched awkwardly beside a small body in a ripped, stained gown of yellow cotton. Six more bodies lay in a neat row along the footpath. Four of the bodies looked badly burned, their skin blistered and black, their faces charred beyond identification. But a couple of the women had obviously been sheltered by falling debris, their bodies battered and scorched but still recognizable.
     
     
    Hunkering down beside his friend, Sebastian found himself staring at a young girl, her slim form relatively untouched by the fire. She couldn’t have been more than thirteen or fourteen years of age, her face still full-cheeked and childlike, her cornsilk-fine fair hair fluttering gently in the smoke-tinged breeze. But what drew Sebastian’s attention, and held it, was the ripped and bloodied bodice of her simple muslin gown. “Could that have been done by a falling timber?” he asked.
     
     
    Paul Gibson shook his head. “No. She was stabbed with a knife. There, in the side”—he pointed—“and several times here, in the chest.”
     
     
    “Bloody hell,” said Sebastian softly. “She was right.”
     
     
    “Who was right?” Gibson glanced up at him. “Did someone survive this?”
     
     
    “So it would seem.” Sebastian nodded toward that long, silent row. “What about the others?”
     
     
    His lips compressing into a thin line, Paul Gibson turned his head to follow Sebastian’s gaze. The Irishman had spent years as an army surgeon, dealing with all the unspeakable horrors of a battlefield’s carnage. He now taught at St. Thomas’s, in addition to keeping a small surgery near the Tower. But despite it all, Sebastian knew that any premature or violent death still troubled Gibson. It was why, late at night in the small, secluded building at the base of his unkempt garden, he could frequently be found exploring the mysteries of life and death with the help of a series of cadavers culled from the city’s untended church-yards. No one in London could read a dead body better than Paul Gibson.
     
     
    “The others are much the same,” said Gibson. He lurched to his feet, stumbling slightly as his one remaining good leg took his weight; he’d lost the lower part of his other leg to a French cannonball. “Several are so badly burned it would be impossible to say how they died without a proper postmortem. But I’ve found at least one more that was stabbed, and another who had her throat slit.”
     
     
    “Could any of them have been shot?”
     
     
    “Actually, yes. The woman at the far end was definitely shot. How did you know?”
     
     
    Sebastian stared at that distant blackened form. “Is she identifiable?”
     
     
    “Maybe by her mother. Although I wouldn’t want her mother to have to remember her looking like this.” Gibson glanced around as a hoarse shout went up from one of the men working through the smoldering ruins. “Looks like they’ve found another one,” said Gibson. “That makes eight.”
     
     
    Sebastian blew out a long, slow breath. “Jesus.” He watched as two men stumbled out of the ruins, a makeshift stretcher carried between them.
     
     
    “This un ’ere’s in bad shape,” said one of the men as they eased their burden down on the footpath. “Please God it’s the last.”
     
     
    Gibson hunkered down beside the charred, blackened form, but said, “This one’s so burned that even with a proper autopsy—”
     
     
    “Get away from that body!”
     
     
    Sebastian looked up to find a tall, bearlike gentleman in an exaggerated top hat and red-and-white-striped silk waistcoat descending upon them from a lumbering dray. Sir William Hadley,