скачать книгу бесплатно
3-Book Victorian Crime Collection: Death at Dawn, Death of a Dancer, A Corpse in Shining Armour
Caro Peacock
Three Victorian crime novels featuring Liberty Lane: a feisty heroine for fans of Georgette Heyer, and Sarah Waters’s Victorian novels.DEATH AT DAWN:Liberty Lane's debut in the summer of 1837. Liberty's father is dead. She's been told he died in a duel, but knows it's a black lie. Her determination to prove it takes her to the heart of events that could shake the throne of young Queen Victoria.DEATH OF A DANCER:When two dancers, Columbine, the star, and Jenny from the chorus, come to blows on stage, it's the sensation of the season. But soon Columbine is dead from poison and Liberty is trying to save Jenny from the hangman.A CORPSE IN SHINING ARMOUR:Summer 1839. The latest craze among young aristocrats is jousting in the medieval style. It becomes seriously violent when two brothers battle over the right to a title. Liberty is called in as scandal turns deadly.
CARO PEACOCK
3-BOOK VICTORIAN CRIME COLLECTION:
Death at Dawn, Death of a Dancer, A Corpse in Shining Armour
COPYRIGHT (#ulink_a5f71d85-b0a6-538f-a64b-5a8ac9e6a79c)
This is entirely a work of fiction. Any references to real people, living or dead, real events, businesses, organizations and localities are intended only to give the fiction a sense of reality and authenticity. All names, characters and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and their resemblance, if any, to real-life counterparts is entirely coincidental.
HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2014
Copyright © Caro Peacock 2014
Caro Peacock asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks
HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication
Ebook Edition © MARCH 2014 ISBN: 9780007554973
Version: 2016-09-12
CONTENTS
Cover (#uf8ce5862-d3c3-5d4d-8d3f-1ab1b8791b54)
Title Page (#ub45d3d4b-d6c6-5ff9-8d26-4fbdda0a1d5a)
Copyright (#ud420dd22-e32e-5cd1-8ed2-b1211b1c21d3)
Death at Dawn (#u170eee93-7334-550e-b3bc-b9e0098be795)
Death of a Dancer (#u48574662-7269-5a3c-b019-787677e4af7f)
A Corpse in Shining Armour (#ud493b7cf-2773-5d00-aaff-e1b1b27a2e98)
About the Author (#u49953a11-3f3b-511e-a131-4d3fb8424a30)
Also by the Author (#uc079fe0f-b5b8-56f6-b591-a8cd491ba29c)
About the Publisher (#ue340d452-4354-5753-bb13-d8fd36645a64)
(#ulink_5e3db93a-0d4b-51ed-8d19-676fbe77f355)
CARO PEACOCK
Death at Dawn
COPYRIGHT (#ulink_38c8e41f-0c16-5f25-bc67-4a40c476edce)
This is entirely a work of fiction. Any references to real people, living or dead, real events, businesses, organizations and localities are intended only to give the fiction a sense of reality and authenticity. All names, characters and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and their resemblance, if any, to real-life counterparts is entirely coincidental.
HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2009
Copyright © Caro Peacock 2007
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers 2007 Cover photographs © Gregor Schuster / Getty Images
Caro Peacock asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebook
HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication
Source ISBN: 9780007244171
Ebook Edition © SEPTEMBER 2008 ISBN: 9780007279340
Version: 2016-09-12
DEDICATION (#uad7e7213-88fd-560a-becc-2fb6d9632743)
To Caroline Compton
CONTENTS
Cover (#u170eee93-7334-550e-b3bc-b9e0098be795)
Title Page (#u4f5f59c8-a41d-5d73-afb2-e925d5ad6a4b)
Copyright (#ub4945e91-3a6a-5221-a9e8-9e03251fb308)
Dedication (#ue021d68a-82a8-56e1-8347-2d2f68c89d23)
Chapter One (#ub1cd5c28-452d-5d6f-8fcf-18c663a65a50)
Chapter Two (#u6595c055-481e-56c0-aaaf-090e7c271a9b)
Chapter Three (#u9a861145-a91e-5775-a41f-a9a7f91a4b33)
Chapter Four (#uf012cacc-c71a-506a-b90e-4e2da9d7ccd3)
Chapter Five (#uaf13d779-f129-5a51-b766-0a1f9bd0e863)
Chapter Six (#u90865d7e-7d54-5cff-b970-686adf51c397)
Chapter Seven (#u1a48f32b-31ca-559f-b53d-62acbb59d11f)
Chapter Eight (#u5a3a3137-1d70-5e1b-9bd0-b215c1c9d74e)
Chapter Nine (#u79912ae8-3107-5047-8695-9e52f5f2ee6d)
Chapter Ten (#u76b2cec2-1fb4-56d3-b4bb-96302d09dc0a)
Chapter Eleven (#u92cc052b-aa1c-5224-a5fe-e12af0d373e8)
Chapter Twelve (#ua17f96b9-ab42-5efd-a104-ce4df4dff6fc)
Chapter Thirteen (#u225102d6-1818-5ddb-827d-49dc44b1f3c1)
Chapter Fourteen (#uce6f30af-bb61-5b10-b14b-1d1a87d5f495)
Chapter Fifteen (#u19d1f7d6-4633-5290-8dc7-a5a6a422ba5d)
Chapter Sixteen (#ubc29485c-7772-5f23-b74c-1c407ac89b64)
Chapter Seventeen (#u4c3549e8-57b3-5547-a1af-295344207131)
Chapter Eighteen (#ub4889ad2-6b8d-5fd4-859b-3dce8faa4b06)
Chapter Nineteen (#uebb3b965-dd94-5664-a3d0-adbf8d0c7687)
Chapter Twenty (#u6f5cba76-628a-53a6-9398-70dacd4a9545)
Chapter Twenty-One (#ud352d856-ee78-52a2-8a63-c0a354f7a2bb)
Chapter Twenty-Two (#ub8922637-cbb1-5bf1-8bb1-07a5ffc53cf3)
Chapter Twenty-Three (#ua097e23a-b1ee-51e3-a1b2-5d5cb81a6d07)
Chapter Twenty-Four (#ucb2f1484-6d70-5e0f-916b-a87a17b40453)
Chapter Twenty-Five (#ue69be6d7-3a44-55fd-b548-427b62323aad)
Chapter Twenty-Six (#ua99398dc-d81a-52aa-b31d-51277b07a3d2)
Chapter Twenty-Seven (#ud1210570-3c0e-5bef-ad8f-3593daee6983)
CHAPTER ONE (#ulink_c900aefe-0b6b-5ef4-b6fa-bf678de89869)
‘Would you be kind enough to tell me where they keep people’s bodies,’ I said.
The porter blinked. The edges of his eyelids were pink in a brown face, lashes sparse and painful-looking like the bristles on a gooseberry. Odd the things you notice when your mind’s trying to shy away from a large thing. When he saw me coming towards him over the cobbles among the crowds leaving the evening steam packet, he must have expected another kind of question altogether. Something along the lines of ‘How much do you charge to bring a trunk up from the hold?’ or ‘Where can I find a clean, respectable hotel?’ Those kinds of questions were filling the air all round us, mostly in the loud but uneasy tones of the English newly landed at Calais. I’d asked in French, but he obviously thought he’d misheard.
‘You mean where people stay, at the hotels?’
‘Not hotels, no. People who’ve been killed. A gentleman who was killed on Saturday.’
Another blink and a frown. He looked over my shoulder at his colleagues carrying bags and boxes down the gangplank, regretting his own bad luck in encountering me.
‘Would he not be in his own house, mademoiselle?’
‘He has no house here.’
Nor anywhere else, come to that. He would have had one soon, the tall thin house he was going to rent for us, near the unfashionable end of Oxford Street when we … Don’t think about that.
‘In church then, perhaps.’
I thought, but didn’t say, that he was never a great frequenter of churches.
‘If an English gentleman were killed in … in an accident and had no family here, where might he be taken?’
The porter’s face went hard. He’d noticed my hesitation.
‘The morgue is over there, mam’selle.’
He nodded towards a group of buildings a little back from the seafront then turned, with obvious relief, to a plump man who was pulling at his sleeve and burbling about cases of books.
I walked in the direction he’d pointed out but had to ask again before I found my way to a low building, built of bricks covered over with black tarry paint. A man who looked as thin and faded as driftwood was sitting on a chair at the door, smoking a clay pipe. The smell of his tobacco couldn’t quite mask another smell coming from inside the building. When he heard me approaching he turned his head without shifting the rest of his body, like a clockwork automaton, and gave me a considering look.
‘It’s possible that you have my father here,’ I said.
He took a long draw on his pipe and spoke with it still in his mouth.
