The Silent Cry - Anne Perry [0]
The Silent Cry
“Monk and Hester … keep us enthralled with their bold intellectual assaults on the hypocrisy of Victorian moral standards. With her grimly detailed descriptions of the match factories, sweatshops, paupers’ hospitals, and tenement ‘rookeries’ crowded into these slums, Perry brings a rank sense of reality to the wretched living conditions of the working poor.… Her early-Victorian series … has deepened and darkened its insights into the social evils that burdened London’s underclasses.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“The brainy, passionate [Hester] Latterly is good company, as ever.”
—The Washington Post
“Reads like a firsthand account of the life and customs of that distant time.”
—The Cincinnati Post
“Richly detailed … By the novel’s end, revelations of corruption and depravity break through the severe conventions of upper-class Victorian prudery in a dramatic courtroom scene.… Highly recommended.”
—Library Journal
The Silent Cry is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
2010 Ballantine Books Trade Paperback Edition
Copyright © 1997 by Anne Perry
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of
The Random House Publishing Group, a division of
Random House, Inc., New York.
BALLANTINE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Ballantine Books,
an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group,
a division of Random House, Inc., in 1997.
eISBN: 978-0-307-76781-3
www.ballantinebooks.com
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Dedication
Other Books by This Author
About the Author
1
John Evan stood shivering as the January wind whipped down the alley. P.C. Shotts held his bull’s-eye lantern high so they could see both the bodies at once. They lay crumpled and bloody, about seven feet apart on the icy, cobbled alleyway.
“Does anybody know what happened?” Evan asked, his teeth chattering.
“No sir,” Shotts replied bleakly. “Woman found them and ol’ Briggs came an’ told me.”
Evan was surprised. “In this area?” He glanced around at the grimy walls, the open gutter and the few windows, blacked with dirt. The doors he could see were narrow, straight onto the street, and stained with years of damp and soot. The only lamppost was twenty yards away, gleaming balefully like a lost moon. He was unpleasantly aware of movement just beyond the perimeter of light, of hunched figures watching and waiting, the myriad beggars, thieves and unfortunates who lived in this slum of St. Giles, only a stone’s throw from Regent Street in the heart of London.
Shotts shrugged, looking down at the bodies. “Well, they obviously in’t drunk or starved or freezin’. All that blood, I reckon as she likely screamed, then were afraid someone ’eard ’er, an’ she din’t wanter get blamed, so she went on screamin’, an’ other folk came.” He shook his head. “They ain’t always bad about lookin’ arter their own around ’ere. I daresay as she’d ’a kept walkin’ if she’d ’ad the nerve, an’ thought of it quick enough.”
Evan bent down to the body nearest to him. Shotts lowered the light a little so it showed the head and upper torso more clearly. The victim was a man Evan guessed to be in his middle fifties. His hair was gray, thick, his skin smooth. When Evan touched it with his finger it was cold and stiff. His eyes were still open. He had been too badly beaten for Evan to gather anything but a very general impression of his features. He might well have been handsome in life. Certainly his clothes, though torn and stained, had been of excellent quality. As far as Evan could judge, he was of average height and solid build. It was not easy to tell because he was so doubled