Eye of the Crow (3 page)

Then everything changed.

An admirer of his abilities took him to the opera. There he looked up from his seat to the nearest balcony and
saw her, in a gleaming white box above him, her blonde hair shining and blue eyes glistening, the soaring violins of Rossini’s
The Thieving Magpie
a perfect background for her beauty. She was mouthing every word, dreaming she was on that stage.

He couldn’t help staring. Somehow, she felt his gaze. Soon she was looking back at a dark man with dark hair and eyes, the intelligence, the gentleness and kindness just glowing there. Her free spirit flew to him.

“You were at the front of your form when you tried. The headmaster wanted you for pupil teacher.”

The boy shakes himself out of his daydream. His mother is still talking.

“You shall go out to work with your hands if you don’t attend,” adds his father sadly. “We pay much more than we can afford to keep you there, you know that. Most boys are gone well before your age.”

“I’ll …” he stammers, “I’ll attend. Tomorrow.”

Rose rests her bonnet on one of the hooks under the soot-smeared little window that faces out into the alley. She turns and puts her hands on her hips, fists balled on the frayed folds of her long cotton dress. It droops and hangs on her frame, bereft of any fashionable crinoline underneath to make it bloom. Her blonde hair is threaded with gray. She reaches out and cups Sherlock’s face in her hands, searching his eyes, then kisses him.

“I’ll find us something to eat.”

She visits the markets at the end of the day, when you can get the pickings for pennies. She pulls a few carrots and an onion out of her basket, another half doorstep of bread, and two black-spotted potatoes. She sets them on the little wooden table in the center of the room where she prepares their meals. She will mix them for stew over the fire.

Wilber Holmes puts his coat on another hook, and loosens his necktie. He looks tired. He always tries to see the bright side of things, but his dark eyes often betray him when he tries to smile. He pulls his spectacles from a pocket, sits beside his son, and reaches for a book. There are a few dozen in a row.
British Birds
and
The Flight of Birds
are always nearest at hand. He must have read them a hundred times, but he can’t stop. Most men spend their nights drinking in public houses on the nearby streets. Wilber Holmes has no use for such gin palaces. He flies into the skies with his birds.

Sherlock sits beside him without saying a word, racked with guilt about not attending school, but ambivalent about ever going back. His thoughts are still far away anyway, remembering the story of his parents’ fateful meeting at the opera, the meeting that both made and destroyed his life.

After the last strains had played that night, the young Jew left slowly, while the privileged young woman rushed from her seat, anxious to tell her family about this latest Rossini
spectacle. One sauntered one way outside the front doors, turning back to remember the opulence of where he’d been. The other burst out, searching for her carriage. The collision was a gentle one. He caught her in his arms.

It frightened his parents and infuriated hers. It was impossible, they told her. She didn’t understand who she was. No Sherrinford could marry this Jew.

The young couple was amply warned.

After they eloped to Scotland, they came home to nothing. Her parents disowned her. His teaching opportunities at the university disappeared as mysteriously as he had once solved scientific problems.

And so they moved to Southwark, south of the Thames to the flat over the hatter’s shop. She became the wife of an unemployed Jew of foreign origins and took jobs teaching children to sing in upper class houses, and when money became even shorter, taking in sewing at home. Wilber might have taught rudimentary science in an elementary school in the city, but the University College of London would never vouch for him, provide the “character” he needed. His father-in-law had seen to that. So, for a few years he tutored the sons of working men in his flat, then went farther south to work at a job that paid less than any school, but one he enjoyed, at The Crystal Palace, where he’d seen trained birds performing in great flocks for massive crowds. They needed a knowledgeable man to tend to their thousands of white doves: the Doves of Peace.

The couple stood by each other with little except their love. They had three children: Mycroft, born eight months
after their marriage, Sherlock some seven years later, and then Violet – little Violet, who died before she reached the age of four.

Now the older boy was gone, employed in a lowly government job, reluctant to ever come home.

The middle child, the eccentric one, was left alone. He went to a Ragged School for destitute children when Rose and Wilber couldn’t afford anything better, and to a National School when they almost could.

Sherlock loves his mother and father, and despises the life they have given him. He could have been
someone else.

He hates what people do to each other. Why are prejudice and crime as constant as the yellow fog in this horrible and magnificent city?

Why would someone murder a beautiful lady in an alleyway in the dead of night?

OMENS FROM THE SKY

W
ilber Holmes closes
The Flight of Birds
with a snap and tries to set the book back on the shelf. He settles for holding it on his lap. Then he tries to brighten things.

“Tell me about your day, son. What did you really do? I won’t criticize.”

“I went to Trafalgar Square.”

“Again.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Anything of note?” Wilber sees the sensational publication clutched in his son’s hands. It isn’t the sort of newspaper that interests him.

“There was a terrible murder last night.”

Wilber yawns and covers his mouth. “Again.”

“This one was different.”

“Anything else?”

“There were crows at the Square.”

“Really?” Wilber’s eyes light up and lock on Sherlock’s. He twists around on the narrow bed. “You know, they’re probably the smartest of all the birds, with the possible
exception of their cousin, the raven. They have the largest brain-to-body ratio of the species.”

Mrs. Holmes turns to them from the table where she is slicing the vegetables with an oversized butcher knife. “Crows always give me the shivers. They eat dead things; they make horrid sounds; they swoop around the heads of the witches in
Macbeth.”

“The burden of the carrion breed, dear, the black carrion breed, slyer than a fox. Some of my colleagues used to say that crows were able to pick out individual human beings and tell one of us from another. Now that’s pretty clever.”

Sherlock gets up and walks past the table. A big tin tub sits on it, half-filled with water, next to where his mother is working. He takes it down and sets it near the fire where she will need it. When she looks away for an instant, he snatches a thin shard of carrot, then opens the door and steps out onto the creaky little landing. The rain has stopped and darkness is falling. The gaslights from Borough High slightly light the thin fog. All of the buildings on their street are jammed together and each has a tiny, walled backyard. A dying tree, the only one on the block, almost fills the hatter’s. In it sit two black birds.

The crows.
They’ve followed him.

Their dark feathers look oily and tattered.

“Corvus corone,”
says his father, standing behind him in the doorway. “Fine birds, really. Fine little rascals. They mate for life.”

A rock whizzes through the yard toward the crows. They lift off at once and are gone. Another rock arches into the air after them.

“You lot!” shouts Sherlock, leaning dangerously far over the frail railing to find the culprits. Down the alley, he sees two little boys glaring back at him. “Leave off!”

“Black devils and Jews is the curse of our land!” shrieks one as they scurry away.

“Come in,” says Rose softly, who had stepped out to see the birds. “Your meal will be ready soon.”

Sherlock spots the crows in the distance. The London sky is growing darker. The black birds vanish into it.

Something occurs to him.

Inside, he finds
The Illustrated Police News,
opens it, and looks at the drawing. There is the poor woman lying on the cobblestones. But what is that? At the top of the picture, not far from the corpse, the artist has drawn something dark with several strokes of the pen.

Sherlock bends his head down and examines the little figure in the shadows.

It is a crow.

THE MURDERER

S
herlock starts out with every intention of going to school the next morning, but the noisy crowds seem to impel him toward the city like a strong wind. Just one more day maybe two, then he’ll go back for good. He follows his route toward Trafalgar Square, glancing back from time to time, afraid he’s being trailed. There are many would turn him in: a teacher, a local hawker, even the old hatter with his cloudy red eyes and scowling face.

But over the river a treasure awaits him. Eyes alert as always, he spies a copy of the morning’s
Police News,
jammed under one of the outside seats on the top of an omnibus, clattering through the traffic toward him. The paper has been left up there and no one on the bus is paying the slightest attention to it. The driver is clutching the reins and the ladies inside are looking straight ahead into the noisy intersection. How can anyone abandon such spectacular information? He slips off the foot pavement right into the flow of horses and vehicles, puts a foot on the conductor’s platform at the rear, and executes a little jump to nab the paper. Not one of the whiskered faces under the tall black hats turns. Tucking it
into his coat, he vanishes back into the traffic and crosses to the north side before looking at his prize.

He loves this stretch of Fleet Street where the big newspapers have their offices. He’s seen grim Mr. Gladstone twice, enemy of Disraeli and once a Chancellor of the Exchequer, his big sideburns puffed out, his walking stick in hand, a perfect top hat on his well-developed head. And last week he spotted The Great Farini, the man who walked over Niagara Falls on a high wire. His flying-trapeze protégé, the bullet-boy El Niño, was by his side.