The Angel of the Crows

by Katherine Addison

  “How very practical!” he said delightedly. “Certainly much easier than climbing that wall every month. And we don’t have to explain how someone could have been chatting regularly with a wooden-legged man and not known it—which was a bit of a stumbling block.”

  We had come through Streatham, Brixton, and Camberwell, and now the trail McMurdo followed, while still sedulously avoiding main roads, began to bear away to the east.

  “Not Whitechapel after all,” murmured Crow. “I suppose it was a bit much to ask of Jonathan Small that he also be the Whitechapel murderer.”

  “A bit much, yes,” I said. “His crimes are quite horrible and outré enough already.”

  Here, where Miles Street turned into Knight’s Place, McMurdo stopped dead in its tracks. I heard the whine as all three of its heads turned in different directions—a notably eloquent expression of bafflement.

  “Oh dear,” said Crow. “McMurdo, what happened?”

  THEY HAVE VANISHED

  Even the whir of the ticker tape sounded disgusted.

  Crow and I looked around futilely. “They couldn’t have known we would be following them some eight-and-twenty hours later,” Crow said, “but how do you disappear from a cerberus’s view by accident?”

  My eye had been caught by the brightly colored crescent moon painted on the sign of one of the shuttered shops that surrounded us:

  MADAME SILVANOVA

  scrying, divination, wards, hexes

  “Crow?” I said and pointed.

  “Do you think there’s a ward?”

  “If I were a fortune-teller in this part of town, I’d certainly ward my premises. And my clientele might have any number of reasons to wish not to be followed or observed.”

  “Besides,” he said, “she advertises confidentiality.” And he nodded at the door of the shop, where the words CONFIDENTIAL and DISCREET had been freehanded by someone with a fair amount of skill. Crow peered closer, reading the hours. “Well, Madame keeps fashionably late hours. We will have to try back this evening.”

  15

  The Murderer’s Story

  After some looking, we found a four-wheeler that could take McMurdo’s weight and returned it to Pondicherry Lodge before going home ourselves, I to sleep and Crow to consume today’s ream of newsprint about the Whitechapel murders. My dreams were murky, and I woke around noon feeling no better rested than I had when I lay down.

  I came out into the sitting room to find Crow deeply ensconced with scissors and paste in compiling his eccentric collection of press cuttings. He did not save every word printed about the Whitechapel murderer—which was just as well, or there would have been no room in the flat for us—but he chose and rejected articles based on no list of criteria that I could decipher. He said he kept only the “essentials,” whatever exactly that meant.

  “Doyle!” he said, and it was pleasant to have one creature in the world who was glad to see me, even if it was only because he wanted someone to listen to his theories about the Whitechapel murderer, of which he had several. It maddened him that no one at Scotland Yard would listen to him—“Even though,” he said ruefully, “I should be used to it by now. They never listen to me until I’m proved right.”

  That seemed foolish, and I said so. “Why do they ask for your help if they don’t listen to you?”

  “Lestrade’s better,” said Crow. “He does listen, even if he frequently doesn’t understand. So does Gregson, although most of the time you can’t tell. It’s detectives like Athelney Jones that I find insufferable. They act like I’m a dilettante, even though I’ve solved more cases than any of them.”

  I asked the question that had been plaguing me. “How long have you been doing this?”

  Crow looked embarrassed, and his wings shivered and almost mantled. “I’m not entirely sure. I don’t keep track of time very well, and the first part of my existence without a habitation—honestly, the memories are pretty patchy. Up until the police officers—in Whitechapel of all places—gave me a name. They said I hung around their crime scenes like a carrion crow. Once they started calling me Crow, things got a lot clearer.”

  “You kept that bit of your habitation,” I said. “Why did you not keep your name?”

  “You ask complicated questions,” Crow said, not complaining. “I suppose the best answer is that having a name isn’t tied to one’s habitation. Or, at least, not in a strictly material sense. Keeping a piece of my habitation didn’t actually keep me from becoming Nameless—my wings weren’t always crow wings, you know—it just let me keep a sense of my self until I got a new name. And of course it meant I didn’t have to become tied to a new habitation.”

  “Crow, are you saying you cheated?”

  He looked even more embarrassed. “That’s what most of the others say. But it isn’t as if there are any actual rules, and I say as long as I don’t Fall, it isn’t anyone else’s business what I do.”

  “That opinion must make you wildly popular,” I said dryly and startled him into laughing.

  “It definitely makes me abnormal,” he said. “Even angels with names and habitations and dominions tend to stay half or more in what, for a lack of a better word, I call the hive-mind. Bees, you know. They call it the Consensus.”

  “The Consensus?”

  “We can’t travel, but we can communicate with each other. All the angels in London form a consensus. And where one angel’s range is barely enough to reach the public house on the nearest corner, the Consensus can communicate with the Consensi of York and Birmingham and Edinburgh and Dublin and can even hop the Channel to the Consensus of Paris. And the Consensus of Paris can talk to the Consensi of Rome and Berlin and so on. That’s why the angels of embassies and consulates are so greatly valued.”

  “Good God,” I said. “But you’re cut off from that?”

  “They were angry at me for surviving something angels don’t survive,” he said. “I should have just embraced the Consensus—that’s what they call it, when you become Nameless, that you embrace the Consensus. I call it dying, and that makes me very unpopular. Thus, I can go talk to any angel in London in person—although some of them refuse to talk to me at all—but I can’t join the Consensus. They’re afraid that I’m going to Fall suddenly and take the whole Consensus with me.”

  “Is that even possible?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Do you miss it?”

  “Oh, yes,” he said cheerfully. “But not enough to die for.”

  * * *

  At four we returned to Madame Silvanova’s. The neighborhood was transformed, shops opening and the pubs already doing raucous business. In the window of the flat above a tobacconist’s, a red lamp told the sensation seekers and the addicts where to find the vampires.

  Madame Silvanova’s establishment was better lit than I would have expected, and the woman who came to meet us, brushing aside the strings of anti-possession wards hanging from the ceiling, was small, with a sharply angular face and gray-brown hair that suggested she was older than she looked. She wore a blue silk dress trimmed with lace. Not, then, an ordinary shopkeeper.

  “I am Madame Silvanova,” she said, her accent distinctly Russian. “How may I help you?”

  Crow and I had discussed possible gambits, based on whether or not Madame Silvanova was a knowing accomplice to murder, but we did not get the chance to try any of them. As she looked us over and realized Crow was neither a man in an overcoat nor Nameless, her eyes got wider and wider, and she blurted out, “It is you!”

  “I beg your pardon?” said Crow.

  “The mirror showed me,” said Madame Silvanova. “You come and then the police come and all is ruin. You must leave. At once.”

  Crow’s wings spread wide, wall to wall in the tiny shop. “If you throw me out,” he said, “I will bring the police. But if you help me, that might not be necessary.”

  She had gone back a step when he spread his wings (in fairness, so had I), and her face was filled with fear, e
ven though she had to know as well as I did that no angel could harm a human being—unless she actually thought he was Fallen, in which case she was a fool, and a fool twice over for still standing here. But then she glanced over her shoulder toward the back room of the shop, and I realized it might not be Crow she feared.

  Crow saw the glance, too, and said, “What did he tell you? Did he tell you about the murder, or only about the treasure?”

  “Murder?” We had given the poor woman too many shocks in a row. She staggered, catching herself on the store counter, and I hastened to support her before her knees buckled. There was a chair behind the counter, and I guided her to sit in it.

  She stared up at me. “Murder?” she repeated. “Who is dead? Whom did he kill?”

  “A man named Bartholomew Sholto,” said Crow.

  Madame Silvanova frowned. “But I read about that in the papers. It couldn’t have been Jonathan. It wasn’t—”

  “It was I,” said a thin and heavily accented voice; we all stared at the person standing in the doorway to the back room.

  For a moment, as my mind struggled to interpret what I saw, I thought I was looking at a child. He was no more than four and a half feet tall, but the face, dark-skinned, was an adult’s, with bags under the eyes and lines of anxiety and unhappiness graven into the forehead. “I did not want to do it,” he said, “but it was too late. There was no other way to stop Mr. Small.”

  “To stop him from what?” said Crow.

  “From feeding,” said Madame Silvanova. “Jonathan Small is a hemophage.”

  Crow and I stared at each other. “Well,” Crow said at last, “I suppose that explains how a wooden-legged man could be so agile. But why did you not kill him?”

  “I am bound by oath to Mr. Small,” said the little man. “And if he were dead, what would become of me? They would throw me in prison as a murderer or exhibit me in a circus like the Wild Men of Borneo. Mr. Small is my only hope of going home.”

  “Where is home?” I said, although I thought I knew.

  “The Andaman Islands. Mr. Small saved my life and thus I serve him, but he promised he will see that I get safely home again.”

  “Jonathan Small seems to be a dab hand at keeping a promise,” I said to Crow. “He’s been in England at least six years.”

  “Six years and eight months,” said the little man, and offered a shy, lopsided smile. “I keep count.”

  “We’re going about this all backward,” Crow said. “My name is Crow, and I am the Angel of London. This is Dr. Doyle. Madame Silvanova we have met”—with a little bow to the lady—“and your name is?”

  “Mr. Small says it is unpronounceable. He calls me Tonga.”

  “I think I should like to know your real name,” Crow said, frowning.

  The little man rattled off a string of syllables, of which the only part I could catch did sound something like “tonga.” He smiled at our expressions and said, “I have had many names. Perhaps you will call me Anuvadaka? It means ‘translator,’ which was my job.”

  “You were a translator at Port Blair?” I said.

  “At Kala Pani, yes. That was why Mr. Small spared my life.”

  “Spared your life?” said Crow. “Not saved it?”

  “With a hemophage,” Anuvadaka said dryly, “they are much the same thing.”

  “But how did you come to be a translator?” I asked.

  “The British soldiers found me wandering in the jungle, feverish and dying. They brought me back to the prison, where the doctor—his name was Somerton and he was a good man—cured me. But I was dead to my people, who would never accept me back once I had been among the outsiders, therefore I stayed as Dr. Somerton’s servant and learned English. When the doctor died of one of the pestilential fevers that sweep through the Andamans, I stayed as a translator, for by then I had learned Punjabi as well, and there was always need for someone who could speak both the language of the overseers and the language of the prisoners. I knew who Mr. Small was, for there were very few English prisoners, and especially not Englishmen imprisoned for killing an Indian man—but then, he and Dost Akbar had killed the man by feeding on him, which I have noticed the British find particularly loathsome.”

  “Were all four of them—Jonathan Small, Dost Akbar, Mahomet Singh, and Abdullah Khan—hemophages?” asked Crow.

  “No, though all four had encountered the Fallen of Agra, who raged in the surrounding countryside and howled for the angels of Agra to come out and fight. I am told that this Fallen was insane.”

  “Some of them are,” I said.

  “They go mad with grief,” said Crow. “I think perhaps all the Fallen are insane—it’s just that some of them stay rational, such as the Fallen of Afghanistan who fight with the partisans. They can make treaties. But they are still irrationally bent on destruction and revenge. Doyle, do you know if any Fallen ever offered a treaty to the British?”

  “Not to my knowledge,” I said. “It would have been refused.”

  “Yes, of course,” Crow said. “Making treaties with the Fallen is something only the enemy does.”

  “The I.A.F. does have at least a principle or two,” I said. “But no one could have made a treaty with the Fallen of Agra. From everything I have heard, she was truly insane.”

  “At their trial,” said Anuvadaka, “the defense lawyer argued that the metaphysicum morbi had driven all four of them insane and that that was why they murdered the man Achmet. But it was really the treasure.”

  “Do you know the story of the treasure?” Crow asked eagerly.

  “I know what Mr. Small has told me,” said Anuvadaka. “I do not know how much of it is true. He says that he was guarding one of the gates of the fort when Singh and Khan ambushed him and told him he had the choice of joining them in betrayal, robbery, and murder, or being killed on the spot. He says he made them swear that they meant no harm to the fort and the people inside it before he would agree, but then he joined them, swearing an oath that bound the four of them together. So far as I can tell, that part is true. He is doing his best to keep faith with Dost Akbar, Abdullah Khan, and Mahomet Singh.”

  “Are they in England?” I asked.

  “No. Only Mr. Small escaped Kala Pani, taking me with him. He plans to take the treasure back to India and find a guard he can bribe to let them escape. He says that part will not be hard, and perhaps he is right.”

  There was a commotion in the street. Crow turned to look and said, “Oh no, it’s Jones! And at least three officers. How on Earth did … where is Small?”

  “He went out,” said Anuvadaka, whose dark face was going a terrible gray color as the blood drained from it. “To secure the use of a steam launch to take us to where the boat for India waits. But—”

  Crow backed up to the door, his wings spreading and becoming jammed in the doorway just as a voice outside said, “Police!”

  “Quick!” Crow mouthed at me. “Get him out the window!”

  We were obstructing justice, then. But I did not want to see Anuvadaka arrested and Small left to go free. Madame Silvanova had already opened one of the small side windows, and she and I boosted Anuvadaka up to it. He was very light, and I saw his toes were splayed and strong.

  “221 Baker Street,” I hissed as he wriggled out the window, reaching for a hold on the bricks. “Tell them Crow said to let you in.” Then he was gone, and I turned back to where Crow had somehow gotten one wing half out the door and seemed to be genuinely stuck. There was a fair amount of cursing from the officers on the other side.

  I counted to ten. Madame Silvanova closed the window, and I said, “All right,” softly, knowing that Crow could hear me and the officers couldn’t.

  Crow floundered and flailed. He really was stuck. It ended up taking me and Madame Silvanova on one side, and Jones on the other, to work him safely back into the shop.

  “You startled me,” he said fussily to Jones as he tried to smooth his feathers back into order. “There was no need for that.” />
  Jones looked bemused, aggravated, and suspicious all at once. “What are you doing here?”

  “We tracked the murderers to this corner, where they seemed to disappear,” Crow said truthfully, and I picked up quickly: “We were canvassing the shopkeepers to see if they had noticed anything unusual.”

  Madame Silvanova recognized her cue and came forward. “I am Madame Silvanova,” she said, and if not exactly gracious, she managed to sound not hostile. “I was telling these … gentlemen that I saw nothing that could help them.”

  Jones looked even more deeply suspicious. “D’you mind if we look around, miss? We have reliable information that Bartholomew Sholto’s murderer is in your shop.”

  “Bozhe moi,” said Madame Silvanova. “Yes, by all means! I wish to have no murderers here.”

  “I thought you were reliably informed the murderer was Thaddeus Sholto,” Crow said.

  “He proved an alibi,” Jones said disgustedly, gesturing to his officers to search the building. “I admit we were at a bit of a dead end when that wooden-legged fellow came in and said he knew where the murderer was hiding.”

  “Wooden-legged, eh?” said Crow. “Did he say how he knew?”

  “I don’t…” Jones looked perplexed. “Forbes! Where’s that wooden-legged fellow?”

  “He was right…” Forbes went to the door and leaned out, looking left and right down the street. “He’s gone!”

  “Shocking,” I said to Crow, and he gave me a quick flash of a smile in return. We both pretended not to hear what Athelney Jones was muttering under his breath.

  Another constable came down the stairs—I could hear his regulation boots clearly—and back out into the shop. “There’s no one here, sir.”

  “If you’d let me last night,” Crow said to Jones, “I could have told you you were looking for a wooden-legged man.”

  Jones’s already red face became uniformly brick-colored. He said, “Yes, and I see that somehow you got here before us. Tread carefully, Mr. Crow, for you may not be able to commit murder but you have a friend who can. Mr. Gregson told me all about the Jefferson Hope case.”