The Angel of the Crows

by Katherine Addison

  “You are sure.”

  “I have been married to her for thirteen years, and I love her as much today as I did the day I married her,” John Hebron said with great dignity. “I am sure.”

  “I think we may trust your observations,” Crow said.

  “After only a few minutes, the woman turned and gestured to me to go away. I was not close enough to see her face, but it was not Effie. All the details were right, but she was the wrong woman. I can’t explain it.”

  “I might be able to,” Crow said darkly. “Mr. Hebron, can you tell us anything else?”

  Hebron shook his head. “I wish I could.”

  “How about you, miss?”

  “Lucy?” Hebron said encouragingly.

  The child lifted her chin as if defying some inward fear and said, “Mama didn’t want the letter, for she waited until we were done and Susan was clearing the plates to open it. Usually she opens her letters right away.”

  “That’s a splendid piece of reasoning,” said Crow, and the little girl hid her face again, embarrassed by praise.

  Hebron said, “Macfarlane says Effie went white as a sheet, and she was distracted all morning. And then, of course, she went out and did not come back.”

  “I assume you do not have the letter, but do you by chance have the envelope?”

  “No,” Hebron said, but his daughter tugged on his waistcoat. “Lucy?”

  She whispered earnestly to him.

  “Well,” he said, looking both proud and embarrassed, “Lucy says she has the envelope, but she doesn’t want to give it to you.”

  “Why not, Lucy?” Crow asked gently.

  Her face was still hidden against her father’s waistcoat, but she said, audible though muffled, “It has Mama’s name on it. She has to come back to it.”

  “Lucy, where did you learn such superstitious nonsense?” said her much discomfited father.

  “Gran’mama said,” the child explained. “She makes me sign all my letters to her with my full name so that she knows I’ll come back to her.”

  “Lucy…” said Hebron.

  But Crow said, very seriously, “Did she tell you not to give your full name to anyone you don’t trust?”

  “Yes, sir,” said Lucy, turning her head enough to regard him with one wary eye.

  “Good,” said Crow. “Your grandmother is right. Your real name has power. I promise I will give the envelope back to you if you let me look at it.”

  Lucy considered and Crow waited patiently. “You promise?” she said finally, only the slightest waver in her voice.

  “I promise,” Crow said.

  Lucy nodded, making up her mind, and wriggled to pull a grubby and battered envelope out of her skirt pocket.

  “Thank you,” said Crow and took the envelope over by the window to examine it, both Hebrons watching him anxiously. “As you say, addressed very legibly to MISS EUPHEMIA RUCASTLE. Is the address correct?”

  “Yes,” said Hebron.

  “So that’s deliberate. It’s a man’s handwriting with a very distinctive flourish to the tails. Postmark—legible, huzzah!—Balham. Which confirms you were in the right place.” He returned the envelope to Lucy, who immediately put it back in her pocket.

  “They never said Effie wasn’t there.”

  “And yesterday’s charade suggests that they want you to think she is there, but unwilling to speak to you.”

  “And that makes no sense, either,” said Hebron. “If Effie wanted to leave me, she would tell me to my face, and she would never go back to her father. He didn’t even send Lucy a christening present.”

  “I wouldn’t have wanted it,” the little girl said firmly, and made her father laugh.

  “We shall be happy to take your most unusual case, Mr. Hebron,” said Crow. “I shall be in touch as soon as I find anything, and I pray you do the same, especially, of course, if Mrs. Hebron returns home.” He saw the two Hebrons out and came back upstairs, frowning.

  “I do not like this, Doyle,” said he. “The leaving is one thing, but why would she not return to her little girl? Why would she not write, or at least send a telegram? And that strange pantomime yesterday … No, Euphemia Hebron is either being held against her will or she’s dead.”

  “She seems the sort of woman who would, if she were leaving her family, at least have written them a note,” I said.

  “Exactly. When she left, she expected to return home again in a matter of hours, not long enough to worry her household. Certainly not days.” He paced thoughtfully up and down the room a couple of times. “The person I want to talk to is Miss Macfarlane. Depending on how long she’s been with Mrs. Hebron, she may know a great deal. Will you come?”

  “Yes,” I said, “I think I will.”

  * * *

  The Hebrons lived in a new two-story villa in St. George’s in the East, the part that wasn’t holding up the ruthless iron spires of Victoria’s Needle. The neighborhood was mostly airship men, whom I supposed to be less likely to take offense at the spectacle of a white woman happily married to a black man. I myself had come to feel Christ’s words about the first stone far too keenly to judge.

  I followed Crow to the tradesmen’s entrance, where the woman who answered the door was clearly Miss Macfarlane; she looked on the verge of tears.

  “Good afternoon,” Crow said, tipping his hat with the utmost politeness. “My name is Crow, and I am the Angel of London. This is my colleague, Dr. Doyle. Mr. Hebron has hired us to look into Mrs. Hebron’s disappearance. May we speak to you for a few moments?”

  “Yes,” said Miss Macfarlane. “Any help I can be.”

  She had been Euphemia Hebron’s maid for three years before her marriage, but even then Mrs. Hebron had been estranged from her family. “Miss Effie had some money of her own, from her mother, and there was bad blood over that. Her father wouldn’t give her any peace about it, wanting her to sign some paper that would let him control it, so that first she moved out and then when he didn’t let up, she went to America. I believe she thought it would be safe to come back. It had been nearly fifteen years, and her father didn’t want anything to do with Mr. Hebron and Miss Lucy. I believe she thought he would leave her alone.”

  “You think her father is definitely behind her absence.”

  “Yes,” said Miss Macfarlane. “That look on her face when she saw the letter—I never have seen a lady feel so guilty as Miss Effie for doing nothing wrong.”

  I felt a pang of kinship for Euphemia Hebron.

  “Thank you very much, Miss Macfarlane. You’ve been a great help.”

  “Will you find her?” said Miss Macfarlane.

  “We’ll do our best,” said Crow, and we took our leave.

  “That answered one important question,” he said when we’d crammed ourselves back into the hansom. “If her father summoned her, Mrs. Hebron would go.”

  “But wouldn’t expect or want to stay,” I said, catching his point.

  “Exactly the conditions under which she vanished. Now, I think, our destination is Balham.”

  * * *

  We took the Underground out to Balham. Crow’s wings did look amazingly like an overcoat if you weren’t paying attention, and most people weren’t. The few people who did notice obviously decided he was Nameless. “People see what they want to see,” Crow said, startling me out of my train of thought.

  “How did you…”

  He laughed, delighted with his success. “It wasn’t hard. You wear most of your thoughts on your face, you know.”

  “What an uncomfortable notion,” I grumbled.

  He laughed again, and then, as if in apology, began telling me the life histories of the other people in the car. Even the Nameless, for he could tell me where they’d been that day and what they’d been doing. One of them was a postal angel—and Crow made some deductions about its route that he said cheerfully were most likely wrong—and the other was a lawyer’s courier, taking important documents to someone in the suburbs.


  I was reminded of something I’d been meaning to ask him. “The Nameless who brought the information about the Aurora—he said it was from his sister. But I don’t think I’ve ever seen a female Nameless.”

  “Ah,” Crow said and actually looked uncomfortable. “The truth is, you’ve never seen a male Nameless. Or a male angel, for that matter. We’re all female.” My expression was no doubt thunderstruck, for he added, “I did tell you bees were the best analogy.”

  “You’re all female,” I said after a moment.

  “Insofar as it makes sense to apply gender to asexual beings, yes.”

  “But…” I gestured incoherently at his suit, at the suits of the two Nameless at the other end of the car.

  “Human beings give us habitations and names,” said Crow, “and also gender. We become what they expect us to be.” He eyed me uncertainly for a long moment before he said, “I was female before.”

  I looked at him hard, then at the two Nameless, thinking about the dun-haired Nameless, soft-voiced and soft-featured. “But if you are all female, why do the Nameless not wear female clothing?”

  He raised an eyebrow at me pointedly.

  “Yes, sorry,” I said, for I’d realized how stupid the question was as soon as I’d asked it. “But I don’t see in that case how any of you become ‘female’ at all.”

  “Have you ever seen an angel in the process of acquiring a name?”

  “No, I don’t believe so.”

  “It is terrifying,” Crow said. “We go to the very verge of dissolution—we may spend weeks so incorporeal that we cannot support so much as a pillowslip. But when we cohere again, bound to our habitation, the building owner names us, and our name makes us what we are. In my particular case, I don’t actually know how long it was before I was corporeal enough to pick up a pebble.” And I knew he meant the chunk of marble that was at the moment in his inside waistcoat pocket. “No one I encountered ever doubted for a second that I was male.”

  “Good Lord,” I said. “I still can’t see you as female.”

  He grinned. “My face and voice changed a good deal, and I’m quite a bit taller. When they named me Crow, I became what they expected.” Then he said anxiously, “Don’t say that’s too peculiar for you, Doyle, please. I know it’s a little…” He made a helpless double-handed gesture.

  I said, “No, it’s not too peculiar. Just unexpected.”

  “Fair enough,” said Crow.

  * * *

  Balham was incredibly bourgeois, but Crow entertained me, as we sought the home of Jephro Rucastle, with the convoluted story of the Bravo murder, which had also taken place in Balham: “The upshot of it all being that Charles Turner Bravo died of antimony poisoning. No doubt there. It’s such a horrible way to die that suicide seems a ludicrous hypothesis—despite both the widow, Florence Bravo, and the hired companion, Jane Cannon Cox, asserting that it had to be. And no matter how many times they questioned him, Bravo himself repeated that he took nothing save for some laudanum he rubbed on his gums. Two people had reason to want him dead. And they were the two people best positioned to murder him. But nothing could be proved against either of them. Jane Cannon Cox did too good a job of destroying the evidence.”

  “You think she was the murderess?”

  “No,” Crow said. “I think she was too canny to murder a man with a great walloping dose of antimony like that. She’d have been like Dr. Pritchard and stretched it out over months—made it a mysterious wasting illness instead of this sudden, inexplicable death that made people ask all sorts of inconvenient questions. Now Florence, on the other hand. Florence was just the sort of person to dump an unconsidered dose of antimony in her husband’s bedroom water pitcher and then go completely to pieces … as Florence Bravo definitely did. I think Florence committed the murder, and Jane Cannon Cox committed the cover-up. And although neither of them got the slightest joy from it, they did escape the gallows.”

  “But how could they possibly have been tried and not—”

  “Ah, but they weren’t tried. The Coroner’s jury brought in willful murder, but that ‘there is not sufficient evidence to fix the guilt upon any person or persons.’”

  “Hardly the usual formula,” I said.

  “No, but it was good enough to close off the scandal, which was all the families wanted. Florence Bravo died a lonely alcoholic’s death, and for good and faithful service Jane Cannon Cox was sent to Jamaica, whence she had come.”

  “So much for being an accessory after the fact.”

  “If she’d hoped it would give her blackmail material, she miscalculated badly. It gave her power over Florence, but Florence was persona non grata with her own family as well as with the Bravos, and Jane Cannon Cox could only take Florence down in a sort of Pyrrhic victory, which—again—she was far too canny to accept.”

  “Evidence against one was evidence against the other.”

  “Yes, and any defense counsel worth his fee would ask if the lady who covered up so competently might not be the mastermind behind the murder, with poor Mrs. Bravo as a mere innocent catspaw. Juries have believed more unlikely things than that.”

  “Here we are, guv,” called the hansom driver. “The Copper Beeches.”

  The house was a handsome one, large enough to make the Hebrons’ trim villa look dowdy, and with a quite respectable expanse of grounds. It was immediately obvious how the house had gotten its name, for the stand of copper beeches by the driveway was exceptionally fine.

  The door was opened to us by a colorless and frightened-looking maid, who disgraced whoever had trained her by shrieking at the sight of Crow and fleeing into the recesses of the house.

  “Well, that’s a first,” Crow said, sounding hurt. “Usually they at least ask if I’m Fallen.”

  “If you were, of course, they would have had no chance to ask.”

  “This cold, machine-like logic will make you no friends, Dr. Doyle,” he said mock-loftily. “But hark! Someone is coming to find out what’s frightened Eliza into fits.”

  The new arrival was a tall, dour-faced woman, who raised her eyebrows at Crow’s wings but stood her ground.

  Crow tipped his hat politely. “Good afternoon. We’re looking for Mrs. Hebron. Is she in?”

  “Who’s asking?” she said suspiciously.

  “My name is Crow, and I am the Angel of London. This is my colleague, Dr. Doyle. We only need a minute of her time.”

  By then, the woman had realized her error. “There’s no one here by that name,” she said. “This is the Rucastle residence.”

  But Crow, not at all discomfited, offered his card and said, “Then may I speak to Mr. Jephro Rucastle? It may take longer than a minute.”

  She hesitated, but she clearly hadn’t been told to deny that Mr. Rucastle was at home, and by then Crow was in the house, having used the average human tendency to step back from angels to shameless advantage.

  “I’ll go see,” she said and retreated. I joined Crow in the front hall.

  “Someone forgot to rehearse the staff in their lines,” I said.

  “Slipshod,” Crow agreed, and then a woman appeared at the top of the stairs and hastened down them.

  “Oh, come quickly!” she said. “Please, come quickly!”

  Her hair was vivid chestnut, and she was wearing an electric blue dress. But her round, freckled face was nothing like the portrait of Euphemia Hebron we had been shown.

  “You must be the young lady from the window,” Crow said.

  “What? Oh, yes, but please, it doesn’t matter. Just come quickly, before he gets here.”

  Infected by her anxiety, we followed her down a long hallway, through a baize door and then through a door which the woman unlocked. “I’m not supposed to have this key,” she said over her shoulder. “I’m forbidden from going anywhere near this wing. But I must help her.”

  “Her?” said Crow as we started up a narrow staircase carpeted in drugget.

  “I don’t know her name, but he
r hair is the same color as mine and I’m wearing her dress. Oh God, I sound like a madwoman.”

  “Not at all,” said Crow, “for you are quite correct. The lady’s name is Euphemia Rucastle Hebron. We are here at the behest of her husband, whom I believe you saw yesterday.” Being an angel, he was of course not out of breath, though both the false Euphemia and I were panting with the pace we were taking up the stairs.

  “Oh!” she said on a gasp. “The … the African gentleman!” I wondered what phrase she had thought better of.

  “Yes,” said Crow. “He and their little girl are most distressed by Mrs. Hebron’s disappearance.”

  “I swear I knew nothing of this,” the false Euphemia said. “Mr. Rucastle hired me as a governess, but he had such strange stipulations.… I should have been quite nervous about accepting, but Balham seemed safe enough, and the salary is ridiculous.”

  “I would guess he did not hire you sight-unseen,” Crow said, and then we were finally at the top of the stairs, where the false Euphemia led us across the hallway to another staircase, this one precipitous and so narrow I could brace myself with a forearm against each wall. At the top of these stairs, we found a half-floor under the gable of the roof, with unfinished plank flooring and low windows.

  “She’s up here somewhere,” the false Euphemia said. “I heard him yelling at her.”

  Crow shouted, “Euphemia!”

  I had never heard him raise his voice indoors before; I was not prepared any more than the false Euphemia was for the way his voice rang, nor for how disproportionately loud it was. It was a little like being caught under a ringing bell.

  After a moment’s startled silence, someone started banging on the third door down the row, and a woman yelled, “I’m here! I’m here! Please, God!”

  The door was locked, but the false Euphemia said, “Let me try.” She pulled another key out of her pocket and said with a grimace, “I thought if I was going to be a thief, I might as well do it properly.”