The Angel of the Crows

by Katherine Addison

  “What’s your theory?” I said, obliging his clear desire to be asked.

  “Well, I was thinking about the way the graffiti just seemed to appear along with that piece of apron—now you see it, now you don’t—and you said something about it being difficult to accept as a coincidence, and I thought that, really, there’s one other person who could willfully make the graffiti and the apron appear together, and that’s the person who found them.”

  “The constable?” I said. “I quite see Lestrade’s point.”

  “PC Alfred Long 254A,” Crow said. “He’s been loaned to Whitechapel from Westminster, so that he has reason to be bitter about this endless investigation, and he’s far from the only person to believe a Jew is to blame. And how easy would it be for him to find the piece of apron and simply chalk his opinion on the wall before he blew his whistle?”

  “I’m surprised Lestrade didn’t kick you out of Scotland Yard.”

  “Oh, Gregson tried that once,” Crow said, grinning. “He just ended up having to apologize and ask me to come back.”

  He looked so reprehensibly pleased with himself that I laughed even though I didn’t mean to. “Is this a serious theory or just a way to wind up Lestrade?”

  “Oh, I’m quite serious,” he said. “If the constable is the author of the graffiti, we’re left with only the one mystery: why did Jack drop—I mean, why did the murderer drop that piece of apron, and that may truly be an accident.”

  “Two mysteries,” I said.

  “Two?”

  “Why was he going back into Whitechapel? He must have known what he’d find there.”

  “He likes taking risks,” Crow said. “We do know that about him. I would guess, in fact, that the risks he takes are part of why he does it. Or, of course, heeding the gentleman with the razor, we might deduce that he resides in Whitechapel.”

  “Which we’d already deduced,” I said. “And even so.”

  “It suggests Whitechapel is where he’s most comfortable,” said Crow. “He was confident of evading the police there—and rightly so, as it turned out—less confident anywhere else.”

  “I suppose,” I said, “he might even have dropped that piece of apron to show that he’d gone back the way he’d come.”

  “It’s more likely than that ludicrous postcard,” Crow said. “This man is not a letter writer, and I shall keep saying that to Lestrade until he believes me.”

  “I understand his attachment to the theory.”

  “Oh, so do I! They’ve a chance of catching the letter writer—although not, I think, a very good one. But unless he makes a mistake, I don’t think they’ve any chance of catching Jack at all.” And then he went back and corrected himself: “The Whitechapel murderer.” But it was a losing battle and he knew it.

  22

  Errands

  Three days after the inquest on Elisabeth Stride adjourned, Crow reverted to the topic of names again.

  He had asked me to go on some errands with him—being unusually close-mouthed about their nature—and I had willingly agreed. We took the Underground first to the nearest thing to a habitation the Nameless had: St. Paul’s. They thronged its steps like pigeons, a great restless ever-shifting flock of men with dull gray suits and glorious wings. I tried to think of them as women and could not, even though I knew myself for a hypocrite.

  The Angel of St. Paul’s was not pleased to see Crow, but at least he acknowledged him. They spoke together in low voices for several minutes; I deliberately admired the architecture rather than trying to listen. Crow came away thoughtful, and on the next leg of our journey, he said, apropos of nothing, “I don’t think human beings understand how dangerous names are.”

  “Probably not,” I said.

  “They shouldn’t have given the Whitechapel murderer a name. Not like that.”

  “You mean the newspapers?” For the newspapers had pounced so gleefully on the name “Jack the Ripper” that it was now difficult to imagine him being called anything else.

  “And the police. By giving credence to that letter, they gave credence to the name, and having a name makes him more powerful, especially because he isn’t bound to a habitation.”

  “Like you,” I said, and wished I hadn’t.

  “Well, yes, if I were a murderer,” Crow said, unoffended. “But this is more like one of the Fallen being given a name.”

  “Could that happen?” I said, alarmed by the mere thought.

  “No. They’re not like me. They can’t take a name without taking a habitation, and since the nature of the Fallen is to destroy, no habitation could survive them. You can’t un-Fall.”

  I shivered. “What do you mean by ‘more powerful’? He’s not a magician.”

  “No, but—oh, for example, ‘Jack the Ripper always evades the police.’ Having a name makes it even less likely that the police will catch him. ‘No one ever sees Jack the Ripper.’ Well, not now they won’t. Having a name makes him more what he already was. And that was already bad enough.”

  “Yes,” I said, thinking of the mutilated corpse of Kate Eddowes. She had been identified by her common-law husband, based on a tattoo on her arm. Her story was much the same as those of her four sisters in murder: lodging houses, casual prostitution, too much liquor, the Ripper’s brutal knife. In a piece of painful irony, she had assured her husband the last time he saw her that she would not let herself be caught by the murderer.

  “Here’s our stop,” Crow said, and we emerged from the Underground at Aldgate, where Crow made directly for the Great Synagogue. I followed him up the steps (and through another throng of Nameless who watched us out of the corners of their eyes), and the Angel of the Great Synagogue met us at the top. “Crow, my friend!” he said with evident pleasure. “What brings you here?”

  “Many things,” said Crow. “Doyle, this is the Angel of the Great Synagogue of London.” I shook hands with the angel, barely even noticing the static discomfort of his touch. He was shorter and stockier than Crow, with dark hair and an olive complexion.

  I noted that Crow had not introduced me to the Angel of St. Paul’s.

  “It is a pleasure to meet you, Dr. Doyle,” said the angel, who knew what I was as surely as Crow did, but did not recoil. “You may call me Mal’akh.”

  Because we had just been talking about names, I noticed that he did not say his name was Mal’akh, only that he could be called that. Later, Crow told me that mal’akh was the Hebrew word for “messenger,” or “angel.”

  “Likewise,” I said.

  Crow said, “I wanted to talk to you about the Whitechapel murders.”

  “Of course you did,” Mal’akh said, resigned, as I supposed all of Crow’s friends, whoever they were, must be, to the inevitable topics of conversation.

  “I don’t think he’s Jewish,” Crow said, possibly as reassurance. “But I’m puzzled by the way the Stride and Eddowes murders seem to be”—he paused, visibly fishing for a word—“haunted, in a metaphorical sense, by anti-Semitism.” He explained Israel Schwartz’s story and the Goulston Street graffiti (leaving out his theory about the real author), and finished by saying, “Elisabeth Stride was killed next to a predominantly Jewish social club, and Catherine Eddowes was killed in Mitre Square, which is what? A literal stone’s throw from here?”

  “About,” said Mal’akh.

  “These things don’t fit with the first three murders, but I can’t decide if there’s something really there or not.”

  “Leave out the graffiti,” said Mal’akh. “It’s most likely a coincidence that has mistakenly been assigned meaning. That kind of graffiti is too common to bear any weight. We wash similar sentiments off our walls all the time.”

  “That’s fair,” said Crow.

  “Have you considered that Elisabeth Stride might not have been killed by the Whitechapel murderer at all? I’ve been reading the papers, and her murder seems different from the others.”

  “Well, we have to assume it’s unfinished,” Crow said. “
He killed her but didn’t have time for more before Mr. Diemschutz and his pony showed up.”

  “But he only needed fifteen minutes for what he did to Kate Eddowes,” I said.

  “He wasn’t surprised,” Crow said. “He knew exactly when the constables would come through Mitre Square on their beats. He planned for them. He didn’t plan for Mr. Diemschutz.”

  “But the testimony of Mr. Schwartz is also different,” said Mal’akh.

  “If that was the murderer, if it was Elisabeth Stride, and if he was even in Berner Street at all,” said Crow.

  “You’re arguing with my theory before I’ve finished presenting it,” Mal’akh said mildly.

  “Sorry,” Crow said, and his wings hunched.

  Mal’akh said, “These murders are creating a great deal of anti-Semitic sentiment, but in and of themselves … murdering a prostitute is neither Jewish nor non-Jewish, and while there may indeed be ritual in what he does to the bodies, it’s his ritual. It’s certainly not Jewish or connected to the Kabbalah or any of the other poisonous nonsense being whispered around the city.” He sighed. “And I do think poor Elisabeth Stride may have been killed by someone else. These murders make a perfect blind.”

  “London is a city of great opportunity,” I said dryly, and both angels looked at me as if they had forgotten I was there.

  Crow said, “Thank you, Mal’akh. I just wanted a better opinion than my own—and to warn you that the Home Office seems to be warming to the theory that all these murders are the work of a mad Polish Jew.”

  “Oh dear,” said Mal’akh.

  “The police don’t agree, but you know how it is with pressure from that high up.”

  “I shall warn the Rabbi,” said Mal’akh. “Thank you, my friend.”

  As we walked back toward the Underground, Crow said, “He was one of the few angels who spoke for me at—I can’t call it a trial because that implies a lot of things that weren’t there. He spoke for me when I was judged by a jury of my peers and found unfit to join in the Consensus. It took considerable courage on his part—angels like harmony, not discord, and none of us likes to dissent—and without him and those one or two others, I might have been driven out of London to perish in the wilderness.”

  “The rest of England is hardly a wilderness,” I said.

  “Oh, but it is,” he said, and he was quite serious. “No other Consensus would have taken me in if London threw me out.”

  “There’s a difference between finding you unfit to join in the Consensus and throwing you out?”

  “One is … I’m not allowed to join in the Consensus, but I’m still part of it. It’s like I’ve been sent to bed without any supper. The other is being thrown out of the house. They didn’t disown me, and they could have.”

  “It seems like some of them must have wanted to,” I said, thinking of the angels who stared past Crow as if he weren’t there.

  “It’s … complicated,” Crow said.

  I said, “Most things involving families are.”

  * * *

  This time when we emerged from the Underground, Crow led me through a warren of side streets to a quite unremarkable green door. We went inside and up two sets of stairs, and at the second-floor landing was an angel with jackdaw wings. He said, “Good afternoon, Crow. I’m glad to see you remembered our appointment.”

  Crow winced a little and said, “Doyle, this is the Angel of Whitehall. Whitehall, this is my friend, Dr. Doyle.”

  “What a remarkable friend,” said Whitehall, and I went hot from my collarbones to my hairline.

  Crow said, “Whitehall is my … I guess I have to say my guardian.”

  “I keep him out of trouble when I can,” Whitehall agreed, “and I appreciate your efforts in that same direction, Dr. Doyle.”

  I had no idea what to say. He was politely soft-spoken, unremarkable in appearance, and utterly terrifying. The sharp feeling most angels gave off was in the Angel of Whitehall at least doubled, maybe tripled. He was, I knew, a very old angel, and perhaps that accounted for it. He had also been the confidant of kings and princes for centuries.

  Fortunately, Crow was impatient. He said, “Can’t we just get this over with?”

  Whitehall said reprovingly, “You are graceless,” but then to me, “If you will excuse us, Dr. Doyle.” He opened one of the doors off the landing and ushered Crow through it, shutting it firmly behind them.

  I was uneasy, although I did not know exactly why. Perhaps it was how silent it was; this part of Whitehall seemed to be absolutely deserted. Perhaps it was the Angel of Whitehall’s crackling aura still unsettling me. But when there was a noise, I jumped like a startled cat, and then wasn’t even sure what the noise was. It had been a cry of some kind, but I couldn’t tell in my memory of it whether it was animal, human … or angelic. I wasn’t sure if it had been a cry of startlement, of anger, of pain. I couldn’t tell where it had come from, and above all else, I didn’t know what to do.

  It is a sign of how unnerved I was that I actually considered leaving, just going back to Baker Street and letting Crow find his own way home—which he was eminently capable of doing. But that was rank cowardice, and I was appalled at myself for considering it, even if only for a couple of seconds.

  My second option seemed to be going in search of the noise, but there I was paralyzed by choice: there were three doors, plus stairs leading both up and down, and the noise had echoed so strangely that it might have come from anywhere.

  Or I could stay where I was and do nothing—which was the result all my dithering achieved. I was still standing in exactly the same place when Whitehall reappeared, carefully closing the door behind him.

  He was alone.

  “Where is Crow?” I said and cursed the perfectly audible suspicion in my voice.

  “He’ll just be a moment,” said Whitehall. “He asked me to ask you to wait for him.”

  “Of course,” I said.

  “You really are a most remarkable friend,” Whitehall said. He sounded bemused.

  I could feel the disturbance he made in the aether from where I was standing. Nevertheless, I asked, “What happened? I heard something.”

  “Yes,” said Whitehall. “I thought you might.” He folded his hands carefully in front of him and said, “It is the consensus of London that only the Nameless shall fly.”

  The silence returned, even more oppressive than before, while I stared at Whitehall, trying unsuccessfully to understand what he was trying, even if obliquely, to tell me.

  “The Nameless fly,” I said slowly, repeating a fact I’d known since earliest childhood.

  “Yes,” said Whitehall.

  “But you … the angels of the London Consensus, if I have that right, do not fly.”

  “Correct. So far as I know, the only Consensus whose angels fly is the Consensus of Madrid.”

  “Crow isn’t Nameless,” I said, feeling like the world’s slowest student trying to solve an equation for x. “And he isn’t allowed to join in the Consensus, but … is he an angel of the Consensus or not?”

  “He is a disgraced angel of the Consensus. He agreed to accept our judgment on him in return for being allowed to stay in London.”

  “Your judgment … did you do something to him?”

  “He consented,” Whitehall said, still as mild as milk. “It is a binding, much like clipping a bird’s wings. And like that, it must be repeated periodically.”

  “It sounded like it hurt.”

  “It is … not pleasant,” Whitehall admitted.

  “Then why don’t—can’t you just accept his word that he won’t fly?”

  Whitehall made a pained face. “There are certain members of the Consensus, the Angel of the Tower and the Angel of Buckingham among them, who do not entirely believe Crow is not Fallen.”

  “But how could he be?”

  “They think that instead of finding a way not to Fall, he has found a new kind of Fallenness.” He added dryly, “It is not a particularly ratio
nal belief.”

  “How could Crow agree to something like that? How often do you have to do it?”

  “Once every three months. Tinker with it though I will, I cannot make it last longer than that.”

  I was somewhat heartened by that sign that Whitehall did not like this situation, either.

  I said, “It seems cruel. And why on Earth do the angels of the Consensus not fly?”

  “We separate ourselves from the Nameless in every way we can,” said Whitehall. “If they fly, then we do not.”

  That sounded insane, but before I could say that, or anything else disastrous, Crow came out. He looked shaken, his feathers rumpled, and he flicked a glance at me without meeting my eyes.

  “Shall we go?” he said, trying for lightness and failing.

  “Certainly,” I said. If he wanted to pretend nothing was wrong, I would happily follow suit.

  Whitehall looked amused, but said, “It was a pleasure to meet you, Dr. Doyle. Crow, you should bring your friends to visit more often.”

  Crow’s wings hunched around him, but his voice was much steadier when he said, “I’ll take that under advisement. Good-bye, Whitehall.”

  “Good-bye,” I echoed, although I could not manage a platitude.

  “Au ’voir,” said Whitehall, smiling.

  I waited until we were in the Underground carriage, our words protected by the noise of the train, to ask, “Are you all right?”

  Crow hesitated long enough that I knew he was trying to find a way around saying no. Finally, he said, “You don’t need to worry. I’ll be fine.”

  “Interestingly,” I said, “neither of those statements answered the question I asked, which, of course, is an answer in itself.”

  Crow’s wings hunched even tighter, and I thought I would do better to change the subject. “Why are the angels of Madrid the only angels who fly?”

  “The Consensus of Madrid is the only one that might accept me if London were to throw me out. They are considered renegades.”