The Angel of the Crows

by Katherine Addison

  “It is that,” said Mr. Aarons. “Like breathing in a bad fog.”

  “Yes, though this is detrimental to the spirit rather than the lungs.”

  “All right,” said Mr. Lusk, seeming to pull himself together. “Thank you for your time, Mr. Crow.”

  And they left with their grim little package.

  I don’t quite know what to make of it, Doyle. On the one hand, we know this isn’t Mrs. Eddowes’s kidney and the Whitechapel murderer has shown no inclination to write people letters (leaving out entirely those ludicrous fakes of which Lestrade is so enamored). On the other hand, this seems more like something the Whitechapel murderer would send, both the letter itself and the ghastly half a kidney. And yet, as Mr. Harris said, there are a lot of very peculiar folks in London. Lestrade has been showing me some of the other letters they’ve been receiving, now that they’ve been idiots and put the idea of writing “Jack the Ripper” letters into everybody’s head, and there are a great many people in London I should not like to meet in the East End after midnight. Whitechapel murderer or not, this man is one of them. I feel sure, however, that Lestrade can be trusted with Mr. Lusk’s safety, even if I fear he will go tearing off after this fresh red herring with his customary enthusiasm.

  Please continue to send your excellent letters. It maddens me that I cannot be there myself, even though I know you are just as capable as I of guiding Sir Henry safely through this mystery.

  Your friend,

  Crow

  * * *

  From Dr. J. H. Doyle to Mr. Crow

  Baskerville Hall, October 17th

  My dear Crow,

  This afternoon, Sir Henry and I (and the ever-faithful Wiggins) went out walking on the moor. We were both far too curious not to try to find George Selden’s camp and also to figure out what happened to him. If he had met his demise upon the moor, as seemed all too probable, it would be better that we find him than poor tormented Barrymore.

  It was an excellent day for walking on the moor, crisp and bracing, and although I still need my stick, my leg is enough better that I could keep up with Sir Henry without difficulty. We kept ourselves on a line with the window Barrymore had been looking out the night before, the only window of the Hall visible once one had passed through that gap in the trees. We looked back frequently to check our reckoning, since neither of us was confident about our ability, in the barrenness of the moor, either to keep a straight line or to discern landmarks.

  “Baskerville,” I said, “have you found any record of Sir Charles having an aetheric practitioner out to cast for a curse?”

  “No, and he kept good records,” said Sir Henry.

  “I wonder why he didn’t?”

  I had told him about my two solo encounters with Miss Stapleton, so that he had no difficulty in following my line of thought. “Either he found he truly did not want to know, or he knew it wasn’t a curse.”

  “I can’t think why he wouldn’t want to know,” I said. “Curses can be removed.”

  “Then it wasn’t a curse.”

  “If it wasn’t a curse, what killed him?”

  “A bad heart and his own terror of our family fetch,” said Sir Henry. “I’m more interested in this fellow Selden who leaves footprints in my flower beds.”

  When we reached any outcropping or cairn that was on our direct line with the window, we would stop and cast about for first, a candle that when lit would serve as a beacon for Barrymore, and second, any sign of Selden’s camp. We had failure after failure, and were both getting discouraged when we found Selden’s camp by almost literally falling into it. It was a natural declivity in the lee of a jagged spur of rock. It was easy to see someone had been camping there, and he had left a scrap of paper under a stone.

  Dreadful handwriting, as you said of the unfortunate Mr. Lusk’s correspondent, and worse spelling:

  Dear Lizzie

  I hav fownd a better deel

  No signature, but I suppose there wasn’t anything to write that wouldn’t incriminate his sister. At least there is something he balks at.

  “A better deal?” said Sir Henry. “What on Earth does he mean by that?”

  “I can’t imagine he wants to go to South America,” I said.

  “No, he’d rather stay in England and break his sister’s heart,” Sir Henry grumbled. “Where do you suppose he’s gone?”

  I shook my head. “I can’t even hazard a guess.”

  There was no other detritus in that miserable little hollow and nothing to show what direction Selden had taken when he left it. We did find his signal point, with the stump of a candle still in a hollow in the rock, shielded from view in all directions except that straight line with the window, still just visible, of Baskerville Hall.

  “Clever brute,” said Sir Henry. “I suppose that’s what makes him dangerous.”

  “That and a much too sentimental sister,” I said. “Are you going to report the Barrymores to Princetown?”

  “I can’t,” said Sir Henry. “It won’t do any good, since Selden has obviously moved on, and Mrs. Barrymore is going to be hurt enough by her brother’s defection. Dash it all, Doyle, the Barrymores have been at Baskerville Hall for four generations—I can’t throw them to the wolves!”

  “They were aiding and abetting an escaped felon,” I said.

  “And probably, if it were my brother, I’d do the same. Wouldn’t you?”

  “Yes,” I said reluctantly, thinking of poor, doomed Henry, “but that’s not the point.”

  “I think it’s exactly the point. And, no, I am not going to report them.”

  Ethically, I think I should have kept arguing. But I don’t have the heart to turn the Barrymores in, either, especially after the way Mrs. Barrymore crumpled when she read Selden’s note. She has all the punishment she can bear, simply in being George Selden’s sister. As for Barrymore, he would clearly do anything in his power to make his wife happy, and yet there is nothing he can do, either about her brother or about their childlessness, which must pain her a great deal. It isn’t as if there’s more information that can be extracted from them, and I confess I do not myself want the careful scrutiny of the law, especially so far from London and Lestrade’s benevolent blindness.

  Just as we started back to Baskerville Hall, we heard again that terrible howl that I have described to you. It froze both of us in our tracks as it rose, and only when the moor was silent again were we able to move on.

  “That’s not a bird,” Sir Henry said flatly. “I don’t care what Mr. Stapleton says.”

  I managed a laugh, although it was not easy. “We are hunting a convict and a hound from hell is hunting us, as likely as not. I only hope its luck is as bad as ours.”

  Sir Henry was struck by a thought. “You don’t suppose that’s Selden, do you?”

  “I think Selden is long gone from the moor,” I said.

  We walked back to Baskerville Hall in silence.

  Mrs. Barrymore, as I said above, was devastated by her brother’s note, but with that great secret revealed, both Barrymores seem much easier, and I don’t think they will revert to the idea of leaving Baskerville Hall.

  We have had a visit from Mr. and Miss Stapleton, which seemed a transparent attempt to throw Miss Stapleton at Sir Henry. Sir Henry thought so, too, because he smiled beatifically and started talking about the wife he had left in Alberta. He claimed her name is Ermentrude. Miss Stapleton didn’t seem to know quite what to do—I noticed her anxious glances at her brother just as I noticed them the other day—as if her instructions hadn’t included that contingency. Stapleton himself merely conversed about the butterflies and moths of the moor and asked about the Lepidoptera of Canada. I had one of those moments of pseudo-telepathy one sometimes has with friends and kicked Sir Henry just before he could say, “You’d have to ask Ermentrude.”

  He coughed and said, “I’m afraid I’m not the person to ask.”

  “Pity,” said Stapleton with what I feel sure was perfect sincerity.


  Sir Henry sat in frowning silence for some time after they had gone, then said, “He reminds me of someone. Who on Earth does he remind me of?”

  “I don’t think it can be anyone you’ve met since you came to England,” I said.

  “No,” said Sir Henry. “And I don’t know that it’s someone I’ve met. It may just have been someone I’ve seen. Argh! Nothing to drive a man crazy like that tip-of-the-tongue feeling.”

  I must end this letter here, but you will no doubt be hearing from me again soonest.

  Yours sincerely,

  J. H. Doyle

  * * *

  Telegram from Mr. Crow to Dr. J. H. Doyle

  20OCT1888

  S IS SCHOOLMASTER VANDELEUR STOP HE IS MARRIED STOP—CROW

  * * *

  Letter from Dr. J. H. Doyle to Mr. Crow

  Baskerville Hall, October 20th

  My dear Crow,

  I promise you that your news has had all the impact you could have wished. We were both much taken aback when we had figured out your meaning, and I believe Sir Henry murmured Thank God for Ermentrude. He would indeed have been in an uncomfortable situation if he had attempted to woo an already married lady, even if both the lady and her husband seem inclined to encourage it. We cannot go out walking without falling over one or more of the Stapleton-Vandeleurs. He buttonholes me with discussions of butterflies or—more frequently since he has drawn the correct conclusion that I am not a budding lepidopterist—the oddities of the moor, while she walks apart with Sir Henry and tries (he says) to encourage him to bigamy. It would take a blind man not to find the lady attractive, but Sir Henry took a dislike to her even before we knew that she was not Stapleton’s chaste and maiden sister, and I fear that her repeated attempts at enticement merely make her look foolish. I do not think she is a lady who relishes the fool’s role; there are definite signs of rupture in the Stapleton-Vandeleur alliance. But she clearly fears him—which makes me think all the more ill of him—and will not defy him. Nor, Sir Henry says, can he persuade her to admit that she is only attempting her seduction because her brother (husband? this starts to look very incestuous) has ordered her to. But we are agreed that it is very hard to imagine that he has changed his name and made his wife into his sister for any innocent purpose.

  I’m sure you will be pleased to know that the coursing pack, with Mr. McAllister in dour Scottish attendance, has returned to Baskerville Hall. Sir Henry is delighted with himself and with Mr. McAllister and with his forty-odd foxhounds. The dogs are noisy brutes; I have refused to go anywhere near them—and should have refused even if they were not all but guaranteed to betray my uncomfortable secret. I was never much for coursing to begin with, and although Sir Henry seems determined to persuade me otherwise, he will not change my mind. There is talk of perhaps putting a course together next month.

  Sir Henry is full of other plans for Baskerville Hall, for modernizing it properly and restoring the formal garden and a host of other things as numerous and noisy as the foxhounds. He is particularly concerned to continue his uncle’s charitable work, and that has led to another interesting encounter, as Mrs. Laura Lyons (née Frankland) came to the Hall to plead her case.

  She is the perfect image of her sister Lydia, except for a rather harder expression about the eyes and mouth. She was very anxious that Sir Henry should see the good use to which she had put Sir Charles’s gift, and indeed she seems to be scraping a living from the typewriting jobs to be found in Coombe Tracey and Grimpen. Dr. Mortimer helps by giving her his articles for publication, and Mr. Stapleton has promised to do the same when he has something worth writing up.

  She seemed uncertain whether she was making what in vulgar parlance is called a dead set at Sir Henry, or if she was being a businesswoman, and Sir Henry seemed rather more interested than he had been in the manifest charms of Miss Stapleton, if I may so still call her. Ermentrude did not make an appearance in his conversation.

  And it is no business of mine with whom Sir Henry chooses to entangle himself romantically, but I noticed Mrs. Lyons’s uncertainty, and I noticed the way she reddened when she mentioned Mr. Stapleton, and I caught her on her way to the stable—Sir Henry having been snagged again by the ubiquitous Holland.

  “Dr. Doyle, is it?” said Mrs. Lyons.

  “Yes,” I said. “I was just wondering what he told you when he put you up to it?”

  She went scarlet with mortification and then tried to cover. “I’m sure I don’t know what you mean.”

  “I’m sure you do,” I said. “Mr. Stapleton persuaded you, somehow, to try to engage Sir Henry’s interest, but you are too honest to be comfortable with a subterfuge like that, just as you are too honest to be comfortable lying about it. I just want to know what reason he gave you?”

  She gave falsehood up as a bad job. “He said … he said the baronet was bothering his sister. He said I didn’t have to commit to anything, just to get him to come walking or riding with me someday soon. But you’re right. I’ve never been a good liar.”

  “How did he persuade you, then?”

  “He … we are to be married next year.”

  My eyebrows shot up. “Are you? I beg your pardon for intruding in personal business, Mrs. Lyons, but it would be criminal of me not to tell you that the lady you know as Miss Stapleton is actually Mr. Stapleton’s wife.”

  The interesting thing is that she believed me—and not in the way a credulous child will believe anything it’s told. I could see it in her eyes as she looked back over their relationship, and that single truth, like Occam’s razor, swept away a hundred puzzles that had seemed too small to bother with at the time. “God,” she said with considerable vehemence. “Played for a fool again. I beg your pardon, Dr. Doyle—thank you—but I have to go.”

  It is not exaggerating to say the lady fled, and I felt I had done more than enough damage, so that I came back to the house to finish this letter to you before the post.

  Sincerely yours,

  J. H. Doyle

  28

  The Hound of the Baskervilles

  After I had put my letter to Crow in the mailbag, I wandered back into the library to prospect through the shelves, hoping (as one always does hope, no matter how often disappointed) to find treasure among the stuffy and stolid eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century volumes. I found A History of Dartmoor, written by the Reverend August J. B. Chesham, and was flipping through the pages when I came across a really rather splendid woodcut of the hell-hound standing over Sir Hugo’s dead body. The artist had not stinted in imagining the thing’s bulk and its phosphor-dripping jowls and the way its head was lowered, more like a bull’s than a dog’s, and I was staring at it, thinking about Constance Burry and footprints and the howling on the moor, and the thing that made everything make sense was the simple realization that Laura Lyons wasn’t the only one Stapleton had played for a fool. He’d told me that the locals said the howling was the Hound of the Baskervilles, and then had offered me a series of more-or-less plausible explanations for the noise, but it had never once occurred to me to check with anyone that the locals did call it the Hound of the Baskervilles—or that the locals had ever heard it before Sir Henry came to Baskerville Hall.

  I still could not quite run, but I almost ran to the kitchen, where Mrs. Barrymore was washing dishes. “Mrs. Barrymore,” I said, and made her jump a foot.

  “Oh, I beg your pardon, Dr. Doyle, I didn’t hear you.”

  I waved it off. “The howling noise on the moor—you know the one I mean, the one that sounds like it’s going to rip your soul from your body—how long has that been going on?”

  She stared at me as if I’d turned bright green and started reciting Wordsworth backward. But she said, “That dreadful noise just started maybe the day that Sir Henry came? The day after?”

  “I knew it,” I said, and flung myself out into the stable yard, across to the yew walk where Sir Charles had died, and through the gate onto the moor. My first thought was to be
ard Stapleton in his den, but I realized, as I cooled off a bit, that that was foolish. There was nothing I could do by myself, and at that point every reason for Stapleton to ensure that I disappeared. Instead of Merripit House, I started to walk to Grimpen and the telegraph office to send a telegram of my own, already beginning to regret the clipping pace at which I’d set out.

  It was with a tired sense of déjà vu that I found Miss Stapleton in my path.

  I raised my hat. “Good afternoon, Miss—”

  “I am terribly sorry, Dr. Doyle,” she said. “I have never been able to stand against him.”

  That was true enough, but I realized a second too late what she meant by it. Just as I was starting to turn, there was a blinding crack against the side of my head, and I suppose I must have gone down like a felled ox.

  * * *

  When I woke, I realized at once that several hours had passed, then that I did not have the least idea where I was. I was inside, for I was lying against a cold stone wall, but I was outside, because I could see the sky shifting in slow shades toward violet and dusk. It took me a long, painful period of cogitation to figure out that I was inside a stone building without a roof. And then I think I knew where I was before I made it to my feet to stagger to the doorway.

  Nothing to be seen on any side except the low verdant death of the Great Grimpen Mire. Stapleton had marooned me.

  My first concern was the whereabouts of the convict, but I was entirely alone on this island with its huddle of ruined buildings. There were signs that Selden had been there—a store of tins, a wodge of blankets. No fire, of course, and I shuddered at the thought of eating tinned peas cold.

  My second concern was that it might very well come to that. Stapleton had said that to try to cross the mire without knowing the path was a lethal mistake—and of all the things he had said to me, that seemed the one most likely to be true. Thus, unless his purpose for me somehow, miraculously, involved coming out here and rescuing me, I was stuck.