The Angel of the Crows

by Katherine Addison

  Master Gilbraith snarled at me over Whitney’s head; she did not, however, attempt to come any closer. It was some comfort in a most discomforting situation, that apparently it was true that no vampire other than James Moriarty could harm me. I had truthfully hoped never to test that proposition at all.

  “Good evening, madame,” I said to Master Gilbraith, and Whitney and I continued our slow progress out of the Gilbraith house. No one tried to stop us, although there were suddenly vampires with all the addicts in the outer part of the house, and they all watched us as warily as cats watching a strange dog.

  As we neared the front door, four vampires appeared seemingly out of nowhere to block it, three women and one man. The women all wore their hair down, as their Master did.

  “Isa,” said one, “why are you leaving us?”

  “Do you not love us?” said another. “Did you not promise to stay?”

  “Did I?” said Isa Whitney, sounding alarmingly uncertain.

  “Remember that Master Moriarty is waiting for you,” I said urgently.

  “Master Gilbraith will forgive you, Isa,” said the male vampire coaxingly. None of them was trying to come near us, but they weren’t moving aside, and I was afraid that if we approached them, they would simply remove Whitney from my arm like taking custody of a lapdog. I wasn’t at all sure, looking at his dazed face, that Whitney would protest.

  A voice said from behind us, “Dr. Doyle?”

  Startled, I turned, keeping my hold on Whitney’s hand, and found James Moriarty, looking just as startled as I felt. “Moriarty!” I said. “What are you doing here?” I turned back far enough to keep an eye on the Gilbraith vampires, all of whom were looking sour.

  “Visiting a friend,” he said, with a wry twist of his mouth. “What on Earth are you doing in a vampire den?”

  “Your Master,” I said, “asked me to come fetch Mr. Whitney.”

  His eyebrows went up. He looked from me to Whitney to the four vampires between us and the door. “I see. That venture seems to be proceeding most prosperously.”

  “You might provide assistance.”

  “So I might,” said Moriarty. “I have no objections.” And he smiled at the Gilbraith vampires, letting his teeth show.

  They shifted uneasily.

  Moriarty came to stand on Whitney’s other side. “Isa Whitney is Master Moriarty’s Chosen. Master Gilbraith has no right to interfere. Which,” he added, “would be why she’s not stopping Mr. Whitney herself.”

  The four Gilbraith vampires glanced at each other.

  “Possession is right enough,” said one, but I could see that it was only bravado.

  “Strength is also right,” said Moriarty. “I suggest you stand aside.”

  And, somewhat to my surprise, they did.

  “Come along, my dear,” Moriarty said to Whitney, and the two of us led him out and down the stairs and out onto the street, where Master Moriarty leaned forward in the hansom and said, “James! What are you doing here?”

  “Looking for help and finding none,” he said pointedly. “I know why you’re here, but you shouldn’t have sent Dr. Doyle in alone. The Gilbraith Hunt are a stupid lot, and they almost tried something.” He handed Whitney up into the hansom.

  “Pay mind to your own business, James,” said Master Moriarty, and then, just as it was crossing my night-fogged mind that hansoms had room for only two passengers, James Moriarty turned back to me and said, “Dr. Doyle, I, too, need your help.”

  The hansom drove off without so much as a “good-bye” from Master Moriarty.

  I took a deep breath, exhaled slowly, and said, “I don’t seem to have very much choice. What sort of help do you need?”

  He had the grace to look guilty. “I don’t mean to entrap you. If you hear me out and want nothing to do with it, I will not bother you further, I promise.”

  “Must we do this here?” I said. “Or can we return to Baker Street, where at least I can sit down?”

  “Of course,” he said. “I do not disdain Mr. Crow’s advice, either. I left a hansom over here.” And he led me to a side street where a black horse and a hansom cab were almost invisible in the shadows.

  “We ready, sir?” the cabbie said cheerfully. I wondered if he specialized in vampire fares.

  I climbed into the hansom and Moriarty followed me after giving the cabbie the address.

  The cab started off. Moriarty said, “I had no idea Master Gilbraith had been foolish enough to interfere with Mr. Whitney. Our paths have crossed by chance.”

  “What was your business with the Gilbraith Hunt, then?”

  “Let me tell the story coherently and in one piece. I notice that your leg seems a good deal better, and the metaphysicum morbi has subsided.”

  “Yes. I did take your advice.”

  “Even vampires can have good ideas.”

  “But are rarely so altruistic as to share them.”

  I caught the motion of him shrugging in the darkness. “I like you. I would have let those hemophages eat you if I didn’t.”

  If he meant to silence me, he succeeded. He either didn’t notice or demonstrated the consideration vampires most often disdain, for—rather than waiting for me to find a reply—he began telling me, in distinctly slanderous terms, about the Gilbraith Hunt, a topic which took us easily from Lambeth to Marylebone.

  In Baker Street, I used my latchkey and Crow had the flat door open before I’d closed the front door behind us. He showed heroic self-restraint and said nothing until all three of us were in the flat and the door closed again. Then he demanded, “What happened?” Unspoken, but still very nearly audible, was the rider, “And why is he here?”

  I had invited Moriarty in, wondering at my own stupidity as I did so; therefore I answered the unspoken question first: “Mr. Moriarty has a case for us.”

  As I expected, this distracted Crow completely. He immediately turned his uncomfortable gaze from me to Moriarty and said, “You do?” sounding both hopeful and dubious, like a child promised a treat by a stern great-aunt.

  “I suppose so,” Moriarty said, shifting uneasily. “Certainly, I have a problem.”

  “Please,” Crow said. “Tell us your problem.”

  “Well,” said Moriarty, gathering himself, “I imagine you know that not all vampiric Masters start from an advantageous position?” He looked from me to Crow, brows raised.

  “You’re talking about vagabond hunts,” said Crow after a moment’s perplexity.

  Moriarty made a face. “I dislike the term, but yes. The acquisition of property is every Master’s first goal, but not all established Masters will give their daughters a seed house. The Master who made me—the Master of the Hunt Flannagan in Dublin—wants no competition. If one of her sisters turns Master, she buys her a ticket to Liverpool and there’s the end of it.”

  “Liverpool is a dreadful place for vampires,” said Crow.

  “It’s overrun,” Moriarty agreed. “Which is why no new Master can stay there. Vagabondage is a terrible thing for a vampire—we are meant to have a house and a hunt. One of the reasons ‘vagabond hunts’ have such a bad name is that they aren’t hunts. A vagabond hunt is a Master who can’t start a hunt because she doesn’t have a house. They resort to all kinds of crimes because they are desperate.”

  “You have a friend,” I said.

  “She is my sister, as vampires reckon such things, for we were both made by Master Flannagan. Her name is Judith Shirley.”

  “Not an Irish name,” Crow observed.

  “Her parents were English,” said Moriarty. “I forget how they came to Dublin, but Judith was born there and loves the city as passionately as anyone ever has. When her parents wanted her to marry a Londoner, she ran away and turned vampire. She was utterly content as a sister of the Hunt Flannagan … and then she turned Master.”

  “I thought vampiric Masters were made as vampires are made,” said Crow.

  “Which is what the Masters prefer for everyone to believe
, but—and I shall doubtless be in trouble with Master Moriarty if she learns I have told you this—the truth is that we do not know what makes a sister become a Master. It isn’t desire, for Judith desired nothing less. She either had to challenge Master Flannagan—and quite certainly be killed—or be exiled from Dublin.”

  “The city she’d become a vampire to stay in,” I said, understanding the cruel double-bind her biology had put Judith Shirley in. “Obviously, she chose to leave.”

  “There’s always a chance that someday she will be able to return,” said Moriarty. “But she needs a house and a hunt and property, and at the moment she has none.” After a moment, he continued bitterly, “At the moment, she is in a Surrey jail on suspicion of murder.”

  “Murder?” said Crow. “But vampires don’t commit murder. Haven’t for centuries.”

  “Even a vagabond like Judith has no need to,” said Moriarty. “That’s only one of the peculiar things about the story.”

  “How did you come to hear of it?” said Crow. “There’s been nothing in the papers.”

  “A letter,” Moriarty said. “She managed to smuggle it out of Stoke Moran with the help of a family of Roma.”

  “Suppose,” said Crow, “you start from the beginning. I know, of course, that your people have been kind to the … Roma, did you say?”

  “It is what they call themselves,” said Moriarty, “and is thus surely to be preferred to ‘gypsies.’”

  “To the Roma,” Crow continued, “thus that part of the story needs no explaining. But why should anyone think a vampire was a murderer? Wait. Who was the victim?”

  “A woman named Julia Stoner. She—Judith, I mean—had been foolish enough to let herself be seen talking to Miss Stoner, and apparently the fact that Miss Stoner’s death was mysterious created an assumption that Judith must have killed her.”

  “That is remarkably shoddy logic,” Crow said, “even for people unaccustomed to the practice.”

  “I really don’t know any more than that. But Judith is my sister and she has no hunt to stand for her. I must help her if it is possible to do so.”

  “And of course you need a doctor,” I said. “Unless an autopsy has already been done?”

  “Judith’s letter says the family is agitating against autopsy—strange, considering that Miss Stoner’s stepfather is a doctor.”

  “Very strange,” said Crow.

  “Will you come, Dr. Doyle?” said Moriarty—beseechingly, if the word can be applied to a vampire.

  “I think you should go, Doyle,” said Crow. “I would.”

  “You’ll go anywhere for a puzzle,” I said, “but I suppose I’m no better. Yes, I’ll come.”

  “Thank you,” said Moriarty with unmistakable relief. “Master Moriarty agreed that I could go, but she called it a fool’s errand and said she would waste none of her sisters on it, and my friend in the Gilbraith Hunt…” He shook his head. “There’s a seven-fifteen train from Paddington this morning.”

  “Good,” I said. “Then I’m going back to bed.”

  30

  Into the Countryside

  While I slept, Moriarty and Crow stayed in the sitting room and talked about murder. When I came out again, they were arguing about whether John Thurtell was or was not guilty of the murder of William Weare.

  I said, “I’m going to ring the bell for tea. You decide if we’re going to terrify Jennie out of her wits.”

  Moriarty smiled a small and alarming smile. “She won’t see me,” he said. He settled in the wing chair by the bow window and picked up one of the stack of the East End Observer on the side table.

  I hesitated, but Moriarty said, “No, I promise. She’ll have no idea I’m here.”

  “All right,” I said, and rang the bell.

  Moriarty was perfectly correct; Jennie never even glanced his direction. She brought me tea and toast and The Times as if everything was normal and there was no vampire in our sitting room.

  After I’d poured my tea and the door was firmly closed behind Jennie, I said, “How did you do that?”

  Moriarty laughed. “Watching the pair of you trying not to look at me was more entertainment than I’ve had in weeks. But to answer your question—and this is another thing I’ll probably get in trouble for telling you—it’s much the same as a beguilement, except instead of drawing attention, you repel it. It’s much harder to do, and it’s really only effective on one person at a time. It’s not much more than a parlor trick.”

  “Useful in this instance,” said Crow.

  Moriarty shrugged.

  I thought Moriarty might have exaggerated the difficulty of his reverse beguilement, for I noticed as we made our way through Paddington Station that no one ever seemed to look directly at him, even the ticket clerk. We had no trouble securing a first-class compartment and settled in across from each other. Moriarty leaned back with a sigh as if exhausted.

  “Were you beguiling them?” I said, with a wave of my hand to indicate the whole of Paddington.

  “Not in the same way as I beguiled your maid,” he said. “This is just a minor deflection. We practice it all the time.”

  “It must save a good deal of trouble.”

  “That is one word for it, yes.”

  To spare myself from trying to make conversation with a vampire, I had bought a raft of newspapers, and unlike some traveling companions I have had—my mother springs instantly and horribly to mind—Moriarty proved amenable to spending our journey in silent reading.

  We alighted at Leatherhead per the instructions in Judith Shirley’s letter. Moriarty succeeded in hiring a dog cart, while I found the station master and got directions for Stoke Moran.

  My scent made our hired horse, a dark bay gelding with two white socks, uneasy, but we found that he calmed considerably if I sat in the back of the dog cart and left Moriarty to do the driving alone.

  The hamlet of Stoke Moran was big enough to have an inn. I took a room there, Moriarty having vanished to find Judith Shirley, and then took my medical bag and set out to find the body of Julia Stoner.

  I found the police station easily enough; as in the villages near where I had grown up, the station doubled as the constable’s home. He was there, a sharp-featured young man with tow-blond hair. I said, “I’m here about the autopsy,” and his face brightened perceptibly.

  “Oh thank goodness,” he said. “No disrespect to the dead lady, but she needs to be buried.”

  “I’m happy to start right now,” I said, and he brightened further.

  “Let me take you over to St. Anne’s,” he said. “We’ve been keeping her in the crypt. It seems like the most respectful thing to do.”

  Aside from being respectful, the crypt would most likely have been warded to retard decay—a church crypt was the smartest place to put a body if you couldn’t put it directly in the ground.

  “I was rousted out in rather a hurry,” I said truthfully. “What can you tell me?”

  “The deceased’s name is Julia Stoner, age thirty-five. Lived with her stepfather, Dr. Grimsby Roylott, and her twin sister Helen. A kind lady, a good churchgoer, much afflicted in her stepfather, who is a man with odd ideas and a terrible temper. Deceased was heard to scream in the middle of the night. She unlocked her bedroom door, said—her sister swears—‘the speckled band,’ and collapsed. She died four hours later without regaining consciousness.”

  That didn’t sound at all like someone dying of exsanguination, which was the only way I could see a vampire killing someone—aside from the normal and non-mysterious methods like strangulation or a knife to the belly. Their teeth weren’t as vicious as those of a hemophage, but they could certainly tear open an artery if they wanted to.

  I followed the constable in the side door of St. Anne’s and down the tight corkscrew of stairs into the crypt, which was as cold and airless as I had expected.

  “I’m going to need more light,” I said.

  The constable said, “Yessir,” lit a match, and began
going around the room lighting candles, of which there was a frankly insane number.

  He caught the look on my face and grinned. “The Vicar believes in thinking ahead.”

  By candlelight, I took my first look at Julia Stoner.

  Someone had had the sense to leave the body as it was, in a nightgown and with a thick, dark, white-streaked plait of hair that hung over the edge of the flat-topped crypt on which she had been laid. I hoped the vicar was offering prayers for that crypt’s rightful inhabitant. Even the long dead could be touchy about that sort of thing.

  I’d become as callous as any successful medical student to the presence of a cadaver—and certainly had not been softened by the experience of war. But there was something about this dead woman, in her nightgown with the sad little frill at the collar, her face sallow and rather gaunt, with frown lines in her forehead that even death couldn’t smooth out, that made me feel like a callow youth profaning something sacred.

  “I’m trying to help,” I muttered as I stripped her. “I want to find out what happened to you.”

  There was no obvious and immediate sign of what had killed her, but after I had assured the constable that I did not need help and he had left, I made a careful, thorough inspection of the body. Along with the usual blemishes and imperfections—and the first signs in finger-and toenails that the crypt’s wards were losing the battle—I found two neat dark puncture marks, all but invisible, in the crook of her left elbow.

  “This may not be a fool’s errand after all,” I said.

  I detected no particular scent when I made the Y-cut, no bitter almonds to warn of cyanide, no scent of camphor or chloroform. Her esophagus and stomach were unharmed—although if she’d lived longer, it looked like she would have had a bleeding ulcer to contend with. I found petechial hemorrhages in her eyes and lungs, but nothing to show her airway had been closed, either manually or by ligature. I brought a candle over and looked carefully at her face, and, yes, the cyanosis was faint, but it was there. She had died of respiratory distress, the inability to breathe. But what had caused it?

  The liver looked all right, but the kidneys were a mess, delicate structures sloughing into a necrotic sludge. That was the hallmark of a toxin, but it wasn’t a toxin she had ingested, and it wasn’t a toxin she had inhaled.