“How was school?” continues his father.
“Instructive.”
His parents don’t smile. There is silence as they look at each other, still holding hands.
“So … what did you study today?” asks his mother, forcing a happier tone.
“Same old things.”
Mr. Holmes has had enough. “Should I ask your headmaster?”
“No … don’t … I … I was rushing home from over the river to get here first.” He confesses. “I collided with Mr. Ratfinch.”
The disappointment is written on their faces.
“At least try,” pleads his mother as she sighs and undoes her purple bonnet, a fancy hat for a woman of her station, a relic now becoming worn, from her earlier life. Her face is still attractive, though the lines are deepening, and her hands are growing rougher.
An image of the murdered woman, as pretty as his mother once was, appears in his mind. Sherlock pushes it aside and tries to think only of Rose, long ago. He glances at the fading little painting they keep on their rough sideboard … his beautiful young mother, the nightingale.
He often imagines her in those golden days.
Her name was once Rose Sherrinford and she had been the jewel in her parents’ life, their only daughter, destined for heaven on earth. The Sherrinfords were country squires with a mixture of French in their blood. Along with her refined education and beauty, Rose carried with her a dowry of many thousands of pounds, a prize for any properly placed young English gentleman. But she was a restless spirit who dreaded living an arranged life. She loved to sing and dreamt of joining The Royal Opera Company at Covent Garden, though she knew it was an “improper” role for a high-born young lady. All her parents would allow her was training. The best voice coaches in England molded her and soon she sang like an angel, but only at social gatherings at home. She memorized all the great roles, idolized the famous mezzo-sopranos, and never missed a production at the Opera House. She bristled at the way her parents caged her. But they were sure these feelings would pass – a man of position would sweep her away from all her un natural inclinations.
Then the Jew arrived.
Wilber Holmes was a genius. Chemistry was his forte, but the mysteries of all the sciences were unlocked with mere flicks of his mind. Ornithology intrigued him the most. He loved the power of flight. But as the son of a poor immigrant Jew, an Ashkenazi from Eastern Europe at that, there was little opportunity to fly. Wilber’s father had changed the family’s very name to make them feel at home and proclaim their loyalty to England: Holmes. And he called his son Wilberforce (“It’s unusual – be proud of the way it marks you.”) after the great English believer in racial equality, and walked the boy to the Jews’ Free School each day, prodding him to win top honors. But it wasn’t enough. Despite Wilber’s skill, the road to higher education – the chance to really get somewhere – looked blocked. In his youth during the 1840s, people of his race and social class were not allowed into the great schools of Oxford and Cambridge.
Still, the young man searched for a chance. He found one at The University College of London, a younger city school, and as he neared the end of a stellar student career, he became a teacher in training. Professor Holmes, he often wrote on scraps of paper, and smiled.
Then everything changed.
An admirer of his abilities took him to the opera. There he looked up from his seat to the nearest balcony and saw her, in a gleaming white box above him, her blonde hair shining and blue eyes glistening, the soaring violins of Rossini’s The Thieving Magpie a perfect background for her beauty. She was mouthing every word, dreaming she was on that stage.
He couldn’t help staring. Somehow, she felt his gaze. Soon she was looking back at a dark man with dark hair and eyes, the intelligence, the gentleness and kindness just glowing there. Her free spirit flew to him.
“You were at the front of your form when you tried. The headmaster wanted you for pupil teacher.”
The boy shakes himself out of his daydream. His mother is still talking.
“You shall go out to work with your hands if you don’t attend,” adds his father sadly. “We pay much more than we can afford to keep you there, you know that. Most boys are gone well before your age.”
“I’ll …” he stammers, “I’ll attend. Tomorrow.”
Rose rests her bonnet on one of the hooks under the soot-smeared little window that faces out into the alley. She turns and puts her hands on her hips, fists balled on the frayed folds of her long cotton dress. It droops and hangs on her frame, bereft of any fashionable crinoline underneath to make it bloom. Her blonde hair is threaded with gray. She reaches out and cups Sherlock’s face in her hands, searching his eyes, then kisses him.
“I’ll find us something to eat.”
She visits the markets at the end of the day, when you can get the pickings for pennies. She pulls a few carrots and an onion out of her basket, another half doorstep of bread, and two black-spotted potatoes. She sets them on the little wooden table in the center of the room where she prepares their meals. She will mix them for stew over the fire.
Wilber Holmes puts his coat on another hook, and loosens his necktie. He looks tired. He always tries to see the bright side of things, but his dark eyes often betray him when he tries to smile. He pulls his spectacles from a pocket, sits beside his son, and reaches for a book. There are a few dozen in a row. British Birds and The Flight of Birds are always nearest at hand. He must have read them a hundred times, but he can’t stop. Most men spend their nights drinking in public houses on the nearby streets. Wilber Holmes has no use for such gin palaces. He flies into the skies with his birds.
Sherlock sits beside him without saying a word, racked with guilt about not attending school, but ambivalent about ever going back. His thoughts are still far away anyway, remembering the story of his parents’ fateful meeting at the opera, the meeting that both made and destroyed his life.
After the last strains had played that night, the young Jew left slowly, while the privileged young woman rushed from her seat, anxious to tell her family about this latest Rossini spectacle. One sauntered one way outside the front doors, turning back to remember the opulence of where he’d been. The other burst out, searching for her carriage. The collision was a gentle one. He caught her in his arms.
It frightened his parents and infuriated hers. It was impossible, they told her. She didn’t understand who she was. No Sherrinford could marry this Jew.
The young couple was amply warned.
After they eloped to Scotland, they came home to nothing. Her parents disowned her. His teaching opportunities at the university disappeared as mysteriously as he had once solved scientific problems.
And so they moved to Southwark, south of the Thames to the flat over the hatter’s shop. She became the wife of an unemployed Jew of foreign origins and took jobs teaching children to sing in upper class houses, and when money became even shorter, taking in sewing at home. Wilber might have taught rudimentary science in an elementary school in the city, but the University College of London would never vouch for him, provide the “character” he needed. His father-in-law had seen to that. So, for a few years he tutored the sons of working men in his flat, then went farther south to work at a job that paid less than any school, but one he enjoyed, at The Crystal Palace, where he’d seen trained birds performing in great flocks for massive crowds. They needed a knowledgeable man to tend to their thousands of white doves: the Doves of Peace.
The couple stood by each other with little except their love. They had three children: Mycroft, born eight months after their marriage, Sherlock some seven years later, and then Violet – little Violet, who died before she reached the age of four.
Now the older boy was gone, employed in a lowly government job, reluctant to ever come home.
The middle child, the eccentric one, was left alone. He went to a Ragged School for destitute children when Rose and Wilber couldn’t afford anything better, and to a
National School when they almost could.
Sherlock loves his mother and father, and despises the life they have given him. He could have been someone else.
He hates what people do to each other. Why are prejudice and crime as constant as the yellow fog in this horrible and magnificent city?
Why would someone murder a beautiful lady in an alleyway in the dead of night?
OMENS FROM THE SKY
Wilber Holmes closes The Flight of Birds with a snap and tries to set the book back on the shelf. He settles for holding it on his lap. Then he tries to brighten things.
“Tell me about your day, son. What did you really do? I won’t criticize.”
“I went to Trafalgar Square.”
“Again.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Anything of note?” Wilber sees the sensational publication clutched in his son’s hands. It isn’t the sort of newspaper that interests him.
“There was a terrible murder last night.”
Wilber yawns and covers his mouth. “Again.”
“This one was different.”
“Anything else?”
“There were crows at the Square.”
“Really?” Wilber’s eyes light up and lock on Sherlock’s. He twists around on the narrow bed. “You know, they’re probably the smartest of all the birds, with the possible exception of their cousin, the raven. They have the largest brain-to-body ratio of the species.”
Mrs. Holmes turns to them from the table where she is slicing the vegetables with an oversized butcher knife. “Crows always give me the shivers. They eat dead things; they make horrid sounds; they swoop around the heads of the witches in Macbeth.”
“The burden of the carrion breed, dear, the black carrion breed, slyer than a fox. Some of my colleagues used to say that crows were able to pick out individual human beings and tell one of us from another. Now that’s pretty clever.”
Sherlock gets up and walks past the table. A big tin tub sits on it, half-filled with water, next to where his mother is working. He takes it down and sets it near the fire where she will need it. When she looks away for an instant, he snatches a thin shard of carrot, then opens the door and steps out onto the creaky little landing. The rain has stopped and darkness is falling. The gaslights from Borough High slightly light the thin fog. All of the buildings on their street are jammed together and each has a tiny, walled backyard. A dying tree, the only one on the block, almost fills the hatter’s. In it sit two black birds.
The crows. They’ve followed him.
Their dark feathers look oily and tattered.
“Corvus corone,” says his father, standing behind him in the doorway. “Fine birds, really. Fine little rascals. They mate for life.”
A rock whizzes through the yard toward the crows. They lift off at once and are gone. Another rock arches into the air after them.
“You lot!” shouts Sherlock, leaning dangerously far over the frail railing to find the culprits. Down the alley, he sees two little boys glaring back at him. “Leave off!”
“Black devils and Jews is the curse of our land!” shrieks one as they scurry away.
“Come in,” says Rose softly, who had stepped out to see the birds. “Your meal will be ready soon.”
Sherlock spots the crows in the distance. The London sky is growing darker. The black birds vanish into it.
Something occurs to him.
Inside, he finds The Illustrated Police News, opens it, and looks at the drawing. There is the poor woman lying on the cobblestones. But what is that? At the top of the picture, not far from the corpse, the artist has drawn something dark with several strokes of the pen.
Sherlock bends his head down and examines the little figure in the shadows.
It is a crow.
THE MURDERER
Sherlock starts out with every intention of going to school the next morning, but the noisy crowds seem to impel him toward the city like a strong wind. Just one more day maybe two, then he’ll go back for good. He follows his route toward Trafalgar Square, glancing back from time to time, afraid he’s being trailed. There are many would turn him in: a teacher, a local hawker, even the old hatter with his cloudy red eyes and scowling face.
But over the river a treasure awaits him. Eyes alert as always, he spies a copy of the morning’s Police News, jammed under one of the outside seats on the top of an omnibus, clattering through the traffic toward him. The paper has been left up there and no one on the bus is paying the slightest attention to it. The driver is clutching the reins and the ladies inside are looking straight ahead into the noisy intersection. How can anyone abandon such spectacular information? He slips off the foot pavement right into the flow of horses and vehicles, puts a foot on the conductor’s platform at the rear, and executes a little jump to nab the paper. Not one of the whiskered faces under the tall black hats turns. Tucking it into his coat, he vanishes back into the traffic and crosses to the north side before looking at his prize.
He loves this stretch of Fleet Street where the big newspapers have their offices. He’s seen grim Mr. Gladstone twice, enemy of Disraeli and once a Chancellor of the Exchequer, his big sideburns puffed out, his walking stick in hand, a perfect top hat on his well-developed head. And last week he spotted The Great Farini, the man who walked over Niagara Falls on a high wire. His flying-trapeze protégé, the bullet-boy El Niño, was by his side.
But today he doesn’t see anyone who matters, because the front page of the paper stops him in his tracks. “MURDERER FOUND!” it proclaims. There under the headline is a crude drawing of a young man named Mohammad Adalji, depicted with a big, hooked nose and nearly black skin. “It seems an Arab did the dirty deed,” reads the first line. Sherlock scans the story, “… lives not five blocks from the scene … found with a butcher knife … blood … to be bound over today at approximately 9:00 a.m…. the Old Bailey Courthouse.”
Sherlock had heard the faint bong of Big Ben just as he snatched the paper. Nine o’clock. The Old Bailey: it’s only minutes away.
He turns and runs.
The crowd is still gathering when he arrives, spilling out into the road waiting for the murderer. Sherlock jostles his way up to the front, hearing men and women cursing the Arab and his horrible crime. Some clutch rotting vegetables and even broken bricks in their hands. Nearly a dozen Bobbies, London’s respected policemen, stand nervously nearby, gripping their rock-hard, black truncheons in their hands.
On the north side of the Old Bailey looms infamous Newgate Prison, where “the Jew,” Fagin, was held in one of Sherlock’s favorite novels, Mr. Dickens’ Oliver Twist. The scaffold is always placed directly in front of the main doors of its dreary, windowless exterior. These streets are packed on hanging days – enormous audiences stretch as far as one can see, the best spots reserved at top price, Mr. Dickens often somewhere in the crowd.
Soon, two thick dray horses pull a big coach up the street: the frightening Black Maria used to transport the worst villains. Its ominous appearance has the effect of throwing coal on fire and the mob’s mood instantly grows angrier.
“That’s ’im!”
“Get ’im!”
“MURDERER!”
As Adalji descends the dark wagon from the rear, manacled at his hands and feet, shoved roughly forward by the Old Bailey’s jailers, an onslaught of filthy projectiles is launched at him. One strikes him in the face and he lowers his head, another hits him in the groin and he grimaces and bends over. The jailers drag him toward the gate, stretching out his arms almost as if to expose him to the crowd. Sherlock sees his face. It shocks him. He wonders if Mohammad Adalji has even reached eighteen. His skin is lighter than in the drawing, his nose smaller, and he looks terrified.
The Arab’s eyes wildly survey the crowd, reflecting the hatred he sees. He notices Sherlock, and glimpses sympathy. Instinctively, he turns and attempts to take a step. A big man in the crowd reaches out and trips him. The Arab tries to keep his balance, but another knocks him dow
n. He almost lands on Sherlock. His head is facedown on one of the boy’s worn, heavily polished boots. As he rises to his feet, their eyes meet. There are tears streaked on the Arab’s cheeks.
“I didn’t do it!”
The police pull the Arab away. One of them notices the boy to whom the criminal has spoken and glares at Sherlock with suspicion. The constable says something to his partner. Then he glances into the sky.
Crows are circling.
The Arab sees them too. An expression of horror comes over his face.
“Sod off, crow devils!” shouts the big man, as he fires a rotten apple at the biggest black bird.
On his way to Trafalgar Square, Sherlock can’t get the Arab’s words out of his mind. He ’d known the scene would be sensational, but it had sickened him. He can’t tell a single soul, of course. If anyone asks, he’ll say that it served the murderer right. But he keeps wondering. Did that frightened boy really do it?
Lost in thought, he walks on to the Strand through the ancient Temple Bar Gate, where long ago, traitors’ severed heads were once displayed.
“Don’t I know you?”
A wind-worn face is suddenly inches in front of his, sending a cloud of fish-breath up his nostrils.
“Don’t I know you?!” it shouts.
Sherlock’s heart nearly stops.
Then he realizes who it is: a one-legged lunatic he’s often seen here near Charing Cross, his filthy clothes held together with strings and pins he’s scavenged on the river-banks, begging from pedestrians by exaggerating his lunacy. Word is he’s a Crimean War veteran and the Bobbies seldom have the heart to take him away. Drool drips from his toothless gums as his vacant eyes stare into Sherlock’s. The boy steps adroitly past him.
At Morley’s Hotel, he looks both ways into the mass of traffic that claps along the stones, then darts across Trafalgar, artfully dodging the wagons and hansom cabs, horses with riders, and vendors with their carts. He looks back. The crows have returned. Three are perched on the hotel to resume their watch, two others atop the glorious golden lion above the gates of Northumberland House.
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