I was starting to say, “All right,” when he interrupted me with a great rustle of feathers.
“But listen—we should know the worst of each other if we’re going to share these rooms. I don’t sleep, which I’ve been told is very annoying. I sometimes don’t speak to anyone for a day or two. It won’t be anything you’ve done, and I’ll come ’round before long. I dislike music.”
“Music?” I said weakly. “I thought angels sang to each other through the aether.”
“Exactly,” he said, showing his teeth in something that might not have been a smile. “Is that a problem?”
“Not at all,” I said, for I was not musical in the slightest. “I, ah, I’m still in a good deal of pain with my leg, and it makes me abominably short-tempered. At present, I have no stamina and spend most of my time asleep—and you needn’t worry, I sleep like the dead. Except for the nightmares.”
“The Fallen bring bad dreams,” Crow said, with a mixture of sympathy and puzzlement, for, of course, dreams were a phenomenon he could not experience.
“In any event, just ignore any noises you hear coming from my room at night.” And as long as I could remember to keep my mouth shut, that should keep my secret safe.
“Indeed,” said Crow, and again I felt a moment of unease about what he had guessed—or inferred—about me from his observations. I might have challenged him, but Mrs. Climpson came click-clacking back up the stairs, and after all, whatever Crow knew or didn’t know, he showed no hesitation about sharing lodgings with me.
We made arrangements that I should move in that very evening, and Crow followed over the next several days, accompanied sometimes by medical students lugging crates, sometimes by men who looked like dockyard brawlers carrying tea chests and steamer trunks. Crow had apparently bargained with Mrs. Climpson for the attic space as well. He demonstrated boundless energy, racing in and out at all hours, taking the stairs two or three at a time. I became resigned to the fact that he made no noise, no matter how vigorously he plunged in and out; only the brush of his wings against the walls or the furniture—or once, catastrophically, the tea tray—betrayed his movements.
For my part, I moved stiffly and haltingly from bed to armchair and back again, trying to stay out of the way, and sleeping more, and more heavily, than I had since I left Dr. Sylvester’s care. Mrs. Climpson and her cook and her shy little Scottish maid-of-all-work focused on feeding me as if they had somehow to make up for not feeding Crow, and although I still did not eat much, my appetite did begin to improve. It helped that the cook, who seemed never to emerge from her basement den, like the ogre in a fairy tale, was uncommonly good at her job.
On the morning of August seventh, I emerged from my room, so late as to very nearly not be able to call it “morning” at all, to find Crow kneeling on the hearth rug in a drifted mound of newspapers.
He was a fanatical reader and collector of London newspapers, subscribing to both dailies and weeklies in a bewildering array and clipping articles from them with patient fervor; anything connected to crime caught his eye, but it was murder he was after, and the gorier the better.
He did not look up at my approach, but said, “Doyle, this is fantastic!”
“What’s fantastic?” I said cautiously.
“They’ve found a murdered woman in Whitechapel. She was stabbed at least twenty-four times!”
“Not fantastic,” I said. “Try fascinating, since you are clearly fascinated.”
“Fantastic as in outré?” he offered.
“I’ll give you that,” I said, amused despite myself. “Twenty-four times?”
“At least. The newspaper reports are not very clear. And nobody knows who she is.”
“That’s not terribly unusual for murdered women in Whitechapel.” I rang the bell for Jennie and sat down at the table.
Crow hunched his wings at me irritably. “And it’s Elliston’s case. Well, he won’t let me in.”
“Let you in?”
“To George Yard Buildings. It’s idiotic—he wasn’t the detective in Emma Smith’s case. He won’t have the least idea of what to look for.”
“I must be very stupid this morning,” I said. “What on Earth are you talking about?”
“The murder!”
“Yes, I did grasp that.” Jennie came in, soft-footed and apologetic, and I asked her for toast and a fresh pot of tea. “Chandler could do you a poached egg, Dr. Doyle. If you wanted.”
“Not this morning,” I said.
She nodded humbly and slipped out. I knew she’d only asked because Mrs. Chandler or Mrs. Climpson had told her to. (Being respectable women of a certain age, both cook and landlady rated the “Mrs.,” even though I had seen no evidence that either Mr. Chandler or Mr. Climpson existed—or ever had.)
“Emma Smith,” Crow said in precise, thin irritation, “was murdered on the third of April, also in Whitechapel, also with an excessive degree of violence. They have not caught her murderers. It is not unreasonable to ask if the two cases may have some connection—which one might also ask about the Millwood and Turner assaults. And that’s not even counting the dismembered woman they found in the Thames last year. But no one will, because the police of London are idiots.”
“You are very harsh.”
“I have reason to be.” He shook himself, wings half spreading and settling back. “Have you ever heard of the Ratcliffe Highway murders?”
“Er,” I said, dredging up a vague memory. “De Quincey, right?”
“Yes, although abysmally inaccurate,” Crow said. Jennie brought in my breakfast, and we were silent for a long time. I was dealing with the last toast crust when I looked up and found him watching me speculatively. He said, “Are you up for a walk?”
“It depends how far we’re going.” I could not deny my desire to get out of the house.
“We’ll walk as far as you’re able and take a hansom the rest of the way,” Crow said.
I had watched the amazing spectacle of Crow folding himself into a hansom cab once, and I felt a private, ridiculous thrill at the thought of getting a second chance to observe. “Lay on, MacDuff,” I said and levered myself slowly out of my chair.
4
The Skull of John Williams
No one gave us a second look as we came into the public taproom, from which I deduced that Crow came here fairly often. I did wonder why, since he neither consumed alcohol nor could even taste it, but I had learned that Crow did things for utterly unfathomable reasons—even when he could be coaxed to explain himself, which was not often.
The landlord said, “Mornin’, Mr. Crow. The gentleman with you?”
“Yes,” Crow said. “I’ve brought my friend Dr. Doyle to see Williams’s skull.”
The landlord made a pursed-lips, eyebrows-raised face, and said, “Ah, well then.” He turned and reached up for what I had taken to be an odd porcelain decanter; as he brought it down and set it on the bar, I could see that, yes, it truly was a human skull, mandible-less, toothless, and brown with age. I picked it up. There was a strange feeling to the skull, a feeling of incompleteness that had been associated with no skull I had ever handled before.