The Angel of the Crows

by Katherine Addison

  “Of course,” I said.

  “You are both most kind,” she said. “I lead a very retired life, and my few friends are not people I could ask this favor of. Will it be acceptable if I return at six o’clock?”

  “Certainly not later,” said Crow. “But one other point. Is this handwriting the same as that upon the pearl boxes?”

  “I have the wrappings here,” she said, producing a half-dozen pieces of paper.

  “You are now my favorite client!” Crow said delightedly. “Let us see here.” He spread the papers out on the table and glanced between them. “This is a disguised hand. But the writer knows very little about disguising handwriting—and he isn’t very good at it. See how the irrepressible Greek ε will break out, and that twirl to the final s. They are undoubtedly by the same person. I don’t want to raise false hopes, Miss Morstan, but is this hand at all like your father’s?”

  “Nothing could be more different,” she said promptly and firmly.

  “Yes, I expected as much. That answer was much too simple. But the question had to be asked. We shall see you at six, then. May I keep the papers between now and then?”

  “Yes, of course,” she said.

  “Thank you,” said Crow and ushered her to the door. “Au revoir.”

  “Au revoir,” she said, including me in her smile, and was gone.

  “An attractive young lady, don’t you think?” said Crow, crossing to the window to watch her out of sight, as he often did with clients. He said he learned more from the way they walked than from anything they said.

  “I did not notice,” I said and winced at the sound of my own grating voice.

  “No?” Crow said disbelievingly. “Come now, Doyle, you aren’t such an automaton as all that. And even I could see that you found her charming.”

  I realized that my denial had boxed me in where simple and truthful agreement would have left me free. “Crow,” I said and sighed. “Yes, she is a lovely young lady.”

  I had puzzled him, which was the thing above all others I had learned to dread doing. “But why would you not just say so? What did I miss?”

  “Nothing.” But he wouldn’t let go of it now. A dog with a bone was nothing compared to Crow with an unanswered question, and I had a lively appreciation for the feelings of the bone. I shoved myself to my feet, said, “I’m going out,” and suited the action to the word.

  12

  The Unknown Friend

  I got no farther than the corner of Baker Street and Upper George Street before I turned and came back, feeling embarrassed and ashamed of myself, only to find a note in Crow’s beautifully illegible handwriting that read, GONE OUT. BACK BEFORE SIX.

  I was relieved, and then felt like a heel of the worst sort.

  Crow had left Miss Morstan’s papers spread out over the table, and I amused myself by picking out the “irrepressible Greek ε” and the twirling s. Then I found I had gotten interested, and for my own edification I made a list on a piece of foolscap of the characteristics I could observe. It was better than thinking about Mary Morstan, whom I could not have, or my foolish behavior with Crow.

  The writer—and I thought him a bit impudent to call himself Miss Morstan’s friend—tended, in both the addresses and in the letter, to large and quite ornate capitals which reeked of egoism and self-esteem, but the rest of his letters, no matter how he formed them, stayed all much the same size, ds and ls no higher than es or as. Once I saw that, it was unmistakable. The same went for his gs and ys, their loops barely managing to descend far enough to be seen. Although it was not a cramped hand in the usual sense, it nevertheless gave an intense sense of oppression, of being squashed between two unyielding forces. I began to see weakness in the letter writer—quite aside from his handwriting, what on Earth was this cloak-and-dagger business about the third pillar from the left? And why be so insistent about not going to the police when thus far, there was no evidence of illegality, save the disappearance of Miss Morstan’s father ten years ago? Either this was some sort of criminal operation—but then, why suggest she bring two friends? And why choose an obviously impoverished governess?—or the writer was more than a little paranoid. But it was all of a piece with sending her a single pearl in the post every year for six years and with his refusal to give his name. It all seemed almost childish, but the value of the pearls and the disappearance of Captain Morstan (and I wondered just how thorough the police investigation had been) put the lie to that.

  And why did he talk of justice when he specifically forbade her to go to the police? You are a wronged woman, he wrote in his squashed and fussy cursive on his very expensive paper. The only “wrong” I could see was that she had been deprived of her father—and yet having one’s father vanish wasn’t really a wrong per se. And why was he sending her those blasted pearls?

  At this point, I realized I was going in circles—and possibly thinking more of Miss Morstan’s kind blue eyes than of the mystery she had brought. “Fool,” I said savagely to myself and tried to turn my attention to an article in The Lancet about the comparative pathology of werewolf bites and vampire bites, but with only middling success.

  Crow reappeared at half past five and began talking almost before he was in the door. “Success, Doyle! The back files of The Times produced an obituary for Major John Sholto, of Upper Norwood, late of the Thirty-fourth Bombay Infantry. He died on the twenty-eighth of April, 1882.”

  “1882 was when Miss Morstan began receiving pearls,” said I.

  “Exactly!” said Crow. “Six days later, Miss Morstan observed the advertisement in The Times. Major Sholto was clearly blocking what someone, as yet unknown, felt to be the right course of action.”

  “Sending her single pearls for six years?”

  “I didn’t say it was the right course of action—merely that someone felt it to be so.”

  “Fair enough. But why is he changing the game now?”

  “Either he is exceptionally timorous or something else has occurred very recently that changes his situation. I have no idea what, so don’t ask.” I laughed, as he had intended, and a ripple of satisfaction went through his feathers.

  If he wanted to pretend I hadn’t inexplicably stormed out on him, I was hardly going to argue. “Major Sholto begins to present rather a sinister figure.”

  “He certainly does,” said Crow. “The Captain’s only friend in London, and he somehow hasn’t heard from him? It’s not likely. And combined with the very suspicious timing … I want to know a good deal more about Major Sholto and his heirs. And I suspect strongly I am going to get the chance. The Times also told me that the Major was survived by his sons Bartholomew and Thaddeus. I would be very surprised if Miss Morstan’s unknown friend were not one of them.”

  “That does seem likely,” I agreed, “insofar as anything seems ‘likely’ about Miss Morstan’s experience.”

  “It’s a very Gothic situation,” Crow said. “But I expect the mystery will be cleared up by our expedition this evening. Speaking of which, will you bring your service revolver?”

  “Of course,” I said. “You think tonight’s work is likely to be serious?”

  “I fear the disappearance of Captain Morstan can have had no happy outcome,” said he. “And I would greatly prefer we not join him.”

  “I cannot fault your reasoning,” I said and went into my bedroom to get my revolver.

  When I came out, Crow said, “I commend your observations on Miss Morstan’s mysterious correspondence,” and I realized that I had left my jottings on the table.

  I felt the blood rush to my face. “Those are nothing,” I said. “Just meanderings.”

  “But you raise some excellent points,” said Crow. “Calling her a wronged woman is an odd choice of words. It certainly suggests that Captain Morstan’s disappearance is not a mystery to this person. Also that that disappearance was neither accidental nor fortuitous.”

  “You mean that he was murdered,” I said.

  “Yes,” said Crow.
“I think the pearls are preemptive blood money. He’s trying to pay her back before she realizes what she is due.”

  “Or he was,” I said. “Why is he writing to her now?”

  “Something has changed,” Crow said thoughtfully. “Hopefully, he can be induced to tell us what. But here is Miss Morstan in a four-wheeler, well upon her hour. Let us join her.”

  I chose my heaviest stick, and I admit the weight of the revolver in my pocket was a comfort.

  We squashed into the four-wheeler, Crow’s wings as ever another passenger and a half. Miss Morstan, muffled up in a dark cloak, looked somewhat nervous, but she was composed and perfectly ready to answer Crow’s questions.

  “Major Sholto was a particular friend of my father’s,” she said. “The letters Father wrote me were full of allusions to the major and the things he said. He and Father were in command of the troops at Port Blair in the Andaman Islands, so that they were thrown a great deal together. By the way, a curious paper was found in Father’s room. No one I have shown it to has been able to make any sense of it. I don’t suppose it is of the slightest importance, but I thought you might wish to see it.”

  “You were quite right,” Crow said, surprising a smile onto her pale face. He unfolded the paper carefully. “It looks like the plan of a large building. Or part of the plan. A very elaborate building. Is it anywhere you have ever been?”

  “Not unless it was when I was too young to remember,” said Miss Morstan. “I have always assumed the building was somewhere in India.”

  “I agree, that seems likely,” Crow said. “So. At one point there is a small cross in red ink and above it is ‘3.37 from left’ in faded pencil. Which rather makes it look as though the cross and the instructions were written by different persons. In the lower left-hand corner is an odd little hieroglyphic like four crosses in a line with their arms touching. Beneath it is written in very coarse characters, ‘The sign of the four—Jonathan Small, Mahomet Singh, Abdullah Khan, Dost Akbar.’ You are right, Miss Morstan, it is most curious. I confess I do not see what bearing it can have upon the matter. Yet it is evidently a document of importance. It has been kept carefully folded in a pocketbook, for the one side is as clean as the other.”

  “It was in Father’s pocketbook that I found it,” said Miss Morstan.

  “I have not the faintest idea of what it means. But by all means preserve it carefully.” He handed it back to her, and she folded it carefully away again.

  Crow proceeded with lively curiosity to ask her about being a governess, and she found, as I had, that he was extremely easy to talk to, not in the slightest judgmental, and eager for details by which most people were bored. And one could tell that he had no ulterior purpose—he wasn’t asking to make small talk or to distract Miss Morstan from the grimmer aspects of our errand. He asked because he truly wanted to know, and she responded to that with the pleasure people always feel when asked sincerely about their lives.

  I listened silently. The joke at Bart’s had been that I would never make it in general practice—I’d scare all my patients into coronaries the first week. I have neither patience nor skill for conversation; I could only admire Crow’s natural, unthinking ability to make a reserved woman like Miss Morstan open up and chatter to him like a girl. It transpired that she was a most accomplished governess, being able to teach French, music, and clairvoyance along with the standard subjects, and Mrs. Cecil Forrester’s ever-increasing brood of children meant that her employment prospects looked good for at least a decade.

  The day had been a dreary one, and although it was not yet seven, a dense, drizzly fog turned London into a city of ghosts. Every face that emerged from the fog was as waxy white as a vampire’s, and even the omnibuses seemed insubstantial, as if we could drive straight through them.

  The Lyceum was already thronged with playgoers. Miss Morstan’s “unknown friend” might be a paranoiac, but he was shrewd. No one watching—assuming such a person to exist—would have noticed the addition of three more people (a couple and a Nameless hired for the evening—hardly the only one) or seen anything suspicious in our movements.

  We had barely reached the third pillar from the left when a small, dark, brisk man in a coachman’s uniform approached us. He had a werewolf’s light and penetrating eyes, and I felt confident in wagering that he had fur on his palms.

  “Beg pardon,” he said, “but are you the Morstan party?”

  “I am Mary Morstan,” Miss Morstan said, “and these are my friends.”

  He looked us over with sharp curiosity, his gaze lingering on Crow. “You will excuse me, miss,” he said, “but my instructions were very clear. Will you swear that neither of these persons is a police officer?”

  “I give you my word that neither of my companions is a police officer,” Miss Morstan said readily, and we all felt the momentary static shock of the oath.

  The werewolf nodded. “Thank you, miss.” He gave a shrill whistle, and a Nameless led over a four-wheeler and opened the door. The werewolf took his place on the box while the three of us climbed inside. The door was barely closed before the coachman clucked to his horse and we plunged into the fog at a remarkable clip.

  Crow and Miss Morstan continued talking like old friends. I thought about what Crow had said, that you never met the same Nameless twice. The idea was both eerie and sad. I wondered if the memories were truly lost or if there was some sort of collective memory where everything was stored. I had never heard anyone complain about having to teach a Nameless the right way to do anything—and how else could they understand English? This Nameless had certainly known how to lead a horse, which it couldn’t know if it were a true tabula rasa. I would have to ask Crow at some more opportune moment.

  At first, I had some idea of the direction we were going, but our pace, the fog, and my own patchy and limited knowledge of London soon had me in hopeless confusion. Crow was never at fault, though. He punctuated his conversation with Miss Morstan with the names of streets and squares. “Vauxhall Bridge Road. We are making for the Surrey side, apparently. Yes, here’s the bridge. You can see the Thames.”

  I did indeed catch a glimpse of the river, lamps shining through the fog on her broad back, but we rattled on, and I was quickly lost again.

  “Wandsworth Road,” said Crow, abandoning conversation. “Priory Road. Lark Hall Lane. Stockwell Place. Robert Street. Cold Harbour Lane. Our quest is not taking us among fashionable London.”

  It was getting darker and foggier, and the neighborhood was one of dull brick row houses with the tawdry yellow glare of public house lights like punctuation at the corners. Every so often there was a red light in a first-floor window, indicating a vampiric hunt. Then came the villas, stodgy and respectable, with their tiny identical gardens, and then yet more row houses, new staring brick soldiers in the war London waged against the countryside around it. Our destination lay among them, on a terrace so new that only one of the houses was inhabited—and that, it seemed, only barely, for there was no more than a glimmer of light from the kitchen window to show there was anyone within. But when I knocked, the door was opened immediately, as if the person on the other side had been waiting impatiently for us.

  He was a wildly incongruous figure in the banal English kitchen, an Indian in soft white clothes with a yellow sash and yellow turban. He stood aside to let us in. His eyes widened when he saw Crow, and he bowed deeply, murmuring something in his own language to which Crow replied briefly.

  The Indian stepped outside to speak to the coachman, and I whispered to Crow, “What did he say?”

  “Welcome to this household, messenger. And I said thank you.”

  The Indian returned, shutting the door, and said in excellent, almost accentless English, “Mr. Sholto awaits you.”

  Even as he spoke, a high, piping voice called from some inner room, “Show them in to me, khitmutgar. Show them straight in to me.”

  “If you will follow me,” said the Indian and led us down a corridor in ke
eping with the kitchen: sordid and shoddy and badly lit. He stopped and opened a door on the right; a blaze of yellow light streamed out, and in the center of the light stood a small man with a massive bald head, decorated only by a bristle of red hair around the edges. His eyes were protuberant, and his face not unlike a frog’s. He was much younger than his dramatic baldness would suggest. I judged him to be about Miss Morstan’s age.

  “Your servant, Miss Morstan, your servant, sir. Please—” And then he got a good enough look at Crow to realize he was not Nameless, and his words stopped with a squeak.

  “My name is Crow, and I am the Angel of London,” said Crow, who quite relished moments such as this. “I am a friend of Miss Morstan’s.”

  “Come in,” the redheaded man said faintly.

  The room was astounding, as opulent as the house was shabby and as out of place as the Indian servant. Rich tapestries hung on the walls; the carpets were beautiful and as soft and welcoming to the foot as a bed of moss. There were tiger skins, a hookah in the corner, a lamp in the shape of a dove that filled the air with a soft and not unpleasing scent of spices.

  “I am Mr. Thaddeus Sholto,” said our host, wringing his hands together. “That is my name. You are Miss Morstan, of course, and you have brought a … an angel and…?”

  “This is Dr. Doyle,” said Miss Morstan.

  “A doctor?” said Sholto, his face lighting up as if he’d been told I was Father Christmas. “Have you your stethoscope? Could you possibly be so kind? It’s my mitral valve, you see. I have every confidence in the aortic, but the mitral … if you would be so kind. I have such grave doubts.”

  I had indeed brought my bag, on the theory that we had no idea of what might happen, and I obligingly listened, but found nothing amiss save that his heart was beating much too fast and he was trembling head to foot in an ecstasy of fear.

  “It sounds normal and healthy,” I said. “You have no reason for concern.”

  “Oh the relief! Thank you, Doctor. Forgive me, Miss Morstan, but one cannot be too careful when it comes to matters of the heart. Indeed, your father might be alive today if he had exercised a little more care.”