unlocked by Mem’sab to let them all back inside.
True to her word, Sarah had gotten the sweets, and when the others filed in through the front door, she was waiting in the entrance hall, with Grey on her shoulder as usual, to give out their shares as soon as they came in. Nan handed hers over to Tommy without a murmur or a second glance, although she was inordinately fond of sweets—Sarah looked startled, then speculative, as she spotted Nan’s hatbox.
“Sarah, you just gotter see—” Nan began, when Mem’sab interrupted.
“I believe that we need to make a very careful introduction, Nan,” she said, steering Nan deftly down the hall instead of up the stairs. “Sarah, would you and Grey come with us as well? I believe that Nan has found a friend very like Grey for herself—but we are going to have to make sure that they understand that they must at least tolerate one another.”
There was a room on the first floor used for rough-housing on bad days; it had probably been a ballroom when the mansion was in a better neighborhood. Now, other than some ingenious draperies made out of dust sheets, it didn’t have a great deal in it but chests holding battered toys and some chairs pushed up against the walls. For heat, there was an iron stove fitted into the fireplace, this being deemed safer than an open fire. This was where Mem’sab brought them, and sat Sarah and Grey down on the worn wooden floor, with Nan and her hatbox (which was beginning to move as a restless raven stirred inside it) across from her.
“All right, Nan, now you can let him out,” Mem’sab decreed.
Nan had to laugh as Neville popped up like a jack-in-the-box when she took off the lid, his feathers very much disarranged from confinement in the box. He shook himself—then spotted Grey.
Grey was already doing a remarkable imitation of a pinecone, with every feather sticking out, and growling under her breath. Neville roused his own feathers angrily, then looked sharply at Nan.
“No,” she said, in answer to the unspoken question. “You ain’t sharin’ me. Grey is Sarah’s. But you gotter get along, ‘cause Sarah’s the best friend I got, an my friend’s gotter be friends with her friend.”
“You hear that?” Sarah added to Grey, catching the parrot’s beak gently between thumb and forefinger, and turning the parrot’s head to face her. “This is Nan’s special bird friend. He’s going to share our room. But he’ll have his own food and toys and perches, so you aren’t going to lose anything, you see? And you have to be friends, because Nan and I are.”
Both birds clearly thought this over, and it was Grey who graciously made the first move. “Want down,” she said, smoothing her feathers down as Sarah took her off her shoulder and put her down on the floor.
Neville sprang out of his hatbox, and landed within a foot of Grey. And now it was his turn to make a gesture—which he did, with surprising graciousness.
“Ork,” he croaked, then bent his head and offered the nape of his neck to Grey.
Now, in Grey’s case, that gesture could be a ruse, for Nan had known her to offer her neck—supposedly to be scratched—only to whip her head around and bite an offending finger hard. But Neville couldn’t move his head that fast; his beak was far too ponderous. Furthermore, he was offering the very vulnerable back of his head to a stabbing beak, which was what another raven would have, not a biting beak. Would Grey realize what a grand gesture this was?
Evidently, she did. With great delicacy, she stretched out and preened three or four of Neville’s feathers, as collective breaths were released in sighs of relief.
Truce had been declared.
***
Alliance soon followed. In fact, within a week, the birds were sharing perches (except at bedtime, when each perched on the headboard of their respective girl). It probably helped that Grey was not in the least interested in Neville’s raw meat, and Neville was openly dismissive of Grey’s cooked rice and vegetables. When there is no competition for food and affection, alliance becomes a little easier.
Within a remarkably short time, the birds were friends—as unlikely a pair as the street brat and the missionary’s child. Neville had learned that Grey’s curved beak and powerful bite could open an amazing number of things he might want to investigate, and it was clear that no garden snail was going to be safe, come the spring. Grey had discovered that a straight, pointed beak with all the hammerlike force of a raven’s neck muscles behind it could break a hole into a flat surface where her beak couldn’t get a purchase. Shortly afterward, there had ensued a long discussion between Mem’sab and the birds to which neither Nan nor an anxious Sarah were party, concerning a couple of parcels and the inadvisability of birds breaking into unguarded boxes or brightly-wrapped presents…
After the incident with the faux medium and the spirit of the child of one of Mem’sab’s school friends, rumors concerning the unusual abilities Sarah and Nan possessed began to make the rounds of the more Esoteric circles of London. Most knew better than to approach Mem’sab about using her pupils in any way— those who did were generally escorted to the door by one of Sahib’s two formidable school guards, one a Gurkha, the other a Sikh. A few, a very few, of Sahib or Mem’sab’s trusted friends actually met the girls—and occasionally Nan or Sarah were asked to help in some occult difficulty. Nan was called on more often than Sarah, although, had Mem’sab permitted it, Sarah would have been asked to exercise her talent as a genuine medium four times as often as Nan used her abilities.
One day in October, after Mem’sab had turned away yet another importunate friend and her friend, a thin and enthusiastic spinster wearing a rather eccentric turban with a huge ostrich plume ornament on the front, and a great many colored shawls draped all over her in every possible fashion, Nan intercepted her mentor.
“Mem’sab, why is it you keep sendin’ those ladies away?” she asked curiously. “There ain’t—isn’t—no harm in ‘em—least, not that one, anyway. A bit silly,” she added judiciously, “but no harm.”
The wonderful thing about Mem’sab was that when you acted like a child, she treated you like a child—but when you were trying to act like an adult, she treated you as one. Mem’sab regarded her thoughtfully, and answered with great deliberation. “I have some very strong ideas about what children like Sarah—or you—should and should not be asked to do. One of them is that you are not to be trotted out at regular intervals like a music- hall act and required to perform. Another is that until you two are old enough to decide just how public you wish to be, it is my duty to keep you as private as possible. And lastly—” her mouth turned down as if she tasted something very sour. “Tell me something, Nan—do you think that there are nothing but hundreds of ghosts out there, queuing up to every medium, simply burning to tell their relatives how lovely things are on the Other Side?”
Nan thought about that for a moment. “Well,” she said, after giving the question full consideration, “No. If there was, I don’t‘s’p-pose Sarah’d hev a moment of peace. They’d be at her day an’ night, leave alone them as is still alive.”
Mem’sab laughed. “Exactly so. Given that, can you think of any reason why I should encourage Sarah to sit about in a room so thick with incense that it is bound to make her ill when nothing is going to come of it but a headache and hours lost that she could have been using to study, or just to enjoy herself?”
“An’ a gaggle of silly old women fussing at ’er.” Nan snorted. “I see, Mem’sab.”
“And some of the things that you and Sarah are asked to do, I believe are too dangerous,” Mem’sab continued, with just a trace of frown. “And why, if grown men have failed at them, anyone should think I would risk a pair of children—”
She shook herself, and smiled ruefully down at Nan. “Adults can be very foolish—and very selfish.”
Nan just snorted. As if she didn’t know that! Hadn’t her own mother sold her to a pair of brothel keepers? And Neville, perched on her shoulder, made a similarly scornful noise.
“Has he managed any real words yet, Nan?” Mem’sab asked, her attention distracted. She crooked a finger in invitation, and Neville stretched out his head for a scratch under the chin.
“Not yet, Mem’sab—but I kind uv get ideers about what he wants’t‘ tell me.” Nan knew that Mem’sab would know exactly what she was talking about, and she was not disappointed.
“They say that splitting a crow or raven’s tongue gives them clear speech, but I am against anything that would cause Neville pain for so foolish a reason,” Mem’sab said. “And it is excellent exercise for you to understand what is in his mind without words.”
“Quork,” said Neville, fairly radiating satisfaction.
***
After that, Nan put her full attention on the task of “understanding what was in Neville’s mind without words.” It proved to be a slippery eel to catch. Sometimes it all seemed as clear as the thoughts in her own mind, and sometimes he was as opaque to her as a brick.
“I dunno how you do it,” she told Sarah one day, when both she and Neville were frustrated by her inability to
