Eye of the Crow

sod and back, fluttering its wings as if looking for a way out. It doesn’t say anything. Neither does Sherlock, who eats like a starving man. He speaks only when he’s finished every last morsel, and then his voice is shaking with emotion.

“I need to know how my parents are and get word to them … that I’m alive.”

But he knows a visit would be reckless, almost impossible.

“I have to see Malefactor first,” he adds.

“Who?”

“He’s a boy who lives on the streets and operates a gang. He hates me. But I have the feeling he’ll help me now, show me how to survive, do what I have to do. I have information I can trade, tell him things about the Bow Street jail, about how …”

Sherlock springs to his feet and heads for the front door.

“Stop!” shouts Irene.

The boy turns.

“Two things: you can’t go out in broad daylight, they are looking for you; and, when you do go, I’m coming with you.”

Her first point makes perfect sense. He feels like a fool for being so rash. The second part stuns him. Certainly, he had hoped she would help him: bring him food, let him stay near the house, not give him up to the police. But come with him to visit the Irregulars? He doesn’t care how unusual she is – he has no intention of bringing her with him.

“Right,” he says, “on both counts.”

Mr. Doyle is supposed to be away for most of the day so Sherlock is able to stay indoors for a while longer. The boy is well aware that it is improper for them to be alone together, but they have little choice. With time to themselves, they talk, each vigilant for any noise at the front door.

“My father is a man of some means, but not like most who have money,” she tells Sherlock with pride, motioning for him to clear the plates off the table and help her take them down to the kitchen.

Andrew Doyle, it turns out, is an Oxford-educated scion of a liberal family who can afford to spend his days at the head of an organization that not only aids the poor, but tries to make the government help them too. He is willing to leave the comfort of his home to roll up his sleeves and contribute in the hospitals, the jails, and even on the streets. He is a “new thinker” of the 1860s, gone from nearly sunrise to sunset, attempting to change the world.

“He wasn’t always that way,” says Irene, hanging up her apron, and motioning for them to return upstairs. “But when my mother died …” Her voice falters. She takes a few steps upwards, keeping her face turned away from her friend. When they reach the ground floor, she continues. “… when she died … on the day I was born … he started walking the streets to work off his grief.” Her voice gains in strength. “He went everywhere. He told me he saw misery like he had never imagined; misery that more than matched his own.”

They move to the dining room table again.

“I am his only child, and he wants me to grow up to care for others and make a difference in their lives, whether I’m a girl or not. He teaches me as often as my governess does. Maybe she shouldn’t even be called that. She was very carefully chosen and doesn’t live with us, just teaches me girlish things I need to know. Father has me read all sorts of things other girls aren’t allowed. You can ask me any political question! I can cook and sew and run without growing pale. He says I should be able to vote, and I’m allowed to stay home alone and do nearly anything I want.”

Her voice grows softer.

“It’s quiet here. We don’t have many people call. Father says I need to be shielded from … my outings are to workhouses and soup kitchens, and my books are my friends.”

Sherlock detects her sadness. The lark flutters its wings and she looks up at the cage.

“We purchased Blondin, there, from a bird dealer south of the river. Poor thing has a broken wing. I want to let him go, but father says he would perish in London.”

Her sadness doesn’t linger. The boy’s desperate situation seems to connect to everything she and her father believe in, and soon she is pressing him to tell her more about the murder case.

There is a sound at the front door. They sit very still, Sherlock poised to flee. Silence. Perhaps it was just a pebble or a piece of metal from a harness, thrown from the street by the wheel of a passing carriage. Irene turns back to the boy, now even more anxious to hear more about his troubles before her father returns.

He had planned to keep the most important details from her, but when she asks so earnestly, he can’t hold back. He needs to tell someone, and his trust in her is growing.

“There are things about this crime that I wasn’t able to speak about in jail,” he begins.

He tells her Mohammad’s whole story, outlines the information he has that might help him: about the crows, the eyeball, the police theory, everything. But everything doesn’t seem like much when he describes it. What does he really have? Just a few crows muttering at the crime scene … and a glass eye. What is that compared to the evidence compiled against the accused? The police have the murder weapon, found concealed under Mohammad’s coat. They have his bloody footsteps going from the scene to the shop. And on top of everything, Sherlock doesn’t have absolute proof that the Arab is innocent – he thinks of Adalji’s angry expression in the jail last night.

It seems to him that Irene believes everything he says, which makes things worse for her. If she had thought both he and the Arab guilty, she could have offered forgiveness and convinced him to turn himself in. But because she suspects he is innocent and caught in a deadly trap from which he might not break free, she is almost compelled to help him.

Only one thing about her truly disappoints him. He wants to know what the papers have been saying about the crime, but it turns out that the Doyles read only the stodgy Times of London. No sensation for them: no News of the World, no Penny Illustrated Paper, and certainly no Police News. Sherlock’s “scandal sheets” hadn’t known the identity of the murder victim during those first few days, and after a brief and restrained interest The Times said little about the crime: such lurid fascination was beneath them. Irene can’t recall the dead woman’s name or even her occupation.

He is back in the dog kennel well before Andrew Doyle returns home. John Stuart Mill will be kept in the house today, and Irene will try to control his whereabouts over the next while. The maid usually feeds the dog inside anyway. A cloth hangs down over the kennel’s entrance, nearly touching the ground, obscuring the view from the back windows.

Sherlock lies awake until he sees all the lights go out in the Doyle house. He waits for what he guesses is an hour and then rises. Even if he actually wanted Irene to come with him, he wouldn’t take a chance on entering the house to signal her. He leaves the yard and moves down the passageway.

She is standing across the road, leaning against the gold-tipped wrought-iron fence that surrounds the Museum grounds.

“I’m coming,” she says clearly.

Almost as shocking as her presence in the night is her clothing. She appears to be wearing trousers.

“They’re father’s,” she says curtly, not even looking down at them. “They shrank in the latest wash and he thinks I threw them out.”

They are tied tightly around her waist with what appears to be a belt from a bathrobe. All her clothes are dark. Smart girl. But from the neck up she still glows like an angel: that blonde hair looks like a light, shining around her in the night.

“Shall we go?”

Perhaps this isn’t a bad turn of events, thinks Sherlock. The police will be looking for a tall, thin boy … on his own.

They search for a long time without finding any scent of the Irregulars. Irene moves like a pale apparition beside him as they descend into the London night, mortified by the ghoulish scenes around her. Still, she keeps up to him and never mentions her fear. Sherlock watches every shadow. Tonight he is both hunter and hunted.

Down a dark Westminster street, they hear a shout directed their way.

“You lot!”