Eye of the Crow

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 protege, the bullet-boy El Nino, 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 down. 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.

The boy leans against the carved stone wall that runs around the exterior of the main part of the square, turning his back on the crows, thinking about the Arab. Every now and then he pulls a rusty brush from a coat pocket and makes sure his straight black hair is perfectly in place.

He loves to watch birds almost as much as people: cardinals, finches, robin redbreasts, magpies, anything. Most of all, he likes to watch them fly. “That’s the one thing they do that human beings wish we could do,” his father often tells him. “We’d all love to fly. It would free us from the bonds of Earth.”

Sometimes, he’s spotted hot air balloons drifting over the tall buildings and church spires of the city like they’ve floated away from some strange dream of the future. It isn’t truly flying, but it is close. Oh, to be up there!

Feeling restless, he gets to his feet and makes his way across the square toward the Art Gallery. He walks up the big steps. He feels compelled to come here where he can see so many rich folks. Rich is something he will never be. All he can do is watch and dream.

He knows that nearly a third of the children in London don’t attend school, and very few go after the age of twelve. Most are put to work or worse. Yet he is still in the cramped National and Foreign Society School on Snowfields Road near the London Bridge Railway Station. Three damp rooms on three floors: one for the little children, one for upper form girls, and a big one for boys. The last is at the top of the stairs with a high ceiling