Eye of the Crow Read Online Free Page A

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 tellshim. “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