Eye of the Crow Read Online Free Page B

last is at the top of the stairs with a high ceiling (beckoning you to stare up and drift into a better world), where the masters, monitors, and all the students also gather for assemblies. He has been in school for seven years, his parents insisting that he read better than the others, cipher better … think better. But there is a ceiling on his future lower than the one in his classroom.
    He thinks of his earlier days, in the dirty Ragged School in Lambeth, sitting in one of the many rows at his narrow wooden desk, beside other miserable pupils. He is fortunate to be gone from there. Unlike those destitute children, he at least has some sort of future, some expectations. In the summers he’s helped the old hatter in the shop under their flat, adding what he can to the family income; it was said he did well. He may become a full-time shop assistant some day, a clerk, or a teacher; nothing better.
    “But look at Disraeli,” his father often tells him. “He will be prime minister one day, mark my words. Other Jews are getting places too. They let us sit in Parliament now. It’s 1867! When I was a boy things were much worse.”
    But Benjamin Disraeli isn’t the sort of Jew that Sherlock is, or like any he knows. Those who succeed, like the Rothschilds and a recent Lord Mayor of London, have never lived in the slums of Southwark or Whitechapel; their blood isn’t mixed; their parents haven’t suffered a great fall. In fact, Disraeli comes from a middle-class family and was baptized in the Church of England: his life has been filled with opportunities. And yet the boy recently saw the great man drawn with a grotesquely long nose and caricatured as Fagin in a copy of
Punch
magazine he found in the streets.
    The boys at school call Sherlock “Judas,” or “Old Clothes,” the name for conniving Jewish street vendors. He is a loner to begin with, doesn’t like to talk: it seems he just reads and thinks. He wears preposterous suits with waistcoats (bought “passed on” at a market), threadbare but as clean as he can make them, his only way to be somebody, though itseparates him even more. He’s had a few fights at Snowfields. He won’t give in or let other boys go unpunished for mean things they say. But some still taunt him. They resent his many first-place finishes, his razor-sharp mind.
    One fight still bothers him more than any other. It happened nearly a year ago. The school bully had teased him so mercilessly that he’d challenged the boy on the street. A big crowd gathered. His opponent was a hulking, eleven-stone pure-English lad. Sherlock went down with the first blow, was pounced upon, his thin arms pinned until they nearly snapped on the pavement. The boy spit on him and slapped his face as the others looked on and cheered.
    “’elpless, ain’t you, Judas? Absolutely ’elpless!” cried the boy. “You can rub your grades in our gobs and wear those clothes and take those snooty ways, but you still ain’t goin’ anywhere remarkable. You’re pinned down, you are, like you should be!”
    When the large boy finally relented and climbed off, Sherlock wouldn’t get up. The crowd stood and looked down at him. He lay there, flat on his back on the street, until everyone was gone.
    He’d been absent from school maybe once a week before that fight, but since then his record had drastically declined. He tries to attend: knows he owes it to his parents. But he can’t. Education
can
get you somewhere, but where has it gotten his father?

    A goldfinch is flying by against the gray clouds. The air has cooled and it looks like rain again. Sherlock is thinking about the murder.
    The new
Illustrated Police News
is still in his pocket. He hasn’t read much of it yet, just the headline and a few words about Mohammad Adalji. He pulls it out and turns to the second page. There the lurid drawing has been reproduced from the day before.
    The blood. The woman. That crow.
    The story flows onto the next page where another