Chapter 19
CHAPTER 19
B ran did come back. And with good timing, because Simeon had just finished drying Crow and tucking him under a thick blanket. “He’s still not dead,” Bran said by way of greeting, setting several parcels on the table.
“Disappointed in your handiwork?” asked Simeon, finger-combing Crow’s hair. He understood at some level that he couldn’t blame Bran for stabbing Crow, but he blamed him nonetheless.
“I didn’t think about it, not any more than I thought about punching you. It was instinct. Wouldn’t you have done the same in my position?”
Yes, Simeon would have. He’d certainly hit people before, and he’d even used a blade on a few occasions when it seemed merited. He didn’t like fighting and would rather talk his way out of a tight spot, but sometimes talking wasn’t enough. He didn’t say any of this to Bran.
Simeon was going to tear into the food at once but then realized his clothing was filthy from alley muck and stiff with dried blood. He saw that Bran had brought two shirts and two pairs of trousers, none of them new but all of fair quality and in decent condition. Ignoring Bran’s stare, he stripped out of his old clothes and put on new, then used a towel to wash his hands again. He even straightened and tied back his hair.
“You seem to know this neighborhood well,” said Bran.
“Lived here most of my life, didn’t I?”
“Your accent doesn’t sound as if you did.”
“I am capable of speaking like a gentleman,” said Simeon in his poshest tones. Then he switched to deepest cockney. “And I ain’t forgotten me roots.”
“He’s not from London.” Bran gestured at Crow, who seemed to be asleep.
“He lived on a farm in America, until he met me.”
Bran’s eyes widened. “You’ve been to America?”
“I’ve been loads of places.”
“But… how? And what are you?—”
Simeon stopped him with a raised hand. “Food first.”
Bran had followed instructions and bought a lot of food. Simeon took a bite of a meat pie of dubious provenance, realized he was ravenous, and demolished that one and another, all without bothering to sit down. Bran sat, however, his back straight and a handkerchief spread over his lap as he took dainty bites. Interesting—a man who was quick with a fist and a knife but put on manners as if having tea with the Queen.
Crow roused enough to announce that he wanted to eat; Simeon insisted on feeding him. “Like I’m a baby bird,” Crow complained. But he ate three pies and drank two cups of tea before falling back asleep.
While Simeon cared for Crow, Bran watched closely, not saying a word. Now, as Simeon gathered the soiled towels and piled them near the door, Bran cocked his head. It made him look very birdlike .
“You love him,” Bran said finally.
“Yes.”
“It doesn’t bother you that it’s a perversion?”
Simeon sighed and rolled his eyes. “I’ve seen people do a great many horrible things to one another out of greed or the desire to exercise power or simple bloody evil. Those are perversions. What Crow and I have is beautiful.”
To his surprise, Bran nodded. He looked sad and contemplative, gaze focused far away. “I had a good position with Lord and Lady Fitzrolf. Footman, you know. I’d hoped to become butler someday. But I was caught in, erm, a compromising position with one of the grooms and was let go. I expect I’m fortunate I wasn’t sent to prison.”
For the first time, Simeon felt true sympathy for his brother. “Did you love him?”
“I found his company pleasant, and I hoped that someday….” Instead of finishing his thought, Bran shook out the handkerchief from his lap, folded it, and tucked it away.
He looked as if he were about to demand explanations again, and although Simeon did owe them, fatigue descended like a great weight. “Need a kip,” he announced. He eyed both beds for a moment and then pointed to the empty one. “Take that if you want it. But don’t leave.” Then he very carefully climbed in beside Crow, who made a sleepy but pleased sound and scooted over a bit to make room for him. Simeon protectively curled himself around Crow and fell asleep almost immediately.
He awoke to a few coals burning in the fireplace, which, along with a single lamp, provided the only light. The curtains had been mostly closed and it was clearly well into the evening. Bran sat at the table, reading a book and sipping tea. The other bed wasn’t rumpled, so perhaps he hadn’t slept, or maybe he had straightened the blankets afterward.
Simeon lay still for a time, watching him, noting his expressions and small movements. “Do you remember me?” Simeon asked after a while.
“I told you, I remember seeing you outside the Castle that time. Both of you. It was the day I was taken to the Castle. You were quite solid, but you somehow seemed like ghosts.”
“I mean from before. When I was small.”
Bran frowned thoughtfully. “Perhaps. I recall…. I know I had a mother and father once. And I remember them showing me a squalling baby and telling me he was my brother. I never knew what became of you. I asked sometimes, when I lived in the Castle, but either they didn’t know or they chose not to tell.”
“I didn’t even have the memory of you, or of our parents,” said Simeon. “Didn’t know anything about any of you until a few days ago.”
Bran slammed the book shut and leaned forward in his chair, as if trying to get closer to Simeon but not daring to move from his spot. “What do you know? Who are they? What are they? What are we?”
Simeon responded in a flat tone. “They’re dead. Have been for ages.”
Crow, who hadn’t said a word until this point, gave Simeon a nudge with his elbow. “You could’ve broken the news a little more gently, Sim.”
“I….” To his shame, Simeon realized that he was envious of Bran, who’d known their parents and lived with them, even if only for a few years, and who had at least some fragmentary memories of them. Simeon had experienced none of that, and even those scraps would have been a comfort during certain times at the foundling home. When the city ha d felt vast and hostile, and when Simeon had felt very small, he would have clung to the certainty that, for a time at least, he hadn’t been alone.
“Please,” said Bran. “Tell me… everything.”
But Simeon didn’t, not immediately at any rate. First he checked Crow’s wound, which had closed and scarred. Color had returned to his cheeks and warmth to his skin. Simeon fetched more tea from the kitchen and gave Crow a filled cup and two pies. He helped him sit upright, fussing over pillows and blankets and finishing with a brief moment of leaning their foreheads together, at which point Crow tugged gently on his hair.
“Give the poor guy a break,” Crow whispered in his ear. “You’ve been stringing him along all day.”
Right. Simeon decided he preferred to engage in this task while sitting on the bed with his feet on the floor and Crow pressed up against him like a living bulwark. “Shall I tell him about us as well, love? What happened with us last year?”
“I think you should. My story’s all tangled up with yours.”
Simeon rather liked that notion.
He gave a fairly abbreviated summary of his childhood and youth, of joining the carnival, of meeting a blond farm boy and foreseeing horrors in the boy’s future.
“But fortunetelling is nothing but claptrap,” Bran protested.
“Often, perhaps. But not when it’s Madame Persephone. And not, as it turns out, if it’s me.”
“But how can you?—”
“I’ll get to it eventually.”
Simeon continued by briefly relating what had happened the second time he and Crow had met. Bran frowned when he learned that Crow’s grandmother had been an angel. “This is all rather outlandish,” he protested. “I simply cannot believe that?— ”
“You can sprout wings and fly,” Simeon reminded him.
“I don’t understand how or why.”
Crow interjected for the first time. “You don’t have to understand. There are tons of things I don’t understand at all, but I use them—well, I used them in my time—all constantly. Like telephones and electric lights.”
Bran chewed his lip and then gave a grudging nod. “All right. For now I shall… overlook logical improbabilities.”
“That’s big of you,” Crow mumbled.
Simeon continued the tale, now describing the return to nineteenth-century England and the various enlightenments he’d received from the Frugises. Bran looked disturbed by all of this, as well he might, but didn’t interrupt. His scrutiny was intense—his torso leaning toward Simeon and his brow furrowed.
Finally Simeon explained why and how he’d fetched Bran. “I was looking for you all over. Even found where the Fitzrolfs lived, but no sign of you.”
“We stayed primarily at the country manor,” Bran explained. “It’s quite nice. Much better than London.” He sounded wistful.
“Well, if you’d been in London I might have had some hope of tracking you down. But you weren’t.”
“Yet you found me nonetheless.”
Simeon looked down at his own hands, gently curled in his lap, and imagined the fingers transforming into feathers. He pictured those feathers spread over an invisible current, skimming the minutes and days and years.
When he finally spoke again, his voice was soft. “Some of us—that is, some rooks—have certain talents. I didn’t know this until a few days ago.”
“What talents?” Bran asked sharply.
“Time. I can see things that have happened or that will happen. Not everything —that would drive me mad at once. But visions come to me. Such as my vision about Crow’s future. But that was the only time I experienced this talent before I arrived in London a few days ago. Since then, I’ve been able to do a great deal more.”
Bran sucked on his teeth. “Is that what you were doing when I saw you outside the Castle?”
“Yes.”
“But that wasn’t merely you peeking into past events. I saw you. Saw both of you.”
Simeon hadn’t been able to get his head around this bit, so he shrugged. “Crow seems to be forced into coming along for the ride when he’s near me.”
Crow poked him. “I’m not forced .”
Right. Simeon needed to accept that Crow was with him voluntarily and was willing to experience all the repercussions of his choice. It was like what people said in their marriage vows: for better, for worse.
And Bran, who clearly didn’t care about any of that, looked impatient. “But I saw you,” he repeated.
“I honestly don’t know the shape of my talent. You saw us. I’ve also managed to somehow draw books here from the future.” He gestured at one of the books lying on the table, which he assumed Bran had taken from the remaining knapsack while Simeon slept. He wondered whether Bran had discovered some of the hidden caches of money as well, but he decided not to pursue that inquiry.
Bran opened the volume almost violently, looked at the first page, and swore. “It says 1890.” He looked up at Simeon again. “And that’s what you did to me, except you pulled me from the past.”
“No, I simply—” Simeon stopped abruptly as the realization hit. “What year was it just before I, erm, found you?”
“It was 1879.”
Crow hissed in surprise but didn’t speak .
“I thought I was only moving you through space,” said Simeon. “I didn’t know that….”
“That you can pluck a man out of one year and set him down, nice as you please, in another?”
Simeon shook his head, aware that both Crow and Bran were shocked. Perhaps he would have been too, if he weren’t preoccupied by the thought of the time stream dropping off abruptly just after he grabbed Bran. Although he told himself that he didn’t know what that signified, that he couldn’t know, it was a lie. His heart knew exactly what it meant.
He turned his glance away from Bran, toward the threadbare curtains that didn’t quite meet in the center of the window.
“How is it,” Bran said, “that you are so powerful? I’m your brother but I can’t do these things.”
“I don’t know. But the Frugises told me that both of our parents could foresee things.”
“Thus the prophecy.”
“Yes. But it’s important— Look. The past is the past. Done. But the future isn’t yet set. Prophecies are not infallible.”
Bran shook his head. “That’s not true. You’ve changed the past at least twice.”
“How so?”
“Once when you visited me outside the Castle. You did that just recently, yes? But I recall it from over twenty years ago. I have a decades-old memory that didn’t exist until yesterday, which makes no sense at all and yet it is true.”
Crow moaned. Simeon looked at him with concern, but apparently his distress was more mental than physical. “Time-travel shit hurts my head. Paradoxes and puzzles. It’s all like a really nasty knot.”
Simeon agreed. He faced Bran again. “What was the second instance? ”
“When you brought me here. Unless you send me back to the precise moment in which you snatched me, at least some portion of 1879 now exists without me in it, even though that was not the case yesterday.”
“Jesus,” Crow muttered.
Suddenly, Bran leapt up and ran over. He crouched in front of Simeon and grabbed his forearms. “You can change the past, man! You can go back and warn me that although it’s quite late, Lord Fitzrolf’s cursed son has decided to go for a ride and is about to interrupt me and the groomsman. You can go back to 1857 and convince our parents not to give us up. You can—” He stopped very suddenly, as if he’d meant to say more but now thought better of it.
A vision passed before Simeon’s closed eyes. It wasn’t one of his time travels but rather an imagined thing conjured from nothing but a suggestion and a long-dead wish. A family together in a small cottage, all of them with hair like ravens’ wings and eyes like polished obsidian. The mother sat at a table with a boy aged five or six, patiently helping him practice letters on a bit of slate. The father stood in front of the fireplace, tickling and teasing a younger boy in his arms as the child shrieked with laughter.
Ah, but that little boy wouldn’t grow up to join the carnival. Wouldn’t meet his beloved in America. Would be Lewis Frugis, not Simeon Bell. Would the world be richer or poorer with Lewis instead of Simeon? Would Lewis be happy through the years? Simeon didn’t know.
“I won’t do that,” Simeon said.
As Crow gave Simeon’s shoulder a little squeeze, Bran worked his jaw. He let go of Simeon’s arms, straightened, and stalked over to the fireplace, where he stood with his back to the room as if warming himself at the coals.
“When did you discover you could fly?” Simeon asked after a while .
Bran didn’t turn around. “After I was dismissed by the Fitzrolfs. They cast me out without a shilling. Nothing but the clothes on my back, and of course no letter of reference. And where was I to find employment in Little Thirkleby? Nobody there needed a footman. I couldn’t find someone to take me on as a clerk, a barman… anything. I’ve no idea how to farm or care for animals. And you can see for yourself that I’m not like you. I’m not strong. The Castle prepared us to be in service, and that was all I knew how to do.”
“How old were you?” asked Simeon.
“Sixteen.”
Crow swore quietly.
“I know what it’s like to have no prospects,” said Simeon. “I’m a thief, after all. And I’ve earned my bread in other ways I’m not proud of.”
If Bran appreciated Simeon’s empathy, he gave no sign. “I walked all the way to the sea. It took me days. I found a high cliff, and I….” He paused. “It was rather melodramatic of me. But I’d always been so small. So negligible. I thought that at least at the end I could do something… large. And my bones wouldn’t be trapped forever in a pauper’s cemetery or worse.”
Simeon had given some thought to his own death, back before he first joined the carnival, when fevers had weakened him and he was coughing up blood. He’d been sad that nobody would mourn him, but worse than that was his conviction—reasonable enough—that the resurrection men would have his corpse and he’d end up splayed on a dissection table, vulnerable to the scalpels of dispassionate medical students. Even now, the thought made him shudder.
“You leapt?” he asked.
“For the first instants, it was glorious. A freedom I’d never experienced. But then I was overcome with fear and regret. I wanted so terribly much to live. And I did. I flew away. ”
He finally turned away from the fire, but only so he could sit at the table and fill a squat glass from a green bottle that he apparently conjured while Simeon slept.
“Gin wasn’t on the shopping list I gave you,” Simeon pointed out.
Instead of replying, Bran drained his glass in one go and then refilled it. “I didn’t know there were others like me, you know. Not until today.”
Simeon thought about Bran at sixteen, alone in the world and with no prospects, confused about what he was. Simeon had also been alone at that age, but at least he’d been in his familiar old neighborhood in London and knew how to get by. He might have been lonely at times, and he was often hungry and cold, but he hadn’t been miserable. In rare moments, he even found joy.
“Rooks are social birds,” said Simeon. “We’re not meant to be by ourselves.”
For a moment, Bran looked heartbreakingly young. And he was young, Simeon remembered. In terms of days lived, Simeon had several years on him. “I wasn’t alone for long,” said Bran, not meeting Simeon’s eyes.
“Where did you go?”
“I flew to London. I hoped to find a position in a house here, but I… I looked quite disreputable by then. No decent clothing, no letters of reference, no….”
In London, there weren’t many ways for a boy with no funds and no connections to support himself, as Simeon knew very well. Thanks to his experiences in the foundling home and on the streets, he’d known how to steal when he needed to. But even then, he’d been caught sometimes. Caned. Sent to Newgate. Bran hadn’t possessed those kinds of skills at all, and without the strength for hard physical labor…. Well, there was one way a pretty boy could earn his bread .
Simeon sighed. “I told you. I survived however I could. Sometimes that meant getting down on my knees or bending over.”
Crow, who knew this about Simeon’s past, remained silent. He’d never judged him for it and had never called him filthy names, not even when he was very angry. He was sad that Simeon had been forced to do things that no child should have to do, but perhaps Crow had never quite grasped that his twentieth-century Midwestern notion of childhood wasn’t at all how Simeon and others like him had spent their younger years. In a sense, Simeon had never been a child.
Bran blinked a few times, but his shoulders seemed to relax a bit at Simeon’s revelation. Perhaps he’d been expecting a more negative reaction. “I eventually found a… sponsor. He was a solicitor and had lodgings on Thanet Street. I was, nominally, his servant, but mostly he….” He cleared his throat. “He was not a nice man. Do you understand?”
“I do.” Simeon tasted bitter bile.
For a few minutes, Bran gazed at his glass of gin but didn’t drink it. “I looked younger than I was. When I grew too old for his tastes, I… moved on.”
“To another sponsor?” asked Simeon, thinking of Bran’s quickness with fist and knife—and the scar on his face.
“For a time. But I continued to age, and in any case, I don’t like the city. It cages me. But in small towns and villages, I can put on airs, you see, and come off as a university student or lordling, traveling on a lark. If I tell them I was robbed and am in need of funds to travel home, they believe me. They take me in, offer me tea and a meal, and when they’re not looking….” He gave a feral grin.
“So you’re a thief, like me.”
“I survive. ”
Simeon understood this and was certainly in no position to judge. Except he’d almost always taken small things—a handkerchief, a snuffbox, a few coins—and he’d taken them from toffs who could afford a minor loss. Not from rural folk who likely owned little and who had invited him into their homes when they believed him to be in need. But perhaps these distinctions were meaningless and he was only trying to rationalize his own behavior.
“No need for that any longer,” Simeon said.
“Because you can snatch things from other times and other places.”
Crow made a noise that sounded like a growl. “He’s not going to do that.” He moved forward as if intending to get out of bed, but Simeon held him in place with a palm to his chest and a warning shake of the head. Crow fell back, his sour expression replaced by a wince of pain.
Simeon looked at his brother and felt suddenly ancient, as if time wasn’t a stream he could travel but rather a weight piled upon him, each minute another stone on his back. “Drink your gin if you must, but I reckon you could use some sleep as much as I can. In the morning we can discuss futures that don’t involve larceny.”
Bran nodded but didn’t move from the chair.
It didn’t take long for Simeon to again wrap himself around Crow’s supine body, to inhale a few times at the crook of Crow’s neck, taking his essence into his lungs. To feel Crow thread fingers through his hair. Not long after, just as Simeon was drifting into sleep, Bran shoveled ashes over the dying coals, doused the lantern, and shuffled to bed. Although he wasn’t heavy, the frame creaked a bit as he settled in.
Simeon fell asleep… and landed in Crow’s dream.