Eye of the Crow

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Murder came in darkness. It came in White-chapel, far from the gaslights of the main streets, to the east where the Jews were, where the poor starved, where the invisible people of the world’s greatest city lived like animals. It came in an instant, in a stab of brutality, unjust and violent.

Hours later, south of the River Thames in Southwark, above a shabby shop in a narrow row near a slum, a boy reluctantly rose to meet another morning. Justice lived far from here too. But today would mark the beginning of a reckoning: for him, for that death, and for many crimes that would follow.

No one had seen the Whitechapel murder.

But in that night black eyes were watching.

And in this morning … the Master was awakening.

THE UNUSUAL BOY

As the sun climbs, its rays spread light through the lifting yellow fog, filtering down upon a brown, flowing mass of people: on top hats and bonnets, heavy clothes and boots swarming on bridges and along cobblestone streets. Hooves strike the pavement, clip-clopping over the rumbling iron wheels, the drone of the crowds, and hawkers’ cries. The smell of horses, of refuse, of coal and gas, hangs in the air. Nearly everyone has somewhere to go on this late spring morning in the year of Our Lord, 1867.

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