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“She thought he ‘looked foreign,’” Crow said, still exasperated hours later. “By which we all know she meant she thought he was a Jew.
I got to my feet, using the boxes beside me for support, and immediately found myself festooned with cobwebs. “Forgive me, Arachne,” I said reflexively, even though the spider who spun this web was surely long dead; it had been drilled into me as a child to be courteous to spiders.
I ate lunch alone; Barrymore was grimly silent. I felt as if I had fallen into Wuthering Heights.
Sir Henry told me about the buffalo spirits of the American plains, and I talked about the ghosts in Afghanistan.
I knew that I had to, that it was important, but the reason made no sense, and the moor was full of scents to follow and prey to catch and a thousand thousand fabulous things that I would not be able to hear or see or smell if I changed.
“I missed you,” Crow said, almost indignantly. I startled myself by saying, “I missed you, too,” and it was worth it for his smile.
He snapped his fingers, and Teddy came galumphing across the room—I can find no better verb than Mr. Dodson’s—from where he had been investigating under the bed.
How is it that you receive an Imperial pension and continue to dress as a man?”
“I’m not a man,” I said, “but I’m not a woman, either. I’ve masqueraded as a man far longer than I wore long skirts and corsets, and I don’t think I could go back. I certainly couldn’t go back to the gossip and embroidery that are a woman’s lot.”
“There’s an anti-Registration movement, you know. The ladies marching for the right to vote march for occult rights, too.”
“I am the very Napoleon of crime,” I said sotto voce to Crow.
