heather parry CARRION CROW
Gothic gem'
Kaliane Bradley Masterful. I loved it'
JULIA ARMFIELD
Carrion Crow
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Carrion Crow
Heather Parry
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First published in Great Britain in 2025 by Doubleday an imprint of Transworld Publishers
Copyright © Heather Parry 2025
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for Madeleine, a wise owl so young
Empedokles says the talon is the crystallization of the tendon, the nail is the wintered nerve.
– Robert Bringhurst, Hachadura VII
1
the French are noted for their skill in making forcemeats
Marguerite Périgord had been confined for the sake of her wellbeing. That’s what her mother had said, on that foggy February morning when she took Marguerite up the stairs with a small stack of books and an armful of bed linen and settled her into the cramped attic of the family home.
Marguerite, Cécile’s eldest daughter, was on the brink of putting herself out into the world, on the brink of marrying herself off to a man, and Cécile felt it necessary to bless her daughter with everything she knew about being such a thing – a woman, married to a man. There are some facts about the world that only your mother can teach you. So into the attic Marguerite had gone, climbing the stairs towards her promised freedom, and she would stay there until she had learned the lessons that would prepare her for the real world, the lessons that only a mother could teach. Such a queer girl. It was for the sake of her own wellbeing.
The Périgord family lived in a smart house in Chelsea, a residence befitting their blood, which was aristocratic, as
Cécile would often remind them, and French aristocratic at that, which was the best type. Marguerite had never lived anywhere but the Chelsea house; she was born within its walls. Cécile had expelled her eldest child in her bedroom on the first floor, screaming into a pool of her maternal blood while holding the hands of staff who’d delivered their own babies in tin baths, alone. After her long recovery and countless fruitless efforts to expand the family, more than six years later came Louis, and after that, in quick fashion, Thérèse, and then there were no more children because there was no more husband at all. From then it had been the four of them: the wellborn Périgords.
The family home was on a street called Cheyne Row. It had three storeys above ground and a room perched at the top. A tall, thin house, like a top hat, with a secretive underworld in which all the work had, formerly, been done. In the basement, a front and back kitchen, a larder, a coal cellar; an old well came up in the front kitchen and had to be covered, for the odours that came up from the ground were offensive to the nose and inappropriate for the preparation of food. On the ground floor, a large reception area where, in the better days, Cécile would take her guests, where the good china watched from highly polished furniture, where the family had received the man whom Marguerite intended to marry and served him their most expensive tea. On the first floor, the cisterns, a grand bedroom for Cécil, with wrought-iron balcony front and back; on the second, a bathing room that held a magnificent eagle-clawed tub. On the third floor, a bedroom for Louis, and one for Thérèse, and the room in
which Marguerite had previously lived. A moderate and untended garden reached out from the backside of the house, and in it were trees as old as the Périgord family, twisted inwards and heavy with their own weight, their branches lowering with each passing year. Above all this, Marguerite was now cocooned.
The attic was the best place for her; it was self-contained and petite, and so small as to be easily kept neat at all times. The hatch into the attic was covered by a piece of flooring that could be pushed upwards and aside when her mother wished to enter from below. To do so, Cécile would stand on the disfigured stairs beneath, bent and curled like the bodies dredged up from the bed of the Thames. Cécile had covered the floor around the hatch in thick rugs, once gold and rose and plum, now greyed and beiged with years of footfall; the rugs overlapped, as if to permit no sound from the attic. For rest, Marguerite had an iron-framed bed on which lay two pillows, feather-thin, for the straightness of the neck, and a cover for all seasons. At the end of Marguerite’s bed was a desk of very thick wood, yellow-brown, with knots engraved on the front of each wide leg. This was Marguerite’s primary torment, for she wished to sit at the desk and rewrite her Hugo stories, or draw a picture of her brother and sister, or press the bodies of the small insects that made their way out of the attic room’s woodwork, but she could not. Affixed to the desk was a black and gold sewing machine with a stabbing needle and a heavy wheel, the mechanisms of which crowded the underneath, making it painful to sit at and awkward to avoid.
In the far corner from the bed head was a tiny pedestal sink, by Doulton Sanitary Works of Lambeth and proudly
marked so, and on the tops of the nickel taps were the words chaud and froid. The sink’s presence in the attic, almost certainly a late addition to the house, suggested that the space had previously been prepared for someone’s residence there, but the sink was unreliable, giving out only a trickle and often running filthy for days at a time. Next to the sink, Marguerite had a small area in which to relieve herself.
From the other side of the sink ran a wall which was mostly left free, as the hatch, through which her mother would appear, was placed directly in the middle of it. In the corner opposite the sink, however, she had a shelf of tidy books, the pages of which had become wet-weathered and ripped with the ferocity of repetition. Her mother encouraged her to read the works of Victor Hugo, which she said had been written by a fine Frenchman who knew about families like theirs. Marguerite tolerated these huge books, one of which ran to almost a thousand pages over three volumes, by selecting small sections, reading a scene or two and remaking the world in her head in a manner she would better enjoy, adding decadence and some fun for the characters. In the books of Victor Hugo there were a million dreary half-worlds to remake for yourself.
The other book Cécile encouraged her daughter to engage with religiously was Mrs Beeton ’s Book of Household Management. The copy on the attic shelf was the one that had been given to Cécile on the event of her own marriage, and within its worn pages were notes scribbled in pencil as to the reception of the many dishes that had been served in the Périgord household over the years since: taken very well
by Mr and Mrs Lincolnshire alongside a slice of tongue; Cook reports that this jelly did not set, perhaps due to an excess of blood in the veal; made young Louis vomit bile. Cécile held firm in her conviction that, mistress of a house or simply a wife needing to feed her working husband, every woman stood to learn something useful from Isabella Beeton. During her time in the attic, Marguerite had found this to be incontrovertibly true.
On the floor underneath her bookshelf was a set of castiron scales in black, with a gold bowl on one side and on the other a circular platform where weights would sit. There were only two weights left, the two heaviest of the set, and these were not intended for Marguerite, but were a remnant of one of Cécile’s tempers; Thérèse, when she had been no more than four, had dropped the weights into the bath and caused the ceramic to crack and split, after which both weights and scales had been banished to the attic, as was Thérèse for two days, or perhaps it was three. Poor Thérèse had cried for the entirety of her confinement, and it was only when she grew silent, having fallen faint due to lack of food, that Marguerite herself had stormed the top of the house and rescued her. Cécile had carried on her day as if nothing was amiss, and from somewhere she found the money to have the ceramic on the bathtub mended, though it was never as grand afterwards, and not one of the children mentioned it again. But the scales remained in the attic, tarnished with badness.
The attic had no windows. There was only a small skylight where the two sides of the roof met, no more than the width and height of a book, so that Marguerite might acquire the upper-class pallor that Cécile said she needed.
She had spent too much of her youth in the sun. Her attic space was far from the kitchens, so she might shed some of the childhood weight around her face and arms. On the walls of the attic were portraits of Queen Victoria, three in total, and, pinned tidily, a few of Marguerite’s favourite letters from her betrothed, and behind them the deeply embossed repeating patterns of the Lincrusta-Walton paper, installed some years prior with grand fanfare throughout the home, Cécile declaring, with assistance from a pamphlet, that it would not warp or be eaten by worms, was not cold in winter or hot in summer like stone or terracotta and was impenetrable and resistant to wet. Above Marguerite’s head there was a ceiling which rose to a point, or rather which sank at either edge of the room, making it difficult for her to stand near the walls. The paint covering the wood above her had flaked in places, and through the timber many-legged insects had burrowed, leaving small holes through which draughts sometimes blew.
At the head of Marguerite’s bed, sitting on a small set of drawers between mattress and shelf, there was a creature dead and stuffed and mounted on a wooden plinth. It was a black bat, and it stood straight up instead of hung, its head tilted upwards as if howling, its wings half mast, its tiny claws lifted in celebration, and at the bottom of its strange legs were the feet of a small duck. If you lifted the creature into the light you would see that its wings were skin-paper, and if you ran your finger pad over its face you could feel its tiny teeth. Its borrowed feet were spread with dark grey flaking between each toe, a heel appendage at the back to help it stand, and Marguerite could fathom no reason for this debasement of both animals other than that the artist
had needed to keep the artwork upright and thought he could improve on each of God’s creations. Still, she could not part with it. Its progenitor had been a gift from her grandfather to her mother, the replacement passed on to Marguerite, and it reminded her that you can throw away the rules of life and let your creative instinct take over; that you can put strange, unfitting parts together and create something atypical but beautiful, something truly unique.
Marguerite’s engagement – the seed of her confinement – was to a solicitor, a Mr George Lewis, thirty-five years her senior and hailing from the north. He was a man who had never entered into marriage before and had fathered no children. Raising himself up from his beginnings, he had learned his trade and invested in turning himself into the kind of person that would inspire love in a woman, rather than earning enough money to buy his way into someone’s bed. Though decades separated them, Marguerite thought his grey hair attractive, and noticed the muscles of his calves through his trousers, and had often found herself thinking about the broadness of his hands around her forearms at night, how she might feel comfort there, above anything else. On his shoulders he carried the weight of the law and if his clients could not afford his services he discounted them, sometimes to almost nothing at all, and each time he did this he increased the price of his work for those with money. He had several apprentices, some of whom lived in the lower rooms of his house without paying a penny, and she had seen him in the street giving money to beggars and those without shoes, the poor unwashed that her mother bade them turn away from. Marguerite had
first noticed Mr Lewis at the London Zoo, with a boy she soon understood to be his nephew. Noticing his gentle way with the boy in his charge, and the way he gave him his full attention, she had followed the two for a good while, then seized upon a moment in which the man was explaining the thylacine to his nephew. He was only a mite taller than her, and wider at the hips, and held himself straight, though his shoulders drooped from working over his books. His lips were wet and his hair was kept tight to his head, and he had pale wrinkles where, she imagined, he had squinted into the sun for the sake of feeling the heat on his face.
‘There exists a creature that laughs,’ said he as the child listened, rapt, ‘called a hyena. And one called a wolf, which is a wild version of the common dog. This creature here, from Tasmania in the Antipodes – they say he is a cross between the two.’
‘A laughing dog, then?’ ventured Marguerite, drawing the stranger’s attention abruptly from the boy. He smiled quickly at the challenge in her eyes, and her forwardness.
‘He is not laughing,’ said the boy.
‘Perhaps,’ said Mr Lewis, conspiratorially, ‘that’s because we have not told him a joke.’
Marguerite went to answer, a smart comment on her lips, but the boy took against the conversation – refusing to be caught in the silly fantasy of adults, for he knew much better – and led his uncle away from both Marguerite and the thylacine. But before they departed, Mr Lewis had asked her name and given his own, and as he bowed his head courteously his eyes had smiled, and something like curiosity had played upon his lips. She watched him roll up
his trouser legs and wade with his nephew into a pool so they could crouch and better see the crabs and snails and things that live under the water in puddles, not caring that the wetness was creeping up the fabric at his knees and his jacket was dangling dangerously close to the water level. He was older, but for Marguerite he held the potential of joy, in more ways than one, and that was something that hadn’t existed in the Périgord household, or in Marguerite’s vision for the future, for all too long. Marguerite knew she would marry him.
While younger men had tried to grab her in the streets, had pushed her up against horses and had thought themselves deserving of affections for nothing more than a bunch of flowers cheaply bought from a woman on the next road, Mr Lewis courted her with tales of strange cases and readings from books. He sent fresh scones to the Cheyne Row house to treat the whole family, and on visiting the house he brought good sherry, napkins embroidered by his two beloved sisters, and, with Cécile’s grudging permission, played the piano, which hadn’t been touched since their father’s disappearance. He was merry with Marguerite’s siblings – he taught Louis to play pontoon and showed Thérèse some sleight of hand, and by the time he left both of them begged Marguerite to marry him, though he had not yet asked. When the proposal came by couriered letter Cécile took it gently out of her hand and told her the marriage would not work; he was not of the same breeding as their family, and it would save Marguerite the ignominy of a divorce to politely turn him down now. But it was Mr George Lewis that Marguerite now hung her life plans on, Mr George Lewis who was the key
to her happiness, and so after weeks of pained silence at Cheyne Row, during which Thérèse and Louis barely spoke and Marguerite packed a suitcase in case she was sent away in disgrace, Cécile quietly re-read the letter, took some books from their sparse shelves, and promised her eldest daughter that she would prepare her for her marriage; she would teach the girl all the lessons she needed to learn.
Marguerite had not relished the prospect of weeks in the attic, with its draughts and its spiders and long days with nothing to do, but Cécile had spent a day arranging things that might entertain her daughter in the correct ways, and Marguerite recognized that it was the attic or nothing. Freedom always comes at a price, that much she had learned, and a confinement was a small sacrifice for the reward of being able to set the rest of her life exactly as she wanted it. She sent a letter to Mr Lewis, saying she would need a brief engagement, and that she would be unable to see him until she had allowed her mother time enough to prepare her in whatever way Cécile saw fit. And now the couple communicated solely through letters, his affections more muted on some occasions and more blunt on others, but each time Cécile brought a letter to her daughter, Marguerite was renewed, and applied herself to her books, and quoted Mrs Beeton’s thoughts on yeast dumplings and carving game, and ate her next meal in a manner restrained and delicate, and thought of the day she would marry her rolled-up-trouser husband, and her life could truly start.
But until then, she must wait. Sometimes, on long afternoons alone with her books, Marguerite would stare at the
browning pages and listen to the world outside her cloying chrysalis, the world into which she would eventually emerge, a fully formed fluttering thing with sheer wings and soft-landing feet. Below her Louis and Thérèse went on with their lives, too young to worry yet about the manner of their marriages, still concerned with their schooling and the fashions that they hoped would not pass them by. Friends were not often welcomed into the house, for Cécile found few families that she felt she could trust, or whose children could be expected to keep to the standards of a Périgord home (though this could also be said of her own children). So the house remained quiet, with its staff already whittled down, over time, from many to just the one cook, who came in the mornings from her house nearby, and a cleaner, who lived in her own home some miles away and trundled in on the carriages, and Louis and Thérèse did not interrupt their sister’s preparations for marriage, never knocking at her attic hatch or shouting her name from the top of the staircase, nor bringing her sweets or other distractions that might make her preparations last even longer than they must.
Likewise, London had not waited for her appearance; it had not asked where she had gone, the red-cheeked, blackhaired girl who used to run around its streets, who grew from a baby into a woman within its embrace. London went on regardless of Marguerite, without Marguerite, forgetting Marguerite. Hooves and carriages clattered across the cobblestones. Messengers shouted their deliveries. Children tripped and smashed their noses on the pavements, shouted at by their nannies. Marguerite thought she could hear the howling cries of families in Battersea Park
scudding across the Thames, or the educated men walking in the physic garden, or perhaps even the rattling chests of the terminal inmates at the consumption hospital in Brompton. But more intensely than any of these things she could smell the shit-stink of the Thames, the deadly sewer on which boats brought wealth from abroad. The year she was born there had been six feet of pure filth on top of the water, Cécile had told her, and when Marguerite was nursing, the streets of the city had been so hot that the river fell and the excrement stuck to its walls and the whole of London choked on the poison smell of its own productions. Her first steps were taken with the stench of the river waiting just at the door; her siblings were born into it too. As they all grew, and found cause to spend more time indoors, newspapers reported that new measures were in place, that London was cleaner, that the people within it were now spared from all of that. And it seemed to be so; the fug of excrement had lifted, for a while, and Londoners had breathed a little easier. But in her attic Marguerite could once again smell the disgust of the Thames; she went to sleep with the miasma pooling on her pillow and woke to the fresh assault of human waste, having dreamed of cholera and dyspeptic expulsions, and sometimes, if she was lucky, her wedding.
But Marguerite’s confinement was for the sake of her wellbeing. She had been named for a princess of France, with all the traits and impulses that came with it. She could not marry until her mother was sure she would not make the mistakes that she, herself, had made, that had taken a young woman and left her bereft, decaying, inside Cheyne Row.
2
divisions of birds
Marguerite was woken by a small square of paint and a ragged nugget of wood falling from the ceiling above her onto her face. The wood had been painted white many years ago, perhaps before any of the current Périgord children were born, and through sluggish time had turned an uneven sort of grey which looked yellow in places. It had cracked and in parts stained, and Marguerite had found that if she scratched at it, hoary splinters would flake off, then wet chunks would come away at the edges, as if the wood had curdled and turned to white cheese. It was the colour and texture of her mother’s flesh. She pulled one of these moist chunks from her forehead; it left a residue on her skin. She lifted her stiff nightgown and wiped the feeling off. The piece of wood was thicker than the others she’d pulled from the ceiling over the course of her confinement, when her hands had such energy that only scratching would help. Sitting up, and exposing herself to the cold of the morning, she could see that the hole left by this falling nugget went almost through the wood; she poked a finger, the
splinters scratching at the sides of her first knuckle, and with only a slight push it emerged into the space between the rafters and the roof proper. Marguerite hooked her finger and tugged; rotten wet timber came away and fell onto the bed. Another tug and the space was about the size of an eye, or the tight fist of an angered marsupial (she had seen several at the zoo). She could now push two fingers inside, and exploring around the space felt the layers and layers of fabric that had been pushed inside by workmen to fight off the cold, and then a sharp beak pecked at her fingers.
There was a great flapping inside the ceiling. Quickly Marguerite recovered herself and pushed her face towards the wood. Soft, half-formed black feathers moved within, then settled. Marguerite pulled one of them from the wet tissue of her eye, and as her vision adjusted to the dark of the space she could make out its shape: upright but slightly cowed, dark as the night and twitching in consternation. She saw flashes of brown and a pale chest; a lark Alouette
she thought, this surely is Alouette a lark. But her sight settled, and she could see that it was neither woman nor songbird; the creature was black and solidly grown. It was a carrion crow, the type that gathered in the shadowy parts of the city and made them their own, the type of animal so ubiquitous they become nearly invisible, passing among the people almost entirely unobserved. But this was a particularly attractive bird, proud and shifting, energetic from tip to toe, conscious of being under Marguerite’s gaze but not intimidated by it. The crow
stood on one of the rafters directly above the hole Marguerite had made and, as she watched, it shuffled sideways, pressing its body into the space where one piece of timber (horizontal) met another (vertical), and it turned its face, coquettish. What a strange creature, up here in the Périgord house. There must have been a loose roof tile, or a gap in the material somewhere, or had another piece of timber rotted through above Marguerite, welcoming the crow into her home?
The rattle of the attic hatch startled Marguerite, and her hands scrabbled to push the wet wood back where it came from. It was an action born of experience; things could be taken from her so quickly, so thoughtlessly. Any damage in the attic could be used against her, any small pleasure turned into a vice. By the time Cécile appeared through the hatch, Marguerite had moved one of the portraits of the queen and pinned it over the hole, hiding both the carrion crow and any damage that Marguerite could be said to have caused. Her mother would suspect nothing of Victoria.
Cécile brought a tray up to her eldest daughter; it held several small plates, a glass of white wine, a letter addressed in fine script to Miss Marguerite Périgord. Underneath the envelope was a single sheet of paper, an empty envelope and a pen. Marguerite settled herself on the bed as if she had just woken, and Cécile wiped her white-gloved hand along the sheet, pulling it tight and straight before she sat on it. She placed the tray on Marguerite’s bed and handed her one of the plates; Marguerite lifted the carved silver spoon and set about her meal. Today, it was a single egg poached in a heavy cream, the body of the egg gelatinous, the cream
set, the yolk hardened throughout. Marguerite was learning to establish within herself the reserved palate and physical restraint of the married lady. She had been told that men found greed distasteful in their wives and it was likely that Marguerite, marrying down, would have to make do, at times, with rather less food than she might otherwise be used to. Yet Cécile could not bring herself to serve her children the peasant food on which she had been raised; she had spoiled her children as they grew, having their cook fill the house with baked biscuits and roasted birds of all kind – at least, in the early years of their youth, when such things were still available to them. These years had made Marguerite the hungry type, and if she was determined to marry a man of more humble origins then she would have to make do with less. The meals served to her in the attic were upper-class dishes, scaled down (thought Marguerite, in the words of Mrs Beeton, under such circumstances, the stomach soon becomes deranged ). Cécile stroked her daughter’s long hair, pulled matted parts through with the tips of her fingers, while Marguerite cut tiny portions of the egg free with the spoon and brought them to her mouth.
‘Neatly, dear,’ said Cécile, from beneath the silk handkerchief she kept over her mouth during these visits. Marguerite stopped eating to kiss her mother’s hand, seeing her mother shiver against either the attic’s chill or her daughter’s touch, then took more cream up in the silver spoon. As her daughter ate, Cécile took Mrs Beeton’s book from the small shelf on the wall and flicked to the General Observations on Eggs:
‘Eggs are employed in a very great many articles of