The truth was, such predictions, supposedly read in cards a person chose, both fascinated me and made me uneasy.
What would I learn? Was it possible the cards would tell me about my family? About my friend at the Foundling Hospital?
A person I might encounter? Prosperity? Adventure? Travel to a foreign place?
She reached for the deck of cards, her coffee cup wobbling as she almost knocked it over. I reached out as I had before for that vase.
There was a faint warmth at the tips of my fingers. The cup immediately settled into place with hardly a ripple of the coffee it held.
We exchanged a look. It was there again, the same as before, only stronger this time. She smiled at me.
“Ye must ask a question for the cards,” she began. “Then hold it in yer thoughts.”
A question. Perhaps the one that was there from the beginning. Why was Dory murdered?
“Do ye have it in yer thoughts?” Elizabeth asked. “Then cut the deck.”
She gathered the cards once more, then fanned them out across the top of the table. She looked up.
“Now, ye must pick seven cards, and keep them face down.”
I selected the cards one by one, stopped, then began again. When I had picked seven, she arranged them in a V-shape.
“The pattern reveals the past and then the future,” she explained and turned over the first card at one side of the V.
“The past—you have travelled far, but there are journeys yet to take.”
I only half listened as an icy rain had begun and pelted the parlour window.
“You are looking for answers that will be revealed quite soon,” she continued. “But with some sadness that you will overcome.” She turned over four more cards. “You have a gift of knowledge...” She continued to the last card.
“A man is revealed.” I looked up to find her watching me with a secretive smile. “He is already known to you and will be very important.”
Mr. Elias? Was there more?
“The card reveals...”
A different sound caught my attention, a rattling sound on the glass. I left the table and crossed the parlour to the window.
It was there, persistent, urgent, a single crow on the window ledge that looked back at me with a sharp black eye and the warning was there as clearly as if the bird had spoken.
“What is it dear? The weather? It’s either rain or fog this time of the year,” Elizabeth lamented as I looked down into the street below and saw a man, short of height in that long coat.
I didn’t need to see more to know there were feathers down the lapels of that coat—bright blue feathers—as he approached the entrance then disappeared from view.
The crow was gone into the night sky. As well as the man, yet I had no doubt where he had gone. I glanced about the flat, clean and well-kept, yet much the same as any other tenement across the city. With a basic key lock on the door that could be opened if an intruder chose. Mr. Elias was inside the building even now, making his way up the stairs.
“We need to leave,” I told her and saw the surprise on her face.
“What is it?”
I turned toward Kip, still asleep on the settee.
“Someone is coming—we need to leave now!” I heard the urgency in my voice as I went to the settee and wakened Kip.
“We need to go.” I told him as Elizabeth still hesitated. I pulled the blanket from him.
“It’s the man from the Close,” I told him.
