Raven with red rose on upper arm

He took a perch on the bare ash outside the high window, the one with the cracked pane, and he watched the dancers go round. Teddy Oakes played sax in the band that year, and every Saturday he wore a red rose in his lapel, cut fresh from the florist's barrow on Mill Lane. The raven had never danced in his life. He couldn't have, with feet like that. But he knew a thing or two about wanting what you can't hold, and he watched that rose the way a man watches the last train.

Then the rose went brown at the edges, and Teddy stopped wearing it, and the barrow stopped coming. By February there were no roses left in the whole town. So Corvin flew back over the moor, three days there and three back, and came in through the skylight on the last waltz with one bloom clamped in his beak, stem and all, green leaves torn and bleeding a little sap.

He dropped it at the feet of Nell Haworth, who had been crying in the cloakroom because her partner had gone home with another girl. She picked it up, looked at the bird, and laughed so hard she had to sit down. Nobody in that hall ever learned where the rose came from. Corvin never came back inside, but every Saturday after that the band played one slow number for the bird on the ash tree, and nobody on Pier Street has ever asked why.