The Lost Future of Pepperharrow Page 4

  Thaniel laughed. ‘I did.’

  They set off towards St James’s Park. All he saw of other people were other flares, mostly at waist height because they belonged to the link lighters. The brambles of telegraph wires overhead were just low enough to make twisting shadows.

  By the time they came to the park gates, he had a tight headache and his lungs hurt. The little boy was coughing, though he had a neckerchief over his face. It sounded too bad to have come on today. It was cold, too; the sandy path was sparkling with frost under the boy’s flare, and so was the grass. It was just possible to make out the string of lamps that marked the lake. When they reached them, Thaniel touched the little boy’s shoulder. He didn’t think he could be older than eight, and it was another mile to the Knightsbridge gate.

  ‘I’ll go by myself from here. Two shillings and six, all right?’ The boy smelled of cigarette smoke and gin, and the sulphurous damp of the fog.

  ‘Right,’ the boy said seriously, and then coughed again. ‘Bye, mister.’

  ‘Bye.’ Thaniel stood and watched til he was out of sight, which was barely ten yards.

  Thaniel rearranged his scarf and sank his hands into his pockets.

  His left closed around some folded sheets of manuscript paper. He took a couple of pieces everywhere so he could write on the train. He had the bones of a symphony, but lately he couldn’t pull them into the right shape. It had begun strong last year, when he had taken over one end of the long bench in the workshop and worked while Mori did. Mori had never said anything, too gentlemanly to make anyone feel like they were being scrutinised, but if Thaniel turned shy over a difficult section and tried to write in the parlour instead, Mori started making tea, which might as well have been a summons, because something in Thaniel’s knees was wired to get up the second he heard a kettle sing.

  But lately there was a dampness in the part of his mind that fired when he was really writing, not just tinkering. Whenever he tried to dig down into himself for more verve, all he found was a maddening mental IOU note that said he would think about it after the post arrived. And of course, after the post arrived, there was always tomorrow’s post.And now – now, he was going to Tokyo by himself. Possibly Mori would appear if the weather was all right, but Thaniel couldn’t picture it. There was every chance he wouldn’t see him for a year. A year of waiting for the post.

  ‘Oh, shut up,’ he told himself aloud. ‘You sulky bloody mess.’

  Away over the other side of the lake, a cluster of flares hung suspended, will-o’-the-wispy. The light upset a heron, somewhere among the reeds. It made a prehistoric noise and clattered away.

  He walked for what felt like the right amount of time and then slowed again, worried that he had gone past the gate. In a tree that must have been very close, an owl hooted.

  ‘Thaniel,’ Mori’s amber voice said from a little way off. ‘It’s this way.’

  FOUR

  Thaniel swung around and didn’t believe what he’d heard until he saw him. Mori was waiting between a pair of trees in a thinner patch of fog. He didn’t look how Thaniel remembered. He never did; he had a changeling’s ability to alter nearly everything about himself depending on where and when he was. His coat had a fur collar, there was silver stitching on his gloves, and he had cut the last of the light dye out of his hair. It was back to its own glassy black.

  For a long time, it had struck Thaniel as unlikely that a clairvoyant samurai would ever bother with a gamekeeper’s son who’d left school at fourteen with all the natural refinement of a shovel. But Mori was one of those men who liked anybody willing to be tenacious with him.

  His clairvoyance was the reason for that. Not many people wanted to live with someone who knew nearly everything, or so he said.

  Mori remembered possible futures. It was just like ordinary memory, but it worked forwards as well as backwards. If something was about to happen, he knew it clearly – in just the same way anyone else knew what had just happened a minute ago. If something was only a distant, hazy possibility, he remembered it like it had happened twenty years ago, buried under all the more recent, more likely things. The second a thing was no longer possible, he forgot it. It was why he maintained that a book was nothing but a dead story, thank you, and he preferred them while they were still alive, fluttering about in someone’s mind, with lots of possible endings and interesting side bits, before the editor pulled them off and pinned it down on paper and he forgot all the good parts. Mori was still annoyed with Arthur Conan Doyle for reasons he couldn’t remember anymore.

  So it was a funny sort of acquaintance. Anyone sensible would have thought they could never have anything in common, or a solitary thing to say to each other. They didn’t even have mutual friends. But Thaniel was good at making up better endings for Sherlock Holmes stories, and Mori seemed to think that was more than enough to be getting on with.

  ‘Kei.’ For a long second Thaniel was paralysed with relief and joy, and awkwardness. ‘You came back,’ he managed.

  ‘Of course I came back,’ Mori said, laughing. ‘How are you?’

  ‘Good.’ Thaniel tried to think of something sensible. It occurred him that the polite thing would be to ask if everything was finished in Russia.

  ‘It is more or less,’ Mori said before he could ask. ‘I’m sorry I haven’t written for a bit, I was ill and I got stuck in Paris.’

  Thaniel saw Mori notice that he’d replied to something that hadn’t happened aloud yet, and the flicker of anxiety and irritation that always came with it. He didn’t like doing it, even with people who knew he could.

  ‘Ill?’ said Thaniel. Mori was either upright and going about his day, or unconscious. By ill, he didn’t mean he’d had a cold. ‘Are you all right now, what—’

  Mori looked lost and exhausted for a moment, before he shook his head and cast the look off like a scarf. ‘Yes – I just hate Paris. I’m surprised more people don’t have some sort of allergic reaction.’

  Thaniel decided to let it lie, whatever it was. ‘Only you could hate Paris.’

  ‘Thaniel, I grew up bowing to immediate family. Every random Frenchman thinks that the only proper way to say hello is indecent assault. I thoroughly hate Paris.’

  Thaniel laughed. Mori tipped his shoulder to suggest they go. They skirted a coughing family coming the other way, then set out across the grass, which crackled as the frost shards broke. If Thaniel had been king of everything, this would have been the test he gave to anyone who claimed they were clairvoyant – to walk unguided through London in fog. Mori went as fast at night and in fog as he did on bright mornings.

  He took Thaniel’s hand. They would have lost each other even a foot apart. The tea-stain haze was thicker outside the park, where Knightsbridge had funnelled it into a dense column. Thaniel squeezed his fingers. It felt safe and private. Mori pressed his knuckles and pulled him to the right, onto Filigree Street.

  Not for away, the electric lights at Harrods were bright enough to give the shop doors a halo, but Filigree Street was medieval. The houses leaned further and further towards each other in a way that always put Thaniel in mind of a row of companionable drunks, so close at the far end that even on a sunny day the road was always in shadow, and far too narrow to ride through. In the confined space, the fog closed in and concentrated itself all the more, until it furled in almost solid patterns, tentacles brushing at the tiny-paned windows. The lower floors were mainly occupied by small, exquisite shops and they were still open, each one with ten or twelve candles outlining the path to the doors. The lights were so dim they were hardly more than phantoms.A caped policeman coalesced from the murk just ahead of them, and touched his hat.

  Thaniel let go of Mori’s hand. He couldn’t help it. He felt like his skull had turned to glass and any casual observer would see all his thoughts finning around.

  Number twenty-seven was all alight. When Mori pushed the workshop door open, the clear air inside tasted sweet. In the window, the clockwork birds were all sl
eepy, though usually they fluttered about between each other’s perches in little silver and bronze flashes. The mechanical fireflies had come out instead. They pootled gold lines around the ceiling and down among the birds, which sometimes stirred in the light. Thaniel had caught one once, but he still couldn’t work out what it was that glowed inside the glass case. It was a powder of some kind which flared brighter the more it was disturbed. A sort of pollen, Mori said, from Peru, although privately Thaniel suspected he’d made that up because he was embarrassed about having invented something completely anachronistic.

  A barn owl settled on the window sill. Thaniel smiled. He’d got so used to owls haunting Filigree Street that he’d stopped noticing them, but a while ago they’d stopped coming. It was good to see one again. He had a silly feeling that it knew Mori had come back.

  Mori took off his coat. Thaniel watched him in the reflection. His image in the glass looked much more solid than Thaniel’s did, because his colours were clearer and deeper. Thaniel was the rough mock-up someone’s apprentice had folded together out of paper scraps, and Mori was the real thing, enamelled, and finished in gold.

  Six leaned out of the kitchen doorway, then came across speculatively. She was nine, or so they thought, but she was miniature for her age, and when she was worried, she tended to look like a solemn toddler. Because she hated anyone touching her any more than absolutely necessary, they kept her hair short so that no one else would have to brush it or plait it, and that made her look even younger. She had a spanner behind her ear today.‘Hello,’ said Mori, very soft, because appearing unexpectedly after six months had a fifty percent chance of eliciting no reaction from her whatsoever, but an equal chance of helpless lifelong rage. Thaniel doubted that even Mori could tell accurately which it would be. Six was built differently to the rest of the world.

  ‘Good evening.’ She said it in stiff Japanese. She was studying Mori, and clearly struggling to take in how he looked. ‘Your clothes are different,’ she said, unhappy. He was in a beautiful blue waistcoat full of silver threads that made him look like he had just that second been caught in the rain. Thaniel had never been able to tell exactly why she hated it when one of them wore anything unusual, but he had a theory that she took an evening suit or a new coat as an external sign of some dangerous internal change.

  Behind her, Osei winced on the threshold and put her hand up a conciliatory fraction to say that usually she looked after a better-trained child. Osei wasn’t a professional nanny – in fact she ran the local tea house – but she was much kinder than anyone Thaniel had interviewed from proper agencies. ‘Miss Charlotte. You should say welcome home.’

  ‘I’m Six,’ said Six. ‘Not Charlotte.’

  ‘No, you’re nine,’ Osei said. She swiped away the spanner. ‘You have to have a proper name.’

  ‘I’m wearing this because I didn’t have anything else warm enough,’ Mori said gently, just over them both. ‘Come here, I’ve got something for you.’

  Six looked unwilling but did as she was told. Quietly, Thaniel was on Osei’s side. Charlotte was Six’s real name, the one her mother had given her in the workhouse register. But the workhouse staff had numbered the children rather than bother with names. Thaniel had tried to tell her that that was awful. Six had only said blankly that if he wanted to call her Charlotte, then she would be calling him Henry.

  Mori took a box from his coat pocket and gave it to her.

  Thaniel came nearer. It was a lightbulb. Inside, the filament had been arranged into something that suggested shapes, but he couldn’t tell what they would make once they were alight.

  Six didn’t make a sound, but she rose onto the balls of her feet and put her arms up. Mori lifted her up. She didn’t want affection, just the empty lightbulb socket above him. He held her while she screwed the bulb in. When it came to life, the filament buzzed, and then flared into an octopus. It writhed and moved, swimming inside the glass. Six laughed. It was an abrupt monotonal bark. Thaniel had thought it was fake for a long time before he realised that there hadn’t been enough laughing at the workhouse for her to have a good grasp of the way it was usually done.

  ‘What do you say?’ Osei prompted her.

  ‘Arigatou gozaimashita.’

  ‘You’re welcome.’ Mori set Six down and didn’t make any more fuss of her. He had never treated her like a child, only a small adult, with the same dignity as one. Thaniel had forgotten that, but watching her now, he could see her sinking into it with a relief that gave him a pang. She took Mori’s sleeve and leaned against him. It was just at an angle that hid her from both Thaniel and Osei. Mori put his arm around her and she put her face against his waistcoat pocket. She seemed to have forgiven him for the change of colour. She was just old enough to enjoy how glamorous Mori was. Her friends at school had god-fathers who were bankers or tweedy, moth-ballish landowners in Nottinghamshire.

  Osei looked anxious and bowed to him. Mori bowed back and thanked her for helping so much. Six let go of him, but stayed close. She had stolen his watch, but she hadn’t unclipped it, which left a small slack of gold chain between them. He moved slowly so that she could keep up.

  She had used to make the very smallest clockwork parts for him. A lot of fine clockwork came from workhouses, where the children were tiny enough to make chain that might as well have been golden hairs, or dust-specks of cogs. Mori claimed not to like children, but near Christmas in the first year Thaniel had lived here, he had brought Six home and then refused to take her back again, and that was that.

  Thaniel found a lamp for Osei, then felt guilty when he looked at the fog again. She was only the size of a link lighter. She always refused to stay for dinner.

  ‘I’m just going to walk back with Osei,’ Thaniel said over the murmur of Japanese from Six.

  Mori straightened up. He looked like he might have meant to say something, but as Osei passed him, with a polite nod, he frowned and leaned back like he’d caught brimstone on her. Thaniel widened his eyes at him to ask what the matter was. Osei didn’t smell of brimstone. Her clothes just drifted jasmine through the air. Mori shook his head.

  When Thaniel looked back at the window, Mori was taking Six through to the kitchen. They walked still linked by his watch chain. Despite the grit in the air, Thaniel felt like he could breathe properly again, but he could tell it was temporary. When he got back, he was going to have to talk about Tokyo – about who would take Six, about whether any of them would see each other, everything – and this delicate, filigree peace would break.

  It only took twenty minutes to see Osei home, and when he came back, Mori had already cooked. The heat from the range curled up to meet him at the dented steps down into the kitchen from the workshop. Sitting on the stove and soaking up the heat was Mori’s octopus, mechanical, like everything else. With bright steel casing over his clockwork, Katsu looked like a mercury spill, except for the copper wheel that had replaced one of his tentacles. He had disappeared for a while once, but a fortnight or so later he had trundled back, minus a leg, and Mori had given him a temporary wheel while he made a new leg. When the time had come to fit it, Katsu had hidden on top of a cupboard, and whenever anyone brought up repairs, he disappeared until the subject moved on. Mori thought that something had been skewed in his clockwork. Thaniel was nearly sure that Katsu liked the wheel. It improved his cornering.

  Thaniel touched one of his tentacles to be sure he wasn’t too hot, then picked him up and gave him to Six, who had just sat down after setting the table. She put her nose against Katsu’s and did a silent fish impression. After such a long time away, it struck Thaniel as freshly odd to have a pet octopus, but it did make sense really. Real pets were out, because Mori didn’t like things that couldn’t look after themselves. You couldn’t have fluffy clockwork, and a clever snake would have been sinister.

  There was food already on the table. It was chicken and proper rice, proper vegetables, proper soup, and a box of beautiful French cakes it would be a shame to ea
t. One had a marzipan octopus on it.

  As he sat down, Thaniel had to twist away and cough into his hands. Six studied him.

  ‘Are you dying?’ she asked. ‘People who cough like that always die.’

  He managed to smile. He was trying and failing to think of a way to mention Tokyo that wouldn’t land on the table like an anvil. ‘No, petal. I don’t mean to.’

  ‘Nobody does. Mori,’ she said, untangling Katsu. ‘If Dad dies, must I go back to the workhouse?’

  Thaniel choked. It was the sort of question she asked at least twice a year and although it upset him more each time, he had never been able to find a way to convince her that in some things, people didn’t change their minds. ‘Six, that’s ridiculous, of course you’re not going back; you’re never going back.’

  ‘No it isn’t ridiculous. Mori might not want me,’ she said reasonably.

  ‘Six—’ he began. He had explained to her before – several times – that she belonged to them both, and the only reason she was legally his was that the registry office would sooner arrest Mori than let him become the legal guardian of a white child. She always ignored him. Even though it was Mori who had taken her from the workhouse and Mori she went to for justice and reassurance, she never seemed able to let go of the nagging worry that any link she had with him was unofficial. Thaniel didn’t blame her.

  ‘Whether I want you or not is irrelevant,’ said Mori. Thaniel looked up slowly. ‘You can’t take children back to a workhouse without a receipt. I haven’t got one for you anymore.’

  Six frowned. ‘But some of the boys used to come in and out nearly every day. For school.’

  ‘With receipts.’ He gave her some rice. ‘The octopus fed yours to the koi.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said, and seemed satisfied.

  Thaniel felt wry. It had never been a secret that Mori had the comprehensive Six instruction manual, although it was annoying not to have deduced more than a quarter of it without him.