The Lost Future of Pepperharrow

by Natasha Pulley

  ‘You said you’d all seen them?’ Thaniel said to the salt burner.

  ‘So?’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Here. What do you care?’

  ‘Would you show me?’

  ‘They don’t come just because some cracker wants them to.’

  The smell of the place was something between charcoal and seaweed. Thaniel would have liked to go closer, but the rocks were uneven and he couldn’t see a path through the burning pits. ‘Why are there ghosts here?’

  ‘If you don’t believe me you should just say that and get on your way.’

  Thaniel could imagine that if you made your living burning seaweed in these grit clouds, not many people would want to hear what you had to say about anything. ‘Did something happen here?’

  The salt burner was still at first. Thaniel waited. However odd he found the salt burner, he must have looked stranger himself. He was a full head and shoulders taller, and his coat was shroud grey.

  ‘Ask the Baron at the big house,’ the man said at last.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Started when we knew he was coming back.’ He wrung his hand once around the handle of his rake with a scraping noise of bad wood and calluses.

  ‘What does it matter that he was coming back?’

  But the salt burner had had enough. ‘Look, fuck off, you’re distracting my men.’

  Thaniel looked around. There were men all around, paused by their own fire-pits to listen, leaning on rakes. They had scarves over their faces. He could have mistaken any one of them for a ghost.

  ‘I told you they were odd people,’ Suzuki said when Thaniel traipsed back. ‘You’re covered in ash,’ he added. ‘Don’t walk it into the house.’

  Thaniel went around the courtyard instead. There was a pine tree whose middle branches were still hung with ancient, decaying prayer cards, from when the house had been a monastery. It was broad and old, the ridges in the bark as thick as saplings themselves, its boughs starting low, about chest height, and covered in dark moss. The needles shushed in the wind.

  Someone had just recently begun to use it as a holy tree again. There were six or seven new cards on bright ribbons tied to the lowest branch. A little wind clocked them together. It sounded ecclesiastical, like church bells did, or footsteps alone on a stone floor. There was nothing else he could do for Hotaru, so he took a new card from the box someone had left out and looked at the hanging ones.

  So that Midori’s headaches get better before the wedding

  So that I stop seeing the ghosts

  So that the baroness’s play goes well

  So that the ghosts go away

  So that the ghosts go away.

  All of them were in different handwriting. He took the pen tied on a string to the tree and filled in a spare card, wishing Hotaru well, and flicked a coin into the shallow pool. A good few sen coins already sparkled under the lilies.

  He jumped when something shrieked at him, then laughed at himself. It was only an owl. There was a mother and two half-grown chicks, all lined up in the roots of the pine tree. One of them was pecking at a dead crow. Other birds littered the grass; there was another glass window just above. One of the chicks came to investigate his bootlaces.

  ‘Hey! Get out!’ A girl with a broom had appeared from the side door. ‘Go on, go!’

  The owls flapped away, the little ones leaving behind a few of their last downy baby feathers.

  ‘They weren’t doing any harm,’ he protested. ‘They just wanted the birds.’

  She looked uneasily after them. ‘Owls are bad,’ she said. ‘You understand? Something bad will happen if there are too many together, they steal your luck. They shouldn’t come near a holy tree. We’re having a hell of a time keeping them away, this whole place is infested with them. Always is when the master comes home.’

  He paused. ‘I didn’t mean to spy, but I saw the cards. Did you write one of those about the ghosts?’

  She nodded. ‘There’s an evil spirit in the well, a woman.’

  Thaniel tried not to look openly unconvinced. Practically every Japanese castle and mansion he’d ever read about had some sort of story about a woman in a well. Medieval lords had seemed to think that that was where women generally belonged. ‘Was there a real lady who died in the well, then?’She looked blank. ‘You don’t know about Countess Kuroda?’

  ‘Oh,’ he said, not sure why he was surprised.

  The girl pointed through to another section of the garden. ‘Go and see,’ she said.

  The well was just beyond some gingko trees. It had been sunk deep, but there must have been some seismic change since the building of it. If the water had ever been clean, it wasn’t now. It had left a thick, vivid yellow sulphur-salt around the well walls. The water at the bottom was boiling, pouring more steam upward. It was impossible to see through, and even if you could have, it would have boiled all the flesh off a corpse before anyone could get down to take it out. It must have been forty feet down, but he could hear the hiss and roar of the water. The heat was uncomfortable, even leaning against the well lip.

  ‘I didn’t know Countess Kuroda died here,’ he said at last.

  The girl had come too. ‘Well, no one was surprised,’ she said. ‘You know how to write down Yoruji?’

  ‘Sorry?’ asked Thaniel, confused. ‘Er – yes. Evening Temple, doesn’t it mean?’

  ‘They write it like that now to posh it up. It never used to be. Yoru is tomb.’

  Disconcerted, he went back to the graveyard to bury the rest of the birds, so that Hotaru wouldn’t be in trouble. Ghosts; like at the legation. Maybe this was just a haunted country. The quicklime puffed into odd shapes as he worked. When he finished, he stuck the spade in the disturbed soil and straightened, feeling better for having done something useful, though he was much, much more tired from it than he ought to have been. Brushing off his hands, which were stiff right in the bones and crackly when he flexed them, he drifted through the nearest graves to see if there was anyone famous here.

  There was a tall, stone shrine gate to mark the boundary. It was old; there was moss around the base, and a wind-eroded fox carving. He couldn’t tell what it meant. Beyond it, the graves were set far closer together than they would have been in the West. Some of them were Christian. Others were simple columns with vertical text, scattered with the curving skeletons of old incense sticks. The moss clung to everything, and so did delicate spiders. With the constant earthquakes, some of the older stones had listed or fallen, and in turn the moss anchored them to the loamy grass.

  He stopped by one, because worked into the headstone was a sort of periscope pipe, and at the top of the pipe, a bell. People were so afraid of being buried alive that they had a bell pull put round their fingertip in the coffin. It must have been quite a fashion, because a lot of the graves had bells. On a couple of them, the bells had plainly been added a long time after the grave had been laid. Some of the little bell towers were wooden, brand new, even on graves from last century. They smelled fresh. It must have been some legal thing they had to do. He had no idea if people here believed in resurrection. Mori talked about past lives sometimes, but only in the way Thaniel talked about Hell – not with any real feeling.

  One of the graves had a kind of scope with a shutter at the top, so you could see down into the coffin. He opened the shutter. Bounced back by two mirrors, gone cloudy now, was the image of someone’s small, inoffensive skull, chin tucked down. It was oddly pleasing.

  From away at the far end of the graveyard, there came the soft, prism-coloured jingling of a single bell. He looked around to find it and frowned. She had changed her clothes, and without all the finery she was nearly unrecognisable in plain things, but the woman kneeling by the oldest graves was Takiko Pepperharrow. She was tying up a new bell. On her left, she had a whole basket of them still to go. They sang merrily when she picked them up and moved them to the next grave.

  Gripped by the need to not talk to her again, he turn
ed away.

  FOURTEEN

  By the time dinner was served, Thaniel was so tired he felt delirious, but Mori promised the food would be worth it. It was a real effort at first, but as he, Mori, and Six walked through the peculiar house, hearing other people coming down from other obscure staircases, the men still fizzy from the hunt and the women talking about the weather on the mountain, he woke up more.

  The dining room was a long, lush space with a huge view out to sea through a pair of double doors that almost opened the entire back wall. The tables were long and low with hollows underneath so you could sit on the floor, and, despite the open doors, they trapped the heat. At intervals along them were gorgeous arrangements of hothouse flowers in glass vivariums, set around pebbles and moss and half-flowering twigs. In some were tiny hummingbirds which, on close inspection, were clockwork, the silver oxidised to gleam blue. People called compliments for the hostess from all along the tables.

  Thaniel overheard a lady telling her husband that the hummingbirds had been part of Mori’s wedding present to Takiko, and that some people might do well to borrow a leaf from his book on their next anniversary.

  Thaniel closed one hand hard over his watch. Mori had made that too.

  If you were just entering into a friendly business arrangement, you did not spend hundreds of hours making ten clockwork hummingbirds for her. You bought her a nice set of china and that was that.

  The food arrived in small but beautiful portions — sushi parcels wrapped perfectly and decorated with fish eggs that looked like tiny jewels, fried rice, ordinary rice but flecked with purple grains, a kind of tofu cake that came with a pot of honey to pour across, beans still in their pods and steaming through salt crystals and spices. The servants moved fast; the kitchen was right next door and it hissed and steamed brilliantly. Rather than signalling meekly when they wanted something, the women yelled and someone came speeding along. It was nothing like he’d expected and ten times more alive than the same house would have been in England.

  ‘Explain why I’m wearing this, to eat pub food? Which I hear you insisted on?’ Mori said to Kuroda, who was sitting on his other side. Suzuki had chased him into another kimono, even more beautiful than the last, and plainly the equivalent of white tie. Everyone had them, each one made of layers and layers. Thaniel had resisted Suzuki’s best efforts – it seemed excruciatingly and indefinably disrespectful – and now he felt drab.

  ‘Not a damn thing wrong with pub food,’ Kuroda said happily. ‘And you’re wearing that so I can have a flower on each hand.’ He put one hand out to Mori and one to Takiko Pepperharrow, who was on his right. Mori looked at his hand sceptically and Kuroda laughed.

  Thaniel made a quiet fuss of Six, who was between him and Mori. Someone had put her in a kimono too. It suited her, and there were pockets in the sleeves into which a determined person could fit quite a lot of nuts.

  Mori gave him a glass of amber wine. It tasted of plums, cut with tea, and it was by far and away the nicest kind of alcohol he’d ever had. Its fumes blended well with the pipe smoke floating in the air. It wasn’t making him cough; with the open doors, the smoke was drifting outside, and the sharp nip of the oncoming sunset seeped in. The servants started to light little candles in paper lamps that hung from the rafters. Before long Thaniel had lost the thread of the conversation completely.

  Every so often a bout of flame went up along the table, because the chefs were cooking trout with blowtorches in front of people as a party trick, and new gusts of laughter and snatches of punchlines followed. Lured by the candles, fireflies drifted in. They looked like constellations that had decided to go wandering. They looped here and there through the smoky air and trundled about when they found the lights, puzzled. Some of the women caught them in their sleeves, and before long there were jars full of confused fireflies up and down the table.

  The woman on Thaniel’s other side, who turned out to be Lady Shimazu, called across a footman and made Thaniel request new dishes for at least five people in a list. When he managed it, she whooped and refilled his glass. He could see he was half being mocked, but it was funny all the same. Lady Shimazu asked him about the journey and they all chipped in when he mentioned the birds. The birds had been doing bizarre things for weeks now. Lord Shimazu’s groundsman had piles of them in the woodshed. The peasants were getting superstitious about it.

  ‘Maybe the mountain will blow,’ someone said, and they all hmmed and said ‘hope not’, not in the least as if they were talking about being incinerated by a volcano.

  They were directly opposite the lighthouse, so when it came on, the electric light strobed right across the room. It was the colour of a foghorn. He had to thump his hand against his ear to convince himself he wasn’t really hearing it.

  All the servants stopped what they were doing, straightened up, and each rang one small silver bell. The chimes sang their metallic blue through the smoke. There was a girl right behind them and to get to her bell, she dropped a cup. It fell straight into Mori’s lap and tipped steaming hot tea across his knee. He didn’t gasp. He only froze.

  People were looking round expectantly, to see who was about to speak. The lighthouse lamp went off again. Thaniel had to tip his head one way and then the other to try and chase away the after-tone.

  ‘Time for the proper wine!’ Kuroda called, to general cheers.

  Everyone seemed to accept that as the reason for the bells. Six went back to her dinner. Around the room, Kuroda’s bodyguards rotated; some switched with each other, and a couple of them left.

  Mori was staring at the cup in his lap, white and unmoving, though he must have been burned. Thaniel had never seen anyone lose colour so completely and so quickly. He looked as if a body had just fallen out of a cupboard and cracked at his feet.

  ‘Mori,’ Thaniel said quietly. He reached past Six to move the cup and give Mori his wine glass, which was empty except for a good shard of ice.

  Mori looked at it without understanding. Then, ‘Sorry. Yes. Thank you.’ He put his sleeve over his hand and tipped the ice into it for a makeshift poultice.

  ‘What the hell is going on? What are the bells for?’

  ‘It’s just the signal for Kuroda’s men to change their posts. They rotate to stay awake.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Thaniel. He frowned. While they were speaking, some new men had come in to take over from the ones who had left. ‘Made you jump, though.’

  ‘I’m just foggy from the journey,’ Mori said.

  One of the men passed just behind them. He was keying at his radio. He was better than the others Thaniel had heard, faster.

  Still in the dining room. The cup worked. He didn’t catch it.

  Thaniel snapped round, then looked back at Mori. ‘That was on purpose. She dropped the cup on purpose. They’re talking to each other about you.’

  ‘I know,’ Mori said patiently. ‘They have to protect the Prime Minister. A clairvoyant who possibly defected to the enemy is every security officer’s worst nightmare, I expect.’

  ‘But how—’

  ‘Leave them be,’ Mori said. ‘They’re just doing their jobs.’

  Thaniel swallowed down the urge to say that spilling boiling water on someone was a bit beyond the purview of most people’s jobs.

  ‘Mori,’ Thaniel said on the way back to the rooms. He was carrying Six, who was asleep. The house was creaking and counter-intuitive. Whenever his sense of direction wanted to turn left, they went right. Sometimes the shadows of other people flickered on the other side of the paper walls. He kept his voice right down. The whole house would hear a whisper. ‘About Kuroda. I heard he killed his wife.’

  He had expected a hot denial, but Mori only put his shoulders back while he thought about it. ‘He had a hand in it.’

  Thaniel lifted his eyebrows at the floor. ‘And he’s shot past slightly odd, through possible lunatic and right up to the top prize of the Napoleonometer! This is really quite extraordinary, ladies and gentlemen, Mr Mori,
you have won a coconut.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Why? If Kuroda’s in the habit of murdering people – Mori. This stuff with his bodyguards; if he decides you’re – I don’t know, if he decides to have a proper go at you—’

  Mori wasn’t looking at Thaniel. He was studying a patch of air just ahead of them, for all the world as if somebody were there, his eyes full of quiet reproof. Just for a second, Thaniel saw something like the outline of a person in the dust where it winked in the soft light.

  ‘He didn’t kill her. I did.’

  Thaniel slowed down. It was hard to believe what he’d just heard and instead his mind skipped around to find other things to think about. They had come out into a big room partitioned into sections, empty but lit with oil lamps. The nearest screen was a hell triptych that showed a woman burning in a falling carriage. The style looked ancient, but the colours were still bright. Demons swam in the smoke. It was a horrible thing, and hallucinatory, because he still couldn’t place where they were in the house. Not the kind of thing Mori would choose, either. Of course he hadn’t; it would have been her. ‘Was there a good reason?’

  ‘Depends what you mean by good.’

  ‘I’ve never known you do a bad thing,’ Thaniel said honestly.

  ‘You haven’t known me long,’ Mori pointed out.

  Thaniel didn’t think he was under special illusions about it. He’d heard plenty of shady stories. A dead cousin, a host of unlikely accidents, including the odd death of the Matron from Six’s workhouse. But at the end of it all, Mori was a quiet man who had been at war with the Haverlys’ cat for four years and made lightbulbs for his little girl. Thaniel said so.

  ‘The irritating thing about evil people is that they have a way of doing good things too,’ Mori said.

  ‘You’ve gone dramatic,’ Thaniel said.

  Mori didn’t look convinced, but he did smile. ‘Why don’t you care? You should.’

  Thaniel put his cheek against Six’s hair while he tried to think of something to say that wasn’t the truth. The truth was that he loved Mori so hopelessly he could have found a way to excuse cemeteries of dead wives. ‘None of my business,’ he said at last.