The Lost Future of Pepperharrow

by Natasha Pulley

  ‘If you know someone who can do it, I’ll put it under cleaning. The legation can cover it.’

  There was a long quiet.

  ‘Unless there’s … something else?’

  More quiet. The girls looked uncomfortable.

  Vaulker banged on the door. ‘Really, this is unacceptable. It’s half-past nine and not even the first sign of breakfast. There are fourteen hungry people here. Mrs Nakano, even toast would be greatly appreciated, if you wouldn’t mind?’

  ‘I never know what he’s saying,’ the old lady said, devastatingly unworried. ‘But I suppose we’d better get going. Can you tell him it would be easier to cook rice? He always wants bread.’

  Thaniel relayed it.

  Vaulker only looked annoyed. ‘No. Pardon me if I don’t want to go entirely native. Do you have flour? Water? Yes? Marvellous.’

  The girls must have understood, because they got up at once and picked up flour packets. Both of them hesitated before they sprayed a handful each over the worktop.

  ‘Sorry about your wife,’ Thaniel said to Nakano, and then bowed to the old lady. Vaulker, he noticed, rolled his eyes. ‘Thank you, ma’am.’

  ‘Yes, yes, you can come back,’ she said, mostly into her cigarette. ‘Good manners make up wonderfully for being ugly, don’t they, girls?’

  ‘Mum!’

  Thaniel laughed.

  Vaulker tapped his fingertips on the door to make him hurry up.

  Thaniel pulled the door to behind him and backed Vaulker down the little stairs more forcefully than he needed to.

  ‘They need a raise,’ he said.

  ‘A raise, why?’

  ‘Because you’re not the easiest person to get on with, and I think they’re talking about ghosts as a polite excuse to get out of here and work at one of the other legations. I think someone saw something once and the rest latched onto it. I’m bringing in an exorcist, so they won’t be able to use that particular excuse anymore, but they’ll probably find another one if you don’t give them a reason to stay.’

  ‘How dare you!’

  ‘See? You’re prickly,’ said Thaniel.

  ‘You’re insubordinate!’

  ‘I’m doing my job,’ Thaniel said.

  Vaulker sighed. ‘How much is an exorcist going to cost?’

  ‘I don’t know, but if it solves the problem for a bit then it’s worth it.’

  ‘Or I could sack them all,’ Vaulker said flatly.

  ‘It’s New Year. You wouldn’t be able to hire anyone else.’

  ‘A raise and an exorcist, that’s your official recommendation, is it?’

  ‘Yes, that’s what I’m wiring to Whitehall now. Have you got a telegraph I can use?’

  ‘Of course, but no telegraphist, because he left after he said he saw a samurai ghost ride through the front lawn. You’ll have to go to the post office.’ He might as well have said, ‘check’.

  ‘No, it’s all right, I was a telegraphist for years,’ Thaniel said, having fun now.

  Vaulker must nearly have been too, because he snorted rather than lose his temper. ‘Of course you were.’

  SIXTEEN

  Thaniel got back to Yokohama towards three, and by then the idea of collapsing in his room and talking to no one but the piano had regained its shine. Although it hadn’t been far, he was exhausted. The ordinary effort of getting to the right platform and the right train was four times magnified when it was all in another language on a shaky tannoy. The stations were laid out differently too. If you went along one local platform for long enough, you ended up at another one that was on its way to Shinjuku, a couple of miles away, and on the same platform five minutes later – to the second –there was a sleeper train going in the opposite direction. In the end he’d had to guess and hope he wasn’t going to Osaka.

  At Yoruji, he sat at the piano and worked properly for the first time in months. He drew the music where he couldn’t be bothered to write out each note and it came out in chiaroscuro, like one of those old candlelight paintings. Lately he’d started to really notice that the more a piece of music looked like a painting or sculpture, the better it was. Symphonies had contours and angles, and where something sounded wrong, it was always because a movement or a phrase was sticking out in a funny way and you had to poke it back into shape. It was very refreshing to be able to see the shape. He hadn’t, not for months.

  The weather had turned freezing, though, so he had to stop before long to hide under the kotatsu.

  Kotatsu were the best thing anyone had invented on either side of the Pacific. Under the table was a pit in the floor, lined with velvet, and in its base was a grille. Below the grille was a fire in a tiny stove. The heat built up under the table, trapped by its thick cloth. You could sit with your heels resting on the grille without being burned, which meant that it was more than possible to keep warm even with the sliding doors wide open. The only downside was that if you sat completely under the tablecloth, like a cat or a child might, you would die of carbon monoxide poisoning, but when Thaniel had asked about that, Mori’s stance was that if children never faced any household hazards, they would only grow up useless and frightened of scissors.

  Mori came around the sliding door. He was looking for something, and after a moment it was clear he hadn’t noticed there was anyone else in the room. Thaniel smiled. He was naturally unobtrusive, but he’d never been invisible. He waited to see how long it would last. He wasn’t hidden behind anything.

  Mori climbed the ladder against the high bookcase. He leaned to make it roll and caught the edge of the next shelf along, and took down a book that looked like it might be ghost stories – the cover was black and the figure on the cover was chalky and strange – which Six liked when she wasn’t reading the generator manual. Once he had it, he stayed on the ladder without holding on, the book propped against a rung while he leafed through.

  ‘Tea?’ said Thaniel, because it had passed fun and become spying.

  Mori dropped the book. His hands and shoulders flickered upward as if they’d been at one of those technology fairs and Thaniel had applied an electrode to the top of his spine.

  ‘Christ, you look like you’ve seen a ghost,’ Thaniel said.

  Mori smiled. He looked shaken. ‘You know when you think you’ve left a cup of tea on the desk, you can walk straight past it even if it’s doing a jig on the kitchen table?’

  ‘Where did you think you’d left me?’

  Mori’s expression opened helplessly. Thaniel saw his mechanisms move as he tried to think of a reasonable lie.

  ‘I was in Tokyo until just now,’ Thaniel put in, puzzled. ‘At the legation.’

  ‘Right,’ Mori said gratefully. ‘How was it?’

  ‘Haunted. I think the staff are just being polite about finding an excuse to work at the Chinese legation because the British Secretary’s an idiot, but we’ve called an exorcist. People are – really superstitious here, aren’t they? I’ve heard three ghost stories already and two were from this house.’

  ‘Mm,’ said Mori, looking like he was trying to work up the will to say something else. He was watching Thaniel hard, studying him inch by inch. ‘It’s a strange house.’

  ‘Am I growing new bits I shouldn’t be?’ Thaniel asked.

  ‘What? No – no.’ Mori was chronologically out, because he added, ‘Yes please,’ before Thaniel could ask again if he wanted some tea.

  Thaniel hesitated, not sure what was going on. ‘I’d go down for tea with everyone else but I’m not going anywhere else today. If I stand up again in the next hour I’ll die on Suzuki’s nightingale floor and you’ll not hear the end of it.’

  ‘Wouldn’t bother him. He’ll have it cleaned pretty recently.’ Mori knelt down across from him. He sounded all right, but he didn’t make mistakes like that unless his mind was elsewhere. Recent and soon looked the same to him, and Thaniel suspected he had to concentrate to get the right one. ‘How is it?’ he asked, motioning to Thaniel’s lungs with his eyelashes.


  ‘Much better here,’ Thaniel said honestly. ‘Maybe it’s the sea.’

  Mori put his head a tiny fraction forward, just one inclination of one vertebra in his neck. ‘I’m sorry about last night, by the way. It was – like just now; you were unexpected.’

  ‘Unexpected? You looked like I’d crawled out of the graveyard still in a shroud,’ Thaniel began, and then stopped, because Mori had fallen so still that he might have been turning to glass.

  He understood what was happening in stages. The confusion cracked, the realisation oozed out, and then egg-yolked down his spine.

  ‘You mean you can remember me being dead, don’t you?’ He couldn’t believe he hadn’t understood before. ‘It’s a pretty heavy possibility at the moment, so … you’ve got it in mind that I’ll not be here soon – recently. Seeing me walking about is like seeing a ghost, isn’t it?’

  ‘Of course it’s not,’ Mori said, more like himself again. ‘I’m sorry. I’m full of fog, it’s the time difference.’

  It wasn’t enough to smooth down the memory of the haunted look he’d had before.

  ‘You should go and talk to the others,’ Thaniel said. He’d said it smiling, but even as he did, it felt heavy. Though he’d had a fortnight to get used to the idea, it was the first time he’d had to be graceful about perhaps dying. He’d been determined that if the worst happened, he would be graceful and there wouldn’t be any hysterics or dramatic regrets aired endlessly to the profound boredom of everyone else. But he hadn’t realised that grace was not a thing you performed, but a weight you carried. ‘Anyone who’s going to live more than fifteen minutes and who won’t seem like the waking dead in the middle of the night.’

  ‘No. I was half asleep, I’m not—’

  ‘Shut up,’ Thaniel said. He was glad his voice was still coming out steady. ‘You’ve got a ghost following you about, don’t pretend you haven’t. I’ll try and find a cheerful hat or something; there’s no reason I can’t be a jaunty ghost.’ He hesitated. ‘Listen. Dr Haverly said I’d probably be all right here. Is that not true?’

  ‘You’re going to be fine. I promise. Like I say, I’m just a bit scattered.’

  Thaniel tried to let it go, but then lost the battle. ‘Can you stop lying for a minute? I don’t speak samurai. I can’t tell if you’re hating every second of my being here because it’s driving you mad with horrible nightmares but you’re just being polite, or if you really don’t mind. Can you tell me straight? If you’d rather I go and stay at the legation, I’ll go. That’s fine. It’s a nice place.’

  Mori looked up with shatter lines around his eyes. ‘Thaniel. I’m so at the mercy of this stupid thing my brain does. It’s a kind of sickness more than anything else. Now this minute, yes, you’re right, I can remember – I can remember your dying. It is odd to turn around and find you here after all, it is … like seeing a ghost.’

  Thaniel had worked it out before like a crossword puzzle and it hadn’t sunk it truly, but hearing Mori confirm it aloud felt like some terrible unseen physician had closed a steel clamp around his lungs.

  Mori must have seen his expression change, because he was shaking his head. ‘I’m only remembering the worst now because the things that will help you haven’t happened yet. But they will happen. I’ll be back to normal when they do.’

  ‘Right.’

  Mori sighed. ‘I know it’s terrible to have to put up with that from me. If you can bear it, though, I’d rather you were here. I understand if you can’t. Not everyone wants to – to see himself reflected a ghost in someone else’s eyes.’ He looked away outside as he finished, as if he’d become suddenly aware that the daylight really was making good mirrors of his eyes.

  Thaniel poured them both some more tea for something to do with his hands. He wanted urgently to lean across the table and take Mori’s. ‘I can cope. And you bloody knew I’d say that, so why all the palaver?’

  ‘Pride,’ Mori said ruefully. ‘I think there was a very small unlikely future where I pretended well enough for you not to notice.’

  ‘No there wasn’t. There might have been one where I pretended not to notice you pretending.’

  Mori laughed. ‘Right. Yes.’

  His eyes slipped over Thaniel’s shoulder then, and then lifted to the height of a standing person. It was so marked that Thaniel twisted round, expecting to see Suzuki lurking, but there was nobody. When he glanced back at Mori again, puzzled, Mori only shook his head and shrugged a fraction.

  ‘Anyway,’ said Thaniel, and cast around for a reason to get himself out of the house for a little while, and give Mori a break from his haunting, ‘I should send a wire to the legation. Let them know where to reach me.’ It was a lie. Vaulker didn’t care where he was. ‘Is there a post office?’

  Mori closed both fists against his knees, but his collarbones dropped as he let some of the pretence go, relieved even in defeat. ‘Just down the road, opposite the man with the cat on the lead. I’ve got a parcel, if you’d post it?’

  ‘No trouble,’ Thaniel said, glad for a real reason to go. He set the teapot down again, carefully, because as though gravity had shrugged, the effort it took to lift was wrong. When he opened his hand, his fingers felt nerveless. He clenched it in his lap under the table, but it still shook. ‘Where’s it going?’

  ‘Aokigahara.’ Mori went to fetch it. It was marked ‘delicate’ in insistent letters. ‘They’re cocoons. Moths.’

  ‘Moths? The ones from the greenhouse?’ Thaniel asked.

  ‘You saw? There’s a ranger up there who collects them.’

  ‘Why is it you, providing moths?’

  ‘We’ve been breeding them here. They’re rare, they come out in February.’ He let his fingertips rest on the edge of the box even after he had let go. He closed up like a fan when he saw that Thaniel had noticed. After a long, strange pause with vaults that echoed with the things Mori wasn’t saying, he finally took a breath.

  ‘Don’t let anyone stop you sending that off. Kuroda’s men are a bit twitchy about his security.’

  ‘I won’t.’

  ‘Sorry,’ Mori said obscurely.

  ‘Mori, even if one of them rugby tackles me, there are fairy princesses who would think this lot were a bit delicate- looking.’

  He’d hoped Mori would laugh, but he only got an absent nod. ‘No, you’re right.’

  Thaniel went to the post office, feeling like a poltergeist.

  SEVENTEEN

  Shintomi Theatre, Tokyo, 1878 (ten years ago)

  Takiko was ready for the Duke of Choshu when he came. Mori had sent her a warning telegram an hour before.

  It gave her time to change. She put on a Western dress cut from vivid kimono silk, all brocaded with blossom patterns. Kimono were too easy to bow in. It was very British, forbidding yourself over-servility and enforcing that resolution with whalebone, and she had a feeling that it would be a good idea to remind the Duke that she was at least half foreign, with one foot outside the circle of his influence.

  The actors went into an interested flutter when she said he was coming. They were rehearsing a kabuki version of Swan Lake, so the stage was a beautiful chaos of white feathers and the constant genteel fight between their own dancing master and the Russian ballerina they’d brought in to give the performance a Western flair. It all looked satisfyingly modern, and not like the sort of place to be perturbed by a fuming patriarch.

  The Duke turned out not to be a fuming patriarch at all.

  The man who sat down opposite her at her table in the empty bar was papery. He looked like a book that had been left in the sun for too long. He was excellently dressed in a Western morning suit, and he wore spectacles whose lenses carried a slight gold tint. They must have been for some kind of vision problem, but they made him look like his constitution was so refined that he couldn’t bear to see the world without a golden veneer.

  ‘Miss Pepperharrow,’ he said, without introducing himself. He didn’t seem surprised that she’d o
bviously known he was coming. ‘I believe you are soon to marry into my house.’

  ‘I am,’ she agreed. ‘Tea?’

  His eyes ticked over her. She got ready to shake his hand English-style if he started out in too offensive a way. He looked like he might combust if a stranger touched him.

  ‘This theatre is yours, I believe?’

  She poured the tea. ‘It is.’

  He looked troubled. ‘You don’t seem like a stupid person. Do you understand what Keita is? I don’t mean who, not family, I mean what.’

  Takiko sat back, because it was so far from the attack she’d expected that it took her a minute to put down the shield and relax. ‘Yes,’ she said slowly. ‘I’ve noticed. He always knows when I should bring an umbrella to go out, if that’s what you mean. He knew when you were coming today.’

  The Duke took off his spectacles and put them back on again, and slowly, with a lot less glee than she’d have thought, she realised that he was flustered. ‘Miss Pepperharrow, the girl I wanted him to marry is extremely stupid, and incapable of anything but looking nice at parties. Did you not imagine, when you swooped in, that I was trying to prevent him from getting to anyone else?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  He looked down at the tea and poured himself three drops more, though his cup was already full. ‘I knew his mother. Keitsune Mori.’ His eyes came up again. ‘He gets it from her, you see. Heaven knows how much of modern history she shaped while she was pretending to be occupied at that loom of hers. It was a joke, you see. The loom. Weaving fates.’ He snorted at himself, but only as if he thought he ought to find it funny, not as if he really did. ‘But her great trick was that she would let you see just what she was, and you would want to do as she asked all the same.’

  Takiko hesitated. ‘I see,’ she said, untruthfully.

  The Duke put both hands on the edge of the table, just his fingertips, but he was such a restrained person that it made her lean back. ‘Do you imagine for a minute that she could do that, and care a damn about the individual threads? No. Eventually, you would look up one morning, and realise that even while you were quite in love with her, and that you would sacrifice anything, you were just one of her threads, one that she herself had chosen and plied and dyed, and to which she had all the emotional attachment of a bobbin.’