The Lost Future of Pepperharrow

by Natasha Pulley

  Outside the post office, Thaniel almost walked straight into the man in the red coat, from Kuroda’s retinue. The man broke into a smile nearly as bright as his Fabergé egg button.

  ‘Ah, morning, mate,’ the man said. He had a lovely warm Osaka accent and Thaniel felt involuntarily at home, because as far as he could tell, Osaka was the Japanese version of York. ‘Going back to Yoruji? I’ll walk with you.’

  ‘No need,’ said Thaniel, who didn’t want to walk with someone who he’d last seen pointing a gun at Mori. ‘I know the way.’

  ‘Better safe than sorry. Things can be a bit rough for gaijin this near the docks. I’m Tanaka.’

  ‘Steepleton.’

  ‘I know. What did you send just now?’

  Thaniel frowned. ‘Who wants to know?’

  ‘I do. I take an interest in what’s going in and out of any house where Count Kuroda is staying.’

  ‘Just presents home. Souvenirs.’

  ‘And that’s what I’ll find if I go and get it, is it?’

  ‘Good luck finding it,’ Thaniel said. ‘The clerk didn’t even look at it, he won’t be able to tell which it was.’

  ‘Marked England though, right?’

  ‘Nope,’ said Thaniel. He looked down at him. Tanaka was tall for this part of the world, but it was still distinctly down. ‘I’m not posting detailed reports on Mr Kuroda’s security arrangements to Whitehall, if that’s what you’re worried about.’

  Without any warning, Tanaka slammed him against a wall and held a knife half an inch away from his eye. He didn’t lose the cheery manner. ‘It’s not the British I’m worried about, mate, it’s Mori. What did he put in that package?’

  Thaniel punched him in the ribs, which made the knife drop a bit, then caught the back of his head and thunked it into the wall. And then suddenly there were policemen on either side of him with batons.

  Tanaka was laughing. ‘You’re spicy. That was assault, though, lads; you saw, right?’

  The policemen had seen. They must have seen Tanaka pull the knife as well, but they said nothing about it. Thaniel sighed and put his hands behind his head. He got a baton in the ribs anyway, but he’d known it was coming and it didn’t hurt as much as it could have. Twenty minutes later he was in a cold little cell at a police station near the harbour, feeling embarrassed.

  He’d expected a wry-looking Mori to come and fetch him out, but it wasn’t Mori who came. A strange nervous silence fell among the policemen when Takiko Pepperharrow walked in. She was wearing riding boots and a Western coat, only mutedly glamorous in comparison to the incredible clothes she’d had before, and she asked politely for papers without any kind of flourish, but the policemen nearly panicked; they had no idea what to do with a woman and they hurried around her like gorillas trying to look after a duckling. She paid the inspector and then shepherded Thaniel out.

  ‘Just bribe them,’ she said once they were outside. She was speaking Japanese. A couple of policemen had come to the door to watch them leave. English must have been suspect. ‘You’re going to be arrested all the time, just carry round a few yen in your pocket for it. I’m sorry about Tanaka, he’s insane. Yakuza I think; you know, mafia. Kuroda collects insane people.’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Thaniel. ‘What do I owe you?’

  She frowned, looking like the question had nearly hurt. ‘Nothing.’ She paused. ‘Are you all right? I expect they took the opportunity you give you a bit of a going over.’

  ‘I’m fine,’ he said, though his ribs did ache now.

  ‘I know you don’t like me, but let me make you a cup of tea. I knew we were all lunatic xenophobes but getting arrested in your first week for fighting back against a nutty yakuza thug is a bit much. It’s embarrassing.’

  He nodded a little. ‘You’re half and half. Do you … have any of this?’

  ‘A bit. No one can say my name and people always worry I won’t have proper manners and I won’t know where to put my shoes if I visit.’ She looked wry about it, without even a trace of irritability. ‘But you’ll do better in Tokyo. People will assume you’re diplomatic staff. I mean, I expect you’ll have a few nutters yelling “fuck off gaijin” every so often, but sticks and stones.’

  ‘What does gaijin actually mean? The dictionary just says foreigner, but …’

  ‘I’d say it’s somewhere between “chink” and “mountain troll”.’

  He laughed. ‘Thanks.’

  She taught him more swearwords on the way back. He didn’t want to find any of it funny, but she was funny, and it would have been hard not to laugh with her. At Yoruji, she made the tea herself, and he started to see that he’d been jealously unfair to her before. The tea room – there was a whole room for tea – was a glass pagoda set on a little island in one of the bigger pools, warm despite the cool weather and riotously bright from silk rugs woven with chrysanthemum patterns. It was a gorgeous place to sit. He felt all his nerves unravelling after being wound up tight at the police station. Opposite him, Takiko cut an odd figure. She was wearing a man’s suit; it was a costume from the theatre, but the props people didn’t want it to look new on stage, and so she was stuck walking round in it looking like an idiot for two weeks while she persuaded some wear and creases into it. Kabuki, she explained, meant slantwise, queer; the entire idea was that it was weird, and so at the moment, they were casting all the women as men and all the men as women. She rolled her eyes when she said it, and he liked her suddenly for being embarrassed talking about art. He was exactly the same. He could barely say ‘semi-quaver’ to someone outside the orchestra without feeling like a pretentious twerp.

  ‘Why were you out in the first place?’ she asked at last.

  ‘Oh. I was just going to the post office.’

  ‘You know we’ve got a postbox here? They come at ten o’clock every morning.’

  ‘No, it was a parcel, it needed weighing.’

  ‘Presents home already?’ She smiled.

  He felt his shoulders stiffen, and shifted the teacup in his hands to disguise it. Kuroda’s men rotated their posts at the sounding of those strange bells; and he had seen her putting up bells. And she must have agreed to have all the rest put up in the house, provided the servants with them, shown the soldiers the ways through the labyrinthine corridors. ‘No, no. Although I should. Mori wanted something posting. Moths in cocoons.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘For some collector in Kyushu,’ he said, naming a random place that was not Aokigahara Forest.

  ‘Kyushu?’

  ‘I don’t know, I just do as I’m told. Usually for the best.’

  ‘I’d advise you not to do that,’ she said.

  ‘I know what you’d advise,’ he said, angling for cheery.

  ‘Did you ask him about Countess Kuroda?’

  ‘None of my business.’

  ‘Jesus Christ, you did and you don’t care.’ She shook her head once in a way that put Thaniel powerfully in mind his sister, when he was tiny and she could see he was about to fall out of a tree. ‘All right, fair enough. But aren’t you worried that that’s you? You’re ill. Have you asked yourself what your death might achieve, if he steered it into the right place at the right moment?’

  Thaniel shrugged. ‘If it’s going to happen anyway then he’s welcome to find a use for it.’

  Her expression opened. ‘How serious is it, at the moment?’

  ‘I don’t really know. The doctor said one thing, Mori said something else, but then he looks like he’s seen a ghost whenever he bumps into me, which can’t be very good. I don’t feel right.’ He hesitated, not sure why he was telling her of all people. But then, she was the only objective party he’d spoken to. He went into English, because he couldn’t concentrate enough for Japanese past the rock forming in his throat. ‘It’s not a shock. My dad had this. We’re pretty short-lived, the men in our family. I hope it’ll be all right, but …’ He had wanted to say something balanced and cheerful, but it wouldn’t come. ‘But I don’t
feel right,’ he said again, too quiet.

  ‘There’s nothing Keita can do?’ she asked, in English too. The first time he’d spoken to her, her accent had been glassy, but it was less so now. She was copying him, in exactly the way he echoed the Japanese of whoever he was talking to.

  ‘What’s he going to do, cure tuberculosis? If we’re not in sight of a cure, he can’t do anything more than anyone else. If it’s not there in the close future for him to remember, he can’t know how to do it.’ He put the tea aside. ‘Like I say, it’s not a shock. I think my lungs were buggered by the time I was twenty, if I’m honest.’

  She had been nodding slightly while he spoke. ‘Still bloody irritating though.’

  He smiled. ‘It is. I mean I might be fine, it might be fuss over nothing.’

  ‘Well, I hope so.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  She leaned over and poked him. ‘Get on with that music you were writing earlier. I was listening. It’s gorgeous. I’m not having that go to waste just because you upped and snuffed it before you could be bothered to finish.’

  Stupidly, even though he was almost certain she had only been kind to make him tell her about the parcel, being teased made everything seem a lot better. ‘I will.’

  She watched him for a moment as if she really was worried. ‘Anyway,’ she said. ‘Are you all right if I abandon you? I’d better get going. I’m supposed to be at the playhouse soon.’

  He nodded and promised it wasn’t exactly a hardship, being abandoned in such a lovely place. He watched her go, waited til she was across the stepping stones, and then followed as quietly as he could. She was out of sight by the time he reached the corridor, but he could hear her on the nightingale floor, which was making its weird, starry squeaking off to the left. He walked right on the edge near the skirting board, and stopped when she stopped. She had tapped on a door. It was Kuroda’s voice that called to come in.

  He waited with his back to their wall. It was only paper, and he could hear straight through it.

  ‘Moth cocoons to Kyushu,’ she said. ‘Have you got anything in Kyushu?’

  ‘No,’ Kuroda said gradually. ‘Nothing. Might just be Mori being Mori.’

  She might have said something else, but Thaniel didn’t hear it, because Suzuki was coming down the corridor. Thaniel tried the door next to him, but it was locked. Suzuki looked shocked to find him there.

  ‘That,’ he said, as if he’d caught Thaniel in the ladies’ cloakroom, ‘is the old smoking room. We don’t use it. Your room is this way.’

  ‘What’s wrong with the smoking room?’ Thaniel said, puzzled.

  ‘It’s locked,’ Suzuki snapped.

  Thaniel inclined his head and wondered if Suzuki knew he lived in a gothic fairytale. A woman had been killed in the house, people saw ghosts everywhere, and now there was a mysteriously locked room. ‘Better not be a dungeon full of dismembered ladies, that’s all I’m saying.’

  ‘I beg your pardon!’

  Thaniel smiled. ‘Where’s Mori, do you know?’

  ‘Not at home,’ Suzuki said stiffly.

  Thaniel would have laughed if he’d been less anxious. ‘I’m not selling pins at the door. Where is he?’

  ‘I really don’t know,’ Suzuki said, escorted him in silence to his room and then floated away again.

  He was right; Mori wasn’t here. Thaniel found Six playing with Katsu and Hotaru, the little gardener boy, and saw Lady Shimazu and some other women chatting over teacups in one of the hot pools on the lower levels, but no Mori. Out on the shore, the lighthouse flashed, and once again, little bells chimed and jingled through the house. Afterwards, listening hard, he could just hear the snackle and beep of Morse as Kuroda’s men moved and exchanged notes. It was almost dark now. Thaniel hesitated on the verandah. His ribs hurt, and he was tired – exhausted – but he didn’t think he could just sit still and wait for Mori.

  He took a lamp and set out for the lighthouse. At least if he knew what the hell was going on there, he would have more to tell Mori than a vague accusation of nothing particular against Kuroda and Takiko.

  NINETEEN

  Tokyo, July 1881 (eight years earlier)

  Kuroda thumped a journalist on the way out the office. It would, of course, only lead to another sketch of him as an ape or an especially fat catfish – he had never understood why the catfish joke had taken off so well in the cartoons. Politicians had whiskers and catfish had whiskers, but so did any number of things: rats, actual cats, raccoons. Beavers. Mori always said it was because nobody wanted to be accused of portraying government ministers as if they might be friendly or fluffy. Kuroda had wanted to ask what the hell kind of rats Mori had met, but Mori had a skewed idea of the world. If Mori ever came across a rat, it wouldn’t give him the plague; it would make friends, give him an enchanted present, and arrange for him to marry a moon princess before the end of the fortnight. Mori always ended up with princesses where everyone else got plague.

  Kojimachi glimmered. At a glance it would have been difficult to see the difference between now or a hundred years ago. Only from certain angles: if you didn’t glance toward Hibiya at the be-cloistered atrocity that was the Rokumeikan, or the Foreign Ministry, or the new brick townhouses everyone seemed so keen about. The city Kuroda knew was fading away. It made him feel old, and stupid, and pushed out. He was forty-one. That was too young to feel evicted from your own country.

  He didn’t want to go home, so he bought another bottle of sake from the shop on the corner, and drank it on the train to Yoruji. It was only an hour’s journey on the train from Shimbashi, and a portion of the track was by the sea, which was black and sighing.

  Yoruji was at the top of a steep, uneven path from Yokohama’s little station. He loved seeing it from below in the dark, lit up and warm, its lamps casting gold veneers underneath the old temple rooftops. It felt like home.

  He let himself in to find that Mori was waiting for him in the smoking room, reading the Daily. All the doors and windows were open, the mesh screens shut to keep out the curious cicadas and let in the sea breeze. It was glorious after the sweating mess that was central Tokyo.

  ‘Is that tomorrow’s edition?’ Kuroda said, roughly. He had never been nervous about what the papers said, but he couldn’t remember them being quite so aggressive before, even during the Korea campaign.

  ‘Yes.’ Mori turned it around to show him the headline. Kuroda glanced at it. It was something along the lines of GOVERNMENT CORRUPTION SCANDAL SPARKS UNPRECEDENTED POPULAR OUTCRY. He took care not to remember it exactly.

  ‘Popular outcry,’ he growled. He poured himself some more sake. ‘Most of those outcrying people have no idea what a land deal looks like.’

  Across from them, beyond one of the little, dense gardens, Mrs Pepperharrow and Kuroda’s wife were sitting in another room, all lit up, drinking tea at a table of their own. They were watching; they’d seen Kuroda come in. Mrs Pepperharrow leaned over the tea table and murmured something that made Countess Kuroda nod seriously.

  Countess Kuroda was at Yoruji more than she was at home. Visiting the Baroness, she said, but really avoiding him. He’d tried to make Mori send her home. Mori had said that Kuroda was welcome to take it up with Mrs Pepperharrow. Since Mrs Pepperharrow wasn’t above running political satires at her extremely well-attended playhouse, he’d decided he probably shouldn’t. So at Yoruji the Countess stayed. He was starting to wonder if she’d made it a permanent thing. Most of her clothes were here now, her jewellery, even the accounts ledgers.

  The ledgers were a bad sign. She spent a couple of hours most mornings working on them, meticulous about the running of the household in Tokyo even in her physical absence, every sen and every bar of soap accounted for in her lacy handwriting. The steward sent her twice-daily telegrams. She kept them pinned together at the back of the ledgers, beside another pinned pile of right-angle-aligned receipts. He had thought it was forced conscientiousness for a long time, before he noticed how she a
te. She peeled apples, always clockwise, and always in one smooth, perfect spiral.

  He almost wouldn’t have minded the under-handed little shuffle she’d done across to Yoruji – almost – but somehow everyone knew. Some of the gossip columns (they never named names, but they made such specific jokes that it was obvious who they meant) were even suggesting some kind of amazing, scandalous ménage-à-trois with Mori and Mrs Pepperharrow.

  ‘Well, they do know that you probably shouldn’t sell huge swathes of government land for tuppence to your definitely- not-mafia friends in Osaka,’ Mori said fairly. Somewhere, the peculiar house creaked.

  ‘What’s this to you? It isn’t as though someone handed me an envelope under a bloody table. It was put to the ministerial council and we all agreed.’

  ‘The council knows how to watch you shoot yourself in the foot,’ Mori said, amused. ‘They’re sending some accountants round tonight. Should be here soon.’

  ‘So much for hiding out here. And I bet you find all this hysterical,’ Kuroda snapped. He poured himself a third cup, then lost patience with the cup and drank from the bottle instead. ‘You could have said something while it was happening. If there’s one thing I’d bet my life on it’s that you saw this coming miles away.’

  Mori set the paper on his knee again. ‘Why should I point out a pothole you can see perfectly well?’

  Kuroda drained the last of the sake from the bottle and slung it at him. Mori leaned backwards without looking. It smashed on the wall next to him. Mori lifted a shard of it out of his cup and flicked it back. He didn’t do it pointedly, only with fun in his eyes. Kuroda slumped down next to him. Mori gave him a cup of tea and watched too seriously as he poured a shot of brandy into it.

  Kuroda smacked him over the head, or tried to, but Mori caught his wrist and bent it backwards until the bone creaked and he had to snarl and snatch his hand back. It hurt. But it was reassuring, too, wonderful, to smash up against a thing that wouldn’t move even if he hurled his whole being at it. Abruptly he needed to test it again, to make sure. Before he had even drawn his fist back, Mori caught his throat and squeezed hard. His knuckles were criss-crossed with parallel white scars. He anticipated the coming punch in the gut, because he picked up the kettle with his free hand and tipped it until it was a fraction away from pouring boiling water into Kuroda’s lap. Close up, he smelled of heat and the sea. He must have been on the beach before.