The Lost Future of Pepperharrow

by Natasha Pulley

  ‘I was just telling her about the frostbite—’

  ‘She doesn’t look stupid, she can probably work it out. Miss, you wouldn’t have got any of those cigarettes spare, would you? I’d bloody kill for one. We can never get them in winter.’

  ‘Don’t tell her you’d kill someone!’ the Marquis de Sade man squeaked.

  She smiled. She could envisage a moment when knowing two sort-of-friendly prisoners might be a good thing. ‘I really don’t think you’d kill me, either of you.’ She set two cigarettes on the ledge of the barred part of the door, at arm’s length, so neither of them could grab her, but neither of them tried. The cigarettes disappeared inside.

  ‘Thank you, miss,’ the second voice said, with feeling.

  ‘Hey! Is that a girl?’ someone called from further up.

  Takiko started with the brush while the wave of catcalls wore themselves out. She decided before long that the edges of the corridor would have to stay dusty. Someone put a part of himself he shouldn’t have through the bars, so she hit it with the broom and carried on on the other side, and smiled as a shout of laughter went around the cells. The guard from the office came running. She inclined her head, because it seemed like a very specific kind of policy, to come when the prisoners were laughing rather than yelling. She explained, but he ignored her and unlocked the cell, and disappeared inside. She stood up slowly after a minute or so.

  ‘Excuse me,’ she said over the noise. ‘Excuse me,’ she said more loudly when he didn’t hear. It had gone quiet on the rest of the wing. A slim shadow and a big one had come to the bars of the cell behind her, the one belonging the de Sade enthusiast. Both of them were holding the bars hard. She could see enough of them to make out that their knuckles were tight.

  ‘What?’ Some of the rage was in the guard’s voice and it came out snappish.

  ‘Suppose I make you a cup of tea? It’s nearly ten o’clock,’ Takiko said.

  He came out unrolling his sleeves. ‘Oh. That’s kind.’

  ‘Do you have cups of your own or shall I go on a thieving mission to the kitchens?’ she smiled. It was amazing what a protection it could be, being little and a bit stupid-looking.

  ‘Oh, no, no, we’ve got our own. I’ll show you.’

  More than anything, going into the guards’ office, which had a small set of creaking steps down to its sunken floor, felt like being a miniature thing going inside a warm tree trunk. When the kettle was half boiled on its own little heater, she poured some water out into a bowl and gave it to him.

  ‘Hm?’ he said.

  ‘You’ve got blood on your face,’ she explained, and pattered her fingertips over her own cheekbone to show him where.

  ‘Oh, right. Thanks.’

  When she tucked herself under the table, the heat from the stove underneath washed round her legs and made her feet prickle as the feeling came back. Once she had made the tea, she held her cup to warm up her hands and then pressed one palm flat to her nose. It was absolutely glorious.

  ‘You make tea very beautifully,’ the guard said. And then, obliquely, ‘Accomplished sort of thing for a cleaning girl?’

  She smiled and pretended not to have understood what he was really asking. ‘Cleaning girls who would like not to be cleaning girls one day ought to cultivate useful skills, don’t you think? One must have ambitions. One might even work at a proper restaurant one day, should anybody ever build one here.’

  He laughed, because she had said it in her princess voice. ‘That’s a thing! Can you teach me?’

  ‘Of course, darling, you must pretend you’re half Chinese and half English, it’s the most fabulously easy thing.’

  ‘Stop, I’m going to spit tea everywhere.’

  ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘Normal voice.’

  ‘Can I ask how old you are?’ he said.

  She was the only woman she’d seen here. She had a depressing vision of being raped behind the solitary confinement shed.

  ‘Forty-two,’ she lied.

  ‘What! You look much younger.’

  ‘Thank you. How old are you?’

  ‘Twenty-one,’ he said shyly.

  She patted him on the head as she got up. He had soft hair, too thin. ‘Lie to the next person, will you? It isn’t polite to make ladies feel old. Dear me. Well, I’d better get on, hadn’t I.’

  She soon found that the best part of the day was cleaning the warden’s office. It was beautifully warm, with a fire burning in a real Western-style grate and lamps everywhere, even in the gloomy daytime. He had glass in the windows and furs on the floor. There was a big desk, full of good pens and paperwork, but at the other end of the room was a littler desk and a young man with glasses and a typewriter, and a telegraph machine whose wire came in through a tiny hole in the wall behind him. He typed all the time, but only numbers, which he was reading from graph axes drawn onto dozens and dozens of peculiar photographs. They were all the same, more or less; two pale, fluctuating patterns, traced out on a dark background. There was nothing more to them that, but they were unpleasant anyway, in a way which scratched at a nerve in the back of her mind, like a razor blade just catching on your knee.

  So they had an electrograph. Mori might be here somewhere. She had an uneasy stir. If he thought she’d feel guilty and break him out once she actually saw the place, he’d miscalculated. A prison was where he belonged.

  The warden snapped his fingers at her. ‘Less staring, more work. Come on, girl.’

  ‘Sorry, sir. Shall I do the desktop or are you too busy?’

  ‘No, on you go.’ He pushed his chair back to watch her work. He relented after a second. ‘It’s a kind of experiment,’ he said.

  ‘Oh. It looks complicated.’

  ‘It is,’ he said, with feeling. ‘Electrical. I wouldn’t even like to say.’

  ‘I wouldn’t understand even if you did,’ she said, and realised wryly that she was doing her best Countess Kuroda impression. It gave her a spike of sadness. Everyone always said, well, you find other friends to fill the gaps the old ones leave; but she never had.

  Behind the warden, on the broad window sill, a snowy owl landed and peered in through the briny glass. The warden saw and shooed it off.

  When Takiko had finished in the office, she carted everything back down the steep stairs, into the dense cold, then tapped on the window of the guards’ office. ‘Is there anything else?’ she said to the young guard.

  ‘No! No, that’s you done for the day. The forest detail will be back soon,’ he said seriously. He checked his watch. ‘Actually, they should be back already. It’s better if you’re safe at home when they come in.’

  ‘I see. Thank you.’ She paused when his hand skittered on the desk in an involuntary-looking way, so violently he had to catch it with the other. ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Oh, it’s nothing,’ he said. ‘Just palsy.’

  She tapped her fingers against her thigh and didn’t point out that that was only a way of saying shaky, not a why or wherefore. ‘Well, see you tomorrow, Mr …’

  ‘Tanizaki. See you.’

  The snow was falling again, thick and spinning. There was at least another few inches of it in the courtyard, enough to have covered over the tracks of the day. The cold was so dense it felt solid – it was a shock to walk into. She rubbed her nose and bounced twice on the spot to try to get the blood flowing. Her legs were stiff. Out on the dim shore, the sea had stopped moving. She looked at the padlock on the solitary confinement shed. The chain would probably have broken with a good enough smack from a spade. But there was a light in the window of the gatehouse, and, inside, Horikawa was watching her.

  Just before she passed beneath the gatehouse, he opened the window.

  ‘I know your game, girl. Think you can make money out of the lads, do you? It’s not decent.’

  ‘I’m just doing the cleaning.’

  ‘My arse,’ he said, and didn’t shut the window. He only looked down at her, chewing the side of his tongue.
After a while, he scratched his neck with his whole hand, making a claw.

  She dropped her eyes so he would think she was upset, and jumped when something clanked into the snow beside her. When she picked it up, it was a bell, the kind you put on cows and oxen.

  ‘Ring it if you walk back after dark,’ Horikawa said. ‘There’s bears. Don’t want to take one of them by surprise, do you?’

  She didn’t say that the bears were hibernating now, and carried on. Down the hill and right to the darkening horizon, there was nothing but the creaking forest, and the powder snow streaming where the wind blew it from the canopy. There was no sign of the late forest detail.

  She wondered if she was going to have to do something about Horikawa.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Tokyo, 11th February 1889

  There was someone else in Thaniel’s bedroom. For a sliver of an instant he saw it: a grey thing hunched over on the hearth with its back to the grate.

  And then there was nothing. The room was ordinary, the door was shut, and he would have noticed the latch, because it clicked such a bright shade of yellow. His heart was heaving.

  It was the third or fourth time he’d had the same nightmare. He had to go to the hearth and stare at it until the absence of a person sank in properly. The chimneys all went down through the house, this one having its base in Vaulker’s office. In defiance of the staff, Vaulker had his fire lit, and so the grate was smoking. Thaniel could feel the warmth if he held his hand above it. He stood there for a couple of minutes, soaking in the borrowed heat, even though the soot dusted his palm.

  In any case, nobody was lurking halfway up the shaft. It must have been the stormy weather that was niggling at him. The electricity in the air was a background scritching, hardly noticeable, but it had a sound, God knew how, and it tinted everything the colour of tin. It tasted of metal, too.

  The nightmare figure didn’t feel like something in his own mind. He saw things that weren’t there all the time. If somebody played a rich enough E flat, the whole world went purple. There had been someone there.

  ‘Look …’ He sighed, feeling ridiculous. ‘You’re scaring the hell out of me, is the thing. If there’s anything I can do to help, tell me. If not – I need to sleep.’

  Silence. Of course there was. But he felt straightened out for having said it.

  Away from the second-hand heat of Vaulker’s fire, the air was freezing. There had been new snow. Down on the lawn, two more tents had arrived in the night. Fukuoka and his friends had cleared a space and lit a fire, which made one orange point in among all the white. Thaniel paused. Although he had tipped the jug at more than a steep enough angle, the water wasn’t moving. The surface had frozen. He smiled and cracked the ice with the handle of his razor. It wasn’t really winter until you’d done that at least once. When he was little, his sister had always laid a fire in the bedroom on the first day there was ice in the jug.

  There was a polite tap on the window. It was Owlbert, who to Thaniel’s enduring surprise had decided to stay. He’d made a nest above the window of the doctor’s surgery, but when he was cold, he came up here. Thaniel opened the window and the owl shuffled in. Thaniel stroked him carefully, hoping he was all right. Owlbert hooted his deep purple hoot. His feathers were full of snow particles. Thaniel put a spare jumper around him. Owlbert shuffled about and then went to sleep.

  ‘Sleep well then,’ Thaniel said. He smiled. There was something lovely about a wild animal that came to see you to borrow your jumper.

  He took his good shirt down from the hanger and basked in the feeling of cotton that was both good and well-ironed at the same time. He meant to put on proper cufflinks, but when he touched one, it sent out a static shock so hard he actually saw it, a crackle of blue. He put on ribbon ones instead and then paused tentatively over his watch before he brushed his fingertip over it. It didn’t shock him, but it was warm.

  Sheet lightning flashed above the deep clouds. His wisdom teeth stung.

  When he went out into the little living room, he found Six bundled up on the cold hearth like an owl. He bent down and made a fuss of her. She didn’t giggle, but she jigged a bit.

  ‘Who were you talking to before?’ she said.

  ‘Owlbert. He’s in there.’

  ‘Mm, he’s helping me keep an eye on you. May I show you something good?’ she said.

  When he said yes, she hurried into her own tiny room across the corridor, which she shared with the stable-master’s twins, and came back holding one of her lightbulbs by the glass. She gave it to him and when he touched the stem, it lit up in his hands. It was the one Mori had made for her in Russia. The filament octopus rippled different brightnesses, so it looked like it was furling about in a bubble.

  ‘H … ow is it doing that?’

  ‘They just work,’ she said, pleased. ‘There’s electricity in the air. It’s not enough to light anything by itself but once there’s something conducting it a bit, they do. Look.’ She pointed. The leather top of her desk was tooled in a gilt pattern. All the lightbulbs scattered across it were lit. ‘That’s like a big circuit board now. I get shocks if I touch it.’ She smiled suddenly. Some of her new teeth were too big for her. ‘It really hurts.’

  ‘Well, that’s – unusual.’ In its bulb, the octopus floated on, serene. Thaniel had to look away from it, because, just for a second, he was back at Filigree Street, Mori a warm weight against his chest with The Tale of Genji propped on his ribs for Thaniel to read for Japanese practice. ‘Listen, let’s get all those together and put them in that bowl, before we set fire to something. They’ll look better all together anyway and I think you have to fill out a lot of forms if you electrocute children on legation premises.’

  ‘All right,’ she said, and together they gathered everything up, tiny bulbs and big, apple-sized ones, and put them all together into the pottery fruit bowl that never had any fruit in it. Even there, the filaments kept up a small, zithering glow. ‘It’s probably the storm.’

  He glanced outside and paused when he saw how black the clouds were. Lightning flickered away in the distance again. It was snowing in spinning eddies, and cold emanated from the window pane.

  Six tapped his arm. He hadn’t been looking impressed enough with the lightbulbs.

  ‘In the Daily a man said he was electrocuted by a weathervane,’ she said. ‘I cut that one out in case you could read it to me later.’ She looked worried that it was presumptuous, even though he had never once said no.

  ‘I will. Right, that all looks safe enough, doesn’t it?’ he said, wishing, not for the first time, for a sheet of rubber. It was one of those things he always meant to find and never got round to. The idea that a person ought to properly insulate his daughter wasn’t one that many shops had taken up. ‘Do you think they’re all right?’

  Six put her hand over the bulbs. ‘They’re not hot.’

  ‘Good.’ He lifted her up. ‘Come on. Let’s find some breakfast.’ He felt depressed about the idea of a cold breakfast. No fires; no coffee.

  She nodded again. He opened the door onto the back stairs. ‘Why are we going this way?’ she said, with an edge of panic in her voice.

  ‘Because I’m forgetful.’ He let the door swing closed again and went on, towards the main staircase. He always went the back way by himself, because it was quicker and it meant you didn’t walk the length of the house twice, but the butler had taken them up the big staircase the first time they had come, and that was the only way Six went.

  He rapped his knuckles on Vaulker’s door as they passed. ‘Constitution ceremony today, remember,’ he said. Vaulker threw a shoe at the door. ‘And I need you to sign the forms for the investigation into the disappearance of that Englishwoman I told you about.’

  The other shoe.

  Six knew whose door it was. ‘Mr Vaulker tried to get out of paying me for fixing his phonograph,’ she said, ‘but I did my sad face and then he said all right and I could have all the cherry bakewell as long as
I didn’t cry.’

  Thaniel snorted. ‘Well played.’ He said it in Japanese in case Vaulker could hear.

  ‘And he doesn’t seem to know very much about Tesla,’ Six added. ‘But I’m not altogether certain that I can consider that to be a reflection of his moral fibre.’

  He put his cheek against her hair. It was a bizarre way of talking, that catch between very simple and completely adult, but he knew exactly what it was. It was how Mori talked to her, and she was only copying his voice in her head. She hadn’t asked him about Mori.

  They were passing right above the kitchen, and from that direction came shouting. Six twisted her nose.

  ‘Ghosts again.’

  ‘Mm, the exorcist didn’t help. He gave us a refund.’ Thaniel wondered hopefully if someone had lit a fire down there after all. He was starting to find he could live without all sorts of things – Mori, a piano, working lungs – as long as there was a decent supply of coffee.

  ‘The second law of thermodynamics suggests it probably isn’t ghosts.’ She studied her own buttons, looking like a baby. ‘Have you explained to them about that?’

  He sighed. ‘No. I don’t know it would be right to. This isn’t our country, people see differently.’

  ‘No they don’t. Thermodynamics aren’t geographically specific.’

  ‘Blue and green are the same colour here. What if, when someone here says blue, they mean what I’d say is green? What if ghost doesn’t mean ghost?’

  She frowned. ‘What else could ghost mean?’

  ‘I don’t know. That’s the point.’

  He saw her decide to be kind to him, even though she didn’t believe it. ‘That’s fair.’

  They reached the dining-room door. He set her down on the threshold so that she could go on ahead. She always sat with the stable-master’s twins, girls about her age and nicely calm. They were doing her good.

  The dining room was full. The chatter gave it a party feeling. There were Imperial purple runners along the tables and at the serve-yourself counter at the far end, little cakes iced with the symbol of the royal household sat in stacks. He went over tentatively. There were cafetières. He put his hand on the side of one of them. Hot. Thank God. He made off with it and claimed the empty end of a table, feeling gleeful.