The Lost Future of Pepperharrow

by Natasha Pulley

  The carriage was on its side. The door was facing upward opened and Akiko climbed out, then turned back to help Arinori. They both looked all right, if thrown about. Arinori scooped her close and breathed through her hair for a moment, his gloved fingertips on the nape of her neck. Thaniel looked away.

  ‘So we’re all walking from here then,’ Arinori said cheerily, though there was a brittle edge in his voice. ‘Honestly, Steepleton you idiot; what sort of madman runs towards a panicking horse?’

  Thaniel shook his head, because it had been pure force of habit. For years, if anything dangerous was even in view on the horizon, Mori had navigated it to one side. He had gone towards that horse as if it couldn’t kill him because he had been certain that it couldn’t, even with its hooves six inches away from his face. But it could have. Mori wasn’t watching him anymore.

  He wanted to go straight to Yoruji. But his head was still ringing, something had cracked unpromisingly in his shoulder, the trains wouldn’t be running today, and his lungs would not last the long walk to Yokohama. And there was Six; he couldn’t just vanish. She would tear herself to pieces.

  ‘Coming?’ Arinori called from ahead.

  He hurried to catch up. Even that set his whole chest on fire.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Tokyo, 11th February 1889

  The road up to the parade route was straight, so they could see the purple bunting from a good two hundred yards away. Someone else had noticed the lightbulb trick, and all along the final section of the parade’s path were strings of lights, wired to nothing but iron pegs in the ground and starry in the storm, which was getting darker and darker. Thaniel couldn’t look up at them for long. After the accident, something in his neck felt wrenched. A fever ache was coming back into his joints.

  He decided he was going to have to see the others to the parade, and then go home. He was going to keel over otherwise. And then at the legation he could wire – someone. Matsumoto, at least, to say that Mori was missing too. Fanshaw; no. It wasn’t Fanshaw’s job to care. Mori wasn’t British. He tried to rake over his memory for someone whose job it was to care. He didn’t know Mori’s family, except that he had a cousin who was Duke of somewhere. Choshu. He had no idea how you contacted a duke. ‘Look,’ Arinori said.

  Away in the distance, at what must have been the foot of Mount Fuji, there was a deep red glow. It glittered. ‘That – is the volcano going off ?’

  ‘Maybe a little.’ Arinori knocked him lightly. ‘Rare to see it, it doesn’t erupt often. Lucky.’

  ‘Right,’ said Thaniel, not convinced that an erupting volcano was ever going to be lucky.

  More men in smart suits were joining their road from either side, too smart to be going anywhere but the parade. He ducked his nose into his scarf and watched the electric lights above them flicker between their usual brightness and brighter flares. Lightning moved nearly constantly overhead, but the snow had stopped. He had hoped the storm would break, but it was showing no sign of that.

  Another man in a guard’s uniform joined them off a narrow side street, only about a yard in front. He was uncomfortably close and Thaniel caught the smell of him, damp, like his clothes never had a chance to dry properly after being laundered. Rather than speed up to get ahead of them, the man kept perfect pace.

  Because Thaniel was watching the man, trying to decide if he was being purposefully rude or if he was only absent-minded, he saw him touch the handle of his gun before anyone else noticed.

  He drew it fast. He shouted something that Thaniel didn’t catch – it might have been ‘traitor’, but maybe not – and aimed at Arinori. It was an awkward lunge to get in front of him, and then both he and Arinori tumbled together onto the ground. The gunshot turned everything blinding white and at first Thaniel couldn’t see at all. When he’d blinked it away, the man was running, but a pair of guardsmen had taken off after him.

  ‘You’re all right, you’re all right. Get up.’

  There was a pause. ‘You know, I don’t believe I am,’ Arinori said softly.

  His black suit had hidden how much blood there was. It was only a small rip in his jacket, but he was already pale, and they were kneeling in a dark pool. Arinori stared at it. Thaniel caught his chin.

  ‘No, look at me. Calm down.’

  ‘I’m going to die!’

  ‘I think so. Better get it done properly.’ It was the worst thing he’d ever said.

  Arinori let his breath out, and smiled, just about. ‘Yes. Good idea.’

  His wife skidded onto her knees beside him. The cobbles put ladders through her stockings. Arinori smiled at her, just, and died there with the electric lights in his eyes.

  The world spun and then vanished.

  Thaniel opened his eyes in a room he didn’t know. It was plain and pale, but there was a silk rug on the wooden floor, and it didn’t smell like a hospital. When he sat up, he felt tired and shivery, and fogged. He stretched his shoulder back and then found that his left arm was strapped to his chest. It hurt. Someone had put him in a different shirt. He touched the top button. It felt much more disturbingly personal than whatever had happened to his arm.

  ‘Hello?’ he tried, then frowned into the echo of his voice, which had sharp edges in the bare room.

  He had a crackling sense of being in a crowded place. If he’d woken blindfolded, he would have said the room was full of people. It wasn’t. He was alone. But he felt sure that someone brushed past him while he was listening, sure enough that it made him jump. He twisted around as far as he could. Nobody.

  An incredibly tall man came in. He had to duck the low door frame. The legation doctor, Willis; which meant this was one of the downstairs front rooms whose windows just peeped above ground. Thaniel had never been in the surgery before.

  ‘Good. You’re awake. I’m afraid you’ve got a fever, but it’s to be expected.’ Willis seemed irritated that Thaniel had done something so stupid as to hurt himself significantly on a holiday. ‘Your body’s had a shock, that’s all, and you didn’t start out at full steam. It’s nothing to worry about; nothing important hit.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘You were shot. Went through your upper arm, nicked your collarbone. It’ll hurt like buggery but with any luck you’ll keep the use of the arm.’

  Thaniel sat still while that filtered down. He couldn’t remember a bullet.

  Willis sat down awkwardly in the chair by the bed. He didn’t quite fit. The back was wicker and squeaky. ‘What’s your diagnosis? If you have one. You have trouble breathing. It’s very noticeable when you sleep.’

  Very noticeable. The skin down Thaniel’s shoulder blades tried to crawl. There was something uniquely horrible about being told a thing about yourself you didn’t know. ‘Lungs, something. I never found out properly. If it kills me it does, I don’t need to call it by its first name.’

  Willis lifted his eyebrows and made no effort to disguise that he considered such an approach to be stupid. ‘Well, let’s see.’

  Thaniel turned his head away as Willis twitched the edge of his shirt aside with a cold stethoscope. It made him shy. Willis looked annoyed and listened for what felt like an unnecessarily long time. When Willis sat back, he inclined his head.

  ‘Well, it’s not going to kill you quite yet. If you look after it,’ he added from under his eyebrows.

  Thaniel nodded.

  ‘How’s the symptoms?’ Willis asked.

  ‘I’m fine. Bit slow sometimes.’

  ‘And?’

  Thaniel hesitated. He didn’t want the conversation to last any longer than it had to – he didn’t like Willis or his patronising sharpness – but it would have been more stupid not to mention it. ‘I’m seeing things. You know. Dreams, ghosts. Like the staff.’

  ‘Are you indeed,’ Willis said, looking disgusted.

  ‘I don’t believe in it. Is there anything you can give me?’

  ‘Short of laudanum, not really. I’d suggest you spend less time going nativ
e. It’s admirable, naturally, but it can cause one a certain flabbiness of thought. The Japanese are essentially pagan, you realise; they exist rather in the state Europeans did some three thousand years ago.’

  ‘Japanese isn’t witchcraft, Willis, and it is definitely not making me see anything.’

  Willis opened his hands to say, well, there’s your problem.

  Thaniel shook his head once, too tired to point out that not that far down the road at the Palace was a good collection of Japanese men who felt exactly the same way about English, and that most international treaty problems would vanish overnight if everyone would just get over their snobbery long enough to sit down, have a cup of tea together, and recognise that they were all exactly the same person in slightly different hats.

  ‘Do you know where my daughter is?’ he asked instead.

  ‘No, I’ve no idea,’ Willis said, as if Thaniel had asked what all the names of Saturn’s moons were. ‘Don’t try to get up. Get some rest and read the newspaper. You ought not wear yourself out with visitors. If you get up I will tether you to that bed,’ he added.

  Thaniel was certain this advice had less to do with rest and more to do with Willis’s unwillingness to have children in his surgery.

  ‘This came for you,’ Willis added, and handed him an envelope.

  Thaniel waited, and then had to say, ‘Could you open it for me?’

  Willis did so, and handed him the single sheet inside. It was a photograph of Grace Matsumoto. She was standing against a white wall, holding a newspaper from the day before yesterday, and a small sign that said:

  AM NOT DEAD STOP MAKING A FUSS.

  ‘Well, that’s that then,’ Thaniel said, puzzled. The sign sounded exactly like her, but the tone didn’t match the way she was looking into the camera. She was just like he remembered her, pointy and boyish, but she looked exhausted. There were marks under her eyes. He sighed. However she looked, he couldn’t open the inquiry now. Something brushed him again. It didn’t touch him quite, but he felt that pre-touch along the fine hairs on his arm. ‘Can you feel that?’

  ‘Yes,’ Willis said unexpectedly. He breathed out loudly through his nose. ‘This place is rather creepy. It’s the weather, that’s all.’

  Just for the barest second, right on the edge of his eye, he saw Mori. Not in clothes Thaniel had seen before – a lovely evening suit – and he was holding something he never once had at Filigree Street – a cigarette and a book of Lucifers. Just a brief shape in the dusty air and then vanished. Thaniel sat frozen, searching for the shape again.

  ‘Don’t let it get to you,’ Willis growled.

  Once Willis had gone, he felt too tired to pick up the newspaper. The shade of paint on the wall opposite, a pale cream, was the colour of the scritching noise that cheap phonographs made when violins lifted too high for the wax to record properly. He drew his knees up so that he could look at the blue blanket instead, and sat still, his free hand on the back of his neck where the nerves ached and his hair was growing through softer where it had been shaved up. The bruises from the carriage crash were starting to throb.

  He could feel Arinori’s blood still; it was sticky over his good hand and both knees, even though when he looked, there was no trace of it. When he thought of what he’d said to Arinori, he wanted to scream. Get it done properly: it flamed and burned through everything else, each word a lump of charcoal.

  Christ, and Mori.

  There was every chance he was all right. He was under no obligation to look after Thaniel now, after all. Maybe this vanishing was just part of his fight with Kuroda.

  Willis’s voice came sharp from the next room. ‘Miss Steepleton – you can’t come in here, you must leave him alone—’

  ‘He said he would read,’ Six’s voice said, unmoved.

  ‘For heaven’s sake, girl—’

  He straightened up. ‘Willis, let her in.’

  ‘You shouldn’t pander to this sort of thing,’ Willis said crossly.

  Six appeared in the doorway, looking at him like she might drop him in the sea one day.

  ‘It isn’t pandering—’

  ‘No, I forbid it. Miss Steepleton, on you go, if you please. This isn’t the place for little girls.’

  ‘Willis—’

  ‘Now come along.’ Willis caught her arm and tried to steer her out, back towards the stairs.

  Six screamed. It wasn’t how children usually screamed. This was primal, funnelled up from some interior inferno, and it didn’t sound human. Thaniel struggled upright but couldn’t stand. He hadn’t felt it lying down, but Willis had given him something, opium or laudanum, and the room hammocked. Willis yelled as Six banged both fists into his stomach and took a chunk out of his hand with her teeth. He dropped her and she shot into the corner, under a side table on which a potted fern sat.

  ‘What in God’s name—’

  ‘Touch her and I’ll break your nose,’ Thaniel managed. ‘Get away from her. Now.’

  Willis backed off, bewildered.

  ‘She’s made differently, you fuckwit, any idiot can see that. Leave her the hell alone.’

  For all Willis was a foot taller, he looked frightened. Not quite for the first time, Thaniel felt wearily glad that he looked so much rougher than he was.

  ‘What on earth is going on?’ Vaulker demanded, halfway down the stairs.

  ‘I had no idea it was quite like that,’ Willis murmured. ‘She should be in an asylum, Mr Steepleton—’

  ‘Over my dead body,’ Thaniel said flatly.

  ‘Steepleton!’ Vaulker snapped.

  ‘Look at her,’ Thaniel snapped back.

  Vaulker looked and faltered. ‘Is she all right?’

  ‘No.’

  Vaulker glanced up at Willis, then back at Thaniel. ‘I see. Well, Mr Steepleton, perhaps you’d agree to not shout obscenities at the good doctor. Dr Willis, I’m entirely convinced that your intentions were excellent as usual, but I don’t believe that any little girl would maintain perfect equanimity should a man of your stature lay hands on her. Might we consider a pax?’

  ‘Yes, naturally,’ Willis murmured, and then hissed as he poured iodine over the bite.

  ‘Should she be in an asylum?’ Vaulker asked Thaniel.

  ‘No! She’s not insane, you know she isn’t.’

  ‘Contain yourself, please! For the second time!’

  ‘No, sir, she’s wholly sane, but she was very ill treated in the past. She was born in a workhouse.’

  He paused. ‘Very well. Miss Steepleton?’ he added, in the patronising tone of people who hadn’t met any children since they were children themselves. ‘What do you say to Dr Willis?’

  ‘Don’t attack me again please,’ she said in her emotionless way.

  ‘I didn’t attack her,’ Willis protested. ‘I only said—’

  ‘Perhaps we ought to draw a line under the thing,’ Vaulker said, looking unsettled. He studied Thaniel. ‘Get some proper rest, please, Steepleton, you look terrible. And if I ever hear you speak in such a vulgar way to anyone again, you’re sacked. Do we understand each other?’

  ‘We do.’

  Vaulker waited for him to say ‘sir’, and Thaniel waited until Vaulker had to look away.

  Vaulker trooped back up the stairs. Willis went into his office without saying anything else and shut the door. Slowly, because the room was still swaying, Thaniel went around the bed, keeping one hand on the mattress, and then eased down onto his knees on the silk rug a short way from Six.

  ‘That was really good, petal. You did exactly the right thing, all right? Are you hurt?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Will you come out?’ he tried quietly.

  ‘No.’ She put a piece of paper – it was a cut-out of newsprint – on the floor beside her, seemed to screw up the kind of courage it would have taken him to catch a spider in both hands, then pushed it, fast, over the boards. She couldn’t reach far enough and edged it further towards him with the toe of her boot, before snat
ching her leg back under the shadow of the little table. Thaniel took it gradually. Leaning made all the muscles howl down his strapped arm and on that side of his chest.

  The article was about a spate of electrocutions, all at blacksmiths’ workshops. He read it aloud and saw her ease a bit, but she didn’t come out.

  ‘I found out what that blue light is,’ she said into her knees. ‘It’s called St Elmo’s fire. Usually you only ever see it at sea, before a storm, on the masts of ships. It’s to do with static electricity and vapour in the air.’

  ‘Why do we have it here?’

  She didn’t seem to hear. ‘We’ve got scrap iron in all the fireplaces now instead of fires. Mine is full of old bed-knobs. I fried an egg on them.’ She was looking into the deep distance. ‘I made them put the horseshoes in yours because you need some luck.’

  ‘That’s kind,’ he said helplessly. Out of bed and calmer now, he was starting to feel the cold. He could see that Willis had something glowing in the grate – it might have been a length of heavy chain – but it wasn’t anything like as warm as a fire. ‘Will you show me?’

  Six was quiet, then nodded and crawled out. She straightened up and brushed off her dress, and waited for Thaniel to stand as well. It was difficult. He swallowed. The air tasted so dry it was sandy.

  ‘Can you hold my hand? Or I’ll fall over.’