Mori was looking at him as if he’d never seen him before. ‘You were worried.’
‘I didn’t mean for it to get in the way like that, I—’
‘About me,’ Mori said gradually.
Thaniel choked. ‘Are you telling me you didn’t factor in me wanting to look for you? That cannot have been a faint chance.’
‘Everything was faint, when I was putting this together. I had to guess.’
‘So – what, you thought I just tolerated you for the sake of a free room?’
Mori didn’t laugh. ‘Isn’t that what impoverished young artists usually do with old millionaires who fall in love with them?’
Thaniel wanted to splinter into pieces. Part of him sank into a relief like he’d never felt before, but the rest was so shocked that the relief was nearly drowned out. Every conversation they’d ever had rushed across the front of his mind. Suddenly Mori’s endless quietness looked much more like grace and deference than indifference.
‘Why would you have me in the house if you thought I was like that?’ he managed at last.
Mori shifted his shoulder a fraction. ‘It was good enough.’
‘Good enough—’ He wanted to say other things, but they flooded up with a pressure that would have looked like madness if he’d tried to put it into grammar and words. ‘I don’t tolerate you. I can’t breathe when you’re not here, I can’t think, I can’t write music properly, I spend my whole bloody life waiting for the post. I never said because I thought you didn’t want to hear it. We don’t talk about – any of it.’
He looked up when Mori brushed his elbows, and fell still. It was only the touch of a kiss, but it sent burning right down his breastbone and a rush of heat that made the cold room too hot. He leaned up a little and felt Mori’s shoulders tip into his hands, then stepped up and eased him nearer. He didn’t know he was crying until Mori brushed his eyelashes.
FORTY-SEVEN
The tribunal was held in a grand, bright room at the Palace, full of multicoloured sunbeams from the stained-glass panels in the walls. There were tables and chairs set up in a careful arc, some already filled by quiet men in perfect suits. Willis had tried to ban Thaniel from going, on the not unreasonable grounds that he was in no fit state to think about anything more complicated than lunch, but there was no one else to translate.
The Duke of Choshu arrived with a retinue of soldiers, including the captain who had come to the legation. He introduced himself to Vaulker with a pristine politeness before crossing the room to speak to Mori. Thaniel couldn’t hear what Choshu said, but he looked anxious. Mori gave him a cup of tea. Thaniel glanced at Vaulker, feeling more foreign than he did even usually, and caught Vaulker looking at him in just the same way. They drew together.
‘Are you up to this?’ Vaulker asked uncomfortably. ‘I can’t catch a single word Kuroda says in Japanese.’
‘I’ll be all right. It’s just how people like him talk. They’re like those old soldiers at the Liberal Club who rattle newspapers and cough at you until you understand.’
Vaulker snorted as if he hadn’t expected to. ‘Well, so long as you’re confident. What about Baron Mori? He seems …’
‘He’s fine,’ Thaniel said, though as he said it he knew he couldn’t have sworn it to a jury. Vaulker was right; Mori always moved slowly, but it was gradual now. He had gone to sit with the Duke, and three or four other men who looked familiar and might have fought at the legation yesterday. They all sat angled in the same way, toward Kuroda’s contingent. Where the two groups overlapped, in the middle of the horseshoe of tables, there was quiet conversation, over newspapers. The front pages all showed the same photograph. It was Takiko, looking up at Yuna as he swung the bottle. Her intentions were clear in the fate lines – it was obvious he hadn’t taken her by surprise. She had been about to hit him back, and in that instant, she looked serene and noble. One of the newspapers had done a sketch based on the same picture, where she was wearing the Japanese flag and the protesters were all apes. Everyone was talking about it. Thaniel recognised a good few of them from the dinner at Mori’s house months ago. Yamauchi, Shimazu, Nabeshima. The big, gilded, southern houses, just like the Mori.
‘It doesn’t really feel like a courtroom, does it?’ Vaulker said.
Thaniel shook his head. It was more like a coffee morning than a courtroom, although that might have been because Kuroda hadn’t arrived yet. Two of Choshu’s men stood behind Mori. They might have been there to stop him running away, but they looked for all the world like they were only there to protect him. Choshu had leaned across to talk to him, one hand on his arm. Mori was listening with an intensity he never normally needed.
The sound of steps came from the long corridor.
‘Right, let’s get this over with,’ Kuroda said. He was on his way to his seat in the centre. ‘We’re here chiefly on a formality, gentlemen. Keita Mori has illegally left state custody, and—’
‘We are here,’ interrupted the Duke, in his dry voice, before Kuroda could sit down, ‘because a bannerman of my house was abducted, and I was lied to.’
Kuroda looked up slowly.
‘My concern,’ the Duke went on, unflustered, ‘is that if Count Kuroda’s disregard for blood has led him to believe that a man temporarily at the helm of the government can steal away a knight and deceive an ancient noble house solely to cover his own tracks, there is no line he would not cross in the correct circumstances even with regard to the royal family.’
He had managed to say ‘Count’ like it was something pointless you might be handed gratis in a grocery shop.
‘Choshu,’ said Kuroda, ‘a bannerman of yours is no more your property than a fox that happens to wander into your house. In the protection of the state, it—’
‘Damn the protection of the state, he’s no spy.’
‘I didn’t say he was a spy. He provided us with intelligence. He’s a proven clairvoyant and he owes his service to his country. He refused to lend it.’
Thaniel swallowed. If Choshu agreed, Mori was going to disappear into government vaults. Mori had closed his hands hard over the edge of the table.
‘Fairytales,’ Choshu said flatly. He hadn’t raised his voice once. ‘There is no such thing as clairvoyance, as I believe we can all sensibly agree.’
Thaniel looked around. At least four or five people in the room must have known what Mori could do, and that Kuroda was right. But in Choshu’s paper voice, the idea sounded idiotic. Eyes were sliding towards Kuroda. ‘The Prime Minister is spinning us a fantasy to distract from the fact that he’s been using an innocent man to disguise a project that will prove profoundly unpopular should the newspapers find it was of government making.’
‘Sit down,’ Kuroda snapped.
Choshu didn’t sit. He switched into English. ‘Dr Carrow, if you’d like to come in and explain the experiments going on in Aokigahara. The ones producing the information Mr Kuroda is so keen to attribute to my bannerman’s being magic.’
Thaniel hadn’t seen Grace come in. She was just by the door with her husband. When she walked out into the middle of the semicircle, there were murmurs about letting a woman into an Imperial council chamber, but Choshu snapped at them to shut up. She spoke clearly and concisely. Someone brought her a small generator. In the silence it was loud and rattling, and there was another protesting murmur, and again Choshu shut them up. When Grace cast chalk into the air, she explained the fate lines around her; one that formed when she intended to walk towards Kuroda, one that lifted above her if she meant to put her arms up. It could have looked like a magic trick, but she was far, far too dry to seem anything like a showman. She was her usual austere self in grey. When Kuroda lost his temper and demanded her arrest for treason, she only pointed out that she was a British subject and he couldn’t try her for stealing an apple, never mind treason. It was a cold joke, and it made the noblemen laugh.
‘And was it necessary that these tests destroy half the capital?’ Choshu asked
her. There was an attentive murmur all around him. Even on Kuroda’s side of the room.
‘No, sir,’ Grace said. She was easy, even speaking in front of so many people. She gave lectures; she was used to it, and good at it. ‘It could have been done with a great deal more focus, the effects kept isolated to Aokigahara, but our brief was speed over safety. In an ideal world, the generators would have been underground, insulated by the bedrock of Mount Fuji. But they were built hastily.’
She said ‘hastily’ as if it meant ‘criminally’.
Choshu told her then that she could go. Kuroda snapped that he hardly thought the testimony of a foreign woman was worth anything, but then had to shut up when the Duke pointed out in his desiccated way that Kuroda had plainly thought a foreign woman could work on a national defence project. The chamber dissolved into a row where all the colours of everyone’s voices clashed and mixed into an indistinguishable brown cloud. Thaniel looked down at his own shorthand. It was a bad idea to take an exact transcript of a fight. It looked crass if it got into dispatches. You were supposed to summarise, softly. He thought about translating it as the fall of Japanese modernism, which was overdramatic, and wrote, ‘the gentlemen continue to disagree’.
He looked up when Grace brushed his arm. He smiled.
‘You escaped.’
‘Oh, the day after you left,’ she said. She paused. ‘I saw Mori in the papers. I called round to the Duke to see if I could testify here. Akira’s spitting nails too; the way he was treated when he tried to look for me. It all adds up.’
‘How did you get out?’
She grinned. ‘Do you know what? A monk trundled up with his lightbulb cart, and the guards let him in because he was a holy man; then he put me in his cart and trundled straight out again. Man’s a genius. What happened to your face?’
‘The protesters at the legation.’
‘Oh, yes. I saw the front of the Mail.’ She frowned. ‘That woman. Christ. You can even see her intentions in the photograph, have you seen it? She was about to punch him in the head. What a valkyrie.’
Thaniel nodded and didn’t try to speak, because he felt like she had jammed her fingers into the bullet scar. She glanced back, because her husband was signalling at her.
‘Anyway, Akira thinks there’s going to be a fight. I’d better take him home.’
Thaniel watched her go. Because of that, he didn’t see exactly what happened next. He was convinced, later, that in his military way Kuroda only meant to call the place to order. He couldn’t imagine him hurting anyone actually inside the Palace. But the Duke’s retainers were already on edge, and when they saw the gun in Kuroda’s hands, he doubted their first thought was a dry shot fired into the ceiling. The gunshot actually went straight over Vaulker’s shoulder, because someone had dragged Kuroda’s arm down. There was an instant of perfect silence.
‘Look, that’s enough,’ Mori said, as if he were breaking up an ordinary tiff over coffee. And then, quietly but very clearly to Kuroda, ‘What would your wife say?’
Kuroda stared at him. If Mori had sunk a knife into his throat, he couldn’t have looked more shocked. An interested murmur went round the room, and a kind of fizz.
‘Yes,’ said the Duke, as dry and immoveable as ever, ‘the tribunal will know that Count Kuroda and my bannerman were always close. One can’t help but suspect that all this dross thrown at the Mori name is nothing but a thuggish effort to keep him quiet in the matter of the murder of a noblewoman.’
‘This is speculation,’ Kuroda snapped.
‘Speaking of murdered people,’ the Duke continued, ‘the tribunal is also aware that Count Kuroda gave me a body which he claimed, fraudulently, was my bannerman. We’ve identified it as the steward of Yoruji, a dedicated and honourable man called Suzuki who, fortunately for us, was recorded in the ghosts at the property dying in defence of his master. Mr Suzuki was a retainer of my house. I will, naturally, be seeking to press charges for his murder. I will also be funding the lawsuits on behalf of the families of the four hundred and seventy-six people who have, thus far, died as a direct result of Count Kuroda’s electrical experiment in the greater Tokyo area alone.’
Uproar.
In the middle of it all, Kuroda inclined his head fractionally to Mori. Losing was the first gracious thing Thaniel had ever seen him do.
Choshu’s guard captain brought Mori across and said that they should go, and perhaps hurry out of the country when it was convenient.
They spent the brief journey back to the legation trying to calm Vaulker down, but they struggled. He was a terrible off-white, and shivering. There was blood on his cheek – the bullet had skimmed him.
‘Thaniel,’ Mori said as they pulled onto the legation driveway. He didn’t say it with any urgency, but he had just had to catch Vaulker’s wrists to keep him from hitting something or somebody in the little space, and Vaulker was much bigger than he was. Vaulker wasn’t trying to hurt anyone, but he was saying they had to get out, and what if someone had followed. ‘Could you find that tall doctor when we …’
‘I will. Do you want some help?’
Mori shook his head. ‘No, he’s not strong. What’s his name?’
‘Tom.’
Mori said it, not loudly enough, Thaniel thought at first, but Vaulker looked at him.
‘You’re all right,’ Mori said. ‘No one else is coming. It was only an accident. These are the legation gates, see? You’re safe.’
‘The men from your clan are still …?’
‘The men from my house are still here,’ Mori said gently. He smiled. ‘Clan. Who arrived here and said, I know, it looks just like Scotland?’
Vaulker nearly laughed. It looked like hypnosis. His hands had eased. ‘House like … the House of Tudor?’
‘Exactly. We say House Mori, House Shimazu. It’s all the same.’
Vaulker looked down, because he had begun to shake. ‘House. That is better, isn’t it. Why did people get it wrong?’
Mori squeezed his hands. There wasn’t much to see but sky outside the windows from the angle they were at, but then they passed a red banner. ‘I think,’ he said, very kindly, ‘it’s the same reason that Tahitian trimaran battleships are called canoes, while the Viking version, half the size and half as skilled, are longships.’
Vaulker smiled and looked embarrassed, and showed no sign of telling Mori it wasn’t true.
The carriage slowed. Thaniel got out before it had stopped altogether.
The Duke’s men had tidied up since this morning and to distract the ladies, someone explained later, they had invited some of the traders from the floating market to set up on the lawn. Privately Thaniel suspected the ladies were perfectly all right and it was Pringle who’d needed distracting, but nobody wanted to embarrass him.
‘Electric torch, sir?’ someone said cheerfully, clicking the light on and off to show how it worked. It made Mori jump. There were people everywhere, calling and setting off unexpected noises. Someone had made a whole host of electric flying things that could lift themselves about three feet into the air and then down again, and then up, never stopping. They made a locust buzzing. Someone else had a whole stall of electric watches under a sign that said never wind your watch again!!
‘Well, that’s the first omen of the apocalypse,’ Mori muttered.
There were ordinary stalls too, and someone was selling newspapers. Thaniel stopped when he saw the headline. The Russian fleet, or a portion of it, had been sighted just off Yokohama. He looked south. It was only fifteen miles away. Mori had seen too, and turned still.
‘It’ll be all right,’ Thaniel said. ‘You wouldn’t have set up a war.’
He could see that Mori didn’t believe a word.
Once Thaniel had fetched Willis to look at Vaulker, he went to the translation office to explain to the juniors what had happened, and found that they were all busy with the telegraphs; the electricity had waned enough for everything to work again, and now there was a rush of message
s crackling through the office as everyone scrambled to confirm exactly where the Russians were, and where the British Navy was, and what the hell everyone was meant to do next. It felt bizarre to walk into a room where, quite rightly, no one cared about what had just happened at the tribunal.
‘I don’t know how to get hold of the Admiralty, sir,’ Pringle said when he came in. A few days ago, he would have been panicking, but he said it quite calmly.
‘I’ll do it,’ Thaniel promised, and started the hunt through the huge telegraph directories.
From somewhere very close, one of the other legations, a bell started to ring, loud and urgent. Others joined it, and then a weird, keening siren, electric-sounding, just like the klaxon at the fence in Aokigahara.
Pringle stood up and pointed out the window. Everyone looked. It was just possible to see the sparkle of Tokyo Bay in the distance. Over the water now, there were smoke columns.
Thaniel found the Admiralty codes and yanked a telegraph closer.
Brit. legation in Tokyo here. Reports of Russian fleet firing shots. Can anyone confirm?
There was a long pause. Outside, the sirens howled on. Vaulker ran up from the surgery and everyone explained at once that they were trying to talk to the Navy.
‘Quiet, quiet,’ Thaniel said urgently, because there was no paper feed in the telegraph, only the dits and dahs of the code.
Then: Tokyo, this is the HMS Valiance, accompanying the new Japanese fleet out of Liverpool. Russians fired because they saw us. They’re trying to stop us getting into Tokyo harbour. Give us twenty minutes.
They all waited around the telegraph. A couple of diplomats from the Dutch legation leaned in, then from the Chinese, and the American, until the little room was full, and there were murmurs everywhere in four languages. Pringle pushed the window open. Someone had a pair of binoculars and there was a yelp from that direction when a flurry of smoke plumes went up. In the grounds, the people in the pop-up electric market were silent, watching too. That was what stuck with Thaniel later, that no one ran or tried to hide. So much of Tokyo had been in electrical chaos for so long that not many people could have been convinced there was anywhere safe anymore.
The Lost Future of Pepperharrow Page 39