The Watchmaker of Filigree Street

by Natasha Pulley

  ‘I’ve been looking for that new jacket everywhere, Carrow.’

  Grace swung around in her chair and then squeaked when Akira Matsumoto ripped off the false moustache.

  ‘You are quite a convincing man without that,’ he said as he sat down opposite her. He flicked it across the room.

  Grace kicked him under the table. Her lip hurt. She was about to tell him to be quiet when she realised that she was the only other person here except the librarian. Everyone else was outside, taking advantage of the sun. ‘What are you doing here?’ she said instead. ‘I thought you were nurturing Japanese poetry in the Upper Reading Room? Or did you have to come and borrow my moustache before they’d let you in?’

  Matsumoto smiled. He was the elegant son of a Japanese nobleman, not so much a student as a very, very rich tourist. Enrolled at New College, he had the run of the university, but as far as Grace knew, he had done no work; only perfected his already impeccable English and translated some Japanese poems. He insisted that it was hard work and important. The more he insisted, the more Grace was convinced the project was mythical.

  ‘I was at the coffee house,’ he said, ‘and I saw my jacket walking past. I followed. May I have it back?’

  ‘No.’

  He levered down her book with one white-gloved finger. Outside, Grace had been uncomfortably warm in the borrowed jacket and starched collar, but Matsumoto seemed not to sweat. ‘The Relative Motion of the Earth and the Luminiferous Ether. What in God’s name is a luminiferous ether when it’s at home?’

  ‘It’s the substance through which light moves. Like sound in air, or ripples in water. It’s incredibly interesting, actually. It’s one of those things like the missing elements in the periodic table: we know mathematically that it must exist, but no one has yet proved it by experiment.’

  ‘Dear me,’ he sighed. ‘How frightfully dry.’

  ‘The man who wrote this essay almost managed it,’ Grace pressed on. She had decided some time ago that it was her duty to make Matsumoto learn some science. It was embarrassing to be associated with a man who thought Newton was a town. ‘His experiment was unsuccessful, but that’s because his parameters were too lax and he conducted it among too many extraneous vibrations. But his design is excellent. This thing here, this machine, it’s called an interferometer. It should work. If I could build one, with some improvements, somewhere absolutely vibration proof – a college’s stone cellars, say – then it could be very exciting—’

  ‘I’ll tell you what’s exciting,’ he interrupted. ‘My finished translation of the Hyakunin Isshu.’

  ‘Bless you.’

  ‘Quiet, Carrow, and pretend to be thrilled.’

  She wrinkled her nose. ‘Show me, then.’

  He lifted the book from his canvas bag. It was a pretty quarto, and when he opened it, it was printed in Japanese on one side, English on the other. ‘All polished and done with, at last. I’m quite proud of it. I only printed the one, for vanity; well, my father’s vanity. I fetched it from the printer this morning.’

  Grace flicked through it. The poems were only a few lines long.

  ‘I direct you to number nine,’ he said. ‘Don’t pull that face. These are the finest poems in all of Japan and medicine for your numerical soul.’

  Grace turned to the ninth poem.

  The flower’s colour

  Has faded away,

  While in idle thoughts

  My life passes vainly by,

  And I watch the long rains fall.

  ‘Not a very great example of manly frankness, is it,’ she said.

  Matsumoto laughed. ‘And if I tell you that our word for colour is the same as our word for love?’

  Grace read the poem again. ‘Still trite,’ she said. It was one of his faults to bombard all his acquaintances with persistent, suggestive charm until they adored him. He couldn’t stand anything less than adoration. Grace had met his other friends, and disapproved. They followed him around like dogs after the huntsman.

  ‘Hopeless,’ he sighed, taking the little volume back. ‘Now do put that awful science book away, Carrow, or we’ll be late.’

  Grace was lost. ‘Late?’

  ‘The National Society for Women’s Suffrage. At your college. In quarter of an hour.’

  ‘What? No,’ Grace protested. ‘I never said I would go. They’re all tea-drinking idiots—’

  ‘Don’t speak of your fellow women in such an abominable way,’ Matsumoto said, tugging her upright. ‘Leave the book and come along. These things are terribly important and besides, the movement is becoming a little frightening. Certainly that Bertha girl looks fit to go at you with a knitting needle if she discovers you’ve shunned her meeting.’

  Grace tried to pull against him, but he was a head taller than her and unexpectedly strong beneath his immaculate clothes. She only just managed to lean far enough away from him to drop the journal back on the re-shelving trolley. ‘You don’t give two figs about women’s suffrage, what are you playing at?’

  ‘Of course I do, of course you ought to have your rights.’

  ‘You have to say that, you’re afraid of the knitting needles too—’

  ‘Ssh,’ Matsumoto said, and they walked silently past the librarian. When they reached the steps, he took her arm and steered her up. ‘If you must know, I have organised the most exquisite poker match in the anteroom where the various put-upon husbands and brothers will be waiting, but dear Bertha won’t let in a member of the unfair sex if he is unaccompanied by an example of the fairer.’

  ‘I see. I’m your ticket to the game.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Grace thought about it. She wanted to be indignant, but even an octopus would have had difficulty finding a leg to stand on after spending the last four years towing him around every library in Oxford. ‘Well … yes, all right, fair enough.’

  ‘Excellent. I will buy you some wine tonight.’

  ‘Thank you. But once the game has finished, if you could announce loudly that you intend to go to your club … ’

  ‘Yes, yes, of course.’ He kissed the top of her head and she caught the scent of his expensive cologne. She felt herself redden.

  ‘Will you get off me!’

  They had just reached the top of the steps. The porter gave her a suspicious look.

  ‘You rather gave yourself away just then,’ Matsumoto laughed once they were out of earshot again. ‘Women haven’t cultivated the art of proper friendship.’

  ‘Women don’t climb all over each other—’

  ‘Oh, that’s a cab – can you catch it? They never stop for me, they all seem to think I’m a harbinger for the invasion of the Yellow Man.’

  Grace ran to catch the cab. The Oxford sort were always in a better condition than their London equivalents, and despite the hot weather, the seats inside smelled only of leather polish and cleaning salt. Matsumoto ducked in beside her.

  ‘Lady Margaret Hall, please,’ Grace called. They ground off over the cobbles.

  Lady Margaret was at the far end of a long, wide avenue. The cab took them past other libraries and townhouses, then the redbrick walls of Keble College with their zigzag patterns, which looked ridiculous and spoke, Grace suspected, of the general unavailability of proper Cotswolds sandstone. Matsumoto’s college had bought it all for their new buildings.

  There was talk of new buildings at Lady Margaret, too. Grace hoped the plans would go through. As the cab stopped outside, the hall looked impoverished even after Keble. Because she almost never took a cab and so never made the transition between the great spires of the town and here in so little time, she rarely noticed how tiny it was. Nobody could have called it a college in the sense that the others were. From the outside, it looked like nothing more exciting than a white stone manor house, nicely planted about with Virginia creeper and lavender, but hardly impressive. There were only nine students in residence.

  Today, though, there was much more activity than usual. Other cabs were arri
ving, and women with parasols were gravitating towards the doors two by two, or slightly ahead of husbands. Some of the men saw Matsumoto and made a beeline across, looking hopeful.

  ‘Ah, Grace, joining us at last?’

  ‘Good afternoon, Bertha,’ Grace smiled, though she could feel that the smile had a certain rictus-like quality. Bertha lived in the room next to hers, but she studied classics, the most pointless subject in the university. It was hard to communicate with somebody who spent every waking hour poring over the linguistic cleverness of men who had been dead for two thousand years. Matsumoto was bad enough, but classicists were honorary Catholics. Now, Bertha was manning the main door like a bishop.

  ‘Perhaps you’d like to change into something more suitable before attending?’ she said, lifting her eyebrows at Grace’s borrowed clothes.

  ‘Yes. This is far too hot.’ Grace pulled off the jacket and gave it to Matsumoto. ‘I’ll be in in a minute. There’s no need to wait for me.’

  ‘Who’s this?’ Bertha demanded. ‘You can’t bring in your ser-vants, there isn’t room.’

  ‘This is Akira Matsumoto. He isn’t my servant, he’s the Emperor’s second cousin.’

  ‘Do you speak English?’ Bertha asked him, too loudly.

  ‘I do,’ Matsumoto said, unruffled, ‘though I’m afraid my sense of direction is somewhat hazy in all languages. Can you remind me where I ought to wait? Somebody did tell me last time, but I’ve quite forgotten now.’

  Bertha was wrong-footed. ‘Through there on the left. There are refreshments and … yes.’

  Matsumoto smiled and slipped past her towards the anteroom and the smell of pipe smoke. Grace watched him go. She couldn’t tell whether he was charming because he had a deep-seated love of humanity, or because charm always got him what he wanted. It was tempting to think that the former notion was naïve and the latter far more likely, but he kept it up all the time. Her own reserves of bonhomie ran low after twenty minutes. She shook her head once and went slowly upstairs to change.

  Her brother had bought her a fob watch for her birthday. It opened in two ways. On one side was the clock face, on the other, a filigree latticework. When the back lid opened, the filigree rearranged itself into the shape of a tiny swallow. Clever tracks of clockwork let it fly and swoop along the inside of the lid, silver wings clinking. She took it down with her in order to have something to fiddle with. The meeting had started by the time she arrived and she had to slip in to sit at the back. She ran her fingernail over the maker’s mark on the back of the watch. K. Mori. An Italian, probably; Englishmen were rained on too often to come up with anything that imaginative.

  Bertha stood on the stage where the high table usually was, her hands clasped in front of her and blushing prettily while she gave her speech. Every now and then, there was a smattering of applause. She was saying the usual things. Grace clicked open her watch and clicked it closed again three times, watching the swallow flit. The clicking was sharp and probably irritating to the women further along the bench, but two of them were knitting.

  ‘And so,’ Bertha was saying, ‘I propose that this society offer its support to Mr Gladstone’s establishment in any way possible, whether through our influence over male relations, or through party donations. Would anyone like to say anything?’

  Someone in a white bonnet lifted her hand. ‘I’m not sure about Mr Gladstone,’ she said. ‘He doesn’t seem entirely trustworthy. My uncle is a phrenologist and says that the shape of his skull is typical of a liar.’

  ‘That’s utter nonsense,’ someone else said. ‘My husband works at the Home Office and has found him to be an absolute gentleman. He provided wine for all his staff at Christmas.’

  Grace turned over the watch and wished that the ingenious Mr Mori could have devised a way to make time speed up. It had only been fifteen minutes. The meeting would last at least an hour. It took Bertha nearly that long to carry her motion. Almost as soon as there was a general agreement, the porter leaned in and cleared his throat.

  ‘Ah, ladies? The gentlemen are declaring their intention to repair to their clubs.’

  There was a flurry of movement as the women hurried to intercept their relatives before they could be left behind. Grace slipped out first and found Matsumoto waiting for her just outside, leaning against a door frame.

  ‘There,’ he said. ‘Duty done. That wasn’t so difficult, was it?’

  ‘You weren’t there. Outside, outside. If women ever get the vote, I’m moving to Germany.’

  His lip quirked. ‘How very unfeminine of you.’

  ‘Have you listened to them? Oh, we can’t support Gladstone, he’s got terribly odd hair, but wait, he’s a lovely man really, even if he does have a queer nose … ’

  As they passed back outside, where the air had cooled now, he lifted his eyebrows at her. ‘I hate to state the obvious, Carrow, but you are one of them.’

  ‘I am an atypical example,’ she snapped. ‘I’ve had a proper education. I don’t spend my time mumbling about crockery. Anyone who does shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near the damn vote, never mind Parliament. Christ, if women members were allowed now, foreign policy would be decided according to the state of the Kaiser’s sideburns. I’ll kick anyone who asks me to sign a petition, I swear.’ She paused. ‘Did you promise me some wine, earlier?’

  ‘I did,’ Matsumoto smiled. ‘If you’ll come back to New College.’

  ‘Yes please.’

  ‘You are ludicrous, I hope you understand.’

  ‘I understand.’ She sighed. ‘Is it white wine? Red tastes like vinegar.’

  ‘Of course it’s white wine, I’m Japanese. I’d like to walk if you don’t mind, now it’s cooler,’ he added, nodding at the clouded sky.

  ‘Yes, me too.’

  As they walked, he took her arm. ‘I must say, I don’t approve of this dress. It’s ghastly. My tailoring is infinitely better.’

  ‘It is. May I have that jacket back?’

  ‘You may.’ He put it around her shoulders.

  It smelled of him rather than her. ‘This is the one you were wearing earlier.’

  ‘I wanted to keep my new one new. I enjoyed the biscuits, by the way.’

  The wind rose and Grace pulled the sleeves over her hands, then paused. Each sleeve had only one button, and each button had been made in the shape of a silver swallow. She looked up. ‘These are good.’

  ‘Oh, do you think? I bought them specially, actually. I’ve always had rather a weakness for swallows. When I was a boy, we used to watch swarms and swarms of them from the castle walls. They fly in enormous numbers sometimes in Japan, and they make the strangest shapes. One can see why people in medieval times thought they were seeing spirits and suchlike. Reminds me of home.’

  Grace took out her watch and showed him the filigree swallow inside. Matsumoto almost never talked about Japan. Or, he would mention it in passing as a way to illustrate the deficiencies of the English, but he had never told her what it was like there. She had assumed, wrongly, that he didn’t think of it.

  He smiled. ‘May I?’

  She passed the watch to him. He turned it around and around. The weighted swallow stood upright whichever way the watch was held.

  ‘There’s something familiar about this,’ he murmured. His black eyes sharpened. ‘Who’s the maker?’

  ‘Some Italian.’

  He looked relieved.

  FOUR

  LONDON, 30 MAY 1884

  Thaniel lay in bed and watched the sun brighten his ceiling. He hadn’t slept until an hour ago because he had been doing the last of the cleaning – the grate and the hearth, and the insides of the cupboards, completely empty except for the crockery. Now he felt as though he were trying to get up at midnight. Usually he took a night shift on Fridays, but the senior clerk had reshuffled the timetable to bring in the fastest coders for eight o’clock, and leave the slowest for the night. Today, the night shift wouldn’t matter; if Clan na Gael kept to their promise, the
Home Office would be safe or gone by midnight. The tall ship outside was creaking again, rigging squeaky from the damp and loud because he had left the window open overnight. Somebody was repairing the hull. He could smell the tar.

  He waited for the clock to reach seven. The mist outside made the air close and stuffy, and he had to peel himself off the sheets.

  In the morning quiet, the click of the watch’s clasp was sharp as it unlocked itself. He turned his head without moving the rest of himself. Pressed down by an invisible finger, the button on the catch lowered, and the case eased open, no quicker than an oyster shell. Once it had opened wholly, it sat inanimate again. He waited, but it did not move again. At last, he lifted it up by its chain.

  The face was glass, to show off the clockwork underneath. It was working. The time was right. Under the hands, the silver balance swung on a hairline wire, and the cogs that wheeled round the seconds ticked under jewel bearings. Behind those was more clockwork, very dense, much more elaborate than an ordinary watch. He couldn’t tell what it was measuring. From the open cover, a round watchpaper feathered out and settled on his knee, face down. He turned it over. A border of fine leaves encircled the maker’s mark:

  K. Mori

  27 Filigree Street

  Knightsbridge

  Mori. He didn’t know what kind of name that was. It sounded Italian. He fitted the watchpaper back into the lid and kept staring at it in snatches while he got up – shave at the mirror, tie, collar. He had gone through the same motions in the mornings and in the nights for long enough to know, without looking at a clock, that it took twenty-one minutes to dress. It was so well established that if he tried to do anything unusual, or go any more slowly, he felt a pressure on the base of his skull. It made his study of the watch difficult, and the question of whether or not to bring it with him more feverish than it needed to be. At last he picked it up. He wanted to show it to Williamson. As he closed the door behind him, he took one last look around the room. Everything was clean, cleaner than he had found it, and there was no clutter. If Annabel had to come down to see to it, she would only have to spend half an hour packing up what he had left.