He turned down the station steps. There were still ticket officers in the forecourt, newly alert after hearing the explosion. Some of them were dusty – they must have been up the road to see. He bought a ticket to South Kensington, aware that the officer was staring at him as he fished four pence from his pocket.
‘We heard a bang,’ the man said tentatively. ‘Someone said that half of Whitehall was blown up.’
‘Only Scotland Yard,’ Thaniel said. ‘Is it this platform or the other—’
‘This side. Are … you all right?’
‘Yes. Thank you,’ he added, holding up the ticket as he turned away.
Grainy steam churned around the westbound platform. It tasted of soot and the walls were black with it. He leaned against a pillar while he waited. He was starting to feel light-headed, and couldn’t tell whether it was the noise from the explosion or the thick air. He almost never used the underground. Pimlico was close enough to Whitehall for the walk to be comfortable, and in any case, he didn’t much want the respiratory failure that would ensue from frequent trips. It wasn’t just a neurosis. Opposite him, on the other side of the tracks, there were posters pasted on to the walls. The two nearest advertised a new kind of restorative elixir for bronchial problems. He became aware of a rattling, and realised that he was still holding the watch in his pocket. Because his hand was shaking, the case kept clipping the chain.
Two women were looking at him half over their shoulders. He looked back, then around when they averted their eyes again. There was an odd movement in the small crowd of waiting people. Men were seeing him and leaving their women on the platform to go back towards the exits to see what was happening above ground. They must have felt the bang of the bomb, but it could have been anything down here – a train hitting the bumpers too hard or workmen in one of the new tunnels further down – but he was covered in dust, and now the dust was following him down the steps. He heard voices calling down that it was like fog outside, and that there were fires. A policeman came on to the platform and stopped by the conductor near Thaniel.
‘How deep are these lines?’ he asked. ‘Do any of them run under Scotland Yard?’
‘No? Why? Not too deep—’
‘South Kensington!’ shouted a guard. It made Thaniel jump, which sent a shooting pain across the back of his head. He pressed his hand against the nape of his neck. The two women were watching him again.
The train arrived in a thundercloud of steam, through which its front lights glowed red. Almost as soon as he was inside, the engine fired and the train was leaving again. Once the lights of the station had been left behind, everything beyond the windows was dark. He let his temple rest against the glass and thought how good a place a train would be to plant another bomb. People were on and off trains all day, and there were too few guards to keep combing every carriage. He started when the train jerked to the side and the gaslight above him flickered, but it was only bumps in the track.
He had the carriage to himself. All greyed, his reflection looked like his father, who had already been an old man by the time his children were born. He had lasted until Thaniel was fifteen and Annabel eighteen, and then, duty done, died suddenly. There was no will, so they had gone to a séance in Lincoln, where the old man asked via a girl medium if they minded helping the duke hire a replacement gamekeeper, and said his savings were in his tackle box, behind the bronze fishing hooks.
It was only twenty feet or so up to street level at South Kensington. The guards, distracted by his coating of ash and dust, didn’t check his ticket. It was too far from Westminster for them to have heard anything. Outside, he lost his bearings before his internal map realigned and placed the station just at the top of Knightsbridge. The rain was coming so hard that there was a mist above the ground where each drop ricocheted back up into the air. The noise sprayed spectra across everything and he put his hand to the wall. The prism colours ought to have been lovely, but his eyes ached and for a long few seconds, until he got himself used to the sound, they might as well have been strobe flashes. Putting up his umbrella, which had left a damp patch across his knees where he had held it on the train, he started down the long road.
Filigree Street was a medieval row of houses whose upper stories leaned toward each other. At its far end, the gap between the gables became so small that people standing in opposite bedroom windows could have shaken hands. It was too dark to see house numbers, but number twenty-seven was obvious because it was the only shop still alight. In the window, a single lamp illuminated a clockwork model of a city that grew new towers and bridges until it became London. When he pushed the door, it was unlocked. There was no bell.
‘Hello?’ he called into the empty workshop. His voice was spiderwebbed with cracks. Electric lights hummed on as he came in and he stopped still, not sure what he had done to turn them on and waiting, his spine stiff, for something else. The lights were set into the ceiling in looping rows. He had only ever seen them at the illuminations, never in anyone’s house. The filaments glowed orange first and then a yellowy white, much brighter than a gas lamp. The fizz of the electricity made him set his teeth. It sounded wrong, in the same way that the great river of tracks at Victoria felt wrong. But nothing else happened except, at last, a fractional brightening. In the new light, everything around him shone. Across the wall beside him was a tall pendulum clock, its movement regulated by the jointed wings and knees of a golden locust. A mechanical model of the solar system spun in mid-air, floating on magnets, and up two steps in the tiered floor, little bronze birds sat perched on the edge of the desk. One of them hopped on to the microscope and tapped its beak hopefully on the brass fittings. Things glimmered and clicked everywhere.
There was a sign by the door.
Room to let. Ask within.
He was about to call out again when, behind the desk, another door opened. A small man with blond hair came through it, backwards, because he was carrying two cups of tea. When he turned around, he nodded good evening. He had slanted eyes. Oriental. Thaniel floundered.
‘Oh, er – do you speak English?’
‘Of course I do, I live in England,’ said the man. He held out one of the cups. His hands were thin, his skin the colour that Thaniel would have turned after a week in the sun. ‘Tea? It’s horrible outside.’
Thaniel set down his soaking umbrella and took the cup. It was green tea. He breathed in the woody steam, which cleared the soot from the back of his throat. He had meant to start asking questions straightaway, but the little foreigner had blindsided him. Although his clothes were English, they looked worn, and with his bad posture and his black eyes, they made him less like a breathing human than an expensive, neglected marionette. Thaniel couldn’t think of a country that was known for turning out broken-toy men. Then he shook his head at himself. There didn’t need to be a country for that. A man could have a character independent of his nation. His thoughts were starting to take on a strange ring: they had shrunk from their usual size and now the ordinary attic that was his ordinary mind looked like a cathedral at night, with endless galleries and rafters lost in the dark and nothing but the echoes to show where they were. He forced himself to sip the tea. The echoes eased.
The man was frowning at Thaniel’s greyed clothes. ‘You’re bleeding.’
‘I’m what?’ Sticky blood had seeped through his shirtsleeve just above his elbow. He couldn’t feel it. ‘I’m all right. Are you Mr Mori?’
‘Yes. I think you ought to come through and—’
Thaniel closed his hand in the air to stop him. ‘One of your watches – it saved me from an explosion in Whitehall.’
‘An—’
‘There was an alarm,’ he ploughed on. His bones ached, and he was grimy, and cold, because he had come out without his coat in the warm morning a hundred years ago, but he could see that if he sat down, he wouldn’t be able to hold on to his thoughts. ‘I didn’t buy it; I don’t know where it came from. Someone gave it to me six months ago. Left it in
my flat with a gift tag. It wouldn’t open until today. A watchpaper with your name and address was inside. Do you remember who you sold it to?’
He had been holding out the watch all the while, and now, carefully, the foreigner took it from him. He turned it over twice. ‘I didn’t sell it. I thought it had been stolen.’
‘I didn’t steal it!’
‘No, you said, it was left for you. Come and sit down, please, your arm—’
‘Damn my arm! It was a bomb! The alarm – it wasn’t an ordinary alarm, it was a siren, you must have made that to order. It made a horrible noise, it made me move and I would have been killed if I hadn’t. What was it for?’
‘It really doesn’t—’
‘Half of Scotland Yard is going to think I knew when the bomb was going to go off, what was it for?’
‘I set several watches to do that.’ The watchmaker held his hands up in the way people do when they speak to hysterical children or wild animals. His fingertips were trembling, but from fear or cold it was hard to tell. The unfamiliar structure of the bones in his face made him hard to read. A draught had come in when he opened the door. On the desk, one of the clockwork birds fluffed up its metal feathers and shivered like wind chimes. ‘I keep the shop open until late on Fridays. A horrible noise is a good way to force customers to leave on time, without having to herd them out myself – it’s next door’s children, they come in and break things. I hate children.’ He looked at Thaniel helplessly, as if he were afraid that it wouldn’t be a satisfactory explanation.
It wasn’t. ‘But then it should have gone off every Friday.’
‘I – was explaining the alarm, not the timing. Anyone could reset it.’
‘The damn thing had a gift tag on it!’
‘That’s … interesting and strange,’ he said, glancing at the door as if he were gauging whether he was fast enough to slip by and out before Thaniel lost his temper.
Thaniel let his breath out. ‘You don’t know a thing about it, do you?’
‘I don’t think I do.’ There was a little space of quiet. Thaniel felt exhausted. His eyes burned and everything became a fraction clearer as the tears lensed the light, like spectacles would have.
‘Right. I see. Well, I’d better go.’
‘No – no. Come and sit down, for God’s sake, before you bleed to death on my floor.’ As he said it, his voice sank low into a red gold that didn’t suit his size. He must have seen Thaniel’s shoulders ease, because he held out his arm to show him through the workshop’s back door where he had just come with the tea. ‘The kitchen’s warm.’
He held open the door and waited for Thaniel to go through first. It led down two dented stone steps, very old, like the kind in churches, and straight into a neat kitchen that smelled sweet from baking. Thaniel dropped into one of the chairs and trapped his hands between his knees. There were lamps but no electric lights. Those must have been in the workshop for show. He was glad – the dimmer light hurt his eyes less.
He gazed around, expecting opium pipes and silk drapes, but everything was English. On the table in front of him was a plate full of scones, and a pot of tea that still steamed. The cups, he thought, were Chinese.
‘Were you expecting someone?’ he said, but didn’t hear the reply. Now that he had nothing else to think about, his arm throbbed and the back of his neck felt as though the bones were fusing together. He clothes were stiff with damp and blood. ‘Is there some water I could … ?’
The watchmaker filled a brass basin and set it down in front of him, followed by a new bar of lemon-scented soap. ‘I’ll go next door and see if Dr Haverly has a spare shirt that might fit you. I think I should bring him too.’
‘No, no, I’ll go home—’
‘You wouldn’t get past the front door,’ the watchmaker said. There was a touch of the north in his accent. It was bizarre, but then, there was no reason to think so; Orientals had just as much right as anybody else to visit York or Gainsborough, although it was difficult to imagine why any of them would want to. ‘I’ll be back soon.’
‘I’m all right,’ Thaniel said. He would have liked a doctor, but he couldn’t bring himself to push the watchmaker’s good will so far as to ask him to pay for the consultation.
‘Well, you need the shirt, at least.’
‘I … thanks, then. But only if he has one he doesn’t want.’
The watchmaker nodded once, then slipped out through the back door and clicked it shut again before the rain could blow in.
Thaniel pressed his clean sleeve to his eyes until they were dry again, then peeled off his waistcoat. It was more horrible to feel the fabric move than to sit still in it. His left sleeve was brown. He rolled it back past his elbow to see the cut. It was long and deep, with a shard of glass still stuck in it. It hurt much more now that he could see it. He closed his fingernails over the protruding edge of the glass and pulled it out. It wasn’t painful as much as it was shocking, like almost falling down the stairs. He dropped the shard into the water, where it plumed little ribbons of red.
The watchmaker came back then, rain-starred and holding a fresh shirt. He set it down on the chair next to Thaniel, along with a roll of bandages, and paused when he saw the glass in the bowl. ‘Christ.’
‘It’s better than it looks,’ Thaniel lied. It was difficult to believe that he had come from Westminster to Knightsbridge without feeling it. The pain was sharpening now that he was calmer. His neck sent spasms down his spine whenever he moved.
‘You had better eat something. Sugar is good for shock.’
‘Thank you,’ said Thaniel, who was too tired now to argue. He rinsed out the cut as best he could and wound the bandage over it one-handed, trapping one end against his hip with his elbow when it came to tying it. Once he had tucked the ends back into the knot, he unbuttoned his shirt one-handed but stopped halfway, unable to go further. It was too much to be half naked at a stranger’s kitchen table. He looked up at the watchmaker, meaning to excuse himself after all, but the man had turned around. He was fetching down crockery and cutlery. When he stretched to reach some plates from the cupboard above him, the hem of his waistcoat lifted and showed the dull brass buttons on his braces.
Thaniel ducked into the new shirt as quickly as he could, and felt better. The watchmaker must have been waiting to hear the clatter of fabric, because he turned back then and gave him some more tea and a scone, then crumpled down opposite him. He saw Thaniel watching him and smiled. It traced small lines around his eyes. Thaniel thought of cracks beneath the varnish on old porcelain.
‘Do you know if there’s somewhere nearby I could stay?’ he asked. ‘I think I’ve missed the last train.’
‘You can stay here, I’ve a spare room.’
‘I can’t cause you any more trouble.’
The watchmaker lifted his shoulder. ‘There are hotels along Sloane Street, if you brought money.’
He had a grand total of tuppence left. ‘I … didn’t.’
‘Or you can try the Haverlys next door. They keep the attic for lodgers.’ Almost before he had stopped speaking, some banging and shouting reached them through the wall. ‘There are the children, mind you.’
‘I can walk home, actually.’
‘I wouldn’t have asked you if it were inconvenient, I’m not that much of a Samaritan. The room has been ready to rent for months. Nobody wants it. And you can’t walk home,’ he added, letting his ink eyes draw a line down Thaniel’s head to the floor.
Thaniel saw the truth of it when he looked toward the door and felt reluctant about going even that far. Helplessness spread through him like damp. When he was small, Annabel had had a horror even of eating too much at somebody else’s house. He had never dumped himself on anyone for a whole night, never mind a stranger, nor even thought of it. It felt presumptuous, and selfish, because he couldn’t return the favour.
‘You must let me pay you for the trouble later, then,’ he said at last, and heard how stiff he sounded. He shut h
is eyes for a second. ‘I’m sorry. I’m not trying to be rude, I mean it’s – mortifying to stumble in here and—’
‘Please don’t be mortified,’ the watchmaker said quietly. ‘It isn’t your fault.’
Thaniel thanked him unhappily and concentrated on achieving an even spread of jam across his scone. The high-pitched whine came back, greenish. The longer he was quiet, the louder it became, until it was the roar of collapsing brickwork.
‘How do clockwork bombs work?’ he said, to drown it out.
The watchmaker set down his teacup. If he thought that the question came abruptly, he didn’t show it. ‘They are explosives wired to a trigger switch, wired to a timer, which could be a clock or a watch, or something more in the region of a marine chronometer, if they must stand unattended for days rather than hours. The purpose of them is to remove the necessity of lighting a fuse in person. The only reason they have not been widely used before now is that until recently the technology did not exist to keep timers accurate in very cold or very hot weather. It’s the springs. The metal expands and contracts. You can lose half an hour a day in winter.’
While he spoke, he stood up and took Thaniel’s plate to the sink, where he turned the tap.
Thaniel half rose. ‘I meant to do that—’
‘Sit down.’
There was a bump under the sink. He jumped, but the watchmaker was unflustered and leaned down to open the cupboard. An octopus fell out. It was made of clockwork and it gleamed in the lamplight, but it was so like the real thing that Thaniel recoiled. The octopus seemed to consider things for a moment, then waved two of its arms. The watchmaker lifted it up and put it in a small water tank on the windowsill, where it drifted around with every sign of contentment.
‘Er … ’ said Thaniel.
The Watchmaker of Filigree Street Page 5