The Watchmaker of Filigree Street

by Natasha Pulley

  The boy threw the rest of his shredded newspaper at them, but the shot fell short and bounced off the keyboard lid of the old piano, which was on a fragile hinge and bumped shut, just hard enough to disturb the strings and bring out a red hum. In tune, despite the draught. Then the sliding door slammed and bounced off the wall, and slid back open again, but then the boy had disappeared. A silence settled over the other customers that lasted for an uncomfortably long time. They were all white, Thaniel noticed; the village was not like the Chinese districts of Limehouse. People had come to it like they would to a fair and the silence was not the awkward kind but more irritable, as though actors had abandoned their lines for a row midway through a play. At last, a woman two tables along wished loudly that the locals would keep their feuds out of the public eye.

  ‘As opposed to ours, which are always quiet and never involve exploding buildings,’ Thaniel murmured, but loudly enough for her to hear. He was pleased when the watchmaker looked down at his tea with the porcelain lines around his eyes again. ‘Why was he upset, the boy?’ he asked, more quietly.

  ‘He was aiming at me,’ the watchmaker explained. As he spoke, he went to the piano to retrieve the ball of newspaper. He put the keyboard cover up again. ‘The men dressed up outside are nationalists; they want Japanese people to be Japanese, and he’s taken it more to heart than the rest. I’m sorry.’

  ‘I was blown up yesterday, I can cope with newspaper.’

  Some of the ivory had chipped off the middle keys, but it was still polished enough to reflect Mori’s watch chain. He must have seen something else while he was there, because he tilted up the lid to see inside. There was a small squeak as he twisted one of the wing-bolts that held taut the strings. The hum turned to a weird, acid sharp. Thaniel folded his hands around his tea, not sure what the purpose of that had been, but he had a feeling that if he were to ask anything about a piano, his entire musical history would come spilling out. The watchmaker came back to his seat.

  ‘Are you all right?’ he said. ‘Your colour’s gone.’

  ‘I was thinking about what it would have been like to do something else for a living,’ Thaniel said. He pushed his fingertips hard against the hot cup.

  ‘Why don’t you?’

  ‘No money.’

  ‘I’m sorry. That seems to be quite common.’

  ‘Seems?’ said Thaniel, looking back at him again.

  The watchmaker moved his head awkwardly. ‘My cousin was Lord Mori. I grew up in a castle. Then I was an aide for a government minister, so … yes.’ A little pause. ‘I’ll be buying the tea.’

  Thaniel put his cup down. ‘Why in God’s name do you need to share the rent of the house, then?’

  ‘I don’t. I’m lonely.’ As soon as he said it, he pursed his lips at his tea.

  Thaniel almost said that he was lonely too. He swallowed it. ‘What happened to your government minister?’

  The watchmaker blinked once, slowly, as if two people had spoken to him at once and he was having trouble hearing which was which, though the conversations around them were still all at a low mutter in the strange boy’s wake. ‘Nothing, he’s negotiating in China now. I prefer clockwork to the civil service though.’ He hesitated. ‘What is it that you do now? Did you say?’

  ‘I’m a telegraphist at the Home Office.’

  ‘Well, I’ll bet you a guinea that you will have a better position soon.’

  ‘What makes you think that?’

  ‘How old are you, twenty-five? People don’t usually stick where they are at twenty-five for the rest of their lives.’

  Thaniel shrugged. ‘All right. I could do with a guinea.’

  SIX

  HAGI, APRIL 1871

  Although it was not so much further south than Tokyo, measuring by latitude, Hagi was distinctly warmer than the capital; it bred plants not found in the north, and as the carriage rounded the final bend of the mountain road, Ito saw the yellow flowers nodding in the castle gardens, where workmen laboured on a portion of the wall. Then the garden was lost behind the old masonry and the driver went along the street for a few hundred yards, respectfully overshooting the castle gate. Ito had told him to stop outside, but he was unsurprised to be disobeyed. They stopped instead at the side of the wide road, just before a market. None of it had changed since he had left as a boy.

  Stiff, he stepped out into air that smelled of pollen and summer, and felt grateful for the chance to walk and stretch. Five hundred miles in four days nettled him far more than the piousness of the driver. The employees of the British Legation always arrived at their posts with the same question: where are the damn trains? He assured them that the government was doing its best, but the fact was that they would have to wait until next year even for a line between Tokyo and Yokohama, a distance representing a short afternoon walk. Connecting lines all the way to the far south belonged to an altogether more distant future. He pushed his arms out in front of him, wishing that he could hurry the future along, if only in the interest of not developing arthritis at thirty-one.

  He caught sight of his hands. They were wan and tired. So were his three aides. The countryside sun had a frank habit of showing all the lines and wrinkles that the mist in Tokyo politely obscured.

  ‘Mr Ito?’

  A man was standing five feet from them. Unlike Ito and the aides, he was nearly luminous. His skin was gold, his hair glossy in its long tail, and his clothes, strictly traditional except for the pocket watch clipped to his belt, looked cool and comfortable in the heat.

  ‘I’ve been sent from the castle to fetch you,’ he explained. ‘My name is Keita Mori.’

  Ito bowed for the Mori name. The man bowed back, unnecessarily. Ito’s father had been a bookseller; the Mori were knights. Well-informed knights.

  ‘I didn’t send any word ahead,’ Ito said, puzzled. ‘We were going to stay at the inn on Kamigoken Street.’

  ‘You can’t stay at an inn when we have eighty rooms sitting idle,’ the man smiled.

  ‘That’s very kind, sir,’ Ito said, wondering which of his staff was the spy. Almost any of them. It was not only carriage drivers who retained their respect for the great houses.

  ‘Not at all. It’s this way.’

  Ito fell into step beside him. Behind them, one of his aides murmured in English,

  ‘Someone has warned them. Lord Takahiro would never usually be so generous to civil service people.’

  Mori looked back. ‘He took the precaution of assuming that if the Minister of the Interior arrives on short notice, the purpose is probably both important and urgent.’ He spoke English with a British accent.

  They all stared at him.

  ‘I am sorry, sir,’ the aide mumbled in Japanese. ‘I meant no offence.’

  ‘I’m not offended,’ Mori assured him.

  Ito considered him more closely. He had thought Mori was much younger, but in fact they were more or less of an age. Ito would be thirty in October and had spent some time lately feeling distressed about the grey in his hair. There was none in Mori’s. ‘So … is English now required at the castle?’ he asked. ‘When I lived here, it was unheard of.’

  ‘It’s still banned. But I like it.’

  The road to the castle gate was crowded, and Ito worried about crushing his already dusty suit, but the carters and sweepers and market women melted apart before them. An apple seller didn’t see them until they were only a few feet away and, mortified, dropped straight down on to his knees and pressed his forehead to the dusty cobblestones. The genuflection was aimed at Mori, not Ito’s party.

  ‘Up you get,’ Mori said gently, and the man apologised again before hurrying away, shoulders hunched in an effort to make himself smaller.

  Hagi castle was on the far side of a short bridge. Ito had grown up seeing it, but his memory had hazed around the edges. Under the blue sky, the castle was stark white and black. It rose from the river on foundations twenty feet high, and above them, the walls towered over the city. Built ov
er decades, it was really a conglomeration of lesser castles spliced together. Mori led the way in through the black gates. Ito slowed. He had never been inside before – commoners unrelated to or unemployed by the Mori clan were forbidden entry.

  A huge cherry tree snowed petals in a wind that brushed them eddying over the flagstones. They were well past their best now, brown at the edges. Fresh, apple-cheeked servant girls not in the least past their best went by with their hands clasped before them, eyes down even when a group of young men clattered by with bows and quivers. If Keita Mori had told him now that there was some ingenious lens built into the gateway that allowed a visitor to see into the past, Ito would have believed him. There was no aspect of the people or the buildings that would have been out of place a hundred years before.

  ‘Lord Takahiro is engaged for now,’ Mori said. He had gone on ahead to wait by the door of the main hall. ‘But if you would like to come in, I can show you where to wait.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Ito. He doubted that Lord Takahiro was busy. Feigning occupation was a standard tactic among noblemen faced with civil servants. He had spent half his life waiting in foyers and outer halls, but patience was always the key. Time waiting was time to plan.

  Mori led them inside. As soon as Ito followed, the wooden floor squeaked slowly. He winced. He hated nightingale floors. The name made them sound as though they ought to chirp and sing, but in fact the noise was horrible. Mori’s own steps were silent, and Ito followed them as exactly as he could, though in vain. Above them were two tiers of galleries where long silk banners rippled in the draught. The rest of the hall was empty and echoing.

  Through a set of sliding doors lay a long corridor. It was lined with suits of armour. Ito counted ten sets before the next doors. Bullet holes riddled the tenth.

  ‘Is this from the war?’ he asked.

  Mori didn’t look. ‘Yes, most of our knights fought for the Emperor. Their armour was retrieved afterwards.’

  There was tea ready in the room within, and the window had a splendid view down over the gardens. The old wall looked very tumbledown indeed from here. The repairs they had seen on the way into the city were overdue. Mori waited with them and served the tea himself.

  ‘I’m sure one of the maids can do that,’ Ito said, unsettled.

  Mori lifted his head fractionally at the tea. ‘Most of the maids are more important than I am.’

  Ito watched him. As he spun hot water around each of the cups to keep the porcelain from cracking, the motion of his hands was fluid. Ito hadn’t been to a real tea ceremony for a while – they always took such a tremendous amount of time – but he remembered it well enough to know that Mori folded the red cloth in the correct way before using it to lift the iron handle of the kettle. When his sleeve fell back, it exposed four finger-shaped bruises around his wrist. Ito pretended not to notice and asked him about castle life instead. As was usual for his class, Mori replied briefly and pleasantly. While he spoke, he twisted the red cloth between his hands. Ito had a fair idea of what he really wanted to say.

  Mutsuhito had summoned Ito to his study early in the morning, last Tuesday. He was a new emperor, only nineteen, and four years ago there had been a war to put him on the throne – the same war that had so thinned the ranks of the Mori knights. Nervous that the titans of the court remained unconvinced that he was worth all the trouble, Mutsuhito was in the habit of rising before dawn and of reading everything any minister gave to him. He frowned in photographs; in person, he had an open face, and young, so young that it was possible to see what he would have looked like as a small boy. Ito wanted to tell him to leave governing to the government and enjoy his youth while it lasted, but such personal advice was not the prerogative of a civil service minister, or anyone.

  ‘Minister,’ the Emperor said. He was standing by a window with his hands behind his back, a posture he had adopted in order to seem older than he was. He was dressed in an exquisite morning suit. ‘Lord Takahiro Mori has still not attended court. We invited him particularly.’

  Ito nodded once. ‘I have noticed his absence, your majesty.’

  Mutsuhito turned to him, though only from the waist. ‘Takahiro behaves like a king and always has. I will not be Emperor of all Japan except Hagi city. He has his own army and a fortress the size of Mount Fuji, and now he is being deliberately rude. If he does not bow, the other noblemen will think … ’ he trailed off. ‘Go to Hagi today and do something about it.’

  Ito lifted his eyes. He was the Minister of the Interior, but Mutsuhito was not a constitutional monarch; it was impossible to divide government into interior and exterior, one department or another, when the young Emperor sat at the centre of all of them, tinkering. ‘Something, your majesty?’

  ‘Anything,’ Mutsuhito said. He looked very alone. ‘He agreed to be a prefectural governor just like the others. He agreed that policy would come from Tokyo now, not from him. Does he not understand what that means?’

  ‘I think he understands, your majesty, but I think he is choosing to ignore it.’

  Mutsuhito’s frustration leaked past his careful manners. ‘Well, I don’t understand. You wouldn’t catch England or America allowing feudal lords to run everything, it’s medieval!’

  ‘They no longer do here, your majesty.’

  ‘Takahiro does not appear to have noticed.’ He looked away and swallowed. ‘What can you do? Can you take his castle? Will you need soldiers?’

  ‘No,’ Ito said gently, ‘we will not be needing soldiers. Accountants will do nicely.’

  Mutsuhito frowned. ‘How does one storm a castle with accountants?’

  ‘One buys it, sir.’

  ‘But … Lord Takahiro does not want to sell his castle.’

  ‘He will,’ Ito promised.

  Ito straightened when he heard a banging of footsteps in the corridor. The sliding doors opened and Lord Takahiro Mori strode through. Everyone around the table stood up, except Keita Mori and the girl who had brought in the tea; they bowed so quickly that Ito thought they had collapsed. The nape of his neck prickled. Most people at court responded with less alacrity to the Emperor.

  ‘So you’re Ito.’ Lord Takahiro studied him frankly. He had a weathered face. Behind him, four retainers stood against the wall, arms folded. They were all southern men, dark-skinned. ‘Sit down. Familiar name. What’s your father do, is he on my staff?’

  ‘No, sir, he was a lower-class samurai from the town,’ said Ito as they all knelt down again.

  ‘Samurai, really. Didn’t see him take up arms in the Satsuma rebellion.’

  Ito, who had just returned from a long stint in America, thought of escaping oranges. ‘No, indeed, sir, he sold books.’

  Takahiro snorted. ‘They’re sending me peasants now. What d’you want?’

  Ito folded his hands around his teacup. He had never been cruel, or he hoped that he had not, but he couldn’t help noticing that Takahiro was setting himself up beautifully.

  ‘The government would like to buy this castle.’

  Silence fell like a brick. The only sounds left were the calls of the workmen outside as they moved along the outer wall, and the tick of Keita Mori’s pocket watch.

  Suddenly Takahiro laughed. ‘With what? It would be cheaper to buy Korea.’

  ‘Government bonds,’ Ito said.

  ‘To be honoured when, in a hundred years?’

  ‘Quite possibly.’

  On the periphery of his vision, Ito saw Mori shrink. Takahiro set his teacup down with something between a clink and a bang. ‘I’d like to see you try,’ he said flatly.

  ‘I don’t think you would like it at all,’ Ito said quietly. ‘The Emperor is anxious about your loyalty. If you decline, tomorrow will see an army of accountants and lawyers from the ministry descend on every record here. I suspect they will discover a great many interesting things.’

  ‘You have no right—’

  ‘The government has every right to investigate the financial state of o
ne of its own prefectural offices.’ Ito lifted his hand a little to encompass the castle.

  Takahiro’s eyes flared. Ito doubted he had been interrupted before in his life. ‘I am still a prefectural governor, and I submitted without a murmur to the indignity of allowing the civil service to saddle me with a deputy—’

  ‘Yes, he was a lucky man. I believe you gave him ten thousand yen and a fine residence in Kyushu, where he now keeps bees. It must be a long commute.’

  ‘How dare you speak to me in this way!’

  ‘I’m here to negotiate terms, of course.’

  Takahiro stared at him but said nothing for a while. When he did speak, his tone was hard. ‘I don’t see what there is to negotiate. I have done nothing but live in my family’s holdings, all within your new laws. My authority to rule my own land is subject to Tokyo’s every whim. My retainers, loyal to my family for generations, are now civil servants, paid by the government. Our records are sound. Bring your accountants.’

  Ito nodded once, though he was disappointed. The clerks would come and Takahiro would cause a riot, and by next week, all the other governors would have burned their ledgers. Hagi would be a one-off trick.

  Keita Mori squeezed Ito’s wrist under the table. ‘You need only give him something he already has,’ he said in English, lifting the teapot as if he were asking whether Ito would like some more.

  ‘Pardon me?’

  ‘The retainers,’ he said. ‘They’re paid through the prefectural office as Tokyo requires, yes, but Lord Takahiro is the governor. This is the prefectural office. He’s paying them far more than the government salary. None of them are really government men. They’re his own private army. Look at them.’

  Ito looked. The four men behind Takahiro stared at him unblinkingly.

  ‘You lose nothing if you offer him control of his own men again. He can’t admit he already has it.’

  Everyone looked at him.

  ‘Yes, please, more tea,’ Ito said quickly in Japanese.