The Watchmaker of Filigree Street

by Natasha Pulley

  ‘This is utterly ridiculous—’

  ‘It is, but that’s not her fault, is it.’

  Carrow looked as if he would have liked to hit him with the cane. ‘You will sign a contract agreeing to keep the Kensington house, which I’m certain she’s mentioned to you, in perfect repair, which will require you to live there. You will not sell it. The dowry will be given in instalments, not all at once. Control of it will remain in my hands. By God, if you think you’re marrying money, you’ve another thing coming.’

  ‘I don’t want her money.’

  They stood in silence. Thaniel looked across at the workshop window, where the lights were now on. Mori was starting to put the wrecked workshop back into order. There were lights in the other shops too, and their windows were doll’s house tableaux of men working or talking, or eating.

  ‘I rather think,’ Carrow said, ‘that this is a stunt of hers to prove a point, and that she will refuse you in order to be unmarriageable. However, I believe in calling bluffs. So I do hope, Mr Steepleton, that you are happy to live the rest of your life with a woman you don’t know.’ He looked Thaniel up and down once again. ‘I find you insolent.’

  ‘You must have known that she would hop if you put up a sign that said don’t walk.’

  ‘How dare you!’

  Thaniel sighed. ‘Would you like to come in for some tea?’

  ‘Of course I wouldn’t.’

  ‘Good night, then.’

  Carrow gripped his cane hard again but didn’t raise it. Instead he turned away suddenly and stepped up into the carriage, which moved off with a jolt. Thaniel let himself into the workshop. Mori had been setting things back into the glass cabinets, but he turned at the sound of the door and there was a silent catch in which Thaniel didn’t know what to say to him.

  He took a plain steel ring from his waistcoat pocket and held it out. ‘This is the right size for her. You’ll need to show it to the jeweller tomorrow.’

  Thaniel took it carefully. In Mori’s hand it had looked larger. After sliding it into his pocket, he stood for a moment with his fingertips resting on the workbench.

  ‘Come and have a drink,’ he said at last. ‘I … seem to be getting married.’

  Mori brought some sherry from the cupboard and curled himself into the armchair while Thaniel sat on the hearth to light the fire. Feeding curls of sawdust into the kindling, he heard the mellow noise of the wine flowing through the bottle neck, and caught the smell of it over the burning twigs. When he turned back, the fire snapping behind him, Mori held out a glass.

  ‘Do you want to be married?’ he said.

  ‘She says that we can send Annabel’s boys to a proper school. In London, so I could see them.’ It would have made more sense of the thing to say that it was because of Grace’s work, not real trust in Mori, that he had come back from Whitehall, but he couldn’t. Having seen what the police had done and how they had done it, he wanted to take that particular story to his grave. ‘People say marriage first and love later. Is it true?’

  ‘In this case yes.’

  ‘That would be … ’ He didn’t finish, because he couldn’t find a word. He had always thought he would never marry, so he had never strayed into imagining it.

  Mori clipped their glasses together softly. ‘Congratulations.’

  Thaniel took a breath, and a sort of indignant, surprised happiness spilled out. He worried about dealing with Lord Carrow and what would be the state of the ominous-sounding Kensington house, and ran on until he realised that he was waiting for Mori to say something without having given him space to, or any indication that he ought to interrupt.

  ‘I sound like an idiot,’ he said, not sure how else he could apologise without sounding dishonest.

  The sharp line of Mori’s collarbone traced a brief angle before falling back to the horizontal. The firelight pooled in the hollow between the bones. He had taken off his tie and collar. ‘You do. But that’s a very good sign.’ He smiled, but only half. If he had not been speaking, he could have been Yuki’s age.

  Thaniel set down his glass, and took out the watch. Mori’s black eyes followed his hand.

  ‘You left this for me, didn’t you? Why?’

  ‘You’re my friend and you would have died. You wouldn’t have listened to a stranger in a coffee house. It had to be something you were wondering about for a long time.’

  ‘I did. What was the extra clockwork for?’

  ‘To measure where you were. If the alarm went off at the wrong moment you would have been in the blast when you stopped, not outside it. You didn’t know to listen for it, so it had be variable. Makes it a bit heavy actually, I can take it out now if you like.’

  ‘No … no.’ He couldn’t believe he hadn’t seen that before. A man who knew he was listening for an alarm didn’t need it to measure where he was. ‘But I tried to get rid of it. If the pawnbroker had taken it … ’

  Mori smiled again. ‘Have you read the warranty?’

  ‘Of course I haven’t read the warranty.’

  ‘Paragraph three. All watches belong to their owners for life. If you break your watch, I’ll repair it for no charge, and if you lose or sell it, it will be returned. Pawnbrokers won’t buy them any more, they disappear too quickly. Obviously some people don’t want their watches back if they’ve sold them, but it’s good to have a bit of mystery around things.’

  ‘You can be unsettling.’

  ‘Sorry.’ He looked at his knees. ‘Anyway, I might go to bed. I’m getting drunk.’

  He said his good nights and, once he had gone, Thaniel moved into the armchair. Sitting on the slate hearth had made the base of his back ache. From the chair, he could see through the half-closed door to the stairs, where Mori had stopped. He stood with his arms folded, his focus somewhere in the middle distance. It was a full minute before he went on again. The lock on his door turned, heavily. Thaniel listened for a while longer, because the silence was so deep and clear that he could hear ghosts of the thirty-six of thirty-seven possible worlds in which Grace had not won at the roulette, and not stepped backward into him. He wished then that he could go back and that the ball had landed on another number. He would be none the wiser and he would be staying at Filigree Street, probably for years, still happy, and he wouldn’t have stolen those years from a lonely man who was too decent to mention that they were missing.

  TWENTY

  In the midst of everything else, Thaniel had forgotten Sullivan’s offer. He rediscovered the business card when he was emptying his pockets the next morning for laundry. The first rehearsal was on Sunday evening in two days’ time.

  When the day arrived, he went straight from Whitehall to the Savoy Theatre, arriving early so that there would be time to look at the music first. He’d been before, but only in crowds. Empty, it was cavernous. He walked backwards to see the galleries. There were two tiers, arranged in a horseshoe around the proscenium arch. A couple of violinists were already in the pit, which smelled of polish and dust. He sat down at the new grand piano and lifted the lid. The keys beneath were real ivory. He stared at them, watching his white reflection.

  At last, he touched one key. He felt the thrum of the string behind it as the sound unfolded around the quiet pit. The music was already on the stand. He played the first line, very quietly. Little colours fizzed. Something in his mind that had been dislocated for years clicked back into place, and although it was a tiny shift, it made him blink. He sat back and flicked through the manuscript until he found a more complicated section and tried that, but it was too shallow to be a useful test, so he tried a few lines of a Mozart concerto instead, from an unremembered storage vault in an unused part of his mind. It was still fresh.

  So was everything else. Tallis with no pedal, Handel with, even the horrible organ piece that had been written for someone with three hands. He had thought it had all gone, but all he had done was lock himself up in a few little rooms and assume the rest of the house had fallen down. It hadn’t.
There were doors and doors, and dust, but when the curtains opened and the drapes came off, it was all where he had left it and hardly faded. He took his hands from the keys and sat with them in his lap instead, because his thoughts were echoing in the new space.

  Somebody plinked two of the upper keys purply. Mr Sullivan smiled.

  ‘How’s the score? Good God, are you all right?’

  ‘I’m – it’s just the dust, I think I’m allergic to something. The score’s easy to follow. Thank you.’

  ‘Excellent, excellent.’ He leaned down close. ‘I was hoping to get this all polished well before October, when we have a rather special guest coming. Around the twentieth. Do you think that’ll be possible?’

  Thaniel nodded. ‘Who is it?’

  ‘A minister from Japan, a Mr Ito. He’ll be here for a formal something-or-other at Whitehall, but the Japanese ambassador here mentioned the operetta and he’s asked to come and have a look, so, naturally we said yes. It’s going to be a special performance at the show village.’ He smiled sheepishly. ‘I was rather flippant about a visit from an oriental minister, but it turns out that he’s a bigger fish than I thought. Heard of him at all? You’re at the Foreign Office, yes?’

  ‘Ito is their Home Secretary.’

  ‘I see? I see.’ He looked worried. ‘If you could manage not to trap your hand in a door the week before, I should be most grateful.’

  Thaniel nodded and thought that it was all a big flaming coincidence, and made a note to himself to ask Mori if perhaps he hadn’t arranged things so that his friend would have an interesting show to see, very close to home, where they might run into each other without his having to ask. It sounded typically shy.

  A telephone rang out shrill and silver. It made Thaniel jump, which provoked a smile from Sullivan as he hurried to answer it. It was built into the wall of the pit.

  ‘Mr Gilbert doesn’t like to come in every day, so we installed a line between here and his flat so that he can listen in.’ He picked up the receiver. ‘Yes, yes, got you. Tune up, everyone!’

  Thaniel’s chest tightened. Playing with a room full of professionals was different to running through a few old things by himself, but there was no escape now. As Sullivan propped the receiver upright in its hook, facing into the pit, Thaniel leaned on a chord and the strings section produced a familiar tide of sharps and flats. They were all shades of seaspray around the Atlantic blue, almost exactly like Katsu’s higher hummings. Thinking of a small octopus made everything homely. A young violinist just beside him had trouble and looked lost, so he hummed the difference for him. While they adjusted the strings between them, Osei Yamashita glided by, dressed in her blossom-coloured kimono. He was confused to see her at first, until he remembered why Gilbert had been at the show village in the first place.

  She had come to speak to Sullivan about costumes, which, she said, needed a third layer if they were to seem authentic. He looked uncertain in the face of her accent, and she had to repeat herself twice before he understood. Embarrassed, he then agreed to everything, although there was a scritchy protest from the telephone, which seemed to think that the budget might not stretch. If Sullivan heard, he ignored it. Osei swept away again, but stopped when somebody in Japanese clothes went past her.

  ‘Yuki-kun! What are you doing? Come back here!’

  ‘The manager gave me a message for Mr Sullivan.’ As always, Yuki sounded irritable.

  He delivered the note to a startled Sullivan, and when he returned to Osei, he gave Thaniel a hostile look. Thaniel tried for a smile. Yuki ignored it. He looked like a prisoner of war. He still wore his sleeves tucked up, and there was a small dagger in his wide belt, with a ribbon-bound hilt. Osei must have forced him to come. Thaniel watched them disappear back into the gloom of the backstage passages, trying to think of a polite way to forbid him the knife.

  ‘Oh!’ Sullivan exclaimed. ‘Excellent. Everybody listen up; the date of Mr Ito’s visit has been confirmed by the Foreign Office. Our debut performance will be on the twenty-eighth of October, at the Japanese show village in Hyde Park. You will be performing outside in autumn, but there will be fireworks and wine afterwards to make it worth your while.’ His cheer cracked and he looked wretched underneath. ‘It seems to be turning into quite the diplomatic gathering. Anybody found to have double-booked himself therefore will be summarily beheaded.’ Laughter rippled around the pit. ‘Oh, isn’t that delightful,’ he muttered. ‘You all think I’m joking.’

  PART THREE

  TWENTY-ONE

  TOKYO, 1882

  Mori had a habit of walking through traffic as though he couldn’t see it. Ito usually attributed it to absent-mindedness, but at a place like Shinbashi station, it struck him as wilful. Shinbashi was the terminus of the trunk line from Yokohama, a great Western-style building with wide ticket halls that horseshoed the end of the tracks and stood twice as tall as anything around it. The road outside swarmed.

  While everyone else gathered outside the station, waiting for a lull in the traffic, Mori came straight out and straight across. Ito wondered how many generations of knights it took to produce one who came with a guarantee that even a Tokyo rickshawman could spot good breeding and get out of its way. Bastardy, it seemed, was no obstacle. He looked just like his mother. The old noblemen of the court tended to say it with a certain reverence.

  Of course, the good breeding was at double strength today, because he was walking with Kiyotaka Kuroda. Always vain of his name, the man was wearing all black. Even discounting his personality, Ito would have disliked him vigorously just for that. It was a special sort of bad taste for an admiral to go about advertising a name that translated into what sounded like a copycat pirate. Blackfield: between that and his triannual invasions of Korea, he might as well have sewn matches in his beard. But Mori had always liked him. Kuroda was walking close to him now, and as they approached, Ito caught snatches of their conversation, half whipped away by the passing traffic that never quite hit them.

  ‘—should make a fuss. Damn embarrassing.’

  ‘—no reason – you idiot.’

  ‘A baronetcy for services to the throne when you should be Duke of Choushu. Might as well have slung mud at you. Why haven’t you stabbed anyone yet?’

  ‘I’m better off. The castle land was requisitioned but—’

  Kuroda’s voice dropped into an indistinct gutturalness that eventually resolved itself into, ‘I’d better leave you to the bookseller.’

  Ito waited for Mori to defend him, but he said nothing about it. ‘Remember to come tonight.’

  ‘What’s happening tonight?’

  ‘The opening of the Rokumeikan,’ Mori said.

  They were just on the pavement, a few feet away. Ito turned his back to them and watched the river to give, at least, the impression of not overhearing. It didn’t work. He felt Kuroda notice him.

  ‘The whatkan?’

  ‘The new foreigners’ residence. You burnt the invitation.’

  ‘Oh, that. Is it mandatory?’

  ‘The Emperor says so. Foreign relations.’

  ‘I’ll show him what foreign relations look like, when he can be bothered to stir himself and get on a battleship. Why has it got such a stupid name? What have foreigners got to do with deer? Deer Cry Hall,’ he said, pronouncing the words very separately. He had pitched his voice for Ito to hear. ‘Sounds like a pub.’

  ‘It’s a Chinese poem. A general sees deer grazing near his camp and thinks what good guests they make.’

  ‘I’ve got deer in my garden. Used to have orchids.’

  ‘The Americans don’t read Chinese poetry,’ Mori said, and the gem edges of his Imperial accent showed much more, suddenly, now that he had enough of the games. ‘They won’t know if we’ve accidentally called them vermin. The point is, put in an appearance. Hysterical as it would be to see the Emperor shout at you and demote you to midshipman, I really haven’t the time to soothe your ensuing alcoholism. The ball finishes at one o’cloc
k in the morning.’

  ‘I’ll be there at ten to, then.’

  There was a bump that sounded like an elbow meeting ribs, and then Kuroda’s sudden roar at a rickshaw boy. Ito didn’t turn around. He had no doubt Kuroda was looking back to see if he would.

  Mori came to stand next to him. ‘Afternoon.’ He had a leather case over one wrist, but it was not the right shape for documents.

  ‘Yes, good afternoon.’ He sounded stuffy after their roughness.

  ‘What are we looking at?’

  ‘Nothing in particular.’

  ‘You know,’ he said in his solemn way, ‘I sometimes think this country could be quite a good place unabsorbed by the British or the Chinese if you and Kuroda could face each other without spitting.’

  ‘And I think it would be quite good if he would see that these parties have a far greater impact on foreign policy than any of his battleships. I hope you’ve brought a change of clothes,’ he added. Mori was in greys and old tweed and looking, as usual, chronically unofficial. ‘It’s white tie. I did tell you, ten or twelve times.’

  ‘I would have if you hadn’t had one of your aides bring one for me.’

  Ito didn’t ask him how he knew. Mori was paid to know things and in all fairness it would have been odd if he didn’t know the whereabouts of his own dinner jacket. It was still irritating. He felt as though a trap had been laid for him.

  Mori put his free hand to the rail of the bridge just before Ito felt the judder too. It began like an ordinary earthquake, but then the ground jumped and the road was full of falling rickshawmen and stumbling horses. The plant pots that decorated the upper windowsills of the station all fell and burst on to the pavement. On the river, the barges tipped. A haul of barrels splashed in and, roped together as they were, bobbed away in line.

  It lasted a long time, about a minute, and when it died down, Ito straightened and tugged down his jacket, rattled. Other than the plant pots and one teetering carriage, there was no obvious damage, although of course there would be in the parts of the city where the buildings were old and wooden rather than new and stone. Wooden houses had a strangely complete way of collapsing; they fell flat, as if they were designed to be packed away. He imagined rows of little flat heaps along the canals and pushed his hand over his face.