The Watchmaker of Filigree Street

by Natasha Pulley

  ‘You were planting grass seeds under that tree six months ago,’ Ito said at last.

  ‘Yes,’ Mori said to the octopus. He was wearing glasses; Ito could see the clockwork reflected in the lenses. The rainbow-making sparks were diamonds. As he clicked another cog into place, a new section of the workings began to spin. The moving bearings threw more bright specks inside the casing.

  ‘Those other men, the ones on the list. They were all near the Palace or in Kojimachi. They were going to kill me, weren’t they?’

  ‘Yes.’ He was still speaking to the clockwork. Ito could not have said when it had begun, but he became aware then that the mechanisms were singing. It was a strange noise, one that made the hairs on his arms prickle. It was the after-tone of a struck tuning fork. ‘The last one believed me and went to a monastery in Kyoto.’

  He was speaking as he always did, dry and clear.

  ‘Why would you let me find out about this?’ Ito said at last. He felt like he had when he had broken his wrist. Altogether worse than pain was that maddeningly clear vision of having not tripped, not broken anything, when logic held up a lamp in the straight tunnel that time drove humans through, and showed that the walls were made of glass. His chest was stiff with the dismay of it. He could still see what would have happened if he hadn’t chased the man to the pear tree. He need only have decided, as he often did that, like gravity and wives, Mori was one of those things best trusted and not over-scrutinised. He realised Mori was waiting for him to finish the question.

  ‘You can kill a man by planting grass seeds in the right place. What can I possibly do now that I know that? Take your word for it that Kiyotaka Kuroda won’t one day persuade you that world war is a good idea?’ He could hear his voice rising but couldn’t stop it. ‘He’s on the edge of it already. I should lock you up and throw away the key.’

  ‘It was necessary to frighten you. Now you won’t send anyone after me when I go to the ship,’ he said. ‘There’s no point stabbing a man when you can arrange for him not to be in the way in the first place.’

  ‘Oh, how philanthropic of you! Are you going to enlighten me about London now? What’s there? What’s so damn important?’

  ‘A friend, like I said.’

  ‘There isn’t.’

  ‘He hasn’t met me yet.’

  ‘I can’t let you go anywhere.’

  Mori let his breath out. The last of the clockwork across the table was gone now. He clicked the octopus’s hatch closed and the thing shifted, waking, and wound its tentacles through his hands. He lifted it into his lap. ‘I’m sorry about this. It’s the only way to make you change your mind.’

  ‘Oh, do your worst, I think you’ll find—’

  ‘Your wife is unknowingly but extremely allergic to bee stings,’ Mori interrupted, quietly.

  Ito fell still. ‘No.’

  Mori only watched him, as if he were very far away.

  ‘Get out !’ Ito exploded, and didn’t care that it made the court ladies jump.

  Mori did as he was told. The octopus sat with its beak on his arm. Ito half thought it would wave, but it didn’t. Once they were gone, he leaned forward against his elbows and pushed his hands through his hair. He had always prided himself on his politics. Not left or right or old or new, but the mechanics of it: compromise, diplomacy, and the avoidance of war, which was what happened when statesmen failed. War was punching the clock instead of looking at the broken mechanisms. He had never failed like that in his life. He normally made fun of people who flew into rages. He closed his eyes and waited for his heart to subside, but it cantered on and on.

  The balcony door opened and Kuroda came through, looking left and right. Ten to one already.

  ‘You’ve just missed Mori,’ Ito said. ‘He’s gone to England.’

  ‘Mm,’ he said, unbothered, and began to turn inside again.

  ‘Kuroda,’ he said suddenly.

  ‘What?’

  ‘About Korea.’ He had to pause and feel his way around the idea. ‘It frightens you. Why does it frighten you?’

  The admiral looked as though a dog had sat up and talked. ‘The Chinese, of course.’

  ‘Why? We have the treaty—’

  ‘Balls. Ask your British friends what they think about treaties.’

  Ito took a deep breath. ‘Just … come here a moment and tell me what would be best.’

  ‘What d’you mean?’

  ‘I mean I’m not a military man. I need someone to explain.’

  Still frowning, Kuroda bent into Mori’s seat and etched a map on the mahogany table top with his penknife. Ito winced, but stopped when Kuroda pointed it at him to ask if there was something he wanted to say. When the dawn came, the clouds were like smoke. He thought of trains and ships, and Mori probably already on the sea. Now that he was calmer, he was confused. Mori was rich enough to persuade anyone who followed him to stop, without giving himself away. He sighed. Kuroda gave him a salt cellar to hold in place of the Russian fleet and told him to pay attention.

  TWENTY-TWO

  LONDON, OCTOBER 1884

  The Kensington house had a narrow garden and eight pear trees. They stood four on either side of a flatter patch of grass that had once been a gravel path, which still crunched in the most worn-down places. After weeks of the to-ing and fro-ing of painters and carpenters, the garden was the only aspect of the house that remained as her aunt had left it. The nettles were as thick as the grass and ivy stuck an octogenarian rake to the wall of the outhouse, which had a little stained glass window in the door. Grace had spent all summer catching her hems on things that stuck or stung, and trying not to look too closely into the branches of the trees, where alarmingly big crows had made their nests alarmingly close to head-height. Thaniel, who had been efficient in all other aspects, was oddly unwilling to put it all to rights. Even on chilly days, he sat outside with his Japanese dictionary pinned down with a rock rather than come indoors. Whenever she brought it up, he mumbled and found something else to do.

  That was not to say he fabricated things. There was plenty to do, and it was made more difficult by the workmen, who were typical of their breed and imbued with a mortal fear of speaking directly to a lady. The house had been cluttered with the accumulated rubbish of her aunt’s lifetime, and to clear it alone had taken weeks. Then the crumbling floorboards had been taken up and replaced, and then the laboratory kitted out, and the gas lines seen to, for her aunt had still run on oil. Piece by piece the house had become bright and new again, but still Thaniel kept to the garden, and still did nothing to it. Because they could only go on Saturday afternoons – with her father having flatly forbidden her to go alone and Thaniel at work in the week and rehearsals on Sundays – he managed to drag it out. Two Saturdays before the wedding, the cold came down fast and the garden whitened. Powdery snow hazed about the trees whenever the wind blew. She was working between two Bunsen burners lit on blue flames, but she knew better than to light a fire upstairs for when he arrived. She might as well have tried to settle a deer there.

  When she heard the ice on the gate crack, she looked up. The laboratory was finished, and as a sort of christening, she had invited Mori to come and see it. She had not seen him since first meeting him, but when she had gone to the post office to send him a telegram, there was already one waiting for her saying that yes, quarter to two this Saturday was good. She sent hers anyway, because something about his wording suggested that he hadn’t anticipated her exactly, but forgotten that he hadn’t had the request yet.

  Her watch said it was still an hour early, but she climbed up on the bench anyway when she heard the gate and pushed open the window to see. It was an unusual window; mostly it was grisaille glass, but just off-centre, the glazier had set a circle of bright colours mosaicked together from half an angel and some family crests, scavenged, probably, from a cathedral. The light was bright and cloudy at once, and the glass put coloured reflections over her arm. Thaniel was by himself.

  ‘Is h
e still coming?’ she called.

  ‘He’ll be by when he said,’ Thaniel promised. He came toward the window and bent briefly to wave before he took the old ladder and propped it against the nearest pear tree.

  ‘Does he seem put upon?’

  ‘No. Why would he?’

  ‘I had the powerful impression last time that he didn’t like me.’

  He laughed. ‘Why invite him, then?’

  ‘Because I might be wrong and I’d like to know what he has to say about this experiment. He could help. What … are you doing?’

  ‘I thought I’d work out here for a bit.’

  ‘Really?’ she said curiously.

  He held up the basket he had just set down by the ladder, angled down for her to see. It was full of golden pears, real gold, or at least a veneer. ‘He had them kicking around the attic, so I stole them.’

  ‘Won’t he mind?’ she said, thinking of all the stolen clothes of Matsumoto’s she hadn’t returned. She had meant to, but when the end of term had come, she hadn’t found the time, and told herself she would see him in London anyway. But then after the Foreign Office ball, he had gone straight to Paris. He hadn’t said goodbye. That was a frequent complaint of his friends. Friends were things that he liked to surround himself with for a while, like good curtains, before he moved on and forgot them and bought new curtains elsewhere.

  Thaniel waved his hand as he went up the ladder. ‘He would have said before I found them if he did.’

  While he clipped the pears into the branches by their magnetic hooks, he chatted as usual, but not much, because he was working his way along the garden, away from her. He belonged with the trees. He didn’t seem to mind touching the branches, though they were full of moss and old splinters where the wind had snapped off twigs. She wanted to go out too, but she could see that if she did, she would notice the splinters and the moss too much, and it wouldn’t be the same for her. She closed the window and climbed back down to the laboratory floor to get on with the labelling of her chemical drawers.

  ‘It isn’t that cold,’ she heard him say a while later, his voice carrying down from the gate on the small wind. Mori was here, then.

  ‘You don’t know anything; you burn in candlelight.’ It had been odd to hear his voice when she could see him, but it was bizarre now that she couldn’t. It was a foot taller and three shades whiter than the rest of him. She had thought before that he had a northern accent, and perhaps it was still there a little, but it was much more standard now. She wondered if it was conscious or not. ‘Mind those. They’ll drop if you don’t clamp them on well.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It’s autumn.’

  ‘How do they know?’

  ‘Interior thermometers,’ he said.

  ‘Not tiny elves, then.’

  ‘That was my original plan, but they proved difficult to catch.’

  ‘She’s in the cellar,’ Thaniel laughed.

  She put her pen down and pushed her hands together. It was difficult to see where Thaniel found the confidence to joke with him. She wished she had it. She was reasonably sure that Mori would want to help with the experiments whether he liked her or not, for the sake of hurrying along a future he was no doubt bored of waiting for, but it would be better if she could persuade him that she was worth the effort.

  Mori was too quiet for her to hear him on the cellar stairs, and so the first sign of his arrival was the turning handle.

  He came in slowly, like somebody else’s cat. She couldn’t tell if that was wariness. He had a strange way of moving anyway, sometimes sudden and sometimes slow, one she had noticed when they first met at the house on Filigree Street. If she had been forced to offer up a theory, she would have said it was what happened when a man could recall being old, but every now and then remembered that he was young still and that there was no need to be careful of his bones. His black eyes caught on the grisaille window, which dotted points of colour into them. His hair was darker than it had been in June.

  ‘Mr Mori, come in.’

  ‘Miss Carrow,’ he said.

  ‘So, I’ve been working on an experiment to prove the existence of ether,’ she said abruptly, because she didn’t much like small talk even when she didn’t know the exact wording ahead of time. ‘It’s there and there must be a way to see it – I don’t mean see, I mean record the effects, of course – but nothing has worked so far. Thaniel told me about you a little while ago, and how you remember. I was wondering if you knew how do to it.’

  ‘It’s something about electricity and … I think it’s icing sugar that works well.’

  She laughed. ‘I don’t suppose you’d happen to know any numbers or suchlike that might be less vague.’

  ‘I don’t. Sorry. It’s not my area.’

  ‘Not your area? How?’

  He shifted. ‘Well, I know that light is fascinating and full of scientific mystery, but mostly I use it for not walking into objects, and mostly I use ether for not walking into events. It’s there, it’s useful, it’s … not something I can study for more than ten minutes at once without falling asleep. I like mechanics. I’m not the right person to ask for mathematics.’

  ‘But you can understand anything now that you ever could understand.’

  ‘I’ll never understand. Advanced physics is about describing things you can’t know intuitively, so you describe it in numbers, but I’ve got it in front of me.’ He was looking around the room rather than at her. He seemed to like it, and since coming in, he had eased closer to the burners. ‘It’s like listening to blind people with no sense of touch prove atom by atom the existence and possible features of an elephant when I’m not even very interested in elephants. I’m sorry,’ he said, and he really did look sorry. He opened his satchel and held out a book. ‘I think this helps.’

  It was a collection of fairy stories. She took it slowly, and felt completely left behind. In those stories, there was always someone who was too unmagic to hear the trees speaking or see the elves in the branches, or who the woods quietly closed out of their own accord. She had never thought it would be her. ‘Thank you, I suppose.’

  He nodded and turned to go.

  ‘Wait, Mori. I thought you would want to do this. I think you could, if you wanted to.’

  ‘I really am sorry,’ he said again, without denying it. ‘But you don’t need me. You’ll get there by yourself soon.’

  ‘Actually I think you’re perfectly interested, but I’ve stolen your favourite toy and now you’re teaching me a lesson,’ she murmured, careful to keep any impatience from her voice.

  He lifted his head and looked straight at her for the first time, not so much with anger as a sort of half-surprise. She felt suddenly as though she had thrown a stone, badly aimed, but still a stone, at a navy sniper.

  ‘Please come along and forget it; you of all people know there will be other toys. This work is important.’

  ‘You’ve stolen my favourite toy,’ he repeated slowly, landing hard on toy, ‘and now you’ve invited me down here to play with a new toy whose mind is a reasoning engine running on rails. But I don’t like train sets, they’re dull, and there is a certain urge to arrange a wreck for the sake of variation.’

  She swallowed. ‘Yes, I deserved that for rather a patronising metaphor. I am sorry, I meant it to be a joke.’

  ‘There’s no piano upstairs,’ he said, more like himself.

  ‘The … floors need to be laid first.’

  ‘But this floor looks new.’

  ‘It is,’ she said, confused.

  ‘I see. Anyway, I’d better go, the Christmas orders are coming in already.’

  ‘Oh, no … ’ she mumbled, and trailed off, because he had started up the stairs without waiting for her to say anything.

  After a lag, she followed him up on an automatic urge not to let a guest see himself out. Because she rarely heard real hostility, it was only on the way, very gradually, that she understood he had not just been punishing her for sp
eaking down to him. It had been a very straightforward threat.

  ‘Do these grow their own pear trees?’ Thaniel called to him from the ladder. Her ribs panged. She wanted to pull him indoors.

  ‘No, I couldn’t fit enough clockwork inside for a whole tree,’ Mori said. He picked up the next pear and climbed up on to the tree’s low fork to hand it over. The gold surface striped briefly as it reflected their fingers. ‘I’m going home, I’ll see you later.’

  ‘That was quick.’

  ‘I couldn’t help.’

  ‘Oh. Never mind. I’ll be a while, I’m waiting for a man with some carpets.’

  ‘Ten minutes.’

  ‘Why don’t you stay a bit and wait with us, then?’

  ‘No, I ought to get on.’

  ‘Mori … ’ Thaniel began.

  ‘I can’t, I can’t, I’ve left bread in the oven,’ he said, already down on the ground again. He let himself out through the rusting gate and then disappeared among the traffic.

  Grace reached the ladder as Thaniel was climbing down. Once he was back on the grass, he brushed splinters and moss from his hands. He smelled of the leaves.

  ‘He doesn’t like me,’ she explained, and her voice came out tight. ‘He was out of the laboratory within about forty seconds of coming in.’

  Thaniel sighed. ‘He’s always strange, you shouldn’t take it to heart.’

  ‘I suppose it’s no shock. He’ll miss you terribly.’

  He pushed his hands through his hair and found a leaf, which he dropped from shoulder height and watched as it sycamored down to the ground. ‘He’ll change his mind eventually.’

  ‘How? There’s nothing that could prompt it; he already knows what all the prompts are and if he’s not convinced now, he never will be.’