The Watchmaker of Filigree Street

by Natasha Pulley

  He looked as if he might have disagreed, but the wind blew again then and a pear fell from the tree. He made a small sound in the back of his throat and started forward to find it in the long grass, then stopped suddenly. There was no time to ask him what was the matter before a thin gold stem crept up through the grass, along the tree trunk. It twisted around it, and grew its own small offshoots and creepers, which fastened themselves to the shape of the bark and the old, risen roots. Tiny leaves clicked as they opened, not as real ones did but unfolding like paper until they were ivy-shaped. They both stood back, and the ivy slowed and stopped at just about the height of a person, gleaming in the cold afternoon. Thaniel laughed. ‘Not bad!’

  She touched his arm. Other pears had fallen too, and the golden ivy had climbed up around the other trees. The vines creaked and sang as they stretched out their very last inches. It made her teeth ache. The gold was reflecting the leaves and the sky, and from any distance it looked like bright water that had become muddled and run up the tree trunks rather than down. By all accounts it was exquisite, but she wished that it was not right outside her front door.

  ‘His name,’ she said. ‘Doesn’t it mean woods? Forest, something?’ She knew random snippets from Matsumoto.

  ‘It … probably used to, before aristocratic spelling interfered. Why?’

  She shook her head. It was unlikely he knew anything about oriental poetry. ‘I don’t know. He unsettles me. He threatened me just now, I think. Something about my being a reasoning engine and his not liking trains. It sounded like years of accumulated dislike. To the point of wanting to hit me with a steam engine.’

  ‘If he was going to hit you with a steam engine, he’d have done it by now,’ Thaniel pointed out. ‘Actually, if he hated you that much, we would never have met.’

  ‘Why did he say it, then?’

  ‘Probably to make sure you didn’t invite him again. Sorry. I’ll shout at him later.’

  ‘No, don’t. I don’t want him to be angrier with me than he already is.’

  He glanced down at her with a smile in his eyes. ‘So he can change his mind for the worse but not for the better?’

  ‘I think he can give in to an extant temptation,’ she said, more precisely than was good-humoured.

  He seemed not to recognise it as snappishness. A cart had stopped outside their gate. ‘The carpet people are here.’

  ‘Make sure they sort out the dining room properly, won’t you?’ she said, naming a random room at the back of the house. ‘I’d like to get that one right, what with my mother wanting to visit.’

  He looked at her as if he didn’t know at all, but it was his habit to take her exactly at her word and do as he was told.

  Once he had gone towards the dining room with the man in charge, Grace stepped in front of a younger man and cornered him in the hall. He looked surprised, but not suspicious, and so she ploughed ahead.

  ‘You do all sorts of flooring, don’t you? Not just carpets?’

  ‘That’s right, ma’am. Hardwoods mainly, lots of oak. Had you got something in mind?’ he said hopefully.

  ‘Well, actually my husband was hoping you could do us a favour. You see those trees out there? We really don’t want them any more, but it would be a shame to burn pear wood. If you cut them down, you can have them for nothing.’

  ‘Are you sure, ma’am? With all the gold—’

  ‘There’s a gardener coming tomorrow morning, so I’d cheerfully pay you extra to get it done quickly. Unless pear wood isn’t so in fashion these days. Is it?’

  ‘Oh, it is,’ he said quickly. ‘Well, if you’re sure, ma’am, I’d be bloody delighted. I mean—’

  ‘It’s all right, I’ve married a very nearly Yorkshire man, you’re not going to out-swear him.’ For the sake of speaking to workmen, she tended to say they were already married, and so did Thaniel: because my husband says so, and even better, because my wife says so, were rather more powerful phrases than ‘Mr Steepleton’ or ‘Miss Carrow’. She wore her engagement ring backwards so that only the band showed.

  He laughed at that and went straight back out to fetch some saws. She turned inside and made some tea, probably badly, and took it through to the dining room, where the master was rather ostentatiously re-measuring the complicated dimensions under Thaniel’s grey eyes.

  She had thought he would stray back into the garden at the first opportunity and she would have to make some excuse, but the carpet man was from Lincolnshire too, and they made friends. The dining room had its new floor fitted nicely by the time he came away, and by then the trees were all gone. The branches had been cut off and stacked neatly by the firewood shed, and all that was left were the stumps, very fresh and yellow, and a debris of leaves over the grass. Among them winked little rags of gold. The whole garden was bigger and brighter. Thaniel stopped as if he had walked into a wall.

  ‘What?’ was all he said at first.

  ‘The carpenter asked if he could have some pear wood cuttings. So I said he could take the lot. That’s all right, isn’t it?’

  ‘Where’s the clockwork?’

  ‘In the basket there.’

  It was; the carpenter had unwound it carefully, and some of it had snapped like real vines would have, but it was largely intact.

  ‘I’d better give it back to him,’ he said. He looked down at it for a while. ‘I’ll just take it round, I’ll be back in half an hour.’

  He picked up the basket and set off down the newly bright garden, without looking to either side or back. She watched him turn left, toward Knightsbridge, and realised that she had upset him much more than she had meant to.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Unconsulted, Lord Carrow had arranged the wedding for the day before Gilbert and Sullivan’s show, and so Thaniel was scheduled to miss beheading by twenty-four hours. He wasn’t worried about the performance, but he had spent more time at the piano than he had at the Kensington house. He had added up the hours on his way home with Mori’s broken clockwork. He was still absently multiplying when he pushed open the workshop door.

  ‘Oh, never mind,’ Mori said before he could get out an apology. ‘They would only have gone to waste in the attic.’

  He set the basket down by the door. In the cold snap, Mori had acquired a brazier that had stayed lit for the last few days. The embers in the middle of the grate waved the air. Thaniel unwound his scarf and hung it up by the lotus clock. Mori was still wearing his, and when he wasn’t talking, he ducked his head so that he could breathe into it. The shop was closed today; he was doing his taxes. The book in front of him was all columns of Japanese numbers. Because he wrote with his left hand on the left page and his right on the right, the figures slanted in opposite directions and looked as though he had written only one page, then printed it against the other while it was still damp. In the basket, some of the gold ivy leaves flapped in the heat.

  ‘Are you not coming to the wedding because you don’t like her?’ Thaniel asked.

  Mori lifted his eyes. They reflected the snowy window panes. Because the dye in his hair had faded, he was more foreign. ‘No. I’m a Buddhist. You might have a Christian obligation to catch pneumonia while you sit for two and a half hours listening to some twerp in a dress drone on about the virtue of wedded life but, dear as you are to me, I don’t.’

  ‘This is like brown tea, isn’t it,’ said Thaniel.

  ‘It isn’t unreasonable.’

  ‘Of course it’s unreasonable, you xenophobic gnome,’ Thaniel said, laughing to cover the disappointment that had settled over his thoughts like sleet. It was stupid: he had anticipated hitting a pocket of Japaneseness over the church, and when Mori had first said no, weeks ago, he hadn’t been surprised. ‘So you’re not … upset.’

  ‘I would be. An oriental man in a church is a target for evangelism.’

  ‘All right. You’re excused, if it’s so distressing.’

  Mori nodded, but then put down his pen. ‘Surely if an angel appears in the mid
dle of a ravening mob, best practice is not to throw them your daughter by way of distraction but to suggest that the angel flies away? The defining characteristic of angels is their aerodynamic capacity.’

  Thaniel frowned. Mori rarely spoke that much at once and it was only now that he had that it was obvious he had lost the north in his accent. It was a tiny, meaningless, sharp loss. He struggled to find the thread of what had been said.

  ‘I’ve said you’re excused; you can’t continue to be annoyed about what the vicar would say to you if you did go.’

  ‘I’ll do my taxes,’ Mori said, and bent his neck over the ledger again. Then, without looking up, ‘Everything all right?’

  ‘Mm.’ He sat down in the other high chair to soak in some of the heat. Despite having put down his basket of gold, he still felt heavy and tired. He pulled Fanshaw’s dictionary across the desk and stole a supernumerary pencil, and kept on with the small stories he made up in order to remember the pictograph characters. He let his elbow rest against Mori’s and every now and then, when he couldn’t find the characters’ constituent radicals in the smaller dictionary he had bought from the show village, nudged him for an explanation. It was much sooner than usual that his eyes became tired and refused to recognise that they knew any of the writing at all. It turned into a meaningless jumble and he sat back.

  ‘What in God’s name is a needlemouse, anyway?’

  Mori paused and wrote it out to see what he meant, and then inhaled at it and tipped his head forward.

  ‘Something wrong?’ said Thaniel.

  ‘I’ve just written annual hedgehog income in the middle of my expenses column.’

  Thaniel laughed without expecting to, until Mori jabbed him with the end of his pen and told him to take himself and his needlemice into the kitchen to make some more tea. He did as he was told, but stopped once he was standing. He could feel the laughter seeping away too quickly through otherwise arid thoughts.

  ‘Mori,’ he said. ‘Why did you change your accent?’

  Mori was cutting out the mistake with a scalpel. ‘I didn’t change it, it changed. I can speak English because I remember it from ahead, and most of it was from you, but we’re not going to talk so often any more. I’m getting everything from open lectures and arguing with Mrs Haverly.’

  ‘Kensington is twenty minutes’ walk away.’

  ‘You’re going to be busy.’

  ‘With what?’

  ‘It’s … you know. Ordinary things pile up.’ He knocked the drawer beside him shut with his elbow. Thaniel had not seen what was inside, but the little bump made whatever it was hum, very quietly. It was a distinctive noise; it was what you got when you closed the lid of a music box.

  He didn’t let his expression change. ‘I’ll never be that busy,’ he said, because it was what he would have said if he hadn’t heard the hum. ‘You’ll see. You’ve been wrong before, you’re wrong all the time. Anyway: tea.’

  Mori looked relieved. Thaniel closed the kitchen door after himself, and stood still while he waited for the kettle to boil. He liked children. The house in Kensington would be a good place for a child to grow up. But he wanted to lock himself upstairs and sleep until he could wake into something else.

  The weather stayed cold all week. The mudbanks along the Thames froze, and then so did the shallows. Near Westminster, the ice was bumpy where the cockle-pickers knocked holes in it and the river water seeped up again. The newspapers became excitable about the possibility of a winter cold enough for frost fairs, although he had his doubts. A cold snap so early usually meant one of those zigzagging winters that saw everyone buried under snow one minute and going about without coats by Christmas, only to catch pneumonia at New Year. But the wind was sharper than ever when Thaniel went to King’s Cross to meet Grace’s friend Matsumoto. As the train from Dover applied its brakes, it slid on the tracks and slammed into the bumpers. The bang made everyone wince. A woman spilled some tea that froze into a sheet of amber. Not for the first time, he wondered irritably why trains ran on the same level that people walked. If they were to have been even two feet down from the platforms, they would be safer.

  He was meeting Matsumoto in Grace’s place; she had been cornered by her mother, something about the dress, and since the man was coming back from France for the wedding, it seemed ungrateful to leave him to do his own welcoming. Grace had told Thaniel to look for an overdressed socialite, so he did, and quickly found him. Matsumoto shook his hand and clapped his arm and called him Thaniel, which, after months of being Steepletoned by Mori, felt like being called ducky. Thaniel spent the cab ride studying him. He was much younger than Mori, and, like Grace had said, almost inappropriately well dressed. The iris in his buttonhole was more than enough to put Thaniel off trying to talk much.

  Because he had assumed Matsumoto would stay at a hotel, he was puzzled when the cab pulled up by the red gate of the show village. In fact, Matsumoto’s family had a London flat. It was on the top floor of the same pretty block of townhouses where Yuki’s father had his workshop. Since Thaniel had last been that way, scaffolding had gone up the side of the building. Some workmen were sitting on the roof with their legs dangling, sharing something from a small flask. They had been working on the chimneys, where the half-constructed brickwork was new and bright. One of the men put the flask in a bucket and wheeled it down on a squeaking pulley to a boy on the ground, who giggled.

  There was an elevator inside. At the flick of a lever, they glided five floors up to the carpeted hallway where the best suites were, passing flashes of flower-arrangements and differently coloured carpets on the way.

  The flat was large enough for Matsumoto to show him around while they waited for the kettle to boil. It must have been recently done over, because the floors shone and smelled of beeswax. On the walls were ancient Chinese prints, except for one modern corner where there were four paintings in almost the same style as the one Mori had bought months ago from the depressed Dutchman. Embarrassingly, theirs was hanging in the parlour beside a sketch Thaniel had made of the Kyrie from Mozart’s Requiem. Mori had rescued it from a wastepaper basket and then hovered with a packet of watercolours and a hopeful expression until Thaniel had painted the other movements too. He had tried to say you couldn’t put up pictures of a requiem in a parlour, but Mori had proven selectively deaf. Whenever Thaniel intended to take them down, Katsu poked him with a pin. He was coming to the very gradual conclusion that Mori hadn’t only been being polite, but really wanted it. Why was still a foggy point.

  The tea was brown. Matsumoto was as English as Francis Fanshaw.

  ‘It wasn’t too much trouble to come, was it?’ Thaniel said at last, when they had exhausted the weather and the paintings.

  Matsumoto shook his head once. ‘No, no. But I really must get straight home afterwards.’ He sighed. ‘Truth is, I’m rather anxious about Matsumoto Castle. My father’s there by himself and the government have been bullying him about selling it for a while. I didn’t think they were serious at first, but his letters are becoming more urgent, so I shall be hopping it straight after the party, I’m afraid. There’s a thing called the Castle Abolition Law that—’

  ‘I know, I know,’ said Thaniel. ‘What will happen if they do take it?’

  ‘New house in Tokyo, I suppose. Gosh, no, the Emperor isn’t in the habit of making beggars of his noblemen. He’s not as bad an egg as all that,’ Matsumoto said, but he looked bleak. ‘God, it’s cold in here. I didn’t tell anyone I was coming, there’s no wood.’

  ‘Let’s go and stand outside for a few minutes, then. It should feel tropical when we come back in.’

  ‘I shouldn’t have said anything, should I,’ Matsumoto said, but he picked up his tea and came obediently outside.

  The balcony had a wide view over the show village, then far across Hyde Park, although it would have been better had the scaffolding not blocked out everything on the left. The sky was indigo around the horizon, and lights sparkled in the village be
low. Not far away, the pagoda was being decked with paper lamps and streamers. Carpenters hammered up a wide stage before it. They had already erected a copy of the village’s gaunt, curving gate on the stage to make a proscenium arch, and now some boys flicked their brushes at each other while they painted it red.

  Grace let herself in behind them. She had a sparkler from Nakamura’s shop downstairs. As she came across to them, she spun the light in spirals.

  ‘Escaped at last,’ she said.

  ‘What’s going on down there?’

  ‘Gilbert and Sullivan’s show,’ Thaniel said. ‘The debut will be here on Sunday.’

  ‘Thaniel’s playing the piano,’ Grace explained to Matsumoto, who only murmured something generally polite in a way that made Thaniel think he hadn’t heard.

  The three of them watched the women with the lamps. They stood on ladders to reach the rafters of the pagoda, while the men passed up lit candles to test the integrity of each paper shade. The firelight made the folds of their kimono sharp, and rippled in black hair and silk belts. The lights were bringing late village visitors over to see what would be happening.

  Directly below them, Yuki’s familiar, ramrod figure emerged from the firework shop.

  ‘Oh, I say!’ Grace called down. ‘I left some change on the counter, I took a sparkler!’

  Yuki looked up and nodded, and then his eyes caught on Matsumoto. ‘Western monkey,’ he said in Japanese.

  ‘Monkey yourself,’ Thaniel called after him. ‘You live in London, you little bastard.’

  Matsumoto’s shoulders twitched back. He was still young enough to be flustered by the disapproval.

  ‘Look, when in Rome,’ Thaniel said.

  Matsumoto shook his head. ‘I’m not so sure. I feel like such a popinjay in these clothes, sometimes, and I wonder if in wearing them I’m not helping chip away at what makes us ourselves.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ said Grace.

  ‘That boy was rude to him because he’s wearing Western clothes,’ Thaniel explained.