The Lost Future of Pepperharrow

by Natasha Pulley

  ‘Pretend to be more ill than you are so I can smoke this,’ he said hopefully.

  ‘I might have malaria,’ said Thaniel.

  ‘Good man, good man.’

  ‘But as well as the malaria, I’ve got a cough, which is – not an emergency, but you haven’t got anything for it, have you?’

  ‘Oh, I expect so,’ Haverly said, glancing back into his own house, gloomily. It was cacophonous. The children were fighting about something.

  ‘No rush. Don’t put that out,’ Thaniel added when Haverly moved to stub out the cigar on the fence post. Thaniel had never smoked, but he could recognise a good cigar; the Foreign Minister smoked so much he was volcanic. He had to turn away and cough. His hands had begun to shake.

  Haverly was frowning. ‘Hold on. Come here, I want to listen to that. Just to the fence. Pardon me.’ He leaned down and set his ear to Thaniel’s chest. ‘Breathe in. And again.’ When he stood back, he had swept his expression neutral. ‘How long have you been coughing like that?’

  ‘Oh. A few weeks I suppose. Same every year though.’

  ‘I think you arrived in London, didn’t you, with some damage to your lungs? Cotton factory, was it?’

  ‘Engine factory.’

  ‘And your father had similar problems, didn’t he, despite always working outdoors in the countryside?’

  Thaniel nodded. ‘He was always bad in winter.’

  ‘Yes. I’m afraid you’re on the sticky end of both the environmental and inherited sticks,’ Dr Haverly said carefully. ‘Unavoidable in London. In your case, I suspect that actually it would have been unavoidable unless we’d put you in a specially oxygenated box on the Isle of Skye. I’m surprised it hasn’t happened before. Better get yourself off to the seaside. Brighton’s a favourite, for this sort of thing. I should give it five or six months at least.’

  ‘What?’ Thaniel said, after a second in which he was too confused to speak. He had thought Haverly would say a week, or just to stay out of the fog. He glanced back at his own kitchen window. Mori was there but facing away, the small of his back against the edge of the range. He was talking to Six, his arms folded. ‘Are you sure? I feel all right, couldn’t it just …’

  ‘Certain, I’m afraid. Your lungs are struggling much more than they should. I think when you say you feel all right, you mean you feel normal, but normal for you is getting dangerous. You’ve always taken colds harshly, but this fog – well. Strong people can recover with the right air.’ Haverly’s eyes slipped away before he dragged them back. ‘But it’s very easy to contract something like phthisis once you’re already in this condition.’

  ‘What’s – no. I see,’ said Thaniel, but too late.

  ‘Tuberculosis.’

  ‘Right.’ He closed his teeth. ‘You mean it’s going to kill me, don’t you?’

  Haverly sighed. ‘Impossible to say. If you keep very well, you could stave it off for twenty years. I mean, you’re terribly fit; you walk everywhere, and you box, don’t you? But London will kill you by summer. You’re breathing poison here.’

  ‘Right. Thank you.’

  ‘I am sorry,’ Haverly said.

  ‘Um … no. Actually we’re going to Tokyo on Thursday,’ Thaniel said gradually. ‘It’s by the sea. Probably a lot nicer than Brighton. Big parks, that kind of thing.’

  Haverly cheered up. ‘Oh, well, in that case! What good timing, hey?’

  ‘Extremely,’ said Thaniel, looking back through the window of number twenty-seven again. He tipped sideways to catch Mori’s eye. Mori saluted, looking awkward to have been found out.

  SEVEN

  Yokohama, 10th December 1888

  The scientists at Aokigahara sent a list of specifications. Kuroda took it to Yoruji on a lowering grey morning with so much static electricity in the air that it dragged at his teeth. Tanaka and his men came too, to scout the place. Kuroda did not envy them the task of learning the corridors in the week it would be before Mori arrived.

  Yoruji, the ancestral northern home of House Mori, was an ancient, rambling place that stood on the highest point of the Yokohama cliffs, facing out to the roiling sea. That morning, the patchwork stormlight fighting through the clouds made sections of the house bright and warm, and some dark. Pieces of it had been rebuilt and rejigged, walls moved, and new buildings added for about five hundred years, and none of the builders had been especially concerned about its making sense. There was even a rumour that the monks who had once lived here had gone out of their way to make it difficult and strange, to better protect the shrine at the heart of the old temple. Kuroda was inclined to think there was some truth to that. Yoruji was such a dim, confusing, odd house that it was hard to think anyone could have made it by accident.

  Mrs Pepperharrow met them at the strangely positioned front door with maps of the house drawn out neatly and labelled for the soldiers.

  ‘Thank you very much, ma’am,’ the captain said, careful and wary.

  On the way over, at least three of the men, including Tanaka, had asked Kuroda exactly who Mrs Pepperharrow was, and why she ran Yoruji in Mori’s absence. He’d decided not to tell them. If a tiny woman was going to have twenty armed soldiers in her house for a fortnight, it was a good idea for them to be puzzled by her. So he’d only told them she ran an important kabuki theatre. Ever since his wife had died, he’d felt overprotective about women.

  Mrs Pepperharrow was an unprepossessing lady, and her main feature was that she was never one thing or another; neither young nor old; not wholly Japanese, which was obvious immediately because she had grey eyes, but not especially English either; not feminine but not manly. At home, she was usually outside, in boots, helping with the upkeep of the grounds. She led the way inside now to a big room with a glass wall that looked out over the gorgeously tailored cascade of the cliffside gardens.

  ‘So,’ she said, as the steward appeared with enough tea and little biscuits to feed an army. The soldiers gave her an adoring look. ‘You’ve got some ideas, you said.’

  Kuroda explained the report.

  The scientists had used words like simple. All one needed to catch a clairvoyant was an electrograph, a decent signalling system, and twenty well-trained soldiers. They had made it sound like the volcano baking soda experiment.

  ‘We suggest using the main temple bell in your tower here as a signal,’ the captain said, a little full of himself.

  ‘No,’ she said straightaway. ‘The Russians are forty miles off Nagasaki, the newspapers say; is that still right?’ She had the streety Tokyo accent that you usually overheard quietly saying ‘fuck’ after it had spilt its drink at one of those pubs where you sat on orange crates rather than chairs.

  ‘Thirty-five, actually.’ Defence pedantry.

  She seemed not to mind. ‘If we start ringing huge bells on the sea shore, people are going to think we’re being invaded. They’re going to come and ask what the hell is going on. We need to keep it much smaller.’

  The soldiers glanced at each other. ‘But – it has to be something we can hear throughout the house and grounds, or none of this will work.’

  ‘Can’t you use these radio telegraphs you mention here?’ She held up the report.

  ‘Their range is very short, ma’am, it won’t carry the whole length of the house. We have to talk in chains, if you see what I mean. One person every fifty feet or so.’

  ‘All right. We can use the servants’ bells. We’ll have to put up more, but that’ll be a lot better than ringing the temple bells.’

  Everyone nodded.

  ‘I’ll order them in,’ she said. She scanned down the document, then looked at Kuroda. ‘Have you got any theories as to why he’d walk into all this, if it’s so foolproof?’

  ‘Honestly I think he’s just doing it to make us work hard,’ Kuroda said. He was still feeling bubbly about the whole thing. ‘He’s always done things like this in the past.’

  She frowned. ‘What, so he’s arranged for the Russian fleet to come here
just to make you a better Prime Minister? I doubt it. If he were to ride into a joust, it wouldn’t just be to teach some other knight an especially vivid lesson. It would be because breaking that particular lance on that particular man would catch the eye of someone you’ve not noticed in the crowd, who might then have an idea and become the next Newton or the next Lady Murasaki. I wouldn’t mind knowing who that is.’

  Tanaka looked amused.

  ‘Why, have you changed your mind about helping us?’ Kuroda said with a small edge, wishing she would see her way to not making him look like such a prick in front of everyone.

  ‘No. Even if he means to gain something by walking into a trap, a trap is exactly where he should be. All right, lads, get on with your business then,’ she added to the soldiers, who nodded and hurried away as if she’d always been with the unit. ‘Don’t be embarrassed about getting lost, everyone does. Just yell and the servants will sort you out.’

  There was a chorus of yes-misses.

  ‘Oi,’ she said, quite gently. ‘Are you going to take those biscuits with you or what?’

  Kuroda smiled. Abrupt or not, he liked anyone who was kind to soldiers.

  ‘You don’t fancy getting a divorce and marrying me?’ Kuroda said once they were gone.

  She studied him. ‘No. We’re only here because of what happened to the last Countess Kuroda.’

  It needled him more than it should have. ‘Bloody hell, woman, do you have to bring it up every time—’

  ‘Calm,’ she said over him, full of patience, ‘the fuck down, and have your bloody tea like a normal person.’

  He settled. It was always nice to have a little tiff to make sure everyone knew where they should stand. He poured himself some tea, or started to, but then paused. Behind her, all along the huge glass windows, owls had lined up. There were twenty at least, different species and sizes, and they were all looking out to sea, as though they expected somebody.

  PART TWO

  EIGHT

  Yokohama, 18th December 1888

  Thaniel jerked out of a nightmare with the absolute certainty that there was someone in the corner of the cabin, watching him. It didn’t go away even once he had been looking around for a while. Unsettled, he went out to the balcony for some air. They were sailing close to the land, much closer than he’d thought. It was misty, but above the mist, unreal because it was so vast, was Mount Fuji. There was a click above him. Some ladies on the next deck up were taking photographs – or rather, the photograph, the one everyone wanted for a postcard.

  Fuji wasn’t like other mountains. The slopes were shallow, the tip truncated. It looked like it should have been small, but it was a titan. From less than a third of the way up, it was white. There were other mountains ghosting around it, but in comparison they were miniature. Right around the skirts of the whole range sprawled Aokigahara Forest, bluish in the mist bands.

  Near the shore was a great murmuration of birds. Thaniel couldn’t tell what they were, but something had upset them. The swing of their flight wasn’t the peaceful twisting of a playing flock; they were shooting away from something, and the shapes they made were strobing.

  Thunder growled from inland. The sky was pewter, and there was a migraine pressure in the air. Up on the mountainside, something flashed blue. He yanked his sleeve over his hand when the rail gave him a shock. Whatever was wrong with his lungs, he’d started to feel the cold badly and he’d slept in a jumper since leaving London. The wool stuck against itself now, staticky.

  Above the land, the birds were crying, and there was a salt-coloured haze over everything. But the sky was clear. The mist, most of it, was the noise of the birds. The world looked clearer when he covered his ears.

  He wondered about tapping on the connecting door to see if Mori was awake yet. He folded his arms to stop himself. Mori had been cheerful all through the journey, and kept the door between the two cabins open always. A few days ago, when they reached the southernmost tip of Korea, he had brought Six through so they could watch from the balcony as they passed the Russian fleet. Thaniel had never seen real warships before. He’d thought the liner was big, but the Russian ironclads were juggernauts. Friendly juggernauts, though; the men in the rigging waved and the liner passengers waved back, and Six pealed into delighted laughter when the flagship let off its guns in a huge, fantastic salute.

  The music in the first-class lounge that night had been Tchaikovsky. Mori taught him to waltz. Thaniel couldn’t always remember where or when to turn, but it didn’t matter; the bones in Mori’s hands were close to the surface, and they flickered before a change in direction, as clear as weathervanes.

  Then Nagasaki had materialised on the horizon. It was a strange place, full of ramshackle shipyards and markets that everyone had poured off the liner to explore for a few hours while the crew refuelled. Everyone except Mori, who wouldn’t even go near the gangway. There was something wrong with Nagasaki, he said; it gave him nightmares.

  That had been early yesterday, and Mori hadn’t got back his cheer. The connecting door was shut now. It seemed the decent thing to give him some time to himself, to get used to home and everything it meant, instead of following him around like an asthmatic puppy.

  There was a green clack as the connecting door unlocked. Mori came through.

  ‘Speak of the devil,’ Thaniel said, surprised.

  ‘I know, I’m sorry.’ He must have got up in a hurry. His cuffs were undone and his shirt was open to his collarbones, and it wasn’t clear what he was apologising for. ‘Could you come inside a minute?’ he said. ‘Away from the balcony.’

  Thaniel did as he was told. Mori shut the balcony door and stepped back from it, just before the murmuration reached them and birds smacked into the windows, dozens of them. Thaniel jumped. Yells came from the cabin above, and more from the one on the right. The bang of each small body burst black stars across Thaniel’s vision, followed by the tin scritch of cracking glass. The birds were blue and grey, the size of tennis balls. One smashed through a weakened patch of glass and Mori caught it, very softly, between both hands.

  It stopped as quickly as it had started. All that was left were floating feathers. Dead birds covered the balcony floor. The living one in Mori’s hands cheeped feebly. When he let it go, it wheeled away, still panicking.

  ‘She’s on the bridge, she’s all right,’ Mori said, just as Thaniel took a breath to ask about Six.

  Some of the birds on the balcony weren’t quite dead yet but jerking brokenly. He opened the door and knelt down to snap the neck of one that was getting frightened and frantic. White-breasted with dark speckles, it was a lovely little thing, something like a finch. He set it down gently. ‘Why did they do that?’

  ‘Something on the mountain.’ Mori watched Fuji go by.

  A few of the other birds twitched, but none of them was alive enough to save.

  Six had made friends with Second Lieutenant Hopkins, who was mechanically minded and happy to show her things. At first, Thaniel hadn’t been too pleased with the idea of letting her go off with strange men; not because he thought Mori would let anything bad happen, but because it seemed dangerous to teach her to trust everyone. Mori, though, had pointed out that it was just as dangerous to teach a little girl that one foot wrong would mean a lunatic and a dungeon. It made it sound inevitable, whereas if you were brought up safe in the knowledge that people were supposed to be good, you approached the bad ones with a healthy fury that might just see you out of the dungeon.

  None of the windows had broken on the bridge, but some of the officers were peering down through the cracked glass.

  ‘Mr Hopkins says it’s electrical,’ Six reported when she saw Thaniel and Mori. She was studying the wing of a dead bird, which Hopkins had spread out to show her. ‘The compasses have gone strange. Look.’ She pointed to the navigation panel just beside her.

  The needles skittered and stuck in odd places.

  ‘Hopkins,’ the captain said distractedly. ‘Put tha
t child back where you found it.’ He was leaning close to a telegraph, listening.

  Thaniel took her hand and nodded to Hopkins. He started to turn away, meaning to take her downstairs again to find some food, but Mori stayed where he was. He was watching the captain.

  ‘You’re about to get a shock from the key,’ he said.

  ‘Since when did we allow passengers on the bridge?’ the captain said. He had one hand over his ear in an effort to listen to the telegraph. ‘If you wouldn’t mind terribly …’ He faded off. ‘Hopkins. The tower on shore is broadcasting. They’re saying to stay five miles off the coast until Yokohama. Turn us away. Engine order full steam— Jesus Christ!’

  The telegraph hadn’t only shocked him; the wiring had caught fire. Mori had been waiting by him with a bucket of sand, so it didn’t get far. The captain gave him an unnerved look.

  ‘How did you know?’

  ‘If it’s electrical, then it will affect the telegraphs. I wouldn’t use that,’ Mori added to Hopkins.

  Hopkins stopped with his hand almost on the Chadburn telegraph, on the point of cranking its bronze lever around to ‘full steam ahead’. As Hopkins stepped away from it, it juddered by itself and the needle skittered. A man covered in coal dust pushed through the door.

  ‘The engine-room bells are going off all over the place, sir – what’s the order?’

  ‘Full ahead, please,’ the captain said. ‘Something funny going on ashore.’ He glanced at Mori.

  Mori shook his head. He looked more troubled than any of them.

  ‘Ah,’ said Hopkins. He had been studying Thaniel, who he’d not acutally met, looking increasingly anxious. ‘Miss Steepleton? Is – one of – these two unlikely gentlemen your father?’

  Six looked up at him, solemn. ‘No. They stole me from a workhouse and now I live in the attic.’

  Hopkins opened his mouth, shocked. Thaniel folded his arms and inclined his head down, not sure what to do. Saying that it was a lovely attic wouldn’t help.