The Lost Future of Pepperharrow

by Natasha Pulley

  ‘Chocolate?’ Mori said to her.

  ‘Yes!’ she squeaked, full of joy. He didn’t usually let her have anything sweet. There was a reason, he said, that white people were all fat and short-lived. ‘And then please may I go down to the engine room and look at the engines, say yes onegai shimaaaas—’

  ‘Yes,’ Mori said, and Hopkins looked puzzled but let them go.

  Not long later, the ship steered back towards the land. Instead of unbroken coast or the odd scattering of wooden houses they’d passed before, there were warehouses and piers. Thaniel went outside. His lungs wheezed and he had to stand still at the rail while he saw stars. Signs for tea cargoes appeared through the haze, painted in white on wooden boards at the ends of the nearer wharves where the clippers from China anchored, and men in work clothes and bandanas loaded crates onto carts pulled by oxen with ribbons tied to their horns. Above the narrow road that looped round the harbour, a dyer had hung kimono sashes. They were thirty feet long and they writhed in the wind.

  There were two other liners already at the big main wharf, which was full of gentlemen in Western suits and women in plain day kimono, although some of them, looking much more well-to-do, had bright silk belts and flowers in their hair. Either for colour or an occasion, strings of blue and red bunting fluttered between the wharf lamps. Along from the wharf, the houses were neat and wooden, close-set, jumbled with advertising signs running lengthwise from the roofs, and dotted with little warm lights where people had set up cooking stalls. At short intervals there were telegraph poles, just like in London, but they were a different shape; they had fewer arms, so they looked more like tall keys than trees. It stuck in his mind later because it was the first really unfamiliar thing he saw.

  Mori had come out too, much more slowly, to give him time to catch his breath without waiting ahead of him.

  ‘We’re going up there,’ Mori said, pointing to their right.

  Thaniel couldn’t see anything there but a lighthouse. It was a red wooden tower with a lamp and an anemometer, to measure the wind. Neither moved. The lighthouse itself leaned forward, as if there was something interesting in the sea.

  A steward called that they were all very welcome to Yokohama, and that they would be free to disembark in a few minutes. Trains into central Tokyo ran from the station, which was a short walk or rickshaw ride away, and would arrive at Shimbashi terminus shortly before three. Passengers staying in Yokohama would find rickshaws on the dockside. Mori was still watching the lighthouse where, as if the keeper had noticed that he was being observed, the lamp came on.

  NINE

  Mori said that it wasn’t far to Yoruji. Luggage had disappeared into the meticulous accounting of the ship’s staff; it would appear at some point, though all the stewards seemed to think it was vulgar to ask.

  The rickshaws at the harbour were one of the strangest inventions Thaniel had ever seen. They were like one-horse hansom cabs, except instead of a horse between the bars, there was a man. Dozens of them waited at the harbour, just after the line of customs officers, and when people climbed up into the little chariot-type carriages, even with luggage, the rickshawmen took off at a jog. Sometimes the wheels were rubber-tyred and beautifully sprung, and sometimes they had no more suspension than a hay cart. He wondered if people had something against horses.

  Six looked thoughtful when someone offered her a steamed bun. She sniffed.

  ‘No. Vile,’ she said.

  Mori pushed the side of her head, very gently. She meowed at him.

  Thaniel ought probably to have said something about manners, but he was too distracted by the mist. It was real mist, not the London soup. It was white, cold, and pristine. It even tasted clean. Slowly over the years, he’d begun to think of white mist as existing only in memory. He hadn’t seen it since he’d left Lincolnshire. But here it was, hanging luminous in the air above the stony unpaved road and the frost that glittered in the verges. It looked like home, and he had a sudden and completely absurd surge of belonging. Six tugged his sleeve to ask what it was.

  ‘What fog’s meant to look like, petal.’

  ‘Oh, dear,’ she said.

  Mori was careful about the way he smiled. He didn’t laugh at them.

  In the open paper window of a tall house, a woman in full geisha paint was talking into a telephone. She tipped the receiver absently away from her face and rubbed the chalk powder off it with her sleeve. Thaniel felt embarrassed about staring when Mori touched his arm, but it wasn’t a rebuke; he was pointing out a girl walking away down an alley, towards the same house, in the full paraphernalia. Usually Thaniel didn’t hold with taking photographs – it was better to remember the thing, not remember carting around an omnipresent camera – but he wished he had one just then.

  The docks fell away quickly. Soon they were walking on a path above an open beach with black sand. The little streams by the path were gurgling not because they ran over so many rocks, but because they were boiling. Six bent down to see, Katsu on her shoulder. They really did smell like something rotten. The rocks in the streams were sometimes covered in pale, yellow brine: sulphur. Thaniel had known Japan was volcanic, but it was a bit startling to see the obvious evidence of it right there on a beach. He had a sudden sense of standing not on solid ground at all, but a sort of gangway over the heavings of the lower earth. As if it heard him, the ground shook softly.

  ‘What was …’

  ‘Earthquake,’ Mori explained.

  Thaniel smiled. The novelty of it was completely disproportionate to the tiny little shudder, but it had made Six giggle too. She stole Mori’s watch so that the chain made a fragile gold link between them.

  Mori pointed out the house up ahead. It was just visible. It stood alone, a collection of curving roofs and gantries that spilled down the cliffside. At first Thaniel thought they must have been walking away from Tokyo, not towards it, but just after the next curve in the cliffs was the glitter of the city’s dockyards and the huge machines that lifted in freight. He felt stupid for having expected everything to be cherry trees and temples. Even from here, he could see that there were ironclads in dry dock. Furnaces in the shipyards glimmered like fireflies. A wilderness of masts reached up for the sky there, and great bramble-clusters of waterwheels.

  They came level with a fence. It wasn’t high, and beyond it was a roll of land that led down to a park, full of black trees. There were men there, raking the leaves. It looked like an enormous job; the place had a wildness to it. He nearly said it was nice to live near a park when he realised it wasn’t a park at all, but the grounds of the house.

  The path tipped them down onto the beach. Even through shoes, despite the cold weather, the sand felt warm. Six looked down at it.

  ‘Fancy a walk in the sea?’ Thaniel said. ‘I can take your shoes.’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I find it all very suspicious.’ She wound Mori’s watch chain once more round her hand, which reeled him in nearer.

  ‘It’s just civilised,’ Mori said. ‘Free underfloor heating.’

  ‘Will we explode?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I suppose that’s all right then.’

  Thaniel was starting to feel light-headed. He put it down, firmly, to the sulphur, and ignored the voice at the back of his mind that had begun to sound like Dr Haverly, that said of course it wasn’t the sulphur. He had to slow down. All he wanted to do was sleep, though it was only two o’clock in the afternoon. Mori slowed to a dawdle and paused to pick up a shell, then another, and wondered aloud whether it would be twee to make a miniature astrolabe to sit in a clam like a pearl. There was nothing more certain in the world than Mori’s perfect disinterest in shells.

  The shale of the shore swung upwards, and onto a gravel road. Gingkos were raining yellow leaves down across it with a continuous scratching sound. And then there was a high red gate, just two posts and an up-curving cross bar. Mori stopped just before it and looked up. He didn’t look happy to be home. He looked like he
had come to the very edge of a battlefield.

  ‘If you catch a leaf, it’s lucky,’ Thaniel said, rather than ask what the matter was. The yellow leaves were eddying around them in a tiny sea wind.

  Mori looked up. ‘Why?’

  ‘Just is.’

  Mori held both hands out to either side. Two leaves settled in his palms one after the other. He gave Thaniel the nearest. ‘One each,’ he said quietly.

  Thaniel took it. ‘Kei … what’s going on?’

  If he heard, Mori didn’t show it. He was already looking up among the trees, quietly, as if he’d heard cannon shot coming and had no particular hope of getting out the way.

  A woman whistled at them from a balcony half hidden in the trees.

  ‘Joy Featherworth, as I live and breathe!’

  She’d said it in English. It was Mori’s name, translated; Thaniel had always known it without ever really thinking about it. It was jarring to hear in a stranger’s voice. He felt obscurely like she’d stolen something from him.

  Mori laughed. There was something hopeless about it. It was happiness and despair together. ‘Pepper – are you coming down?’

  The woman was in a plain white under-kimono, but her hair was swept up high and studded with jewelled pins that winked rainbows in the sun. She was having to hold some leaves aside to talk down to them on the path. An older lady batted at her, plainly wanting her not to, but she only batted her back with a tea-towel.

  ‘I’m being held hostage by the tailor, but I thought I’d shout at you from a tree and then you’d feel loved and wanted.’

  Mori was still smiling. ‘I do.’

  ‘Miss? I don’t suppose there’s any sort of electrical supply,’ Six called up.

  ‘There is actually. Are you Miss Steepleton?’

  Thaniel wondered how she knew. She wasn’t a servant. Servants didn’t yell from balconies. They certainly didn’t call noblemen by their first names.

  ‘Yes. Six Steepleton. I don’t like alliterating,’ Six said, casting a narrow look at Thaniel as if his last name were his own personal fault, ‘but not doing so would have caused terrible legal difficulties.’

  The woman was nodding. ‘Tell me about it. The whole Mori house went mad when Keita and I were married. They refused to let me take his name, so I’m still Pepperharrow.’

  TEN

  Shintomi Theatre, Tokyo, 1878 (ten years ago)

  Until she was nearly thirty, Takiko Pepperharrow had been convinced that good things come to unobjectionable people. Saying yes and simpering all the time was silly – her mother did that and even noticeably anxious ducklings walked all over her mother – but she had always maintained that just marching in and annihilating everyone was a bad idea too, in the long run.

  It was a kiln-hot afternoon in July, on the day her theatre master Ayame handed her the role of a lifetime, when Takiko decided it was time to give annihilating everyone a chance.

  Princess Yaegaki was one of the greatest roles in all kabuki theatre. The play was incredible. There was a scene where the princess floated through the air among foxfire. Countess Kuroda had requested that the company perform the play on her birthday. And because she was terribly modern and fashionable, she wanted, said Ayame, to see a real woman in the role.

  For about forty seconds, Takiko couldn’t believe it. After ten years making costumes and working the oily mechanisms under the stage that moved the scenery and the curtains, limping along in tiny roles with fewer lines than an eviction notice, it was everything she’d been waiting for.

  ‘We don’t have the licence to perform the play of course,’ Ayame added, glittering. Even if he was just talking about lunch, he sounded like he was confiding a secret, so when there was a real secret, it was impossible not to feel pulled in. ‘But it’ll be a private performance. Just the Countess, the Count, and their friends. No need to spend all that money on a licence when it’s just an informal thing that isn’t even for the general public.’

  Takiko took a breath, because that was definitely wrong. The Guild would torch alive anyone who so much as breathed a copyrighted word without the proper licence.

  But then she understood what was going on. Ayame had given her the role so he could report her. The others must have finally demanded he stop training her. That would be it. Career over. She might even end up in prison.

  Balls to that.

  When the day came, Takiko thought she would be nervous, but it was too hot to feel anything except thirsty. The dressing rooms trapped the heat inside their paper walls, and if anyone left the back door open for some air, the hot wind powered in like someone had put a blast furnace there.

  Out in the auditorium, completely audible from the dressing rooms, Count Kuroda was growling that he would have preferred to go to the sumo. A bit deliriously, Takiko thought she would have quite liked to be at the sumo instead too. It was like theatre, with all the rigid ceremonies and the stiff judges sitting at the edge of the ring, but unlike the theatre, there was a certain necessary lightheartedness. She’d always thought the theatre would take itself less seriously if there were a healthy chance that the senior management might be skittled by an enormous man being flung across the room by the back of his belt.

  While she stitched the new gold threads into Ayame’s best wig, she took care to look diligent, and not like she was plotting.

  ‘Get out of the way,’ someone snapped. She only glanced at him and didn’t catch who it was, only the white sweep of the paint down his neck and the cloth band that hid his hair, ready for a wig. Made up, all the actors were interchangeable swans. It was so hot in the warren of dressing rooms that everyone was walking about without shirts, the white paint drawn to inverted triangles right down their spines. They moved slowly to keep from sweating through it. ‘And shouldn’t you be ready by now?’

  ‘I’m leaving it til the last minute or I’ll keel over,’ she said. ‘It’s so hot.’ The costume was sparkling on its mannequin, all fire colours in layers and layers, some fox-trimmed, some purple, some bronze. She was already wearing the harness that had to go underneath it for the flying scene.

  He narrowed his eyes at her. ‘If you were ever going to be a real actor, you wouldn’t let a bit of heat bother you. Women don’t have the constitution for the stage.’

  ‘We’ll see,’ she said.

  ‘Put that away,’ he said, and lobbed a pot of paint at her.

  The lid wasn’t quite on properly, and some of the white spilled across her fingers. She rubbed it off on a cast-off scrap from one of the samurai costumes. The others had clusters of paint pots and jewellery in their places; hers, right on the end near the back door and the boiling draught that blew under it, was mainly taken up with a Singer sewing machine. She had come to like the Singer a lot. She was worried she liked it in the way that long-term prisoners felt safe behind the bars.

  A small owl came in through the window and settled with a great deal of purpose on her sewing machine. Takiko tried to shoo it. It sat down. Its beak was sharp. She decided it could have the Singer if it really wanted to and stood back, puzzled. Something must have woken it up early.

  ‘Is that an owl? How lucky!’

  Ayame had just floated in with a blast of hot air that smelled of dust and stagnant drains. He was dressed like a waitress, apron and everything, his beautiful hair piled up out of the way. There was a pencil stuck in it. He did hours at the teashop next door to practise being a woman.

  ‘Lucky?’ Takiko said.

  ‘Didn’t your mother tell you? Owls are called “fukurou” because they bring “fuku”.’ Luck. He’d said it in English, like he would have to a tourist. ‘They know things, owls. They have a way of turning up when something extraordinary is about to happen.’

  ‘My uncle says that if you’re followed by an owl it’s because a shinigami has marked you out to die,’ someone said in passing. ‘It’s not about luck, it’s about fate.’

  ‘Or that,’ Ayame said cheerfully.

  Takiko s
ighed and didn’t ask how owls were supposed to know the business of passing death gods. ‘Did you send the owl in here?’

  ‘Beg pardon?’ said Ayame.

  She couldn’t tell if he was acting. He was brilliant at looking innocent.

  ‘How are you feeling?’ Ayame added. ‘You mustn’t be nervous, I’m certain you’ll be splendid.’

  She bowed and then watched him, and wondered if she’d got it all wrong, and she was about to crucify someone who was trying to do her a favour.

  ‘You look terrified,’ he laughed, and squeezed her knuckles. His hands were cool. ‘The gentlemen might be very illustrious, but nonetheless they are here to see the play. You’ve got your role, same as any other night. Do it well, and you’ll have your new name at the next ceremony. Yoshizawa Ayame IX; we’ll stitch it on your costumes together, hey?’

  It was what she’d wanted ever since she’d joined the company.

  It was the great evil of plays that every character had some kind of purpose. Absorb too much of them, and you could go about believing there was something wrong with you if you drifted unremarked towards your thirties, and coasted into a quiet beach of no interest to anyone. Whenever those thoughts arrived, she always heard her mother’s voice pointing out, not unreasonably, that she should be grateful. There was plenty to be grateful for, and it was childish to say it was hard to have seen Christopher Pepperharrow’s world, where everyone spoke three languages and travelled four times round the world in four years, and learned, and learned, and did things. A lot of people saw that and didn’t pine. None of her sisters did. Fumiko had married a lawyer.

  ‘Now paint over that ugly little badger face of yours,’ Ayame said. He patted her head.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ she said. She pulled her sleeve over her forehead. She was so hot she felt like she was melting. Sweat was creeping down her back.

  ‘Come along, owl,’ Ayame said, and picked it up without any hesitation, as if it didn’t have a beak or talons. He put it just outside the door, where it walked off.