The Lost Future of Pepperharrow

by Natasha Pulley

  He couldn’t sleep. He had to take the newspaper off the window at night because as soon as it was dark, a wrenching claustrophobia he’d never had before settled over him and tightened until he couldn’t breathe. It was freezing with the hole in the glass, but it was better than suffocating. He couldn’t do anything but lie there, exhausted and awake, watching his own breath whiten just above him and listening to the protesters’ storytelling outside. Trapped. He’d always been able to sit happily in small spaces, but this was different.

  Snatches of the newspaper headlines kept catching his eyes. Murderer – court – Duke of Choshu to speak at the funeral.

  He’d had to tell Six before she read about it by herself. She hadn’t believed him. Owlbert, she’d insisted, was here because he was waiting for Mori to come. Owls did that. Thaniel had tried to tell her that owls were just owls sometimes. She had gone quiet after that. He had no idea how she was taking it.

  On the first night he had tried to think about that old memory of the Christmas carols in the hearth and sleeping with Mori on the living-room floor, but it had turned to cinders in his hands. He’d picked it up too often. All the calm had worn off. He couldn’t bring back what it had felt like, or even which carols they’d been. When he tried to remember, the part of him that had felt it didn’t work.

  All he could do was listen. The protesters all sounded normal, individually. Sometimes they took water from the outside tap under the window, so he heard them talking, and they were all carpenters and schoolteachers. The teachers had only come for this week, because of the national holidays around the Constitution ceremonies. Fukuoka’s friend Yuna, the one with the mad gleam, was an accounting clerk. Thaniel felt like he knew them. It was feverish and ridiculous, and he hated it, because he could feel his mind escaping through his fingers. He hadn’t known that all it took was a few days locked in a room alone.

  On the fourth day, Six was anxious and brittle.

  ‘The diplomats say no one’s allowed outside. Nobody will say why.’ She went naturally into Japanese now. English was for school. ‘They say we should keep quiet. Mariko says the men outside want to kill me. Not her, just me.’

  ‘They don’t want to kill you personally.’ Thaniel lifted her onto the piano stool beside him, though he wanted to put her on his knees. He had a feeling she needed the dignity more than a hug. She was carrying a bag of flour, and her sleeves were already white with it. Like everyone else, she’d spent the last few days casting it around. Everybody wanted to know whose ghost they were sitting in. He brushed it off her. ‘It’s all of us. We’re British. The men outside are angry because people like us have done terrible things here before.’

  ‘What things?’

  ‘Bombs, warships. Treating people like they’re less good than us. You can’t blame them for feeling like we shouldn’t be here.’

  ‘But we haven’t done anything—’

  ‘No, no, no, no,’ he said over her, wanting to nip that sentiment before it could grow any more. ‘Doesn’t matter. You know that story about the trolls under the bridge who eat people? You couldn’t really blame anyone who rushed up and chased them out instead of waiting around to be eaten. Even if those particular trolls didn’t hold with eating people at all and just handed out tea to anyone who stopped by. They’d still look just like the dangerous trolls.’

  She smiled.

  He squeezed her gently. ‘We’re like the nice tea trolls. This is the price we pay for looking like something evil. Even though we’re not. You just have to be a bit patient with it. I don’t think we’d help anything by getting angry. What do you reckon?’

  ‘Yes,’ she agreed. And then, solemnly, ‘Rar. Arg. Tea troll.’

  He grinned. ‘But we’ll be going home soon, so it won’t matter.’

  ‘To London.’

  ‘Yes.’

  She frowned. ‘But we have to speak English there all the time.’ She was looking into the middle distance in exactly the way Mori did when he could remember a future he never wanted to see. ‘There are things it’s hard to think in English. There’s not a word. You can think them but you can’t explain properly and the thought just fogs away because you can’t call it anything. What if we forget how to think properly?’

  ‘We won’t. We’ll still speak lots of Japanese. We’ll still see Osei.’ He bit the end of his tongue. ‘Anyway, you can’t say everything in English, but that doesn’t stop you thinking it.’

  ‘Makes it harder though,’ she murmured.

  ‘Help me with this,’ he said quietly, because he wanted to distract her, and because he needed to look away. He showed her the music on the stand.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘You know how I told you about the moths in the piano, at Aokigahara? This is what they sang, more or less. But I don’t know how it goes from here. You’re in charge of the left hand, mine hurts.’

  She wasn’t that musical, but she did it with a deep concentration now, frowning. The notes furled woodland colours round everything in the sparse frozen room and made it warm-looking, at least.

  ‘I like that,’ she said at last, puzzled. ‘That’s different to normal music.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Dad,’ she said slowly. He could tell she’d been working up to it for a while and braced himself for something difficult. ‘How come we’ve got so many ghosts?’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Well, they had three at the Dutch legation. But we’ve got them everywhere.’ She pointed to the floor. ‘It feels crowded in Dr Willis’s surgery. If you put flour around, there’s loads of ghosts there. It’s like a party.’

  ‘I don’t know, petal. Maybe we’ve got the best view.’

  ‘That’s facetious,’ she sighed.

  Someone tapped on the door. ‘Time’s up.’

  He touched her back. ‘Six. What you were saying about speaking. That’s what music is for. Anyone can understand.’

  She looked up. ‘No. Numbers do that. That’s why scientists from different countries talk in numbers. They don’t talk with pianos.’

  He took care not to laugh. She would have thought he was laughing at her, not at the idea that there was a human being of nine years old who would say that. ‘It’s for the things numbers are less good at.’

  ‘You can talk about anything with numbers,’ she said, confused.

  ‘Well, never mind it, then.’ He gave her a soft push towards Vaulker, who must have been getting used to her, because he looked warmer with her now.

  ‘We’re trying to hurry it along,’ Vaulker said quietly. His eyes moved down and up Thaniel once. He looked tired and crumpled, and like he had never felt more weary of anyone. ‘Board up that window, God’s sake.’

  Thaniel nodded. The door snicked shut and locked. He bent forward and watched his hair fall down by his eye on the right. He knew exactly why Vaulker had no patience for him. Music and playing with little girls were supposed to be things good and useful people did, not idiots who caused international scandals.

  He let his head rest against the wall. There were pipes right behind it and they conducted sound very well; he could hear everything going on in the translation office clearly, though it came with a coppery tint. He didn’t pay attention until raised voices carried up.

  ‘What do you mean, they can’t send the militia?’ Vaulker sounded frayed.

  ‘They’re saying that with the fires everywhere, they haven’t the men, sir.’

  ‘This is about Steepleton. They won’t send anyone to protect us while he’s still here.’

  ‘Well, sir, unless we float him off on a raft there isn’t much we can do there.’ The second half of the conversation was Pringle, who had turned out to be unexpectedly loyal.

  ‘Those men are about to storm this place, they’ve been working up to it for days. Look … tell the glaziers to go home. We need to put boards over the windows. And – telegraph the Navy. This is ridiculous, we should have been evacuated days ago. They’ll be here soon
anyway with Kuroda’s new fleet.’

  Thaniel nearly called down that the British Navy were exactly who shouldn’t cruise into Tokyo Bay just now. The Russians weren’t going to view the British warships escorting the new Japanese ones as a special sort of postal service. If the British escort – and there would be an escort, to take back the temporary English crews on Kuroda’s ships – sailed ashore to evacuate British citizens, no number of white flags would convince the Russians not to fire.

  Hooting and shouting rose up in a wave from the driveway, like it always did now when anyone tried to drive towards the legation. Thaniel thought it was only the post at first, but the pitch of the yells was different and he realised they must have found a cab with a girl in it. He went to the window and looked out through the small part that wasn’t smashed or covered over with newsprint. He was in time to see Takiko Pepperharrow climb out. She went round to the other side, ignoring the protesters so completely that she didn’t flinch when an apple burst against the carriage door.

  ‘Oh, gentlemen, do settle down,’ she said. It worked. Thaniel wondered if it was just that the protesters didn’t really want to hurt anyone, or if she had managed to trick them into being the audience in an involuntary pantomime. It had been a stagey thing to say, but perfect. She was tiny and fragile, but there was power in that. Nobody wanted to throw anything at her. She smiled at them all. ‘I wonder if you’d be darlings and let us through?’

  It was a kind of magic. Men shuffled back for her.

  She opened the other door and handed down someone else. There was an odd quiet.

  ‘Isn’t that the man from the papers?’ somebody said.

  ‘Would you let us by? Thank you.’

  Thaniel stared until he was sure, then looked towards his own door. It was Pringle who opened it, looking flustered. They were at the bottom of the stairs, a tangle of people. Takiko was asking for a doctor, and Vaulker was trying, in a way that sounded like he didn’t know what he was saying, to argue that it couldn’t be who they thought. Two of the younger translators were trying to tell him that it was.

  ‘Keita?’ Thaniel ran down the stairs.

  Mori looked shattered and thin, but he brushed Vaulker out of the way and made it to the foot of the stairs before he collapsed. Thaniel caught him and had to buckle down onto the floor, because Mori was heavier than he looked. It was like seeing a light turn off; the last glow in the filament lasted a while in his eyes before it was gone.

  FORTY-FOUR

  Willis was always big, but he looked monstrous when he held Mori’s wrist. He frowned while he counted his pulse against a watch. They were in the airy surgery, with a proper fire burning in the grate. Takiko was pouring them all a generous tumbler of Willis’s apparently medicinal but very expensive brandy. She had brought a sample of the drug that had done the damage. Willis had recognised it almost straight off. Normally it was to help you think. In big doses it was to treat blood clots. It could cause strokes, but it didn’t make anyone catatonic.

  ‘Well,’ said Willis, standing back. ‘If I didn’t know I was looking at the effect of a drug, I’d say he was sleep-walking. You can move him, he can see you, you might even talk to him and get something of a reply, but he’s not conscious.’

  ‘Is there anything you can do?’ Thaniel said quietly. His voice sounded wrong after having been underused for the better part of the week.

  ‘No.’ Willis paused. ‘It’s a standard drug but I can’t quite tell what it’s done to him. I’d be wary of trying to give him anything else, but we’re in no immediate danger. His heart is slow; he could sit there all week like this without eating and he wouldn’t be particularly the worse for wear. It’s almost stasis. I think this is nothing but an allergic reaction.’

  Thaniel swallowed, not wanting to argue it now. ‘But – if he’s awake, why won’t he talk? He’s not sleep-walking.’

  ‘I really couldn’t say,’ Willis said, looking annoyed with the whole problem, as if he suspected Mori was just being perverse. He sighed. ‘Well. I’m starving. You too, I suppose, ma’am?’

  ‘I am,’ Takiko said, in her fine English that was completely different to her Japanese.

  ‘I shall scavenge,’ Willis said. He had taken to her straightaway and he went up the stairs looking cheerful. Thaniel watched him go, then studied Takiko and wondered if she just thought the world was full of well-dispositioned and helpful people, in the same way the Queen thought everything outside the Palace smelled of fresh paint.

  He moved across to the window to sit with Mori on the sill. It was colder, but Mori had gone there naturally when Willis tried to set him near the fire. He was looking out across the lawn, which, being downhill, was all in view despite the lowness of the windows. The protesters had gone back to their tents. It looked like a tent village now, and cheerful, hung about with lightbulbs on strings and dotted with fires. New banners were going up. More expel-the-barbarians, but other things too, fiercer, less official. The noise had been rising since yesterday.

  Mori wasn’t looking at them. He was looking at a point in the air directly above a tiny sapling cherry tree. He wasn’t staring either; he was only watching the garden, his eyes moving, but always much above where any of the plants or the people were. Thaniel leaned close to him to try and follow his eye line, in case there was something in the air he hadn’t seen before, but there wasn’t. There was only the snow.

  ‘You were at Abashiri prison?’ Thaniel asked Takiko at last.

  She nodded. ‘And he was at Kabato prison.’ She made a sound somewhere been a snort and a hum. ‘He got himself to me, so I got him here.’ She didn’t sound like she thought she had managed it very well. She looked bad up close. Her knuckles were cracked from cold, and the glow of wealth that had haloed her at Yoruji was all eroded away. He thought there were lines across her forehead that hadn’t been there before.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  She lifted her eyebrows at him as if he’d called her a silly bitch. ‘What?’

  Thaniel smiled. It was exactly the way Mori answered questions like that. ‘How do I say that in samurai? Buck up, horse-face?’

  She laughed. ‘You should write a dictionary. I’m all right. Sorry.’

  He shrugged to say he didn’t mind. Between them, Mori was as still as the trees.

  ‘I don’t think he can find where now is,’ Takiko said.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘He’s been getting it wrong by … a few minutes at first, and then he was hours or days out, and by the time we arrived at the dock, I couldn’t have a conversation with him. I think he’s off by much more now.’ She swallowed. He heard it. She sounded ill. ‘Years I think. He was talking about our son, going to school.’A child. Thaniel couldn’t speak for a while. Then he never wanted to speak again. He wanted to find a snowdrift and die in it – just get out of the way, out of the life Mori was supposed to have.He’d been wondering for weeks now what the point of all this was, why Mori had come to Japan at all, knowing what would happen to him. But a child was a very good reason indeed. Maybe even a child who could do what Mori could do. Maybe that child would change the world, or maybe it wasn’t that, maybe it was just about having someone who understood – someone who was Mori’s own, not a glad-rag family he had pulled together from a place so far from home that every single conversation had to be signalled across the oceans that separated how they thought.

  ‘He killed a woman,’ Takiko said abruptly. ‘I saw it. Kuroda was drunk, and angry, and he killed his wife. She was my best friend. Mori stood back and watched. When I asked him about it, he said he needed Kuroda, and she had been about to send Kuroda to prison. That was all. He had plans, so she died. I think he’s here with us because we’re supposed to help him, but – I don’t want to. Do you honestly think he should be free to do that? Because that seems to be what we’re saying here. Either he stays like this, or … we let something dangerous and inhuman back into the world.’

  Thaniel drew both hands over
his face. ‘He’s not inhuman. It’s for something.’

  Takiko turned sharper than usual as she lost another few motes of patience. ‘Yes, obviously it’s for something. What if, in the really long run, it’s better if thousands of people die now and Japan folds under Russian rule? What if it turns out that insane nationalists like those pricks outside end up being the deciding vote in everything, and a powerful Japanese Empire now means atrocities later?’

  Thaniel nearly laughed. ‘If he wanted to stop that, he wouldn’t use a war to do it. Some minister somewhere would trip over a screw and change his mind about what to have for dinner and the world would turn.’

  ‘You sound a lot like someone hearing hooves and scrabbling for reasons it might be zebras and not horses.’

  Thaniel shook his head. ‘And you sound like someone who hears ticking in a watchmaker’s shop and thinks it has to be a watch, and not a clockwork octopus.’ He sighed. ‘He’s a zebra person, is all I’m saying. I just … he’s good. He is. Whatever your friend died for, it will be something good.’ He glanced up. ‘And you must think so too, or you wouldn’t have rescued him from Abashiri.’

  She was pushing her hands together. ‘I owed him that one thing. No more, though. If he’d just told me what it was for … but he didn’t. All he would say is that he needed Kuroda.’

  ‘No, he wouldn’t tell me either, but he wasn’t being difficult when I asked. I think he was ashamed.’

  ‘What’s shame got to do with it?’

  ‘Shame shuts you down, doesn’t it.’

  ‘Does it?’

  ‘Does it?’ Thaniel echoed, not quite able to believe she was asking, but then, she had nothing to feel shame about. ‘I wake up in the night trying to think what I’d tell my sister if she ever found out about …’ He could only bring himself to nod at Mori. ‘And I still don’t know. Nothing, probably.’