Takiko was quiet for a long time. ‘He let me hurt him. Quite badly. I hit him. He didn’t even put his hands up.’
‘Why do you sound surprised? He wasn’t going to hit you back, was he? Christ, he wouldn’t hit me back.’
‘But people hit me all the time.’
He didn’t know what to say to that. He had to let his neck bend and stare at the floor. He didn’t think there was anything to say. The world had been pretty savage to her and a few words from some gaijin musician weren’t going to convince her that Mori was any different.
‘The hell is he looking at, anyway?’ she sighed. She was right; Mori was watching the far corner as though something were going on there, but there was only a bookcase.
‘Something that might happen there in ten years’ time probably,’ Thaniel said heavily.
She nodded. ‘This isn’t the ideal place to bring him. We were in and out of here all the time years ago. He probably can’t tell which occasion it is.’
‘Why were you here?’ Thaniel said, without really caring.
‘Well, he was Home Ministry. Half the job was to turn up to the British and American parties. We all used to go, the four of us. I mean Countess Kuroda and …’ She shook her head and waved her hand once, like she was clearing a ghost that had wisped too close in front of her. Her eyes ticked around the room. ‘They used to use this as the cloakroom. When you got sick of the ambassador you ducked down here, had a cigarette, bitched about gaijin and then – once more unto the breach.’
Thaniel nearly laughed. They’d all been wondering why the legation was so bloody haunted, but Mori had said it, in that recording at Yoruji; wherever there was a clairvoyant in and out, there were plenty of ghosts.
‘He needs – a flare. Something to show him when now is,’ he said instead. ‘Something to stand out.’
Takiko only glanced at him and shrugged a little to say she wouldn’t be helping him to think about it. Her eyes slipped away, full of sadness, but he could see that being sad wasn’t going to change her mind.
Six came down not long later, taking the stairs carefully because they were steep. Thaniel went to her and picked her up before she could come too near. She stiffened. ‘Put me down, I’m busy. Good evening,’ she added to Takiko, and didn’t seem to find it irregular that she should be there. ‘Busy,’ she said to Thaniel, who set her down.
She had another packet of flour, and as soon as she was on her own feet again, she feathered little handfuls of it into the air and watched intently as the ghosts formed.
‘Why did you say Mori was dead when he isn’t?’ she added.
‘I thought he was.’
‘Hm,’ said Six, and hurried after the coat-tail of a half-formed ghost.
‘What,’ said Takiko, who had stood up. She was staring at the ghost.
‘We have ghosts now,’ Six explained. ‘Where have you been?’
‘Away,’ Takiko said, looking shocked.
Half-heartedly, Thaniel told her about the engines at Aokigahara, the scientists, the electricity, and what Mori had said about ghosts and clairvoyants.
‘Six, petal … can you stop doing that?’ he had to add. He could taste the flour. ‘I can hardly breathe as it is.’
‘No. You said he was dead and he wasn’t.’
He bent forward and pushed both hands over his face.
‘Six,’ Takiko said. ‘What’s over there?’
‘A bookcase,’ said Six, a bit flat.
Takiko lifted her eyebrow. ‘You’re not little enough or strange enough to get away with being obnoxious. Look where Mori’s looking.’
Six looked, then frowned and bumped across to strew flour into the air there. She could only do a bit at a time, and it was a broad space. It would keep her occupied for a bit. Thaniel nodded ruefully to Takiko.
Willis came back with a tray full of sandwiches and onigiri, and tea.
‘This might be the last food we get for a while, so set to,’ Willis said, a bit gruffly. When she went up to him to see what there was, Takiko looked quail-sized. ‘The kitchen staff have run away. They saw the translators boarding up the office.’
‘Oh, real chicken,’ Takiko said reverently. Willis laughed. She took two sandwiches and gave one to Six. Six looked up, surprised, then took a bite out of it while Takiko was still holding it. Thaniel hated them both in an awful little spike for that. He wanted to remind them that he was still here, Six was still his, for now. He squashed it, appalled with himself.
‘Vaulker’s hovering at the top of the stairs, by the way. Probably trying to work himself up to an apology,’ Willis said.
‘No need.’
‘How magnanimous.’
‘It’s just translation,’ Thaniel said, wondering if there might be a way to persuade Mori to eat something. He didn’t look too thin yet, but he had turned fragile. ‘Translating Eton to Lincoln is harder than London to Tokyo, stupid not to expect problems. You didn’t believe me either, did you?’
‘No. I always did wonder why you didn’t just change your accent. Save you a deal of bother.’
Thaniel didn’t have the energy to point out that there were some guns you had to stick to, if you still wanted to be you.
‘I imagine he’ll come out of this by himself sooner or later,’ Willis added into the silence.
Thaniel nodded. Mori had better do it quickly, before he starved.
The telegraphs had gone haywire again. Some of them were sparking and juddering of their own accord. As Thaniel came into the translation office, the juniors were pulling the wires out with their hands over their sleeves and getting shocks anyway. One of the translators had just volunteered to go north, wherever the electricity was weaker, when they all noticed Thaniel and went quiet.
‘Mr Steepleton,’ Vaulker said, too briskly. ‘You can go. We need to find a working telegraph and arrange a Navy ship.’
‘We can’t ask the Navy,’ he said. ‘We’d start a war. Pringle, get down to the harbour and charter a ship. The problem is getting places on board a liner but we don’t need a liner to get to Peking, just a clipper. Whatever they ask, give it to them, there’s no point haggling when everyone else will be doing the same thing.’
‘Hold on,’ Vaulker said.
‘Go on, Pringle, through the stables.’ Pringle went.
‘No – no, I said, the Navy—’
‘This will be quicker and quieter than the Navy,’ Thaniel said when Vaulker caught his elbow. He waited and looked down at his arm. After two ringing seconds Vaulker let go and kept his hand open above it, conciliatory. He looked frightened.
‘But not safer,’ Vaulker said. ‘There are women here.’
‘It is safer. No one’s going to open fire on a chartered clipper. And we need to go before everyone outside realises the militia aren’t coming, whatever the protesters do. Speaking of families – are people packed to go?’
‘Not yet.’
‘Better get together what they can carry. And tell the women they need to be in flat shoes.’
‘Flat …’ Vaulker nodded and went to the stairs, more slowly than usual, as if they were between earthquakes and he was waiting for the floor to ripple.
A flash went off in the camp, but nothing explosive. It was silver, magnesium, from a camera. Then another and another; there was a whole firefly swarm of journalists just beyond the gate. Thaniel bit the tip of his tongue. The whole government would know Mori was here in a couple of hours. After that, there would be nothing stopping them telling Vaulker to hand over Mori or enjoy the incoming mob.Vaulker turned away to tell some of the juniors to make sure the women were ready. Everyone else went back to what they’d been doing before – fighting with the manic telegraphs, or else nailing boards up over the windows. Thaniel wanted to help, but he could barely lift his arms. The bruises and the gunshot wound had stiffened. All around him, the hammer blows shot unpleasant green stars over everything.
The other door banged open. Pringle came through, out of breath and
frightened. ‘I couldn’t get through,’ he said. His eyes were streaming. The others had paused to listen to him and after the hammering from before, everything was very quiet. The shouts from the camp seemed much closer. ‘They saw me. Some men chased me. They had – they had knives. I’m sorry, sir,’ he said wretchedly.
Thaniel put him in a chair and gave him some of the plum wine they usually saved for diplomatic guests. It was as strong as rum. Pringle scrubbed his sleeve over his eyes. The wine danced in the glass when he took it.
The quiet in the room lasted a long time.
‘If we’re trapped and we can’t even use the telegraphs,’ someone said eventually, ‘what do we do now?’
‘Keep nailing those up, for a start,’ Thaniel said. ‘And then – might as well crack open the good wine. Not going to be a better time.’
That got a half-hearted little whoop. Pringle popped the cork on another bottle and took it round, and people started to make gallows-humour jokes. Because the wine was strong, it didn’t take long before the laughter wasn’t forced. Everyone’s wives came down too, and the children. Six came up to see what the noise was about. Thaniel gave her some wine to try. Pringle asked awkwardly if Thaniel wouldn’t play something on the piano, so he played something he would have done at a pub, the sort of song people could sing and clap to even if they didn’t quite know the words. Mrs Vaulker turned out to have once been a professional singer. They shook hands over the piano top.
‘We ought to have had a glass of wine together before now,’ she said wryly. ‘But I was taken up with drumming classes with the girls, and I believed Tom when he said you were an awful prick.’
Thaniel started to laugh. Vaulker looked mortified, but then laughed too and toasted her forlornly with his nearly empty glass.
Thaniel went downstairs to tell Willis and Takiko what was happening, and to bring them some of the wine. Mori hadn’t moved an inch, and Willis looked more worried than he had before, even while Thaniel was still explaining.
‘Under siege, how droll,’ Willis said, but distantly. ‘Listen … I’m worried I was wrong about his being stable. His heart is slowing down. So is his breathing.’
‘Why?’
‘It might be nothing more complicated than a kind of catatonic state brought on by trauma or shock,’ Willis said uncomfortably, plainly unsatisfied with it. ‘Honestly, I don’t know. I’ve never seen a damn thing like it.’ He lifted his hands and let them thump again onto his knees with more of a bang than most people’s would have. He was more than twice Mori’s size and Thaniel wished, however gentle he was, that he would sit back.
Takiko caught Thaniel’s eye and asked with her expression, shall we tell him? Thaniel shook his head. Willis wasn’t the kind to believe in clairvoyance even if it was dying in front of him.
Thaniel sat down on Mori’s other side and folded his arms to keep from touching him. Panic was starting to flutter under his sternum. There were too many things he couldn’t help or change, and they were all closing in, and there was nowhere to go.
‘I must have a book that has something to do with this,’ Willis grumbled, and went back out to his study.
If Mori knew they were talking, he was ignoring them. A shard of gravel pinged off the glass and a shatter-spider cracked over the surface. Mori didn’t move. Some boys outside cheered.
‘We need to get him to another room,’ Willis said from behind them. ‘They’re going to smash that.’
‘They’re not,’ Thaniel and Takiko said at the same time. A faceful of glass would be very memorable, even twenty years away.
Fukuoka shouted something at the boys and they went to throw stones at something else. He glanced towards them – he must have been able to see them clearly with the lights on inside – and bowed awkwardly and quickly, looking worried someone else would see. Thaniel nodded back to him.
Upstairs, someone turned up the volume on the phonograph. Some joker had put on the 1812 Overture, and the cannon blasts were drowning out the little bottle-bombs that were smashing against the walls now. The crashes made him study the window. If it had exploded inward, Mori would have felt it. Even if he was so lost that his lungs and his heart didn’t know how often to beat and breathe.
Willis retreated to his office again.
Thaniel stared at the floor and tried think what he remembered clearly from ten years ago, the things that stood out and acted like lighthouses and landmarks. He’d been twenty; just moving to London for a job in the telegraphy department at the Home Office. He could clearly remember moving into a small flat in Pimlico, overlooking the Thames. But everything after that was a just a grey haze of day shifts and night shifts on a complicated rotation. Nothing that shouted out a particular moment. Moving, getting married, and dying: those were the days you could pinpoint exactly from years away. Nothing he could very well recreate here for Mori.
‘This isn’t you,’ Six observed from the bookcase. She was talking to Takiko. She had managed to highlight a whole pair of ghosts, talking over cigarettes. One was Mori. The other, as Six said, was a little woman, but not Takiko.
‘No, that’s Countess Kuroda,’ Takiko said quietly. She was watching the cigarette smoke wisp. ‘I forget when that was. One of the parties nobody wanted to go to.’
‘That’s really clear,’ Six noted. ‘They’re deciding something that matters.’
Thaniel watched them hard. He could read lips, always had done; you had to across orchestras. When he understood what they were talking about, he caught Takiko’s hand and pulled her across to make her see.
‘—says I’ve got a year maximum. Then it will all be rather unsightly.’ The Countess paused, and lit a new cigarette, which she gave to Mori. The flour grains clustered whiter where her silk dress shimmered. It made her look luminous. ‘Takiko tells me you know things.’ She smiled. ‘And you’re not surprised, are you?’
‘No. I’m so sorry. It’s … Midori, it’s a bitch of a disease.’
‘I’ve always had the constitution of a damp cobweb, I’m not shocked.’ She studied him quietly. The cigarette smoke wisped, perfectly clear in the flour. ‘Listen. The stories about people like you. Are they true?’
Mori flicked his eyes up. ‘Which ones?’
‘You can change things. Given the right leverage, you can … do something decent. Kuroda thinks you’re a death god. Or something.’
He was quiet at first. He sat back from the smoke as though it had made him feel queasy. ‘Yes,’ he said.
She straightened, pleased. It made her look like a very cheerful, very beautiful pheasant. ‘Well then. Let me give you a present, then. I am not going to die coughing out my lungs onto your beautiful nightingale floor. I meant initially to have a nice walk on the cliffside and then jump off it when I started to feel bad, but that’s rather stupid. I’d rather give my death to you. What can you do with it?’
Mori watched her for a long time. When he was entirely still, it was easy to see he wasn’t altogether an ordinary human. There was something else in him. ‘Could I have the cigarette packet?’
She gave it to him. He tore open the packet so he could write on the inside with a pencil. It was impossible to see what he was writing – the flour ghosts didn’t show up the lead on the cardboard – but the way his hand moved implied lines, and numbers; maybe a kind of chart. He gave it back to her without saying anything, in the way serious traders handled balance sheets.
Her expression changed as she read it. When she looked up, the balance sheet might just have told her that, after a lifetime of penury, she had inherited millions of pounds’ worth of holdings. ‘How do we do this?’
‘Kuroda. If we can make him kill you on this day, at this time, we’ll get that end result within ten years.’
‘That’s hundreds of thousands of people.’
‘Yes.’
She started to laugh, and then suddenly she caught the side of his neck and dragged him close into a hug. ‘This isn’t a trick, is it? This isn’t some
Winter King semantic rubbish?’
‘I don’t really do semantic rubbish, I’ve not got the right sort of brain,’ Mori said. He kept his hands in his lap rather than touch her.
She held his shoulders for a little while. She still had a vestigial smile around her eyes. ‘Well; let’s go back up and get howling drunk, shall we? Can we tell Takiko?’
He looked past her, terse now. ‘I – no, she’ll … I think she would kill me before we managed any of it.’
The Countess frowned. ‘You don’t sound like you’re joking.’
‘I’m not.’
‘Mori, this is – rather a personal question, but she’s pretty rough and people have never hesitated to be rough with her, and I can imagine she doesn’t really see any reason not to take it out on someone else. She’s like Kuroda that way.’ She paused and tipped her head to catch his eyes. ‘She hasn’t hurt you, has she?’
‘No.’ He didn’t laugh.
‘But she could.’ She frowned. ‘You must feel it already.’
‘I’m not who you should be worrying about. Come on. I want to get drunk too. I’m a funny drunk, I go round prophesying at people I don’t know. I nearly caused a trade war with Holland last time.’
The Countess laughed. As a couple of hulking white men blundered by on the way to the stairs, she put herself between him and them.
Takiko had had one hand clamped over her mouth all the time they watched. When she took it away, she’d gone so white Thaniel thought she might collapse. He put his hand out in case she needed it, but she knocked it away and crossed her arms tight as if she would have liked to crush her own ribcage inward.
‘He didn’t tell me. He didn’t …’ She looked at Thaniel with drowning eyes. ‘What are we going to do?’
There was no time to say anything, because yells and barked orders filtered in from outside. Someone was shouldering a way through the protesters.
The Lost Future of Pepperharrow Page 36
