The Watchmaker of Filigree Street

by Natasha Pulley

  Takahiro wasn’t fooled. ‘My cousin should be careful of tying his shoelaces in a melon field,’ he said, almost mildly. ‘Anyone might think he was stealing.’

  ‘I was asking whether Westerners put milk in brown tea,’ Mori said.

  ‘I doubt it. You won’t talk again until I speak to you.’

  Mori bowed his head.

  ‘Lord Takahiro, nobody wishes to see you make an ignominious exit,’ Ito said. ‘If you agree to the sale now, the Emperor would be very happy to allow you financial control of your own retainers, should you accept.’

  Takahiro remained expressionless. ‘Why?’

  ‘He knows what he is asking you to give up. He hoped for a gesture of good will; he does not want to force you out.’

  ‘Or perhaps Keita here suggested it to you.’

  Ito felt another flicker of unease. The singing tick of Mori’s pocket watch was the room’s only sound once again. He was holding it between both hands to muffle it, but he was a poor insulator.

  ‘Is it necessary to have something with you that always makes a noise?’ Takahiro asked him.

  ‘It might be mine, in fact,’ Ito said, touching his own watch chain. It was a shabby excuse for an intervention, but he couldn’t think of anything better.

  ‘Tokyo fashions. Watches and golden spectacles and silk cravats; what are you going to try next, corsets and petticoats?

  His retainers smirked.

  ‘And the matter at hand?’ Ito asked. He had heard it all before. The conservative newspapers liked to list things that modernist politicians did; an inability to speak without peppering one’s arguments with English phrases, the wearing of Western high collars, complimenting one’s own wife in public, forgetting how to speak Japanese. They weren’t wrong. Ito himself did all of those things except the last, and he had no intention of donning a kimono and bullying his wife. Mrs Ito would have hit him with her shoe.

  Takahiro folded his arms. ‘I accept, of course. Anything in the service of the Emperor.’

  Ito bowed a little from where he sat. ‘You have the Emperor’s gratitude, sir.’

  ‘Yes.’ Takahiro stood up and went to the window. The workmen on the wall stopped talking and put their heads down. Without any warning, he caught his cousin’s collar and slapped him so hard that Ito heard his teeth knock together.

  ‘If you ever interfere in clan business again, I’ll cut your hands off like the commoner you are. Give me that,’ he added, wrenching the pocket watch from Mori’s hands. ‘Effeminate piece of rubbish.’

  He threw it hard out of the wide window. It smashed on the crumbling wall between two startled workmen, spraying cogs and broken glass. The other builders saw it too and melted away, leaving tools and half-eaten food behind them. Some white fish rolls caught the sunlight sadly.

  Ito’s aides stared into their teacups; Takahiro’s retainers looked satisfied.

  ‘Out,’ Takahiro said.

  Mori bowed and left quickly. As he disappeared into the corridor, Ito saw him spit something into his hand.

  Takahiro smiled. ‘So. Better have some wine.’

  After the wine, one of the omnipresent maids showed Ito and the three aides to separate rooms. Ito stepped in front of her as she was leaving. She shied, as if she expected him to grab her, so he held up his hands quickly. Where to find Keita Mori was a simple question, but he found himself dressing it up so politely he might have decently been asking the Empress. The alarm in the girl’s face turned to a shade of puzzlement that implied she worried for his cognitive health before she caught her neutrality again and directed him down the corridor to the left. When he arrived, he tapped his knuckle against the door frame.

  ‘Mr Mori?’

  No answer. He slid the door open by an inch or so, and almost walked into a small boy. The boy had an old book and a guilty expression. He put the book behind his back as soon as he saw Ito.

  ‘Hello,’ Ito said.

  ‘I didn’t steal it.’

  ‘Perhaps I ought to take it?’

  The boy twisted his nose and handed the book over. Ito ruffled his hair.

  ‘Off you go.’

  The boy departed with the self-conscious walk of the knowing wrongdoer. Ito knocked again and went inside. The room turned a right-angle, and there was another sliding door through which he could hear a faint clicking, like clockwork being wound up. He put the stolen book down on the nearest table as he went through. As he did, the book fell open; it wouldn’t close because so many extra things had been pasted in. On the open page was a photograph of Mori and five other men, one of whom had him in a crushing bear hug from behind. They were all very similar to each other, and nothing like Mori himself.

  Ito knocked on the second door. Inside, Mori was sitting at a Western desk with his back to the door, putting together cogs and springs with a pair of tweezers. The desk was otherwise bare, with only a calligraphy scroll and a pen lying rather ostentatiously on the corner in clearest view of the door. Mori looked back and slid the clockwork mechanism into the desk drawer with his left hand. There was a tiny click as he locked it. The key disappeared into his sleeve. There was a teacup next to him. It held a tooth with bloody roots.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Ito said quickly. ‘I didn’t mean to intrude. I, er … intercepted a small boy with one of your books.’

  Mori nodded. ‘Akira. Lord Matsumoto’s little boy. He stays here in the summer and steals anything interesting.’

  Ito smiled. ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Of course.’ Mori’s hand went to his belt, where the pocket watch should have been, and then he stopped and folded his hands in his lap instead. ‘I don’t suppose you know the time.’

  Ito consulted his watch. ‘Ten past eight.’

  ‘Takahiro always goes for a walk around the gardens at eight.’ He looked at the door as if he hadn’t quite convinced himself that Takahiro was not about to knock it down and shout at him for his secret clockwork-making.

  ‘Does he often beat you?’ Ito asked.

  ‘He was showing off for you.’ He was quiet, and, from the way he shifted his jaw, he must have been probing the empty space left by the tooth. ‘And he’s much kinder when he isn’t flustered.’ He sounded, if not sad, then at least heavy. ‘Shame he’s always flustered now. We used to get on before he had a title.’

  Ito glanced toward the window in the pooling silence. In fact, it was less a window than another door. It was open, and led out on to a balcony. The sky was a brilliant red and low on the horizon hung the Golden Star. Ito had never seen a view like it in Hagi. The city sparkled below; the city he had lived in, and yet, how unfamiliar it looked from here. He felt as though he had found a secret room in his own house after walking past it for years.

  ‘I wouldn’t mind some air,’ Mori suggested, lifting one hand to let Ito go out first. Ito went gratefully, and tried to keep his pace slow. He had always wanted to see inside the castle, and now that he was here, he suspected that his schoolboy curiosity was showing. Mori was chivalrous enough not to mention it.

  The air was still warm, and in the light wind, the pale pink cherry blossoms had blown up on to the balcony. The petals sat on the mossy wood like the bubbles of silver air on coral.

  ‘Thank you, for your advice,’ Ito said.

  Mori shook his head.

  ‘You won’t be sad to see the castle taken away from your family?’

  ‘It’s falling down anyway.’

  ‘No, really.’

  Mori studied the banister. When he spoke again, it was in English. ‘Honour is leaving your family behind because your own conscience is more important. This place breeds it. Everywhere like this place does.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  Mori shrugged.

  ‘The armour, in the corridor … ’

  ‘It was my brother’s. I had four others too, but their armour is a bit burned, so it’s not much to look at.’

  ‘Were you too young to go with them?’

  ‘No
, I’m a bastard on the wrong side.’ He lifted his arms a little to show that he wasn’t allowed to carry a sword.

  So his legitimate brothers had gone to the wars and left him to the tender mercies of Takahiro. Ito tried to think how long ago that must have been. Three years or four. A long time, however impervious Mori seemed to his cousin’s temper.

  ‘You know,’ Ito said at last, ‘I need someone like you on my staff. We’re going to America again in the winter. Your English is astonishingly good. It’s almost impossible to find fluent aides, but I can’t do without them.’

  ‘No need to be polite,’ Mori said.

  ‘I know.’

  Below them, a grey cat bounced on to the new wall from an overhanging tree. It had seen the abandoned fish rolls. As the cat landed on the stonework, Lord Takahiro passed beneath one of the wide archways, returning from his evening walk. He paused, just in sight still, to look at the lilies that had grown through the stone.

  The wall collapsed. Not slowly, or in pieces, but all at once, as though it had been dropped from a height. One moment it was there in the quiet evening; the next it was gone, and the crash was resounding and clacking around the castle, the echoes warped by the sharp angles of the roofs. Dust rose in uneven plumes down the ruined length of the brickwork. Ito stared. The cat shot away and stopped twenty feet from the wreckage, hissing. Takahiro did not emerge.

  ‘The weight of the cat … ’ Ito said, stunned. His fingernails felt odd, and he realised that he had closed his hand hard over the banister when the wall came down. Now they were full of moss.

  Mori had folded his arms. Neither of them spoke for a while. They both leaned forward against the banister to watch while servants poured toward the fallen masonry, calling out for Takahiro.

  ‘I had better arrange for the coroner to come,’ he said.

  ‘That was—’ Ito said. He had never seen anyone killed before.

  ‘Not a tragedy,’ said Mori, who must have seen it often.

  ‘My offer was serious, you know. About America.’

  ‘I know.’ He hesitated. ‘I do want to go. But I can’t swear lifetime service. I’ll have to leave in ten years.’

  Ito laughed. ‘How specific. What will happen in ten years?’

  ‘I’m going to London. There’s someone … well, I must go to London.’

  ‘I see,’ Ito said, mystified.

  SEVEN

  LONDON, 31 MAY 1884

  Despite the forebodings of the waitress, whose name was Osei, breakfast was good. Thaniel would have stayed much longer, but at nine o’clock Mori said that he had an appointment at St Mary Abbot’s workhouse to buy some clockwork parts. Since the train station was close to the village entrance, they left together. They had almost reached the red gates when Mori handed him a little golden ball, about the size of a curled dormouse. As soon as Thaniel touched it, it whirred to life and slid between his fingers, cleverly weighted to cling on at almost any angle, and warm, like something alive. It gave a little hoot and puffed steam at him.

  ‘What is this?’ he laughed. ‘And why have I got it?’

  ‘A steam engine toy,’ Mori said. ‘It’s an old design. The Ancient Greeks had them.’

  ‘The Ancient Greeks? If they had steam engines, why didn’t they have trains?’

  Mori twitched his shoulder. ‘They were philosophers; they put two and two together and got a goldfish. As to why you’ve got it, silly things help with nerves.’ He inclined his head fractionally to the east and Whitehall. ‘Or I think so.’

  Thaniel began to say that he wasn’t nervous, but it would have been a lie and he didn’t want to lie to him. ‘Thank you. But is this real gold?’

  ‘It is. But you can send it back later. Or bring it,’ he added without looking at him.

  ‘I will. Bring it, I mean,’ said Thaniel. ‘I’ve got to give your neighbour back his shirt, anyway.’

  He looked down at the steam toy, which skimmed around his hands unerringly no matter how slowly or quickly he moved. Its weight felt solid; the surface was polished to a sheen that showed convex reflections of his fingertips and the buttons on his waistcoat. Above them, the sky was clearing, and there was a patch of bright blue that the gold turned to green. A black reflection appeared. A tall gentleman had stopped just in front of them.

  ‘I say,’ the gentleman said, looking at the toy, ‘wherever did you get that?’

  ‘He made it,’ Thaniel said, gesturing to Mori with his elbow.

  ‘Made it? My dear fellow, might I have your card?’

  Mori gave it to him. It was nearly as beautiful as the toy. A clockwork pattern had been cut around one side and edged with silver, but the gentleman seemed not to think that it was anything extraordinary.

  ‘Mr Mori,’ he said, without stumbling over the pronunciation, ‘I think I’ve heard of you, actually. I shall call on you later; I’ve been looking for a good clockwork maker for weeks.’ He gave Mori his own card. ‘Will four o’clock be convenient?’

  ‘Of course. I’ll expect you then.’

  Thaniel gazed after the gentleman and began walking again. ‘That was lucky.’

  ‘Hm?’ said Mori. He smiled suddenly. ‘Oh, yes. Very.’ He inspected the gentleman’s card before saying, ‘What does this say?’

  ‘Fanshaw,’ said Thaniel.

  ‘How does Featheringstonehough spell Fanshaw?’

  ‘The upper classes accumulate unnecessary letters. There are other names like that. Risley is spelt Wriothsley. Villers is Villiers. It makes them look old and important.’ He put his hands back in his pockets, his left around the steam toy. The right clipped the watch. ‘Oh. I was going to – I didn’t say. The watch was locked when it was left for me. It didn’t open until yesterday. How did it do that?’

  ‘There’s a timer inside. For gifts, you know, anniversaries and things, so that it won’t open until the day.’

  ‘How do you set it?’

  Mori held his hand out, and when Thaniel gave him the watch, he twisted the clasp anticlockwise, and the back opened. On that side were small dials that showed the months and days and then the hours. ‘Here. Why?’

  ‘I was worried I was going mad.’ He paused uncomfortably. ‘Are you sure I can keep this? It must be worth a fortune.’

  ‘I’m sure. I thought it had been stolen. I won’t miss it.’

  When they had reached the gate, Mori lifted his hand to show that he was going right. The station was on the left.

  ‘I’ll see you tomorrow,’ Thaniel said, holding up the steam toy. As they parted, he looked back. Since Mori had already faded into the mist, there was nothing to say that any of it had been real but the weight of the toy in his pocket.

  Whitehall swarmed with workmen. They were clearing the ruins of the Yard; salvaged bricks stood in stacks, while the broken ones were being taken away on big carts. Even though it was the weekend, the Home Office was alive, and because the bomb had snapped half the telegraph wires, the yellow spiral steps had become a byway for a stream of clerks. Thaniel stood at the foot for a while, waiting for the whining sound to stop throwing its greenish tinge over everything, his hand closed around the steam toy. When it did not stop, he took the toy out and watched it roll about its happy way. Mori was right: it was silly enough to banish any serious thoughts or fears or the need for a pretend fainting fit.

  He had barely reached the top of the stairs before the senior clerk dumped a pile of paper into his arms. He winced.

  The senior clerk didn’t notice. ‘Take those down to the basement.’

  ‘What? Why?’

  ‘The basement,’ the senior clerk insisted.

  He sighed and did as he was told. The small weight of the papers made his arm throb, and when he reached the basement, his sleeve was blooming red. He swore quietly, wishing he could have managed to not bleed over a borrowed shirt. Because of the starch, the red stopped when it reached his cuff. He tucked the papers under his other elbow so they wouldn’t stain, though he didn’t know why h
e bothered. The basement was for storage. It was a forest of cabinets, all filled with outdated files on matters that had been resolved years ago. He reconsidered fainting.

  Pushing the swing doors open with his shoulder, he was enveloped in the smell of old paper. And lamps. There was light everywhere. After the gloom of the stairwell, it let him see very sharply for a few seconds before his eyes adjusted. A policeman with gleaming buttons smiled at him and nodded to the papers.

  ‘Those for us?’

  ‘Er … ’

  The policeman angled down the top of the first file. ‘Oh. Over there. Stick them in the in-tray.’

  Not wholly sure what was going on, Thaniel made his way around the desks that now filled the wide aisles between the filing cabinets. They were all old desks, abandoned down here for faulty legs or chipped tops, but the policemen had propped them level again with paper and broken mousetraps. Most of them were unoccupied, but between the archives for A–P 1829 was Dolly Williamson. He was using somebody’s hat as a wastepaper basket. There were scratches on his cheek that Thaniel hadn’t seen through the smoke yesterday, raw-looking still.

  ‘Thaniel,’ he said, with a careful neutrality. ‘Where have you been? I sent a man to see you yesterday but—you’re bleeding,’ he added, to Thaniel’s arm.

  Thaniel dropped the papers into his in-tray. In fact it wasn’t a tray, but a space of desk labelled ‘in-tray’ in chalk. ‘It’s nothing. What’s all this?’

  ‘Temporary lodgings. The Yard is completely gone. That other explosion was the Carlton Club, so I shouldn’t wonder if they— open a smoking room down here somewhere too.’

  He paused. ‘So.Where were you?’

  ‘I’m not Clan na Gael, or I wouldn’t have told you about—’

  ‘I know. I had some checks run this morning.’ He propped up a piece of paper and held it long-sightedly away from himself. ‘You’re from Lincolnshire. So is your family. Mother died in childbirth; father was a gamekeeper at a manor until his death in seventy-five. You haven’t got any friends. No wife. You write to a widowed sister in Scotland, who receives half your salary by postal order, monthly, but who rarely writes back. Have I missed anything? Any Irish relatives?’