He straightened. ‘No, it’s my ordinary face.’
‘The others are huddling outside over their sandwiches, you know. They seem frightened. Did you say something stern about cotton mills?’
‘No? I don’t know anything about cotton mills.’
Fanshaw laughed. ‘I see. How are you getting on?’
‘I looked up Mori in that cabinet. Apparently he’s baron of somewhere.’
Fanshaw’s eyes widened with interest. ‘That kind of Mori. Really.’
‘Are they famous?’
‘They’re a huge samurai clan in Japan. Lots of money, very conservative, usually. Their current head is the Duke of Choushu, which is very like being Duke of Northumberland. O-oh … I know. I know; there was a Mori on Minister Ito’s staff. Left a while ago. I remember someone said in dispatches he’d upped sticks to make clockwork in England. Never thought I’d meet him. Bizarre.’
‘Maybe government work was boring.’
Fanshaw laughed. ‘Doubt it. Ito’s going to be prime minister as soon as he can wangle a cabinet system, not a shadow of a doubt. Anyway, a present for you,’ he added, and dropped a Japanese dictionary on Thaniel’s desk. It landed with a bang that made the papers jump. ‘Learn that.’
‘All of it?’
‘All of it.’
Thaniel angled the cover open with his fingernail and winced – he had used his left hand. The tiny exertion made the scab on his arm crack. On the tissue-thin pages, the text was minuscule. ‘But don’t you speak—’
‘I’ll be here for only a third of the time; I have a dozen other things to do.’
‘What things?’
‘Everything,’ Fanshaw sighed. He dropped into his chair. From his desk drawer he took out a tweed pincushion, full of glass-headed pins, and a piece of fabric with a needle pushed through it. Thaniel could only see the underside of the stitching, but he thought it was half an ivy pattern. ‘Though I swear I spend at least half my time directing Lord bloody Carrow to Lord Leveson’s office. It isn’t as though he’s moved in twenty years. These people seem to think it unnecessary to memorise the layout of a building when fellows like me are around to do it for them.’ He cast around aimlessly. ‘I’ve forgotten something. I’ve always forgotten something. You know how one ends up with a constant nagging sense that one has walked out of one’s house without some vital item of clothing and so one lays out a second pair of trousers for the express purpose of forgetting them? Tickets!’ he said suddenly. ‘FO employees get tickets to the ball, you can pick one up in Chivers’ office round there. Wouldn’t want you to miss it. Not after all the effort I’ve put into the damn thing. Oh, and you’ll need to sign some more secrecy oaths, I shouldn’t wonder. If you thought HO material was sensitive, wait until you see what comes through the wires here. The salary is proportionately enlarged, I should add.’
‘I … my God, you were serious?’
‘Quite.’
‘Thank you.’
Fanshaw waved it away. ‘Can’t waste a Japanese speaker on Home Office telegraphy.’ He sighed again, falling back into his previous lethargy. He looped the needle through a new stitch and the green thread hissed quietly.
‘What are you doing?’ said Thaniel, who had held it in for as long as he could, which wasn’t long.
‘What? Oh, the embroidery. Symptom of overwork, I’m afraid. If I don’t work at it a bit every now and then I go gently mad.’
‘Why does embroidery help?’
‘You are such a genuine fellow, aren’t you. I think it’s to do with doing something with one’s hands that doesn’t much involve one’s brain. I suspect it might be a developing neurosis, I have been meaning to see someone. Runs in the family. I’m not a patch on my brother, you know. He has to go around the estate counting the railings. There are quite a lot of railings. I suppose numbers, being immutable, are comforting when one feels one isn’t quite in control of things. Three will always be three.’
Thaniel nodded, slowly. He had never understood proper mathematics. There was always a gaping hole in the middle of the idea – namely, that he had never been able to see what three was. From what he could tell, it was a thing of its own, but he had only been able to envisage it as its sign, which was like trying to conceive of a piano by looking hard enough at the letters in the word.
‘I was about to make some tea,’ he said eventually. ‘Would that help?’
Fanshaw put his hands together and leaned back in his chair as though he had arrived in the Promised Land after forty years wandering a tealess desert. ‘Rather, thank you. Oh, by the way, all telegrams for the Yard are coming here, so when they come in, do take them down to the basement, won’t you?’
For the last week, cracks had been baking into the mudbanks of the Thames, but the Home Office cellar was cold. Some of its clutter, and therefore its insulation, was gone now, and when he went down, the young officer at the front desk was holding his hands around his lamp. Among the old filing cabinets and the brassy noises of the men moving about in heavy boots, Williamson looked criminal in a pair of fingerless gloves.
‘I think I saw the Franklin expedition in a cupboard back there,’ Thaniel said.
‘We’re just missing dog teams and— ice picks,’ Williamson said gloomily. ‘Are those our telegrams from the FO? What are you doing with them?’
‘Francis Fanshaw recruited me this morning.’
‘Oh, that’s good.’ He took the transcripts, and Thaniel’s handwritten notes. He put them aside. ‘So,’ he said, and his voice dropped as it did when his stammer was about to disappear for a while. ‘Frederick Spindle was in here this morning talking about hidden diamonds and extra mechanisms.’
Thaniel moved a chair across and sat, arms folded in the cold. He was in his shirtsleeves. ‘I’ve come about that too. I’ve just looked up Mori in the oriental desk records. He’s a baron in Japan. His family is rich. Fanshaw says very rich. I don’t think the diamonds signify.’
‘What’s he doing making watches in Knightsbridge?’
He shook his head. It was not impossible to explain Mori’s oddnesses, but he was wary of trying to do it now. He would rose-tint them too much.
Williamson leant his elbows against the table and pushed his fingertips under his scarf. ‘But it’s not quite right, all the same.’
‘It’s not quite wrong either.’
Williamson’s sharp eyes caught on him for too long and read his bones. ‘Nevertheless,’ he said, more slowly, ‘the watch arrived at your flat on the night of the threat. It opened on the day of the bomb. The alarm went off just before. And special mechanisms that measure where the bearer is at a certain time? I don’t know what that was intended for, but Spindle says it’s one of the most complicated pieces of machinery he’s ever seen. You don’t make the most complicated piece of machinery ever seen by one of London’s best watchmakers if you only want to set an alarm, do you?’
‘I took the room he was letting,’ Thaniel said quietly. ‘To keep an eye on him. I don’t say I think he’s innocent. I’m saying you can’t assume the diamonds are payment when the man’s from money. Old money, from the way Fanshaw talked.’
Williamson sat back a little. ‘Well, that’s good. That’s very good.’ He looked sorry but did not say it. ‘You know, you should be in Special Branch, not typing for Fanshaw. You’re steady enough.’
He smiled. ‘Out of interest, how often do Special Branch officers die when they let slip to the Irish?’
‘If they do let slip? Always.’
‘It’s good to work with efficient people, though, isn’t it, so it’s all swings and roundabouts.’
Williamson coughed as he laughed. ‘Tell me about Mori.’
‘What kind of thing?’
‘What’s your impression of him, forgetting the clockwork mysteries?’
‘He’s kind,’ said Thaniel. He looked down at the floor, which was scuffed in semicircle shapes where the desk had been pivoted. ‘He’s afraid of heights, he doesn�
��t like next door’s children. He has a pet octopus made of clockwork. It collects socks. They seem to know him well at the oriental show village in Hyde Park, so I don’t think he is the completely solitary sort.’
‘How are you getting on?’
‘Well enough.’
‘To the extent that you could have a good look around the house without raising suspicion?’
‘I couldn’t take up the floorboards,’ Thaniel said slowly.
‘No need to take up floorboards. I’d like you to search for correspondence. If he is involved with the Irish, he might have burned everything pertinent, but he might not have. People feel safe at home; he might have kept letters, pamphlets … they’re not above blackmail, either.’
His teeth stung. ‘All right.’
‘If you find anything, tell me straightaway. Spindle’s final report should come in soon, but I can’t arrest anybody for suggestive clockwork and there’s … well. Pressure from on high.’
‘You look like it,’ he said.
‘No, no, say what you really think,’ Williamson tried to huff, but then put his hand to his head. ‘Do I really?’
‘Dolly, it will be all right. I thought you’d already arrested most of the men involved in all this?’
‘Yes. We knew who they were months beforehand, but couldn’t take them until after we found the bombs. No evidence otherwise. But no bloody bombmaker. If we don’t have him, it will be the devil’s work trying to connect the rest of the bastards direct to the explosion, and none of them know; no man knows more than he needs to lest he’s arrested. Just – be careful. If you spook this man, the case might … ’
Thaniel sat back. Williamson must have seen his expression close, because he lifted a placatory hand and then pulled it over his jaw.
‘Don’t imagine for a moment that I don’t know this is a vast administrative cock-up, resting so much on a civilian.’
‘What happens if I don’t find anything?’
‘Then I’ll have to arrest him anyway and shake a confession out of him, and quickly, before the Foreign Minister hears I’ve arrested an oriental nobleman.’
Thaniel’s lungs stiffened hard, and then hurt because they wouldn’t move. ‘Dolly, it might not be him. You’ve got the clockwork in the bomb, but any watchmaker could have taken apart some of his watches, and you’ve got a suggestive watch, but any other watchmaker could have set it to do what it did.’
‘And the beggar outside your house, who saw a boy with foreign marks on his shoes?’
‘Half the watchmakers in London are Chinese.’
‘Is that what you really think, or do you only want it not to be him?’
Thaniel stood up. ‘What I want is for you not to be personally thrown out by the Foreign Minister on the not very unlikely chance that a samurai manages to hold fast against a few coppers long enough for someone to hear of it.’
Williamson stood up too. ‘Sorry.’ He held his hand out.
Thaniel shook it and turned away before the policeman could see his face clearly.
With a gilt invitation to the Foreign Office ball in his satchel, Thaniel let himself into the house through the front door rather than the workshop. Mori had looked busy through the window, or at least, occupied. He set Fanshaw’s dictionary down on the kitchen table and put the kettle on, and read through the first few pages while he waited. It was a dictionary not of words but of single characters, some of which happened to be words, arranged by stroke number. It began with numbers, and the signs for person and sun and big. He moved the block of the pages left to see the entries toward the back. They were rambling and mazy, and ancient-looking. The meanings were all philosophical terms.
‘There’s tea in here,’ Mori called when he heard the steam.
Thaniel shut his eyes. ‘I thought you might not want disturbing.’
‘Disturb away.’
He tilted the door between them open. It had never been quite shut, resting on its stiff iron latch. It was heavy oak, pointed at the top, but the weight was familiar; he had spent years putting his shoulder to a similar door in the duke’s chapel organ loft. This one didn’t creak. On the other side, Mori had his back to him, his neck bent over a microscope. Whatever he was doing must have been difficult, because he didn’t look back to see why there was still quiet. He passed a pencil from his right hand to his left and made a note on a blueprint. It was plain he wouldn’t have thought it was rude if no conversation was forthcoming after all.
Thaniel went up behind him to catch his elbows and set a guinea down by his hand. His shirt was real linen and, because he had been sitting side on to the draught, cool down the left arm. He twisted in his chair.
‘What’s this for?’
‘Your winnings,’ Thaniel said. ‘I work for the Foreign Office, as of this morning.’
Mori inclined his head. ‘Well done.’
‘Thank you. Baron Mori.’
‘Oh, who told you that?’ he said crossly.
‘Nobody. I looked at your immigration papers at the office. Why didn’t you say?’
‘I’d like to be a watchmaker before I’m a samurai, somewhere in the world.’
‘Must be terrible for you, being a samurai.’
‘Shut up, peasant.’
Thaniel laughed and knew what Williamson would say if he could see him, and then pushed the thought into the bicycle shed at the back of his mind. Williamson wouldn’t have to live in Pimlico after it was all over.
Dinner was not much later: fresh bread, real grapes, and a bitter oriental wine that, after two cups, he decided he liked. He also liked watching Mori eat rice with chopsticks, which he could use far more accurately than Thaniel could use cutlery. Mori seemed to disapprove of cutlery as a sort of unnecessary decadence and by way of reinforcing the point, he did all the washing up except Thaniel’s fork, which he left in a jar like a chemical specimen. Thaniel prodded him and Mori smiled at him in the reflection in the dark window.
Outside, among the birch trees in the garden, soft balls of light rose from the grass. They were what he had seen on his first night, but here he was nearer to them than before, and he could see that they were differently coloured, in shades of amber and yellow. Every now and then, one flickered, as if something were moving between them. The Haverly baby, left outside the back door again, noticed too, and whooped.
He set down the plate he had been drying. ‘What are they?’
‘Fireflies.’
‘There are no fireflies like that in England.’
Mori took a key from his pocket. As soon as he opened the door, the floating lights disappeared. They both went outside to look around anyway, but they found nothing but Katsu, who bubbled at them from a watering can.
PART TWO
ELEVEN
OXFORD, JUNE 1884
Grace had worked all week on the interferometer. Term would end on the fourteenth of June – tomorrow – and then it would be too late. Accurate measurements would be impossible in London, where there were trains above and below ground and building work everywhere. That was why the American’s experiment had gone wrong. He had been in the cellar of a naval academy with five hundred men running drills above his head. But she was hopeful now. She had done everything properly: re-run the original calculations, found the errors, corrected them. As she had taken the last of her notes from the last of her stack of reading, she started to feel a bubble of lightness coming up through her ribs. It had been very fragile at first, but she thought now it was made of something stronger than suds. The new experiment would work. She would still have to go back to London for a little while, but not for ever. Once the paper was published, the college would have her back.
She had set up in Lady Margaret Hall’s deep, silent cellar, where everyone left her alone. Mostly alone. Matsumoto called every day at three o’clock to make sure that she hadn’t blown herself up. She had tried to explain that she hadn’t got any explosives and therefore couldn’t explode, but he only said it was dangerous
to imagine she wouldn’t find a way.
It was nearly three o’clock now. Having balanced the last mirror on the interferometer, she straightened up. In the way things do after a long period of concentration, the room looked inexplicably different. It was bigger, and fuller. Along the back wall was the college’s infant wine collection. Everything else was hers. She had set up a trestle bench, scattered with bits of mirror and several hacksaws. Next to that was the font she had borrowed from New College chapel. Sitting within it was a flat plane of wood, on which sat the four arms of the interferometer in a cross shape. Although one could still do proper science with a magnet and some iron filings, it felt professional to have made something that looked like a mutated windmill. Science had to have some mystery, otherwise everyone would find out how simple it was.
The can cut into her forearm as she poured the first of the mercury into the font. It glimmered and swam. When she poured in the second can, the mercury already in the font jumped and splashed, but nothing like as much as water. It was too heavy. She moved the can around, making shapes in the surface, which dented under the new weight pouring in.
A cane tapped on the door.
‘Coming in, Carrow,’ Matsumoto called. ‘Anything nasty I should know about?’
‘Yes, stay back a bit. You shouldn’t breathe in these fumes.’
He pushed the door open with the handle of his cane. ‘What in God’s name are you doing?’
‘It’s mercury.’
‘I can see it’s mercury, Carrow, the question is why is there mercury in this otherwise delightful cellar?’
‘Wait, last one,’ Grace said. She was breathless now. The mercury cans weren’t big, but they were so heavy that they might have been steel all the way through. ‘It deadens vibrations. It’s heavier than water.’
‘I’ve brought some friends. I thought it might do you good to see other humans.’
‘What?’ Grace put down the empty can and straightened up to find that six of Matsumoto’s minions were already halfway down the steps. They were all dressed in close-cut jackets and silk ties that rippled with magnificent petroleum colours. When they came into the lamplight, they made polite, appreciative noises at the cluttered room. One came across to her and bowed too formally.
The Watchmaker of Filigree Street Page 12
