The Watchmaker of Filigree Street

by Natasha Pulley

  ‘Morning.’

  ‘Oh, morning.’ Mori said it mostly into his microscope. He was building up some miniature clockwork beneath the lens, with very fine, thin tools that looked like something that belonged to a surgeon. ‘Sorry, I’m counting.’

  Thaniel stayed quiet and sat down in the high chair. One of the Haverly children was just outside, his nose pressed piggily against the window while he watched the display. He jumped when Mori threw a mint humbug at the glass. It bounced off and landed in the doorway. The boy grinned and took it, and went on his way. Mori was already looking into his microscope again. Thaniel couldn’t see his fingertips moving, only the tiny shift of the tendons in the back of his hand. Beside him was an empty jar. He had tipped the parts out over the desk in a little heap of cogs and things whose names Thaniel didn’t know. Mori put his left hand out without looking up and lifted a tiny metal framework from halfway down the nearer slope.

  ‘I’ve stopped counting,’ he said once he had set it in place.

  ‘I think I might have broken Katsu,’ Thaniel confessed. ‘He was … ’ He tried to decide whether Katsu’s having stolen most of his socks and his good tie was a morally sufficient reason for locking him in the dresser. ‘He was moving, but then he stopped,’ he said instead.

  ‘If you can’t find it, you can take one of mine for tonight,’ Mori said.

  ‘Pardon?’

  Mori straightened and put his hands against the base of his spine. ‘Your tie.’

  ‘I said that Katsu might be broken.’

  ‘I misheard, sorry.’

  ‘No, he has stolen my good tie,’ Thaniel said. He paused. ‘At least if watchmaking falls through, you can make your living as a mind-reader.’

  ‘I – yes,’ said Mori. ‘Morning,’ he added as a postman came in with a big, flat parcel. ‘Yes, down there. Thank you.’

  ‘What’s that?’ Thaniel said, curious. The postmarks and stamps weren’t English or Japanese.

  ‘A painting. There’s a depressed Dutchman who does countryside scenes and flowers and things. It’s ugly, but I have to maintain the estates in Japan and modern art is a good investment.’

  ‘Can I look?’

  ‘I wouldn’t bother,’ he said, but Thaniel untied the string and folded down the top half of the paper packaging anyway. It was a strange painting. The paint was laid on so thickly that it stood up in bumps from the canvas, all in muddy colours and lumpy strokes. Mori was right, it was ugly, but it was swirlingly distorted as if the wind were a visible force in the air, and in the greens was the sound of the hay moving.

  ‘You should keep this here. It’s good.’

  Mori made an unwilling sound. ‘I don’t like Western art.’

  ‘No, look at this.’ He lifted it from its package. It wasn’t heavy. ‘It’s clever, it looks like busy Mozart.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I … ’ Thaniel sighed. ‘I see sound. Mozart looks like this. You know. Fast strings.’

  ‘See? In front of you?’

  ‘Yes. I’m not mad.’

  ‘I didn’t think so. All sounds?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Mori waited, and then prompted him, ‘For example?’

  ‘For example, when you speak, everything tints this colour.’ He held up the watch. ‘Ticking watches are … what. Lighthouse flashes. The stairs at my old office clang yellow. It’s nothing.’

  ‘Do you ever draw them?’

  ‘No, because it looks like I belong in an asylum.’

  ‘It would be much more interesting than a picture of a field and some mud,’ Mori said seriously.

  Thaniel dipped his head down, knowing he had turned red. He hadn’t meant to tell him any of it and now felt exposed. ‘No, it wouldn’t. I’m going to hang this up.’

  There was a crash from upstairs that sounded a lot like an octopus breaking through the back of a dresser. ‘Katsu seems all right,’ Mori observed.

  ‘Do you know where he’s put my things?’

  ‘No, sorry. As I say, he works partially on random gears, so I don’t always pre-set where he goes. I’ll look later, but I can’t leave this for now or it will fall apart. You can take one of my ties. Top drawer,’ he said, pointing to the ceiling. His bedroom was directly above.

  Thaniel didn’t move. It was the chance he had been waiting for, but it was a harsh thing.

  ‘Go,’ Mori said. ‘I haven’t cursed the threshold. Christ, Englishmen and privacy.’

  The room was without character. There were no pictures, no souvenirs, no paper lamps, not even any books. Only a chest of drawers and the bed. He looked through the drawers. Clothes, no papers. The top left was all ties and collars. He checked the windowsill and under the bed, and when he found nothing, he shook his head at himself and went back to the ties. A green and a blue one were buried under greys in a way that suggested they didn’t come out often. When he moved the dark ones aside to reach them, he uncovered a book. He stopped. Ancient and cracked, the cover was otherwise blank, but the spine had been broken and restitched to allow for the insertion of extra pages. It was in Japanese. Although he didn’t know nearly enough yet to read well, he opened it.

  It was not a diary. There was text, but most of it was in bullet points, and they surrounded other things: cut-outs from newspapers, precise ink sketches of clockwork, people, annotated maps. After a while, he recognised dates too, though they were written Japanese-fashion, with the year noted according to the length of the present Emperor’s reign. He tried to remember what Fanshaw had told him. There had been a civil war in Japan in sixty-seven, and then the Emperor had taken power in sixty-eight. Now was eighty-four; this year would be the sixteenth. The dates in the diary were only vaguely clustered. Early on were dates from before Mutsuhito’s reign, though he couldn’t read the name of the previous ruler, and they hopped around a few years and months in either direction. Later were nearer dates. Once or twice, this year cropped up. Towards the back were entries for this year and for next year, and the year after. He frowned and recalculated the difference, but he was sure he was right. He flicked back. In the middle, next to an entry about the twelfth of April in 1871, was today’s date, the fourteenth of June, 1884. The ink was old and faded, just like the entry from the earlier date. The first word of the entry was his own name.

  He looked round, pointlessly. He would hear Mori coming up the stairs. He closed the book over his finger and took it into his own room, where Fanshaw’s dictionary still lay open on his bed. He learned forty new words every day. It was less difficult than it had seemed at first. Seeing sounds was useful for quick remembering, and the pictograph writing system was sensible; the word for mountain looked like a mountain, and the word for forest was three trees together. Things like ‘beautiful’ threw a spanner in the works – that was a combination of ‘big’ and ‘sheep’ – but as Mori pointed out, context helped. Monks in remote parts of ancient China had probably developed some unorthodox opinions about sheep before long, and their doctrine explained too why three women together were evil and why every second word had a temple or a shrine in it somewhere. He could read a little now, at least, and he only wanted to translate a tiny portion. The grammar was assuredly beyond him but the character system allowed semi-coherent parsing.

  There was a hole in the back of the dresser where Katsu had escaped. He brushed up the splinters and tilted the door closed. With the diary open on his knees, he began turning the pages of the dictionary. Each character was listed in order of the number of pen-strokes required to construct it, and this being logical but laborious, it took him a little while to find them all. But Mori had neat writing, and he didn’t mistake any. After half an hour, he had something like a translation.

  June 14, 1884

  Thaniel bought some music. I can’t say the composer’s name, but I like the song; it makes me feel young. There is blue cake, with an icing duck on it. He says it’s a swan, but I think it’s a duck. Red wine, too. I don’t like it but according to him I must le
arn to like it if I’m to be accepted in civilised society. We both have too much, although it’s hardly a celebration unless somebody embarrasses himself.

  And: might need new dresser in his bedroom.

  He shut the diary and put it back in Mori’s drawer. He re-read his translation. None of it had happened but the broken dresser, and there was no way Mori could have known that until this morning. He didn’t understand the rest at all. He knew he would have made horrible mistakes throughout. Whatever it really was, however, it was nothing to do with Clan na Gael or bombs.

  Having torn up his translation and scattered it into the grate, he made his way back downstairs in order to gauge Mori’s opinion of the ties. He had been gone for too long and he wanted to imply he had been deliberating. Vanity was better than spying for Special Branch.

  ‘Blue,’ he said as soon as Thaniel came in.

  ‘Green it is.’

  Mori lobbed a tolerant look in his direction as he took the blue tie back. ‘I stole your invitation to see what they’re doing tonight. It said there’s a pianist playing halfway through, Endymion Griszt; if I gave you the money, could you buy the sheet music for me?’

  ‘Griszt, are you sure? He’s the lunatic with the pink ribbon round his hat.’

  ‘I know, but still.’ He held out the invitation.

  ‘I’m not sure about this ball,’ Thaniel said. ‘There will be no one there I know and there’s this … special section in the invitation listing all the ambassadors, look. Arinori Mori, is he a relation of yours?’

  ‘I don’t think so. His Mori means woods. Three trees.’ He sketched the character on a scrap of paper. ‘I’m Mo-u -ri, which is the same in English spelling but different for us. Like this.’

  ‘Featherworth.’ Thaniel looked up. ‘You’re the Japanese equivalent of Fanshaw.’

  ‘It probably used to be woods, with a pretentious drawl. Must you go?’

  ‘Yes. But I’m going to try and come back early. I’ll steal some food and run, I think.’

  Mori laughed low in his throat, mostly to the clockwork in front of him. He looked tired; he was holding himself brittly, with his neck still and straight. ‘Mr Steepleton, at the ball. If you meet … ’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘No. Never mind.’

  ‘Someone you know?’

  ‘Yes, but I realised that I’m not interested.’

  Thaniel snorted and clapped his back, gently, in case he broke him. Mori bent forward over the microscope again, away from his hand. Thaniel watched him. He didn’t seem right. The creeping sense that he might have seen him reading the book came up from the ground, but that was more anxiety than evidence.

  ‘Are you feeling well?’ Thaniel said at last.

  ‘I’m getting a cold.’

  ‘It’s summer, go outside. You’ll feel better for the sun.’

  ‘It is not summer, England doesn’t have summer, it has continuous autumn with a fortnight’s variation here and there. And the Haverly children are outside. Stop laughing at me.’

  Thaniel did stop laughing then, because he had just seen a constable through the window. The man only told the Haverly boys to quieten down. Mori gave Thaniel a puzzled look and he realised he had been staring. He shook his head and mumbled something about going to the post office. When he got there he sent a wire to Williamson, asking for more time.

  THIRTEEN

  The Carrow house in Belgravia was big enough to lose the cavalry in, but it was not big enough for Grace to lose her maid, Alice, or for her brothers to pass beyond the range of her hearing. Both of them were in the army, and both were on leave for the ball tonight. Their father had insisted. Lord Carrow had organised a good part of the proceedings, and he wanted, he said, to show off his children. It was code for padding out the numbers.

  While Alice was sighing over Grace’s evening dress, he knocked and came inside. He had the awkward way of a man who sees his colleagues more often than he sees his children.

  ‘Gracie. Get everything down from Oxford?’

  ‘Mm. There wasn’t much, I brought most of it home at Easter.’

  He looked around the room. So did Grace. It was smaller every time she came home. An ancient rocking horse still stood in the corner, just beside the desk. The desk was scattered with squared paper and pencils, and the pieces of a calculating engine she had been building during the last holidays. A glass prism in the window shone rainbows over the chests and Persian carpets and assorted astronomical equipment, all put patiently in order in her absence. Provoked by the shifting of the old floorboards, the rocking horse squeaked. The blackboard was bolted to the wall in an asymmetric position. She had had to nail it in herself; the maids had kept putting it in the cellar.

  ‘Dress up properly,’ he said. ‘Francis Fanshaw will be there, remember.’

  ‘Yes. I remember.’

  ‘You’ll upset your mother if you don’t make an effort.’

  Grace looked at the ceiling. Her mother occupied most of the top floor, curtains drawn and fires burning. She was ill now, had been, said the servants, since she had come back from Oxford, so Grace hadn’t seen her yet. But when Grace opened her own door that morning, she had walked into a faint cloud of lilac perfume. She was almost certain that her mother must have been standing there just before, watching her through the hinges.

  ‘How I spend the rest of my life can’t depend on what might or might not upset her,’ she said quietly.

  His eyebrows lifted. ‘I beg your pardon. I seem to recall I sent you to Oxford, despite the wishes of your mother, and that she ailed all the faster after that. You’ve had four years doing quite as you please without anything to show for it. Unless this fabled fellowship is just around the corner?’

  ‘No,’ she said.

  ‘Well then. I’m doing for you what I can and I shall be damned if you turn your nose up. One of the great evils of our time for men and women is to be educated beyond one’s purpose in life.’

  ‘Not malaria, then,’ she said, without laughing, because ten years ago it had been funny that he was a stupid person. It was not funny now. ‘Or those insufficiently educated for their purpose.’

  ‘Your mother will be wearing yellow,’ he said. He had a great capacity to ignore what he believed made no sense. ‘She hopes you will wear something complementary.’

  ‘I’ve only got one dress that will do and it’s green, I’m afraid.’

  He went stiffly to the door, where he stopped suddenly. ‘In ten years’ time, you will be glad to have been given a push.’

  ‘You’re doing all this on the strength of your certainty that you are qualified to say what I will think in ten years? You idiot.’

  ‘Miss!’ Alice exclaimed.

  ‘We shall all meet downstairs at eight,’ he said. He was straining to keep his voice quiet. Grace tilted her head at him by way of asking why he had not left yet.

  The door clicked behind him, and Alice burst into the scolding that had been brewing all along.

  ‘That will do,’ Grace said, once she had let her run for a while.

  Alice sat down with a bump to return to her stitching. She was sewing beads back on to the green evening dress. It had been years since Grace had worn it, and it had shed them gradually over the base of the wardrobe. She sat in front of the mirror and watched her reflection push pins into its hair, though what she saw was her room at college, being cleaned now and made ready for whoever was to have it next term.

  When the concierge announced her name, heads turned briefly. She hadn’t been out in London society since going to Oxford. She was glad when she saw some familiar faces, Francis Fanshaw for one. She started to lift her hand, but his smile was glassy and he turned away quickly. She let her hand drop again and felt ugly. While her brothers shot toward cavalry friends, she looked around for black hair, but if Matsumoto had already arrived, he wasn’t dancing. She could only see diplomats and their elegant wives, and the pristine clerks of the more important Foreign Office sections,
all Englishmen with similar hair and similar posture, though there were a dozen languages fluttering under the chandeliers. She didn’t think that any of them were Japanese. She swallowed and started to look instead for somewhere to sit down.

  A snatch of expensive cologne drifted past her just before a pair of white-gloved hands settled over her arms.

  ‘Come along, Carrow, stop frowning at those poor women and come and play a proper game.’

  She turned. Matsumoto nodded toward the far corner of the ballroom, where the stewards had set up a miniature gentlemen’s club. It had card tables and roulette, and deep velvet armchairs arranged by the fire.

  ‘Alice chose the dress?’ he offered after a moment.

  She nodded and smoothed down the front, though it wasn’t creased. It was still fashionable, but she felt gaudy in it, and aware that it looked strange with her short hair. ‘What do you think?’

  ‘Oh, it’s … it’s … well, it’s a catastrophe with sequins.’

  She laughed, then took his arm and let him lead her across to the roulette table. His entourage was already there, turned out beautifully in white ties. A couple of his aides were speaking animatedly to one of the interchangeable clerks in Japanese. Grace watched the man, curious to know where he could have learned. The banker nodded to Matsumoto and handed him a black dice case, with the roulette ball inside. He held it under her nose.

  ‘Blow. Not that it will affect a random process, of course. See? Science.’

  ‘Probability theory is mathematics.’

  ‘Shut up.’

  Grace blew, and Matsumoto tipped the ball gently on to the wheel. Everyone placed their bets while the silver wheel spun, black or red, or for those who did not understand probability, a number.

  ‘Zero?’ Matsumoto said to her.

  ‘One in thirty-seven chance,’ Grace said.

  ‘Gambling is about fun, Carrow, not mathematics. Zero,’ he added to the banker. ‘Think of horse races. People like to bet on the one with three legs and a wheeze. They don’t bet on that one because they think it will win, but because they can see how very glorious it would be if it were to win.’