The Watchmaker of Filigree Street

by Natasha Pulley

  ‘So, I’ve invited Grace Carrow here tomorrow night,’ Thaniel said. Turning in the air between them was the morning’s timely rain and everything that had been correct at the hotel, but he talked past it.

  ‘I’d rather not have unmarried women in the house,’ Mori said carefully.

  ‘She’s a Belgravia lady, she’s not coming in the capacity of an unmarried woman. And I’m sure she will have a chaperone.’

  ‘I can stay out of the way for an evening, then.’

  ‘I’d like you to meet her.’

  ‘I wouldn’t.’

  Thaniel pushed his hand over his mouth. ‘But you’ll like her. She’s clever. She’s a physicist. I think she might be a suffragist.’

  ‘No. I haven’t got time for women’s suffrage.’

  ‘But she – what?’ he said.

  Mori did not quite move, but the bone in his wrist shifted. His arm was resting on the edge of the bath. ‘Women won’t have a vote until it’s in the fiscal interest of the state to give it to them. They’ll have it when all able-bodied men die and not before. Protesting now is pointless.’

  ‘Good. Reasonable as usual.’

  ‘Do you still want to expose her to me?’

  ‘Yes,’ Thaniel insisted, and then tried to swallow the lump in his throat. ‘Look, you were right about everything at the hotel. You can do what you say, so you know I don’t mean for anything improper. I like her, that’s all, she’s interesting, but she’s from the sort of family who will have me horsewhipped if I don’t see her in the company of someone respectable. Barons are respectable. Please?’

  Mori looked across and was, briefly, a languageless, inhuman thing rescued from the sea and asked for an impious favour. He was not his ordinary self until he moved again. ‘For the sake of your not being horsewhipped, then.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  Mori let his hand slide from the edge of the bath and back underwater. ‘You will, of course, be buying the good cocoa from Harrods, since you forgot the music, and you locked me in all night, and I don’t like Miss Carrow.’

  Thaniel hitched. He had meant to squeeze his wrist. ‘Yes. Of course. Then – tomorrow at seven?’

  ‘Mm. And not that Brazilian rubbish. The green packet from Peru.’

  ‘Yes.’

  When he reached the bottom of the stairs, he stopped with his hand flat on the polished orb on the banister. The rail was squeaking because Katsu was swinging from it by two tentacles. Watching the octopus play, he held his thoughts very still, and eased open an imagining of what it would be if Mori were telling the truth. He stopped himself and banged it shut before he could see too much. He went back out in the rain to buy the cocoa.

  *

  He left for work the next morning much earlier than usual, when the air was still cool and his wisdom teeth felt sharp from not having eaten. While he waited in the Home Office cellar, opening and closing the lid of his watch, a young constable gave him a cup of tea that tasted of dust. The dust was everywhere; the policemen were settling in, and everything had been moved. The filing cabinets stood like jumbled building blocks at the edges of the room now, surrounded by stacks of mouldering papers and an assortment of horrible, expensively framed paintings. Unwanted gifts from foreign emissaries. He opened his watch again. Williamson came around a bank of cabinets and stopped when he saw Thaniel at his desk.

  ‘Thaniel. Found your note. Come — with me,’ he said quietly.

  Thaniel followed him along the rows of desks and cabinets. They passed through a small door and along a corridor, unlit and pitch black, so that he had to follow the silver resoundings of Williamson’s boots, and then into the light again and a small room with brooms stacked by one wall. A table had been set up in the centre. Mr Spindle waited on the other side, his hands resting on either side of a blackened mess of clockwork.

  ‘If you could repeat your findings to Mr Steepleton here,’ Williamson said. His stammer was gone again.

  ‘Why?’ said Spindle, sounding irked. Without his tri-lensed loupes, his green eyes were of an ordinary size. He looked like any other shopkeeper. ‘I thought you were fetching the Home Secretary?’

  ‘The Home Secretary doesn’t live with our man. Go on.’

  Spindle pursed his lips, but he lifted a pair of long tweezers, and handed Thaniel a magnifying glass. ‘As you wish. You’ll need to be closer than that,’ he said.

  ‘I can see.’

  ‘Very well. You see the mainspring here? I showed it to you before. Gold and steel, as per Mr Mori’s style. The main mechanism uses jewel bearings of course, as all good clockwork does, but these are industrial-grade diamonds. Rubies are far more standard. I have here a comparison watch I bought from Mori’s workshop last week; as you see, there are diamonds inside. Nothing like as many as in yours,’ he added to Thaniel, and glanced at Williamson. ‘I still think it’s foolish to believe he has that sort of money to—’

  ‘I’ve seen his records at the Foreign Office.’ Thaniel interrupted. ‘He entered the country as Baron Mori, with a letter of confirmation from the Minister of the Interior in Japan.’

  ‘And how would one check the veracity of a letter from the Minister of the Interior in Japan?’ Spindle laughed.

  ‘By wire,’ Thaniel said. ‘From my office. It’s Japan, not Mars.’ He had done it last week, when he was sending through a reply to diplomatic dispatches. It had been only an overhead note, aimed at the operator rather than the official channels. The reply had come through quickly only a few hours later; the clerk had not even needed to check. He had met Mori, who used to come to the Legation often as a translator on behalf of Minister Ito. Same man: remarkable northern accent, knack for dressing sensibly despite belonging to a nation of civil servants who favoured morning coats with buttonhole flowers. Not to be faced over the bridge table.

  ‘Well, I suppose I’ll have to defer to the spy on matters of espionage. Shall we return to this? You see these small cogs here? They are unusually small. It takes small hands to achieve work this fine.’

  ‘Workhouse children make clockwork parts.’

  ‘So do oriental watchmakers. Finally, this large cog.’ He lifted it out. It was blackened and bent from the immense heat of the exploding bomb, but still carried a glint of silver in places. ‘You can just see the engraving pattern on it. Vines and leaves, yes? I believe his name means woods.’ Spindle set the cog down and opened the sample watch. Inside the lid was one of Mori’s hand-drawn watchpapers. ‘Same pattern. Short of his having signed the thing, I rather think all this is conclusive.’

  Thaniel turned to Williamson. ‘All this means is that whoever made the bomb did it with reliable clockwork, and Mori’s is the most reliable in London. If Mr Spindle here were as good, it would be his work in the bomb.’

  Spindle flinched at that.

  ‘I know,’ Williamson said, ‘which is why I haven’t sent anyone round to arrest him straightaway.’ He sighed and took Thaniel’s arm. ‘Come back out here. Thank you, Mr Spindle. If you could wait here a moment longer.’

  Thaniel let himself be guided out into the main cellar, but then he shook Williamson’s hand from his arm. ‘You can’t go to the Home Secretary with that, Dolly, you know you can’t.’

  ‘Of course I won’t, I was going to make him wait for an hour and then tell him the Home Secretary can’t see him. He’s a pompous little tick; I like to waste his time when I can. Sick of the sight of him. He’s been with us since the Victoria bomb.’

  Thaniel eased, but not much. They made their way to Williamson’s desk in silence. Thaniel’s supplies had reached it; there was a real wastepaper basket now, and a packet of tea serving as a paperweight.

  Williamson took a breath and then paused. ‘But I am going to investigate those explosives you found.’

  ‘Now?’ Thaniel said heavily.

  ‘Tomorrow. There’s another raid today. We’re still chasing down some of the other men involved. The ones who put the damn thing in place, in fact.’
r />   ‘Then what happens to him?’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘You go to the house, and then … ’

  ‘We hold him there while we search. When we find something, he’ll be arrested.’

  ‘What if I’m wrong, what if it’s nothing? You’ll just shake it out of him?’

  Williamson tucked his head down as if he were talking to a child. ‘I’d suggest you stay in an hotel— tomorrow night,’ he said. The debate was over: his stutter had returned. He sighed through his nose. ‘I know you like this fellow, but even without everything else, an inch square of dynamite in a watchmaker’s shop worries me. There’s no telling how many other inch-long packets he might have, and … small amounts are becoming popular. Easier to bury in clockwork, harder to disarm. A bomb is not a cluster of dynamite sticks any more.’

  Thaniel had nothing to say to that. They shook hands across the desk.

  ‘Stay with him until tomorrow,’ Williamson said. ‘Last leg now.’

  SIXTEEN

  A crash came from downstairs. Both of her brothers were at home. Since it was six o’clock, the servants’ dinner hour, neither the butler nor Alice was about the house to scold them. Grace sighed and checked the deck of playing cards again.

  That morning, she had gone into town with Alice and bought two identical packs of cards. After removing the ace of spades from one and inserting it into the other, she had replaced the tampered version in its package and resealed it. It was a simple test, but having thought about it all Sunday afternoon, it seemed like the best way. Anything more complicated and Thaniel’s friend would know that something was going on. The results would be clear. If he took out the extra ace before they played, it would go a long way to proving Thaniel’s hypothesis. If he did not, it was safe to assume he was a fraud. He was a watchmaker, and Grace had never met a mechanically minded person who could leave a mistake in place. He would take the extra card out if he knew it was there. He had no reason not to.

  Beside the mirror, the barometer clicked around to ‘rain’ as the mercury column shrank. She watched it for a few seconds, then looked back through the open door. The corridor was empty; Alice had only just gone down to the kitchen. They had agreed to leave in twenty minutes. Grace slid the tampered cards into the pocket of her summer coat and draped it over her arm. It would be interesting to see how the watchmaker reacted to an early and unchaperoned arrival.

  She was at the bottom of the stairs when her brothers charged past. They were not much younger than she was, nineteen and twenty-one, but whenever they were on leave, they regressed to childhood.

  ‘Out of the way, out of the way!’ shouted James. He was carrying a rugby ball.

  Grace flattened herself against the wall. ‘You are not playing rugby in the house.’

  ‘No, we haven’t got enough men. Do you want to play?’ William asked, beaming. He was the youngest, and Grace suspected that it was he who had acquired the rugby ball. The game had been unheard of when Grace was small, but William had played it at Eton when it first became popular, and now he spoke of it in a reverent tone he normally saved only for women and rifles. Since she had once been with him to see the Harlequins play at Hampstead, she had tried to convince them both to take up cricket instead. Cricket had rules: one was not allowed to stamp on the head of another player and pass it off as enthusiasm.

  ‘No,’ she said. She peered past them into the drawing room. ‘Did you break that vase?’

  ‘Oh, probably. James! Here!’

  It was, she decided, nothing to do with her. She was busy.

  Outside, the heat was as viscous and sticky as honey. It rippled along the marble fronts of the townhouses. As she walked, summer coat still over her arm, the deck of cards was a sharp shape in one pocket. Her skin prickled, and she rubbed her wrists to brush away the thunder flies. They were everywhere today – she could see them in the air, like grain on a photograph.

  The storm clouds were ahead as she turned out of Belgravia. Good.

  By the time she reached Filigree Street, the rain was sheeting and she looked as though she had fallen in the Thames. She had expected to shiver on the porch and squeak to be let in, but in fact the door of number twenty-seven opened just as she was coming up the steps. Inside, Thaniel smiled.

  ‘I’m so sorry, the rain … ’ She watched as the water skittered into a row of empty bottles on the bottom step. She had seen the servants at home put them out too, but no one had mentioned what they might be for. The bottle necks were too narrow to be an efficient way of catching rain water.

  ‘I know, we saw the clouds coming from the workshop. Mori’s making tea. Come in, it’s warm, we’ve got the fire going now … ’ He trailed off and his gaze eased over her shoulder. ‘Is there no one with you?’

  ‘No,’ she said. Mori. The name sounded familiar, but she could not remember why. ‘I’m sorry. I was supposed to have, but my brothers were playing rugby in the house and I decided I’d had enough, so I left without my chaperone.’

  ‘Rugby? Why?’

  ‘God knows,’ she said. He stepped aside to let her in. Taking the pack of cards from the pocket, she hung her wet coat up on the hooks in the hallway. ‘They’re soldiers; when they’re not charging at Africans they want to charge at each other.’

  He showed her into a neat parlour. It was small but warm, with a piano in one corner and a low Chinese table by the fire. An armchair had been relegated to the window. He saw her note the odd arrangement.

  ‘I hope you don’t mind sitting on the floor … ’

  ‘No, that’s quite all right, it’s Bohemian. Anyway, I’m freezing.’ She dropped down on the rug with her back to the fire and he knelt opposite, straight, like a pianist. She had thought he might be, despite his protestations at the ball.

  ‘Shall I fetch you a blanket?’ he asked.

  Grace coughed. ‘No, no need.’

  ‘You’ve gone blue.’

  ‘I’ll warm up in a minute.’ Her eye caught on a grey jumper folded over the arm of the chair. It was the kind that sailors and workmen wore. ‘Actually, would you mind if I borrowed that?’

  ‘Oh … it’s not mine, but I’m sure Mori wouldn’t mind.’ He fetched it for her. When she took it, she found that it was exactly the right size for her. She pulled it on. It smelled of lemons, and the wool was expensive and soft.

  They both twisted around when a clink of china came from the door.

  He had not told her what Mori looked like, and she had imagined a grave, traditionally dressed man of an age with Matsumoto’s father. He was not. His clothes were Western and his hair was short and dyed, and he looked very young. When he leaned down to set the tea things on the table, he gave her a polite smile. The smile drew lines around his eyes that gave away his real age, but they disappeared when the smile faded. She smiled back, feeling shabby.

  ‘Mr Mori, I’m delighted to make your acquaintance,’ she said. She held out her hand across the table. ‘Grace Carrow. I’m sorry to have stolen your jumper. And I’m sorry I’m so early.’ She watched him carefully.

  ‘Never mind.’ He shook her hand with a grip too strong for his thin fingers, and knelt down beside Thaniel. He seemed not to mind her being early, but that was as much an oriental trait as a clairvoyant one. ‘Where’s your chaperone?’ He had exactly Thaniel’s accent. He must have learned his English from him.

  ‘I had to go without her, I’m afraid.’

  He looked at her as though he could read her motives listed on the back of her skull. ‘Are you certain you should be here alone?’

  ‘She’s already inside now,’ Thaniel pointed out. Mori hadn’t taken his eyes from her. She shifted and straightened up.

  ‘Yes, of course,’ he said at last, then held out a plate of beautiful, multi-coloured cakes to her. She didn’t recognise them, but she took one anyway, curious. It was sponge and cream inside, and easily the most wonderful thing she had eaten for months.

  ‘My God – where did you find these?
They’re delicious.’

  ‘He bakes,’ Thaniel said.

  Grace expressed her admiration and took one more, then stopped. She could have eaten half a dozen, but she was bulky next to Mori, and it was making her increasingly uncomfortable. ‘So, why London, if you don’t mind my asking?’ she said.

  ‘The best clockwork in the world is here.’ The more he spoke, the stranger his voice was. It was too low for his frame, and although even Matsumoto had a trace of his native sibilance sometimes through all the Oxford elocution lessons, Mori didn’t.

  ‘Oh, of course.’ She stopped, then pulled out her swallow watch. ‘Hold on. Clockwork. This is one of yours, isn’t it?’

  He angled it down with one fingertip. ‘Yes. I sold this one to a William Carrow. Your brother?’

  ‘It was a present. It’s excellent,’ she added, opening the back to show Thaniel the interior bird. ‘I knew your name was familiar. For some reason I imagined that you were Italian. Oh, I’ve brought some cards,’ she added, itchily aware that he could have nothing to say against an accusation of being Italian. She hadn’t imagined that speaking to him would be difficult, but it was. For all he was more fluent, he was far more foreign than Matsumoto. The way he sat had a schooled look to it, and so did the care he was taking over the tea. He had turned her cup so that the blue Chinese design on it faced her, and Thaniel’s. He had done it while they talked and she didn’t think he meant either of them to notice it was ritual. But it was. The china deserved it, too. She recognised the designs. The Belgravia house was full of examples of her mother’s old auction house habits. It was Jingdezhen china, more than three hundred years old and still uncracked. Matsumoto had said once or twice that there was something of a generation gap at home, but she hadn’t known it was so wide.

  ‘What are we playing?’ said Thaniel.

  ‘Poker?’ said Grace. ‘Do you know that?’

  ‘I’ll lose, but yes.’ He looked at Mori. ‘Heard from the British Legation in Tokyo that you’ve got a bit of a reputation at cards.’

  ‘What are you doing talking about me in dispatches?’