The Watchmaker of Filigree Street

by Natasha Pulley

  ‘I’d rather not. This once. Please.’

  ‘What kind of tea do you drink in the dark, anyway?’ she said quietly. She hoped it would scare him, but it didn’t.

  ‘Come again?’ was all he said.

  She pressed her fingernails into her palms. ‘Do you remember when I said that one day he would get tired of me, and on that day, you would agree with him? It’s today.’

  He inclined his head, very slightly, so that the light in his hair only shifted rather than disappeared. ‘Do you remember when I said I’m not stupid?’

  ‘Of course you’re not stupid—’

  ‘No, I’m an ordinary man who works in an office and sometimes plays the piano.’

  She didn’t recognise the words at first, and when she did, it was with a prick of irritation at being quoted, and then a creeping dismay. She had not thought he listened so closely. ‘I never meant—’

  ‘I’ll come back tomorrow,’ he said again.

  ‘No, come back now. I know you only want the night, but tomorrow you’ll want another and another, and you’ll never leave. Do you not understand what would happen then? Thaniel, if we’re seen to separate – for Christ’s sake, my father is best friends with Lord Leveson. You know, the Foreign Minister? He’ll see to it that you lose your job no matter what I say to him, and neither of us will see anything of the rest of the dowry. What will happen to your sister then?’

  He closed his hand on the desk at the mention of his sister. ‘I want to stay because I’ll hardly ever come back after this. Grace, there’s going to be a child before long. And I’ll love you, and her, and he’ll be left behind, like he always is, but I won’t care, because we will have drifted by then and I’ll have my own family to think about. I want to think of him while I still can.’

  ‘What rubbish has he been telling you?’ she demanded, aware that her voice had risen. It was one thing to know the man was clever, but another to see how he could apply it. If it hadn’t affected her, she would have admired the strategy of it. ‘Thaniel, it’s only to make you—’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Good God, I feel like Cassandra! I’ve been making true prophecies and still you don’t believe me. Just for a moment, push past the fact that you aren’t so clever as he is, and see what he’s done.’

  ‘I’m not clockwork.’

  She wanted to shake him. ‘You are. But you are such good clockwork that you don’t know. Please, see it. It’s my life you’re holding, as well as yours. I can’t keep the laboratory going without the dowry money.’

  ‘I know that. Which is why I will come back, in the morning,’ he said, with a dead calm she realised that she had often heard before. Like an idiot she had thought it was because he was never angry.

  She let her breath out. ‘In the morning then. I’m sorry about all that. I’m sure we’ll see, soon enough.’

  His expression opened. ‘Yes. Tomorrow.’

  ‘All right. Well, I shall go and enjoy a cavernous hotel room to myself.’

  He smiled.

  ‘My best to Mori,’ she added.

  She let herself out into the powdery snow. The door clicked behind her. With grains of snow tapping against the hem of her skirt as the wind blew it in rivulets from Knightsbridge, she looked back in time to see him go into the kitchen through the heavy, old door at the back of the workshop. Once he had gone, the lights faded by themselves, and there was only the dim glow of the dying brazier.

  In the cab on the way back to the hotel, she closed her eyes, wanting to rest, but saw things behind her eyelids. She had never seen a stone wall fall, but Matsumoto had showed her a photograph of Crow Castle. It was, he said, much smaller than some of the great old castles in the south that had come down over the past decade, but it was still a colossal thing, standing on inward curving walls above a black lake. The process of multiplication ticked as she tried to think what one of the stones would weigh, and then how many stones went into a wall that size, or bigger, and then what that weight would do to human bones. There would hardly have been bones to speak of.

  ‘The Westminster, miss,’ said the cabby, waspishly.

  She straightened, and realised that the cab had been still for more than a minute. The yellow light of a street lamp cast a shadow of the window glass across her knees, where it seemed to run liquid. She got out and paid the man. Her joints were moving badly, all unoiled hydraulics.

  Upstairs, she pushed open the unlocked door of the suite. The lamps she had lit before leaving were still burning. The carriage clock on the mantelpiece chimed half past eleven and the floor shook, just perceptibly, as a train left Westminster station underground. She pressed the heels of her hands against her temples and blew her breath out. Her engagement ring caught on a strand of her hair.

  As she sat down, a sovereign fell from her pocket and rolled off under the chair. Heads. She picked it up and imagined the disturbed ether billowing as it closed over the dead chance of tails. The trails in it would be everywhere, stacked in layers; there would be Grace-ghosts making tea, locking the door, standing in the window, doing all the things she faintly meant to soon. There would be shapes made by the cleaning woman who would come at ten o’clock tomorrow, and faint ones from guests who still hadn’t decided whether or not to take this particular room. The particles were so fine that they were knocked about by the pressure of flashing nerves in minds ten miles away. A hundred.

  She turned the coin over in her hands and tossed it again. Heads. Heads. Heads; it was funny, that. With every throw that turned up heads, it was tempting to think heads was less likely for the next, but it was still even chances. A memoryless process. The coin did not know it had thrown heads four times in a row. Before every throw, the ether would split two ways, in equal anticipation, always. It didn’t matter who did the throwing or why. The chances would be the same, just as unpredictable, even if by some extraordinary fluke, heads appeared twenty times. Which was how Katsu worked, of course.

  She held the coin and, at last, let her mind work. She had been holding the ideas still for so long that they had developed by themselves, with little intervention from the rest of her. She glanced at the clock. Twenty-five to midnight. The last train would go on the hour. There was time, if she hurried.

  Outside, the wind hummed around the gutters and clattered frozen leaves against the window pane. Some caught in spiders’ webs and threw uneven shadows across the floor. With his back to the wall and his arm across Mori, Thaniel could feel the heat of the fire along the back of his hand and his forearm, and the cooler air behind his shoulder. He hid from the light against the nape of Mori’s neck. He could feel sleep coming; his grip was gone and his thoughts had turned mirrorish. Under his arm, Mori curled forward. If he had been standing, he would have let his head drop.

  ‘I’ve got to go. Mrs Steepleton is about to go missing from the hotel room.’

  ‘What?’

  Mori’s silhouette sat up and pulled on his shirt, leaving Thaniel cold for a second before the dense heat of the fire had time to fill the gap. ‘Everything’s wrecked, or it will be, by the time I get there.’

  He understood what he was hearing then. He sat up too. ‘Someone’s – taken her?’

  ‘I don’t know. You’re not coming,’ he said, before Thaniel could say it. ‘Stop intending to say things and listen to me.’

  Thaniel bit his tongue.

  ‘I can’t remember where to find her,’ Mori said, ‘which means that it hasn’t been decided yet. If I go now, I could still see her. I can remember seeing her all around London after that, so I’m going to try and catch up, and then I’ll be close by when the decisions are made and I’ll have a chance of overtaking her. You would slow me down.’ He hesitated, as if he had meant to add something else, but then got up suddenly and went to the door, wrapping on his scarf. Thaniel lurched after him.

  ‘You know something else,’ he said from the top of the stairs. Mori was already by the door, halfway into his coat.


  ‘I don’t,’ he said.

  ‘You can’t lie for your life. What is it? What happens if you can’t catch up?’

  ‘No time,’ Mori said. The front door snapped shut. By the time Thaniel had dressed and followed, the snow was falling again in flurries and he could see no sign of him. He stared down Filigree Street through the lamplight stripes. The wind blew snow between the buttons of his shirt.

  There was nothing to do but sit at the piano and wait. He practised for the operetta to distract himself, a candle on the piano top, although he no longer needed to see the music. The snow came down and silently down. There was snow in his thoughts too. Matsumoto had been afraid. So had Grace. Through the snow, he couldn’t see whether it was because they both understood things he hadn’t, or because they had failed to understand something. And so he couldn’t tell whether he had just watched Mori go to do just what he had said, or just what Grace had said he would.

  Over the bright colours of Sullivan’s score came a sudden, sharp creak. He lifted his hands off the keys and leaned to see past the doorway. It was too heavy to be Mori. He followed the sound upstairs, passing the susurration of the clocks in the workshop, then the downy silence of the snow on the landing window. Tiny green echoes danced in the penumbra of his candle. He eased open the door of Mori’s bedroom, letting the candle trickle light inside. It was empty.

  ‘Mori?’ he said uncertainly.

  The candle only shone over Katsu. The little octopus was lying on the pillow, tentacles arched around an invisible shoulder. There was even a kink where Mori’s collarbone would have been. Thaniel felt weight settle on to his diaphragm. Mori had expected to be here, then.

  A knock at the front door made him jump. Thinking it was Mori without keys, he went too quickly downstairs and didn’t feel it when candle wax spilt on to the back of his hand.

  Dolly Williamson was outside.

  Thaniel looked past him for uniformed men, but there were none.

  ‘Pax,’ said Williamson. He held up his hands. ‘Sorry for the time. Thought I’d better come myself.’

  ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘May I come in?’

  Thaniel stepped back. Williamson led the way into the parlour and watched him light the lamps.

  ‘Your wife has gone missing from her hotel,’ he said, sitting down on the piano stool. ‘The stewards reported it about half an hour ago. Someone found the door open. They thought you had too, at first, but then one of them said you had left earlier.’

  ‘Missing.’

  Williamson nodded. ‘So, we’ve looked at the hotel. There does seem to have been a struggle. There was blood on the door, but it was nothing like enough to have been a lethal injury. I assume your wife is alive.’

  Thaniel realised that his hand hurt and peeled off a still-soft disc of fallen candlewax.

  Williamson leaned down a little to force him to meet his eyes. ‘Why did you leave?’

  ‘I wanted a book. I stayed for a while to get warm and then missed the last train.’

  ‘A book. On your wedding night.’

  ‘Horsehair couches are hard to sleep on.’

  Williamson took a breath, then let it out again. ‘I see. And where is Mr Mori tonight, then?’

  ‘York. There’s a clockwork fair.’

  ‘He didn’t come to the wedding?’

  ‘No, it was only family.’

  ‘How do they get on, he and your wife?’

  ‘I think they’ve spoken twice.’

  ‘I hear she’s a clever woman. Scientist. I wouldn’t put it past a girl like that to work out there was something not right about him. Or to ask him about it.’

  Wrong, but not in the wrong field, he realised. She must have seen them. If she were angry enough with him, or even just scared enough of Mori to report it – those cases never went through, but he saw suddenly that Williamson would latch on to it and damn well make it go. There wasn’t the evidence to convict Mori for the bombings but second best was to get him into a prison for something else. The sentences were long. He would have known the second Grace decided to go to the police station. She knew that too. Thaniel had to close both hands over the candleholder to keep himself from pushing the left across his face.

  ‘It wasn’t him, Dolly. He doesn’t make bombs.’ His voice might have come from a very far-off phonograph.

  ‘All this is nothing but a screaming coincidence? If you think that, then … ’ He stopped. In the garden, small lights flared and cast coloured shadows on the far window’s frames. ‘What’s that?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Thaniel led the way to the back door and opened it. Nobody was there, but the floating lights he had seen on his very first night had returned. They hovered over the snow, their glow more than enough to show the single set of footprints leading away from the door.

  ‘So he was here,’ Williamson said. He looked Thaniel over. ‘Were you lying or didn’t you know?’

  ‘He wasn’t—’

  ‘Stay where you are,’ he said, and set out to follow them around the house.

  Thaniel crouched down to see the prints. Mori still had only that one pair of brown boots with the Japanese manufacturer’s mark imprinted in the sole, and there was no mark in the impressed snow. Williamson came back a few minutes later and shook his head.

  ‘They go out to the road, but I couldn’t follow after that.’ He looked hard at Thaniel. ‘I’m going to arrest you, and then you might tell me something worthwhile.’

  ‘These aren’t his! His shoes have Japanese in the soles—’

  ‘Thaniel. How many other small men live here?’

  ‘None, but he won’t buy English-made clothes.’

  ‘Is it really beyond the realms of possibility that he might have bought new shoes without your noticing?’ Williamson demanded.

  ‘Arrest me, then, but I won’t have anything different to say.’

  ‘You’re under house arrest. Constable Bloom will stay with you,’ he said as the front door opened. An austere constable stopped just inside to shake the snow from his boots. Williamson must have seen his lantern coming through the workshop window.

  ‘Find my wife, in the meantime. Please.’

  Williamson shook his head, his hand on the door. ‘What the hell has he said to you to blinker you so much? He made the bomb and your wife found out, and now he’s taken her. What did he do, when you first came here? Really, it would be magnificent to know. I can put it in a training manual.’

  ‘I’ll tell you after you find her.’

  Lifting his hand helplessly, Williamson let himself out. Constable Bloom stopped Thaniel before he could close the door and did it for him. Thaniel went back to the piano, where he sat down for a while without touching anything before he turned to the back of Sullivan’s score, where there were two spare pages, and started to reconstruct Griszt’s piece from memory.

  The next morning Lord Carrow came to the house. He said nothing, hit Thaniel in the face with his riding crop, then left again. Another officer came to relieve Constable Bloom. Nothing yet, he said. Thaniel left him in the kitchen with a good supply of tea and sat in the workshop to read.

  When five o’clock came around, he said he was going upstairs to sleep, found his old coat in the cupboard – the new one was still at the hotel – and climbed through Mori’s window and on to the small porch of the back door. He reached the snowy ground with nothing but a few scrapes. Skirting behind the birches in order not to leave obvious tracks through the middle of the lawn, he found the stream along the back of the Filigree Street gardens and followed it north. It came out on the very edge of Hyde Park, so near the show village that he could hear voices and a singing violin as someone practised a strain from the operetta.

  He went slowly, willing Mori to be waiting for him. The crowds and the twilight were safer than home, stocked as home was with policemen. Outside Osei’s teahouse was a tight knot of people using it as a meeting spot. He wove through them, looking for a grey coat. Alth
ough he could cope with arrest and Lord Carrow’s riding crop, and whatever had happened to Grace, he could feel himself going ragged at the edges. His ribs hurt with wanting Mori to come and be his ordinary self and explain it was not what he thought, but still there was no grey coat. He stilled and stilled as the hope seeped away, his hands loosening in his pockets in the same way Katsu did when his springs ran down.

  Someone brushed his arm. It was only Osei. She bowed tinily and lifted her hand in the direction of the pagoda to show he ought, perhaps, to hurry up now.

  He pulled himself together, although the ragged patches didn’t line up as well as they should have. Osei’s dark eyes had caught on the mark on his face. He went on ahead of her so that he wouldn’t have to speak. He should have gone back to Filigree Street before the police noticed his absence but part of him clamoured to say that Mori was only late, and something might have happened, and he might still come during the performance. He had said he would. Only two days ago, he had said it. And that Katsu was going wrong proved it. He had meant to be here.

  The pagoda was hung about with hundreds of paper lanterns. He had thought that the outdoor performance would be miserably cold, but in fact it was plenty warm enough. An open marquee protected the audience’s seats, though there was no more snow yet tonight, and at the end of each row was a coal brazier. The heat waved out above the cushions, distorting the lamplight. Even so, the women were wrapped in fur stoles, and some people had brought blankets. The glow and the white ground made it all seem like something put together on the whim of a musical czar, somewhere in the grounds of the Winter Palace. It was very far away from the silence at Filigree Street.

  He found the orchestra to one side of the stage and only felt when he sat down and the glass plinked on the under-edge of the piano that the weather vials were still in his pocket. He moved them carefully, not sure what would happen if all of them broke at once. He slid them into his waistcoat pockets instead. There was no rush. The audience were still finding their seats. Musicians waxed strings and adjusted keys while stagehands fussed over the paper lamps. Outside, men hurried in and out of Nakamura’s shop with rockets and lists, preparing for the firework spectacular after the show. It took a little while for Thaniel to notice a group of oriental men in immaculate clothes near the front. Most of them were young, but they surrounded an older man, benignly ugly. He sat in the same way Mori did in the cold, hands pushed under his coat sleeves. Thaniel glanced back at the orchestra, but it was still in relative disarray. He ghosted away and across to the front row, as yet unoccupied.