The Watchmaker of Filigree Street

by Natasha Pulley

  ‘Morning,’ she smiled.

  ‘Where are we?’

  ‘St George’s.’

  He shook his head, confused. The ward was airy and well proportioned. It was not the kind of place that treated people for nothing. He didn’t have any hospital subscriptions; they cost something absurd, two or three guineas a year. ‘But I haven’t—’

  ‘I paid. How are you feeling?’

  He felt as though somebody had stuffed his head with wool and left its more usual contents in a jar. The idea of a whole sentence was daunting. ‘Hazy,’ he said instead.

  ‘The nurse says you’ve a concussion. Lots of scrapes and bruises.’

  ‘What happened to you?’

  ‘Nothing, I was much further back. Bumped my arm.’

  ‘No, I mean before.’ He swallowed, and tasted smoke. ‘Everyone thought you had been kidnapped.’

  She blinked. ‘Kidnapped? No. I might have knocked a few things around. I just left. I was angry.’

  ‘But where did you go?’

  ‘I walked round town. Then I got on the underground when it opened.’

  His head hurt. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Never mind that now. We’re both all right. So is almost everyone else. The police are saying it was a miracle that it rained. There were sixty people in the teahouse when the roof caught fire, but the storm put it out before the smoke could trap them.’

  He looked down the empty ward. ‘But he’s dead, isn’t he?’

  ‘Who, Mori? No. He’s in surgery.’

  ‘Surgery for what?’

  ‘No idea. Thaniel – stay where you are,’ she said, pushing her fingertips to his chest.

  ‘Yes,’ he lied. He leaned back a little. ‘I can’t believe he didn’t see it coming,’ he said, to distract her. ‘Modernist Mr Ito visits the home of Yuki the mad nationalist, whose father makes fireworks? I told him from the start to get Yuki away, but he wouldn’t listen.’

  ‘It could have been anyone,’ Grace said quietly. ‘That firework shop was so busy when I went up that a man dressed in a gorilla suit might have strolled in unremarked.’

  ‘No. You don’t know Yuki, he attacks people. He tried to kill Mori once. Tried to shoot Ito at the show.’ He coughed. The back of his throat was raw and dry, and the water she gave him only made it itch. ‘Mori sounded like it had taken him by surprise. Nothing ever surprises him. And none of this surprises me, so I don’t see how—’

  ‘Think about it later,’ she said gently. ‘Listen, I must sort out fees and so forth, and then see my parents, if they think I’ve been kidnapped. Good God, I go for a walk and the world goes mad. You get some rest.’

  Thaniel promised that he would, waited until she had gone, then called over a nurse and told her that he wanted to be discharged. Once they had both signed the papers and she had given him back his clothes, he pulled the curtain around his bed closed. He dressed behind it. There were small cuts across his chest, splinters from the blast. The middle of his back felt stiff from the graze there. Nothing terrible.

  He lost count of the number of loops in his tie and had to start again.

  When the surgery was over, the nurse told him, Mori would be taken to the Jewish ward. It was upstairs. The staircase was hung with huge oil paintings, which gave way to long windows on the wards, all slightly open in order to let the air circulate. Beneath one of them was a warning poster about the dangers of mephitic odours. He knew vaguely that they had to do with the spread of disease, but he had no clear idea of the subject. He could smell only the cleaning salts and over those, the chemical sweetness of carbolic acid. When he opened the double doors of the ward, he found it mostly empty. Some Yiddish men were playing cards. Another was suffering an epileptic fit while two nurses struggled to hold him down. A third nurse saw Thaniel and shooed him out.

  ‘Visiting hours do not begin until three o’clock!’

  ‘Could you tell me—?’

  ‘No! Wait outside the hospital, or in the galleries.’

  He tried to argue and was shown out by one of the taller doctors, who left him halfway down the stairs. He stared after him. His eyes still stung from the smoke and he rubbed them, then stopped when he saw that his fingertips had come away wet.

  Below him in the entrance hall, a pair of nurses hurried in through the front door, letting in a gust of cold air. Best not to wait outside in the cold in this state. His logical capacity was divorced from the rest of him, observing from a few inches to the left of his head. It directed him along the long corridor that led away from the door. After some drifting about, he found the gallery. It was tucked away to the left of the back door, which opened out into a conservatory overlooking a wide garden. The windows were all shut, the air warm.

  As he stepped into the gallery, the floorboards creaked. They were old. In glass cabinets stood wired skeletons of all sizes, adults and children, and in one, a pair of strangely conjoined twins, whose two spines curved from one pelvis. Each had two ordinary arms and a head. He studied the wiring, certain that it was a fake, but then he saw that the tailbones were fused together. Whoever the skeleton had belonged to, he – they – had been nearly six feet tall. It was difficult to see how they could have walked. It must have been a matter of one leg each and a good deal of trust. They had clearly managed. The bones weren’t warped or uneven. Everything was symmetrical and strong, cleaned to a pearlescent shine. He moved on to look at the other cabinets, avoiding his own reflection.

  Further on were pictures, mainly paintings of dissections or operations. The people didn’t look real. Half-formed things hung suspended in bell jars. Around them were more cabinets filled with waxworks. One showed a face, stripped of skin on one side to expose the complicated muscles underneath, another a flayed hand. A family of skeletons leaned over an anatomy book that had proven so interesting that being dead hadn’t distracted them. He wandered for a while, bending to see into cabinets but never touching them, not wanting to cover them in fingerprints. Someone had cleaned most of the soot off him, but it was still in the lines of his fingertips.

  He was glad that the gallery was so strange. It was keeping his mind off surgery. He wished he knew what kind. If it was serious, they would use chloroform. Chloroform was better than a large whisky, but he knew a little about it, Annabel’s husband having died under it. It killed some people. It triggered a form of allergic reaction. Nobody knew why.

  He sat down on the floor beside the twins’ cabinet and tried to think of nothing. It worked best when he counted. After every nine hundred or so, the city bells rang to mark the quarter hour. Towards half past one, a doctor came by and pulled him up by his elbow, assuming he had escaped from somewhere. Thaniel assured him he hadn’t, but the doctor sent him outside anyway.

  At first it was numbingly cold, but that was only because he had been sitting still for so long. After he had walked around for a while he didn’t feel so bad. Yesterday’s thunderstorm had washed away the snow, but the puddles had frozen and the street crackled with the sound of ice splintering under boots and cartwheels. While he waited, a small crowd gathered outside the double doors; other visitors, with seedcake or fruit or small bottles of gin hidden in their pockets. At three, a fat janitor opened the doors and stood between them as people passed through. Whenever the man saw a suspicious bump in a coat, he snatched it out and laid his prize on the table to the side of the corridor. He seemed disappointed when he patted Thaniel’s pocket and found only his watch which was, despite everything, not broken. Thaniel watched him confiscate an apple from an old woman. He couldn’t see what was wrong with bringing food on to the wards, but he was too tired to ask.

  When he found the Jewish ward again, he saw Mori almost straightaway. He was still asleep. Beside him, a doctor made notes on a chart.

  ‘Are you a relative?’ he said to Thaniel, sceptically.

  ‘I’m a cousin, he’s half English. Is he going to be all right?’

  ‘He is,’ the doctor said. ‘Damn miracle. Fell f
rom the roof, apparently. Rope burns on his hands; he must have caught hold of something. He was found in a doorway at the base of the building. Astonishing luck. We’re keeping him here tonight to sleep off the chloroform. If he doesn’t wake in an hour, tell the duty nurse.’

  Thaniel nodded again and sat down in the chair by the bed. He cast around for a newspaper. There were none. Visitors were not encouraged to linger. He leaned forward against the mattress, his head cushioned in his arms, and faded to nothing but listening. Gas shushed as the lamps flared on. The bells, sometimes. Half past three, four, half past four. Twice, footsteps paused near him, but no one asked him to leave.

  A cold hand pushed itself through his hair. ‘Are you asleep?’

  He jolted upright. ‘You’re awake. My God, the surgeon more or less told me you’d die from the anaesthetic—’

  Mori smiled a little. ‘Don’t exaggerate.’

  ‘I’m not!’

  ‘I’m not allergic to chloroform. I’m not allergic to anything but yellow liquorice allsorts and those haven’t been invented yet.’

  Thaniel took his hand back before he could touch the bandages that just showed through the hospital night shirt. ‘What did they do?’

  ‘They took out some shrapnel, that’s all.’

  Thaniel watched him for a long time. ‘Well,’ he said at last, ‘now we know why you’re afraid of heights.’

  Mori smiled properly. The lines around his eyes were deeper than usual now. They made him look like an old photograph of a young man, often crushed, but ironed carefully so that only the ghosts of the marks remained. Thaniel moved the edge of the blanket over his arm. With the windows open, the ward was frozen.

  ‘What in God’s name were you doing?’ Thaniel said. ‘Grace was only on the underground trains, and then she went up to Matsumoto’s flat to see the fireworks after the operetta. Why couldn’t you just have tied Yuki up somewhere until Ito was gone? He shot at him before the explosion; it isn’t as though any of us were surprised when the bomb went off, and – for Christ’s sake – how could you have even allowed for there to be a bomb? How could you not have known?’

  ‘It was so unlikely that I couldn’t even remember why I was afraid of heights.’

  ‘How? How was it unlikely? I saw this coming and I don’t remember any futures at all. Yuki was always going to do it!’

  Mori sat up, slowly. ‘I don’t think it can have been Yuki.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because I would have done something more useful than fall off a building if he had meant to do that.’

  ‘Mori, you … you fell, before, on the underground tracks, you said. You hurt your ankle. That would have made you late for everything else. He must have decided and done it and before you could have even reached the village, never mind … ’

  He trailed off because Mori was already talking over him. ‘I don’t need to stop things in person. If it was Yuki, there would have been something in place that would stop him as soon as he decided. I wouldn’t have let it all hinge on my not falling in pitch dark, I’m not that stupid, or I hope not.’

  ‘No, you’re not. I was there to keep him from killing Ito.’

  ‘Even that has a last-resort look about it to me. I don’t think … ’ He shook his head. ‘I’m so sorry. I don’t know what I can have been thinking.’

  ‘I don’t care. You’re alive.’

  ‘You should care, if I’m putting you in the way of idiots with guns or—’

  Thaniel closed his hand over his arm. ‘No, no. He couldn’t have hurt me, I’m twice his size, and after the Yard I don’t think my heart even beat faster. I was well qualified.’

  Mori only shook his head again. He was looking at the folds in the blanket. His eyes were clouded. Watching him try to find the pieces of himself he had forgotten was worse than imagining him on an operating table. Thaniel moved on to the edge of the bed and hoped Mori could feel the future in which he did dare, despite the frowning nurses, to put his arm around him, but he didn’t think he could.

  ‘Just leave it now,’ he said quietly. ‘It’s done.’

  ‘I don’t understand why the bomb was moving,’ Mori said. ‘That makes no sense. I should have been able to find it.’

  ‘He must have strapped it to a dog, or something.’

  ‘What for? That was risky. Anyone could have seen it. Why didn’t he hide it in Nakamura’s workshop? Anyway, it wasn’t a dog, I would have seen a dog, it was … ’ He let his breath out. ‘In the walls. Something small.’

  ‘I think it might have been a rat, I heard something in the elevator shaft.’ He stopped. He remembered the seawater colours.

  ‘What?’ Mori said.

  Thaniel let him go and stood up. ‘Listen, I ought to find Grace. She went to see her parents; she should be back by now.’

  Mori’s focus strayed to the middle distance. ‘She’s in the foyer.’

  ‘You get some rest. Real rest. No inventing things ahead of time, or frightening the nurses. When will you be discharged?’

  ‘Half past ten tomorrow morning,’ he said, and then stopped and set his teeth together, and looked up at Thaniel with eyes full of questions. The vowels had been short.

  ‘I’ll come back for you then.’

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Grace unbuttoned her coat as she came into the hospital’s wide foyer again, chased by a spray of sleet and grateful for the clinical quiet. Her father had almost stopped shouting at home when the police superintendent had hissed that she was a stupid little girl, which had set him off afresh. She had left them to it, not certain why he was so angry about it when in fact his opinion agreed exactly. Rather than sit down, she paced slowly, studying the oil paintings and probing the weave of the last two days for loose threads. Since they had argued at Filigree Street, she had started to sink under the feeling that the simple way Thaniel spoke had never been a reflection of the way he thought, but a spectrogram. She had always seen the odd pauses and dark lines in the colours of his words and assumed they were accidental hitches. They were emission lines. She had done everything she could to ensure Mori couldn’t know what had happened, but Thaniel was different, and she couldn’t tell what he would have noticed. God knew there had been near misses. She pushed her hands through her hair and tried to see it from the beginning again.

  It had been half past – no. Twenty-five to twelve on the wedding night. The carriage clock on the mantelpiece had not looked symmetrical as she watched the second hand go round. She had watched it for a little while, like a metronome, holding the coin.

  Then, everything had been quick. She pulled open the small suitcase that Thaniel had left under the bed. As she had hoped, there was a change of clothes inside. She pulled off her own clothes and left them scattered over the floor, then shrugged into his, tying a knot in the back of the shirt to make it fit her shoulders. She wrapped on his tie while she went round the room knocking things on to the floor with one elbow. Fully dressed, she scraped the icing from the long cake-knife and cut her arm twice before smearing the blood over the mirror and the door handle. Nobody would come if it didn’t look like violence. Thaniel had left a handful of change on the mantelpiece, so she swept it into her palm, along with her own stray sovereign. At the last moment, she remembered to pull off her earrings and her wedding ring.

  Leaving the door bumping open on its latch, she took the empty suitcase and went quickly down the back stairs. They were nicely decorated, despite being the province of the staff. She looped around again to the warm entrance hall and stood just shy of the corner by the desk, out of sight of the door. She could feel her watch ticking in her pocket, almost exactly in time with the hotel clock. It was ten to midnight already. Mori was late.

  ‘No, no,’ called the night watchman, just as the front door opened. His loud voice made her jump. In the doorway, Mori ignored him and came in. ‘We don’t want your sort in here.’

  Grace squeezed her eyes shut. Mori started toward her before she called h
is name, but she was already running for the kitchen and the back doors. She heard him ask one of the cooks if he had seen a woman go by, and the cook said, truthfully, that he had not.

  The snow was fresh and brittle, and she was able to run unslippingly to the station. The midnight train pulled in just as she arrived. She ducked past an antique ticket inspector, provoking a shout, and opened one of the carriage doors before the train had wholly stopped. Inside, she sat down by the window and cupped her hand to her eye to see out into the station, an iron taste in the back of her throat. If the train left before Mori could catch it, he would have no way home except a cab, which would take at least ten minutes longer. Ten minutes would be enough to find Katsu, if she was lucky.

  She was breathing hard after running, and she had to clear the condensation from the glass twice while she waited. It felt like hours, and she began to feel coldly certain that there was some delay. Mori appeared on the station steps, distinctive in his grey coat among all the black, but then the train sighed and ground forward. Grace slumped over her knees.

  ‘Er – I say?’ said a voice just beside her. She jumped. It belonged to a little clerk. ‘I say, my dear, what are you doing out late at night dressed as man? Is everything all right?’

  ‘I’m in disguise and running away from my husband’s best friend, who can remember the future,’ she said, because her mind was too full to conjure lies. ‘I’m trying to beat him back to his house now, so that I might steal his clockwork octopus, which runs on random gears.’ He stared at her. ‘You look confused. Random gears are clockwork gears governed by spinning magnets, and the switch that each one controls will flick depending on whether the magnet is facing its north or south pole. Why do I want an octopus with random gears? That section of things is still on the drawing board I’m afraid.’