The Watchmaker of Filigree Street

by Natasha Pulley

  ‘Young ladies ought not to drink,’ he said coldly.

  ‘You ought not to wear that colour tie.’

  He made a point of changing carriages at the next station. Grace checked her watch again. Five past midnight. Gently, she opened the back panel and watched the clockwork bird peck at its imaginary scraps. She wondered if Mori had known it was for her when he made it. If he had, she couldn’t see why he had chosen a bird. It was Matsumoto who loved swallows. She set the watch down open on the carriage table and crumpled back in the wooden seat. She was tired. The softly illuminated carriage seemed, as it moved through the black tunnels, like a cabin built away in the countryside, folded up tight in a night unpunctuated by street lamps or stars. It made her sleepy, despite everything.

  She had expected to find that somehow he had reached Knightsbridge ahead of her, but the little station at South Kensington was empty. She still ran from there to Filigree Street, borrowed clothes slowly soaking in the snow. There was a light on at number twenty-seven. Thaniel was still up, playing the piano. He was gaunt in the light of the single candle, but the tune was jaunty; he was practising for the show tomorrow night. She wanted to knock on the window.

  Instead, she eased round to the back door, snow creaking under her shoes. It was unlocked. In the clean, warm kitchen, the stove still held a glitter of dying embers. Katsu was nowhere in sight, but she knew where to look. Thaniel had often complained about the octopus living in his dresser. She crept up the stairs. The landing was dark. She had never been up before, but the first door she chose was the right one, judging from the sheet music over the floor. She went through the drawers one by one, but no Katsu. Aware that Mori would be back in a few minutes, she cast about hopelessly, then tried Mori’s room. It was spartan. She saw the little octopus straightaway. He was curled on the pillow, one tentacle curled up over an invisible shape in the air. A step creaked on the stairs, and she froze for a second before sliding under the bed.

  It was only Thaniel. He leaned in through the door and said Mori’s name, and then stood still for a long time. She squeezed her eyes shut and tried not to breathe. Someone banged on the front door and he turned away. She lay still for a moment longer. Mori was a fastidious housekeeper – there was no dust beneath the bed, no cobwebs. The floor was so well polished that her breath clouded it.

  Katsu remained stiff even when she picked him up, so she folded his tentacles down one by one and closed him into the small suitcase. She had to wait in the gloom at the top of the stairs while Thaniel led a big man she didn’t know into the parlour. Then she darted to the back door again. Her incoming footprints had already been obscured by new snow, which sank down further than before when she stepped out. Almost as soon as the door was closed, a swarm of little lights rose from the back of the garden. They drifted toward her like living things, but they came with a hum of clockwork. Something of Mori’s. She stole into the passage between the terraced houses, not wanting to find out what they might be.

  *

  The electric lights of Harrods illuminated the whole width of the road. Although she felt exposed standing by them, she waited for a cab there; it was the only place in the dense night where a cabby could spot her. Still, not many cabbies had chosen to brave the weather, and she was on the verge of leaving on foot when one finally guided his plodding horse across. He was puzzled when she said she didn’t mind where they went, and more puzzled when she chose their turnings by flicking a sovereign coin. But since she said he could have the sovereign at seven o’clock the next morning, he didn’t ask many questions and seemed only to put it down to some Belgravia fad he hadn’t heard of. In the suitcase beside her, Katsu rattled every now and then as it tried to shift and move. It was reassuring: it meant Mori had not expected the octopus to be in a suitcase at all. The cabby stared at the case once or twice and then fixedly at the road.

  Seven o’clock found them just beside the Clock Tower, where the bells sang out the hour over London. A pale line glowed around the edges of the sky, just enough to show through the vapour rising from the frozen Thames. The ice was so solid now that some adventurous tinkers had set up little stalls beyond the quays, where they were hanging up small lamps along the awnings.

  ‘Seven o’clock, miss, you’ll be wanting to be on your way, I expect, thank you very much for your custom,’ the cabby said in a dislocated rush. Katsu’s clatterings had become more frequent and more noticeable during the past hour.

  Grace did as she was told. Her throat was sore and, faintly, she could still taste the sweetness of the icing from the wedding cake.

  Then, ‘You shouldn’t be out by yourself all night, miss,’ he said as she shut the door.

  ‘I know,’ she said tiredly. ‘Can you tell me where the nearest underground station is? And – will it be open at this time?’ She had meant to hail another cab, but the trains were warmer, and the more she relied on whim, the harder it would be for Mori to follow her.

  ‘Westminster station, up there,’ the cabby said. She had come a full circle. ‘The underground’s always open early. It will be packed, mind.’

  She gave him his sovereign coin and set off for the station, limping because her legs had stiffened from yesterday’s running. She hadn’t run so much since she was ten years old.

  The cabby was right; Westminster station was crowded, and it was easy to slide unnoticed past the guards, who she couldn’t have paid now even if they had caught her. The cold snapped at her ears and her hands. Condensed steam had frozen in drops along the ceiling above the tracks. Sometimes one of the bigger drops fell off and plinked on the rails. While she paced to keep warm, she passed a dead beggar in an archway. She saw others notice him too, but everyone was too cold to risk missing the train in favour of telling a conductor.

  When the train steamed in, it didn’t stay long. The carriage door had hardly closed behind the last man when a whistle keened through the smoke and the wheels jerked. The clerks – they all looked like clerks – read newspapers by the lamps. Some coughed. Nobody looked at her, but there was a little shuffling to make room for her in a seat at the edge of one of the small tables. She was the only woman. Not trusting herself to catch her last penny if the train were to hit a bumpy patch of track, she spun it on the table. At first, it spun so quickly that its edges blurred and became the surface of a copper ball. As it slowed, it drew circles on the table top, then fell. Heads. She would get off at the next stop, wherever that was.

  Two minutes went by, then five, and then the train paused in the tunnel to wait for another. The next station, she realised too late, was Victoria, where there were a dozen lines criss-crossing each other, bound over and underground. They waited for another five minutes. She pinched her own wrist hard, unable to believe she had been so stupid as to spin the coin as she boarded. She should have waited until the train was stopping. She had just handed Mori ten minutes, at least, to reach the station before her, and if she decided not to get off there now, he would still know which line she was on if he was within ten minutes of Victoria and able to remember the chance of seeing her there.

  She was coming to the conclusion that all she could do was make it fifty-fifty and throw the coin again at the station when she realised that it would be better to get off as she had meant to. Mori must have known what was happening by now; he must have known that someone was throwing a coin or a dice. It was camouflage. She had thrown the coin and the fact that she was deciding to get off at Victoria did not, therefore, look like a real decision, only a decision to follow the coin. If he was anywhere close, he would be there soon, and then he would follow her if he saw her. At a station honeycombed with underground tunnels, that was not, in fact, a bad thing. She shifted the suitcase on her lap and thought about sheep in order not to think about Katsu, because she could feel gears turning in her mind.

  Victoria. The cold had blown in from the overground tracks. She hunched in Thaniel’s coat, scanning the crowd. The platform was lit by the big globes that hung on chains
in all the underground stations she had seen, glowing eerily because the glass was frosted. She couldn’t see a grey coat. She walked the length of the platform, watching the cloakroom at the top of the steps beyond the ticket office. In order to come down to the lines, everyone had to go past it. Through the open doors, she could see inside it too. It was a big room, and everything about it – the doors, the luggage rails, the round lamps and the paintwork – looked new. A Clan na Gael bomb had gone off here in February and the railway company must have finished the repairs only recently. Around her streamed half the civil service on its way to Whitehall.

  Gazing out at the swarm of black coats and black hats, the endless, identical men, she thought of disappearing altogether. It would be easy. She could go to Paris and find Matsumoto again. She would only have to follow the line of swooning ballerinas.

  She crushed her knuckles against her eye. There was no laboratory waiting in Paris. There wouldn’t be one here unless she did what she had set out to. And Thaniel: there would be no Thaniel either. Not very long from now, he wouldn’t be a man any more, only a clockwork copy of one with a clever veneer of character. That he couldn’t see it made her feel still and hollow. It was listening to tuberculosis rattle in the lungs of a man who thought he only had a cold. He had been good, and kind, and he was going to vanish, along with everything else.

  There was a flash of grey in the black. Mori was standing on the platform between the two underground tracks, turning slowly as he looked for her. The back of her throat tasting of copper, she waited until he saw her, then waved urgently at him before she jerked backwards into a crowd of clerks, all taller than her. She looked down the tracks, where two rats were playing. There was no rush of hot air to announce the arrival of a train. Without giving herself time to think, she stepped over the small kerb, between the rails, and ran into the tunnel.

  There were no lights inside, but further ahead, around a curve, a glow came down in narrow lines. It was lamplight, filtering through one of the steam grilles in the pavement up above. She picked her way slowly along the tracks, the back of her neck prickling as she listened for the thunder of an engine, on steps behind her.

  A train crashed past as she rounded the next bend. The headlamp was bright in the dark. Though she pressed herself to the opposite wall, the blast of hot air from the engine was searing. Steam flooded everything long after the train had gone. She coughed, tasting soot. A burst of laughter reached her from up above, through another grille. She stared upward and tried to think at what point it had become inevitable that she would be here today, running through underground tunnels from a man who nobody in their right mind would have challenged. She was becoming more and more sure that it was the second she had bumped into Thaniel at the roulette table. More pressing was the question of what she meant to do now. Walk back to Westminster along the line God willing. If Mori caught up with her – she banged her fist to the wall to stop herself thinking or planning. A weird laugh echoed around her. She jumped before she realised it was her. Any moron could tell you that running blind without thinking was stupid, but thinking was far more dangerous now. She tried to embrace the panic and the illogicality that came with it, because that would be what saved her if Mori caught up.

  Once she had passed under the grille, she was in solid darkness again. She walked with her hand to the wall. It was gritty with old soot. In the brief light from the train, she had seen that everything was opaque black from the smoke. She tripped on something, but she didn’t know what, and when she stopped, she heard it shuffle away. She took a deep breath and started again, feeling her lungs stiffen. The corner of the suitcase bumped against her leg. Katsu was heavy.

  The tunnel wall disappeared.

  She stepped backwards and found it again, but it took a sharp turn that led back the way she had come. She stood still for a long time before crossing the tracks as quickly as she dared. The other wall carried on smoothly. She had come to a junction, a Y shape, of which she had just walked the upper left line. Suddenly she wasn’t sure of where she was. She couldn’t see a clear map in her mind’s eye; she couldn’t remember if another line joined this one between Victoria and Westminster. With a slow unfurling of new, real, unmanufactured panic, it occurred to her that the track had already split without her knowing, from the other side, and that instead of walking to Westminster, she was heading down a new tunnel, a dead-end half constructed, or one of the older, abandoned lines, where there would be no trains and no workers to find her.

  ‘Mrs Steepleton?’

  She flattened herself against the wall and her hand to her mouth.

  ‘Are you here?’ he said.

  He was less than a foot away. She could hear his clothes moving, but the dark was so complete that it was impossible to make out even his outline. She didn’t speak. If she didn’t speak, he would not remember later that it had been her.

  She waited until she heard him a fraction of an inch away from her, then punched him as hard as she could, straight forward into his chest rather than risk missing his face. They were the same height, but she had more weight. It knocked him flat. She heard a thud as he fell against one of the rails and waited, but he didn’t get up again. She knelt down and found his shoulder, then his temple. His hair was soft, and the structure of his bones felt sharp and fragile. It sent a tingle up her arm. At first it made her shudder, then sad.

  She hit him again, with much less force and more nerves. She had no idea how much a human skull could withstand. With her knuckles hurting and her hand shaking, she held her palm over his nose and mouth to be sure he was still breathing. He was. She lifted him to the side of the tracks, close to the wall, in case it wasn’t a dead line after all.

  Slowly, she felt for the other wall, the one that led down from the fork in the track. It bent her fingernail backward. She winced and clenched her hand, then she ran in the dark. When her lungs hurt from running and smoke, the tunnel gave way to the lights of Westminster station. A train waited on the other side of the tracks. She cried when she saw it. Even if he had come round a few minutes after she knocked him down, he would be hard pressed to follow her now, but she still got on with everyone else, and flicked her coin only as station lights approached.

  Mr Nakamura’s workshop was full of people. They were going in and out with fireworks and lists, making ready for the display after the operetta. Nobody paid her any attention, though she was the only one who did not have black hair. On the last train, she had lined up her possibilities. The firework shop; her own laboratory at the Kensington house; the armoury at Horse Guards, behind her father’s office. They were all full of explosives. The penny decided, in the end. She tried again, hoping for Horse Guards, but it fell on tails.

  She went quickly. It had been hours since she had run from Mori on the tracks and she was gambling that he hadn’t yet managed to get out of the underground in the state she had left him in, but he was strong. He might have. Like she had at the Bodleian, she walked as if she knew where she was going. The labels of the chemicals were all in Japanese, but she knew what she wanted by smell. She only had to open a few bottles and packages on the main worktop before she found it. She took the whole packet, parcel-sized, and knelt down behind the desk. All of the fireworks in the bundles around her had snap fuses of the kind that pulled open and ground a few grains of gunpowder between two rough slips of card to make a spark. She took one out and looped one end through the top hoop of her watch, then guided it all the way around the case and trapped the other in the back panel with the clockwork swallow. She pressed the catch experimentally. The lid opened and pulled the paper, and it snapped and sparked. Good. With the dial at the side, she set the lid to lock and to open in half an hour, and put on a new fuse.

  The octopus waved when she took it out. It seemed no worse for having been in the suitcase for so long, and it had not wound down. She held it still between her knees as she tied on the makeshift bomb. She had almost finished when someone stopped just beside her. She f
roze uselessly, afraid to look up, but nothing happened. She lifted her head half an inch. It was Yuki, Matsumoto’s nationalist friend. He hadn’t seen her; he was only going through some papers. Someone, an old man’s voice, called at him. His expression changed into indignation and he shook his head, making his hair sway in its long tail. She eased to the left, around to the next side of the desk. The old man came to talk to him and went through the chemicals on the worktop. He was looking for what she had just taken. His voice rose and the boy shouted back at him, holding up his hands. She had no idea what they were saying, but the sign language was universal. I didn’t take it.

  The old man slapped him and the boy pushed past him, aiming for the door. Almost immediately, the man bleated at him and hurried after him, but he was ignored, and the boy soon had a good start over him. They disappeared outside.

  ‘Why don’t you speak English!’ Yuki shouted. ‘You should! You are just like them!’

  She sat holding Katsu for ten long ticks of her watch, working up some nerve again. An explosion in a firework shop wouldn’t be viewed with suspicion by anyone but Thaniel. She had to hold the certainty tightly, because the idea that Yuki might be arrested for it made her want to untie the bomb and take Katsu back to Filigree Street. He was an unhappy child with an idiot for a father. She could remember being that. If she kept him with her on the way out, nobody could say anything against him.

  Very carefully, she set Katsu free on the fifth floor, from the door of Matsumoto’s flat. She had been afraid that it wouldn’t go anywhere, the settings all wrong, but it shuffled off happily enough, exploring the walls and then the elevator, where it disappeared into the small gap between the floor and the lift. She felt wretched. It was a beautiful piece of machinery. Nobody would see anything like it again for a hundred years if Mori decided not to make another.

  She folded her arms tightly across her ribs to keep her hands from shaking and went to the window to watch St Mary’s clock tower. It was itchy to have nothing to do but wait. She had to be here right before the explosion so someone could see her come out, but she did wish she could have arrived closer to the operetta’s interval, so that she wouldn’t have to wait for so long. Another five minutes should do it. She pushed her hands over her eyes. They were still sore from the smoke in the underground. There had been a sharp fear at the back of her mind all day, since the tunnel. It was that although Mori was prescient and strong, he had been knocked out by a scientist who had never hit anyone in her life. In all probability, that was because it had been very dark, and she hadn’t known when or where she would hit him, so he hadn’t either. But there was a chance that he had let her do it.