‘Finding out whether or not we should be playing with real money. Have you got any matches?’
‘It wasn’t that bad,’ Mori said, but he took a box of matches from his waistcoat pocket and flicked them to him.
‘Really. I heard it was a house in Osaka.’
‘Nobody wants a house in Osaka,’ he said, and it was strange to hear him switch suddenly to foreign pronunciation in the middle of his English. ‘It would mean you had to live in Osaka.’
‘What’s wrong with it?’
‘It’s like … Birmingham.’
‘We’re still playing with matches,’ Thaniel said. Grace smiled. Mori saw her and smiled too, apologetically. He had the natural quiet of a man who did not entertain often. She slid the deck across the table to him. She had taken care to put the jokers at the top and the extra ace a few cards up from the bottom. He wouldn’t find it by accident.
‘Will you do the honours?’ she said.
‘Mm.’ He picked it up and untied the string on the paper packet. He unwrapped the paper fold by fold and then folded it up again once it was off the box. That, at least, she had seen Matsumoto do, though she had no idea why either of them bothered. The pedantry was faintly grating, but it made her more certain he would take out the ace if he knew it was there.
‘Ten each to start with?’ Thaniel said, counting matchsticks.
Mori set the first joker on to the table, then set the second precisely over it.
‘Stingy,’ said Grace, trying to disguise how she was watching Mori.
‘I haven’t played in years,’ Thaniel grumbled in his good-natured way. ‘Last time I lost to my sister.’
‘Oh, yes, what was her name again?’
‘Annabel. She lives in Scotland.’
Mori picked up three-quarters of the pack, exposing an ace of spades, took it out and set it down on top of the jokers. He put all three on the floor, out of the way, and dealt the cards.
If it was a trick, she could not see how it was done. She spent the first game thinking about it, to no avail. In the meantime, he played like a professional, without looking at his cards. When he won, he turned them over to show a handful of middle numbers. He made a matchstick house out of the winnings, with too much concentration. He was bored, more than bored, although he had been politely careful enough not to let it show in his face. She saw Thaniel watching him too and their eyes met past his shoulder. She nodded slightly and Thaniel looked as though he might break soon. She couldn’t tell what it was, because he was sitting and chatting naturally, but something about him was being held together with willpower and drawing pins, and it made her suspect that there was more to it than being followed and generally worried.
‘You’re good,’ she said to Mori.
‘I had too much spare time and too many brothers when I was young.’ The matchstick house had a chimney. He had very steady hands.
‘I’ll make some more tea,’ Thaniel said.
Mori surfaced. ‘Would it be all right if we were to play something else? With dice?’
‘I’ve got backgammon upstairs.’
‘Why? You’ve done well,’ said Grace.
‘It’s not fair on the two of you.’
‘Oh, bold words.’
He sighed. ‘Factual ones, really. Sorry.’
As Thaniel went out, he turned sideways as if he was avoiding something. The something soon appeared, in the shape of a life-sized but very clearly clockwork octopus. It shuffled into Mori’s lap, seemed to survey the table, and then set about dismantling his matchstick house.
‘Oh, what is that ?’ she said, impressed.
‘This is Katsu.’ He held it up a little and it coiled around his hands.
‘Ka … ’
‘Katsu. It means Victor. For the Queen actually.’
‘Christ, that’s amazing. May I see?’
‘Yes. Careful, he’s heavy. You can see inside if you like.’ He picked the octopus up and passed it over the table to her. When she took it, it was weighted in the way a living thing would have been, toward the centre, but as he had said, much heavier. ‘The clip at the back there.’
Katsu sat still while she opened the panel at the back of its head. The interior gleamed with strata of clockwork, bolted together with miniature diamond bearings. She knew enough about mechanics to follow the cogs until she found the gears. They were tiny, and there were hundreds. It made her feel like a giant looking down into a mine. ‘Good God. Are these random gears? How did you make them?’
‘Spinning magnets,’ he said. He didn’t seem surprised to be asked. ‘Hence that insulation, otherwise he goes wrong whenever he goes near the workshop generator.’
‘That’s … I’ve never seen machinery like this. This is years ahead of ordinary calculating engines.’ She looked up. ‘Decades.’
‘No, no. Clockwork is much further along than most people think. Nobody patents anything. Factories would put watchmakers out of business.’
‘I suppose.’ She clipped Katsu back together and the octopus waved three arms at her as she lifted it by its middle to see how it moved. Perfectly. She tickled it and it curled up. Whatever the unseen advances of clockwork, they were not this advanced. A calculating engine could just about do its twelve times table: there was nothing in the world that could mimic life. She watched Mori closely and decided that at some point in the next minute or so, she would drop the octopus. He gave her an odd look.
‘Careful,’ he said.
She set it gently back on to the floor, where it edged under the table again, back to Mori and the matchsticks. His expression cleared. ‘Fantastic,’ she said.
‘Thank you. Have another cake, they don’t last.’
The sun had come out again at last, and in the warm, late light, the hard icing gleamed different shades of blue and green and red, bright enough to be a pile of sea anemones. She took one and was halfway through it before she saw that he hadn’t joined her.
‘Aren’t you having any?’ Grace said. She felt freshly clumsy. If they had stood together, she was reasonably sure they would be about the same size, but he had a knack of taking up less space.
‘I don’t much like them, actually. I made them for Mr Steepleton. He sees colours in music. He says that if you play these colours in this order on the piano, you come out with “Greensleeves”,’ he said, nodding to the careful arrangement.
Grace studied the cakes, and doubted that it was a real thing so much as a common metaphor used by the musically minded for those who were not. She had heard one of Matsumoto’s choir friends talk the same way. He had been an odd person. ‘Whatever the tune, you should make these more often. They’re very appealing.’
He lifted his head and there was fathoms-deep dislike in his eyes, but then they were only mirrors again and Thaniel was coming back with the tea. He pushed the door gently shut with his elbow, his hands occupied with the tray and the backgammon case under his arm. She watched him and liked his quietness, then stopped when she realised that Mori was watching her.
Whatever knack he had for cards didn’t carry over to dice. They were all more or less equally lucky and unlucky, and though there was much less skill in it and much more chance, he seemed to like it better.
Sunset had come and gone by the time Thaniel took her to find a cab. In the dark, the crooked street was warm, even though she had returned Mori’s jumper, and the drying pavements smelled of rain. Lines of washing hung between the leaning gables. There was almost no noise except the hissing gas lamps and the singing of unseen crickets. They walked in silence for a while.
‘He is certainly a genius,’ she said at last. ‘That octopus is far beyond anything the rest of the world can produce. I put in that extra ace, and he took it out, which means that either somebody from my household told him about it, or you’re right about him.’ She looked up at him. ‘That said, why would he bother? I know that mad geniuses have their pastimes, but fooling a Foreign Office clerk for the sake of it is … odd.’
br /> He was quiet for too long. She saw his chest rise before he spoke. ‘Six months ago, a watch was left in my flat in Pimlico. It let off an alarm a few seconds before the Yard bomb exploded. Saved my life. I had it analysed. The alarm was set for that time and on that day, and no other day. I’m living here because the police told me to. It’s possible that he’s the bombmaker. He could have told me all this to explain away the watch, which otherwise must have been meant for someone else. A big lie for a big mistake.’
‘A bombmaker. That adds a certain urgency.’ She thought about it. ‘All right. Well, if it’s a fraud, then he has someone in my house. It’s the only way he could have known about that extra card. And what I would wear yesterday. I think I’d better speak to my maid before I come to any conclusions. I’ll send a telegram as soon as I know.’
‘Send it fast, if you can. The police are coming tomorrow.’
‘Of course.’ She took his arm. At first he almost pulled away, but then he leaned against her fractionally and she squeezed his hand. ‘You seem to trust me an awful lot,’ she said quietly.
‘You’re a scientist.’
‘Not any more.’
‘You never explained about that.’
‘Well, I’ve left university.’
‘But you were talking about a house of your aunt’s, or—’
‘Oh. It’s … yes,’ she said, surprised that he remembered. ‘She left me a house, but as part of a dowry, held in trust to be handed to my future husband because the women of the family are traditionally stupid and my father won’t put it in my name. If I want it, and its very spacious and laboratory-sized cellar, I need to marry. There’s money too, which is also not in my name. Very simple really.’ She thought of stopping there, but his was an open, inviting quiet. ‘But not likely. The main candidate was Francis Fanshaw, which you know, but he’s a widower. His boy is five. Sensibly enough he doesn’t want the child running about after a stepmother whose cellar is full of noxious chemicals.’
‘So go and rob a bank and do your work in secret in an attic somewhere,’ he said, with unusual force.
Grace had the impression of having come to some thin ice. ‘You sound as if you know what you’re talking about.’
‘I don’t know any science.’
‘You know something.’
He looked as if he wouldn’t say, but then, ‘I used to play the piano. But then my sister’s husband died and so I had to start sending her money, and music isn’t lucrative. But I mean it,’ he continued, without giving her space to be sorry for him. ‘However you do it, doing it is better than giving it up. You can publish under my name if you like. I can send your post on and no one would know.’
She looked up. ‘Would you really?’
‘You didn’t have to come here today. If I could set you up in a laboratory, I would.’
They were both quiet for a few paces.
‘Well, you could, actually,’ Grace said at last. ‘All that’s needed is a warm body. I want my laboratory. Do you want a house in Kensington?’
He laughed, not much. She felt it through his ribs. ‘Your family would have a thing or two to say about that.’
‘No, no. Unsuitable matches are very easy to make if one just walks around Hyde Park until midnight. Immediate disgrace and a certain urgency ensues. One of the Satterthwaite girls did it a few years ago so that she could marry a Catholic Frenchman. When a sign says don’t walk on the grass, one hops.’
He was looking ahead, up the long road and its dots of street lamps to the dark gates of Hyde Park. ‘No, I can’t do that.’
‘It was only a thought,’ she mumbled. ‘I didn’t mean to sound serious.’
‘No, I mean the park isn’t safe. There’s a pub here.’
She looked up. ‘What?’
He let his breath out. ‘My sister has two boys. She gets by on an army pension and what I send, which isn’t much, even now. They go to school at church on Sundays and that’s all, I think. If I could … ’
‘They could go to Harrow,’ she said, and he looked away as if it were a dangerous imagining that he didn’t want to touch or examine too well. She watched it make him wary, but couldn’t think what to say to reassure him. Money didn’t matter when there would always be more of it, but she didn’t want to put it like that. It was such a commonly spoken thing that it was hard to see the real meaning. ‘Why don’t I explain exactly what it would entail, and then you can decide?’ she said eventually.
He nodded and held the pub door open for her. Pipe smoke and men’s laughter washed out to meet them.
SEVENTEEN
She knew when she came through the front door that the house was not sleeping yet. The air didn’t have that undisturbed taste, and the lamps were burning well on fresh-cut wicks. Before she could take off her coat, Alice rushed down the stairs, her eyes blotchy, and ushered her into her father’s study. He was sitting behind the desk, where the density of the smoke around him showed that he had not moved for some time.
‘What’s this about a telegraphist from the Foreign Office?’ he said. ‘I was about to fetch out the police.’
‘He has a friend who might be a clairvoyant, which has a bearing on what I was working on at Oxford, so I went along. I did tell everyone where I was going.’
‘Is this clairvoyant friend of the male or female persuasion?’
‘Male.’
He breathed out another furl of smoke. ‘I suspect it is an unfortunate consequence of your mother’s condition that you have had nobody to reprimand you for unmaidenly behaviour in the past,’ he said quietly. ‘I wish I had thought of that earlier, before letting you run so wild. Do you know what time it is?’
‘Yes.’
‘Did it not occur to you that to be seen, or known to be out until after midnight in the company of men would very much damage any chances of a decent match?’
‘It was an accident.’
‘That matters very little,’ he said. ‘And I believe you have made your mother freshly ill.’
‘Moths and dust make my mother ill. I think it would be in vain to arrest all of my movements in the hope of maintaining her in good health.’
‘For God’s sake!’ he burst out, suddenly much louder, and although it was what she had been angling for, it made her lean back jerkily. ‘Give me the man’s name.’
‘You’re not going to bully him—’
‘I said give it to me! Write down the address. Now.’ He pushed a pen across to her, and the inkwell.
She wrote. As she did, she felt sorry. She had half thought he would see what was going on, but he hadn’t; he wasn’t even close to it. She had always known she disliked him mainly because he had charge of her and tended to botch the job, but now that he soon wouldn’t, he was only a worried, not very bright man trying to do what he was thought was best. It was cruel to execute this piece of strategy above his head. When she had finished the address and drawn a small map, she picked up the paper and gave it to him rather than pushing it across the desk.
‘Well, I see you might be coming to regret your actions after all,’ he said stiffly. ‘It wouldn’t hurt to apologise to your mother in the morning. She has been sedated for now.’
‘Yes, of course.’
‘I shall see about this in the morning. Go to bed.’
She let herself out into the hall, and shook the worst of the cigar smoke smell from her clothes. She put her nose to her sleeve, but the last of the lemon soap from Mori’s jumper was lost. Thinking she was alone, she sighed and closed both hands through her hair, then shied to one side when she saw a human form shift on her left. It was Alice, who had been waiting for her at the foot of the stairs. She was still crying a little.
Grace bent her knees to speak to her under the banister. ‘Buck up. Everything’s all right.’
Alice sniffed. ‘Is it really?’
She went around to sit down beside her. The stair creaked. ‘Alice, whatever you reply doesn’t matter in the least, so I’d like yo
u to tell the truth. Has anyone been asking you questions about me recently? What I’m going to wear, what I’m doing? That card trick I was arranging, the one I told you about? I don’t mind if they have.’
Alice looked blank. ‘Questions? No. I would never tell anybody anything of the sort.’
‘Nothing at all?’
‘Nothing. I don’t speak to anybody about you, ma’am, I’m your lady’s maid, not a gossip.’ She swallowed. ‘Were you really out all night with a pair of men, ma’am?’
‘Yes. I played cards.’
‘But if anyone finds out—’
‘Yes, yes, I’m a fallen woman, pariah, et cetera, et cetera. I’m going to do some work upstairs.’
‘Work? But it’s the middle of the night—’
‘A cup of tea would be lovely, thank you.’
She set down her chalk. The trail of dust still hung in the air between her and the blackboard, dry-tasting. Previous mists of it had settled over the folds in her sleeves, lending to the cotton the illusion of the bright lights in silk. When she stood back, seeing the entire board for the first time rather than only a part of it, it looked crowded. Crowded and nonsensical. No matter what speed she assigned to the ether, it would not match the other side of the equation, which was the assumption of Mori’s veracity. If a clairvoyant could sense movement in the ether, if the effects of an event were to hum and knock through it as her breath made shapes in the chalk dust, they would not get far before the movement of the earth destroyed those shapes with its tailwind. It was possible, that much was obvious, but only at a very short distance. If he were genuine, he should have been able to predict things that were only just about to happen, very close to him. Inches.
‘He’s a fraud,’ she said to the chalk. ‘Thaniel is living with a bombmaker who can do card tricks. Magnificent.’
The dust in the air puffed gently, and then swirled when Alice came in with another cup of tea, having taken away the first when Grace failed to notice it until after it had gone cold. She watched the white particles float off to the side.
‘What was that, ma’am?’ Alice said.