The Watchmaker of Filigree Street

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because he’s a fledgling nationalist lunatic, so he wants everyone from Japan to dress like a samurai and go about snarling. That’s his father’s workshop, there. I’ve said it isn’t clever to leave him with fifty tonnes of gunpowder and a grudge against anyone in a jacket, but apparently it would be wrong to boot him out for something he only might do,’ he said, thinking that he ought to mention to Mori that Yuki showed no sign of changing his mind about his politics. Mori would already know, but there was value in making it clear that he knew as well.

  ‘Better a jacket than those idiotic kimonos,’ Grace said.

  ‘I’m going to talk to him,’ Matsumoto said.

  ‘Matsumoto! You can’t bear it, can you, not being completely adored by everybody who sets eyes on you … no? Not listening? I was only talking to myself anyway,’ she muttered as the elevator whirred.

  Thaniel leaned his forearms on the balcony rail so that he wouldn’t miss any explosions if there were any. He saw Grace’s hands flatten slowly on to the stone too.

  ‘I upset you before, didn’t I?’ she said. ‘Because of the trees.’

  ‘No. Leaving home jitters is all.’

  She paused. ‘Mori still won’t come?’

  ‘He won’t come.’

  ‘I know you’d like him to, but I’m glad.’

  He looked side on at her. ‘He’s not a witch. He’s a lonely man with no one to talk to except a machine in the shape of an octopus.’

  Her eyebrows lifted. ‘Thaniel. Wake up. He can remember anything but a random process. That’s anything except coin tosses and dice throws. Spinning magnets, like Katsu’s random gears. He’s sensing ether disturbances. He knows the moment you intend to do anything, because the electricity moving through your brain is pushing ether as it goes. Is that not remotely worrying for you? It means he knows how to make you trust. He knows how to make you change your mind, because he can isolate the second in which you could change it.’

  ‘I know he can. I wouldn’t have touched a piano again if he hadn’t put me in front of Arthur Sullivan when he did. A thing done on purpose isn’t necessarily bad.’

  ‘But you wouldn’t know if he didn’t want you to. I’m afraid of him because if he ever gets tired of me, he will be able to convince you that you are too.’

  ‘It would be interesting if we could imagine for half a minute that I’m in possession of more common sense than a chicken,’ he said quietly. ‘I live with him, I can see when he’s arranging things.’

  ‘I don’t mean that you’re stupid. I mean that you’re an ordinary man who works in an office and sometimes plays the piano, and Mori is a genius who could engineer worlds. I’m … explaining why I’m worried, that’s all.’

  Thaniel absorbed that in silence. Down by the pagoda, Matsumoto had found Yuki. There was a photograph to be had there, he thought, with the one in a morning suit and an iris, the other in a faded robe, sleeves tied back, though the wind was spitting snow now. ‘I know what you mean. But I think you’ve got him wrong.’

  ‘I don’t. I don’t think you’ll make any real choices until you’re away from him.’

  ‘Grace. We’re getting married. He doesn’t want us to. But we still are.’

  ‘Yes. That makes me immeasurably anxious,’ she murmured. ‘I feel as though I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop.’

  He shook his head.

  She was quiet for a while. ‘Has it occurred to you that clairvoyance and bombmaking aren’t mutually exclusive? You know he could have made it to bring you to Filigree Street. In any case, he knew it was there and didn’t disarm the thing.’

  ‘You could always throw him off a roof somewhere just in case.’

  She sighed. ‘I wish Matsumoto would hurry up. I’m freezing to the tiles.’

  ‘Let’s go down, then. I should be getting back anyway.’

  ‘Why? Plans?’

  ‘Reservations,’ he lied, because it would have been needling to say he wanted as long a last night at home as he could have.

  He found Mori trying to tempt Katsu from one of the top cupboards, where there was a new nest of stolen foil wrappers and springs from the workshop. The octopus had developed a love of shiny things, which he had cunningly installed well out of Mori’s reach. Thaniel stretched up and lifted him out with both hands. Katsu wrapped himself around his arm and refused to let go.

  ‘It must be your cufflink,’ Mori said helplessly. ‘I’m sorry, I really didn’t set him to do any of this, it’s his random gears, it’s like throwing tails twelve times in a row on a coin toss … ’

  ‘Or he’s alive,’ Thaniel suggested.

  ‘If he were really thinking, he would have intentions, so I would know what he’d do next, but – I – don’t.’ He tried to reach the panel that would expose Katsu’s inner workings, but Katsu only cooed at him and skittered off over the floor. They both watched the lamp under the stairs go on, and a flustered spider hurry out. Then, ‘Oh, I almost forgot: I’ve got an early wedding present for you. I would give it to you after the ceremony, but that would defeat the point.’ He led the way into the workshop, where the lights hummed on as soon as he crossed the threshold.

  Thaniel followed, curious. ‘What do you mean, defeat the … ’

  Mori stretched to lift down a fine cherry wood box from the shelf above his workbench. He set the box gently in front of Thaniel and put his hands behind his back to show who should open it. Thaniel lifted the lid. Inside, cushioned on a blue velvet lining, were three glass vials. They were all corked and sealed with glossy wax, and they all seemed empty, except for very faint differences of colour. Moulded around the vials were tiny bronze labels etched with ornate, miniature borders of the same pattern as Mori’s watchpapers. They were marked in English and in Japanese. The first was ‘sun’, the second ‘rain’, and finally, ‘snow’. Thaniel looked up.

  ‘What are these for?’

  ‘You can choose the weather tomorrow.’ He lifted out the ‘sun’ vial and held it up to the light. The glass was tinted yellow and inside a faint powder floated weightlessly, winking like dust motes. It cast a golden shadow across his hand. ‘If you release these particles into the air from a sufficient height – the church tower would do nicely – they will take effect within a few seconds. This one will disperse cloud. These two will gather it. The new conditions last a few hours.’

  Thaniel touched the vials one by one, watching their coloured shadows on his fingertip.

  ‘Whichever you want, half a vial should do the trick. And if you save some, you can decide what you want for the operetta too. That building where Nakamura lives is high enough. Obviously the sun mixture will only get you a clear sky at night. Personally I recommend that you rain the whole thing off and make them do it in the Savoy, like civilised people.’ He dipped his eyelashes at the rain vial.

  ‘What’s wrong with outside?’ Thaniel said absently. The vials weren’t made of glass. They glinted differently, and they didn’t feel fragile. He had thought, when the box first opened, that they were jewels, and he wondered suddenly if they might be made of diamond. He had dropped some of the stuff before, he realised, when he had been searching the workshop; God knew what would have happened if he had done that outside. Mori was good at his unbreakable inventions. He put his hands behind his back. The vials looked as though they belonged in a glass case in a museum, or locked in a vault.

  ‘This is England. It will be horrible, whatever the weather.’

  ‘But you’ll come? Your friend Ito will be there, so … ’

  ‘Of course I’ll come; I’ve been looking forward to it. And forget Ito, you will be there.’ He had lifted both hands impatiently when he spoke, and as he let them drop again suddenly in his broken-doll way, Thaniel caught his elbow to keep him from bumping his wrist on the corner of the desk. Mori took his arm back, and Thaniel thanked him too formally for the present.

  Grace shivered by the pagoda while she waited. She had come down from th
e balcony by way of hinting that Matsumoto ought to hurry along, but he hadn’t noticed. Yuki had scowled at first, but he was talking now, and Matsumoto showed no sign of stopping him. He was enjoying having tamed somebody. Behind her, the smell of hot wax from the lamps reminded her of Christmas. It was still two months away, and she hoped the weather would continue as it was. She liked frost fairs.

  Matsumoto came back at last, looking irritatingly happy. ‘How would you like to come with me to a nationalist meeting in town?’

  ‘There are Japanese nationalist meetings in town?’ said Grace.

  ‘No, Irish, but a few of the men here go. The sentiment’s the same.’

  ‘It is the night before my wedding,’ she said. ‘I’d prefer not to spend it with the Irish Republican Brotherhood of Twaddling about the Oppressors.’

  ‘Yes, of course, how silly of me. You’ll be out with all your other friends.’

  Grace slouched. ‘All right. It won’t be long, though, will it? I’m frozen already.’ She dug her heel into the layer of packed-down ice on the ground.

  ‘We can leave early. It’s only in Piccadilly, we’ll take the train.’

  She lifted her head. ‘No, we will not take the train, unless you’d like to die of bronchial failure—’

  ‘Nonsense,’ said Matsumoto. ‘I’m in London; I must go on the underground.’

  ‘You do understand that the trains run on steam, produced by coal, which, when burned, gives off sulphuric vapours?’

  ‘Are those bad?’

  ‘Do you know, let’s go. The onus on the Japanese public school system will be much relieved if I can kill you off before you have a chance to breed.’

  ‘Splendid,’ he said, and beckoned to Yuki.

  The station was not far, and as soon as they were below ground the cold lost its bite. Even before they reached the platform, she could taste the soot in the air, which was gloomy with it. The people were too. She was surprised by how many there were. Of course, it was cheaper than a cab and less horrible than the omnibuses, but still it was bleak. In his Japanese clothes, Yuki attracted curious looks, which he ignored. His expression was faraway, as though he could see something in the distance that nobody else had noticed.

  As the train roared through, hot air plumed ahead of the engine and set the soot particles whirling. Matsumoto handed her up into a first-class carriage. It was otherwise unoccupied. Just beyond the window was the tunnel wall, pasted with a decrepit poster for throat lozenges. Matsumoto looked out as the train moved off again, delighted with the novelty. For a long time, there was only pitch darkness, but then there came a flit of dim light. It was the drillers’ lamps in a half-finished tunnel, leading steeply downward. Although they passed it quickly, she saw the light gleam on the circle of a tunnel shield, and the men working in its square compartments. Since the beginning of the standard use of the shields, which edged forward foot by foot as the men inside dug out the space ahead, it had become impossible to track the progress of the underground. There was no more cutting up streets; the tunnels ran too deep for anyone above ground even to hear the digging. The carriage jerked suddenly and her hands closed of their own accord over the edge of her seat.

  ‘I hate trains,’ she murmured.

  ‘I’m sure they rarely crash,’ Matsumoto said, laughing.

  ‘Anything that moves at forty miles an hour and crashes is fairly catastrophic, however rare. There’s no such thing as a mild train crash, is there?’

  ‘Oh, buck up, Carrow.’

  The meeting was in a town hall that smelled of varnish and damp coats. They sat at the back, Grace on the end of a row and Yuki beside a group of men who greeted him warmly. Hoping that Matsumoto wouldn’t notice, she took out a book from her coat pocket. She had bought it earlier that day. It was by Oliver Lodge, the Liverpool man working on weather control. He had, apparently, had some more successes in laboratory conditions, but as usual, a lack of funding was getting in the way of anything like commercial application. Between pages, Grace paused to listen, but always faded out of it again. She didn’t much like Irish republicans for the same reason she didn’t much like suffragists. There was a lot of talking, and little understanding that the problem would not go away if one only complained sufficiently.

  ‘I want to leave,’ Matsumoto said.

  ‘Hm? What? But we’ve only just—’ She stopped. ‘I’m not complaining. Let’s go.’

  ‘Aren’t you listening to him?’

  ‘Of course I’m not listening to him.’

  ‘He’s praising the bombing of the Yard in May,’ he said urgently. ‘And Parliament, and – Carrow, we must leave. Yuki, I’m terribly sorry, I feel unwell.’ And then they were out. Grace looked back in time to see one of Yuki’s friends pat his arm, though he looked disappointed. Matsumoto shook his head.

  ‘I’m sorry. He told me it was just a nationalist meeting. He didn’t say it was the unofficial gathering of Clan na Gael. Christ.’ He looked back toward the doors as they crossed the road again. ‘That was a call to arms. I can’t believe they have meetings like that. Anyone could have gone in.’

  ‘It isn’t illegal,’ Grace pointed out. ‘There were probably policemen there. Clan na Gael is only the extreme arm of the Irish nationalists. They have a representative in Parliament. Parnell. I’ve had tea with him. They’re not just madmen in a little room somewhere.’

  He laughed incredulously. ‘I am continually surprised at the political leniency of a government that’s already been bombed half out of Whitehall. That’s the British for you. What’s the time? Only seven. We can walk back, if your aversion to the trains is too much for you.’

  ‘Hold on, should we not extract Yuki first? If he’s listening to all that and living in a firework shop—’

  ‘He says he’s been going there for months and the firework shop’s still there. Besides, it belongs to his father; he’d be destroying his own living if he did anything silly.’

  Grace nodded. They had only gone on a little way, and she had taken a breath to remark on the horses that were sliding on the ice as they tried to pull their cabs up the hill, when Matsumoto cut in first.

  ‘I meant to say; are you all set for tomorrow? Your mother’s had a talk with you?’

  ‘I hope you don’t mean what I think you do.’

  As usual, he couldn’t have been less embarrassed. ‘Look, I’ve heard your views about biology. I seem to recall your claiming that it’s the study of yeast and ooze. That doesn’t bode well.’

  ‘Kind of you to be concerned, but no need.’

  ‘Are you certain? I don’t trust your mother. I imagine she explained it in the terms of something like an appendectomy. That’s wrong, you know. A man does not want to feel like a surgeon working without anaesthetic.’

  ‘For the love of God, Matsumoto, shut up.’

  ‘You can’t say I didn’t warn you.’

  She looked up at him. ‘We’re marrying because I want a laboratory and he has a widowed sister with too many sons. It’s a business arrangement.’

  ‘No, no, hiring one’s tailor is a business arrangement. You’re going to live with this fellow and he isn’t bad-looking or unpleasant.’

  ‘Matsumoto.’

  He took a breath, but then let it out again, and his levity faded. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to … one says silly things, you know, when one is … ’ He struggled, then shook his head. ‘When one is in shock over the marriage of one’s ugly friends.’

  She thumped his arm and they walked on bickering, and slipping every now and then. Matsumoto complained bitterly about the Arctic weather, and Grace thought of the way Thaniel had walked on the ice, lightly, with both hands in his pockets. She didn’t know how he did it, but he suited the winter. His eyes were the right colour for it. With any luck, the snow would come tomorrow to match him, and the old graveyard of the little Kensington church would be hidden and pristine, and her mother’s flowers would seem all the brighter. And Mori, if his views of the weather were a
nything like Matsumoto’s, would be less likely to change his mind at the last minute.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Although St Mary’s spire was not especially high, it was high enough to see that the tallest things in the city were other church spires. Thaniel cracked the seal of the snow vial, spraying little shards of red wax over his hands, and then held it up to let the wind take the winking dust. He was doubtful about it. London sprawled under a white sky, interrupted only by the patch of frosted green that was Hyde Park; half a vial of powder was not much beside such a wide space. Above him, the bells made a shimmering sound as the particles brushed them. While he waited, he looked down into the street for Mori, who was easy to find because his was a grey coat in among all the black. He was walking west, away from home. There was time to wonder why but not to reach any conclusions before the first snowflake stung his cheek. He leaned out through the open arch. The clouds were gathering and the air was turning grainy with ice. By the time he was at the altar, the snow spun and eddied, and the frozen mud of the churchyard was hidden under a fresh white.

  When Grace arrived, she had a white parasol for the snow. He saw her spin it through her hands on the porch to shake off the damp before she let it down. Because her father still disapproved, it was Matsumoto who brought her down the nave.

  The ceremony was over quickly, though it felt long in the cold, and then they moved on to the Westminster. It was much warmer there. In the dark afternoon, they had lit candles along all the tables. Thaniel’s nephews soon set to playing with the wax. They sounded Scottish now – so did Annabel, who had aged since he had seen her last. He sat watching them and listening to Grace and Matsumoto on his other side. Having not seen him since they were tiny, the boys were nervous of him and, when forced to speak, kept looking uncertainly at their mother. They weren’t precocious. He didn’t push them, because he could remember, vividly, how much he had hated being forced to chat to obscure relatives he didn’t know. He wished that he could have learned Mori’s knack for speaking to children.

  Across the dining room, a pair of bronze birds flitted in through the open doors. Some of the women diners squeaked, but the birds were clearly unaccidental, because they executed an elegant loop-the-loop in tandem, glimmering oddly as they flew. Thaniel recognised them a second before they both shed a cascade of colourful sparks along the length of the table. The guests ooed and laughed. Delighted, Annabel’s boys ran after them as they sang off around the hall, making shapes with the fireworks. Before long, the birds looped back and hopped on to Grace’s wine glass, one on either side. She lifted one of them down. Like a real swallow, it held her finger tightly, leaving six pale marks on her skin. It puffed up its bronze feathers and shivered, clinking.