The Watchmaker of Filigree Street by Natasha Pulley
When he left, he walked toward the train station, but slowed before he reached it. It was a watch full of diamonds. Williamson would scream if he found out he had gone home and left Mori unobserved. He crossed the road and started for Knightsbridge.
In the warm day, Filigree Street had come alive. He passed a stationery shop selling glass pens tied on ribbons to a great pair of antlers, and a bakery where a model Ferris wheel spun tiny fancy cakes slowly around and around in the window. When he found Mori’s workshop door open and Katsu sunbathing on the step, the clockwork octopus did not seem out of place, and certainly nobody else seemed to think so. The people looking into the shop windows were nicely dressed, and some of the women were carrying packages tied with Harrods blue ribbons. Feeling shabby, he stepped over the octopus.
‘Afternoon,’ said Mori from his desk. ‘Did the fainting go down well at work?’
‘I didn’t try, I bled all over the place instead.’ He had to take another breath, although there ought to have been plenty left over after such a short sentence. ‘I’d like to take the rent on that room, if it’s still free.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes, mine’s depressive.’
Mori opened his shoulders. He was only straightening out of his more usual bad posture, but it made him seem smaller, like a boy told to recite a poem. ‘Why is it?’
‘It … Well, I had cleared most of it out, before yesterday.’
Mori did not ask why again. Instead, with his left hand, he took a kettle from where it had been resting on its stand and poured out the water into two waiting cups. It turned green with the powdered tea. He leaned over the desk to give one to Thaniel, who took it and was surprised to find the cup almost too hot to touch, the water having only just boiled.
‘You’ve got a knack for this. Oh, here.’ He held out the steam toy. ‘It helped. Thank you.’
‘I think it’s that I drink too much tea,’ Mori said as he took the gold ball. The heat from the kettle was making some of the moons in the floating solar system above him turn a fraction quicker on their axes. Saturn’s rings had shifted upward. Now that he looked, there were too many planets; on the outer edge were two extra, spinning around each other as well as the sun. He wasn’t surprised. Only reading the newspaper on the night shift was a good way to miss major astronomical discoveries.
‘Can Six try?’ said somebody else, and Thaniel jumped. There was a tiny girl beside Mori. She had been leaning forward and sitting still, and though she was in plain view, he hadn’t seen her before. She was a mouse of a thing. Her hair was cropped short and her dress made of lumpy black stuff hardly finer than hessian. Mori gave her his own cup and she tried the tea solemnly before making a face and giving it back.
‘Is she yours?’ he said, confused.
‘No. This is Six; she’s making some fusee chain for Mr Fanshaw. The workhouse is the only place that produces it these days, but they throw it away; apparently the children make it only to stave off idleness.’ He let his voice drop lower as he quoted the workhouse slogan. ‘So I had to rent her for the day. Six, Mr Steepleton.’
‘Six?’ echoed Thaniel.
‘They’re numbered at the workhouse. Give them back,’ he aimed at her.
The girl aimed owl eyes at him. ‘Six hasn’t got anything.’
‘Left pocket. And I think you’re old enough to speak in the first person.’
Looking annoyed, she pulled out a pair of multi-lensed glasses of the kind he had just seen Spindle use. Thaniel stared hard at them. He knew the name, but he couldn’t think. His tired brain gave him wolves. No; loupes.
‘Thank you.’ Mori took them back. ‘There are still scones in the kitchen if you like,’ he added to Thaniel. ‘Make yourself at home.’
‘Can I have another one?’ Six said.
‘Yes.’
Six slid down from her high chair and bobbed through the workshop’s back door. She clunked – her boots were too big for her. Thaniel followed her slowly, and carefully, because like Mori she was more fragile than the usual model of human.
She couldn’t reach the table, and so he had to pass her the scone. ‘It’s a fine day out, isn’t it?’ he said, for something to say.
Mori must have made her scrub her hands, because they were brilliantly clean against the rest of her grubby and rumpled self. Under it all, she couldn’t have been older than four or five, and if Mori had been allowed to take her away from the workhouse, she was an orphan. He could excuse her stealing.
‘Six saw a caterpillar.’
‘What kind?’
‘Green, with purple and white zigzags.’
‘I see,’ Thaniel said slowly. Liking children did not keep him from being perplexed by them. He was recently too old to remember his own childhood with any clarity. ‘I imagine that was exciting?’
She glanced up at him warily. ‘No. It was just a caterpillar.’
‘Do you know what caterpillars turn into?’ he tried again.
‘Yes. Babies know that.’ She bit into her scone, quickly, as if she thought he might take it from her. ‘How does it decide if it’s going to be a butterfly or a moth?’
‘I … don’t know.’
‘They’re different species,’ Mori said from the workshop. ‘It’s the way you decided not to be a monkey before you were born.’
Six considered. ‘Matron says I’m a monkey,’ she countered.
‘Matron will find she is anatomically incorrect.’
Nodding to herself, Six clunked back into the workshop with the remaining half of her scone. Thaniel followed, wanting to see what she was doing and why Mori wasn’t doing it himself. Once she had stopped eating, she picked up a pair of pliers in one hand, and lifted something invisible in the other. The light glinted on it and he thought he saw a strand, only a fraction thicker than hair.
‘Give back Mr Steepleton’s watch,’ he said.
‘You’ve got a stupid girl’s name,’ she mumbled, but she held out the watch to Thaniel. He took it, embarrassed. He was no good at making himself at home and he could see he was drifting pointlessly. Something about the way Six was holding herself was proprietorial: she had taken the watch to offend him and make him go away. She wanted Mori to herself.
‘No. That would be Keiko. I’m Keita. Your idea of gender markers is nationally subjective.’
‘What does that mean?’ she snapped.
‘Stupid,’ he said. ‘Do your work.’
She snorted at him but did as she was told. ‘What is this for ?’ she asked.
Mori had put on his glasses, and now he moved them down again. ‘You know when you wind up a spring and let it uncoil, it moves fast at first but then slowly?’ he said.
She nodded. Thaniel looked too.
‘Springs regulate the movement of clocks. You can’t have a clock starting too fast and becoming too slow. So, if you wind that chain around the spring, and wind the other end around a cone shape – the mainspring barrel – the clock will keep even time. Modern clocks work differently, so almost nobody makes the chain any more. Hardly anyone could make it, even if they wanted to. The links are too tiny. I managed four in an hour.’
She smiled, pleased with that. ‘Six can do a hundred and fifty.’
He adjusted his glasses again. ‘Keita is impressed.’ He lifted his eyes at Thaniel and widened them to ask why he was still standing up and wearing his hat.
‘Sorry, I was watching.’
‘How are you with machinery?’
‘I – fix telegraphs sometimes.’
‘Sit down,’ he said, and when Thaniel sat, he set in front of him a framework mechanism, a spring, and six or seven cogs. He separated them gently and showed him how to fit them on to their spindles, and how they linked, and how to file them down. Because he had to lean close, Thaniel could smell the lemon soap from his skin and his clothes. The colour of his voice and the warm air from the open door made the workshop feel far from London. When Thaniel looked up next, it was counterintuitive t
‘Oh, that’s Fanshaw,’ he said.
Six looked interested and Mori prodded her. ‘No,’ he said.
‘I haven’t done anything!’
‘Go and play in the garden, if you don’t want to be arrested and sent to Australia.’
‘There’s nothing in the garden,’ she grumbled.
‘Well, there’s a cat, and some fairies, and a watering can. You’re five, you’ll make do.’
She looked up. ‘Fairies?’
‘Hm?’
She was gone before Fanshaw reached the door.
‘Won’t she be disappointed when there aren’t fairies?’ Thaniel said.
‘There are, I made some.’
‘What? Why?’
Mori nodded toward the Haverlys’ house. ‘Those little bastards from next door have stopped coming in here and breaking everything since there have been magic things to chase in the stream.’
‘Afternoon!’ Fanshaw called from outside. He paused to take off his hat and coat. ‘It’s turned rather hot, hasn’t it? Good God. Right, now I come without much hope, I have to say, because this seems to be a sticky job.’ He folded his coat over his arm and then stopped dead just before the doorstep. ‘What – is that?’
‘An octopus,’ said Mori, making no move to rescue him.
Thaniel ducked in front of him and picked the thing up. The clockwork was so well- jointed that it was upsettingly like the real thing. He put it down quickly on the worktop, from where it flopped into Mori’s lap and wrapped itself around his arm. He stroked it absently.
‘You were saying about the clock,’ he said.
Fanshaw seemed to go to some effort to force his eyes upward again. He cleared his throat. ‘Yes. Yes, the … it’s quite old, you see, and it has some sort of chain that apparently nobody makes nowadays. Something to do with fuses. Ah, it’s quite heavy, you might need that other hand … ’
Mori took the old clock with only one and let Katsu keep the other. He tilted open the back panel. ‘No,’ he said. ‘It’s all right. I had some fusee chain made this morning, I can mend it while you wait.’
‘Really? Thank God.’
‘Tea?’
‘Oh, is it green? Thank you very much. Wonderful,’ he said, and looked over the display cases while he drank the tea. By the time he had chosen two watches for his nephews, Mori had finished too, and Fanshaw went on his brisk way promising to mention the shop to everybody at work.
‘He’s going to say not to come unless you want a disturbing experience with an octopus,’ Thaniel said, watching Katsu slide squeakingly down the table leg. ‘How did you know he wanted that chain? He didn’t tell you before.’
‘No, but he said he had been looking for someone for a while, and most watchmakers can mend most things. It’s only antiques that are difficult, so I thought it was probably … oh, bugger,’ he said, as the octopus fell off and on to a heavy switch in the wall, near the floor. It turned on the electric lights, one of which blew, as if it had been caught unready. Mori pursed his lips at it. ‘Do you mind electricity?’ he said. The others, the undamaged lights, were already fading.
‘No?’
‘Would you change that bulb, then?’ He held out a fresh bulb from the drawer beside him. It was a perfect glass bubble with a tangle of fine wire inside.
Thaniel took it and felt unqualified to be doing anything with it. ‘Why can’t you?’
‘I’d have to stand on the desk.’ He shifted. ‘I’m afraid of heights.’
‘And you can’t even stand on a desk?’
‘Shall we not dwell on it?’ Mori said, at a slightly higher pitch than usual.
‘Sorry. Is there anything important I ought not to stand on … ?’
‘No, no, just these … ’ He chivvied two of the clockwork birds off the edge of the desk. Thaniel climbed up. The dead bulb screwed loose easily, and when it came away from its fixture, he studied the insides. Its tangle of wire had snapped. The ends touched the glass with a skittering noise as he turned it around in his hands.
‘Who usually changes them?’
‘I pay beggars,’ Mori mumbled.
He screwed in the new bulb. Nothing happened. He frowned, thinking he had made a mistake, but then Mori leaned across to wave his arm at a patch of air by the door. The lights crackled on, and Thaniel felt the heat through the glass almost at once. He climbed down feeling disproportionately pleased with himself. It was a very modern thing to do; for a moment, at least, he could see why people became so excited about motorised engines and automatic mills.
Mori was still watching him with anxious eyes.
‘I can’t tease you when I’m afraid of that thing,’ Thaniel said, nodding to where Katsu had stretched out in a new sunbeam.
‘Why are you afraid of him?’
‘I don’t know, I feel like it’s going to run up my shirt.’
‘Oh. Nothing like that. I reset him every morning so that he does a certain set of things throughout the day. He has random gears, so whether he turns left or right out of the workshop is not predetermined, but that’s all. He isn’t thinking, or deciding. Look, I can show you.’ He caught the octopus and clicked open a panel. Thaniel went to stand beside him, and Mori gave him a pair of his several-lensed glasses. He didn’t need them to see that the clockwork inside, dense as honeycomb, sparkled with hundreds of tiny jewels. They threw colours on to the walls.
‘Those are diamonds.’
‘Yes,’ said Mori, as if it were the most usual thing in the world. ‘All good bearings are jewels. The harder the substance, the less they twist, the more accurate they are. Diamond is hardest, so I use industrial grades for inner clockwork. If you have something on show then rubies look better, but no one except me sees this, so it doesn’t matter.’
‘Isn’t that expensive?’
‘Not overly. There’s about a thousand pounds’ worth in here.’
‘A thousand … pounds.’ It was a year’s salary for a man like Fanshaw. ‘Are you rich, then?’
‘Yes.’
Thaniel watched the diamonds turn and wave. He had a murky feeling that he was seeing the payment for the Victoria bomb. ‘Which reminds me, about rent?’
‘Housekeeping. Just your own food and so forth.’
‘But in Knightsbridge—’
‘So, these are the random gears, here,’ Mori said, pointing with the end of a brush pen to a miniature series of magnets that spun among the clockwork. ‘He won’t attack you, but he may well chance to live permanently in your top drawer, and over that I’m afraid I’ve no control whatever. At least, not without gutting him and starting again, which I’m not going to do.’
Thaniel nodded once, slowly. ‘Housekeeping sounds fair enough.’
‘I think so.’ He clipped Katsu’s back panel closed again. The octopus stole his pen and made off with it. Mori looked down at his microscope. ‘I was about to do something, just now,’ he said blankly.
‘Take back Six?’
‘Not yet.’
‘A watch? More octo … pi?’ Thaniel said, knowing that it sounded wrong, though so did puses and podes. He tried to think where he had heard it last, but he did not often have business with more than one octopus at a time.
‘No, I saw you and I thought … oh, yes.’ Mori caught one of the clockwork birds and opened it up. From inside came the faint but distinct smell of gunpowder. ‘Would you like some more tea?’
Thaniel sat down again. ‘Please.’
NINE
OXFORD, JUNE 1884
It had been a fine morning. Misty rain cooled off the scorched feeling in the streets and saved the crisping grass. With her window propped open, the grumbling humming of the bumblebees came up from the broad flowerbeds with the smell of damp lavender. Grace was trying to read, but at some point in the last week, she had lost her watch, and her mind kept chafing about where it could have gone. She had looked through all her poc
She worked in her nightdress and a shawl until her eyes got tired, then, not wanting to find anybody to tie corset strings, dressed in some of Matsumoto’s old things. It was good to get up and she wanted suddenly to go out and have a walk in the garden, or take the work out with her, but then the unharmonious bells rang out noon round the city. Going anywhere, even the garden, felt like too unconscionable a waste of time. She had turned her calendar over at midnight last night. The end of term was circled in red next week. She sat down in the uncomfortable chair again and propped her chin on her knee while she scanned down the essay to find her place.
She jumped when someone tapped on the door.
Bertha opened it. ‘There’s a lady here who says she’s your mother.’
‘My mother’s a chronic invalid.’
Bertha nodded and mimed being wrapped in shawls. ‘I thought I’d better not send her up, lest she dies of shame.’ She let her eyes go around the room. It wasn’t that bad, even if she had been stacking used cups into a pyramid rather than taking them back downstairs.
‘Thanks. Always magnanimous. I’ll come down,’ Grace said. She wondered if it might be Matsumoto playing a joke.
‘Put some proper clothes on, won’t you?’
‘Oh, are we all for corsets and bows now there’s no podium? No, sorry, that wasn’t very good. All my clothes are in the laundry. I didn’t expect anyone today.’
‘Well, perhaps you’d like to borrow something?’ Bertha said, with a particular, clear politeness.
‘Better not. I’ll get it burnt or spill something on it.’
Bertha only looked impatient and left. Grace followed, slowly, listening for Matsumoto laughing, but in the airy sitting room at the back of the house, with its fine view over the lavender borders and the long roll of grass down to the river, was her mother. Her mother, who hadn’t left London for years. Her mother who hadn’t left the house for years.
‘Mama, what’s happened? Is it William? Or James? I thought they were both coming home on leave, what—’