The Watchmaker of Filigree Street by Natasha Pulley
Spindle tried to prise away his hands. ‘No! No, I didn’t—’
‘Give the bomb to another watchmaker to look at, Dolly, and I’ll bet you my life that they’ll tell you it’s not Mori’s workmanship, even if they are his parts.’
‘They forced me to!’ Spindle exclaimed. He looked between them desperately. ‘You can’t say no to these people. I was – I had boasted too much about being a consultant for the police, and they heard, and a man came to the shop. I thought he would kill me. He would have, if I hadn’t made—’
‘You were calm enough to make a bomb.’
‘Williamson! They would have—’
Williamson had closed his eyes. He looked more tired than ever. There were new lines on his face since Thaniel had seen him last. ‘You’ll have to come with me now.’
Mr Spindle stared at him. ‘It’s treason.’
‘Is this your coat? Put it on.’
They waited while Spindle put on his coat. Williamson steered him outside, then blew his whistle. A constable came running, and then another not long after him. Belgravia was well patrolled. Thaniel resisted the urge to shove Spindle in front of an approaching cab. Williamson stood by him in the snow and silence for a few moments. Although the road was busy with cabs and carriages, the snow muffled the sound, and the only thing he could hear clearly was the clucking of water under the drain beside him.
‘How do you explain how Mori knew about the Yard bomb early enough to leave you that watch?’ Williamson asked at last.
‘Same reason I knew to come and meet you today. You wanted to know what he said to me, before. He’s a clairvoyant, Dolly, a real one. My wife proved it. In chalk, on a blackboard.’
Williamson faltered. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘I know it sounds ridiculous, but come and meet him.’
Williamson smiled uneasily. ‘I don’t go in for clairvoyants.’
‘You will for him. Please. It’s warm at home, and you’re ill. So is he, you can complain together.’
With an expression caught between scepticism and anxiety, Williamson consented.
Mori was still out when they arrived back at number twenty-seven. Williamson murmured to the men in the waiting police carriage to go to the Kensington station, and waited awkwardly at the kitchen table while Thaniel made some tea. The kettle sang just before the front door opened.
‘Can you make four cups?’ Mori called from the hallway.
‘Four?’ He turned around, and so did Williamson. Mori came through the door with a small child in front of him. It was Six, wrapped in his scarf. She looked up at Thaniel with doubtful eyes.
‘I see?’ said Thaniel.
Mori looked set upon. ‘It’s freezing at the workhouse. Six, don’t steal anything, this is a policeman.’
She studied Dolly. ‘A real one?’
‘A real one.’ He put his hand out to Williamson, who shook it slowly. As always, Mori seemed smaller beside an ordinarily sized person, but the warm colour of his skin made Williamson look haggard. ‘You think you’re dying, but you aren’t,’ he said gently. ‘You need to eat some proper fruit and go to the sea. This is the address of a house of mine in Cornwall, it’s lovely there. They’re expecting you there on Saturday. It’s cold there, but no snow, and there’s going to be an interesting storm on Thursday. If you catch the ten fourteen train down, first class, you’ll be sharing a carriage with the woman in the blue coat who you sometimes see along Whitehall Street. She’s visiting her aunt.’
Williamson stared at him. ‘If you really know the future then you know who made the bombs.’
‘Spindle.’
‘Why the hell didn’t you report him?’
‘No one would have believed me,’ he said. ‘I’m a little Chinaman and a business rival, and he’s a government consultant.’
‘I … well. Interesting,’ Williamson said, sounding shaken. Thaniel gave him the tea and they sat down together while Six looked at Williamson’s whistle. He seemed grateful to have a child there; she made a good distraction, and she had several solemn questions about police work that sounded to Thaniel as though she had been talking to Mori about it beforehand.
‘Don’t try to take the train,’ Mori told him when he said he would leave. ‘There’s a man about to commit suicide on the line. You won’t get there in time.’
‘There’s … ?’
‘A cab for you outside instead.’
After Williamson had gone, Thaniel gave Six some more tea. He wouldn’t have thought such a small child would go in for tea, but she had finished hers faster than any of them.
‘Is your funny octopus here?’ she said.
‘No. I don’t know where he’s got to,’ Mori said. He looked sad, not for the first time.
Thaniel’s heart turned. He had been hoping that Katsu was as bomb-proof as his watch, but it had been days, and no one had found him in the wreckage.
One of the Haverly boys threw a snowball at the window. Through the glass, he looked a little shocked that he had been accurate. He had climbed over the fence between the two gardens.
‘I’ll give you a cake if you get him in the stream by the end of the afternoon,’ Mori said to Six.
‘Hold on,’ Thaniel said. ‘No making criminals of the orphans, Fagin.’
‘But I want some cake,’ Six frowned. ‘And his name isn’t Fagin.’
‘I mean you needn’t throw anyone in a stream.’
‘Nobody gets anything for nothing. What do you want?’
He straightened, alarmed.
‘You’ve got until … ’ Mori looked at his watch. ‘Five o’clock. Extra for his brothers. But not the baby, it hasn’t done anything objectionable yet.’
She nodded and let herself out through the back door, having to reach upward to turn the handle.
‘So that was dreadful,’ Thaniel said flatly. ‘We’re keeping her. Not just while it’s cold.’
‘I don’t want any extra people in my house,’ Mori protested, fadedly.
‘It’s your fault for bringing her back; you must have known what I’d say.’
Mori sighed. ‘I hardly ever know what you’re going to say. You change your mind too often.’
THIRTY-ONE
It was a small gathering, but some effort had gone into it nonetheless. Grace sat in the second row. The occasion was in honour of Thaniel, who had saved the life of an important Japanese minister during the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta. Now he was being given some sort of medal, although since the ceremony was in Japanese she couldn’t understand anything. She had known nothing about any of it until he sent a telegram inviting her yesterday, and since the annulment was not yet legally final – there was no larger bureaucracy than the British civil service – she had felt that she ought to attend. Wearing black, she was invisible among the men in their lovely suits. There was a certain security in it.
Thaniel had said a well-rehearsed hello when she arrived, because Mori was with him, and introduced a tiny girl called Six, but after that she had pretended to find the punch bowl of sudden and great interest so that he wouldn’t ask why she was in black. In fact, the little girl was distraction enough, although not in a havoc-causing way. She had been introducing herself to people in Japanese. Twice, she reported back to Thaniel, who drew lines in the air to show the length of syllables as he corrected her pronunciation. The gathered Japanese men seem to find them both a fabulous novelty, which she supposed they were, like Mori and his Lincoln accent, which had returned.
For the hundredth time, she doubted herself. It was possible, maybe, that everything would have been all right had she simply not done anything, if she had taken a slice of wedding cake in a paper box to Mori, and said nothing but good things of him. Thaniel had said there would have been a child. She couldn’t decide if that was true prophecy or only something Mori had told him to rattle him.
The ceremony finished. Nearly as one man, everyone in the room got up and gravitated toward the buffet. She saw some me
Someone sat down beside her. She glanced to the side, feeling hostile. It was a distinctly human thing to walk on to a large, empty beach, and set up one’s deckchair two feet in front of the only other soul there. Matsumoto smiled briefly.
‘They sell The Times in the Gare du Nord. Your husband was on page six. Curiosity got the better of me. I’m sorry to be late. I was on the train from Paris to Berlin. Damn thing blew a piston twelve feet away from the border. Quite harmless, but they wouldn’t let us across because they thought it was a gunshot, so the train came all the way back.’
Grace nodded once and folded her arms. ‘He’s not my husband any more.’
‘What?’
‘Oh, you know. He decided he would prefer to live with his watchmaker.’
Matsumoto followed her eyeline. ‘Then I’m glad you’re away from it all. I’m not sure it’s healthy even to be in the same room as Keita Mori. Is … that why you’re in black?’
‘No, my mother died,’ she said shortly. ‘Don’t fuss; I’m not upset. I didn’t like her much, but I seem to have done for her at last.’
‘All right,’ Matsumoto murmured.
‘I’m glad you came,’ she said. She hadn’t meant to say it and swallowed hard, waiting for the barrage of inevitable teasing, but he only nodded. He was still watching the crowd, twisting one of his swallow-shaped cufflinks. Having gone to school in England and been raised on an English diet, he was taller than his countrymen and made the scale look mistaken, as though they were further away than they really were.
‘I’ve missed you,’ he said at last. ‘The world is not quite the same when nobody is stealing my good jacket.’
‘I don’t know what you’re complaining about. All your jackets are good jackets.’
He touched his lapel and then clasped his hands to stop himself. ‘So … what’s your situation now? You’ve gone back to live with your father, I presume?’
‘Yes.’ She forced herself to say, ‘I rather feel that I ought to hurry along and find some work. I’m not welcome in the house. A girls’ school has offered me an interview. Chemistry mistress.’
‘Oh, don’t be absurd. I was telling my father about you, via telegram. He said he would be delighted if you’d like to come and stay for a while – he says the castle could do with an interesting woman in it, particularly since the government seem not to be tearing it down after all.’ He aimed a pensive look toward Mori, who was speaking to Ito with his arms folded. Ito looked like an accomplished doctoral student who had settled into believing he was good enough to get on by himself, only to be faced with an old tutor who asked casually about something he hadn’t read.
‘I thought you had sisters?’
‘They like flower-arranging.’
‘Christ.’
‘His view exactly. He’s rather eccentric. He wears a bow tie.’
Grace couldn’t stop herself laughing. ‘Really?’
‘Oh, yes. Complete loon.’ He inclined his head. ‘So, would you like to stay? It will get you out of London for a while, at least.’
‘I … I don’t think Alice would want … ’
‘Never mind Alice,’ he said gently. ‘We can hire a chaperone on the way. If you feel that you need one.’
‘I don’t know what to … ’
‘Splendid,’ he said. ‘That’s settled, then.’
Grace hesitated. ‘Listen, I’ve done very stupid things lately, horrible things really—’
‘Aimed at Mori?’
She nodded.
‘That man ought to be shot for the general good of humanity, before he loses his temper.’
Grace wanted not to cry in full public view, but she could feel that she was about to. Matsumoto put his jacket around her shoulders and raised the collar so that her face was hidden. It smelled of his expensive cologne. She tried to shrug out of it. ‘There’s no need to coddle me, Matsumoto—’
‘My name is Akira. Please.’
She lifted her head. ‘Grace, then.’
He smiled a little and held out his hand. When she took it, hers looked small by comparison. Aware that her skin was rough from overexposure to chemicals, she started to slide it back, but he closed his other hand gently over her knuckles to stop her, and inclined his head at her with an amused sort of tolerance. She squeezed his fingers and did not let go.
‘I should have asked you before,’ he said quietly.
She pushed her free hand against her eyes again. ‘Twelve feet from the border, did you say?’
‘Yes. It was missing some nonsense, a bolt from the pivot or something. God knows how it came off, they’re big things. Lucky, mind.’
‘I’d like to go with you,’ she said.
Not far away, she saw Mori detach himself from Ito’s chattering group and collapse into one of the chairs in the front row. He held himself awkwardly, although since he had bad posture anyway, she wasn’t sure if it was habit or surgical scars. He pulled something out of his pocket. At first Grace thought it was a watch, but it was too small. He flicked it into the air to let the light catch it. It was a heavy-duty bolt.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I’d like to thank everyone at the University of East Anglia who looked at the early chapters of this book and crossed out all the rubbish; especially Tala White, who insisted on the value of both fantasy and octopuses, and Professor Rebecca Stott and her excellent historical fiction seminar.
Also Jenny Savill, my agent, and Alexa von Hirschberg, who between them turned this from a long ramble into a story.
The Daiwa Anglo–Japanese Foundation, meanwhile, made it possible for me to write about Japan from the standpoint of a person who has lived there. I’m pretty sure that if they could have arranged for me to live in Victorian London too, they would have. So thank you to Jason James and everyone at Daiwa House, and thank you Katsuya and Mitsuru Shishikura, and the Uemoto family, who looked after me in Hokkaido and made sure that a) I didn’t annoy any bears and b) I had access to fish and chips.
With regard to historical accuracy – there is some, mainly courtesy of Lee Jackson’s Dictionary of Victorian London, which includes brilliant resources on the early days of the London Underground, the Knightsbridge show village, the bombing of Scotland Yard and a thousand thousand other interesting things. Natsume Soseki’s sad and hilarious Tower of London provides a very good idea of what a Japanese man thought of England in the early 1900s. Many of the policies of the Meiji government can be found in old editions of the Japan Times. The Edo-Tokyo Museum has a model of the Rokumeikan, along with accounts of one of the parties held there.
Finally, thanks to my mum and dad, who taught me how to imagine. And thanks to Jake for making sure I sometimes talk to people who are not imaginary. Surprisingly important.
A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR
Natasha Pulley studied English Literature at Oxford University. After stints working at Waterstones as a bookseller, then at Cambridge University Press as a publishing assistant in the astronomy and maths departments, she did the Creative Writing MA at UEA. She has recently returned from Tokyo, where she lived for nineteen months on a scholarship from the Daiwa Anglo–Japanese Foundation. The Watchmaker of Filigree Street is her first novel.
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First U.S. edition 2015
This electronic edition published July 2015
© Natas
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Natasha Pulley, The Watchmaker of Filigree Street