Page 10 of The Lost Future of Pepperharrow

Six leaned out of the kitchen doorway, then came across speculatively. She was nine, or so they thought, but she was miniature for her age, and when she was worried, she tended to look like a solemn toddler. Because she hated anyone touching her any more than absolutely necessary, they kept her hair short so that no one else would have to brush it or plait it, and that made her look even younger. She had a spanner behind her ear today.‘Hello,’ said Mori, very soft, because appearing unexpectedly after six months had a fifty percent chance of eliciting no reaction from her whatsoever, but an equal chance of helpless lifelong rage. Thaniel doubted that even Mori could tell accurately which it would be. Six was built differently to the rest of the world.

‘Good evening.’ She said it in stiff Japanese. She was studying Mori, and clearly struggling to take in how he looked. ‘Your clothes are different,’ she said, unhappy. He was in a beautiful blue waistcoat full of silver threads that made him look like he had just that second been caught in the rain. Thaniel had never been able to tell exactly why she hated it when one of them wore anything unusual, but he had a theory that she took an evening suit or a new coat as an external sign of some dangerous internal change.

Behind her, Osei winced on the threshold and put her hand up a conciliatory fraction to say that usually she looked after a better-trained child. Osei wasn’t a professional nanny – in fact she ran the local tea house – but she was much kinder than anyone Thaniel had interviewed from proper agencies. ‘Miss Charlotte. You should say welcome home.’

‘I’m Six,’ said Six. ‘Not Charlotte.’

‘No, you’re nine,’ Osei said. She swiped away the spanner. ‘You have to have a proper name.’

‘I’m wearing this because I didn’t have anything else warm enough,’ Mori said gently, just over them both. ‘Come here, I’ve got something for you.’

Six looked unwilling but did as she was told. Quietly, Thaniel was on Osei’s side. Charlotte was Six’s real name, the one her mother had given her in the workhouse register. But the workhouse staff had numbered the children rather than bother with names. Thaniel had tried to tell her that that was awful. Six had only said blankly that if he wanted to call her Charlotte, then she would be calling him Henry.

Mori took a box from his coat pocket and gave it to her.

Thaniel came nearer. It was a lightbulb. Inside, the filament had been arranged into something that suggested shapes, but he couldn’t tell what they would make once they were alight.

Six didn’t make a sound, but she rose onto the balls of her feet and put her arms up. Mori lifted her up. She didn’t want affection, just the empty lightbulb socket above him. He held her while she screwed the bulb in. When it came to life, the filament buzzed, and then flared into an octopus. It writhed and moved, swimming inside the glass. Six laughed. It was an abrupt monotonal bark. Thaniel had thought it was fake for a long time before he realised that there hadn’t been enough laughing at the workhouse for her to have a good grasp of the way it was usually done.

‘What do you say?’ Osei prompted her.

‘Arigatou gozaimashita.’

‘You’re welcome.’ Mori set Six down and didn’t make any more fuss of her. He had never treated her like a child, only a small adult, with the same dignity as one. Thaniel had forgotten that, but watching her now, he could see her sinking into it with a relief that gave him a pang. She took Mori’s sleeve and leaned against him. It was just at an angle that hid her from both Thaniel and Osei. Mori put his arm around her and she put her face against his waistcoat pocket. She seemed to have forgiven him for the change of colour. She was just old enough to enjoy how glamorous Mori was. Her friends at school had god-fathers who were bankers or tweedy, moth-ballish landowners in Nottinghamshire.

Osei looked anxious and bowed to him. Mori bowed back and thanked her for helping so much. Six let go of him, but stayed close. She had stolen his watch, but she hadn’t unclipped it, which left a small slack of gold chain between them. He moved slowly so that she could keep up.

She had used to make the very smallest clockwork parts for him. A lot of fine clockwork came from workhouses, where the children were tiny enough to make chain that might as well have been golden hairs, or dust-specks of cogs. Mori claimed not to like children, but near Christmas in the first year Thaniel had lived here, he had brought Six home and then refused to take her back again, and that was that.

Thaniel found a lamp for Osei, then felt guilty when he looked at the fog again. She was only the size of a link lighter. She always refused to stay for dinner.

‘I’m just going to walk back with Osei,’ Thaniel said over the murmur of Japanese from Six.

Mori straightened up. He looked like he might have meant to say something, but as Osei passed him, with a polite nod, he frowned and leaned back like he’d caught brimstone on her. Thaniel widened his eyes at him to ask what the matter was. Osei didn’t smell of brimstone. Her clothes just drifted jasmine through the air. Mori shook his head.

When Thaniel looked back at the window, Mori was taking Six through to the kitchen. They walked still linked by his watch chain. Despite the grit in the air, Thaniel felt like he could breathe properly again, but he could tell it was temporary. When he got back, he was going to have to talk about Tokyo – about who would take Six, about whether any of them would see each other, everything – and this delicate, filigree peace would break.

It only took twenty minutes to see Osei home, and when he came back, Mori had already cooked. The heat from the range curled up to meet him at the dented steps down into the kitchen from the workshop. Sitting on the stove and soaking up the heat was Mori’s octopus, mechanical, like everything else. With bright steel casing over his clockwork, Katsu looked like a mercury spill, except for the copper wheel that had replaced one of his tentacles. He had disappeared for a while once, but a fortnight or so later he had trundled back, minus a leg, and Mori had given him a temporary wheel while he made a new leg. When the time had come to fit it, Katsu had hidden on top of a cupboard, and whenever anyone brought up repairs, he disappeared until the subject moved on. Mori thought that something had been skewed in his clockwork. Thaniel was nearly sure that Katsu liked the wheel. It improved his cornering.

Thaniel touched one of his tentacles to be sure he wasn’t too hot, then picked him up and gave him to Six, who had just sat down after setting the table. She put her nose against Katsu’s and did a silent fish impression. After such a long time away, it struck Thaniel as freshly odd to have a pet octopus, but it did make sense really. Real pets were out, because Mori didn’t like things that couldn’t look after themselves. You couldn’t have fluffy clockwork, and a clever snake would have been sinister.

There was food already on the table. It was chicken and proper rice, proper vegetables, proper soup, and a box of beautiful French cakes it would be a shame to eat. One had a marzipan octopus on it.

As he sat down, Thaniel had to twist away and cough into his hands. Six studied him.

‘Are you dying?’ she asked. ‘People who cough like that always die.’

He managed to smile. He was trying and failing to think of a way to mention Tokyo that wouldn’t land on the table like an anvil. ‘No, petal. I don’t mean to.’

‘Nobody does. Mori,’ she said, untangling Katsu. ‘If Dad dies, must I go back to the workhouse?’

Thaniel choked. It was the sort of question she asked at least twice a year and although it upset him more each time, he had never been able to find a way to convince her that in some things, people didn’t change their minds. ‘Six, that’s ridiculous, of course you’re not going back; you’re never going back.’

‘No it isn’t ridiculous. Mori might not want me,’ she said reasonably.

‘Six—’ he began. He had explained to her before – several times – that she belonged to them both, and the only reason she was legally his was that the registry office would sooner arrest Mori than let him become the legal guardian of a white child. She always ignored him. Even though it was Mori who had taken her from the workhouse and Mori she went to for justice and reassurance, she never seemed able to let go of the nagging worry that any link she had with him was unofficial. Thaniel didn’t blame her.

‘Whether I want you or not is irrelevant,’ said Mori. Thaniel looked up slowly. ‘You can’t take children back to a workhouse without a receipt. I haven’t got one for you anymore.’