Page 101 of The Lost Future of Pepperharrow

Arrayed in a vast line over the icy water was a fleet of ironclads. Each one might as well have been a black floating castle. Although they must still have been three or four miles away, she could see their water wheels, and the smoke rising in cathedral pillars from the funnels. They were exactly where Mori had said they would be; stationed just off the coast, blocking any possible shipping route round to Abashiri and beyond. She looked round and snatched up a pair of binoculars to make absolutely sure. Yes; the names of the ships were all in Russian. Every few seconds, huge, beautiful arcs of smoke soared out from their guns. They were running drills.

‘Wonder where our boys are,’ the yakuza man murmured.

‘I think they’re coming,’ she said. ‘They were gathering intelligence at Abashiri – I telegraphed the Navy about this half an hour ago. We should go right around. I think this is all going to be a battlefield by tonight. Hold on, I think they’re signalling us. What does that say? Does anyone know Morse?’

One of the Russian ships was flashing its fog lamp at them.

The man who had used to be a fisherman peered at it, then smiled. ‘They say they’re about to stop firing. We can go straight through.’

So they did, and sailing between two battleships was like sailing on a little stream at the bottom of a canyon. The steel hulls towered above the trawler on either side, so big they made the sounds of the water and the crackling ice echo. The gun ports loomed, crawling by. Some of them were still steaming. She glanced back into the other room, to where Mori was sitting exactly where she’d left him, and hoped to God he hadn’t been lying about how to win.

‘Are we definitely sure we want to be in Tokyo when all this kicks off ?’ the fisherman said, and Takiko set her teeth. ‘I mean really. We haven’t got a chance in hell against Russia—’

‘We’re going to Tokyo,’ the yakuza man said flatly. ‘The lady says so, so we’re doing it.’

She must have looked shocked, because after a while, he nudged her.

‘Miss. You literally walked in front of a firing squad for us. We can take you to Tokyo. People aren’t always shit, you know.’

It was two days’ sailing to Tokyo, even with the engine. They came into the bay in light that looked like dusk, but really it was storm dimness. The city was brilliant, and for a good while Takiko couldn’t understand what she was seeing. It was an electric glow that turned the undersides of the snow clouds orange. The others watched it too. It looked like the end of days.

As they turned into the great harbour, another kind of light, blue foxfire, followed the angles of the prow and the bridge cabin. It brightened and brightened, shining up the mast. She started to get a strange, metallic headache.

Mori hadn’t moved from his space by the window in the little communal room for the whole journey. He was struggling to stay upright; he wasn’t aligned enough with the immediate present anymore to move with the bob of the sea. Instead he pressed back against the cabin wall. He could talk when he was lucid, which was intermittently, but she hadn’t been able to make him eat properly, or sleep. His mind was working, but the clocks in his organs and bones had stopped.

‘I’m going to take you to the British legation. I’m a citizen and Kuroda can’t get you there.’ She glanced up, because the tip of the mast was tracing a beautiful line of blue fire at least forty yards behind them now. That happened in the famous scene in Princess Yaegaki, when the princess was taken over by the spirit of a fox and flew to stop a fight in among little falling fires. They did it with tiny paper lamps on stage, charged with baskets of kerosene. She hadn’t known foxfire was real.

Mori hesitated, worried. ‘Takiko,’ he said, and she frowned, because he had never called her that. She was always Pepper. He didn’t say anything else, lost.

‘It will be all right,’ she tried. ‘We’ll be safe.’

He looked down at his hands. Something in him faded. ‘Are you sure about Eton?’

She touched his arm. ‘Can you try and hold onto now for a bit longer? Just for another few minutes. Joy – look at me. Can you?’

He heard something else, from some time else. ‘He’s so little. He’s only seven. It just seems awfully …’

She couldn’t move or speak then, because she could nearly see the future he was talking about sketched between them. A little boy. When she realised, she was paralysed; she smacked the back of her own hand to bring herself up from it. It stung enough to work. She opened the door and guided Mori through by the small of his back.

She had never thought about children. There had been no point. When her sisters asked if she wanted any, she had never been able to say, because hers had never been that kind of marriage, so there was a dam across the idea. It had never been worth knocking through. If she’d found that she did want children, it would have been horrible. She would have turned into one of those middle-aged people who collected dolls, and ended up with a room full of bright glass eyes in porcelain faces, all lined up on shelves pegged to walls painted in nursery colours. She couldn’t think of anything more disgusting.

‘Nearly there,’ the yakuza man called. ‘We’d best all go in different directions once we dock. Good luck, miss.’

FORTY-THREE

Tokyo, 22nd February 1889

With the storm and the electricity, all the ships back to England were booked up for the next week, and so Thaniel had spent four days locked in the visiting diplomats’ room with no company but the grand piano. They let Six in for an hour a day. He knew he ought to have been angry about that, but in fact he was grateful, because it would have been difficult to pretend to be cheerful for longer. Outside, the protest camp was much bigger. Someone with a good arm slung a wine bottle through the window in the middle of the night, but he couldn’t remember which night now. He had taped a newspaper over the hole, sheet by overlapping sheet, so that the articles about him were all overlaid in a meaningless blur. It was still cold, because the stewards wouldn’t come in to bring firewood, but whenever Six came, she smuggled in more lightbulbs, and the combined heat was enough to keep his corner of the room warm. They were shining more brightly than they had before, and there were more fires in town. The newspapers were full of a rush of solved crimes, and the big debate across the middle pages was whether the ghosts were admissible in court – whether a witness was enough or whether you had to have properly photographed the scene. But his own name came up too often and he had to stop looking at anything except the weather forecasts.

He couldn’t sleep. He had to take the newspaper off the window at night because as soon as it was dark, a wrenching claustrophobia he’d never had before settled over him and tightened until he couldn’t breathe. It was freezing with the hole in the glass, but it was better than suffocating. He couldn’t do anything but lie there, exhausted and awake, watching his own breath whiten just above him and listening to the protesters’ storytelling outside. Trapped. He’d always been able to sit happily in small spaces, but this was different.

Snatches of the newspaper headlines kept catching his eyes. Murderer – court – Duke of Choshu to speak at the funeral.

He’d had to tell Six before she read about it by herself. She hadn’t believed him. Owlbert, she’d insisted, was here because he was waiting for Mori to come. Owls did that. Thaniel had tried to tell her that owls were just owls sometimes. She had gone quiet after that. He had no idea how she was taking it.

On the first night he had tried to think about that old memory of the Christmas carols in the hearth and sleeping with Mori on the living-room floor, but it had turned to cinders in his hands. He’d picked it up too often. All the calm had worn off. He couldn’t bring back what it had felt like, or even which carols they’d been. When he tried to remember, the part of him that had felt it didn’t work.

All he could do was listen. The protesters all sounded normal, individually. Sometimes they took water from the outside tap under the window, so he heard them talking, and they were all carpenters and schoolteachers. The teachers had only come for this week, because of the national holidays around the Constitution ceremonies. Fukuoka’s friend Yuna, the one with the mad gleam, was an accounting clerk. Thaniel felt like he knew them. It was feverish and ridiculous, and he hated it, because he could feel his mind escaping through his fingers. He hadn’t known that all it took was a few days locked in a room alone.