Page 115 of The Lost Future of Pepperharrow

The Duke of Choshu arrived with a retinue of soldiers, including the captain who had come to the legation. He introduced himself to Vaulker with a pristine politeness before crossing the room to speak to Mori. Thaniel couldn’t hear what Choshu said, but he looked anxious. Mori gave him a cup of tea. Thaniel glanced at Vaulker, feeling more foreign than he did even usually, and caught Vaulker looking at him in just the same way. They drew together.

‘Are you up to this?’ Vaulker asked uncomfortably. ‘I can’t catch a single word Kuroda says in Japanese.’

‘I’ll be all right. It’s just how people like him talk. They’re like those old soldiers at the Liberal Club who rattle newspapers and cough at you until you understand.’

Vaulker snorted as if he hadn’t expected to. ‘Well, so long as you’re confident. What about Baron Mori? He seems …’

‘He’s fine,’ Thaniel said, though as he said it he knew he couldn’t have sworn it to a jury. Vaulker was right; Mori always moved slowly, but it was gradual now. He had gone to sit with the Duke, and three or four other men who looked familiar and might have fought at the legation yesterday. They all sat angled in the same way, toward Kuroda’s contingent. Where the two groups overlapped, in the middle of the horseshoe of tables, there was quiet conversation, over newspapers. The front pages all showed the same photograph. It was Takiko, looking up at Yuna as he swung the bottle. Her intentions were clear in the fate lines – it was obvious he hadn’t taken her by surprise. She had been about to hit him back, and in that instant, she looked serene and noble. One of the newspapers had done a sketch based on the same picture, where she was wearing the Japanese flag and the protesters were all apes. Everyone was talking about it. Thaniel recognised a good few of them from the dinner at Mori’s house months ago. Yamauchi, Shimazu, Nabeshima. The big, gilded, southern houses, just like the Mori.

‘It doesn’t really feel like a courtroom, does it?’ Vaulker said.

Thaniel shook his head. It was more like a coffee morning than a courtroom, although that might have been because Kuroda hadn’t arrived yet. Two of Choshu’s men stood behind Mori. They might have been there to stop him running away, but they looked for all the world like they were only there to protect him. Choshu had leaned across to talk to him, one hand on his arm. Mori was listening with an intensity he never normally needed.

The sound of steps came from the long corridor.

‘Right, let’s get this over with,’ Kuroda said. He was on his way to his seat in the centre. ‘We’re here chiefly on a formality, gentlemen. Keita Mori has illegally left state custody, and—’

‘We are here,’ interrupted the Duke, in his dry voice, before Kuroda could sit down, ‘because a bannerman of my house was abducted, and I was lied to.’

Kuroda looked up slowly.

‘My concern,’ the Duke went on, unflustered, ‘is that if Count Kuroda’s disregard for blood has led him to believe that a man temporarily at the helm of the government can steal away a knight and deceive an ancient noble house solely to cover his own tracks, there is no line he would not cross in the correct circumstances even with regard to the royal family.’

He had managed to say ‘Count’ like it was something pointless you might be handed gratis in a grocery shop.

‘Choshu,’ said Kuroda, ‘a bannerman of yours is no more your property than a fox that happens to wander into your house. In the protection of the state, it—’

‘Damn the protection of the state, he’s no spy.’

‘I didn’t say he was a spy. He provided us with intelligence. He’s a proven clairvoyant and he owes his service to his country. He refused to lend it.’

Thaniel swallowed. If Choshu agreed, Mori was going to disappear into government vaults. Mori had closed his hands hard over the edge of the table.

‘Fairytales,’ Choshu said flatly. He hadn’t raised his voice once. ‘There is no such thing as clairvoyance, as I believe we can all sensibly agree.’

Thaniel looked around. At least four or five people in the room must have known what Mori could do, and that Kuroda was right. But in Choshu’s paper voice, the idea sounded idiotic. Eyes were sliding towards Kuroda. ‘The Prime Minister is spinning us a fantasy to distract from the fact that he’s been using an innocent man to disguise a project that will prove profoundly unpopular should the newspapers find it was of government making.’

‘Sit down,’ Kuroda snapped.

Choshu didn’t sit. He switched into English. ‘Dr Carrow, if you’d like to come in and explain the experiments going on in Aokigahara. The ones producing the information Mr Kuroda is so keen to attribute to my bannerman’s being magic.’

Thaniel hadn’t seen Grace come in. She was just by the door with her husband. When she walked out into the middle of the semicircle, there were murmurs about letting a woman into an Imperial council chamber, but Choshu snapped at them to shut up. She spoke clearly and concisely. Someone brought her a small generator. In the silence it was loud and rattling, and there was another protesting murmur, and again Choshu shut them up. When Grace cast chalk into the air, she explained the fate lines around her; one that formed when she intended to walk towards Kuroda, one that lifted above her if she meant to put her arms up. It could have looked like a magic trick, but she was far, far too dry to seem anything like a showman. She was her usual austere self in grey. When Kuroda lost his temper and demanded her arrest for treason, she only pointed out that she was a British subject and he couldn’t try her for stealing an apple, never mind treason. It was a cold joke, and it made the noblemen laugh.

‘And was it necessary that these tests destroy half the capital?’ Choshu asked her. There was an attentive murmur all around him. Even on Kuroda’s side of the room.

‘No, sir,’ Grace said. She was easy, even speaking in front of so many people. She gave lectures; she was used to it, and good at it. ‘It could have been done with a great deal more focus, the effects kept isolated to Aokigahara, but our brief was speed over safety. In an ideal world, the generators would have been underground, insulated by the bedrock of Mount Fuji. But they were built hastily.’

She said ‘hastily’ as if it meant ‘criminally’.

Choshu told her then that she could go. Kuroda snapped that he hardly thought the testimony of a foreign woman was worth anything, but then had to shut up when the Duke pointed out in his desiccated way that Kuroda had plainly thought a foreign woman could work on a national defence project. The chamber dissolved into a row where all the colours of everyone’s voices clashed and mixed into an indistinguishable brown cloud. Thaniel looked down at his own shorthand. It was a bad idea to take an exact transcript of a fight. It looked crass if it got into dispatches. You were supposed to summarise, softly. He thought about translating it as the fall of Japanese modernism, which was overdramatic, and wrote, ‘the gentlemen continue to disagree’.

He looked up when Grace brushed his arm. He smiled.

‘You escaped.’

‘Oh, the day after you left,’ she said. She paused. ‘I saw Mori in the papers. I called round to the Duke to see if I could testify here. Akira’s spitting nails too; the way he was treated when he tried to look for me. It all adds up.’

‘How did you get out?’