Page 17 of The Lost Future of Pepperharrow

The telegraph hadn’t only shocked him; the wiring had caught fire. Mori had been waiting by him with a bucket of sand, so it didn’t get far. The captain gave him an unnerved look.

‘How did you know?’

‘If it’s electrical, then it will affect the telegraphs. I wouldn’t use that,’ Mori added to Hopkins.

Hopkins stopped with his hand almost on the Chadburn telegraph, on the point of cranking its bronze lever around to ‘full steam ahead’. As Hopkins stepped away from it, it juddered by itself and the needle skittered. A man covered in coal dust pushed through the door.

‘The engine-room bells are going off all over the place, sir – what’s the order?’

‘Full ahead, please,’ the captain said. ‘Something funny going on ashore.’ He glanced at Mori.

Mori shook his head. He looked more troubled than any of them.

‘Ah,’ said Hopkins. He had been studying Thaniel, who he’d not acutally met, looking increasingly anxious. ‘Miss Steepleton? Is – one of – these two unlikely gentlemen your father?’

Six looked up at him, solemn. ‘No. They stole me from a workhouse and now I live in the attic.’

Hopkins opened his mouth, shocked. Thaniel folded his arms and inclined his head down, not sure what to do. Saying that it was a lovely attic wouldn’t help.

‘Chocolate?’ Mori said to her.

‘Yes!’ she squeaked, full of joy. He didn’t usually let her have anything sweet. There was a reason, he said, that white people were all fat and short-lived. ‘And then please may I go down to the engine room and look at the engines, say yes onegai shimaaaas—’

‘Yes,’ Mori said, and Hopkins looked puzzled but let them go.

Not long later, the ship steered back towards the land. Instead of unbroken coast or the odd scattering of wooden houses they’d passed before, there were warehouses and piers. Thaniel went outside. His lungs wheezed and he had to stand still at the rail while he saw stars. Signs for tea cargoes appeared through the haze, painted in white on wooden boards at the ends of the nearer wharves where the clippers from China anchored, and men in work clothes and bandanas loaded crates onto carts pulled by oxen with ribbons tied to their horns. Above the narrow road that looped round the harbour, a dyer had hung kimono sashes. They were thirty feet long and they writhed in the wind.

There were two other liners already at the big main wharf, which was full of gentlemen in Western suits and women in plain day kimono, although some of them, looking much more well-to-do, had bright silk belts and flowers in their hair. Either for colour or an occasion, strings of blue and red bunting fluttered between the wharf lamps. Along from the wharf, the houses were neat and wooden, close-set, jumbled with advertising signs running lengthwise from the roofs, and dotted with little warm lights where people had set up cooking stalls. At short intervals there were telegraph poles, just like in London, but they were a different shape; they had fewer arms, so they looked more like tall keys than trees. It stuck in his mind later because it was the first really unfamiliar thing he saw.

Mori had come out too, much more slowly, to give him time to catch his breath without waiting ahead of him.

‘We’re going up there,’ Mori said, pointing to their right.

Thaniel couldn’t see anything there but a lighthouse. It was a red wooden tower with a lamp and an anemometer, to measure the wind. Neither moved. The lighthouse itself leaned forward, as if there was something interesting in the sea.

A steward called that they were all very welcome to Yokohama, and that they would be free to disembark in a few minutes. Trains into central Tokyo ran from the station, which was a short walk or rickshaw ride away, and would arrive at Shimbashi terminus shortly before three. Passengers staying in Yokohama would find rickshaws on the dockside. Mori was still watching the lighthouse where, as if the keeper had noticed that he was being observed, the lamp came on.

NINE

Mori said that it wasn’t far to Yoruji. Luggage had disappeared into the meticulous accounting of the ship’s staff; it would appear at some point, though all the stewards seemed to think it was vulgar to ask.

The rickshaws at the harbour were one of the strangest inventions Thaniel had ever seen. They were like one-horse hansom cabs, except instead of a horse between the bars, there was a man. Dozens of them waited at the harbour, just after the line of customs officers, and when people climbed up into the little chariot-type carriages, even with luggage, the rickshawmen took off at a jog. Sometimes the wheels were rubber-tyred and beautifully sprung, and sometimes they had no more suspension than a hay cart. He wondered if people had something against horses.

Six looked thoughtful when someone offered her a steamed bun. She sniffed.

‘No. Vile,’ she said.

Mori pushed the side of her head, very gently. She meowed at him.

Thaniel ought probably to have said something about manners, but he was too distracted by the mist. It was real mist, not the London soup. It was white, cold, and pristine. It even tasted clean. Slowly over the years, he’d begun to think of white mist as existing only in memory. He hadn’t seen it since he’d left Lincolnshire. But here it was, hanging luminous in the air above the stony unpaved road and the frost that glittered in the verges. It looked like home, and he had a sudden and completely absurd surge of belonging. Six tugged his sleeve to ask what it was.

‘What fog’s meant to look like, petal.’

‘Oh, dear,’ she said.

Mori was careful about the way he smiled. He didn’t laugh at them.

In the open paper window of a tall house, a woman in full geisha paint was talking into a telephone. She tipped the receiver absently away from her face and rubbed the chalk powder off it with her sleeve. Thaniel felt embarrassed about staring when Mori touched his arm, but it wasn’t a rebuke; he was pointing out a girl walking away down an alley, towards the same house, in the full paraphernalia. Usually Thaniel didn’t hold with taking photographs – it was better to remember the thing, not remember carting around an omnipresent camera – but he wished he had one just then.