Page 24 of The Lost Future of Pepperharrow

He sighed. He’d known it would be odd, coming so far from home to somewhere so different, but he really had had higher hopes for his own nerves than total failure in the first fifteen minutes after arriving.

‘Yes, really.’ Suzuki pointed to a corner of the pool which had a clear view over the sea and the roofs of the monastery next door. ‘That is the Baroness’s favourite place. She has excellent taste.’

Thaniel waited until he’d gone before he stepped down into the pool, not where Suzuki had suggested. He sat down slowly on the stone bench underwater. The heat burned at first but then worked into his spine. It was good – much better than an ordinary bath.

The steam from the water carried an edge of sulphur with it, but it wasn’t unpleasant. It only smelled of heat. Whether it was that or some rocky mineral in the water, it tasted much cleaner and fresher than normal steam. When he lifted his arms out and onto the side of the pool, his skin felt polished. Now that he was by himself, he let his neck bend while he waited to stop feeling like the whole place had punched him.

In the background somewhere was a faint, odd, crackly beeping. He frowned, because it had the rhythm of Morse, but he’d never known a house to have its own telegraph, and anyway, there were no telegraph lines. The tiny sound made little starry lights. It stopped, and after a moment he wasn’t sure he’d heard it at all. He wondered if he was hallucinating telegraphy. He hoped not. If you were going to hallucinate something, Morse was very dull.

Voices came from the open doors behind him: Mori and Suzuki, arguing about clothes. Suzuki won. Through the space under the curving trees and the verandah roof, Thaniel watched Suzuki unwrap the packets he had brought until the floor was covered in geometrically folded paper. Inside were traditional robes, layers of them. They went on thinnest first and Thaniel understood why Mori hadn’t wanted to bother; dressing was a long process, and he must have been cold at first. Each layer had its own belt, tied with a ceremony that made the knots look like they meant something, and then the final layer, which would have been a coat in the West, was like nothing Thaniel had ever seen, even in a painting. It was thousands of pounds’ worth of silk if it was a penny, with black on black embroidery that shone where it caught the light. He couldn’t make out the patterns from so far away, but he could see that they were there. The last belt was sacerdotal red. As Mori turned around to chase the end of it from Suzuki, he was starker and neater than human. Not the Mori he knew at all.

‘And the foreign gentleman—’

‘Will be left well alone,’ Mori said.

Suzuki seemed to see that he couldn’t have a total victory. ‘Very well,’ he said smoothly, and set to folding up all the pieces of rice paper individually.

When Mori came out into the sun, the black silk writhed with naphtha colours. He stepped over the stones between the pools without breaking his pace, though the hem of his coat brushed the water.

‘Careful,’ Thaniel said. It was a banal thing to say, but he couldn’t think of anything else.

‘If Suzuki wants me to wear it, he’ll have to put up with my actually wearing it. Anyway, it’s not supposed to be clean, it’s riding gear for this bloody hunt.’ He knelt down on the slate edge of the pool. The brocade was a riot of bird patterns; blackbirds, flocking from left to right. It must have been designed to be seen only by the person wearing it or someone sitting right next to him, because it had been obscure even from a few feet away. The collar of each layer was starched so well that they didn’t move when he did. They left a hollow at the back of his neck. At home, Thaniel’s sister had a silk scarf she never wore. It stayed wrapped in tissue in the top cupboard. It was probably an offcut of something like what Mori was wearing now. If someone had suggested she take it anywhere near a horse, she would have spat. ‘You’re invited. I didn’t say that before, did I? Pepper’s got half of Tokyo staying.’

‘Suzuki told me,’ Thaniel pointed out.

‘You always look like someone who knows what’s going on,’ Mori said, looking sorry. ‘I never know what I have or haven’t mentioned.’

Thaniel glanced up. ‘Any children you might have forgotten to bring up?’ It came out sounding much more forced than he’d wanted.

‘No,’ Mori said, laughing.

‘And Mrs Pepperharrow; she’s not going to be annoyed that I’m here?’

‘No? She’s half-English. She doesn’t mind foreigners.’

Thaniel wanted to drown. ‘That’s good then.’

He thought Mori would go, but he let himself drop flat onto his back on the warm slate. The red silk shone across his hips and the flocks of blackbirds shifted and shimmered. Yesterday, this morning even, Thaniel would have reached out to touch it.

He sank further back, towards the middle of the pool. The water was too hot there, but he didn’t care. Actually burning was better than burning inside.

The sounds of the house filtered out. In another garden just below them somewhere, some girls were putting out laundry. He could hear the creak of the pegs against the sheets. Someone was walking over the nightingale floor, which made a constellation of white squeaks.

Out in the bay, the lighthouse flashed on, unpleasantly bright even in the daylight. Thaniel looked down at the water, hearing a kind of violin-high whine from the white blast. Mori’s hands flickered. The lighthouse had made him jump.

‘If the Baron is to be on time,’ Suzuki began, and then stopped, because from the lower garden came the odd but very distinctive sound of several people chiming handbells. ‘Oh, where’s the dratted …’

Thaniel straightened up and watched, puzzled, as Suzuki took a bell of his own from a loop on his belt, shook it three times, and then put it back. He didn’t offer a word of explanation.

‘If the Baron is to be on time he had best come now,’ he finished.

The last silvery-blue coils of the sound faded off into the rain. ‘What was that?’ Thaniel asked, wondering if it was some kind of ceremony he hadn’t heard of.

Suzuki sighed. ‘Just a little fad of the Baroness’s.’

Mori had jerked upright when the bells rang, and now he had turned too still, his hands balled to fists against his knees. Suzuki paid no attention and herded him back inside.

Thaniel was still wondering about it when the Morse crackle sounded again, this time much nearer. He twisted around. A man in a dark suit had appeared right at the far end of the pools. He was pacing there now, and he was holding a strange little box, pressing a button like a telegraph key. It wasn’t wired to anything, but it was what was making the noise. Thaniel sat back a little. Real, wireless telegraphy; he’d never seen it before.