Page 26 of The Lost Future of Pepperharrow

‘Gentlemen, hello.’ She bowed a tiny doll’s bow. ‘Lovely to see you properly and not hanging out of a tree. Welcome home.’

Mori bowed back to her, not half as formally as he had with Kuroda, but still full of gentility. She’d lit a candle in him somewhere, because he glowed a bit when he said thank you. ‘And this is Mr Steepleton.’

She ducked her head to Thaniel, gradually, because the silver combs in her hair must have been as heavy as she was. ‘The musician, yes, wonderful; I’ve got the phonograph recording of your Mozart concert, it’s absolutely the best one there is.’

‘Baroness,’ he said, and felt real despair, because she wasn’t being false-charming. She really sounded honest.

‘No-o,’ she laughed. ‘Just Takiko, please.’

‘Nathaniel,’ he said bleakly.

‘You’ll watch the hunt, Baroness?’ Kuroda put in, clearly of the opinion that she wasn’t paying him enough attention.

‘Ecstatically,’ she said. She nudged Thaniel and, when he glanced down, glinted the edge of a deck of gilded playing cards at him from just under her sleeve.

Kuroda noticed, but he looked pleased. ‘Baroness,’ he said, ‘would you come and take the edge off me for these nice people?’

She bowed wryly to Thaniel and Mori and went away with him. Kuroda slowed right down for her, clearly happy to have something so bright in tow. Mori was watching them too.

‘She …’ Thaniel couldn’t think of anything to say. ‘She seems not to mind him. I’d have hidden in a barn when I was her age.’

Mori did smile, but not much. ‘You’re not her age yet.’ Like it often did after several other people had been talking, his voice sounded even more unusual than normal. Everyone else’s was normal unremarkable cotton, but he sounded like velvet to which someone had just held a match.

‘Oh,’ said Thaniel. He was already getting a growing sense that a white man was likely to fall apart before any normal person was halfway through their warranty.

‘Hurry up!’ Kuroda shouted. ‘Get on your horse, Mori!’

‘Would anyone mind if I chucked him in a well?’ Thaniel said, already tired of the purple splotches and glad to change the subject.

Mori smiled properly this time. ‘No, I think that’s wholly to be encouraged.’ He climbed up on the stirrup and settled in the saddle. The horse shifted to see what the new rider felt like. He sat straight and still, listening to his own balance. Under the hem of the black kimono, he was wearing proper riding boots. Although they were fitted for spurs, with a bronze loop round the heel, he had taken off the sharp edges.

Kuroda pulled a white stallion right up alongside and Thaniel jerked backward, an inch from being trampled. The clank of horseshoes shot silver into everything. He had just long enough to feel Mori’s stirrup dig into his back and a knife edge of panic before Mori leaned over his head to smack Kuroda with his crop in time to make him pull back again. Kuroda looked down, surprised to see anybody there.

‘Well? Should’ve got out the way,’ he said. ‘D’you still shoot, Mori?’

Thaniel clenched his hand and thumped his knuckles against his own leg to vent the need to swear at him.

Mori swung his horse and shoved Kuroda out of his saddle. There was a thump as their shoulders met and then another when Kuroda hit the ground. Motes of hay puffed up around him.

‘Should’ve held on,’ said Mori drily.

There was a silence in which it seemed almost certain he would be taken away and shot. Half the men in the stable yard now were the same ones who had met Mori at the front door, and hands went to sword hilts. Not far away, Kuroda’s men in their dark suits eased away from their posts and more towards Kuroda. One was dressed differently – loudly, Thaniel thought – maybe to make absolutely sure people noticed him. He wore a bright red coat and one of the buttons was a tiny Fabergé egg. He was holding a revolver in the easy way of someone who used it all the time, and it was aimed at Mori’s kneecap.

Kuroda slung some hay at him. ‘Fuck off! ’

Everyone relaxed. Thaniel stood still, waiting for his heart to stop banging. He didn’t mind jokes. But if Mori hadn’t hit Kuroda, the horses would have collided and he would have gone down under their hooves. After a second, he went around and helped Kuroda up. He understood. Kuroda was a frightening man who liked people who weren’t frightened of him. It was still an effort to brush him down and clap his shoulder like he was harmless. Kuroda was laughing now. He climbed up onto his stirrup again and paused when a boy came to look at the buckles on the saddle. It was a relief not to be the focus of his attention.

Around them, other men were climbing into their saddles, and the women dropped back from the horses. Mori nodded at Thaniel to step back before Kuroda whistled sharp and hard and the riders spun away as fast as a cavalry regiment. The ground was scattered with pine needles, which jumped under the horses’ hooves. It shook until they were well away. Someone threw a bow and a quiver between horses and someone else caught it, and then he heard the snap of a string and a bird fell from the sky. One of the dogs tore across to fetch it.

Thaniel watched them from the stable gate, digging his fingernails into the wood. He’d never thought of Mori’s barony as being real in any sense but money. Mori described Japan as a tiny place in the middle of nowhere with no trains and a suspicious attitude toward telegraph lines. Somewhere along the way, Thaniel had filed it away with other middle-of-nowhere bits of the world and pinned on a matching idea of its aristocracy. Tiny African states had kings, though they were kings of less land and fewer people than a Suffolk farmer oversaw in an afternoon. It wasn’t the kingship of England or Germany, the sort that turned the world rather than crops.

‘Are you all right?’

He looked around, didn’t find anyone, then looked down. Takiko Pepperharrow was there again, looking half concerned and half amused.

‘I saw Kuroda up to his usual,’ she said. ‘He’s jealous of Mori. He’s possessive about his friends. Doesn’t want you on his patch. He hasn’t got very many friends.’ It was perfect cut-glass English.

‘Oh. No, I’m all right.’