Page 33 of The Lost Future of Pepperharrow

‘I’m awake,’ Mori whispered.

‘Nightmare?’

‘No, I’m fine.’ Mori was breathing again, but not much. He was holding himself still and terse. Thaniel knelt down next to him, meaning to take his hands, but Mori brushed him away. ‘Don’t – don’t,’ Mori whispered. He glanced at the door and Thaniel looked back with the sudden certainty that Six was there, but the threshold was empty except for the soft furling of the steam from the hot pools. ‘Go back to bed.’

Thaniel did as he was told, his heart squeezing, shut the door, and stood still on the verandah while he waited to stop feeling like he wanted to vanish into the ground.

The second the door was closed, he heard moving fabric and the inner door of Mori’s room open and shut. Nothing on the nightingale floor, but then a tap on another door, and, very quietly, so quietly he wouldn’t have heard if he hadn’t been listening for it, Mori’s amber voice said ‘Pepper’ and another door opened and shut.

Thaniel walked out to the hot pools, which steamed in the cold night. Where the moonlight striped across them, there were curling patterns in the vapour.

He must have been caught in the flinders of the nightmare still, because for a split second he saw someone outlined in the steam before it blew apart again. His ribs hitched. He sighed at himself and knelt down on the edge of a pool to scoop a handful of hot water across his face.

None of his damn business if Mori wanted to talk to his own wife in the night.

He stayed by the pool, breathing the steam. Inch by inch, the sky lightened. It turned violet and then pink, and then almost blue. He got dressed properly. He’d meant to spend the whole day asleep and not talking to anyone except the piano, but though it had sounded like heaven yesterday, the whole idea was purgatorial now. He found Suzuki, who gave him a train timetable, and set out for the railway station.

The British legation wasn’t far away. From Yokohama to the big Tokyo terminus station at Shimbashi it was an hour on a brand new train. Shimbashi was the size of King’s Cross and heaving with people at nine o’clock in the morning. The name meant Newbridge, and there was indeed a great new bridge across the river, churning with carriages and rickshaws and overfilled oxen carts, everyone going in whichever direction they felt like. As Thaniel came out from under the high brick arches of the station, a herd of students came the other way. One of them was wearing a fez.

It wasn’t until he was in that ordinary, chattering, anonymous crowd that Thaniel realised just how much of a relief it was not to feel like he was being watched. A weird pressure on the back of his neck had lifted since he’d left Yoruji. He rubbed at the bones there. No wonder people thought the house was haunted.

From Shimbashi to the legation was a short ride in a cab. It was in a borough to the west, Kojimachi. It was all big open spaces, parks, and brick buildings. But quite close, sometimes in clear view down the broad and clock-towered streets, there was another Tokyo altogether – a leaning, rambling, tangled clutter that looked much older and much less polished.

‘This is the nice part of town,’ the cabbie said, wrinkling his nose at the crowd of curving roofs away down the hill while Thaniel paid. He had stopped at the top of the grand sweep of the legation’s gravel drive, outside the front doors. ‘No need to look that way, hey?’ He sounded a lot like a Whitehall chauffeur might have if a foreign envoy had found Anglo-Saxons still camped in Clerkenwell.

Thaniel didn’t say that the cluttered places looked much more fun. He thanked the man and turned towards the legation. He was almost at the steps when someone said, a bit half-heartedly,

‘Foreigners go home!’

There were two men holding a banner that drooped in the middle. They were dressed in the traditional way he’d expected Kuroda to, purposefully rough and scruffy, kimono sleeves tied up despite the cold. They must have been freezing.

‘Morning,’ he said, interested. ‘What are you protesting?’

‘Foreigners,’ one snapped. ‘You shouldn’t be here.’ He even came up and gave Thaniel a push.

It was like being shoved by a quail. He had to bat the man’s small fist aside with his knuckles. ‘Steady on. Foreigners generally?’ he added, halfway up the steps.

‘Foreign oppression!’

‘All right. I’ll see you both later.’

‘See you,’ the man’s less angry friend said, gloomily.

‘Fukuoka!’

‘Sorry.’

Inside were chandeliers and deep silk rugs. At a glance it might have been somewhere in London. A pair of palms leaned over the main doors and the walls were full of oil paintings, the gilt frames shined up and glittering. The nearest door led to what looked like an office, full of men too young to be diplomats but who almost certainly were. He tapped his knuckle on it.

‘I’m looking for the Secretary,’ he said. ‘Is he in?’

‘And who might you be?’ someone said in a pompous voice.

‘I’m the new translator from London.’

The young man straightened, flustered, then got up. ‘Yes, of course – we didn’t expect you until after New Year – very keen, aren’t you? Good train, I suppose? You’ve come from Yokohama, did your wire say? Nice down there.’

Thaniel inclined his head. ‘Steepleton,’ he said, to give the boy a chance to get onto a normal conversational track.