Page 39 of The Lost Future of Pepperharrow

‘Sorry,’ Mori said obscurely.

‘Mori, even if one of them rugby tackles me, there are fairy princesses who would think this lot were a bit delicate- looking.’

He’d hoped Mori would laugh, but he only got an absent nod. ‘No, you’re right.’

Thaniel went to the post office, feeling like a poltergeist.

SEVENTEEN

Shintomi Theatre, Tokyo, 1878 (ten years ago)

Takiko was ready for the Duke of Choshu when he came. Mori had sent her a warning telegram an hour before.

It gave her time to change. She put on a Western dress cut from vivid kimono silk, all brocaded with blossom patterns. Kimono were too easy to bow in. It was very British, forbidding yourself over-servility and enforcing that resolution with whalebone, and she had a feeling that it would be a good idea to remind the Duke that she was at least half foreign, with one foot outside the circle of his influence.

The actors went into an interested flutter when she said he was coming. They were rehearsing a kabuki version of Swan Lake, so the stage was a beautiful chaos of white feathers and the constant genteel fight between their own dancing master and the Russian ballerina they’d brought in to give the performance a Western flair. It all looked satisfyingly modern, and not like the sort of place to be perturbed by a fuming patriarch.

The Duke turned out not to be a fuming patriarch at all.

The man who sat down opposite her at her table in the empty bar was papery. He looked like a book that had been left in the sun for too long. He was excellently dressed in a Western morning suit, and he wore spectacles whose lenses carried a slight gold tint. They must have been for some kind of vision problem, but they made him look like his constitution was so refined that he couldn’t bear to see the world without a golden veneer.

‘Miss Pepperharrow,’ he said, without introducing himself. He didn’t seem surprised that she’d obviously known he was coming. ‘I believe you are soon to marry into my house.’

‘I am,’ she agreed. ‘Tea?’

His eyes ticked over her. She got ready to shake his hand English-style if he started out in too offensive a way. He looked like he might combust if a stranger touched him.

‘This theatre is yours, I believe?’

She poured the tea. ‘It is.’

He looked troubled. ‘You don’t seem like a stupid person. Do you understand what Keita is? I don’t mean who, not family, I mean what.’

Takiko sat back, because it was so far from the attack she’d expected that it took her a minute to put down the shield and relax. ‘Yes,’ she said slowly. ‘I’ve noticed. He always knows when I should bring an umbrella to go out, if that’s what you mean. He knew when you were coming today.’

The Duke took off his spectacles and put them back on again, and slowly, with a lot less glee than she’d have thought, she realised that he was flustered. ‘Miss Pepperharrow, the girl I wanted him to marry is extremely stupid, and incapable of anything but looking nice at parties. Did you not imagine, when you swooped in, that I was trying to prevent him from getting to anyone else?’

‘Sorry?’

He looked down at the tea and poured himself three drops more, though his cup was already full. ‘I knew his mother. Keitsune Mori.’ His eyes came up again. ‘He gets it from her, you see. Heaven knows how much of modern history she shaped while she was pretending to be occupied at that loom of hers. It was a joke, you see. The loom. Weaving fates.’ He snorted at himself, but only as if he thought he ought to find it funny, not as if he really did. ‘But her great trick was that she would let you see just what she was, and you would want to do as she asked all the same.’

Takiko hesitated. ‘I see,’ she said, untruthfully.

The Duke put both hands on the edge of the table, just his fingertips, but he was such a restrained person that it made her lean back. ‘Do you imagine for a minute that she could do that, and care a damn about the individual threads? No. Eventually, you would look up one morning, and realise that even while you were quite in love with her, and that you would sacrifice anything, you were just one of her threads, one that she herself had chosen and plied and dyed, and to which she had all the emotional attachment of a bobbin.’

‘Well, I’m not in love with your kinsman, your Grace. This marriage is a business contract between friends,’ Takiko said quietly. Even as she said it, she knew she wasn’t quite telling the truth. ‘I need somewhere presentable to live to host my more elevated patrons, and he wants to share the burden of his estate, which I believe he finds too large for one person.’

‘Yes, one enters into contracts with husbands and lawyers, but other things too,’ Choshu said, just as quietly. ‘Things so old we cannot even call them good or evil, and which we do not ever expect to find introducing themselves in a good jacket at a matinee performance.’

She shook her head.

‘Keitsune made him quite deliberately, you know,’ Choshu said. He looked uncomfortably aware that the bar didn’t suit what he was saying either, or the velvet upholstry. He glanced up at the sky-light like he was wishing for a thunderstorm. ‘No one knows who the father was, but Keitsune disappeared for a week. One can only assume she was looking for the right ingredients. She killed herself on the day he was born.’ He poured himself more tea again, even though the cup was in danger of spilling now. ‘She was honourable about it; she said she was quite aware she had shamed her husband and she was paying with her life. Made us all vow to keep the child in the family.’ He half laughed. ‘I believe even that was a calculation. I think we would have found ways to chafe against that plea if she had lived.’

‘That doesn’t prove he’s anything bad—’

‘Miss Pepperharrow. Try to think past how wanted he makes you feel, and how necessary. Think instead how it is that he came to you.’ He looked at her hard. ‘You were on the point of despair. You would have crumbled, in some way or another, if he hadn’t come into your life at the precise instant that he did.’

She bent her neck slowly. That was right, at least. ‘I suppose.’