Page 4 of The Lost Future of Pepperharrow

‘It’s impossible without a clairvoyant to test,’ she said, slowly, because that wink had made her want very much to annoy him. ‘Unless you have one handy, it will be pointless.’

‘You’ll get whatever you need,’ he said easily.

The men in dark suits were checking their pocket watches. Grace glanced at Tanaka.

‘You’re not really asking me, are you?’ she said quietly. She wondered about making a run for the window.

‘No, love,’ he said, and ushered her out.

PART ONE

ONE

London, 2nd December 1888

Fog rolled down Filigree Street early that morning. It was a great brown mass, darkening the lights from one window and then the next, engulfing the gilded shop signs until there was nothing left but a crooked trail of bright dots that might have been the street lamps. At the narrow end of the road – it became narrower and narrower the further you went – laundry on the lines between the gables turned sooty. Lamps went on in upstairs windows as people hurried to take it in, too late.

At number twenty-seven, Thaniel eased the door open just wide enough to slip through, so he wouldn’t let too much of the fog or its chemical smell into the hall, and wound his scarf on high over his nose. It should have been daylight by now, but the fog made it look like midnight, and he had to walk close to the shop fronts to keep himself in a straight line. He shoved his hands into his coat sleeves.

Normally, even though it hurt everyone’s eyes and lungs and probably everything else as well, he liked fog; it was a novelty, like snow, and it was hard not to feel a thrill when he saw how different the world looked under the weird brown pall. But all he could think today was that the post wouldn’t come. It never did in fog. No post; no telegram from Russia. Like he did every morning, he looked back at number twenty-seven, and the dark workshop window, then pinched himself. Mori wasn’t just going to magically reappear overnight.

South Kensington station was eerie with so few people there, every step clocking loud on the wooden platform in a way he never noticed in a crowd. The big new posters for Milkmaid condensed milk were optimistically bright, plastered over the older soot-stained ones. They always seemed to appear around the same time the fog did; the milk carts stopped running, of course, because nobody wanted to try and take care of five hundred glass bottles when the streets were full of fog-skittish horses. When the train came, the carriage wasn’t even half as crowded as it would usually have been.

When Thaniel came up from the Underground at Westminster, the streets were deserted. There were no cabs, no carriages, not even doormen outside the Liberal Club or Horse Guards. The white buildings loomed spectral and huge, the roofs lost in fog, and he could see what it would look like in a thousand years’ time, when it would probably all be in ruins. It was a relief to get into the heat and light of the Foreign Office.

It was a glorious building, with a huge entrance hall and a main stairway built to impress visiting sultans and diplomats. The great chandeliers were unlit today, the vaults of the ceiling lost in a brown gloom, and the clerks at the desk were handing out candles. Thaniel took one and caught himself grinning, because the novelty gave everything a holiday feeling, like going to church on Christmas Eve. One hand cupped over the little flame, he set off away from that first grand, frescoed hall, into the tangle of little corridors that weren’t meant for visitors. There were some lamps going, the gas popping and stuttering, but they gave off much less light than they did their odd chemical smell. The gas line had never been brilliant.

The Far Asia department was much brighter. He couldn’t tell how official it was – not very, knowing his manager – but this floor of the building was lit electrically, as a kind of pilot experiment with one of the electric companies who wanted to light the whole of Whitehall. Instead of that popping of gas lamps, there was the friendly sizzle of Swann lightbulbs. It was much quieter, and Thaniel liked it, but sometimes, if the power supply waned too much, they fizzed with a noise that, to him, sounded green. The whole corridor had a green tinge to it now.

The department was mostly empty. A few people were playing a delicate game of skittles in the long corridor that led to the Minister’s office. Given that the balls sometimes missed and thumped the door, the Minister probably wasn’t in either. Thaniel looked up and down the corridor, then dropped onto the stool of the grand piano nobody else ever played and went over the opening of Sullivan’s new show. The piano had appeared, mysteriously, about a month after he’d started working here. His manager, Fanshaw, was a huge Gilbert and Sullivan fan, easily avid enough to acquire a piano if it meant he got snatches of the new shows before anyone else. He usually frowned on clerks doing other things at weekends – the Foreign Office was a vocation, thank you, not a job – but he never looked happier than when he was taking Thaniel off weekend shifts in favour of rehearsals at the Savoy. Thaniel kept up a decent supply of free tickets to say thank you.

He kept his weight on the quiet pedal, so that the sound wouldn’t hum through the whole building. He was pleased about the new show. It was different to the music Sullivan had written before, richer, less funny, and there was a fantastic moment in the overture when, if everyone hit the big crescendo like they were meant to, the sound was coronation anthem, cathedral-filling grand, and the theatre lit up gold.

Thaniel looked round when the lights buzzed. The green was worse than ever. He shut his eyes hard and pushed one hand to his temple. He did like seeing the colours of sound. He liked seeing the colour of Mori’s voice, and the lights that hovered like an aurora above an orchestra, but he was starting to think that electricity might not be his favourite thing.

‘The hell is that music coming from?’ a courtly voice demanded. Thaniel froze.

He got up gradually and looked around the door of the office. Lord Carrow was inside, talking to Thaniel’s manager and looking uncomfortable even to find himself in an office space, as though working for a living might be catching. He was gripping his cane hard, horizontally, in both hands.

‘Oh, it’s you,’ Carrow said blackly. ‘I forgot you worked here.’ He glared at him and turned back to Francis Fanshaw. ‘As I say, if you could drop her a line and encourage her to remember she has a father who would occasionally enjoy confirmation that she hasn’t been abducted by savages.’

He didn’t wait for anyone to say yes or no and strode out, banging Thaniel’s shoulder hard on the way by. Thaniel watched him go.

The last time they had seen each other was in a bland little registry office in Kensington four years ago, when Thaniel and Grace Carrow had been signing divorce papers. They’d all been brittly polite to each other, and then Lord Carrow had punched him in the eye in the foyer.

‘You haven’t heard from Grace, have you?’ Fanshaw said once Carrow was well out of earshot.

‘We don’t talk to each other. Um … why was he asking you?’

‘She lives in Tokyo now, didn’t you know? She married that Japanese fellow – you know, the anti-you. Dandy, annoying; I forget his name. Apparently she hasn’t written for a while.’

‘Well,’ said Thaniel, ‘I wouldn’t write if Carrow were my father.’

‘My feeling too.’ Fanshaw paused. He had never asked exactly what had happened between Thaniel and Grace, and Thaniel was glad, because he couldn’t think of a good lie even now. ‘Say,’ he said, ‘how’s that watchmaker of yours?’

It might only have been that Fanshaw had gone from thinking of one Japanese man to another, but Thaniel had a horrible zing of fear that hurt his whole spine. He hated it when people asked him about Mori. Fanshaw had every right to, he’d met him, but the very first thing Thaniel always thought whenever anyone asked was, do they know?

It was prison if you were lucky, an asylum if you weren’t. Hard labour or electroshock therapy; and beyond that, he had no idea, because the newspapers couldn’t print those kinds of stories, and asylum doctors didn’t publish their treatments. They didn’t hang people anymore, but that was only because the doctors had managed to classify it all as a kind of madness – moral insanity.