Page 44 of The Lost Future of Pepperharrow

She leaned over and poked him. ‘Get on with that music you were writing earlier. I was listening. It’s gorgeous. I’m not having that go to waste just because you upped and snuffed it before you could be bothered to finish.’

Stupidly, even though he was almost certain she had only been kind to make him tell her about the parcel, being teased made everything seem a lot better. ‘I will.’

She watched him for a moment as if she really was worried. ‘Anyway,’ she said. ‘Are you all right if I abandon you? I’d better get going. I’m supposed to be at the playhouse soon.’

He nodded and promised it wasn’t exactly a hardship, being abandoned in such a lovely place. He watched her go, waited til she was across the stepping stones, and then followed as quietly as he could. She was out of sight by the time he reached the corridor, but he could hear her on the nightingale floor, which was making its weird, starry squeaking off to the left. He walked right on the edge near the skirting board, and stopped when she stopped. She had tapped on a door. It was Kuroda’s voice that called to come in.

He waited with his back to their wall. It was only paper, and he could hear straight through it.

‘Moth cocoons to Kyushu,’ she said. ‘Have you got anything in Kyushu?’

‘No,’ Kuroda said gradually. ‘Nothing. Might just be Mori being Mori.’

She might have said something else, but Thaniel didn’t hear it, because Suzuki was coming down the corridor. Thaniel tried the door next to him, but it was locked. Suzuki looked shocked to find him there.

‘That,’ he said, as if he’d caught Thaniel in the ladies’ cloakroom, ‘is the old smoking room. We don’t use it. Your room is this way.’

‘What’s wrong with the smoking room?’ Thaniel said, puzzled.

‘It’s locked,’ Suzuki snapped.

Thaniel inclined his head and wondered if Suzuki knew he lived in a gothic fairytale. A woman had been killed in the house, people saw ghosts everywhere, and now there was a mysteriously locked room. ‘Better not be a dungeon full of dismembered ladies, that’s all I’m saying.’

‘I beg your pardon!’

Thaniel smiled. ‘Where’s Mori, do you know?’

‘Not at home,’ Suzuki said stiffly.

Thaniel would have laughed if he’d been less anxious. ‘I’m not selling pins at the door. Where is he?’

‘I really don’t know,’ Suzuki said, escorted him in silence to his room and then floated away again.

He was right; Mori wasn’t here. Thaniel found Six playing with Katsu and Hotaru, the little gardener boy, and saw Lady Shimazu and some other women chatting over teacups in one of the hot pools on the lower levels, but no Mori. Out on the shore, the lighthouse flashed, and once again, little bells chimed and jingled through the house. Afterwards, listening hard, he could just hear the snackle and beep of Morse as Kuroda’s men moved and exchanged notes. It was almost dark now. Thaniel hesitated on the verandah. His ribs hurt, and he was tired – exhausted – but he didn’t think he could just sit still and wait for Mori.

He took a lamp and set out for the lighthouse. At least if he knew what the hell was going on there, he would have more to tell Mori than a vague accusation of nothing particular against Kuroda and Takiko.

NINETEEN

Tokyo, July 1881 (eight years earlier)

Kuroda thumped a journalist on the way out the office. It would, of course, only lead to another sketch of him as an ape or an especially fat catfish – he had never understood why the catfish joke had taken off so well in the cartoons. Politicians had whiskers and catfish had whiskers, but so did any number of things: rats, actual cats, raccoons. Beavers. Mori always said it was because nobody wanted to be accused of portraying government ministers as if they might be friendly or fluffy. Kuroda had wanted to ask what the hell kind of rats Mori had met, but Mori had a skewed idea of the world. If Mori ever came across a rat, it wouldn’t give him the plague; it would make friends, give him an enchanted present, and arrange for him to marry a moon princess before the end of the fortnight. Mori always ended up with princesses where everyone else got plague.

Kojimachi glimmered. At a glance it would have been difficult to see the difference between now or a hundred years ago. Only from certain angles: if you didn’t glance toward Hibiya at the be-cloistered atrocity that was the Rokumeikan, or the Foreign Ministry, or the new brick townhouses everyone seemed so keen about. The city Kuroda knew was fading away. It made him feel old, and stupid, and pushed out. He was forty-one. That was too young to feel evicted from your own country.

He didn’t want to go home, so he bought another bottle of sake from the shop on the corner, and drank it on the train to Yoruji. It was only an hour’s journey on the train from Shimbashi, and a portion of the track was by the sea, which was black and sighing.

Yoruji was at the top of a steep, uneven path from Yokohama’s little station. He loved seeing it from below in the dark, lit up and warm, its lamps casting gold veneers underneath the old temple rooftops. It felt like home.

He let himself in to find that Mori was waiting for him in the smoking room, reading the Daily. All the doors and windows were open, the mesh screens shut to keep out the curious cicadas and let in the sea breeze. It was glorious after the sweating mess that was central Tokyo.

‘Is that tomorrow’s edition?’ Kuroda said, roughly. He had never been nervous about what the papers said, but he couldn’t remember them being quite so aggressive before, even during the Korea campaign.

‘Yes.’ Mori turned it around to show him the headline. Kuroda glanced at it. It was something along the lines of GOVERNMENT CORRUPTION SCANDAL SPARKS UNPRECEDENTED POPULAR OUTCRY. He took care not to remember it exactly.

‘Popular outcry,’ he growled. He poured himself some more sake. ‘Most of those outcrying people have no idea what a land deal looks like.’

Across from them, beyond one of the little, dense gardens, Mrs Pepperharrow and Kuroda’s wife were sitting in another room, all lit up, drinking tea at a table of their own. They were watching; they’d seen Kuroda come in. Mrs Pepperharrow leaned over the tea table and murmured something that made Countess Kuroda nod seriously.