Page 48 of The Lost Future of Pepperharrow

She sat in silence for a while, still too full of rage to ask if he was all right.

Mori was silent too. He was sitting back against the wall now, his eyelashes full of pain tears that didn’t fall and his hands clamped together, but he was still shaking. With a little tide of disbelief, she realised he was going into shock.

‘I didn’t even touch you,’ she snapped, and then went still when she heard herself. She was doing now what Kuroda always did. He was furious, he lashed out, he faded back and knew he’d gone too far, but he didn’t apologise because he wasn’t sorry, not really. And then, because he wasn’t sorry, he was angry with whoever he’d thumped for being hurt.

It was different, obviously it was different, the fury voice snarled.

‘Joy,’ she said softly. ‘Come on, let’s … let’s get you up. Come and sit down in the warm. You’re cold.’ He was. His hands were bloodless when she pulled him upright. She set him down again near the fire. She knelt down too and stoked it up, though she was too hot now. He made a sign to say thank you, and then let his head drop down on his knees. She sat looking at him for a long time, turning over and over the prickling realisation that, whatever he had just done, however bad, he was so utterly vulnerable that she was going to have to be more careful. All the anger misted into the awful bleak frustration of being the strongest person in the room by far.

She caught herself on the edge of apologising, understood just in time what he was doing, and almost punched him again. Fragile he might be, but Takiko was damned if she’d let him turn that fragility into armour when he had just used Countess Kuroda’s to smash her to pieces. She didn’t know yet how she was going to do it, but she was going to get a collar on Mori if she died trying.

TWENTY

Yokohama, 19th December 1888

The tide had gone right out when Thaniel stepped down onto the dark beach with a lamp. The lighthouse rock was on dry land now, or the nearer half of it was. The little boat that had been outside before was gone. So was the white shirt at the top. It was after midnight now, and for the first time since he’d been a child, he couldn’t see street lights. Just the lights at Yoruji, and, in the lighthouse tower, a single point of candlelight. He trod over the crackly sand and started up the steps.

They were even and unweathered. At the top, the door was propped open, just, with a well-shined shoe. He tapped on the briny wood. Nobody answered. He pushed open the door. Inside was a spiral stairway that stretched up to the blackness at the top of the tower. He started up, slowly, because his lamp threw harsh shadows along the stairs that spun as he rounded the spirals, and soon he found why the lighthouse-keeper had propped the door open rather than take the keys. They were on a hook near the top of the stairs, big, churchy things that weighed hardly less than a metronome when he lifted them. They clanked as he let them go. There were four. That was a lot, he thought, for one door.

The lamp room was dark except for that one candle, which had burned right down at a desk by the window. He lifted his own little lamp, which was just bright enough to shine on all the machinery inside. Much more machinery than any ordinary lighthouse would have needed.

Parts of it in were wooden and glass casing, parts of it open strings and clockwork, some of which went up through the ceiling in exposed bronze mechanisms. The rest of the space, or almost all of it, was taken up by a table scattered about with papers, many of which were photographs. They all showed the same thing; mirror-twin zigzag lines, pale against dark backgrounds.

The machine, whatever it was, was working. Suspended inside a box, open at the moment but with a hinged side and a clasp that would lock it, was a fragile pair of metal prongs that looked like wishbones. They were moving; they drew together and apart, slowly, though the room was completely still. It was nothing to do with the wind. Beyond the big windows, the sea might have been a lake, and mist hung undisturbed at different heights above the black water.

He used to have a distrust of machinery, but he’d watched Mori teach Six, and when you were looking at something you didn’t know, the principle was always the same; start with what you did know, and trust that the rest wasn’t beyond the wit of man.

The only thing he recognised for sure was a clock. It was worked into the side of the machine, with a heavy counterweight and a pendulum that came to a precise point. The clock wasn’t framed, and the workings were uncovered at the back. A wire led up from it. He climbed on a chair to see where it went. Inside were strings and pulleys, and a little clockwork mechanism.

‘Right,’ he said aloud, because the colour of the sound made tentative thoughts look more solid. ‘So that regulates – vertical motion, so it’s pulling something up. In … front of this lens here, which …’ He had to climb down again. ‘Is a camera,’ he said, puzzled.

There were photographs on the table. He picked one up and held it beside the camera chamber until he understood. If there had been photographic paper underneath them now, the tips of the two moving prongs would be making the same patterns as the pale lines in the picture. The point of the machine was to record the motion of the moving points on a photograph.

He looked up at the ceiling, where the stem of the prongs disappeared. He opened the little glass door out onto the gantry. On top of the roof, in line with the machinery inside, was a tall lightning rod.

It wasn’t stormy now. Certainly there was no lightning. Inside, the prongs moved gently. He sighed. He never understood what was going on with electricity. Nobody had been able to tell him what was actually moving when they talked about electric current. Even Mori didn’t know. He would, he said, be dead before anyone explained it, which meant he couldn’t remember. Six said it might be ether, but nobody knew what ether was either. That wasn’t quite true; his ex-wife Grace probably did know what ether was.

The door thunked closed downstairs. There was no use hiding. He went to the door instead. The lighthouse-keeper’s steps were more than halfway up the stairs.

‘Evening,’ Thaniel called down. ‘Sorry I let myself in. I’m lost.’

The steps paused, then sped up, and a man the opposite of what Thaniel had expected appeared on the landing. He was in a nicely ironed shirt and delicate spectacles, and his hair was neat and side-parted, Western style. He didn’t look anything like a lighthouse-keeper. He looked like somebody from somewhere in the middle of the civil service. He looked flustered too. He was still tucking in his shirt in a way that seemed like he was hoping a bit desperately that Thaniel wouldn’t ask where he’d been in the middle of the night. ‘What? I don’t speak English, what are you doing up here?’

‘I was on the beach, but then the fog came in and now I’m lost. You don’t happen to know where we are?’

The man blinked twice, then took off his spectacles and polished them on a fold of his shirt. ‘In … relation to where? I’m sorry, I’m really not very good at English …’

‘I’m not speaking English,’ Thaniel pointed out, but patiently. He had a theory that for an oriental person to hear an occidental one speak understandably was a good deal like it would have been for an Englishman to encounter a talking horse who wanted to know the way to the tobacconist’s. The best you could do was get in a chunk of clear grammar, so that people knew, at least, that you were a well-educated horse.

‘Oh. Ah … you’re not, are you.’

‘I was hoping to find Baron Mori’s house?’ Thaniel said, trying to seem as unhorsey as he could. ‘I wouldn’t have bothered you, but I saw the candle, so I hoped …’

‘Oh – oh. The house. Er … it’s up that way. You can go past the big gingko trees at the top there.’

‘Thank you. So what’s this thing?’

‘Oh, heavens,’ the man laughed. ‘Rather complicated I’m afraid. It measures atmospheric electricity. We’re a weather station up here, you see. It’s called an …’ He said something Thaniel had never heard before, to do with electricity. ‘Quite neat really, only about six of them in the world til recently.’