Page 53 of The Lost Future of Pepperharrow

‘I’ll give you anything you want.’

‘What? I don’t want money—’

‘I didn’t say money, I said anything.’ He shook his head once. ‘Anything. You want to keep me locked up forever, I’ll do it. You want Kuroda dead, I’ll do it, or ironclad women’s rights, or universities in Countess Kuroda’s name, a family; anything.’ He didn’t touch her, but his fingertips were an inch above her arm. ‘No tricks.’

She stared at him for a long time. She should have said no, she could feel it, but it would have been right on the line where prudence became cowardice. ‘Kuroda faces real justice for what he did, and you never manipulate anything ever again if it’s more significant than a pet rabbit.’

‘Done,’ he said softly. He looked fragile in that desperate, terrible, composed way he had on the night the Countess died.

She swallowed. He had killed the Countess, he was by every measure in the world a murderer, and God knew how often he’d done it when Takiko wasn’t there to see, but she had an awful sense that she had just slammed a beautiful wild animal, one that had always trusted her, into a cage. When she spoke, her voice came out too harsh. ‘So what is it you want me to do?’

‘There’s a prison camp in the north, in Hokkaido.’ He paused as if it was hard to make himself say the words. ‘Abashiri. You have an uncle who lives there; I sent him there years ago. Get inside the prison. I can’t remember now why you need to be there. But I do know that you need to look for something …’ He was staring hard into the middle distance. ‘Strange,’ he said at last. ‘Anything that doesn’t belong. I know that’s counterproductively vague.’

She hesitated. She’d heard about the prisons in the north. Everyone had. But only in general terms, because nobody ever came back, and they didn’t let journalists in. ‘Mori, you were in Russia for six months. And now the Russian fleet is here. What if you did that? What if what you’ve forgotten is that in the long run, you think Japan will be better off if it’s part of the Russian Empire, and you’re arranging the war?’

He nodded a little. ‘Yes. I sent them, yes, I told a friend in the Okhrana to send them before Kuroda’s new ironclads arrived. I don’t know why, though.’ He paused. ‘I told him something about wars and Americans, but I think I was lying.’

The honesty set her off balance. She had expected excuses or denials, not just a frank owning up. ‘If they fire on Nagasaki,’ she said slowly, ‘they’ll murder tens of thousands of people.’

‘I know,’ he said. ‘I don’t know why I’d risk that. Can you think why I’d do that? I didn’t – tell you, somehow?’

‘No.’

He nodded again. He was holding himself steady and still now, but the edges of the panic from before were still there. He was looking past her, not at her.

‘Hokkaido,’ she said after a long time. There was nothing in Hokkaido but endless forest, bears, and those labour camps. It was exactly the kind of place Mori would send someone meddlesome to get her out of the way. ‘I’ll think about it.’

He hugged her, hard, and not like he was worried he could hurt her. It was a thump of bone on bone. When he kissed her forehead, an ashamed part of her was glad he was unhappy.Another part, one that whispered in the Duke’s paper voice, wondered if that couple hundreds of years ago in the woods had thought they’d made a clever deal with the Winter King too.

She was too anxious to go to bed. Instead she sat by one of the hot pools with a view over the bay, her ankles in the water, and tried to calm down. If Mori knew she was helping Kuroda and he was angry, he had no need to send her to Hokkaido on a wild goose chase. He could just arrange for her to be arrested for something vague right here, or for her to break a leg falling down the stairs.

And he wouldn’t have made a promise like the one he had if he’d any intention of keeping it, surely. Surely.

She wondered what it looked like when a fleet of ironclads shelled a town. She knew what it looked like after; when she was little, they used to go on holiday to Kagoshima, which the Americans had blasted to kingdom come not that long ago. Her father had put her in one of the craters in the castle walls to take a photograph. She asked Kuroda when he came out.

‘It’s beautiful, actually,’ he said. When he sat down, he kept a tentative distance. Ever since that night with the Countess, he had been anxious around her. She didn’t know if it was because he was genuinely frightened of himself now around women, or because he was scared of what she might put on the stage. ‘Like God’s own firework show. I’ll take you on a ship one day, you can see. Are you worried about the Russians?’

‘Not worried, I was just thinking about it.’ She sighed. ‘Abashiri prison. Mori wants me to go there. Does that mean anything to you?’

Kuroda frowned. ‘Abashiri, no. Well, it’s a labour camp. It’s one of eight or nine up there. Did he say anything else about it?’

‘I’m worried he’s sending me because he knows I’m talking to you.’ She was almost sure Kuroda was lying. His eyes had sparked when she mentioned Abashiri. It was such a benign-sounding word; it meant ‘netting-run’, so it must have begun life as a fishing village and not a labour camp, but already it had more gravity than it should have. ‘To get me out of the way. If you know what’s there and why he might want me to go, I’ll go. If he’s just getting rid of me – the winters are hard up there. It might be a death sentence.’

Kuroda smiled. ‘How do I know you’re not in cahoots with him and you’re not going to do one of your Kali manoeuvres and screw me utterly? You’re only talking to me at all because I’m the lesser of two evils, but he’s a charming bastard. He could have talked you round.’

She shook her head. ‘You are the lesser of two evils. You’re a vicious idiot with a drinking problem, but he … isn’t. He’s entirely sane, and very clever. And he watched you drink, and drink, and then he watched you kill your wife. Maybe it was you who hit her, but only like it’s the bullet and not the man behind the gun that hits someone. And now, he’s watching the Russian fleet get closer, and closer. If there’s a choice between loyalty to my charming husband or serving my country, I’ll serve.’

‘Well, you’re a samurai now,’ he said gruffly. ‘Obviously you want to serve. Basic chivalry.’

She sighed. Probably it was a decent translation of what she’d said into Hopeless Posh-Boy, but it made her fingernails itch. ‘Chivalry – Kuroda, you know when women put vegetables on a spoon and zoom it round so their kids think it’s a magic butterfly or something? Chivalry is just what your mum called being a decent human so you’d feel like a really good boy when you were nice to people. Don’t say it to grown-ups.’

He snorted. ‘Like I say. Samurai.’

They were both quiet for a while.

‘At Abashiri,’ Kuroda said at last. ‘If you see that he’s set up something – dodgy. Put a stop to it.’

She nodded. God knew what was really going on in Hokkaido. The only thing to do was go to the north and see, and make sure that somehow or other, she got a collar on Mori and Kuroda both, before either of them could do anything too nasty.