Page 62 of The Lost Future of Pepperharrow

Silence. Of course there was. But he felt straightened out for having said it.

Away from the second-hand heat of Vaulker’s fire, the air was freezing. There had been new snow. Down on the lawn, two more tents had arrived in the night. Fukuoka and his friends had cleared a space and lit a fire, which made one orange point in among all the white. Thaniel paused. Although he had tipped the jug at more than a steep enough angle, the water wasn’t moving. The surface had frozen. He smiled and cracked the ice with the handle of his razor. It wasn’t really winter until you’d done that at least once. When he was little, his sister had always laid a fire in the bedroom on the first day there was ice in the jug.

There was a polite tap on the window. It was Owlbert, who to Thaniel’s enduring surprise had decided to stay. He’d made a nest above the window of the doctor’s surgery, but when he was cold, he came up here. Thaniel opened the window and the owl shuffled in. Thaniel stroked him carefully, hoping he was all right. Owlbert hooted his deep purple hoot. His feathers were full of snow particles. Thaniel put a spare jumper around him. Owlbert shuffled about and then went to sleep.

‘Sleep well then,’ Thaniel said. He smiled. There was something lovely about a wild animal that came to see you to borrow your jumper.

He took his good shirt down from the hanger and basked in the feeling of cotton that was both good and well-ironed at the same time. He meant to put on proper cufflinks, but when he touched one, it sent out a static shock so hard he actually saw it, a crackle of blue. He put on ribbon ones instead and then paused tentatively over his watch before he brushed his fingertip over it. It didn’t shock him, but it was warm.

Sheet lightning flashed above the deep clouds. His wisdom teeth stung.

When he went out into the little living room, he found Six bundled up on the cold hearth like an owl. He bent down and made a fuss of her. She didn’t giggle, but she jigged a bit.

‘Who were you talking to before?’ she said.

‘Owlbert. He’s in there.’

‘Mm, he’s helping me keep an eye on you. May I show you something good?’ she said.

When he said yes, she hurried into her own tiny room across the corridor, which she shared with the stable-master’s twins, and came back holding one of her lightbulbs by the glass. She gave it to him and when he touched the stem, it lit up in his hands. It was the one Mori had made for her in Russia. The filament octopus rippled different brightnesses, so it looked like it was furling about in a bubble.

‘H … ow is it doing that?’

‘They just work,’ she said, pleased. ‘There’s electricity in the air. It’s not enough to light anything by itself but once there’s something conducting it a bit, they do. Look.’ She pointed. The leather top of her desk was tooled in a gilt pattern. All the lightbulbs scattered across it were lit. ‘That’s like a big circuit board now. I get shocks if I touch it.’ She smiled suddenly. Some of her new teeth were too big for her. ‘It really hurts.’

‘Well, that’s – unusual.’ In its bulb, the octopus floated on, serene. Thaniel had to look away from it, because, just for a second, he was back at Filigree Street, Mori a warm weight against his chest with The Tale of Genji propped on his ribs for Thaniel to read for Japanese practice. ‘Listen, let’s get all those together and put them in that bowl, before we set fire to something. They’ll look better all together anyway and I think you have to fill out a lot of forms if you electrocute children on legation premises.’

‘All right,’ she said, and together they gathered everything up, tiny bulbs and big, apple-sized ones, and put them all together into the pottery fruit bowl that never had any fruit in it. Even there, the filaments kept up a small, zithering glow. ‘It’s probably the storm.’

He glanced outside and paused when he saw how black the clouds were. Lightning flickered away in the distance again. It was snowing in spinning eddies, and cold emanated from the window pane.

Six tapped his arm. He hadn’t been looking impressed enough with the lightbulbs.

‘In the Daily a man said he was electrocuted by a weathervane,’ she said. ‘I cut that one out in case you could read it to me later.’ She looked worried that it was presumptuous, even though he had never once said no.

‘I will. Right, that all looks safe enough, doesn’t it?’ he said, wishing, not for the first time, for a sheet of rubber. It was one of those things he always meant to find and never got round to. The idea that a person ought to properly insulate his daughter wasn’t one that many shops had taken up. ‘Do you think they’re all right?’

Six put her hand over the bulbs. ‘They’re not hot.’

‘Good.’ He lifted her up. ‘Come on. Let’s find some breakfast.’ He felt depressed about the idea of a cold breakfast. No fires; no coffee.

She nodded again. He opened the door onto the back stairs. ‘Why are we going this way?’ she said, with an edge of panic in her voice.

‘Because I’m forgetful.’ He let the door swing closed again and went on, towards the main staircase. He always went the back way by himself, because it was quicker and it meant you didn’t walk the length of the house twice, but the butler had taken them up the big staircase the first time they had come, and that was the only way Six went.

He rapped his knuckles on Vaulker’s door as they passed. ‘Constitution ceremony today, remember,’ he said. Vaulker threw a shoe at the door. ‘And I need you to sign the forms for the investigation into the disappearance of that Englishwoman I told you about.’

The other shoe.

Six knew whose door it was. ‘Mr Vaulker tried to get out of paying me for fixing his phonograph,’ she said, ‘but I did my sad face and then he said all right and I could have all the cherry bakewell as long as I didn’t cry.’

Thaniel snorted. ‘Well played.’ He said it in Japanese in case Vaulker could hear.

‘And he doesn’t seem to know very much about Tesla,’ Six added. ‘But I’m not altogether certain that I can consider that to be a reflection of his moral fibre.’

He put his cheek against her hair. It was a bizarre way of talking, that catch between very simple and completely adult, but he knew exactly what it was. It was how Mori talked to her, and she was only copying his voice in her head. She hadn’t asked him about Mori.

They were passing right above the kitchen, and from that direction came shouting. Six twisted her nose.