Page 63 of The Lost Future of Pepperharrow

‘Ghosts again.’

‘Mm, the exorcist didn’t help. He gave us a refund.’ Thaniel wondered hopefully if someone had lit a fire down there after all. He was starting to find he could live without all sorts of things – Mori, a piano, working lungs – as long as there was a decent supply of coffee.

‘The second law of thermodynamics suggests it probably isn’t ghosts.’ She studied her own buttons, looking like a baby. ‘Have you explained to them about that?’

He sighed. ‘No. I don’t know it would be right to. This isn’t our country, people see differently.’

‘No they don’t. Thermodynamics aren’t geographically specific.’

‘Blue and green are the same colour here. What if, when someone here says blue, they mean what I’d say is green? What if ghost doesn’t mean ghost?’

She frowned. ‘What else could ghost mean?’

‘I don’t know. That’s the point.’

He saw her decide to be kind to him, even though she didn’t believe it. ‘That’s fair.’

They reached the dining-room door. He set her down on the threshold so that she could go on ahead. She always sat with the stable-master’s twins, girls about her age and nicely calm. They were doing her good.

The dining room was full. The chatter gave it a party feeling. There were Imperial purple runners along the tables and at the serve-yourself counter at the far end, little cakes iced with the symbol of the royal household sat in stacks. He went over tentatively. There were cafetières. He put his hand on the side of one of them. Hot. Thank God. He made off with it and claimed the empty end of a table, feeling gleeful.

The coffee cups always came paired with a silver bowl of icing sugar. Mrs Nakano had said once that she’d heard how foreigners put milk and sugar in coffee, but sugar hadn’t really caught on here yet and he doubted that many people knew there were different types of it. No one had mentioned it to her. It would have been ungrateful, and it was too much fun to play with. He dropped the spoon in it to make a mushroom puff of powder that tasted sweet when he leaned over it.

There was no cutlery anywhere, except chopsticks. Even the teaspoon was porcelain. He wondered at first if it was some kind of subtle revenge against Vaulker, who thought chopsticks were heathen, but then realised that it was probably the electricity. If his cufflinks were getting too hot to wear, the silverware would be too hot to use.

With the cup warm between his hands, he watched the stablehands in the courtyard fitting out the good carriage with ribbons for the occasion. Once the coffee had wound up his springs enough, he fetched the paperwork about Grace Matsumoto. A single form to launch a full murder inquiry was forty pages long. He’d done most of it now, but he was having to come up with some creative lies to keep Matsumoto’s name out of it, and that had involved telegraphing Grace’s father, Lord Carrow, in London. The reply wouldn’t come for a few hours yet at least, with the time difference. Thaniel had signed it just as ‘British legation, Tokyo’. His own name wouldn’t do any good.

Hands landed on his shoulders. He jumped.

‘Easy! I hate to interrupt you with sublunary considerations, but is that a murder investigation? And is it someone delicious and interesting?’

‘Standard practice for when a citizen goes missing,’ he said, as someone with a carnation in his buttonhole sat down and stole the rest of the milk. Feeling grateful for the interruption, Thaniel decided it probably counted as an honour to have your milk stolen by the Minister for Education.

Arinori spent a lot of unnecessary time at the legation, which he used like a gentlemen’s club; he’d been the ambassador in London five years ago and he had a horror, he said, of letting his English slide. Thaniel thought he did it mainly to annoy conservatives. Kuroda hated the Anglicisation of hats, never mind the government. ‘You know,’ Arinori said, ‘you could be handsome if you didn’t cut your hair like a sailor.’

‘What are you doing here?’ said Thaniel, who cut his hair like a sailor because it meant having it cut less often.

‘I stayed the night. I was writing a speech.’ Arinori dipped his fingertip into his coffee, then into the icing sugar, and sucked it pensively.

‘Oh, a speech. Abolishing kanji still?’

‘I’d have thought you’d be for the idea.’

‘What, because I’m a stupid gaijin?’

‘Well, yes,’ Arinori said. ‘You have smaller brains. Look at you, you weren’t made to write, you were made to nut a mammoth.’

Thaniel stole the milk back. ‘But it wouldn’t help foreigners or anyone learn, would it, to write Japanese in Roman letters? Niwa niwa niwa niwa ga iru.’ In the garden are two chickens. ‘How are you going to know if you’re talking about a garden or a chicken if you don’t have the pictographs? Or tell the difference between jishin like confidence and jishin like an earthquake, or your nose or a flower … or any of the other fourteen million identical words you never phonetically differentiated because the entire language is nicked from Chinese but you couldn’t be bothered with the tones?’

‘That was quite a good rant. Did you practise on the mammoths?’

‘The speech isn’t about kanji, is it.’

‘No, it’s about the sovereignty of the Emperor.’ Arinori smiled. ‘Anyway. How are you?’

‘Not bad,’ Thaniel said. ‘What about this weather, though?’ Now that he’d said it, he wondered what was going on in the kitchen. They’d been so adamant about the fires that he couldn’t imagine the ovens were running. But here they were with hot coffee and pastries.

Arinori moved his cup to one side and collapsed face-first on the table. ‘I’ve died of boredom. You’ll have to apologise to my wife.’