Page 95 of The Lost Future of Pepperharrow

Thaniel waited again, staring at the Persian rug on the floor. There was a cat sitting on it, a beautiful grey one with huge green eyes. The quiet went fathoms down. Somewhere through the walls, he heard an argument break out, two men, but he couldn’t hear what they said. The quiet came back. The snick of the door was loud when the Duke opened it again.

‘Come with me,’ he said. He stood back and seemed wholly unworried that Thaniel was nearly a foot taller than him.

They went through to another room, much bigger and full of old, beautiful maps of the city, and then outside, across a snowy courtyard, to a shrine. It was beneath a huge pine tree whose trunk was tied with thick red rope. Thaniel had seen those at other shrines but he had never found out what they meant. The pillars inside were hung with prayer cards. It smelled of fresh-cut wood, which seemed always like a warm smell, even now when there was snow floating in with them. Under the bell was what he would have called an altar but probably wasn’t, and on the altar was something the size of a man, covered with a shroud. Someone else was there too, a broad man in a Western suit facing away from them. A priest beyond the barrier read out the day’s prayer cards. After each prayer, the bell tolled. Thaniel felt something under his ribs slither.

‘Keita Mori isn’t at Abashiri, Mr Steepleton,’ the Duke said. ‘He’s here. Or what’s left of him is.’

Everything spun without moving. When it stopped, he felt like panels of glass had thunked down around him. The world was still there and he could still hear it and see it, but it was muted and he might have been watching a play. He had started towards the altar before he had decided to move. The man standing there turned back. Thaniel only just had time to recognise that it was Kuroda before he was smacked flat on his back in the snow. Kuroda clamped one hand round his throat to keep him there.

Thaniel couldn’t talk, or breathe. Of their own accord, his hands had jolted up to catch at Kuroda’s wrist, but he stopped himself in time. He could think just clearly enough to see that if he touched Kuroda now he would end up in a Japanese prison for the rest of his life. The scar on his shoulder seared.

Kuroda let him go like touching him was repulsive.

‘Your Grace,’ Kuroda said to the Duke, ‘you’ll excuse all this, I hope. I’ll get him out of your sight now. Mr Steepleton, you’re under arrest. For murder.’

‘No!’ Thaniel said over him, jerking onto his feet again to turn to the Duke. ‘It was Kuroda’s men, the ghosts are still there! You can go and see!’

Kuroda nodded at someone and two men came up on either side of Thaniel. One of them was the man in the red coat with the Fabergé egg button. ‘You can indeed go and see if you like, your Grace, but what you’ll see is this parasite murdering your bannerman and setting fire to the place in a fit of jealousy. Found out Mori was married, you see. Look at his eyes now, he’s off his head on something. He got scared when he realised the ghosts would have recorded what he did, he’s taken something and now he’s come raving to you.’

‘Go and look for yourself,’ Thaniel begged the Duke. ‘You’ll see what happened.’

‘I should be gratified if you wouldn’t take it upon yourself to give me orders,’ Choshu said, as cool and quiet as he had been throughout. ‘And I shall not do the Prime Minister the indignity of doubting his word because some foreign troglodyte tells me so.’

‘Take him back to the British legation,’ Kuroda said to his men. ‘Make it clear to Secretary Vaulker that if he strays from British soil, he will be delivered back again in pieces. I want him deported and tried in London. Choshu, thank you for having invited me, it was very kind.’

The Duke bowed slightly and Kuroda bowed deeper. Two men pulled Thaniel away. He didn’t feel it. At the door he twisted back against them to see the shrine again, willing there to be some sign it wasn’t Mori, but the form under the shroud was the right size.

Thaniel didn’t remember the journey back to the legation. The first thing he remembered was ridiculous: he had to explain in third person what they had against him because Vaulker didn’t speak Japanese and Kuroda’s men refused to speak English, and no one else was good enough to translate well.

Vaulker wasn’t surprised. He directed them up to one of the diplomatic guest rooms at the top of the house. The men went away. Vaulker followed him inside and shut the door.

‘I didn’t,’ Thaniel said, but mechanically.

‘Well, let’s have your version then.’

He shook his head. Maybe he could have had a stab at explaining about a real clairvoyant and all the rest of it if he’d been feeling normal, but he wasn’t. It was half-past two in the morning.

Six had to be on the edge of blind hysteria by now. He couldn’t imagine anyone had taken the time to explain anything to her. They would all just be telling her no, she couldn’t see him, and to stop being a nuisance and go and play.

In the distant sort of way he recognised from fevers, he noticed that he couldn’t hold a thought for very long before he skipped onto the next one. They were skipping fast, all over the place, except to the memory of the shroud and the chapel, and the delicate bones; it was like trying to catch a swarm of frogs jumping away from a cat.

‘I’m sorry,’ Vaulker said after he had let the silence go on, ‘but I’m sending you back to England. This is far too sticky. You’ll be on the next ship out.’ He blew his breath out in a near-whistle. ‘If you want my advice, I’d tell them that you ought never to have been put into a position of responsibility in the first place. You weren’t educated or brought up for it, naturally it went wrong. Clearly you haven’t killed anyone, you’ve just been mixed up in something you don’t understand. Not your fault.’

Thaniel smiled a little. ‘You know it’s not just London and then a big wall and then Pandemonium. I didn’t get much school but I remember they were pretty solid about not killing your child’s godfather. It isn’t like getting the dative and the locative confused if you don’t learn your declension tables properly.’

Vaulker stared at him. When he spoke, his voice broke. ‘I know that. I’m telling you what to tell those fossils at the FO. There are men there who still disapprove of people who only have money because their grandfathers were promoted from the ranks at Trafalgar. People like … but you think I’m like them, of course, just because I bothered to learn to speak properly. Steepleton, I don’t know why you did it, and perhaps – God knows perhaps you didn’t – but I can’t do anything else, except what I’m doing. I’m going to lock you in now. Kuroda’s men are staying outside and … if you try to escape, I think they will shoot you. For God’s sake, think of your daughter.’

He let himself out. Thaniel watched the door close and heard the green clank of the lock, and felt nothing for a long, long lag before it broke over him. He pressed his hands over his mouth to keep from making a sound.

PART FIVE

FORTY

Abashiri, Hokkaido, 19th February 1889

Kabato prison was two hundred miles away. Most of the way was roadless through the forest, and it took the prisoners thirty days to arrive.

It was a very, very long month. Takiko had no idea what to do anymore. She’d never had no idea what to do, and she was so angry with the helplessness of it that she stopped being careful. She snatched five bewildered prisoners from in front of a firing squad – including the yakuza man who had beaten up Oemoto – and said she needed help cleaning if so many more people would be coming from Kabato. She’d been watching firing squads for days. They were trying to clear space in the cells. They let her have the five prisoners. The warden stirred himself enough to say it was irregular. She said it was free labour. That was that.