"Nakamura"s Flower Fires," Thaniel read. He looked at Mori. "What does that mean?"
"Fireworks."
Toward the back of the shop was an open s.p.a.ce with tatami mats and a low workbench, where an old man knelt cutting straight, thin sticks from bamboo canes. He looked mortified when he saw them, and fell straight on to the floor in front of them. Thaniel thought he had fainted, but it was a bow. When he sat up again, there was a smudge of dust on his forehead. Although he wiped it away, the deep lines in his skin remained lighter. Mori helped him up. He was younger than Thaniel had thought, but ailing with something difficult. Behind him, a curtain rustled and a woman eased the edge of it aside, but she dropped it when she saw them all.
"You can"t do that whenever you see me," Mori was saying.
"Mori-sama is very kind, but I know my place." Nakamura looked helpless. "What has he done now?"
"It was nothing," Mori said. "But perhaps he shouldn"t have a sword."
"Where did you find a sword?" Nakamura demanded of his son. Thaniel propped it against a bench, out of Yuki"s reach "Mori-sama, I am so sorry-"
Mori interrupted him quietly in j.a.panese. Nakamura started to reply, and then hung his head. Yuki snorted, but there was an awkwardness to his impatience.
"He needs to be apprenticed," Nakamura said miserably. "He has nothing to do but label boxes here and go to his meetings in town." Thaniel glanced at Yuki. He was probably popular among the more insane Irish. "I was wondering, Mori-sama, if perhaps ... "
"I"m not sure clockwork would suit him," Mori said quietly.
"I don"t understand?"
Yuki did. His expression hardened again and his black eyes strayed to the shelves of fireworks. Thaniel was inclined to agree with him. Forbidding the boy clockwork seemed like a vain effort when he already worked in a firework shop. The longest rockets stood in ricks tied with string, or baled tightly on the shelves. There were hundreds. The workbench was scattered with planed sticks and coloured paper, and labels, and bowls and packets of powders whose shades varied from silvery grey to white. One set of jars were opaque black to keep out the sun. Their tags were built of old, complicated characters, the sort that had first been drawn in the sand of sulphur-seamed caves to describe what there wasn"t a word for yet.
"Never mind," Mori said. "I think Mr Yamas.h.i.ta is looking for someone to help him."
"But that"s bow-making."
"It"s a good solid trade and it"s difficult enough to be interesting, and it"s traditional. And Yamas.h.i.ta is strict."
"Yes," Nakamura said. "Yes, sir." He pushed his son"s shoulder. "Apologise to Mori-sama. Now!"
Yuki looked away like a cat. There were frustrated tears in his lashes.
"If you"re polite," Mori said quietly to him, "Yamas.h.i.ta might teach you how to use that sword, too. You could be good."
Yuki blinked, startled by the praise, and his father seemed unable to decide between pleasure and shame.
"Good night," Mori said, bowing slightly. Nakamura hauled his son on to the ground, where they both stayed.
Thaniel led the way out. After a short while he said, "Nationalist meetings and a shop full of fireworks sound like two things that would be better not lined up."
"True."
"Couldn"t you have arranged for him to be without one or the other?"
Mori was quiet. Then, "You said to that policeman that he should fight someone his own size."
"Yes?"
"Yuki isn"t my size. I"ll take a bomb from him if he makes one, but I don"t want to stop him making one. It"s shaking a baby or kicking a kitten." He sighed. "I mean-"
"No, I"ll take your word for it."
"Bet your life on it?" Mori said ruefully.
"Yes." The truth of it had a helium lightness. As they started back to the village gate, he took Mori"s hand to see what damage Yuki had done. There was a long cut across his knuckles where the sharp edge had just caught him, and a red stripe from the flat that would bruise later. Mori watched him look, not for long, then pulled his hand back and folded his arms. It was a lonely thing to do, Thaniel thought. He wanted to ask what the matter was, but he saw Mori"s shoulders stiffen at the approach of that future, then ease again when he stopped intending it.
"Lord Carrow is outside our house," he said. Thaniel sighed, because he had forgotten about Grace and he was tired now, and not keen to argue with a man he didn"t know. Mori didn"t look at him, but his nearer shoulder eased back, like an opening door so that they could speak from adjoining rooms. "You needn"t do it."
Thaniel shook his head. "I think it"s a bit late for that."
NINETEEN.
The Carrow carriage had stopped opposite number twenty-seven. It must have been there for a while, because the horses were restless and shaking their heads. Its lamps illuminated the family crest painted in blue and white, and once Mori had slipped inside the house by himself, the carriage door opened and a tall man with a silk-lined cape stepped out. He stood with his cane in front of him, looking at Thaniel hard.
"Do you intend to marry my daughter?"
"Yes." Lord Carrow"s expression tightened. "She was very straight. She said she had to marry somebody and means didn"t matter."
"This is utterly ridiculous-"
"It is, but that"s not her fault, is it."
Carrow looked as if he would have liked to hit him with the cane. "You will sign a contract agreeing to keep the Kensington house, which I"m certain she"s mentioned to you, in perfect repair, which will require you to live there. You will not sell it. The dowry will be given in instalments, not all at once. Control of it will remain in my hands. By G.o.d, if you think you"re marrying money, you"ve another thing coming."
"I don"t want her money."
They stood in silence. Thaniel looked across at the workshop window, where the lights were now on. Mori was starting to put the wrecked workshop back into order. There were lights in the other shops too, and their windows were doll"s house tableaux of men working or talking, or eating.
"I rather think," Carrow said, "that this is a stunt of hers to prove a point, and that she will refuse you in order to be unmarriageable. However, I believe in calling bluffs. So I do hope, Mr Steepleton, that you are happy to live the rest of your life with a woman you don"t know." He looked Thaniel up and down once again. "I find you insolent."
"You must have known that she would hop if you put up a sign that said don"t walk."
"How dare you!"
Thaniel sighed. "Would you like to come in for some tea?"
"Of course I wouldn"t."
"Good night, then."
Carrow gripped his cane hard again but didn"t raise it. Instead he turned away suddenly and stepped up into the carriage, which moved off with a jolt. Thaniel let himself into the workshop. Mori had been setting things back into the gla.s.s cabinets, but he turned at the sound of the door and there was a silent catch in which Thaniel didn"t know what to say to him.
He took a plain steel ring from his waistcoat pocket and held it out. "This is the right size for her. You"ll need to show it to the jeweller tomorrow."
Thaniel took it carefully. In Mori"s hand it had looked larger. After sliding it into his pocket, he stood for a moment with his fingertips resting on the workbench.
"Come and have a drink," he said at last. "I ... seem to be getting married."
Mori brought some sherry from the cupboard and curled himself into the armchair while Thaniel sat on the hearth to light the fire. Feeding curls of sawdust into the kindling, he heard the mellow noise of the wine flowing through the bottle neck, and caught the smell of it over the burning twigs. When he turned back, the fire snapping behind him, Mori held out a gla.s.s.
"Do you want to be married?" he said.
"She says that we can send Annabel"s boys to a proper school. In London, so I could see them." It would have made more sense of the thing to say that it was because of Grace"s work, not real trust in Mori, that he had come back from Whitehall, but he couldn"t. Having seen what the police had done and how they had done it, he wanted to take that particular story to his grave. "People say marriage first and love later. Is it true?"
"In this case yes."
"That would be ... " He didn"t finish, because he couldn"t find a word. He had always thought he would never marry, so he had never strayed into imagining it.
Mori clipped their gla.s.ses together softly. "Congratulations."
Thaniel took a breath, and a sort of indignant, surprised happiness spilled out. He worried about dealing with Lord Carrow and what would be the state of the ominous-sounding Kensington house, and ran on until he realised that he was waiting for Mori to say something without having given him s.p.a.ce to, or any indication that he ought to interrupt.
"I sound like an idiot," he said, not sure how else he could apologise without sounding dishonest.
The sharp line of Mori"s collarbone traced a brief angle before falling back to the horizontal. The firelight pooled in the hollow between the bones. He had taken off his tie and collar. "You do. But that"s a very good sign." He smiled, but only half. If he had not been speaking, he could have been Yuki"s age.
Thaniel set down his gla.s.s, and took out the watch. Mori"s black eyes followed his hand.
"You left this for me, didn"t you? Why?"
"You"re my friend and you would have died. You wouldn"t have listened to a stranger in a coffee house. It had to be something you were wondering about for a long time."
"I did. What was the extra clockwork for?"
"To measure where you were. If the alarm went off at the wrong moment you would have been in the blast when you stopped, not outside it. You didn"t know to listen for it, so it had be variable. Makes it a bit heavy actually, I can take it out now if you like."
"No ... no." He couldn"t believe he hadn"t seen that before. A man who knew he was listening for an alarm didn"t need it to measure where he was. "But I tried to get rid of it. If the p.a.w.nbroker had taken it ... "
Mori smiled again. "Have you read the warranty?"
"Of course I haven"t read the warranty."
"Paragraph three. All watches belong to their owners for life. If you break your watch, I"ll repair it for no charge, and if you lose or sell it, it will be returned. p.a.w.nbrokers won"t buy them any more, they disappear too quickly. Obviously some people don"t want their watches back if they"ve sold them, but it"s good to have a bit of mystery around things."
"You can be unsettling."
"Sorry." He looked at his knees. "Anyway, I might go to bed. I"m getting drunk."
He said his good nights and, once he had gone, Thaniel moved into the armchair. Sitting on the slate hearth had made the base of his back ache. From the chair, he could see through the half-closed door to the stairs, where Mori had stopped. He stood with his arms folded, his focus somewhere in the middle distance. It was a full minute before he went on again. The lock on his door turned, heavily. Thaniel listened for a while longer, because the silence was so deep and clear that he could hear ghosts of the thirty-six of thirty-seven possible worlds in which Grace had not won at the roulette, and not stepped backward into him. He wished then that he could go back and that the ball had landed on another number. He would be none the wiser and he would be staying at Filigree Street, probably for years, still happy, and he wouldn"t have stolen those years from a lonely man who was too decent to mention that they were missing.
TWENTY.
In the midst of everything else, Thaniel had forgotten Sullivan"s offer. He rediscovered the business card when he was emptying his pockets the next morning for laundry. The first rehearsal was on Sunday evening in two days" time.
When the day arrived, he went straight from Whitehall to the Savoy Theatre, arriving early so that there would be time to look at the music first. He"d been before, but only in crowds. Empty, it was cavernous. He walked backwards to see the galleries. There were two tiers, arranged in a horseshoe around the proscenium arch. A couple of violinists were already in the pit, which smelled of polish and dust. He sat down at the new grand piano and lifted the lid. The keys beneath were real ivory. He stared at them, watching his white reflection.
At last, he touched one key. He felt the thrum of the string behind it as the sound unfolded around the quiet pit. The music was already on the stand. He played the first line, very quietly. Little colours fizzed. Something in his mind that had been dislocated for years clicked back into place, and although it was a tiny shift, it made him blink. He sat back and flicked through the ma.n.u.script until he found a more complicated section and tried that, but it was too shallow to be a useful test, so he tried a few lines of a Mozart concerto instead, from an unremembered storage vault in an unused part of his mind. It was still fresh.
So was everything else. Tallis with no pedal, Handel with, even the horrible organ piece that had been written for someone with three hands. He had thought it had all gone, but all he had done was lock himself up in a few little rooms and a.s.sume the rest of the house had fallen down. It hadn"t. There were doors and doors, and dust, but when the curtains opened and the drapes came off, it was all where he had left it and hardly faded. He took his hands from the keys and sat with them in his lap instead, because his thoughts were echoing in the new s.p.a.ce.
Somebody plinked two of the upper keys purply. Mr Sullivan smiled.
"How"s the score? Good G.o.d, are you all right?"
"I"m it"s just the dust, I think I"m allergic to something. The score"s easy to follow. Thank you."
"Excellent, excellent." He leaned down close. "I was hoping to get this all polished well before October, when we have a rather special guest coming. Around the twentieth. Do you think that"ll be possible?"
Thaniel nodded. "Who is it?"
"A minister from j.a.pan, a Mr Ito. He"ll be here for a formal something-or-other at Whitehall, but the j.a.panese amba.s.sador here mentioned the operetta and he"s asked to come and have a look, so, naturally we said yes. It"s going to be a special performance at the show village." He smiled sheepishly. "I was rather flippant about a visit from an oriental minister, but it turns out that he"s a bigger fish than I thought. Heard of him at all? You"re at the Foreign Office, yes?"
"Ito is their Home Secretary."
"I see? I see." He looked worried. "If you could manage not to trap your hand in a door the week before, I should be most grateful."
Thaniel nodded and thought that it was all a big flaming coincidence, and made a note to himself to ask Mori if perhaps he hadn"t arranged things so that his friend would have an interesting show to see, very close to home, where they might run into each other without his having to ask. It sounded typically shy.
A telephone rang out shrill and silver. It made Thaniel jump, which provoked a smile from Sullivan as he hurried to answer it. It was built into the wall of the pit.
"Mr Gilbert doesn"t like to come in every day, so we installed a line between here and his flat so that he can listen in." He picked up the receiver. "Yes, yes, got you. Tune up, everyone!"
Thaniel"s chest tightened. Playing with a room full of professionals was different to running through a few old things by himself, but there was no escape now. As Sullivan propped the receiver upright in its hook, facing into the pit, Thaniel leaned on a chord and the strings section produced a familiar tide of sharps and flats. They were all shades of seaspray around the Atlantic blue, almost exactly like Katsu"s higher hummings. Thinking of a small octopus made everything homely. A young violinist just beside him had trouble and looked lost, so he hummed the difference for him. While they adjusted the strings between them, Osei Yamas.h.i.ta glided by, dressed in her blossom-coloured kimono. He was confused to see her at first, until he remembered why Gilbert had been at the show village in the first place.
She had come to speak to Sullivan about costumes, which, she said, needed a third layer if they were to seem authentic. He looked uncertain in the face of her accent, and she had to repeat herself twice before he understood. Embarra.s.sed, he then agreed to everything, although there was a scritchy protest from the telephone, which seemed to think that the budget might not stretch. If Sullivan heard, he ignored it. Osei swept away again, but stopped when somebody in j.a.panese clothes went past her.
"Yuki-kun! What are you doing? Come back here!"
"The manager gave me a message for Mr Sullivan." As always, Yuki sounded irritable.
He delivered the note to a startled Sullivan, and when he returned to Osei, he gave Thaniel a hostile look. Thaniel tried for a smile. Yuki ignored it. He looked like a prisoner of war. He still wore his sleeves tucked up, and there was a small dagger in his wide belt, with a ribbon-bound hilt. Osei must have forced him to come. Thaniel watched them disappear back into the gloom of the backstage pa.s.sages, trying to think of a polite way to forbid him the knife.