The Watchmaker Of Filigree Street Part 23

'Miss Carrow,' he said.

'So, I've been working on an experiment to prove the existence of ether,' she said abruptly, because she didn't much like small talk even when she didn't know the exact wording ahead of time. 'It's there and there must be a way to see it I don't mean see, I mean record the effects, of course but nothing has worked so far. Thaniel told me about you a little while ago, and how you remember. I was wondering if you knew how do to it.'

'It's something about electricity and ... I think it's icing sugar that works well.'

She laughed. 'I don't suppose you'd happen to know any numbers or suchlike that might be less vague.'

'I don't. Sorry. It's not my area.'

'Not your area? How?'

He s.h.i.+fted. 'Well, I know that light is fascinating and full of scientific mystery, but mostly I use it for not walking into objects, and mostly I use ether for not walking into events. It's there, it's useful, it's ... not something I can study for more than ten minutes at once without falling asleep. I like mechanics. I'm not the right person to ask for mathematics.'

'But you can understand anything now that you ever could understand.'

'I'll never understand. Advanced physics is about describing things you can't know intuitively, so you describe it in numbers, but I've got it in front of me.' He was looking around the room rather than at her. He seemed to like it, and since coming in, he had eased closer to the burners. 'It's like listening to blind people with no sense of touch prove atom by atom the existence and possible features of an elephant when I'm not even very interested in elephants. I'm sorry,' he said, and he really did look sorry. He opened his satchel and held out a book. 'I think this helps.'

It was a collection of fairy stories. She took it slowly, and felt completely left behind. In those stories, there was always someone who was too unmagic to hear the trees speaking or see the elves in the branches, or who the woods quietly closed out of their own accord. She had never thought it would be her. 'Thank you, I suppose.'

He nodded and turned to go.

'Wait, Mori. I thought you would want to do this. I think you could, if you wanted to.'

'I really am sorry,' he said again, without denying it. 'But you don't need me. You'll get there by yourself soon.'

'Actually I think you're perfectly interested, but I've stolen your favourite toy and now you're teaching me a lesson,' she murmured, careful to keep any impatience from her voice.

He lifted his head and looked straight at her for the first time, not so much with anger as a sort of half-surprise. She felt suddenly as though she had thrown a stone, badly aimed, but still a stone, at a navy sniper.

'Please come along and forget it; you of all people know there will be other toys. This work is important.'

'You've stolen my favourite toy,' he repeated slowly, landing hard on toy, 'and now you've invited me down here to play with a new toy whose mind is a reasoning engine running on rails. But I don't like train sets, they're dull, and there is a certain urge to arrange a wreck for the sake of variation.'

She swallowed. 'Yes, I deserved that for rather a patronising metaphor. I am sorry, I meant it to be a joke.'

'There's no piano upstairs,' he said, more like himself.

'The ... floors need to be laid first.'

'But this floor looks new.'

'It is,' she said, confused.

'I see. Anyway, I'd better go, the Christmas orders are coming in already.'

'Oh, no ... ' she mumbled, and trailed off, because he had started up the stairs without waiting for her to say anything.

After a lag, she followed him up on an automatic urge not to let a guest see himself out. Because she rarely heard real hostility, it was only on the way, very gradually, that she understood he had not just been punis.h.i.+ng her for speaking down to him. It had been a very straightforward threat.

'Do these grow their own pear trees?' Thaniel called to him from the ladder. Her ribs panged. She wanted to pull him indoors.

'No, I couldn't fit enough clockwork inside for a whole tree,' Mori said. He picked up the next pear and climbed up on to the tree's low fork to hand it over. The gold surface striped briefly as it reflected their fingers. 'I'm going home, I'll see you later.'

'That was quick.'

'I couldn't help.'

'Oh. Never mind. I'll be a while, I'm waiting for a man with some carpets.'

'Ten minutes.'

'Why don't you stay a bit and wait with us, then?'

'No, I ought to get on.'

'Mori ... ' Thaniel began.

'I can't, I can't, I've left bread in the oven,' he said, already down on the ground again. He let himself out through the rusting gate and then disappeared among the traffic.

Grace reached the ladder as Thaniel was climbing down. Once he was back on the gra.s.s, he brushed splinters and moss from his hands. He smelled of the leaves.

'He doesn't like me,' she explained, and her voice came out tight. 'He was out of the laboratory within about forty seconds of coming in.'

Thaniel sighed. 'He's always strange, you shouldn't take it to heart.'

'I suppose it's no shock. He'll miss you terribly.'

He pushed his hands through his hair and found a leaf, which he dropped from shoulder height and watched as it sycamored down to the ground. 'He'll change his mind eventually.'

'How? There's nothing that could prompt it; he already knows what all the prompts are and if he's not convinced now, he never will be.'

He looked as if he might have disagreed, but the wind blew again then and a pear fell from the tree. He made a small sound in the back of his throat and started forward to find it in the long gra.s.s, then stopped suddenly. There was no time to ask him what was the matter before a thin gold stem crept up through the gra.s.s, along the tree trunk. It twisted around it, and grew its own small offshoots and creepers, which fastened themselves to the shape of the bark and the old, risen roots. Tiny leaves clicked as they opened, not as real ones did but unfolding like paper until they were ivy-shaped. They both stood back, and the ivy slowed and stopped at just about the height of a person, gleaming in the cold afternoon. Thaniel laughed. 'Not bad!'

She touched his arm. Other pears had fallen too, and the golden ivy had climbed up around the other trees. The vines creaked and sang as they stretched out their very last inches. It made her teeth ache. The gold was reflecting the leaves and the sky, and from any distance it looked like bright water that had become muddled and run up the tree trunks rather than down. By all accounts it was exquisite, but she wished that it was not right outside her front door.

'His name,' she said. 'Doesn't it mean woods? Forest, something?' She knew random snippets from Matsumoto.

'It ... probably used to, before aristocratic spelling interfered. Why?'

She shook her head. It was unlikely he knew anything about oriental poetry. 'I don't know. He unsettles me. He threatened me just now, I think. Something about my being a reasoning engine and his not liking trains. It sounded like years of acc.u.mulated dislike. To the point of wanting to hit me with a steam engine.'

'If he was going to hit you with a steam engine, he'd have done it by now,' Thaniel pointed out. 'Actually, if he hated you that much, we would never have met.'

'Why did he say it, then?'

'Probably to make sure you didn't invite him again. Sorry. I'll shout at him later.'

'No, don't. I don't want him to be angrier with me than he already is.'

He glanced down at her with a smile in his eyes. 'So he can change his mind for the worse but not for the better?'

'I think he can give in to an extant temptation,' she said, more precisely than was good-humoured.

He seemed not to recognise it as snappishness. A cart had stopped outside their gate. 'The carpet people are here.'

'Make sure they sort out the dining room properly, won't you?' she said, naming a random room at the back of the house. 'I'd like to get that one right, what with my mother wanting to visit.'

He looked at her as if he didn't know at all, but it was his habit to take her exactly at her word and do as he was told.

Once he had gone towards the dining room with the man in charge, Grace stepped in front of a younger man and cornered him in the hall. He looked surprised, but not suspicious, and so she ploughed ahead.

'You do all sorts of flooring, don't you? Not just carpets?'

'That's right, ma'am. Hardwoods mainly, lots of oak. Had you got something in mind?' he said hopefully.

'Well, actually my husband was hoping you could do us a favour. You see those trees out there? We really don't want them any more, but it would be a shame to burn pear wood. If you cut them down, you can have them for nothing.'

'Are you sure, ma'am? With all the gold-'

'There's a gardener coming tomorrow morning, so I'd cheerfully pay you extra to get it done quickly. Unless pear wood isn't so in fas.h.i.+on these days. Is it?'

'Oh, it is,' he said quickly. 'Well, if you're sure, ma'am, I'd be b.l.o.o.d.y delighted. I mean-'

'It's all right, I've married a very nearly Yorks.h.i.+re man, you're not going to out-swear him.' For the sake of speaking to workmen, she tended to say they were already married, and so did Thaniel: because my husband says so, and even better, because my wife says so, were rather more powerful phrases than 'Mr Steepleton' or 'Miss Carrow'. She wore her engagement ring backwards so that only the band showed.

He laughed at that and went straight back out to fetch some saws. She turned inside and made some tea, probably badly, and took it through to the dining room, where the master was rather ostentatiously re-measuring the complicated dimensions under Thaniel's grey eyes.

She had thought he would stray back into the garden at the first opportunity and she would have to make some excuse, but the carpet man was from Lincolns.h.i.+re too, and they made friends. The dining room had its new floor fitted nicely by the time he came away, and by then the trees were all gone. The branches had been cut off and stacked neatly by the firewood shed, and all that was left were the stumps, very fresh and yellow, and a debris of leaves over the gra.s.s. Among them winked little rags of gold. The whole garden was bigger and brighter. Thaniel stopped as if he had walked into a wall.

'What?' was all he said at first.

'The carpenter asked if he could have some pear wood cuttings. So I said he could take the lot. That's all right, isn't it?'

'Where's the clockwork?'

'In the basket there.'

It was; the carpenter had unwound it carefully, and some of it had snapped like real vines would have, but it was largely intact.

'I'd better give it back to him,' he said. He looked down at it for a while. 'I'll just take it round, I'll be back in half an hour.'

He picked up the basket and set off down the newly bright garden, without looking to either side or back. She watched him turn left, toward Knightsbridge, and realised that she had upset him much more than she had meant to.

TWENTY-THREE.

Unconsulted, Lord Carrow had arranged the wedding for the day before Gilbert and Sullivan's show, and so Thaniel was scheduled to miss beheading by twenty-four hours. He wasn't worried about the performance, but he had spent more time at the piano than he had at the Kensington house. He had added up the hours on his way home with Mori's broken clockwork. He was still absently multiplying when he pushed open the workshop door.

'Oh, never mind,' Mori said before he could get out an apology. 'They would only have gone to waste in the attic.'

He set the basket down by the door. In the cold snap, Mori had acquired a brazier that had stayed lit for the last few days. The embers in the middle of the grate waved the air. Thaniel unwound his scarf and hung it up by the lotus clock. Mori was still wearing his, and when he wasn't talking, he ducked his head so that he could breathe into it. The shop was closed today; he was doing his taxes. The book in front of him was all columns of j.a.panese numbers. Because he wrote with his left hand on the left page and his right on the right, the figures slanted in opposite directions and looked as though he had written only one page, then printed it against the other while it was still damp. In the basket, some of the gold ivy leaves flapped in the heat.

'Are you not coming to the wedding because you don't like her?' Thaniel asked.

Mori lifted his eyes. They reflected the snowy window panes. Because the dye in his hair had faded, he was more foreign. 'No. I'm a Buddhist. You might have a Christian obligation to catch pneumonia while you sit for two and a half hours listening to some twerp in a dress drone on about the virtue of wedded life but, dear as you are to me, I don't.'

'This is like brown tea, isn't it,' said Thaniel.

'It isn't unreasonable.'

'Of course it's unreasonable, you xenophobic gnome,' Thaniel said, laughing to cover the disappointment that had settled over his thoughts like sleet. It was stupid: he had antic.i.p.ated hitting a pocket of j.a.paneseness over the church, and when Mori had first said no, weeks ago, he hadn't been surprised. 'So you're not ... upset.'

'I would be. An oriental man in a church is a target for evangelism.'

'All right. You're excused, if it's so distressing.'

Mori nodded, but then put down his pen. 'Surely if an angel appears in the middle of a ravening mob, best practice is not to throw them your daughter by way of distraction but to suggest that the angel flies away? The defining characteristic of angels is their aerodynamic capacity.'

Thaniel frowned. Mori rarely spoke that much at once and it was only now that he had that it was obvious he had lost the north in his accent. It was a tiny, meaningless, sharp loss. He struggled to find the thread of what had been said.

'I've said you're excused; you can't continue to be annoyed about what the vicar would say to you if you did go.'

'I'll do my taxes,' Mori said, and bent his neck over the ledger again. Then, without looking up, 'Everything all right?'

'Mm.' He sat down in the other high chair to soak in some of the heat. Despite having put down his basket of gold, he still felt heavy and tired. He pulled Fanshaw's dictionary across the desk and stole a supernumerary pencil, and kept on with the small stories he made up in order to remember the pictograph characters. He let his elbow rest against Mori's and every now and then, when he couldn't find the characters' const.i.tuent radicals in the smaller dictionary he had bought from the show village, nudged him for an explanation. It was much sooner than usual that his eyes became tired and refused to recognise that they knew any of the writing at all. It turned into a meaningless jumble and he sat back.

'What in G.o.d's name is a needlemouse, anyway?'

Mori paused and wrote it out to see what he meant, and then inhaled at it and tipped his head forward.

'Something wrong?' said Thaniel.

'I've just written annual hedgehog income in the middle of my expenses column.'

Thaniel laughed without expecting to, until Mori jabbed him with the end of his pen and told him to take himself and his needlemice into the kitchen to make some more tea. He did as he was told, but stopped once he was standing. He could feel the laughter seeping away too quickly through otherwise arid thoughts.

'Mori,' he said. 'Why did you change your accent?'

Mori was cutting out the mistake with a scalpel. 'I didn't change it, it changed. I can speak English because I remember it from ahead, and most of it was from you, but we're not going to talk so often any more. I'm getting everything from open lectures and arguing with Mrs Haverly.'

'Kensington is twenty minutes' walk away.'