The Watchmaker Of Filigree Street Part 26

'Nearly.' He had taken off his tie, which was looped under the left strap on his braces so that it hung against his hip like a jockey sash. He set the iron down on its own flint bowl of hot coals carefully. There was a dew of sweat between his collarbones. 'Did everything go off well, then?' he said.

'Yes it was lovely.'

Mori poured his teacup over the coals, then leaned back when they hissed and steamed. 'Good. I thought you were staying at the hotel?'

'I am, I am. I'll go back later. Grace is ... her family are still there. You should have come,' he said suddenly.

'I know. I'm sorry.' He gave Thaniel a pensive look and began to turn away. 'It's late for tea, but there's some wine, or-'

'Mori, wait.'

When he stopped, Thaniel went round the desk to catch him and pressed his cheek against Mori's darkening hair. His clothes smelled of steam and lemon soap. Through them, he was solid. He held Thaniel tightly for a while before tilting him back. He had an ego-saving trick of not looking over-concerned, only curious.

'It was-' Thaniel began.

'Don't tell me, just intend to. And then I'll forget, if you change your mind.'

Thaniel nodded once and saw him listen to what he could have said while the filaments of the light bulbs made fireflies of themselves in his eyes. Annabel, Matsumoto, Grace. When he ran out of thoughts, he looked down and brushed the loop of the silk tie where it hung over Mori's hip while he let other things rise to the edge of speaking. Mori held his elbows, watching him straighten the knot. He drew him closer by them and then held his arm out to the door. The lights switched off and hid them from the dark street. The fading orange in the filaments showed clear in his eyes, then disappeared when Thaniel kissed him. His shoulders came forward and Thaniel breathed him in, the lemon soap on his skin, and the water vapour and the charcoal. Though he had shaved that morning, his cheek was rough.

'Where did you go this morning?' Thaniel said quietly, against his temple. 'You didn't walk back this way. I saw you from the church tower.'

'I went to see Six.'

'The little girl from the workhouse?'

'Mm. We went to see the vivarium in Hyde Park. I've been going on Sat.u.r.days, when you go to Kensington.'

'Good ... that's good,' Thaniel said. Whenever he went to see Grace, he imagined that Mori's clockwork stopped and that he only sat in the workshop, waiting for someone to wind him up again. It was odd to think he kept himself wound up and went off to visit orphans while n.o.body was watching. He felt left behind, hypocritically.

Mori stepped back and let his arm drop again, and the light bulbs hummed bright. 'Mrs Steepleton is on her way to fetch you back now.'

'Would you mind if I stayed here until the first morning train?'

'No,' Mori said, frowning. 'But that's a waste of a night in a hotel. This place has been here since the thirteen hundreds, it will still be here tomorrow.'

'But I'm not going to come back much. Am I?'

'Well, it isn't-'

'That music box in your desk. Is it for Six?'

Mori was still. 'No.'

'No, I didn't think so.'

'I'd better light the fires upstairs, then.' He paused, looking at the street lamps outside. 'The wood's damp, so it will take me a while.'

'No, that's all right,' Thaniel said. He sat down to wait, absently teasing Katsu while he watched the snow fall past the reflection of the workshop.

TWENTY-FIVE.

Grace pushed open the workshop door. Thaniel was waiting inside, by himself, close to the charcoal embers in the small lock of a soldering iron on the desk. She had heard him leave the hotel, but it had taken her a while to dress, and she had not managed to catch the same train. When she had reached the curve of Filigree Street, she had thought n.o.body was awake, but then the workshop lights had come on, and they had already been inside. She had stopped still for a second, because they hadn't looked as if they had just walked in. They had been there together in the dark. Her stomach twisted nastily. Everybody had their bad habits but she had wanted not to know Thaniel's, not until they were used to each other and they could laugh instead of flinch. Thankfully Mori had taken himself off elsewhere now. It was hot inside.

'h.e.l.lo,' she said. 'What's the matter? I heard you go.'

He didn't look surprised to see her. He was sitting very still, and although he usually smiled when he saw her, he only glowed dully.

'Nothing. I just came for a cup of tea. I thought you were asleep or I would have said.'

'Well, come back with me, or you'll miss the last train.'

'I can come on the early train, it's all right.'

'Rather a long cup of tea.'

'I was going to do some sleeping as well,' he said, not quite laughing. 'Why does it matter where I am?'

'Because you've been skittish about the Kensington house for months, and you plainly don't want to leave Filigree Street, and I think that wherever you are tonight will be where you stay. This is ... if you were going to regret things and go back on it all, it was always going to be today.'

He frowned. 'Grace. I'll come back in the morning. I'm not going back on anything.'

'I know I sound strange. But will you humour me?'

'I'd rather not. This once. Please.'

'What kind of tea do you drink in the dark, anyway?' she said quietly. She hoped it would scare him, but it didn't.

'Come again?' was all he said.

She pressed her fingernails into her palms. 'Do you remember when I said that one day he would get tired of me, and on that day, you would agree with him? It's today.'

He inclined his head, very slightly, so that the light in his hair only s.h.i.+fted rather than disappeared. 'Do you remember when I said I'm not stupid?'

'Of course you're not stupid-'

'No, I'm an ordinary man who works in an office and sometimes plays the piano.'

She didn't recognise the words at first, and when she did, it was with a p.r.i.c.k of irritation at being quoted, and then a creeping dismay. She had not thought he listened so closely. 'I never meant-'

'I'll come back tomorrow,' he said again.

'No, come back now. I know you only want the night, but tomorrow you'll want another and another, and you'll never leave. Do you not understand what would happen then? Thaniel, if we're seen to separate for Christ's sake, my father is best friends with Lord Leveson. You know, the Foreign Minister? He'll see to it that you lose your job no matter what I say to him, and neither of us will see anything of the rest of the dowry. What will happen to your sister then?'

He closed his hand on the desk at the mention of his sister. 'I want to stay because I'll hardly ever come back after this. Grace, there's going to be a child before long. And I'll love you, and her, and he'll be left behind, like he always is, but I won't care, because we will have drifted by then and I'll have my own family to think about. I want to think of him while I still can.'

'What rubbish has he been telling you?' she demanded, aware that her voice had risen. It was one thing to know the man was clever, but another to see how he could apply it. If it hadn't affected her, she would have admired the strategy of it. 'Thaniel, it's only to make you-'

'I don't think so.'

'Good G.o.d, I feel like Ca.s.sandra! I've been making true prophecies and still you don't believe me. Just for a moment, push past the fact that you aren't so clever as he is, and see what he's done.'

'I'm not clockwork.'

She wanted to shake him. 'You are. But you are such good clockwork that you don't know. Please, see it. It's my life you're holding, as well as yours. I can't keep the laboratory going without the dowry money.'

'I know that. Which is why I will come back, in the morning,' he said, with a dead calm she realised that she had often heard before. Like an idiot she had thought it was because he was never angry.

She let her breath out. 'In the morning then. I'm sorry about all that. I'm sure we'll see, soon enough.'

His expression opened. 'Yes. Tomorrow.'

'All right. Well, I shall go and enjoy a cavernous hotel room to myself.'

He smiled.

'My best to Mori,' she added.

She let herself out into the powdery snow. The door clicked behind her. With grains of snow tapping against the hem of her skirt as the wind blew it in rivulets from Knightsbridge, she looked back in time to see him go into the kitchen through the heavy, old door at the back of the workshop. Once he had gone, the lights faded by themselves, and there was only the dim glow of the dying brazier.

In the cab on the way back to the hotel, she closed her eyes, wanting to rest, but saw things behind her eyelids. She had never seen a stone wall fall, but Matsumoto had showed her a photograph of Crow Castle. It was, he said, much smaller than some of the great old castles in the south that had come down over the past decade, but it was still a colossal thing, standing on inward curving walls above a black lake. The process of multiplication ticked as she tried to think what one of the stones would weigh, and then how many stones went into a wall that size, or bigger, and then what that weight would do to human bones. There would hardly have been bones to speak of.

'The Westminster, miss,' said the cabby, waspishly.

She straightened, and realised that the cab had been still for more than a minute. The yellow light of a street lamp cast a shadow of the window gla.s.s across her knees, where it seemed to run liquid. She got out and paid the man. Her joints were moving badly, all unoiled hydraulics.

Upstairs, she pushed open the unlocked door of the suite. The lamps she had lit before leaving were still burning. The carriage clock on the mantelpiece chimed half past eleven and the floor shook, just perceptibly, as a train left Westminster station underground. She pressed the heels of her hands against her temples and blew her breath out. Her engagement ring caught on a strand of her hair.

As she sat down, a sovereign fell from her pocket and rolled off under the chair. Heads. She picked it up and imagined the disturbed ether billowing as it closed over the dead chance of tails. The trails in it would be everywhere, stacked in layers; there would be Grace-ghosts making tea, locking the door, standing in the window, doing all the things she faintly meant to soon. There would be shapes made by the cleaning woman who would come at ten o'clock tomorrow, and faint ones from guests who still hadn't decided whether or not to take this particular room. The particles were so fine that they were knocked about by the pressure of flas.h.i.+ng nerves in minds ten miles away. A hundred.

She turned the coin over in her hands and tossed it again. Heads. Heads. Heads; it was funny, that. With every throw that turned up heads, it was tempting to think heads was less likely for the next, but it was still even chances. A memoryless process. The coin did not know it had thrown heads four times in a row. Before every throw, the ether would split two ways, in equal antic.i.p.ation, always. It didn't matter who did the throwing or why. The chances would be the same, just as unpredictable, even if by some extraordinary fluke, heads appeared twenty times. Which was how Katsu worked, of course.

She held the coin and, at last, let her mind work. She had been holding the ideas still for so long that they had developed by themselves, with little intervention from the rest of her. She glanced at the clock. Twenty-five to midnight. The last train would go on the hour. There was time, if she hurried.

Outside, the wind hummed around the gutters and clattered frozen leaves against the window pane. Some caught in spiders' webs and threw uneven shadows across the floor. With his back to the wall and his arm across Mori, Thaniel could feel the heat of the fire along the back of his hand and his forearm, and the cooler air behind his shoulder. He hid from the light against the nape of Mori's neck. He could feel sleep coming; his grip was gone and his thoughts had turned mirrorish. Under his arm, Mori curled forward. If he had been standing, he would have let his head drop.

'I've got to go. Mrs Steepleton is about to go missing from the hotel room.'

'What?'

Mori's silhouette sat up and pulled on his s.h.i.+rt, leaving Thaniel cold for a second before the dense heat of the fire had time to fill the gap. 'Everything's wrecked, or it will be, by the time I get there.'

He understood what he was hearing then. He sat up too. 'Someone's taken her?'

'I don't know. You're not coming,' he said, before Thaniel could say it. 'Stop intending to say things and listen to me.'

Thaniel bit his tongue.

'I can't remember where to find her,' Mori said, 'which means that it hasn't been decided yet. If I go now, I could still see her. I can remember seeing her all around London after that, so I'm going to try and catch up, and then I'll be close by when the decisions are made and I'll have a chance of overtaking her. You would slow me down.' He hesitated, as if he had meant to add something else, but then got up suddenly and went to the door, wrapping on his scarf. Thaniel lurched after him.

'You know something else,' he said from the top of the stairs. Mori was already by the door, halfway into his coat.

'I don't,' he said.

'You can't lie for your life. What is it? What happens if you can't catch up?'

'No time,' Mori said. The front door snapped shut. By the time Thaniel had dressed and followed, the snow was falling again in flurries and he could see no sign of him. He stared down Filigree Street through the lamplight stripes. The wind blew snow between the b.u.t.tons of his s.h.i.+rt.

There was nothing to do but sit at the piano and wait. He practised for the operetta to distract himself, a candle on the piano top, although he no longer needed to see the music. The snow came down and silently down. There was snow in his thoughts too. Matsumoto had been afraid. So had Grace. Through the snow, he couldn't see whether it was because they both understood things he hadn't, or because they had failed to understand something. And so he couldn't tell whether he had just watched Mori go to do just what he had said, or just what Grace had said he would.

Over the bright colours of Sullivan's score came a sudden, sharp creak. He lifted his hands off the keys and leaned to see past the doorway. It was too heavy to be Mori. He followed the sound upstairs, pa.s.sing the susurration of the clocks in the workshop, then the downy silence of the snow on the landing window. Tiny green echoes danced in the penumbra of his candle. He eased open the door of Mori's bedroom, letting the candle trickle light inside. It was empty.

'Mori?' he said uncertainly.

The candle only shone over Katsu. The little octopus was lying on the pillow, tentacles arched around an invisible shoulder. There was even a kink where Mori's collarbone would have been. Thaniel felt weight settle on to his diaphragm. Mori had expected to be here, then.

A knock at the front door made him jump. Thinking it was Mori without keys, he went too quickly downstairs and didn't feel it when candle wax spilt on to the back of his hand.

Dolly Williamson was outside.

Thaniel looked past him for uniformed men, but there were none.

'Pax,' said Williamson. He held up his hands. 'Sorry for the time. Thought I'd better come myself.'

'What's going on?'

'May I come in?'

Thaniel stepped back. Williamson led the way into the parlour and watched him light the lamps.

'Your wife has gone missing from her hotel,' he said, sitting down on the piano stool. 'The stewards reported it about half an hour ago. Someone found the door open. They thought you had too, at first, but then one of them said you had left earlier.'

'Missing.'

Williamson nodded. 'So, we've looked at the hotel. There does seem to have been a struggle. There was blood on the door, but it was nothing like enough to have been a lethal injury. I a.s.sume your wife is alive.'

Thaniel realised that his hand hurt and peeled off a still-soft disc of fallen candlewax.

Williamson leaned down a little to force him to meet his eyes. 'Why did you leave?'

'I wanted a book. I stayed for a while to get warm and then missed the last train.'