LONDON, 30 MAY 1884
Thaniel lay in bed and watched the sun brighten his ceiling. He hadn’t slept until an hour ago because he had been doing the last of the cleaning – the grate and the hearth, and the insides of the cupboards, completely empty except for the crockery. Now he felt as though he were trying to get up at midnight. Usually he took a night shift on Fridays, but the senior clerk had reshuffled the timetable to bring in the fastest coders for eight o’clock, and leave the slowest for the night. Today, the night shift wouldn’t matter; if Clan na Gael kept to their promise, the Home Office would be safe or gone by midnight. The tall ship outside was creaking again, rigging squeaky from the damp and loud because he had left the window open overnight. Somebody was repairing the hull. He could smell the tar.
He waited for the clock to reach seven. The mist outside made the air close and stuffy, and he had to peel himself off the sheets.
In the morning quiet, the click of the watch’s clasp was sharp as it unlocked itself. He turned his head without moving the rest of himself. Pressed down by an invisible finger, the button on the catch lowered, and the case eased open, no quicker than an oyster shell. Once it had opened wholly, it sat inanimate again. He waited, but it did not move again. At last, he lifted it up by its chain.
The face was glass, to show off the clockwork underneath. It was working. The time was right. Under the hands, the silver balance swung on a hairline wire, and the cogs that wheeled round the seconds ticked under jewel bearings. Behind those was more clockwork, very dense, much more elaborate than an ordinary watch. He couldn’t tell what it was measuring. From the open cover, a round watchpaper feathered out and settled on his knee, face down. He turned it over. A border of fine leaves encircled the maker’s mark:
K. Mori
27 Filigree Street
Knightsbridge
Mori. He didn’t know what kind of name that was. It sounded Italian. He fitted the watchpaper back into the lid and kept staring at it in snatches while he got up – shave at the mirror, tie, collar. He had gone through the same motions in the mornings and in the nights for long enough to know, without looking at a clock, that it took twenty-one minutes to dress. It was so well established that if he tried to do anything unusual, or go any more slowly, he felt a pressure on the base of his skull. It made his study of the watch difficult, and the question of whether or not to bring it with him more feverish than it needed to be. At last he picked it up. He wanted to show it to Williamson. As he closed the door behind him, he took one last look around the room. Everything was clean, cleaner than he had found it, and there was no clutter. If Annabel had to come down to see to it, she would only have to spend half an hour packing up what he had left.
He set off in the thready mist. It was still dense over the river, where it made skeleton ghosts of the ships’ masts and trapped the stale smell of the water. The way took him past Parliament and Westminster Abbey, whose high walls threw the path into a shadow that still held the night-time cold, then up to Whitehall Street and its rank of new, bright buildings. The knot that had been forming deep in his intestines tightened. The bomb at Victoria had been a little clockwork device that might have fitted into a shoebox. The springs of even an ordinary watch could go strong for more than a day. There was every chance that the new bomb was in place already.
The yellow of the stairs sounded far away, and the telegraphy office on the second floor seemed further up too. He had to stare at the nearest telegraph machine for a few minutes before he could lift his hands and wind in a new reel of transcript paper, and when he did, he gripped it too hard and bent the upper edge in five places where his fingers had been. He had no time to put in a straighter one before the machine thrummed and began scratching out a message. Being forced to concentrate, and do something, made him pull himself together. It was stupid to think there would definitely be a bomb in Whitehall. If everybody went about paralysed, Clan na Gael wouldn’t need to bother with dynamite to bring the civil service to a grinding halt. He had never even met an Irishman, but he felt suddenly determined that he’d be damned if he was going to worry and shudder his way through the day.
The clicks and pauses came in the hiccuping rhythm of Williamson’s code.
Clockwork bomb found and— disabled at base of Nelson’s Column. Field officer reports it looks— complex. Decent springs used and sixteen packets of dynamite. Timer set to go in— thirteen hours i.e. 9 p.m. Sending uniforms to search HO again today please confirm receipt …
While the code ran, Thaniel held the end of the transcript paper with one hand and rested the other on the bronze knob of the key. As soon as Williamson stopped, he replied, GM Dolly message received.
A pause. GM was good morning, but Thaniel realised then that Williamson, with his meticulous typing, probably did not know it. His own English had devolved rapidly since he had become a telegraphist. There was a shorthand for everything. GM, good morning, GA, go ahead, 1, wait a moment, BO, bugger off, generally to the Foreign Office.
How do you— always know it’s me?
The way you type.
You HO boys are— disturbing sometimes. Going— for a drink after? Everyone seems— to be planning to descend on the— Rising Sun.
It was a bar opposite the Yard, just down from Trafalgar Square.
Hope so, Thaniel sent back. Plan not to die in service of British Government. Pay insufficient. Remember that watch that was left at my house?
Y—es?
It was locked before. It opened this morning. I think you should have a look at it.
How big?
Watch-sized.
Not explosive then. It’s— bloody odd, but no time today for anything without— dynamite in it. Sorry. Must go.
Wait. You said the timer on the column bomb was set for nine tonight. If there are other bombs, should we expect those at the same time?
A long pause. Then, Yes.
Thaniel delivered the first message to the senior clerk and threw away the rest of the transcripts. By the time he came back, they were uncrumpling slowly in the wastepaper basket like the tendons of a dead thing relaxing. He watched them and felt crumpled too. His neck had been aching lately because there was never time to stretch or walk.
‘Williamson says to expect it all at nine o’clock tonight,’ he said to the room.
There was a small silence as the other three paused in their coding. As they did, a boom of gunfire cracked the air. It made the four of them jump, before they all dissolved into nervous laughter. It was only Horse Guards. They fired shots in the parade ground at eight o’clock every morning. Thaniel lifted out the watch anyway to be certain. Sure enough, the filigree hands showed eight. The rose gold sheened its familiar voice-colour.
‘Phew!’ Park said, with a brittle enthusiasm. ‘Where did you get that?’
‘It was a present.’
Park’s transcript paper creaked and then crackled as it buckled in on itself. When he had written down the message, he peered down at the watchpaper in the lid. ‘Mori,’ he read. ‘He’s quite well known, isn’t he?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Thaniel honestly. The other central exchange machine started up too, and they had to turn away from each other.
The senior clerk passed a folder full of notes over his shoulder while he wrote. The notes were messages to be telegraphed today. Still listening to the central exchange and transcribing with his right hand, Thaniel opened the file and began to tap out the top messages with his left, to the rhythm of the opening chorus of Iolanthe. He had seen it last year. Arthur Sullivan’s music tended to be disguised behind silly lyrics in comic opera, but underneath, its real colours were as good as anything by more respected composers. He still had the programme and a lithograph print at home, locked in the music box.
‘How do you do that?’ Park said, talkative now that they had broken their usual silence. The two operators on his far side glanced toward Thaniel too, eavesdropping.
‘What?’
‘Write with one hand and code with the other.’
‘Oh. It’s like playing the piano.’
‘Where did you learn to play the piano?’ said Park.
‘My … father was gamekeeper at a big house, and the gentleman there was a concert pianist with no children. He was bursting to teach. If I’d said no, he would have tried the dog.’
They laughed. ‘Are you any good?’
‘Not any more.’
Williamson’s officers arrived soon after. Thaniel wanted to make them look at the watch, but Williamson had said it was nothing, and insisting would have frightened the other operators. Once they had searched under the telegraphs, Thaniel faded back into the scratching of the code, and worked his way through the file of notes. They were mostly meaningless to him, being snippets of conversations whose totality he had not heard. A few did make sense. The Foreign Office was throwing a ball next month and there was a message confirming an order of six casks of champagne for the Foreign Minister.
‘Steepleton, is that from Gilbert and Sullivan?’
He looked round at the senior clerk. ‘Yes?’
‘Pay attention to the messages! The fate of the nation might well be in your hands!’
‘It isn’t. They’re full of Lord Leveson’s champagne.’
‘Get on with it,’ the senior clerk sighed.
The policemen returned three hours later and declared an all clear. In that time they couldn’t have done anything but stroll the halls and glance in a few cupboards. The senior clerk announced suddenly that all those who had begun on the early shift should pause for tea and some food. They would work on until nine. They would be free after that, one way or the other.
Glad for the chance to stretch, Thaniel drifted to the small canteen, where he waited in line for a cup of soup that was, just for today, being provided free of charge. The usual canteen chatter had dulled almost to silence. The sound of soup being ladled into cups was too loud. He tried to think how he had ended up here.
He had taken the job four years ago and had considered himself lucky to get it. Before that, he had been a ledgers clerk at a locomotive factory in Lincoln. That had been cold and horrible. The Home Office paid more and did not expect its employees to buy their own coal. But telegraphy never varied. It was as easy as writing, once you knew Morse Code, and he wasn’t educated enough to advance much further. There were vague prospects of becoming an assistant senior clerk at some point this year. He had been pleased about that when he heard, then horrified to be pleased, because being pleased with something so boring meant that without noticing, at no particular point that he could see, he had shrunk to fit the job. He had never meant to be a telegraphist for four years.
But the fact was that you could not support a widow and two boys with orchestral work. After Annabel’s husband had died he had sold the piano. He hadn’t been able to go to concerts or opera for a good while, but gradually that wore off. Now, he bought a cheap ticket once every season or so. The part of himself he had amputated still twinged sometimes, but letting her go to a workhouse would have been worse than a twinge.
Now, when the Irish were not threatening to blow up Whitehall, he worked between eight and eleven hours a day for six days or nights a week except at Christmas. He was not poor – he could afford ten candles and two baths a week. He wasn’t going to throw himself in the Thames for the misery of it all, and God knew most of London was worse off. All the same, he had a feeling that life should not have been about ten candles and two baths a week.
‘D’you reckon we’ll blow up today, then?’ the cook asked him as he handed over the soup. He had a South Riding accent that sounded like home.
‘Not up here. Last time they threw a bomb at the ground-floor window, didn’t they?’ He caught the cook’s disconcerted expression. ‘Still, blowing up would be a change from paperwork.’
The cook laughed, too high.
As nine o’clock edged around, the office began to slow. The clip of Morse was more spaced as the telegraphists listened for an explosion. In the larger office across the corridor, the typists lost their rhythm and lowered their voices. Thaniel saw Park’s knuckles whiten over his telegraph key. He leaned across and took it from him gently, and got up to cross the corridor. The telegraph room was windowless, but the typists’ office had huge windows overlooking Whitehall Street. The others followed him. They found the typists standing too, going to the same window. It was open now and letting in the smell of ozone. Thunder growled around the city steeples, quietly, as though it knew that hundreds of men were trying to listen.
Nine chimes tolled out from Parliament and the city remained its ordinary self, unlit by flashes or smoke. Rain tapped on the window panes. The clerks exchanged glances, but nobody moved. Thaniel took out the watch. A minute past, two minutes, and still nothing. Ten. Then a gust of laughter came from the street. The clerks from the Foreign Office were already on their way home. They were sharing umbrellas.
The senior clerk rang his bell.
‘Well done, everyone! Early shift is over, late begins in two minutes. Clear out, and if you see an Irishman on your way home, give him a good kick from the Home Office.’
There was a cheer, and he took his first deep breath for months. He hadn’t been aware of breathing shallowly. It had happened gradually; someone had put a penny on his chest every hour since November, and now the weight of thousands of pennies had lifted at once.
Everyone was going to the Rising Sun and to other bars and clubs near Trafalgar Square. He walked along Whitehall Street among the exodus of clerks, past the long rank where the night cabs waited in the rain. He always kept an umbrella at the office, and once he had put it up, he half closed his eyes as he listened to the thrum of the rain on the canvas. It made a wash of rippling half colours. While somebody behind him told an Englishman, Irishman and Scotsman joke, he bent his neck and lifted his shoulders to let his spine stretch. The wet cobbles were orange with the reflections of the lamps. He couldn’t remember seeing that before.
A man standing in the doorway of the Rising Sun would see a man standing in the doorway of Scotland Yard, and as such, it was the most orderly pub in London. He pushed open the doors and walked into the smell of beer, furniture polish, and damp clothes. It was filling fast with clerks and policemen, and though nobody was drunk yet, they were calling across heads and laughing. Dolly Williamson was at the bar, chatting to the girl behind it. He was a big man with a beard that he had cropped since Thaniel had seen him last. He saw Thaniel in the mirror and turned around, beaming.
‘You’re here! Drink? What d’you like?’
‘Brandy, thanks,’ Thaniel said. He shook his hand, and Williamson thumped his arm.
The girl, whose name was Miss Collins, was pouring out their brandy when he felt the watch in his pocket clicking. When he opened it, the dense clockwork behind the timekeeping set was going fast, and getting faster. He just had time to wonder what it was doing before it screamed. Not an alarm, but a horrible, keening siren noise. He spun it over to search it for a catch, painfully conscious of the startled looks coming from all around, and half expecting to be tackled and shot. There was no catch.
‘Sorry,’ he shouted to Williamson over the noise, and ducked outside with it to the deserted alley on the right of the building. Some waiting cabbies looked across curiously from where they stood with their horses. He was able to keep just out of sight, as long as he kept his back pressed against the Rising Sun’s angled wall.
The watch stopped. He sighed, and half came out.
A titanic bang made the ground leap. Smoke and fire roared out from the Yard. A wave of heat shoved him, and he saw a cabby fly across the road, then smash into the front windows of the pub. There were a series of crashes from inside that were the heavy tables dominoing. The noise made white bursts across everything. A spray of typewriter keys floated by. When he turned his head away, his skin was stiff from a coating of soot. Standing in the alley, he was shielded almost completely, except from the few shards of glass and brick from the far edge of the blast. They pattered down around his shoes. Then all the noise was gone and there was a long silence, filled with smoke plumes and rags of floating paper, and isolated fires. The aftershocks of the flashes stayed in his eyes and sank slowly, then rose again whenever he blinked.
He stood still. He couldn’t hear anything, although he could see that other people were shouting. In his palm, the tick of the watch felt much too slow. A young policeman caught his arms and looked into his eyes. Thaniel could read his lips just well enough to see that the man was asking if he was hurt. He shook his head. The policeman pointed him back towards the Home Office, to avoid the rubble. It was everywhere, completely blocking the road that should have led to Trafalgar Square.
Beside him, smoke billowed from inside the Rising Sun. The kegs had exploded and the bar was burning. A few men staggered out, smacking at their sleeves to extinguish the orange ashes there. Dolly was not among them. Ignoring the constable, he bent under what was left of the doorway.
‘Dolly!’ He couldn’t hear his own voice, and couldn’t tell if he had shouted loudly enough for anyone to hear over the fire.
It was a small place, and he soon found Williamson half-trapped under one of the big tables. They had been made to seat twelve people, Viking style, but the blast had hurled them all against the bar. The corner of one had smashed the floorboards where he had been standing before he left. Ruined splinters flanked a hole that looked right down into the cellar. Lit by the flames racing along the spilled brandy over the bar, they were a bloody red. He did not stop and stare but the sight of them branded itself into his mind, and imaginary pain flashed across his ribs where the table would have crushed them if he had stayed.
He pulled Williamson out. Williamson staggered on the way up, his pupils different sizes, but he seemed to catch his balance after Thaniel held him still for a second. Between them they lifted down the barmaid, who had to climb over the taps. They couldn’t find the door in the smoke, and climbed out instead through the shattered windows.
‘I’ve got to go,’ Williamson said, gripping Thaniel’s arm. ‘I must deal with all this, understand? Get yourself—’
He was cut off by a distant boom.
‘Christ, another one.’ Williamson stared that way. ‘Get yourself home. Away from the city centre, for God’s sake. Stay by the river, do not go too closely by Parliament. And you, Miss Collins, go on.’ Without pausing, he ran after the policemen already streaming toward the ruined buildings of the Yard.
The girl stared blankly at Thaniel and began to pick her way over the rubble. He stood still for a second, then turned back the way he had come. Williamson was right; there was nothing for him to do but go home and hope that the Irish had no interest in Pimlico.
The smoke from the explosion drifted with him all the way along Whitehall Street. As he walked he became one of a company of ghosts. The watch’s tick thrummed through his palm. He would have to give it to Williamson, he should have, just now. Only the bombmaker knew exactly when a bomb would go off. That alarm had been set as a warning. The lights of Westminster underground station filtered up its steps and through the smoke. He was further toward the middle of the road than he had thought.
‘Out the way, out the way!’
He stepped to the left for the two men with a stretcher. They were running toward a hospital; the doctors were already outside, rolling up their sleeves as they waited for the injured, white coats already grey along the creases from the grit in the air. The man on the stretcher was dead. Thaniel stared at him. His eyes were still open and he had died with an expression of complete passivity. He had a pair of spectacles hooked over his breast pocket and ink on his fingers. Just a clerk. He looked as if he had seen the flames and let them come.
It would have been him. Thaniel saw white flashes again, though there was no noise to provoke them. He could see it as clearly as memory, as if he had missed it so closely that his mind had strayed down the wrong arm of time and had yet to come back. He would have heard the bang and turned around; the glass windows would have shattered inward, and then the force of the blast would have knocked him back against the bar as the tables fell. The corner of that nearest table would have crushed his ribcage, and within a minute or so, he would have died of the puncture to his lung, with his fingertips stained silver by the pencil lead from telegraph transcripts.
He opened the watch lid, which was alternately smoke-smudged and not where his fingers had been closed over it. The round watchpaper was still inside. K. Mori, 27 Filigree Street, Knightsbridge. Fifteen minutes away on the underground. The watchmaker would know who it had been sold to. The familiar well-scheduled pressure on the back of his skull wanted him to go home, like Williamson had told him to, but if he did, Williamson would only have to send someone else to do it tomorrow, and by then, this Mori might have heard enough of what had happened not to want to talk to policemen.
He turned down the station steps. There were still ticket officers in the forecourt, newly alert after hearing the explosion. Some of them were dusty – they must have been up the road to see. He bought a ticket to South Kensington, aware that the officer was staring at him as he fished four pence from his pocket.
‘We heard a bang,’ the man said tentatively. ‘Someone said that half of Whitehall was blown up.’
‘Only Scotland Yard,’ Thaniel said. ‘Is it this platform or the other—’
‘This side. Are … you all right?’
‘Yes. Thank you,’ he added, holding up the ticket as he turned away.
Grainy steam churned around the westbound platform. It tasted of soot and the walls were black with it. He leaned against a pillar while he waited. He was starting to feel light-headed, and couldn’t tell whether it was the noise from the explosion or the thick air. He almost never used the underground. Pimlico was close enough to Whitehall for the walk to be comfortable, and in any case, he didn’t much want the respiratory failure that would ensue from frequent trips. It wasn’t just a neurosis. Opposite him, on the other side of the tracks, there were posters pasted on to the walls. The two nearest advertised a new kind of restorative elixir for bronchial problems. He became aware of a rattling, and realised that he was still holding the watch in his pocket. Because his hand was shaking, the case kept clipping the chain.
Two women were looking at him half over their shoulders. He looked back, then around when they averted their eyes again. There was an odd movement in the small crowd of waiting people. Men were seeing him and leaving their women on the platform to go back towards the exits to see what was happening above ground. They must have felt the bang of the bomb, but it could have been anything down here – a train hitting the bumpers too hard or workmen in one of the new tunnels further down – but he was covered in dust, and now the dust was following him down the steps. He heard voices calling down that it was like fog outside, and that there were fires. A policeman came on to the platform and stopped by the conductor near Thaniel.
‘How deep are these lines?’ he asked. ‘Do any of them run under Scotland Yard?’
‘No? Why? Not too deep—’
‘South Kensington!’ shouted a guard. It made Thaniel jump, which sent a shooting pain across the back of his head. He pressed his hand against the nape of his neck. The two women were watching him again.
The train arrived in a thundercloud of steam, through which its front lights glowed red. Almost as soon as he was inside, the engine fired and the train was leaving again. Once the lights of the station had been left behind, everything beyond the windows was dark. He let his temple rest against the glass and thought how good a place a train would be to plant another bomb. People were on and off trains all day, and there were too few guards to keep combing every carriage. He started when the train jerked to the side and the gaslight above him flickered, but it was only bumps in the track.
He had the carriage to himself. All greyed, his reflection looked like his father, who had already been an old man by the time his children were born. He had lasted until Thaniel was fifteen and Annabel eighteen, and then, duty done, died suddenly. There was no will, so they had gone to a séance in Lincoln, where the old man asked via a girl medium if they minded helping the duke hire a replacement gamekeeper, and said his savings were in his tackle box, behind the bronze fishing hooks.
It was only twenty feet or so up to street level at South Kensington. The guards, distracted by his coating of ash and dust, didn’t check his ticket. It was too far from Westminster for them to have heard anything. Outside, he lost his bearings before his internal map realigned and placed the station just at the top of Knightsbridge. The rain was coming so hard that there was a mist above the ground where each drop ricocheted back up into the air. The noise sprayed spectra across everything and he put his hand to the wall. The prism colours ought to have been lovely, but his eyes ached and for a long few seconds, until he got himself used to the sound, they might as well have been strobe flashes. Putting up his umbrella, which had left a damp patch across his knees where he had held it on the train, he started down the long road.
Filigree Street was a medieval row of houses whose upper stories leaned toward each other. At its far end, the gap between the gables became so small that people standing in opposite bedroom windows could have shaken hands. It was too dark to see house numbers, but number twenty-seven was obvious because it was the only shop still alight. In the window, a single lamp illuminated a clockwork model of a city that grew new towers and bridges until it became London. When he pushed the door, it was unlocked. There was no bell.
‘Hello?’ he called into the empty workshop. His voice was spiderwebbed with cracks. Electric lights hummed on as he came in and he stopped still, not sure what he had done to turn them on and waiting, his spine stiff, for something else. The lights were set into the ceiling in looping rows. He had only ever seen them at the illuminations, never in anyone’s house. The filaments glowed orange first and then a yellowy white, much brighter than a gas lamp. The fizz of the electricity made him set his teeth. It sounded wrong, in the same way that the great river of tracks at Victoria felt wrong. But nothing else happened except, at last, a fractional brightening. In the new light, everything around him shone. Across the wall beside him was a tall pendulum clock, its movement regulated by the jointed wings and knees of a golden locust. A mechanical model of the solar system spun in mid-air, floating on magnets, and up two steps in the tiered floor, little bronze birds sat perched on the edge of the desk. One of them hopped on to the microscope and tapped its beak hopefully on the brass fittings. Things glimmered and clicked everywhere.
There was a sign by the door.
Room to let. Ask within.
He was about to call out again when, behind the desk, another door opened. A small man with blond hair came through it, backwards, because he was carrying two cups of tea. When he turned around, he nodded good evening. He had slanted eyes. Oriental. Thaniel floundered.
‘Oh, er – do you speak English?’
‘Of course I do, I live in England,’ said the man. He held out one of the cups. His hands were thin, his skin the colour that Thaniel would have turned after a week in the sun. ‘Tea? It’s horrible outside.’
Thaniel set down his soaking umbrella and took the cup. It was green tea. He breathed in the woody steam, which cleared the soot from the back of his throat. He had meant to start asking questions straightaway, but the little foreigner had blindsided him. Although his clothes were English, they looked worn, and with his bad posture and his black eyes, they made him less like a breathing human than an expensive, neglected marionette. Thaniel couldn’t think of a country that was known for turning out broken-toy men. Then he shook his head at himself. There didn’t need to be a country for that. A man could have a character independent of his nation. His thoughts were starting to take on a strange ring: they had shrunk from their usual size and now the ordinary attic that was his ordinary mind looked like a cathedral at night, with endless galleries and rafters lost in the dark and nothing but the echoes to show where they were. He forced himself to sip the tea. The echoes eased.
The man was frowning at Thaniel’s greyed clothes. ‘You’re bleeding.’
‘I’m what?’ Sticky blood had seeped through his shirtsleeve just above his elbow. He couldn’t feel it. ‘I’m all right. Are you Mr Mori?’
‘Yes. I think you ought to come through and—’
Thaniel closed his hand in the air to stop him. ‘One of your watches – it saved me from an explosion in Whitehall.’
‘An—’
‘There was an alarm,’ he ploughed on. His bones ached, and he was grimy, and cold, because he had come out without his coat in the warm morning a hundred years ago, but he could see that if he sat down, he wouldn’t be able to hold on to his thoughts. ‘I didn’t buy it; I don’t know where it came from. Someone gave it to me six months ago. Left it in my flat with a gift tag. It wouldn’t open until today. A watchpaper with your name and address was inside. Do you remember who you sold it to?’
He had been holding out the watch all the while, and now, carefully, the foreigner took it from him. He turned it over twice. ‘I didn’t sell it. I thought it had been stolen.’
‘I didn’t steal it!’
‘No, you said, it was left for you. Come and sit down, please, your arm—’
‘Damn my arm! It was a bomb! The alarm – it wasn’t an ordinary alarm, it was a siren, you must have made that to order. It made a horrible noise, it made me move and I would have been killed if I hadn’t. What was it for?’
‘It really doesn’t—’
‘Half of Scotland Yard is going to think I knew when the bomb was going to go off, what was it for?’
‘I set several watches to do that.’ The watchmaker held his hands up in the way people do when they speak to hysterical children or wild animals. His fingertips were trembling, but from fear or cold it was hard to tell. The unfamiliar structure of the bones in his face made him hard to read. A draught had come in when he opened the door. On the desk, one of the clockwork birds fluffed up its metal feathers and shivered like wind chimes. ‘I keep the shop open until late on Fridays. A horrible noise is a good way to force customers to leave on time, without having to herd them out myself – it’s next door’s children, they come in and break things. I hate children.’ He looked at Thaniel helplessly, as if he were afraid that it wouldn’t be a satisfactory explanation.
It wasn’t. ‘But then it should have gone off every Friday.’
‘I – was explaining the alarm, not the timing. Anyone could reset it.’
‘The damn thing had a gift tag on it!’
‘That’s … interesting and strange,’ he said, glancing at the door as if he were gauging whether he was fast enough to slip by and out before Thaniel lost his temper.
Thaniel let his breath out. ‘You don’t know a thing about it, do you?’
‘I don’t think I do.’ There was a little space of quiet. Thaniel felt exhausted. His eyes burned and everything became a fraction clearer as the tears lensed the light, like spectacles would have.
‘Right. I see. Well, I’d better go.’
‘No – no. Come and sit down, for God’s sake, before you bleed to death on my floor.’ As he said it, his voice sank low into a red gold that didn’t suit his size. He must have seen Thaniel’s shoulders ease, because he held out his arm to show him through the workshop’s back door where he had just come with the tea. ‘The kitchen’s warm.’
He held open the door and waited for Thaniel to go through first. It led down two dented stone steps, very old, like the kind in churches, and straight into a neat kitchen that smelled sweet from baking. Thaniel dropped into one of the chairs and trapped his hands between his knees. There were lamps but no electric lights. Those must have been in the workshop for show. He was glad – the dimmer light hurt his eyes less.
He gazed around, expecting opium pipes and silk drapes, but everything was English. On the table in front of him was a plate full of scones, and a pot of tea that still steamed. The cups, he thought, were Chinese.
‘Were you expecting someone?’ he said, but didn’t hear the reply. Now that he had nothing else to think about, his arm throbbed and the back of his neck felt as though the bones were fusing together. He clothes were stiff with damp and blood. ‘Is there some water I could … ?’
The watchmaker filled a brass basin and set it down in front of him, followed by a new bar of lemon-scented soap. ‘I’ll go next door and see if Dr Haverly has a spare shirt that might fit you. I think I should bring him too.’
‘No, no, I’ll go home—’
‘You wouldn’t get past the front door,’ the watchmaker said. There was a touch of the north in his accent. It was bizarre, but then, there was no reason to think so; Orientals had just as much right as anybody else to visit York or Gainsborough, although it was difficult to imagine why any of them would want to. ‘I’ll be back soon.’
‘I’m all right,’ Thaniel said. He would have liked a doctor, but he couldn’t bring himself to push the watchmaker’s good will so far as to ask him to pay for the consultation.
‘Well, you need the shirt, at least.’
‘I … thanks, then. But only if he has one he doesn’t want.’
The watchmaker nodded once, then slipped out through the back door and clicked it shut again before the rain could blow in.
Thaniel pressed his clean sleeve to his eyes until they were dry again, then peeled off his waistcoat. It was more horrible to feel the fabric move than to sit still in it. His left sleeve was brown. He rolled it back past his elbow to see the cut. It was long and deep, with a shard of glass still stuck in it. It hurt much more now that he could see it. He closed his fingernails over the protruding edge of the glass and pulled it out. It wasn’t painful as much as it was shocking, like almost falling down the stairs. He dropped the shard into the water, where it plumed little ribbons of red.
The watchmaker came back then, rain-starred and holding a fresh shirt. He set it down on the chair next to Thaniel, along with a roll of bandages, and paused when he saw the glass in the bowl. ‘Christ.’
‘It’s better than it looks,’ Thaniel lied. It was difficult to believe that he had come from Westminster to Knightsbridge without feeling it. The pain was sharpening now that he was calmer. His neck sent spasms down his spine whenever he moved.
‘You had better eat something. Sugar is good for shock.’
‘Thank you,’ said Thaniel, who was too tired now to argue. He rinsed out the cut as best he could and wound the bandage over it one-handed, trapping one end against his hip with his elbow when it came to tying it. Once he had tucked the ends back into the knot, he unbuttoned his shirt one-handed but stopped halfway, unable to go further. It was too much to be half naked at a stranger’s kitchen table. He looked up at the watchmaker, meaning to excuse himself after all, but the man had turned around. He was fetching down crockery and cutlery. When he stretched to reach some plates from the cupboard above him, the hem of his waistcoat lifted and showed the dull brass buttons on his braces.
Thaniel ducked into the new shirt as quickly as he could, and felt better. The watchmaker must have been waiting to hear the clatter of fabric, because he turned back then and gave him some more tea and a scone, then crumpled down opposite him. He saw Thaniel watching him and smiled. It traced small lines around his eyes. Thaniel thought of cracks beneath the varnish on old porcelain.
‘Do you know if there’s somewhere nearby I could stay?’ he asked. ‘I think I’ve missed the last train.’
‘You can stay here, I’ve a spare room.’
‘I can’t cause you any more trouble.’
The watchmaker lifted his shoulder. ‘There are hotels along Sloane Street, if you brought money.’
He had a grand total of tuppence left. ‘I … didn’t.’
‘Or you can try the Haverlys next door. They keep the attic for lodgers.’ Almost before he had stopped speaking, some banging and shouting reached them through the wall. ‘There are the children, mind you.’
‘I can walk home, actually.’
‘I wouldn’t have asked you if it were inconvenient, I’m not that much of a Samaritan. The room has been ready to rent for months. Nobody wants it. And you can’t walk home,’ he added, letting his ink eyes draw a line down Thaniel’s head to the floor.
Thaniel saw the truth of it when he looked toward the door and felt reluctant about going even that far. Helplessness spread through him like damp. When he was small, Annabel had had a horror even of eating too much at somebody else’s house. He had never dumped himself on anyone for a whole night, never mind a stranger, nor even thought of it. It felt presumptuous, and selfish, because he couldn’t return the favour.
‘You must let me pay you for the trouble later, then,’ he said at last, and heard how stiff he sounded. He shut his eyes for a second. ‘I’m sorry. I’m not trying to be rude, I mean it’s – mortifying to stumble in here and—’
‘Please don’t be mortified,’ the watchmaker said quietly. ‘It isn’t your fault.’
Thaniel thanked him unhappily and concentrated on achieving an even spread of jam across his scone. The high-pitched whine came back, greenish. The longer he was quiet, the louder it became, until it was the roar of collapsing brickwork.
‘How do clockwork bombs work?’ he said, to drown it out.
The watchmaker set down his teacup. If he thought that the question came abruptly, he didn’t show it. ‘They are explosives wired to a trigger switch, wired to a timer, which could be a clock or a watch, or something more in the region of a marine chronometer, if they must stand unattended for days rather than hours. The purpose of them is to remove the necessity of lighting a fuse in person. The only reason they have not been widely used before now is that until recently the technology did not exist to keep timers accurate in very cold or very hot weather. It’s the springs. The metal expands and contracts. You can lose half an hour a day in winter.’
While he spoke, he stood up and took Thaniel’s plate to the sink, where he turned the tap.
Thaniel half rose. ‘I meant to do that—’
‘Sit down.’
There was a bump under the sink. He jumped, but the watchmaker was unflustered and leaned down to open the cupboard. An octopus fell out. It was made of clockwork and it gleamed in the lamplight, but it was so like the real thing that Thaniel recoiled. The octopus seemed to consider things for a moment, then waved two of its arms. The watchmaker lifted it up and put it in a small water tank on the windowsill, where it drifted around with every sign of contentment.
‘Er … ’ said Thaniel.
‘He’s called Katsu.’
‘I see?’
The watchmaker looked around. ‘It’s only clockwork. It’s not some strange fetish.’
‘No, no. It was, you know, unexpected. It’s good.’
‘Thank you,’ he said, placated. He inclined his head at the octopus, which mirrored him. ‘That said, I suppose it’s not much of a mystery why I can’t rent out the room.’
Thaniel watched the octopus too. It was hypnotic. The mechanical joints moved as fluidly as the water, glinting with the warped colours of the kitchen. It took him a little while to realise that it was watching him back, or it looked as if it was. He straightened up, feeling caught out. ‘Have I told you my name yet?’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘It’s Steepleton. Nathaniel, but Thaniel if you like. I know it’s a bit … but my father was Nat.’
‘I’ll stick to Mr Steepleton, if you don’t mind.’
‘Why?’
‘In Japan, first names are only for who you’re married to, or if you’re being rude,’ the watchmaker explained. ‘It sounds wrong to me.’
Japan. Thaniel couldn’t remember where it was. ‘Can we negotiate down to Steepleton? Mr Steepleton makes me sound like a bank manager.’
‘No,’ said the watchmaker.
Thaniel laughed, then touched the back of his neck awkwardly when it occurred to him the man might not have meant to be funny. ‘So I shouldn’t ask your first name?’
But the watchmaker was smiling again. ‘It’s Keita.’
‘Sorry, what … ?’ It was a simple sound, but knowing that it was Japanese and therefore difficult, his brain had refused to hear it properly.
The watchmaker spelled it for him. ‘Rhymes with later,’ he added, and, unoffended, poured them both some more tea.
The spare room was crooked, as though it had planned to be L-shaped but changed its mind at the last minute. In one wall was a diamond-paned window, warped into a wave; under it was a bed with fresh sheets, and under that, floorboards bleached into a diamond cross-hatch pattern by the sun. Once the watchmaker had lit the lamp, he left the door open on his way out. His bedroom was only a few feet away across the landing. Thaniel sat down on the edge of the bed to check the bandage on his arm, and faced that way. The two doors made a double frame around the other room, where the watchmaker sat on his own bed in a pool of lamplight and wrote in a diary. His hand moved up and down the page, right to left. As he shifted the book over his knee to start the next page, the previous one fell down into view. The writing was all tiny calligraphy pictures. The watchmaker lifted his eyes and, realising that he was in fact spying on a man writing a diary, even if it happened not to be a language he knew, Thaniel eased the door closed, and turned off the lamp. Although he moved slowly, his joints were stiff and grinding. He had to undress without bending much. When he got into bed, he stayed kneeling, working up the courage to move his spine and knowing it would hurt that nerve in the back of his neck again when he did.
Despite the thunderheads, the night was light now, and silver light cross-hatched itself across the floor. He leaned on the windowsill, resting his cheek against the wall. Below him was a garden, quite long, where he could make out the rough shapes of bushes and trees through the rain. Off to the left were the city lights, but beyond the garden there must have been some kind of heath, maybe even Hyde Park – he had lost his sense of direction – because everything that way was black.
A swarm of lights sparked into life in the garden. Frowning, he found the latch, old but well oiled, and pushed the window open. He couldn’t see what the lights were, only that they were floating above the grass. He flicked a farthing at them, but they didn’t scatter. Suddenly they all went out. Nothing moved but the rain.