The Watchmaker Of Filigree Street Part 11

'What happens if I don't find anything?'

'Then I'll have to arrest him anyway and shake a confession out of him, and quickly, before the Foreign Minister hears I've arrested an oriental n.o.bleman.'

Thaniel's lungs stiffened hard, and then hurt because they wouldn't move. 'Dolly, it might not be him. You've got the clockwork in the bomb, but any watchmaker could have taken apart some of his watches, and you've got a suggestive watch, but any other watchmaker could have set it to do what it did.'

'And the beggar outside your house, who saw a boy with foreign marks on his shoes?'

'Half the watchmakers in London are Chinese.'

'Is that what you really think, or do you only want it not to be him?'

Thaniel stood up. 'What I want is for you not to be personally thrown out by the Foreign Minister on the not very unlikely chance that a samurai manages to hold fast against a few coppers long enough for someone to hear of it.'

Williamson stood up too. 'Sorry.' He held his hand out.

Thaniel shook it and turned away before the policeman could see his face clearly.

With a gilt invitation to the Foreign Office ball in his satchel, Thaniel let himself into the house through the front door rather than the workshop. Mori had looked busy through the window, or at least, occupied. He set Fanshaw's dictionary down on the kitchen table and put the kettle on, and read through the first few pages while he waited. It was a dictionary not of words but of single characters, some of which happened to be words, arranged by stroke number. It began with numbers, and the signs for person and sun and big. He moved the block of the pages left to see the entries toward the back. They were rambling and mazy, and ancient-looking. The meanings were all philosophical terms.

'There's tea in here,' Mori called when he heard the steam.

Thaniel shut his eyes. 'I thought you might not want disturbing.'

'Disturb away.'

He tilted the door between them open. It had never been quite shut, resting on its stiff iron latch. It was heavy oak, pointed at the top, but the weight was familiar; he had spent years putting his shoulder to a similar door in the duke's chapel organ loft. This one didn't creak. On the other side, Mori had his back to him, his neck bent over a microscope. Whatever he was doing must have been difficult, because he didn't look back to see why there was still quiet. He pa.s.sed a pencil from his right hand to his left and made a note on a blueprint. It was plain he wouldn't have thought it was rude if no conversation was forthcoming after all.

Thaniel went up behind him to catch his elbows and set a guinea down by his hand. His shirt was real linen and, because he had been sitting side on to the draught, cool down the left arm. He twisted in his chair.

'What's this for?'

'Your winnings,' Thaniel said. 'I work for the Foreign Office, as of this morning.'

Mori inclined his head. 'Well done.'

'Thank you. Baron Mori.'

'Oh, who told you that?' he said crossly.

'n.o.body. I looked at your immigration papers at the office. Why didn't you say?'

'I'd like to be a watchmaker before I'm a samurai, somewhere in the world.'

'Must be terrible for you, being a samurai.'

'Shut up, peasant.'

Thaniel laughed and knew what Williamson would say if he could see him, and then pushed the thought into the bicycle shed at the back of his mind. Williamson wouldn't have to live in Pimlico after it was all over.

Dinner was not much later: fresh bread, real grapes, and a bitter oriental wine that, after two cups, he decided he liked. He also liked watching Mori eat rice with chopsticks, which he could use far more accurately than Thaniel could use cutlery. Mori seemed to disapprove of cutlery as a sort of unnecessary decadence and by way of reinforcing the point, he did all the washing up except Thaniel's fork, which he left in a jar like a chemical specimen. Thaniel prodded him and Mori smiled at him in the reflection in the dark window.

Outside, among the birch trees in the garden, soft b.a.l.l.s of light rose from the gra.s.s. They were what he had seen on his first night, but here he was nearer to them than before, and he could see that they were differently coloured, in shades of amber and yellow. Every now and then, one flickered, as if something were moving between them. The Haverly baby, left outside the back door again, noticed too, and whooped.

He set down the plate he had been drying. 'What are they?'

'Fireflies.'

'There are no fireflies like that in England.'

Mori took a key from his pocket. As soon as he opened the door, the floating lights disappeared. They both went outside to look around anyway, but they found nothing but Katsu, who bubbled at them from a watering can.

PART TWO.

ELEVEN.

OXFORD, JUNE 1884.

Grace had worked all week on the interferometer. Term would end on the fourteenth of June tomorrow and then it would be too late. Accurate measurements would be impossible in London, where there were trains above and below ground and building work everywhere. That was why the American's experiment had gone wrong. He had been in the cellar of a naval academy with five hundred men running drills above his head. But she was hopeful now. She had done everything properly: re-run the original calculations, found the errors, corrected them. As she had taken the last of her notes from the last of her stack of reading, she started to feel a bubble of lightness coming up through her ribs. It had been very fragile at first, but she thought now it was made of something stronger than suds. The new experiment would work. She would still have to go back to London for a little while, but not for ever. Once the paper was published, the college would have her back.

She had set up in Lady Margaret Hall's deep, silent cellar, where everyone left her alone. Mostly alone. Matsumoto called every day at three o'clock to make sure that she hadn't blown herself up. She had tried to explain that she hadn't got any explosives and therefore couldn't explode, but he only said it was dangerous to imagine she wouldn't find a way.

It was nearly three o'clock now. Having balanced the last mirror on the interferometer, she straightened up. In the way things do after a long period of concentration, the room looked inexplicably different. It was bigger, and fuller. Along the back wall was the college's infant wine collection. Everything else was hers. She had set up a trestle bench, scattered with bits of mirror and several hacksaws. Next to that was the font she had borrowed from New College chapel. Sitting within it was a flat plane of wood, on which sat the four arms of the interferometer in a cross shape. Although one could still do proper science with a magnet and some iron filings, it felt professional to have made something that looked like a mutated windmill. Science had to have some mystery, otherwise everyone would find out how simple it was.

The can cut into her forearm as she poured the first of the mercury into the font. It glimmered and swam. When she poured in the second can, the mercury already in the font jumped and splashed, but nothing like as much as water. It was too heavy. She moved the can around, making shapes in the surface, which dented under the new weight pouring in.

A cane tapped on the door.

'Coming in, Carrow,' Matsumoto called. 'Anything nasty I should know about?'

'Yes, stay back a bit. You shouldn't breathe in these fumes.'

He pushed the door open with the handle of his cane. 'What in G.o.d's name are you doing?'

'It's mercury.'

'I can see it's mercury, Carrow, the question is why is there mercury in this otherwise delightful cellar?'

'Wait, last one,' Grace said. She was breathless now. The mercury cans weren't big, but they were so heavy that they might have been steel all the way through. 'It deadens vibrations. It's heavier than water.'

'I've brought some friends. I thought it might do you good to see other humans.'

'What?' Grace put down the empty can and straightened up to find that six of Matsumoto's minions were already halfway down the steps. They were all dressed in close-cut jackets and silk ties that rippled with magnificent petroleum colours. When they came into the lamplight, they made polite, appreciative noises at the cluttered room. One came across to her and bowed too formally.

'Albert Grey. I think we might have met once, but I may have been preoccupied at the time.'

He meant he had been unable to tear himself away from his Ancient Greek. Grace shook his hand carefully, her fingers stiff from lifting the heavy cans. 'Sorry about the fumes.'

He glanced at his palm and rubbed it against his trousers. 'What's all this machinery, then? Some kind of wonderful alchemy?'

'No, it measures light.' She heard a clink and had to jerk past Grey to take one of the mirrors from somebody else. 'Don't touch anything, please.'

'Physics a rather a.n.a.lytical pursuit for a woman, don't you think?' Grey said, dipping his finger into the mercury pool.

'Oh, don't be such an a.s.s,' Matsumoto snapped, just as Grace opened her mouth to defend herself. 'We all know you fancy yourself a bit of an enlightenment man, but face facts, for G.o.d's sake. You've got the a.n.a.lytical capacity of a dead rabbit. No need to bad-mouth real scientists to cover it up.'

There was a small, shocked silence. Matsumoto never lost his temper with anyone. Grey looked across at him with the startled eyes of a suddenly rebuked child.

'You should all leave,' Grace said at last. 'These fumes are poisonous if you breathe them for too long.'

But Grey, anxious now, tried a false little laugh. 'Only poison? Matsumoto here was telling us about explosives. Apparently you nearly blew up the college once. Are you certain you aren't behind the Whitehall bombing?'

'The what?'

Matsumoto's eyes widened. 'Carrow. I've been bringing you a newspaper every day.'

'I've been ... meaning to read them later.'

'The bomb at Whitehall? Destroyed Scotland Yard? Fenians?'

'Oh, Christ were they all killed? The police I mean?'

'No, they were all out.'

'Then why is it important?'

'Can you hear yourself, I wonder?'

Grace heard a small splash and spun around. 'Get your fingers out of my b.l.o.o.d.y mercury, Grey! Matsumoto, if I wanted to speak to humans, I would go upstairs and eat in hall. Everyone get out. I said not to touch it,' she said, and smacked Grey's hand with a steel ruler, hard. He gasped and s.n.a.t.c.hed it back.

'All right, I'll see you all at dinner,' Matsumoto said. He herded them back toward the steps. They went in a quiet cl.u.s.ter, Grey last. He caught the arms of two others when he reached the top. Men in Oxford seemed to occur in chains, like conspiratorial atoms. She wished it would stop. A gale of laughter came down the stairs, and she knew that the joke had been about her.

'You didn't really think I'd be overjoyed about having them climb all over my experiment?' she said to Matsumoto. 'My very important experiment, which has taken a week to build?'

'No, but medicine never tastes good.' He sighed and came to look at the mercury. Compared to the others, he had a quiet, unpretentious way of standing, but just at that moment, Grace resented it. He enjoyed his own ease.

'Being solitary isn't a disease that needs a cure-'

'Invariably a claim made by the imminently hysterical. The man who looked after me when I was small spent all his time alone and became quite psychotic before long. Anyway, this mercury no doubt has some kind of purpose veiled to the unscientific. Is it dangerous? This isn't going to be like the magnesium thing again, is it?'

'It isn't explosive,' she said, for the fourth time that week. 'And the crater wasn't that bad, and your eyebrows were perfectly all right.'

'I think you'll find the crater is still perceptible in the lawn, despite the valiant efforts of the gardener.' He looked up. 'You know I hope you haven't gone around involving the other girls in all this chemistry stuff.'

'Why, because they'd burn off people's eyebrows?'

'No, because then they would know how to make bombs, and what would happen if you gave someone like Bertha a bomb?'

Grace paused. 'She does cla.s.sics. And the others are biologists, which means they spend all day with yeast and ... ooze.'

'All right, what is all this, if not lethal?'

'It is an interferometer.' She even liked saying the word. She gave it a gentle push and it spun slowly on the mercury, mirrors winking. 'It measures the speed of light as it pa.s.ses through ether.'

'Ether is like air to sound. Light has to ... move through something.'

'You remembered,' she said, surprised.

'I do sometimes remember science by accident,' he sighed. 'What's the point?'

'The point,' said Grace, 'is to prove the existence of the ether. Usually, ether just sits it permeates everything. It's very fine: imagine something that makes grains of icing sugar look like boulders. But the earth is moving through it, which drags it, so you get what's called ether wind, or ether drag. That's very useful, because we can measure it. If you can show ether has a flow, you show it exists in the first place.'

'How, I ask dutifully?'

'With light. It's the only substance affected purely by ether and not by air. The device has four arms, as you see, and mirrors at the end of each arm in order to reflect light back and forth. The light that moves in the direction of the ether flow will go quicker than the light that moves horizontally across it. Just like a boat following the current of a river will go faster than one crossing it. This mirror here puts the two light beams together again and feeds them into this telescope, which is casting what are called light fringes on this piece of paper. They look like coloured lines as the waves overlap. If the light is moving through ether, the lines won't match up properly. If it isn't, they'll be very clear.'

'I see. And why is that useful to know?'

'Any of number of reasons,' Grace said, ignoring his expression. 'If we can prove ether, it could explain a great deal. Ether penetrates everything, including vacuums, including the human brain, so the impulses there a.s.suredly affect it.'

'Impulses.'

'Thinking is a physical process, Matsumoto, it's electricity flashing and chemicals moving, it's not magic. Moving things push ether about.'

He looked put out. 'Electricity.'

'Yes. Anyway?'

'Yes, yes.'

'Anyway,' she repeated, 'ether could explain how real mediums work, and how ghosts could exist, generally how thought has physical effects beyond the cranium. If you could study ether, you would be halfway to understanding what happens to your consciousness after you die.'

'Oh,' said Matsumoto, sounding more interested. 'What happens now, then?'

'Now, I have to turn off all the lights, and turn on the sodium lamps here to tune it, and make some observations.'

'It's already boring,' he said, but he helped her turn off the lamps on the desk until only one was left. She used it to find the switches for the interferometer's powerful sodium lamps, then blew it out too.