The Watchmaker of Filigree Street (Watchmaker of Filigree Street, #1)

by Natasha Pulley

Once, there had been a strange, meaningless percussion from the Foreign Office, but that had been an accident: somebody had sat on the machine at the other end of the wire. Sat and bounced. He had taken care not to ask about it.

Some of them were pointless because it would have been faster to lean out of the main office window and shout, but the senior clerk said that would have been ungentlemanly.

The senior clerk claimed that he stayed because his wife snored, but Thaniel was starting to think that she must have forgotten about him by now and changed the locks.

George sighed and sat up in his nest of grimy blankets to take the coins. From somewhere within the folds, his ferret squeaked.

Today the silence had a silver hem.

‘So I shouldn’t ask your first name?’ But the watchmaker was smiling again. ‘It’s Keita.’

It was quite a coincidence for a mechanical sea creature and he was speculating whether it could possibly have been done on purpose when Katsu stole his other sock and flopped on to the floor with an unbiological bang, whereupon it octopuses out of the open door and slid down the banister. He exclaimed at it, was ignored, and then went after it just in time to see it disappear into the parlour. It was climbing up the leg of the piano stool when he caught up. The watchmaker confiscated the sock and threw it over his shoulder to Thaniel, who caught it with the tips of his fingers. The octopus settled in his lap.

‘Actually mine is full of clockwork pears. Although I suppose that sticks to the broad principle,’ he admitted. ‘Pears, why?’ His shoulders went back. ‘My old tutor was a botanist, so I started making them for one of his birthdays a while ago and then couldn’t stop. It’s like those origami swans.’

‘The kettle’s just boiled downstairs,’ Mori said through the door, which was open on its latch. ‘Can I come in?’ ‘Yes?’ Thaniel opened the door, then shut it again. ‘You’re in the bath.’ ‘What did you think I was doing?’ ‘Cleaning.’ ‘I’m not talking to you through the door. Come on. I’m not a girl.’ He sat down on the floor with his back to the door, where he could see Mori only from his shoulders upward. With his hair wet, he was sharper than usual, and the water shone along the bones in his spine. Although he often went about with his sleeves folded back, his skin was the same colour across his arms and his chest. He wasn’t dark, but not pale either; where a white man’s veins would have shown through blue, there was nothing. It made him look more finished.

‘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.

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

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.

‘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.’

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.

A cold hand pushed itself through his hair. ‘Are you asleep?’ He jolted upright. ‘You’re awake. My God, the surgeon more or less told me you’d die from the anaesthetic—’

‘Oh,’ Thaniel said softly. He looked away. ‘I wish you’d turned up five years earlier. You needn’t have been so long working for Ito.’ ‘You weren’t my Thaniel yet. You weren’t finished. You wouldn’t have liked me.’

‘So that was dreadful,’ Thaniel said flatly. ‘We’re keeping her. Not just while it’s cold.’ ‘I don’t want any extra people in my house,’ Mori protested, fadedly. ‘It’s your fault for bringing her back; you must have known what I’d say.’ Mori sighed. ‘I hardly ever know what you’re going to say. You change your mind too often.’