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They were on a train steaming its way south on the Great Western Railway. The new and much-lauded Cornish Riviera Express had left London at at 10:10 in the morning, only – Thaniel wagered – a few years earlier than it ought to have; its non-stop run to Penzance was now the longest daily run in the world.
Mori had made just smug enough a comment about it when the announcement was made that a memory had knocked itself loose in Thaniel's mind: something Mori'd said years ago about giving the railway works at Swindon a nudge. He'd found it odd at the time, since Mori wasn't interested in trains, but now it made sense. Thaniel was getting used to connecting dots separated by the span of years: if Mori said something out of context, more often than not the context rolled itself out like a red carpet for him a little while later.
The Express and its new Castle Class engine didn't feel out of their place in time to Thaniel at all: technology always forged relentlessly ahead whether or not Mori paid particular attention. They were the odd ones: Mori, Six and him tucked away comfortably in a first-class cabin together. Thaniel'd felt oddly conscious of how strange it must have looked – a broad Lincolnshireman, a finely-boned Japanese aristocrat, and a child travelling together – but apparently tickets that cost half his yearly salary also bought absolute reputability. Thaniel didn't feel he belonged in first-class, but when the train stewards looked at them, they probably just saw walking guineas.
They were headed for Cornwall to escape a horrid London winter which had brought with its standard gloom a chemical fog so dense that you could have cut it like a cake. In the past week Six had needed Mori to walk her to school in the mornings and fetch her in the evenings; only a clairvoyant could navigate the streets without getting hopelessly lost. When you stuck your hand out in front of you, some nights you were lucky to be able to see your own fingertips.
Once, on his way back from the Foreign Office, Thaniel'd got himself turned around in the haze. He would have been run over by a tram if not for seeing the bursts of lime green that were the horses' shoes on the cobblestones. Six catching a lung-rattling cough had been the final straw, and Mori had packed them all up and declared that they were escaping to somewhere more civilised until the spring.
Escaping from London was not something Thaniel had ever thought he would do. Men from Lincolnshire generally escaped to London, where they ended up trapped forever, almost too poor to stay but definitely too poor to leave again. But the last few years had changed what Thaniel thought of as impossible, and now they were headed to Cornwall, where Mori apparently had a friend whose house they would be borrowing for the duration.
Extricating Six from number twenty-seven had been the hardest part. Mori travelled the way only the really rich could, completely at ease and taking barely anything for a three-month stay except a small valise of clothes and a trunk stuffed full of clockwork. Thaniel hadn't had much to bring himself, even packing for Six, and porters had appeared from thin air that morning to whisk their things away ahead of them to the station. Getting Six into the cab with them, on the other hand, had devolved into a battle of wills. She hated change with a passion, and a change in schedule accompanied by a change in location was too much to ask. She wasn't the sort of child who screamed; instead, she'd locked herself away into her attic room – literally. At nine, she'd blossomed under Mori's absent-minded tutelage into a genius at anything mechanical, and Thaniel would have been surprised if London's best locksmiths could've got her out. He'd been useless, helpless in the face of her being angry at them, but Mori'd sat patiently on the other side of the door and said, 'Roku-chan, come out and I promise you'll get to see the steam boiler.'
'What's that,' she'd asked, flat and suspicious.
Mori'd been ready, in his usual way: he'd taken out a modern photograph of the Express and slipped it under the door.
Thus bribed, Six had been fine on the cab and then doubly fine in the station. She'd attached herself to Mori by taking his watch out of his pocket without unclipping the chain, then spent the entire time absorbing Paddington's great arched roof before nearly losing her composure entirely at the sight of the train itself. Once they'd found their compartment, Mori'd whisked her off on the promised tour and when they'd got back Six'd laid down and promptly fallen asleep from an excess of stimulation. Katsu was curled in her arms, one of his tentacles coiled around her left wrist.
Thaniel pulled his gaze away from the frostbitten landscape scrolling past as Six shifted slightly. She had her head in Mori's lap and he had the fingers of one hand resting in the short crop of her hair. She rarely permitted them to touch her when she was awake, but seemed to find it soothing when she was tired. The sight of them made something in Thaniel's breast feel so warm it nearly burned.
'I'll get it in the neck from her later once the novelty of seeing a steam engine up close wears off,' Mori said quietly, eyes on Six's sleeping face. She had the same blank expression asleep as she did awake, just softer.
'Your friend won't mind all three of us crowding in?' Thaniel asked again, just to be sure. Mori had acquaintances by the boatload in circles with air more rarefied than Thaniel could breathe, but none that he ever purported to call a friend except this Mr. Tremayne, who was apparently an old tutor. Thaniel didn't know what to expect.
'He's got plenty of space,' Mori said, his amber voice low so as not to disturb Six. 'Anyway, it's not likely that he'll be back at any point when we're there.'
'You don't know?' Thaniel asked. It wasn't like Mori not to know, which just lent weight to Thaniel's theory that Mr. Tremayne, who apparently went off to Peru for a decade at a time, was an invention that Mori was using to help blur their difference in class. It wasn't as though Baron Mori couldn't buy whatever property he wanted anywhere he wanted to, especially if he wanted them to have privacy.
Mori shrugged awkwardly. 'Some of his schedule is determined by a fairly random event,' he said. 'I try not to look too hard, with friends. It feels like prying, unless they're in danger of something imminent.'
Thaniel reached out for Mori's other hand and took it. Mori squeezed down on his fingers and they sat like that until evening, which came so early at that time of year, descended. Then Mori gently shifted Six, giving her to Thaniel so that he could open up his valise. He'd brought with him the fireflies from the garden that Six loved so much, and once released they flitted around the cabin in random patterns, painting the air with their gentle yellow glow.
'Kei,' Thaniel said once the cab that had taken them to Tremayne's had trundled out of the drive. 'When you said your friend had a house... This isn't a house.'
'This is a house,' Six informed him. She was holding onto Thaniel with one hand and Mori's watch with another. 'It has a roof and walls and a door.'
And, Thaniel expected, sixteen rooms, but he couldn't argue with her logic.
'I'm tired,' Six declared. It'd been a long train ride and that was before the remainder of the transit to get to Heligan. 'Do I get the whole attic?'
Mori led them inside. For a moment Thaniel felt deeply conscious of how they must have seemed, linked together by a child, but there was no rush of staff, no butler, not even a valet. The house was lit up and warm, and people had clearly been through recently to clean, but they seemed to be alone.
'Merrick doesn't like strangers any more than I do,' Mori answered his unasked question before looking down at Six. 'You can choose where you want to sleep. The roof is new, so the attics are in good shape, but the rooms have real beds.'
Six let go of them; Mori's watch was back in his pocket before Thaniel even saw her hands move. 'Can I have a map?'
Mori took a hand-sketched map of the house out of his pocket and gave it to her. 'Dinner at six o'clock in the kitchen.'
Six took out her own watch and checked the time. Mori had given it to her for her birthday earlier that year, having worked on it for a long while. Thaniel hadn't had a chance to see it before Mori'd presented it to her, and Six didn't let anyone touch it. She was sensitive to the fact that Mori wasn't on her paperwork, though it was impossible to explain why the government would rather deport Mori than let him be one of her legal guardians. How a child of nine found paperwork important was beyond Thaniel, but Six was her own type of child. She called Thaniel dad, but Mori was Mori and she couldn't be convinced to call him anything else.
'Six will be back at six,' she said solemnly. Mori gave her the fireflies trapped in a jar with a handle to light her way. 'Ittekimasu,' she said, giving Mori a narrow look.
'Itterasshai,' Mori responded, which earned him an approving nod. Six liked the structure that call-and-response Japanese greetings lent to the otherwise anxiety-inducing acts of coming and going, and took their meanings – I'm going and coming back and Please go and return – quite literally.
She went off in her slow, deliberate shuffle-walk, the fireflies casting constellations onto the corridor walls as Katsu waved his tentacles sinuously from his spot on her arm.
Mori told him to pick out a pair of rooms for them while he went to see about dinner, so Thaniel wandered the house. Now that he had got over the shock of the Heligan estate, it occurred to him that the inside of the house was practical, almost humble. There was the occasional oil painting and pieces of furniture older and worth more than he was, but the place was surprisingly bare for a house that was probably at least a few hundred years old. It had something of Mori's character to it: monied to its bones, but not ostentatious except in careless strokes. It made Thaniel feel oddly at home.
He had just finished with lugging his trunk into a room opposite the one he had deposited Mori's things in when he heard the blue and purple notes of one of his favourite pieces float towards him. Drawn like a moth to flame, Thaniel traversed the corridors until he found Mori a few right turns away in a music room. He was sitting offset on the bench in front of the piano, leaving a space.
Smiling helplessly, Thaniel sat down next to him and set his hands on the keys. 'You know this needs tuning,' he said as they started an improvised duet, Mori plucking the harmony out of his head as they went along.
'And all the clocks in this place need to be wound up,' Mori hummed, 'so you're not alone if you're irritated.'
'Not irritated at all,' Thaniel said, and leaned over to press a kiss to Mori's temple.
After the music, which made the house feel completely theirs, Thaniel had no qualms invading Tremayne's kitchen and helping Mori with dinner. The larder was, as promised, fully stocked, and it must have been to Mori's orders because there was soon rice on the stove and the smell of grilled fish rising in the air. The clatter of good, solid crockery being sat out and the occasional sizzle of oil made light colours wash across Thaniel's vision.
Thaniel felt something in his chest slowly unwind as they worked together in quiet tandem. London and its smog and the constant fear of being discovered suddenly seemed a world away. He found himself composing a few new bars for the piece he was currently working on in his head midway through hunting for cutlery; Mori hummed along in harmony a minute later.
Six o'clock eventually came and went, but Six didn't appear. Mori, who had set the food out, looked pinched about the eyes and then sighed. 'This is going to go cold.'
Thaniel wasn't sure what he meant; Mori always knew where she was, but now he looked uncertain. 'Where's Six?'
There was a pause. 'I don't know,' Mori admitted.
'What do you mean you don't know?' Thaniel asked, alarmed. It was one thing to let Six roam around an unknown place and another thing to let Six roam around an unknown future; Mori didn't do the latter, unless he was so ill he was bedridden.
'She's here in the house,' Mori said slowly, getting halfway distant the way he did when he was trying to remember. 'But she's staying very still and thinking very hard about anything but where she's going next.' He stopped to smile wryly. 'Clever girl.' He moved, the motion almost sudden given how still he'd been standing, to cover up the food.
'Kei,' Thaniel said, because there was something twisted up in Mori's expression that he couldn't name. 'What's going on?' He took Mori's hands between his own to still them. 'Are you sick?'
Mori shook his head, abortive. 'No,' he said, inverting their hands so that he was holding Thaniel's now, thumbs rubbing the tops of Thaniel's knuckles. 'I'm fine. She's angry at me, that's all. I told you I was going to get given hell for moving us here.'
'She can't get her own way all the time,' Thaniel said. It was very much like Six, when she was angry, to seem outwardly fine but then do something dramatic like change all the doorknobs on them when they weren't looking, but they weren't at home and Mori was worrying him. 'How has she managed to hide from you?'
Mori shrugged in his bird-like way. 'There's random clockwork in her watch, the same that is in Katsu. It powers a compass – an anti-compass, I suppose. I told her how to use it if she ever felt the need to get away from me. That, and children are capricious. They're barely human; they never truly make up their minds until the last minute, which makes them harder to predict.'
Thaniel frowned. 'Why would you tell her that?' It seemed unwise to give Six a way of slipping out from under them: when given a hammer, she was the sort who looked for nails.
Mori set Thaniel's hands down; he did it carefully, as though he were made of glass. 'She deserves to know how the fundamentals of an escape route away from me are built. It gets more difficult for me to stay uninvolved as she gets older.' His shoulders moved beneath his shirt, uncomfortable. 'It wasn't her choice to come live with us, but it can be her choice to stay or leave.'
Thaniel felt himself staring. 'Kei, she's nine.'
'My mother killed herself on the day I was born,' Mori said, point-blank. 'I get the clairvoyance from her. Deaths and grievous injuries are useful – people tend to react strongly to those events, which makes it easier for us to see probable futures. My mother used her death to put me in the world; I was a bastard on the wrong side and she made the family swear to keep me. I don't know what for.'
Thaniel tried to see what Mori was getting at. He was speaking more than he usually did, and making less sense. 'You think your mother died to set you on a certain path?' he ventured.
Mori set his jaw. 'I don't know. Maybe.'
'And you're worried you'll be no better when it comes to Six,' Thaniel concluded. Mori nodded, tight. Thaniel felt a surge of pity so extreme for a moment that he didn't know what to say. Instead he leaned forward and pressed their foreheads together. 'Have you ever considered that she might have done that because she thought it would give you an escape route?'
Thaniel felt Mori's shoulders hitch for a moment.
'I'll never know,' Mori murmured, his eyelashes brushing Thaniel's cheekbones. 'The future can be remembered. I can't know the past.'
'You don't do well with uncertainty,' Thaniel had to say.
'Comes with the territory.'
Heligan, with its layers of walls and the surrounding estate encapsulating the house, felt secure and private enough that Thaniel pulled Mori into his arms and held him. 'Kei,' he said, putting conviction into his voice. 'You're not a terrible father now, and I don't think you will ever be.'
'You haven't known me very long. I've sent a lot of people to useful deaths.'
Thaniel considered this. Six's matron from the workhouse had died mysteriously two years ago. That was probably only the tip of an iceberg, but somehow he couldn't bring himself to care. The Mori he knew spent his days making lightbulbs for his little girl and going to war with the Haverlys; if he was manipulating history for his own ulterior motives, he was doing it entirely via post. Somehow Thaniel felt a criminal mastermind would have put himself in a better position to conduct affairs than a small flat in Knightsbridge that he nearly never left except to get said post.
'It doesn't matter how long I've known you,' he told Mori. 'I'm right.'
'I made the owner of this house a cripple,' Mori retorted. 'Got him shelled in the leg in Canton.'
That made Thaniel pause, which made Mori stiffen. 'During the Arrow War?'
'Yes.'
Thaniel did some quick arithmetic, aghast. 'You must have been, what, twelve?'
Mori narrowed his eyes. 'That's what you find unacceptable?'
'If Tremayne thought you were an eldritch horror, he wouldn't have given you a key,' Thaniel said, dismissive. 'Was this work for the East India Company?'
Mori arched an eyebrow. 'Really, the point you find objectionable is that I was a child smuggler?'
'You're a baron. You shouldn't have needed to do that.'
'I wasn't born a baron,' Mori said. 'The Company was the lesser of two evils.'
Thaniel huffed. 'That's not disturbing at all to hear. What were you doing there?'
'Setting things in motion.' Mori looked to the side for a moment; it was impossible to say what he might have been thinking. 'I needed a foothold in England, just in case.'
It took a moment to do the arithmetic in his head, but then Thaniel put the years and dates together and it began to take shape. 'I'd just been born that year.'
'Conceived, actually,' Mori said, sounding pained.
'I'm flattered,' Thaniel told him dryly. 'I don't know if I would've put myself in a warzone for someone who wasn't even properly alive yet.'
'Well, you shouldn't be,' said Mori flatly. He leaned back away from Thaniel to pull something out of his pocket. It had the shape of a watch, with a creamy gold cover. When Mori opened it, there was a compass inside. A delicate needle swung about at random, ticking every second towards a different directional marking. There were sixty marks for sixty seconds; sixty potential choices.
'I made one of these for you as well,' Mori said, shutting it after a moment. It closed with a barely audible purple click. His cases were always works of art, and there were linear engravings on the outside of this one like the blank bars of sheet music. He held it between a finger and his thumb, offering it to Thaniel. 'In case you're wrong about me.'
Thaniel looked down at the little embodiment of the unpredictable in Mori's hand. 'No, thank you. I trust you with my life. Nothing made me walk away from Grace and the promise of easy living to go back to you, you know.' He reached out to close Mori's hand around it. 'Why don't you keep it? Surprise yourself once in a while, with a future you don't choose and don't have to be responsible for.'
Mori looked at him for a long time, his eyes dark like deep pools. His shoulders, which were always bent as if they carried too much invisible weight, curved inwards as he exhaled and tucked the device away. He closed his eyes as he did so and looked a little lighter after that.
Thaniel reached over and ran his fingers through Mori's hair. He'd stopped lightening it, and it was now its natural, glossy black. 'Let's go find our kid,' he suggested.
'She's very much Ms. Steepleton when she's behaving like this,' Mori murmured, turning his hand to kiss Thaniel's palm. 'Completely unpredictable.'
'You let us be,' Thaniel said, entirely aware of how true that was and too in love to care whether he was a piece of clockwork being crafted at twenty-seven Filigree Street. He took Mori's hand in his own. 'Now come on.'