The Toymakers(102)

The window was ajar, the frost of morning whispering through, but though she peered out, she did not see him hanging from a ledge, nor reclined up on the roof tiles, taking in the morning air.

Through the walls she heard the chatter of Emil’s children. Nina was already barracking them for some imagined mischief.

As she stepped back from the window, her eyes fell on Kaspar’s bedside table. There, beneath the lantern strewn up with dancing paper dolls, lay a letter.

Cathy, the envelope read – and the word was loaded with all the dread of the journal he used to write, the feeling of his hands on her last night, the strange new silence in the walls.

My own Cathy

By the time you find this letter, I will be gone. I dare not think of your face as you are reading these words. I dare not imagine the moment you tell Martha, my Martha (for she has always been mine, no matter what the particulars of her blood), that she will not see me again. You will not hate me for it, because your heart has always been bigger than hate. But do not think ill of yourself, should you perhaps feel a little relief. Because the truth is, I have been gone for many years already. I left you on the day I left the Emporium for those foxholes in the French earth. That I came back at all was down to you. You picked me up and put me back together – and if you could not put me back together whole, that was never your burden, and never your fault.

I have known for too long that I am withering away, but I know now what I must do and, though I do it, I do it with the deepest regret – for I love you as I have only ever loved one thing, and that is the Emporium itself. In my heart and mind, you are bound up with one another and never to be prised apart. But the Emporium is in ruins, and it is me keeping it that way. And, my darling, you are in ruins – and it is me keeping you that way. It is in this letter that I set you free.

Live a long, rich life. Think of me often, but never with regrets. But Papa Jack’s Emporium must endure where I cannot, and so must you, my darling. There is a different place for me now. I am going to find it.

Yours for the last time,

Kaspar Godman Esq.

PS. Take care of Emil. He is going to need you now.



Cathy read it once. She read it twice. She forced herself to read it again, each time more agonisingly slowly than the last – but, if she had expected the words to evaporate and change, she was sorely mistaken. There they stayed, imprinted on the page just as they were imprinting themselves on her heart.

An hour passed, maybe more. But the clock had stopped ticking. The motors had wound down. She thought, perhaps, that she herself was winding down – until, with an enormous effort, she got to her feet. She marched to the mirror – and, god, but she looked old. Dry your eyes, Catherine Wray, she told herself, and choked when she realised the old name had already come back to her tongue. No, she reminded herself. Whether you’re a Godman or a Wray, you’re still you. And Cathy, you don’t cry.

Folding the letter neatly to place it in a pocket, she marched out on to the gallery.

He was not in his workshop, but she had known that already. She crossed the silent shopfloor, where no miniature locomotives hurtled along the aisles, no tramping could be heard between floorboards and shelf stack, and into the half-moon hall. She fumbled for a key and opened up the door, staggering out into the whiteness that had encrusted Iron Duke Mews.

The snow had fallen thickly last night. Drifts grew up the walls of the mews, burying the doors of the neighbouring shops. It had fallen too deeply to leave any footprints, but she hastened up the mews all the same: Cathy Godman, still in her nightgown, plunging knee deep with every step.

She had gone halfway when she stumbled. There was a mound in the snow, no doubt belying the cobbles underneath, and she pitched forward as she hit it. The snow cushioned her fall and for a time she lay there, breathing it in: the morning air, the stillness, the very last day of what she’d thought was her life. She watched as a pair of newspapermen crossed the end of the mews, but they did not look in so they did not see her lying there.

Nor did they see the frosted velvet and felt that had been unearthed when she stumbled.

Cathy saw it in the corner of her eye: indigo and tartan; a lolling tongue of darned sock. In an instant the numbness (surely so much more than the snow) to which she was giving herself had been swept away. In its place was fire that thawed every corner of her body. She plunged her forearms into the snow, scrabbled for purchase, shovelled handfuls away where she could not take hold. Then she heaved, until the tartan and felt was lying on top of the snow and she was staring down, down into the lifeless face of Sirius, the patchwork dog.

She brushed crystals of ice away from his cross-stitched nose. She pressed her face to his belly, listened for the whirring of his heart – but the mechanisms that drove him, that had driven him ever since Kaspar was a boy, had stopped. Her fingers fumbled for his belly, but nothing turned within. The key by which Sirius was wound was unnaturally still.

Cathy bore the dog up (how light it was, only cotton wadding and felt!) and carried it back along the mews, through the doors to the half-moon hall. There she spread its legs to see the tiny key protruding from the fabric on its underside. ‘Please,’ she whispered, and blew on her hands to warm up her fingers. Delicately, she started to turn.

The key caught, and she could feel the touch of the mechanism inside. Something clicked every time it revolved, but soon she came to know she was turning the key in thin air; it was not meshing with whatever contraption lay on the other side. She shifted Sirius around, petting him gently, making yet more promises as she worked. ‘It’s all right, boy,’