The Toymakers(16)

He was on the verge of saying something, but she would never know what – for, at that moment, the paper trunk blocking the door began to buckle and crease. Kaspar leapt to his feet. Without exchanging another word, they watched as the glint of an axe appeared through the bark. It drew back, swung again, and at last the paper monstrosity began to list, revealing the Emporium floor.

In the doorway, showered in scraps of paper and card, stood Emil. His eyes were alive with the joy of discovery.

‘Kaspar,’ he said, shaking shreds of paper bark out of his hair, ‘I just knew it would be you.’

‘Who else?’

‘Papa knows it too. He’s looking for you.’

‘I’ll bet he is,’ beamed Kaspar – and Cathy saw the look they exchanged, the one that said: there’ll be stern words, brother, but every one of them worth it. Because – just look at all this! Look at all this beautiful chaos!

‘You’re a bona-fide Bedlamite,’ Emil laughed. And, with a conspiratorial whisper, ‘Kaspar, we should go up high, after hours, up to the highest gallery and just throw them all down. It would be like that time with Papa’s snow clouds. He’ll know it was us, but it will be—’

Kaspar was poised to revel in the idea when Emil’s face suddenly soured. For the first time, he had looked beyond his brother – and there stood Cathy, plain as day and with no place to hide. Suddenly, all temptations vanished; whatever they had been scheming evaporated into thin air.

‘It isn’t what you think, Emil.’

‘No?’ the younger man breathed. ‘Then what is it?’

Kaspar marched on, kicking the detritus of paper tree aside, and passed Emil. From the aisle, he looked back, his eyes taking in Cathy again: her face, her hair, the curves of her body that she knew, for the first time, were no longer invisible. He mouthed three words – ‘We’ll speak soon’ – and then he disappeared.

Left behind, Emil looked her up and down. ‘I’m sorry,’ he stuttered, ‘but you really can’t be here. If my papa were to …’ He stopped. ‘My brother isn’t a bad man, but … Back to work,’ he said, abandoning the thought. ‘The evening stampede is about to begin.’

And then he too was gone, leaving Cathy to pick her own way out of the ruin. In the aisles outside, the shopkeeps were already descending on the accidental forest. Some of them had hacksaws and more axes; some of them had brought shovels to lever up stumps. Yet more had decided to leave a tree in place and were rushing out boxes of baubles and other decorations.

Ignoring the complaints of the baby putting up a protest inside her, she rolled up her sleeves and returned to her work.





WARGAMES



PAPA JACK’S EMPORIUM, CHRISTMAS 1906


That moment in the Wendy House had frightened her. She had to admit that. The way Kaspar Godman had looked at her – not admiringly, not possessively, as those fishermen’s sons used to do, but curiously. She had thought she was being careful. At the end of every shift she took toast and biscuits and stewed apples from Mrs Hornung’s trolley and retired to her room, just her and her baby to while away the long winter nights. She was keeping her head down, keeping out of sight, keeping herself to herself – and yet … I’m coiled, she admitted. Coiled too tight. Hiding away doesn’t keep you hidden, not in a place like this. Hiding away only gets you seen.

‘We haven’t been thinking straight, little thing. Running away was never just running. It was keeping running, even when you’re standing still. It’s all your fault, you know. When I’m not nauseous I’m dog-tired, and when I’m not dog-tired I’ve moods you wouldn’t believe. I’m up one minute and rock bottom the next, and it’s all your doing.’

Cathy had found her way through the lower storerooms, where the toys of past Christmases waited patiently to revisit the shopfloor. Now she stood outside what seemed a forgotten wardrobe, its door half-hanging from its hinge. Sally-Anne had tried to tempt her here on more than one occasion, but this time, it was a little voice inside her head tempting her on.

‘People with secrets hide away. People with nothing to hide? They make friends. They laugh and they dance and they … live life. Nobody ever came to the Emporium to bury themselves. So … in plain sight,’ she whispered, and was thrilled to feel the flutters of her baby’s response, ‘that’s the only place worth hiding.’

With those words, she opened the wardrobe door.

They called this place the Palace, because that was what Kaspar and Emil had called it when they were just boys and this place one of their secret dens. Now the long hall on to which the wardrobe door opened, decked out like the lodge of some medieval Viking jarl – with thrones carved out of the trunks of great oaks and a dais upon which three of the shop hands were playing fiddles (or more properly being played by those fiddles, for it was the instruments leading the way) – was a retreat for exhausted shop hands to drink and eat and make merry. Cathy stepped through a fug of smoke to find the evening’s banquet already half-devoured. Shop hands were lounging around the long table, or in the corners playing at cards. Some had opened up copies of other Emporium games. Little Douglas Flood was playing a game of backgammon, himself against the board. The West Country boy named Kesey was battling through a game of chess; black had already beaten him to a retreat, the pieces gliding of their own volition across the chequerboard squares.