The Toymakers(36)

‘He can’t sleep again,’ said Emil. ‘That means either he had an idea or …’

Papa Jack lifted himself to move again. Cathy was certain she was not mistaken; the old man was either crying or singing. Whichever it was, it had the quality of winter wind in the trees.

‘… or what?’

‘Or he’s remembering.’

High above, Papa Jack disappeared through another door. The light seemed to move sluggishly after him, as if he wore it as a bridal train.

Emil must have realised he was standing too close to Cathy for he swiftly stepped aside.

‘I’ll come back soon, Cathy. I’ll make soldiers so magnificent those toyboxes will sit around gathering dust. This winter, they won’t even remember those paper trees.’

Cathy watched him race off into the darkness of the shopfloor. It was strange how easily Emil and Kaspar thought of the first frost, of October and November and Christmas beyond. Cathy laid a hand on her belly, where the baby was suddenly too big to cartwheel around. Before winter, there was autumn – and before autumn, summer. No wonder she could not envisage beyond, for what was life going to look like then?

The weeks flickered by.

Keeping Kaspar from Emil and Emil from Kaspar became a parlour game in which all three of them were embroiled (though only Cathy had any knowledge of the rules). When Kaspar was inside the Wendy House walls, the baby tumbled in panic – for what would happen were Emil to come sauntering through the paper trees right then? When Emil came by, to show her the Cossack cavalry he was devising, the miniature cannonade and musketeers fit for the Crimea, the baby tumbled again – for what if there were to come a knock at the door and Cathy were to open it, only to discover a perfectly composed toybox out of which Kaspar Godman unfolded himself?

There were tricks she learnt to employ. The gifts Emil brought could be hidden at the bottom of Kaspar’s toybox. The signs of Kaspar’s visits were easier to disguise, for he brought only his ideas – and the only sign he was there were the teacups he left behind, the impressions his body made on the bed when he lay back and told her how one day he would make her a Wendy House ten times the size, a paper garden for her baby, a whole world they need never leave.

And perhaps it was the way her eyes furrowed at this that prompted Kaspar’s return at dawn the next morning. Evidently he had slept, for he looked less ragged than Cathy had seen him in weeks. He wore a woollen town coat and, over his shoulder, a satchel of waxed leather.

‘You’ll have to come quickly, if this is going to work.’

Still in her nightdress, Cathy felt suddenly naked. ‘If what’s going to work?’

‘You’ve been a prisoner too long, Miss Wray. This Emporium of ours has its wonders, but sometimes you need a moment of normality to remember the magic. What do you say?’

‘I’d say something, if only I knew what …’

‘Outside, Miss Wray. London. But is has to be now – because once Emil starts pottering around the shopfloor, the moment is lost. Seize the day, Miss Wray!’

It was not the idea of seizing the day that propelled her to rush behind the screen and scramble into her day clothes. It was the thought of Emil wending his way down here, to share the fruits of his evening’s endeavour, and catching her with Kaspar. For Emil, that would be a calamity too terrible to bear; she was, after all, his secret.

Hastily dressed, she stepped out from behind the screen and slipped her arm through Kaspar’s. ‘Do you know,’ she said, ‘it’s somehow hard to think of there being an outside at all.’

‘It can get you like that,’ said Kaspar, and with a wolfish grin, he led her through the shadowed halls.

The coach was waiting at the end of Iron Duke Mews, with a horse already reined up. At first Cathy took it for patchwork, but it was only the enforced months of the Emporium tricking her eyes; this horse was very real. Kaspar helped Cathy on to the stage, where she sat among great felt sacks bulging with presents. She recognised sets of Emil’s soldiery spilling out, boxes of paper trees, a floating cloud castle, weighted down so that it did not disappear, up above the London streets.

‘What is all this?’

‘There’s a city to explore,’ Kaspar began, ‘but we have to earn it first. Come on, I’ll show you.’

The sun was not fully risen as Kaspar drove the coach into the winding streets of Soho, but by the time they reached the Cambridge Circus it was lighting them in radiant array. Cathy had quite forgotten the temptations of sunshine. She felt brighter already. Outside the Palace Theatre, where a gaggle of stage hands called out to Kaspar as he passed – ‘I used to come down here sometimes. The men in these theatres, they think they know magic. Don’t tell Papa, but I leased them Sirius one season. They taught him stage tricks. They’re the reason he can perform a tightrope walk’ – they stopped to buy oranges, and with their fingers sticky with juice they wended their way south, down the Charing Cross Road and to the banks of the river.

There were places he wanted to take her. Somewhere, there was a poky little toyshop that specialised in miniatures – they were not without merits, Kaspar said, as long as you could overlook the fact that all they did was sit there, looking small – but better were the places he used to visit, secret places of his own. ‘The Emporium might be the world, but summers there are long, Miss Wray. Sometimes you want … something else. I tried to bring Emil once. I had to put a halter on him just to get him out of the door. I forfeited two rounds in our Long War just to make sure he wouldn’t tell Papa. But … Emil never did like escaping the Emporium. I don’t think he’s set foot outside in three whole years.’