The Toymakers(38)

At least the stupidity of his sneer plucked her out of her own thoughts. ‘Have you even ridden one?’

‘I could make a patchwork horse twice as comfortable. Give it a little thought and I could make one twice as fast.’ As if to prove a point, he darted for the roots behind him, came back with a fist full of twigs and lengths of dead grass, and set about meshing them in his lap. A few moments later, he set down a cavalry horse of sticks and made it canter toward her. Once it was in her lap, she held it aloft. It was only the sketch of a horse, and yet every muscle was demarked in dead grass; its halter was thistle, its mane made out of clover.

There was silence, punctured only by the riot of ducks on the water (the gentlemen from the motorcar had launched a punt and were helping their shrieking lady friends aboard). Cathy set the horse back down, tweaked its tail, and watched it canter to Kaspar. Moments later, he turned it back toward her. Each time it made the crossing, it frayed apart a little further; each time it lurched over a diminishing length of grass. And, as they passed it back and forth, Cathy’s hands crept closer to Kaspar’s own. At last, when the horse was spent, Kaspar’s fingers touched hers.

He wants to kiss me now, thought Cathy. And, even as certain as he is (vain and cocksure as ever), I’d let him. But the baby had sensed something; it moved inside her, suddenly the only thing she could feel. The ripples across her insides. The ridge that moved across her belly.

She had waited too long. Masking his pain, Kaspar whipped his hand away, began tying knots in the grasses at his feet.

‘Home?’ he said.

Something inside her wanted to say more. There was so much with which that silence might have been filled. And yet, ‘Home,’ she finally replied.

By the time they returned to the Emporium, dusk was already settling. What clerks and daytrippers had swarmed Hyde Park were turning back to their townhouses and lodgings. At the end of Iron Duke Mews, the Emporium was a box of delights forgotten at Christmas and secreted away until the snow next fell. There was something forlorn about the idea that these aisles never saw summer.

Kaspar said so little as they made their way back to the aisles. He was hurt, that much she could tell. He had every right to be. He had told her so much, of the time before their papa, of the crossing they had made, of that wretched tenement where they had lived. All that he wanted was for her to say a little of her own life. Why, then, did it seem so hard?

He took her as far as the paper trees but would go no further. As she watched him go, something implored her to follow. And yet she remained, her feet stuck as fast as the roots of the trees that surrounded her.

Sirius did not rush out to join her. That would have been some consolation for whatever it was she was feeling – but, as she stepped through the Wendy House door, she realised why. The dog was curled up at the foot of the bed, and pinned to his breast was a simple letter.

I missed you.

Where are you?

Yours always

Emil



She clasped the letter to her breast, pitched down on to the bed and lay there as Sirius scrabbled up beside her. She was tired, yet thoughts of Kaspar kept cartwheeling through her mind, and the baby was pressed up against her, shifting in places that made her think the time was near. Where had this heaviness come from? It ought to have been a joyous day: she and Kaspar, out in the world. And yet …

She sat up. ‘I’ve let him down, haven’t I?’ The paper tore where her fingers were straining at it. ‘Come on, Sirius. You can lead the way.’

She stopped outside the door to Emil’s workshop. Part of her hoped he wasn’t there. But no, there he was, as besotted with his work as Kaspar before him. He had fallen asleep where he was sitting, slumped over his lathe with a unit of half-formed soldiers lined up in the vice.

Gone were the half-formed patchworks he had been trying to make; gone, his attempts at recreating Emporium Instant Trees; gone, the chaos of splintered parts that had put Cathy in mind of a child at tantrum. As hard as she looked, she could not even see the picnic hamper over which he had shed so many tears. Now, the workshop was an ordered production line. Units of soldiers occupied every surface and shelf. Some of them needed painting, some needed lacquer; but all stood proud, defiant as any Emporium soldier had ever been.

She stole in, Sirius sloping after.

Cathy spent some time looking at the soldiers. Emil’s original Kapitan was perched on his worktop, always at his left-hand side. There was something unbearably sad about that. Either sad or – why not? – the most magical thing ever. A little part of Emil was refusing to grow up. And that was how Cathy knew: no matter if he never learned to do the things Papa Jack could, Emil would always be a toymaker at heart.

She hated to think of him, waiting in the Wendy House for her today. Her hands danced across the thatch of his hair, until finally he woke.

‘Cathy?’ he whispered. ‘I was worried for you. I was …’

‘I know you were, dear Emil.’

‘But you came.’

She thought: I almost didn’t.

‘I did.’

She sat on one of the upturned boxes and watched as he kneaded the wakefulness back into his eyes. It was on the tip of his tongue to ask where she had been, and if he had asked it, she would have said; she did not have the strength of secrets in her tonight. All she wanted was to tell, to tell it all.

‘Do you want to show me?’ she asked.