The Toymakers(39)
‘Show you?’
‘You came to show me something, didn’t you? And I wasn’t there to see it.’
Emil came to his senses, leapt to his feet. In a flurry of movement, he had whipped away the dust sheet covering his work bench. On it sparkled a legion of soldiers, armed with their working rifles, flanked by proud dragoons and miniature cannonade.
Cathy had seen toy soldiers at battle before, but she had not seen them like this. They came at each other, stopped and let loose their fire. The barrels of the toy cannons jerked upwards and, out of their eyes, black orbs erupted to scatter the enemy like skittles. The devastation they wreaked was incredible to behold.
Gazing out across the ruin his creation had made, Emil trembled with pride. ‘Oh, Cathy,’ he whispered, ‘what do you think?’
She only stared.
‘When Kaspar sees this …’ Emil began to place the soldiers back into their cases, handling his cannons with the delicate fingers a boy reserves for only his most special toys. When, at last, he was done, he gave Cathy a salute so long she felt quite ridiculous. ‘No, I need to stop thinking of Kaspar. I didn’t do this for Kaspar. Cathy, I hope you don’t think it strange, but I must say it. Why, if I don’t say it now, I never will, and then I’ll perish. I … did it for you. I did it so you’d know I could do it, and that making my toys is done out of love. Love of sitting here in my workshop and making things happen. I don’t do it for glory, I don’t do it to win, I don’t do it even because, one day, I want all of London’s children to think of me, Emil Godman, like they think of my papa. I did it because you made me see. Papa and Kaspar have their magics, but I have my own magic, of a sort. You’re my totem now, Cathy. I hope you don’t think it foolish.’
Cathy dropped at his side, helped him put his new soldiers back in their boxes. It was safe here, with Emil. And perhaps she might even have told him: this is where I’m from, and this is why I ran, and this, this is what my mother and father wanted for me and my baby …
‘Where did you go today, Cathy?’
The question cut through whatever she had been thinking. She could not tell him. Leaving the Emporium doors with Kaspar at her side, that moment in the park when she had almost – when she had wanted – to touch him with her lips. Those things would be like betrayal to poor Emil. So instead she told him how boys across London – across the world – would thrill this coming Christmas; and when, at last, she was back in the Wendy House walls, she wrapped her arms around Sirius, lay back, and wept.
It was true, what Kaspar had said in those first days after they met: you could never keep a secret in the Emporium aisles. Even if it took a week, a month, a year, the truth would finally out.
In the middle of the night, she woke to the strangest pain of her life.
It was dark in the Wendy House. The paraffin lantern had burned out, and as Cathy groped to relight it the pain reached a new horizon. Somebody had their hands deep inside her, holding on tight. She tried to sit up, upsetting the patchwork dog that had been lounging so happily across her legs, and when she did she felt the most insatiable urging in her bladder. There was a glass of water on the bedside table and she opened her mouth to throw it back. It steadied her, but everything seemed so far away; the walls, the door, the edges of everything, it was all in a haze.
She was hovering on the edge of the bed, trying to calm the patchwork dog that ran in anxious circles around her, when the pain ebbed away. For the first time, she regained her breath, got to her feet and struck a light inside the lantern. The room seemed more solid now. She sat and teased the dog’s ears, and was whispering to it that she was all right, of course she was all right, when the pain returned. This time it was all in the small of her back. She could feel it swelling, taunting her with promises of more pain to come; then, when she finally thought she could bear it, the sensation exploded. She tried to take a breath but only half a breath would come; she tried to take another, if only to make up for the first, but again she could not fill her lungs. In that way she continued until, finally, the pain grew dull once more. She rolled back on the bed and felt the darned-sock tongue of the dog against her hand. It was this that brought her back to attention. She picked herself up, moved in awkward steps to the Wendy House door.
She had one foot within, one foot without, when the pain returned. This time, she held on to the doorjamb until it passed. Was it only an illusion, or had the pain come back more quickly this time? It felt like the tides that filled those old estuary sands, devouring the land a few inches deeper with every wave. As soon as she was lucid again, she set off through the paper trees – but stopped before she had reached the edge of the forest. If this was what it felt like, if what had started tonight was going to end with a squalling baby in her arms, she should be back there, back in the only place in the world she could truly call home. She looked over her shoulder, at the diminutive Wendy House with its diminutive door – but she had not taken two steps toward it when the pain soared up inside her.
She found herself sitting with her back against a paper tree, breathing quickly, breathing deeply, somehow finding a pattern that helped her steer a way through. When she looked up, the dog was standing forlornly in the Wendy House door. She beckoned to it and it loped over, its unmoving eyes somehow radiating concern.
‘Fetch him,’ she whispered, clasping the dog’s jaw.