The Toymakers(44)

‘They don’t want us,’ she finally said. ‘My family were sending me away. To a home … And if it had been that way, there would have been a matron and she’d have been wresting Martha out of my arms, right here, right now, and then she’d have been with somebody else, with a different name, with a different …’ She paused. She would not tremble, not now. Strange how seeing Martha in the flesh had made her a mother; she had been a mother all of this time. ‘I’m sixteen now. Girls younger than me have made it on their own. That’s what I’ll do if you …’ She thought she had the courage to say it, but when the moment came it was too much an ultimatum, and her tongue would not let her go on.

‘Cathy, may I?’

Papa Jack opened his hands. For a moment, Cathy tightened herself – but it was only an instinct; she knew she was safe, here in the Emporium. She knelt and gently placed Martha on his lap, where his hands closed around her. How huge they were; she might have rested in his palm.

‘This Emporium of ours, it has always been a place for runaways. I spent so long running, Cathy Wray, until I founded this Emporium. Mrs Hornung and our very first shop hands, all of them lost, with no place to go. It takes a special sort of person to make the Emporium their home. Now there’s you …’

Martha awoke, to see the gnarled face of Papa Jack looking down.

‘A child born into my Emporium ought to know how my Emporium was born, don’t you think?’

Cathy brought Martha back to her shoulder.

‘If you’re to stay, if you’re Emporium through and through, it’s important that you know. It isn’t a story I’m fond of telling. It’s important you know that as well.’

Papa Jack clapped his hands and, from beneath the shelfing, a toy chest picked itself up, shuffling across to him on a hundred pinewood legs. At his feet it lowered itself to the ground and opened its lid. Inside were rags, worn leather gloves, a nest of silver fur as of some eastern wolf. Sitting atop the nest, there lay a wooden contraption painted in dark forest green and sparkling white. Papa Jack lifted this up. Set down on his lap, it looked a simple toy: a diorama of dark pine forest and endless snow, a crank handle and simple figurines of men in brown coats, iron-capped boots, felt and fur hats.

‘I made this long ago, so that I would always remember. So that my boys out there would know. If you’re ready, Cathy, you might help me now …’

She paused, suddenly aware of the door closed at her back. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘Trust me, Cathy. Please.’

Cathy knelt again at the old man’s feet and, at his behest, took hold of the crank handle on the end of the toy. Papa Jack’s hand closed over hers. She was surprised to find his skin as soft as the baby she was holding.

‘Don’t be afraid,’ he said, ‘though I was more afraid than I could possibly be.’

Then, with his hand still over hers, the handle started to turn.

It began like this:

The crank handle turned and, with it, Cathy’s hand.

Deep in the contraption, the cam shafts rose and fell, propelling the figures to begin their march. The toy kept them in place, rotating the diorama of icy tundra and black pine forest against which they walked, but this march was endless.

Cathy felt the first wave of cold as the numbing of her fingers. She tried to draw back her hand but Papa Jack’s lay over it, holding her fast. ‘Don’t be afraid,’ he whispered, and something in his voice gave Cathy the courage to continue, even as the cold reached up her arm, even as crystals of frost coated every hair hanging from her head.

She looked about. A whiteness, swirling and indistinct, was rising up the walls around her, obscuring the books on the shelves, the mortar and brick. Soon the walls fell away. The whiteness was absolute. It plucked her out of the Emporium and cast her down here, in this otherworld of Papa Jack’s creation. A single snowflake landed on the tip of her nose and, when she looked down, she saw that she was wrapped in fur, that Martha was swaddled up tight beneath a fur-lined hat.

A voice sailed past her. ‘You there! Stay in line!’ She heard the tramping of boots, too many boots to hold in her imagination.

She had seen this once before. In the space between the aisles, Emil had spread out his picnic hamper, and the shelves had faded away to reveal a wildflower meadow, picnickers all around. Only hadn’t that been the perfection of his toy, bringing to mind the thought of a summer’s day so vividly that she created it for herself? Hadn’t that been imagination? Whatever this was, it had to be something more – for these were not her memories, not her imaginings. These were coming from the toy and the man who hunched over it, still turning the handle with a perfect motion. Somehow she was inside his head, his imagination become manifest.

She was startled out of these thoughts by silhouettes on her shoulder. A column of figures opened up and marched around her, disappearing into the vortex of snow up ahead: men, countless men, in ragged felt coats and muskrat hats, some with packs slung over their shoulders, some dragging sleds in which other men were piled up.

‘Where am I?’ Cathy gasped. For the first time, trees appeared as stark silhouettes in the whiteness ahead. She felt herself being drawn to them, as if she too was marching in procession with the column. ‘Who are they?’

‘You see the man ahead, the man who stands apart from the rest?’