The Toymakers(48)

‘And that is how,’ said Jekabs. ‘How I survived, and how I knew what toys truly are. I’d found a kind of … a magic, if you will. A way of reaching the soul of a man. Because even men like Chichikov, they would spend their nights parading my toy soldiers up and down. You won’t believe it now, but a year into our katorga, Ursa Minor himself pulled a toy soldier from the floorboards in our shack and, that night, I saw him marching it up and down his palm as he stood guard. And I came to know – there’s a shared heritage in toys. Take any man and show him a hobby horse, and a little piece of him will be a boy again, desperate to put it between his legs and take a ride. If you’re going to make a toy, you have to hold one truth as inviolable above all others: that, once upon a time, all of us, no matter what we’ve grown up to do or who we’ve grown up to be, were little boys and girls, happy with nothing more than bouncing a ball against a wall. That’s what I’d discovered in the East. I took something good from my katorga and it transformed my life.’

Jekabs reached out a hand and clasped Cathy.

‘You must go now.’

‘But …’

‘Back to the Emporium.’ He looked sadly at his blistered, frost-bitten hands. ‘I survive this, Cathy. I’ll be seeing you soon.’

Behind Cathy, Papa Jack’s hand froze on the crank handle and, as the toy stopped moving, so did the walls of the study reassert themselves. The wilderness of white faded, Papa Jack’s ledgers returned to their shelves, and the cold that had worked in her body slowly ebbed away. The fur she had been wearing sloughed off her shoulders and vanished before it hit the ground. She heard the faint cries of Jekabs’ fellow prisoners growing fainter yet – and then it was gone.

She turned around. Papa Jack sat slumped in his chair, his hand still on the crank handle though it moved no more. He looked spent, his face as white as the hair that fell around it. Cathy went to him and, kneeling down, took his hand. ‘Jekabs,’ she ventured. ‘Papa Jack?’

He looked up.

‘Didn’t I tell you?’ he whispered, smiling sadly. ‘It’s not a story I’m fond of telling. You see, now, why I wanted you to know? This is not only my Emporium. This is my life. I could no more throw out a mother and child than I could denounce a man like Ursa Minor. We all started in the same place, no matter where we end. That’s how I’ve lived my life. That’s how I’ll die.’

‘I’m sorry, Jekabs.’

‘You mustn’t be. The most terrible things can happen to a man, but he’ll never lose himself if he remembers he was once a child.’ Gently, he placed the toy back in its nest and the chest scuttled into its hiding beneath the shelving. ‘You must be tired, Cathy. Go. Get some rest. I’ll have Mrs Hornung bring you supplies. You might live in your Wendy House until the first frost of winter. By then, we’ll find you a place. A place you might stay …’

She was still too disoriented to do anything but whisper her thanks. In that way, she teetered back toward the door, certain that the books were opening and closing their pages to usher her on the way.

As she reached the door, a thought struck her. ‘Your advert,’ she said. ‘The one that brought me here. It cried out to me. Are you lost? Are you afraid? I’m right, aren’t I? It knew I needed help. That’s why you sent it out, into the world – to find people like me. Mrs Hornung said that’s what brought her here too. And when I looked at that advert – it was hovering, brighter than all the rest around it, and with that circle scribbled round it in ink. The advert that brought me here, it was one of your toys, wasn’t it? One of your … magics.’

Papa Jack had lifted his needle and thread, returned to the cross-stitched cadaver at his side, but his eyes came back to her now.

‘The vacancy you came for, it was circled?’

Cathy nodded, uncertain what to feel. ‘Your Emporium, a place to hide from the world out there, the world where bad things happen. A home for people who need it, people like you, people like me … It found me, didn’t it?’

He lay down his needle and thread. ‘Cathy Wray, our advertisements are just advertisements. We need more shop hands every winter, even with those who come back year on year. There’s nothing more to them than paper and ink.’

It couldn’t be. She had felt so certain. ‘But then …’

‘Whose newspaper was it, Cathy?’

‘It belonged to my father.’

‘And tell me, is your father the kind of man who reads that paper every night, looking at the situations vacant … just in case?’

‘He is.’

‘And is he the kind of man who might know the right thing, even if he hasn’t the words to say it?’

She thought, suddenly, of Jekabs Godman, of rapists and murderers, slavers and saboteurs: all of them, playing at toys; all of them, children in the once-upon-a-time.

‘He is,’ she whispered.

‘Then, Cathy, that advert you saw, that ink sketched around it, perhaps that was the oldest kind of magic there is. The ordinary magic: a father who loves his daughter, telling her in the only way he knows how …’

‘Love?’ Cathy said. ‘Papa Jack, they tried to give her away.’ She stressed the word, for that was what Martha was now: not the idea of a child, not some imagining of the future, but a person, flesh and blood with a heart separate from her own.