The Toymakers(63)

Sighing, he sank into his chair. The arms rose up to give him comfort.

‘My boy has been writing to me as well.’

Secrets, thought Cathy with a curse. Her life in the Emporium had been secrets before – but only secrets shared, never secrets between them.

‘You must understand the position he’s in. Do you think they would let him write with such news? No, you’d receive letters scoured out, big lines of black. It is an act of love, Cathy, truly it is. What good would knowing—’

‘He told you, didn’t he?’

‘I am his father.

‘I am his wife. He’d have me thinking he’s out there, basking in a rose garden, tasting borage and mint, until the day his letters don’t come and, instead, there’s a telegram at the door, some secretary writing for some general, and that’s it, the end of Kaspar’s life, the end of my family. Just like it happened for Robert Kesey.’

She marched back to the door.

‘Cathy, don’t you—’ Papa Jack opened his hands, taking in the letters she had left behind.

‘Keep them,’ she said. ‘What use are they to me?’

She was already in the hallway, among hanging jack-in-a-boxes and dismembered clowns, when Papa Jack begged her to stay. Cathy had never liked the sound of Jekabs Godman uncertain of himself, and it was this that compelled her to turn around. Back in the workshop, he was lifting something from the trunk where he kept his winter toy. He grasped a little leather journal in his hands, the stub of a pencil dangling from it on a ribbon.

‘I made them for my sons, the year the Emporium opened. Oh, they were secretive little boys, and me barely a father, so long had I been missing from their lives. All they truly had was each other. They had their own language, a feral little tongue I could no more understand than the English around me. This journal, this one you’re holding, this was Emil’s. The other Kaspar took with him. I entangled the two together, you see. Go now, open it up. See for yourself …’

On the first page were the words, DOES IT WORK? and, below that, in Kaspar’s very particular scrawl, IT REALLY DOES! PAPA IS A GENIUS! The pages after had been torn out, perhaps in some childhood pique. The next were all filled with Kaspar’s hand – and yet the date he had scratched out at the top read 31 August 1914, the very night he had left.

‘How can that be?’

Papa Jack rolled his fingers, urging her to turn the pages.

Here was more of Kaspar’s writing, more and yet more: 2nd September. 19th. 1st October. 2nd, 3rd, 4th. Pages and pages were filled with his missives. She saw Robert Kesey’s name leap out. Robert Kesey is dead.

‘He writes to you in it,’ said Cathy, ‘he sends you letters through his journal …’

‘One more of the old toys you know about, now. One more secret. I built these so that my sons could whisper secrets to each other from one end of the Emporium to the other, or tell stories in the dead of night. Mostly they used it to taunt each other in that Long War of theirs – but boys, as the English say, will be boys. They forgot about them, in the end. Well, there were so many other new toys in those days. Every season some new fascination for them to explore …’

Papa Jack returned to the floor, where he delved again into the belly of the giant beast.

‘Jekabs …’

‘Take it,’ he said. ‘He hasn’t hidden a thing from me. I can assure you of that. It’s all in there, if you want to see it, all of Kaspar Godman’s war.’





THE TOYMAKER’S WAR



PAPA JACK’S EMPORIUM, NOVEMBER 1914–AUGUST 1917


Sirius was waiting for her when she returned to her bedroom. Perhaps he recognised the journal from Kaspar’s boyhood days, for he nosed at it with his cross-stitched snout. ‘Off with you now,’ said Cathy, first making certain his motors were wound. If she was going to do this, she was going to do it alone.

The Emporium at night could be an eerie place, in winter most of all. You could hear the skittering of toys left wound up, and the shop hands – those not making merry hell in the Palace – still roamed the aisles, readying for the morning rush. But Cathy locked the door, remained in her own private world – and, when she found the courage, opened the journal. Kaspar’s handwriting was so like him, elegant and wild, full of bold flourishes and curls.

My papa, I had not known you kept our old journals, but when you pressed this into my hands the morning I left our beloved Emporium, I felt a rush of such nostalgia I cannot set it down in words. But perhaps you know it. I treasured this collection of paper and thread once, and I will treasure it now, as I head into the unknown. My papa at my side! Promise me that you will keep what news you can from Cathy and Martha. To them I send missives of love. To you, who have seen so much more than me, the truth unvarnished.

We have completed our training and embark for Belgium before dawn. Tonight Douglas Flood and I play cards against Robert Kesey and Andrew Dunmore, but I have been forbidden from dealing the pack (they consider me a conjuror). It has been strange to be away from our Emporium for more than a night, and for myself I find it stranger still to remember there was a time when the Emporium was not home. For the boys I travel with, tomorrow will be their first taste of foreign air. They ask me about the world as if I know anything of it, when the truth is that, to me, those years before the Emporium are a dream.