The Toymakers(71)

‘I know about his injuries,’ she said, suddenly strident. ‘But I’m his wife. You’ll think it ought to matter, but you don’t know me, and you don’t know my husband.’

Doctor Norrell gave a simpering look that seemed to say: they all think that, in the beginning. But then he said, ‘Lieutenant Godman’s injuries were not insignificant, yet his body has borne them well. He’ll walk again, I’m certain of that. No, Mrs Godman, what I want to talk about are the injuries we do not see.’ For a moment he was silent. ‘This is a convalescent hospital, Mrs Godman. It is not a hospice. It is my duty to repair our men and return them to the front, where they are needed most. I’m taught to watch for malingerers, for confidence men, for men of ill honour. But not every wound is one you can stitch together or cut away, and not every man who isn’t fit to return is a malingerer. I’m speaking, as you must know, about maladies of the heart. And of the head.’

‘My husband isn’t mad, Doctor Norrell.’

‘Madness is relative. Do you know, in Ypres, they called your husband the God Man? The God Man – on account of the things he did that put him in harm’s way. His record demonstrates him a ruthlessly efficient leader. He’s been promoted and decorated. The boys in his platoon look up to him enormously, and the same cannot be said for many of the NCOs whose paths have crossed mine. And yet … Mrs Godman, your husband has not breathed a word since the day he arrived. There has been no crack through which I can shine a light, to better understand what goes on behind his eyes. Mrs Godman, you may not want to hear what I have to say next, but it’s important that you do. Your husband was dragged from the mire by two of his men. By the time they reached the field station, it had been eighteen hours since the explosion that felled him. He had spent every one of those hours with his head buried in the cavity of his second lieutenant’s chest. When the field ambulance reached him, they believed him to be dead. The God Man, they said, dead and gone. And yet he awoke, in the hospital behind the front line. By some miracle, his wounds were not infected. He is still there behind his eyes, Mrs Godman, but there has been no way in. Most of my colleagues would tell you that silence settles the mind, that the lieutenant is doing everything he can to return to himself. But there is another school of thought – and it is my sincere belief – that, for maladies like your husband’s, the only cure is in the talking.’ Again, he stopped. ‘Do you understand my meaning, Mrs Godman? Your husband cannot be cured if he remains hidden inside his own head.’

‘What you’re saying,’ said Cathy, ‘is that my husband is here – and yet he’s not.’

The doctor laid down his papers. ‘Perhaps it is time that you saw the lieutenant for yourself.’

Kaspar was classified as a cot case and, as such, was in the ground-floor ward, among the other bedridden and fresh amputees. Sister Philomena was emerging from the room as they arrived. Inside, makeshift curtain rails divided the beds – and there, propped up in bed with his head hanging down, was the man Cathy had loved for so many years. Lieutenant Godman. The God Man. Her Kaspar.

He was old. That was the thing that struck her. She could see the bones of his cheeks; they gave him the look of a sculpture, though without any of a sculpture’s classical poise. Upon his lap sat a wooden box, carved with the fractures of a thousand snowflakes, and on its top a varnished plate spun at the same pace as the crank handle Kaspar’s hand was turning. On the plate danced two circus acrobats, mahogany mice in braces and long pantaloons. The melody from the contraption inside was lilting and sad, a nursery rhyme as played by a harpist of great renown. It slowed and sped up, according to the whim of Kaspar’s hand.

‘Did he make that thing?’ Cathy whispered.

‘Sister?’ called Doctor Norrell – and, at his command, Sister Philomena returned to the room. ‘The music box, did the lieutenant …’

‘It was in pieces, and part of his packs,’ she explained. ‘The first days he was here, he rebuilt it out of every last splinter. Sometimes, he lends it to the other men. They’re besotted with it. And it’s the queerest thing – whenever Lieutenant Godman’s without it, he comes out of himself. He gets out of bed, he starts pacing, he prowls. I do believe he has an attachment.’

Cathy took three great strides into the ward. Some of the other soldiers revolved to face her, but Kaspar – her poor, beautiful Kaspar – did not flinch; his eyes saw only the twirling mice, his ears heard only that sweet, sad refrain.

‘Bring me a cane,’ she said. ‘I’ve a carriage waiting outside. Doctor Norrell, my husband is coming home.’

The spyglass was one of Martha’s most treasured possessions. Her papa (not her blood papa, who she understood – in the storybook kind of way she understood these things – to have perished in the Aegean) had made it for her. It had an ivory handle in a pearlescent design and, if you pressed one eye to the glass, you could watch everything that was happening through its sister piece, hidden out on Iron Duke Mews. That was how she knew of her mother’s return even before the Emporium doors opened. As soon as the spyglass revealed the hansom carriage approaching, she scrambled for the dirigible tethered between the paper trees. She was in the stern, preparing to toss ballast over the side, when Sirius lolloped out of the trees and set up his thin, cotton whimpers.