The Toymakers(8)

Her nerves grew the closer she got. At once the workshop seemed impossibly long; the toymaker at its end shrank further and further away, while behind her the way she had walked stretched out, as in a fairground hall of mirrors. She had reached the second hearth when something picked itself up from the bails of wool that covered the floor. A framework of branches and wires rose jaggedly up, enclosing cam shafts and wooden pistons within. Half of the frame had been covered in muslin, threaded with hair; there was enough for Cathy to take it for a model of a deer, but so incomplete it could not rise to its feet. It turned its sightless face to her, a blind foal reaching for its mother.

Finally, she stood before the toymaker.

‘Please, sir, I’ve caught you on your opening night. I’m sorry it’s so late. I didn’t mean to—’

The man shook his head, because evidently this was a preposterous notion. ‘It’s never too late.’ His voice was like snowfall, ghostly and soft, and the way his eyes tightened suggested some double meaning. ‘Did my Emil take you through the questions?’

‘What questions?’

Bewildered, the man lifted a single finger and gestured to the gazette that had fallen at his feet. ‘They were right here, in the vacancy.’ He intoned them slowly, rolling his whiskers around each one. ‘Are you lost? Are you afraid?’ He fixed her with his eyes, as if descrying one in her silence. ‘Are you a child at heart?’

‘Yes,’ Cathy found herself saying, resisting the temptation to turn it into a question of her own.

‘That’s good enough for me. I have an ear for a liar. Do you remember being small, how you could tell if your mama or papa were trying to outfox you? Something in the back of their voice always gave them away. Well, I never lost the knack.’ The man rose from the chair, giving the impression of a fallen tree being hauled back on to its roots. With one hand in the small of his back, he levered around to extend the other for Cathy. ‘My name is Jekabs. But you might call me … Papa Jack’ – and, when she shook his hand, his fingers were not gnarled like she had expected, but smooth and soft: a painter’s hands, the hands of a child.

It was important to be brave. She had been brave when she stepped out of the back door, brave when she took the train and knew there was no going back, but bravery, she supposed, could not end there. Now that there was somebody else lurking inside her, she would have to be brave every day. Brave in the little things, as well as the big.

‘You’ll need showing to your room. Allow me.’

There was a small bell by the workshop lathe. He lifted it in an outsized hand and its chimes echoed all around. In the rafters above, the chimes were answered by pipe-cleaner birds.

‘My room?’

‘Bed and board, remember?’

‘You mean I’m hired?’

‘It was the first frost of winter this morning. We don’t turn folk away, not on first frost.’

With those words, Papa Jack sank back into his chair. In moments, the phoenix was in his lap. His fingers danced along its seams, and in their wake sprang up more feathers, crimson and vermilion and burgundy red.

‘You can come this way, dear.’

Cathy turned. A figure was standing in the workshop door, no doubt summoned by Papa Jack’s bell. She set off that way, careful not to crunch the wind-up mice still milling at her feet. Only halfway along the workshop hall did she dare to turn back. ‘Sir,’ she ventured, ‘don’t you even want to know my name?’

Papa Jack looked up, airily. She had not noticed, until now, the way his white locks fell about his head, like an avalanche. His eyes had the faraway look of the fishermen she had known, those who had fought in foreign wars and come home wanting only to fish. In reply he breathed no words, only opened his hands, and the phoenix, whose feathers he had been darning, took flight.

The lady waiting in the door was not as old as Cathy supposed. She might have been no older than Cathy’s own mother, and wore a look similarly severe. ‘You’ll let me carry your bag?’ she said as Cathy joined her. Her house dress was a simple starched cotton, and on top of this she wore a holland apron.

‘If it’s all the same, I’ll carry my own.’

The lady led her along the hall, back to the galleries that overlooked the shopfloor.

‘The master might not want your name, but I’ll have it soon enough.’

‘It’s … Cathy,’ she replied, her eyes drawn by the confetti snowfall coalescing into clouds above the aisles.

‘And you came off one of them adverts, did you?’

‘I did.’

‘That’s how I found myself here as well, but that was twelve years gone, when his boys was just bairns. You’ll call me Hornung. Mrs Hornung, though the first name’s Eva.’

Together they wound their way along a crooked servants’ passage to the foot of a crooked servants’ stair. Along the way, Mrs Hornung trilled and whispered under her breath but Cathy could not make out a word.

The way was steep, each step uneven, but there was light at the top of the stairs. The landing was cramped, barely big enough for them both to stand there together, with a door hanging open on either side. Through one lay a simple washroom with toilet bowl and tub. Cathy was about to step through the other when Mrs Hornung touched her hand and whispered, ‘Are you sure about this, girl?’