The Toymakers(9)
The question caught her off guard.
‘It wouldn’t be too late for you to go back … wherever it is you came from. You could make up a story. Whoever it is, they’d understand.’
She stiffened. ‘I’m sure I don’t know what you mean. All of these others are here, aren’t they? I can work like the best of them.’
Mrs Hornung considered her oddly. Then, something shifted in her appearance. She seemed to have acquiesced to some unvoiced demand. ‘You’ll find Sally-Anne on the shopfloor come sun up. She’s been with the Emporium too many Christmases to mention. She’ll show you the ropes. Get your rest, Cathy. There’s much you’ll have to learn.’
It wasn’t until Mrs Hornung had disappeared that Cathy’s heart was stilled. She wondered if the other heart was beating as rapidly. Perhaps it could sense her trepidation, and beat in unison with her own. Quickly, she slammed the door shut and scrabbled to find a bolt. Only once she was sealed within did she look around. There was a bed in the corner, where the pitched roof met the wall. A steepled window looked out across black rooftops and streetlights, half a moon hanging between towers rising up on the other side of the city. Apart from that, there was nothing.
‘Are you still there?’ she whispered, with her hand on her belly. She prowled around the room, until she reached the window. She had not known she was so high, but there was a clarity to the air, the taste of winter’s first frost. It was strange not to smell the sea. London had odours of its own. ‘It can’t be so bad. We might have turned up at a den of thieves. They could have killed us already. No reason why they’d wait until the dead of night, creep up here and smother us with a pillow …’ Her eyes revolved, until they landed on the door. ‘No reason at all.’
The thought propelled her to heave her bed against the door, but that revealed black holes in the floorboards that had been gnawed away to reveal the pitted darkness underneath. In the end, she heaved the bed back into place. It was better to be afraid of what she knew than what she didn’t. She lay down and closed her eyes; her body was ready for sleep, but her mind was not. It kept erupting with images of Lizzy a victim of their father’s inquisition, with the idea of their mother storming to Daniel’s house and demanding to search every cupboard and crawlspace.
‘How long before they call the police?’ she whispered, but the baby fluttered inside her and, to Cathy, its inference was clear: they won’t call the police; they couldn’t stand the shame. ‘So it’s only me and you. And hang them,’ she uttered. ‘They would rather you never existed.’
Such thoughts could turn self-righteousness to self-pity, so she concentrated on other things. She whispered, instead, about all the things they would do together in this, their new home. She had not thought about it when she slipped through the back door this afternoon, but now it seemed startlingly clear: this was not about a week, a month, or even a year; this was about a new existence. ‘Perhaps we’ll stay. What better place to grow up than in a toyshop? Why, you’d have everything you’d ever want …’
After she had lain out what few things she had, she climbed to the window ledge and looked out. Oh, but life was a strange and terrifying thing! She was still there, hours later, when the last shoppers flocked out into the winter dark, bound for the horse-drawn buses lined up against the Regent Street arcades. In their hands were bags in which confetti fireworks were already erupting; ballerinas so impatient to get home they were already turning their tours en l’air. Behind one gaggle of shoppers a reindeer in hessian and felt, no doubt the ancestor to whatever half-finished contraption had been resting in Papa Jack’s workshop, trotted out, only for a group of shop hands to hurry after and corral it back on to the Emporium floor.
Cathy cupped her hand to her belly. ‘Funny to think how close we are. An hour on a train, nothing more. And yet …’ This was a different world, though it seemed so guileless to say it. She was not a child, she had to remind herself. She could not be, not with a child of her own budding inside her. ‘It’s hardly like home, is it, little thing?’
No, it didn’t feel like home at all – and yet, as she hummed lullabies to soothe herself to sleep that night, one thought was knocking at the door, determined to be let in: Papa Jack’s Emporium did not feel like home, but home it would have to be.
PAPER FORESTS
PAPA JACK’S EMPORIUM, CHRISTMAS 1906
There are a hundred different clocks in the Emporium. Some keep time with the comings and goings of London seasons. Others tick out of sync, counting down the hours of that faraway coastline the Godman brothers once called home. Still more keep erratic and uncontrollable times: one counts each third second backwards, the better to extend the time between chores; another elongates the evening, all the better to keep bedtime at bay. These are the times that children keep, and which adults are forbidden from remembering. Only a child could understand how one day might last an eternity, while another pass in the flicker of an eye.
Yes, Papa Jack’s Emporium is a place out of step with the world outside. Come here day or night and you will find a place marching to the beat of its own drum. Listen and you might hear it, even now …
Emil Godman was up with the Baltic dawn, for such was the habit of his father’s lifetime, and, above all other things, Emil wanted to impress his father. Consequently, a full three hours before sunlight touched Iron Duke Mews, when it was shedding its pale winter light over the countries of the frozen East, Emil was already out of bed and in his workshop. A miniature of his father’s own, its tables were lined with wooden soldiers in various states of undress. Emil walked among them, trailing his fingers over faces half-etched, oblongs of wood waiting for the workshop lathe. According to the shop ledgers, a full three legions of soldiers had left the Emporium doors in the two weeks since opening night; shelves that had been eighteen thousand strong were now depleted, and the knowledge gave Emil one of the greatest thrills of his life. Most of those soldiers were his summer’s work, or else the work of last winter’s craftsmen, but all of them were Emil’s design. He settled into his chair, rolled up sleeves around his meaty forearms (they had his papa’s girth, though he was some years away from sprouting the same wiry hair), and set to work. Simple infantrymen and cavalry he allowed the shop hands to sculpt and paint, but the Emporium’s most prized pieces were for Emil alone.