‘Why Cathy, surely you can’t be—’
‘Emil,’ she said, and was surprised to hear how easily her own voice frayed, ‘please …’
But now his face was buried in his food; now he could not bear to look. And, inside her, oblivious to its discovery, the baby continued to turn.
STOWAWAY
PAPA JACK’S EMPORIUM, 1907
Consider Emil Godman: the youngest son of a youngest son, born to a toymaker who did not yet know that he was a toymaker, to a man who would one day find ways to invent whole worlds. On Christmas night, if you were the kind of creature to spy on him through a crack in the skirting boards, you would have found Emil in his workshop, tinkering with the toy held fast in the vice. He had been coming back to this toy for many long months, each time unable to make the adjustments that might have seen it taking pride of place on the shop floor. Something to transform the season, something to strike all mention of those Instant Trees from the Emporium record – something, anything, to stand alongside the magics with which his father, and now his brother, were imbuing their toys.
It was a mahogany case, lined in velvet, and when he opened it up it was to reveal a family of mice dressed as ballerinas. He wound them up, daring to believe when the mice unhitched themselves from the contraption and lined up in formation – but, when the music tinkled and the dancing began, everything was wrong. When the lead mouse turned a pirouette, she tumbled into the dancers behind her. When the second held an arabesque, she promptly fell over. When it came time for the climactic move, the whole troop turning their tours en l’air, the result was a chaos of arms and legs and tails, little grey legs windmilling madly in a heap on the tabletop.
Emil whipped them all up and set them back in the vice. He was about to take another turn, but something stopped him. At first, he thought it was his hands, treacherous as they were. He looked at them with fire – for why couldn’t they be the ones plucking magic from thin air, taking the runners off a rocking horse and letting that horse go cantering around the store? Then he realised it wasn’t his hands at all. It was his head. His head was too busy, too clouded with other things. How could he be expected to achieve real magic when his heart wasn’t in toymaking at all? It was the girl. After what he had seen at the Christmas table, he couldn’t stop thinking about the girl …
Christmas night came, and Emil breathed not a word. Boxing Day died, and still Papa Jack had not come knocking at Cathy’s door, demanding to know why she had not told them she was conjuring a baby beneath their roof. Next morning, as the shop hands prepared the Emporium to open once more, there were no whispers in the Palace, no sordid looks from Sally-Anne and the rest. Doubting herself, Cathy ventured to the foot of the Godmans’ stair, thinking she might catch him coming down, but Emil was already out, and soon the patchwork dog appeared to warn her away with its stuffed-pillow barks.
There was a deluge directly after Christmas Day, but the Emporium halls were never as busy again as they had been in December’s earliest days. Cathy worked the register, or took children on rocking-horse rides up and down the aisles while the Emporium stable hands looked dutifully on, and by New Year she was courageous enough to return to the Palace each evening. By the end of that week she was beginning to feel that she was mistaken, that Emil hadn’t really seen what he’d seen at all. In fact, as the second week in January arrived, and with it fresh flurries of London snow, she was finally starting to feel safe. Safety was a feeling that crept up on you. It was not like anxiety or fear. Safety did not descend in a rush, nor seize you in its hands; but here it was, all the same. A secret shared was a secret halved – and Cathy might even have convinced herself to confide in others, to take one of the more seasoned girls to one side and confess, if only Sally-Anne hadn’t sashayed into the Palace one morning, stopped the breakfast revelries (Douglas Flood insisted on playing his fiddle even at breakfast) and demanded everyone’s attention.
‘Time to pack your cases ladies, gentlemen,’ she declared, with a sad lilting tone.
At once, the shop hands understood. Cathy followed their gazes, to where Sally-Anne was now standing, up on the dais. In her hands was a single white flower, the hanging bell of a snowdrop plucked from the Emporium terrace. The thaw had come. This day at the Emporium would be the season’s last.
The Emporium closed its doors on a frigid January morning, London encrusted in frost.
Mrs Hornung had prepared great cauldrons of stewed apples to see the shop hands on their way, but aside from this there was no ceremony. Papa Jack did not emerge from his workshop. Emil and Kaspar barely ghosted past. By the time Cathy was done packing what few possessions she had, most of the shop hands were already gone. She wound her way slowly to the shopfloor, already denuded of last season’s toys, and stood at the open doors, feeling the bracing chill of the London air.
‘You’ll be back next year, dear?’ said Mrs. Hornung.
‘I will,’ Cathy lied, and went out with both hearts beating wild.
At the end of Iron Duke Mews, Sally-Anne scurried past her, whispered ‘Good luck!’ and climbed into a taxicab her gentleman had sent to spirit her away. Then Cathy was alone, and London seemed suddenly so vast and unknown.
The Emporium had looked after her for a time. Emil had looked after her by saying nothing, ever since the feast on Christmas Day. Now there had to be another way. She supposed that the Emporium was looking after her still, for there was a secret place in her satchel where all of her winter pay had been stashed. If she was careful, it would see her until spring. But spring would bring with it new life in more ways than one, and it was a long time until this new year’s first frost and the Emporium’s reopening. How different life would be by then.
She set off, into the great unknown.
Decisions like this should not be made on an instant. And yet, that was what she was doing: deciding her child’s future at every intersection of roads, mapping out its life story by gravitating toward one tram stop or the next. Without knowing it, she reached Regent Street, where horse-drawn trams and trolleybuses battled for control of the thoroughfare. North or south was the decision she had to make. The wind was coming from the north; so south it was.
It took her some time to find a bus bound for Lambeth and Camberwell beyond. Those places seemed as likely as any. Sally-Anne had spoken of grand houses along the Brixton road, carved up into tinier apartments for city clerks and railway workers. One of those might do, for ushering her baby into the world. The question of what happened next was one she was steadfastly putting to the back of her mind.
The bus was slow in wending its way south. Cathy took a seat on the lower deck, where the windows were fogged by the cold and London was a ghostly miasma through the glass. They had not yet reached the circus at Piccadilly when she felt somebody sitting down beside her. Though she kept her head down, she could sense that the stranger had turned in her direction. He was sitting uncomfortably close, his eyes roaming all over her face, her hair, her belly. Finally, she could bear it no longer. She looked up, determined to dress him down – she would rather be thought hysterical than stomach his scrutiny a moment longer – and there sat Kaspar Godman, looking half-affronted that she had not noticed him sooner.
‘And where do you think you’re going?’
‘Kaspar, what are you—’
‘You didn’t think to say goodbye?’
‘The Emporium’s closed, Kaspar,’ she said, quickly reordering her thoughts. ‘Everybody left.’
‘So where are you going?’