Cathy crouched so that the dog could nuzzle her hand. She still had no sense how such a thing might work, but the more time she spent with it, the less it seemed to matter. Such was the magic of an Emporium toy.
‘Papa made him for us, to remind us of the dog we left behind. It was the winter we first came. We were living, all three of us to a single room, in one of those Whitechapel tenements a good girl like you won’t know anything about. Papa didn’t speak back then. He didn’t really have the words. But he was making us those soldiers out of wood, and we were playing our Long War, and then, one night, Emil was crying, and I was there, holding him, asking what was wrong. That was what it was like back then. Emil would crawl over in the night and I’d have to hold him, tell him we were on the greatest adventure of our lives. And when he said he’d been thinking of our old dog, well, that got me sobbing too. I’d imagine you find that hard to believe. Me, Kaspar Godman, crying like that? Well, there was something about that night. Back then we barely knew a word in English. What we wouldn’t have given to play with the boys on the floor below! But not one of them could understand a word we said. Papa was taking what work he could, tinkering around, and one night he came back with a pile of old trousers and capes. He must have spent three weeks hunkered down in the corner with those things – but then, one morning, there this dog was, all wound up and waiting to play. We named him Sirius, after the mutt we left behind …’ Kaspar clicked his forefinger and thumb, and Sirius rose on his haunches to beg. ‘He was simpler back then. He couldn’t do nearly as many tricks …’
‘I love him,’ said Cathy, and meant it too.
‘Cathy.’ A note of seriousness had crept into Kaspar’s voice. ‘If you’re going to keep him, there’s something you have to promise me.’
‘I know you, Kaspar,’ she said, not knowing if that was true. ‘You’d better tell me what it is first, or I’m liable to find myself in some sort of contract …’
Kaspar took a deep breath before he proceeded. ‘You have to keep him wound.’ He saw the way she was looking at him, as if searching for a jest. Sometimes, Kaspar Godman found it hard to be taken seriously. It could be the most vexing thing. ‘Ever since the day Papa gave him to us, he’s never wound down. At first it was because Emil and I always wanted to play with him. But then …’ He hesitated. ‘I don’t know if I can explain it. You’ll think it strange. Sirius has changed so much since then. Patches have been torn off and taken away. He’s had new buttons for eyes. Half of his tail burnt off once – I’ll admit I was to blame for that – and we stitched him a new one. But he’s never wound down. We wouldn’t let it. And … his contraption is old. I don’t know what would happen if it stopped. What if he couldn’t be wound up again? What if, once he ground to a halt, he was over, he was spent? Well,’ he concluded, ‘do you promise?’
Cathy said, ‘I do,’ and at that Kaspar turned, as if to hide his eyes. Soon he was hovering in the Wendy House door, ready to disappear into the forest.
‘Kaspar, if he did wind down, if that contraption did break, couldn’t you just make him a new one?’
‘I don’t think it’s like that. It would be like somebody opening up your chest and giving you a new heart. How could anything – how could anybody – be the same after that?’ He turned back to her, summoning up a smile at last. Things, he decided, had become far too maudlin; life was for levity, not despair. ‘Do you think I’m awfully strange, Miss Wray?’
‘Awfully sentimental, perhaps.’
‘Aha!’ declared Kaspar. ‘Well, there you have it. For, if a toymaker cannot be sentimental, who on this fine earth can?’
Kaspar was correct; she quickly grew restless. The Wendy House was bigger than it had any right to be, but by the end of the second day it was already a prison cell. She spent long hours reading the old catalogues, charting the creations of Papa Jack and his sons across the years, but this could not sustain her for ever. By the fall of the third night she knew all about their first winter, when the Emporium was nothing more than the room where the Godman family lived and the boys from down the hall, who told the boys from down the road, who told the boys from further afield, that here was a family trading toys for winter fuel. She knew about the savings Jekabs Godman built up across that next summer and how, on the day of the winter’s first frost, he made a deal with a fellow migrant, a man named Abram Hassan, to lease the derelict shopfront at the end of Iron Duke Mews. It was Hassan who convinced Jekabs that a stranger could rise up in London, that even a foreigner might prosper. Until then he had been working hard to lose his language, reasoning that English boys wanted English toys, but Hassan convinced him that, if this ‘Emporium’ of his was to succeed, a little exoticism went a long way. People could believe in magic from the frozen East, he said, so long as that East was further afield than Whitechapel or Bethnal Green. So that winter the rocking horses were painted with the red and green tassels of the Russian Steppes, and the bears were Arctic white with jet black eyes. Cathy held up the postcards with which Kaspar and Emil had capered around the West End, drumming up business while their papa slaved in his shop. It must have worked, because the next year’s catalogue proudly declared the Emporium the toast of London town. Papa Jack’s toys had garnered such a reputation that the freehold of the building was now his, and the first photographs of the shopfloor showed the aisles thronged with enchanted children, and equally enchanted mothers and fathers. That, Cathy supposed, was how the true fortune of the Emporium had been built: by making even grown-ups hanker after toys they might once have had.
Leafing through old photographs was distraction enough for the first few days. Yet the stretches between Kaspar’s visits were achingly long, and when she spoke to Sirius her voice echoed in the cavernous Wendy House hall.
‘I’ll bring you more books,’ said Kaspar one night. ‘And games. Papa has chess boards that you can play against themselves, backgammon too. If you treat it right, the wood can remember. Beat those boards once and you won’t beat them in the same way again.’
Time moved erratically in the Wendy House walls. Sometimes the tedium drove her back to bed in the middle of the afternoon. Often she only knew what hour it was by the fingers rapping on the glass that announced Kaspar’s coming. Once, he arrived as she slept and she woke to find him urgently winding up Sirius, whose innards had started to slow down as she dreamt. ‘Every night,’ he was saying as the dog got back to its paws. ‘Every night, with your prayers …’ Cathy swore, then and there, that she would never forget again.
By the third week, she was spending too much time standing in the Wendy House door, gazing up into the paper branches. What a thrill it would have been to take just one step, and then one more! But Cathy was true to her word. She made a calendar to keep track of the days, and on it plotted the twists and turns of the baby in her belly. The kicks came with such frequency now. She could catch a heel or a hand and make it squirm inside her.
Somewhere along the way, she realised she had not thought of her mother or her father, nor even of Lizzy, in several weeks. Daniel himself was an outline in her mind; he might never have existed, were it not for the child turning inside her. Perhaps this was how lives changed: with new families always supplanting the last.
One night, when Kaspar arrived, she had rearranged the Wendy House floor. The bed she had shifted around, the curtains she had rehung; the nursery had been dismantled and rebuilt in a different corner.
‘I know what this is,’ announced Kaspar, depositing the evening’s supplies on the bed. ‘I’ve read about it in the Annals. This is what happens to polar explorers when they get trapped in their tents. It’s a kind of hysteria. The white madness!’
‘It is not hysteria. Or madness of any kind. It’s …’