Consider Kaspar Godman. Tonight, if you were the kind of Emporium obsessive who collects a catalogue each year, whose home is infested with silver satin mice, who has saved and saved your pennies in the hope of one day taking a runnerless rocking horse of your own back home, you would have found him in his workshop, unwashed and unkempt as only a man in the throes of passion can be. Only, you would not have found Kaspar Godman locked up with an admirer; you would have found him in a storm of balsam and metal rivets, of paints and lacquers and varnish. Around him would be a half-dozen incomplete boxes, one upended inside another. One would be overfilled with patchwork animals, wound down and piled high. Another would have half a bedstead poking out. Yet another would be splayed open around Kaspar Godman’s waist, as if trying to devour him whole.
The peripheries of the room were couched in the patchwork animals he had tried to make. A mermaid, meant for a good girl’s bathtub, lay half-beached on a shore of wound-down patchwork bears. Kaspar had thought he would devote his summer to making patchwork so lifelike there was not a difference between his and his father’s own, but there was a higher calling and he slaved for it now. He pressed his hands against the innards of the box in which he was standing, thinking he might shift its edges back just one more inch – but the wood began to buckle, the slats came apart, and instead of standing inside his own cavernous vault he stood in a disaster of splinters and jagged shards. Still, he did not abandon his calling, nor lament the world that was doing him wrong. He sat for a while, in the middle of the destruction, and gaped. Even in failure, what a life this was! He picked up one of his joists, slotted the broken shards back together and laughed. What a blissful way to spend your hours, your days and nights, making things up because nothing else mattered!
He was about to take another turn, but something stopped him. At first, he thought it was his hands. They were too tired. His whole body was spent. Then he realised it wasn’t his hands at all. It was his head. What inspiration he had to achieve this, the thing that had first driven him to cobble the slats together and start teasing out the space inside … it was the girl. Down there in the Wendy House, waiting for him to come back; the smile she had given when he stepped into his toybox, the way her face had crinkled, trying to resist her astonishment – and yet, and yet …
What he wanted, most of all, above even beating Emil in the next round of the Long War, was to take a completed toybox down to Cathy and say, ‘Look! Look at this thing I have done! You think it’s only my papa who achieves the most vivid of Emporium magics – well, not any more …’
It was the girl. He realised, now, that he was doing it because of the girl.
By the time he careened across the shopfloor, he was more convinced than ever. Cathy had never made a toy in her life, but she had opened something inside him, some untrammelled desire. Kaspar had never lacked inspiration (no toymaker could have made his paper trees without it) but this was different. He had never lacked shop girls to tell outrageous stories to, nor even to get lost with in one of the Emporium’s many nooks, but this was different too. Being the best had always been important – but only to be the best. Being the best for somebody else, well, that was special …
He stopped as he hit the paper forest. His papa’s Magic Mirror was hanging here, showing some corner of the Emporium storerooms where its sister mirror hung. He stood in front of it, his reflection imposed upon that shuttered room full of boxes, crates, the ranks of twitching skeletons waiting to be draped in patchwork, wound up and released into the Emporium playrooms. He was not, he had to admit, the most handsome sight. He made some attempt to style his hair with the tips of his fingers, straightened his shirtsleeves and the velveteen waistcoat he always wore (it did not do to wear common plaid, not when his work was so important) and proceeded, pausing to pick paper wallflowers on the way.
Before he went into the Wendy House, he peered through the window. And there she was: Cathy Wray, perched on the end of her bed. Her belly looked markedly bigger than it did even three nights ago, but it was not there that Kaspar was looking. He was looking at her eyes.
Cathy startled when the door moved, both hearts inside her leaping in fright. Her heart only half stilled when she saw that it was Kaspar, for wasn’t there every chance Emil might come trotting behind? Kaspar looked more bedraggled than she’d seen him, yet still held himself with a peacock’s pride. Cathy marched past, slammed shut the door and wheeled around. ‘Where on earth were you?’ she demanded.
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘You used to come every night. And now—’
‘Am I to understand that you miss me, Miss Wray?’
It was a question Cathy was determined not to answer. And yet, ‘I do,’ she replied, angry with herself for admitting anything so foolish. The truth was hard to articulate: Emil was company enough, distraction from these Wendy House walls, but somehow it wasn’t the same; Emil brought his worries – but Kaspar brought his wonders.
‘It wouldn’t have taken ten minutes to come to the shopfloor, just to—’
‘I’m sorry. I’ve been selfish.’
‘I’ll say you have.’
‘Have you been … very bored?’
Yes, she thought, boredom had been a part of it. But there had been Emil and, now that she pictured him, she did not want to be unduly cruel. There was sweetness to Emil and she hardly begrudged his visits, even when he came to her like a little boy does his neglectful mother, to pull on her apron strings and ask have I been good? She even enjoyed his company. He had brought her books: The Compleat Confectioner, being a collection of recipes for children by the ‘Indomitable Mrs Eale’; The Nursemaid’s Oracle – with advice on rearing and disciplining unruly youngsters – by one William Boulle; a sketchbook Papa Jack had made of the workings of the human body (this had more to say about joints and motion than it did the processes of giving birth – for which, Emil declared, there was a copy of Gray’s Anatomy somewhere on a shelf, if only he could conquer his squeamishness enough to open the pages). Now that she thought about it, that was more than Kaspar had ever done. Kaspar was the one to bring her the reams of newspapers the Emporium collected for stuffing and packing, but leafing through them only reminded Cathy how close the walls of her Wendy House were – and what a world there was out there, if only she could reach it. London, which had once seemed so far away, sat denied on her doorstep. The front page of The Times showed the Royal procession moving along the Horse Guard’s Parade – to think, she might have seen Prince George himself; Lizzy would have died! – while, inside, announcements were made for summer theatre in Regent’s Park and an advertisement showed ladies in elegant tea gowns, walking through Kensington with the air of courtiers. There were only so many times she could read the list of debutantes being presented at court this season without screaming: I don’t care about coming out! All I want is to come outside …
‘I’ve been out of my mind.’
‘I’ll make it up to you.’
‘How?’
‘I’ll think of something.’
‘How?’
Kaspar brightened. ‘You’re not denying my ability to think, are you, Miss Wray?’
‘Nothing of the sort,’ she snapped, ‘and do stop calling me Miss Wray. It’s almost the worst thing about it.’
‘The worst thing about what?’
‘About this,’ she said. ‘Kaspar, don’t you think … isn’t it possible I might have been better off if you’d just let me go and find a new home? Because if you’re just going to leave me here …’
At this, Sirius gave a solitary yap.
‘You’re upset,’ said Kaspar.
‘I am.’