‘You’ll have to come quickly, if this is going to work.’
Still in her nightdress, Cathy felt suddenly naked. ‘If what’s going to work?’
‘You’ve been a prisoner too long, Miss Wray. This Emporium of ours has its wonders, but sometimes you need a moment of normality to remember the magic. What do you say?’
‘I’d say something, if only I knew what …’
‘Outside, Miss Wray. London. But is has to be now – because once Emil starts pottering around the shopfloor, the moment is lost. Seize the day, Miss Wray!’
It was not the idea of seizing the day that propelled her to rush behind the screen and scramble into her day clothes. It was the thought of Emil wending his way down here, to share the fruits of his evening’s endeavour, and catching her with Kaspar. For Emil, that would be a calamity too terrible to bear; she was, after all, his secret.
Hastily dressed, she stepped out from behind the screen and slipped her arm through Kaspar’s. ‘Do you know,’ she said, ‘it’s somehow hard to think of there being an outside at all.’
‘It can get you like that,’ said Kaspar, and with a wolfish grin, he led her through the shadowed halls.
The coach was waiting at the end of Iron Duke Mews, with a horse already reined up. At first Cathy took it for patchwork, but it was only the enforced months of the Emporium tricking her eyes; this horse was very real. Kaspar helped Cathy on to the stage, where she sat among great felt sacks bulging with presents. She recognised sets of Emil’s soldiery spilling out, boxes of paper trees, a floating cloud castle, weighted down so that it did not disappear, up above the London streets.
‘What is all this?’
‘There’s a city to explore,’ Kaspar began, ‘but we have to earn it first. Come on, I’ll show you.’
The sun was not fully risen as Kaspar drove the coach into the winding streets of Soho, but by the time they reached the Cambridge Circus it was lighting them in radiant array. Cathy had quite forgotten the temptations of sunshine. She felt brighter already. Outside the Palace Theatre, where a gaggle of stage hands called out to Kaspar as he passed – ‘I used to come down here sometimes. The men in these theatres, they think they know magic. Don’t tell Papa, but I leased them Sirius one season. They taught him stage tricks. They’re the reason he can perform a tightrope walk’ – they stopped to buy oranges, and with their fingers sticky with juice they wended their way south, down the Charing Cross Road and to the banks of the river.
There were places he wanted to take her. Somewhere, there was a poky little toyshop that specialised in miniatures – they were not without merits, Kaspar said, as long as you could overlook the fact that all they did was sit there, looking small – but better were the places he used to visit, secret places of his own. ‘The Emporium might be the world, but summers there are long, Miss Wray. Sometimes you want … something else. I tried to bring Emil once. I had to put a halter on him just to get him out of the door. I forfeited two rounds in our Long War just to make sure he wouldn’t tell Papa. But … Emil never did like escaping the Emporium. I don’t think he’s set foot outside in three whole years.’
Escaping from the Emporium seemed such a strange thing to hear Kaspar speaking about. She wondered how often he slipped through the tradesman’s exits, what life he found out here, what people he knew.
It was on her mind to ask when the river hove into view and, hanging above it, the Houses of Parliament, the Abbey standing proudly behind. She had seen them in miniature on the Emporium shelves, but there they were, blotting out the skyline. How vast the world really was, when you started looking up! Kaspar drove the coach out over the river and for a time they lingered there, the boats turning underneath. She breathed in the ripe tang of the Thames and wondered that she was even alive.
Sir Josiah’s sat beyond the railway arches and the Lambeth bridge. A tumbledown of brick buildings arrayed around a yard with wooden outhouses in between, it sat in shadow at the end of a row of buildings that looked bleaker still. The yard that sat in front was pitted with potholes where thistles and nettles burst up in inglorious rapture.
Kaspar brought the trap to a halt and, leaping down, extended a hand to guide down Cathy.
‘What is this place?’
In reply, the doors opened and, across the narrow yard, out tumbled a horde of children. The elder ones stampeded the younger in their clamour to get past. Two of the grubbiest fought each other for the privilege of unlocking the iron gates but, once they had, nothing (not even the barking of the mistress who had appeared in the doorway behind them) could hold back the tide. Children of all shapes and sizes, not one of them wearing clothes that fit, lapped around the wagon. Kaspar slid blinkers over his horse’s eyes, if only to stop his restless shifting.
‘Think of it as the Summer Emporium,’ Kaspar began – and, upon lifting the first of the felt sacks from the coach floor, submitted himself to a whirlwind of grasping hands as the children closed in.
After it was done, and the coach floor empty, Cathy watched the children tumble in orgies of delight around the yard, running wind-up armies against each other, squabbling for the affection of the litter of patchwork kittens they had awoken from their slumber, or clinging tight to the floating cloud castles for fear they might evaporate away. For some time, Kaspar was locked in conversation with Sir Josiah’s schoolmistress (why this should have bothered Cathy, she had no idea, save for the fact that this particular mistress had a prim beauty about her); only when he had finished did he saunter back through the gates and join her at the wagon. Inside the yard, the battles went on. One of the patchwork kittens was already stuck, mewing for help from the top of a paper tree.
‘Do you do this every year?’
‘Once a summer. It stops one feeling … stifled.’ He paused, reappraising himself. ‘Don’t look at me like that, Miss Wray! I’ll admit – I enjoy the adoration.’
‘I know you do.’
‘Does it make me awfully selfish?’
Cathy was puzzled. ‘To hand out toys at an abandoned children’s home?’
‘To bask in the glow of it.’
A thought cascaded over Cathy, one from which she could not escape. For mightn’t her own child, the one squirming in her belly, have started its life in a place like this? Might it not be its face pressed against the window, waiting for a visit – from the Emporium, from a grieving family, from an old spinster desperate for a baby of her own?
‘I think selfishness of that kind might be forgiven. Kaspar …’ And here she hesitated, thinking she might take his hand. ‘Can we …’
‘Back to the Emporium?’
‘Not that.’ She tried to lift herself on to the coach again, but her body resisted; she felt the touch of Kaspar’s hands as he helped her aboard. ‘But not here.’
‘I believe that’s a thing we might do, Miss Wray.’