She only stared.
‘When Kaspar sees this …’ Emil began to place the soldiers back into their cases, handling his cannons with the delicate fingers a boy reserves for only his most special toys. When, at last, he was done, he gave Cathy a salute so long she felt quite ridiculous. ‘No, I need to stop thinking of Kaspar. I didn’t do this for Kaspar. Cathy, I hope you don’t think it strange, but I must say it. Why, if I don’t say it now, I never will, and then I’ll perish. I … did it for you. I did it so you’d know I could do it, and that making my toys is done out of love. Love of sitting here in my workshop and making things happen. I don’t do it for glory, I don’t do it to win, I don’t do it even because, one day, I want all of London’s children to think of me, Emil Godman, like they think of my papa. I did it because you made me see. Papa and Kaspar have their magics, but I have my own magic, of a sort. You’re my totem now, Cathy. I hope you don’t think it foolish.’
Cathy dropped at his side, helped him put his new soldiers back in their boxes. It was safe here, with Emil. And perhaps she might even have told him: this is where I’m from, and this is why I ran, and this, this is what my mother and father wanted for me and my baby …
‘Where did you go today, Cathy?’
The question cut through whatever she had been thinking. She could not tell him. Leaving the Emporium doors with Kaspar at her side, that moment in the park when she had almost – when she had wanted – to touch him with her lips. Those things would be like betrayal to poor Emil. So instead she told him how boys across London – across the world – would thrill this coming Christmas; and when, at last, she was back in the Wendy House walls, she wrapped her arms around Sirius, lay back, and wept.
It was true, what Kaspar had said in those first days after they met: you could never keep a secret in the Emporium aisles. Even if it took a week, a month, a year, the truth would finally out.
In the middle of the night, she woke to the strangest pain of her life.
It was dark in the Wendy House. The paraffin lantern had burned out, and as Cathy groped to relight it the pain reached a new horizon. Somebody had their hands deep inside her, holding on tight. She tried to sit up, upsetting the patchwork dog that had been lounging so happily across her legs, and when she did she felt the most insatiable urging in her bladder. There was a glass of water on the bedside table and she opened her mouth to throw it back. It steadied her, but everything seemed so far away; the walls, the door, the edges of everything, it was all in a haze.
She was hovering on the edge of the bed, trying to calm the patchwork dog that ran in anxious circles around her, when the pain ebbed away. For the first time, she regained her breath, got to her feet and struck a light inside the lantern. The room seemed more solid now. She sat and teased the dog’s ears, and was whispering to it that she was all right, of course she was all right, when the pain returned. This time it was all in the small of her back. She could feel it swelling, taunting her with promises of more pain to come; then, when she finally thought she could bear it, the sensation exploded. She tried to take a breath but only half a breath would come; she tried to take another, if only to make up for the first, but again she could not fill her lungs. In that way she continued until, finally, the pain grew dull once more. She rolled back on the bed and felt the darned-sock tongue of the dog against her hand. It was this that brought her back to attention. She picked herself up, moved in awkward steps to the Wendy House door.
She had one foot within, one foot without, when the pain returned. This time, she held on to the doorjamb until it passed. Was it only an illusion, or had the pain come back more quickly this time? It felt like the tides that filled those old estuary sands, devouring the land a few inches deeper with every wave. As soon as she was lucid again, she set off through the paper trees – but stopped before she had reached the edge of the forest. If this was what it felt like, if what had started tonight was going to end with a squalling baby in her arms, she should be back there, back in the only place in the world she could truly call home. She looked over her shoulder, at the diminutive Wendy House with its diminutive door – but she had not taken two steps toward it when the pain soared up inside her.
She found herself sitting with her back against a paper tree, breathing quickly, breathing deeply, somehow finding a pattern that helped her steer a way through. When she looked up, the dog was standing forlornly in the Wendy House door. She beckoned to it and it loped over, its unmoving eyes somehow radiating concern.
‘Fetch him,’ she whispered, clasping the dog’s jaw.
The dog seemed happy to have a command. Springing to attention, it took off through the trees.
She did not know how long she lay there. The tightening returned, coiling her body, and though she tried to be ready for it, somehow it was always a step ahead of her, always leading her on. The way to get through it was to roll over, not to resist. She breathed when she could breathe – and when she could not, she simply held on.
She was lying there still when she heard the voice on the other side of the forest. ‘Miss Wray!’ it cried, and she came to her senses – because Kaspar was coming to her now, and at least she would not have to do it alone. Then a second voice cried out. ‘Cathy!’ it hollered. And she froze; because the second voice was coming from the opposite side of the shopfloor, and the second voice was Emil.
The patchwork dog gave one of its muted yaps and shambled out of the forest gloom. In moments it was on her, pushing its snout into her belly. When it drew back, Cathy saw that its paws were dark and wet; she was sitting in a pool of her own water. She was trailing her fingers through it, daring to feel what was happening underneath, when the voices cried out again. ‘Miss Wray!’ Kaspar exclaimed, and then, ‘Emil … what are you doing here?’
And, in a frightened voice: ‘Kaspar, how in God … how in God do you know?’
‘The dog came for me.’
‘It came for me too …’
Cathy looked into its black button eyes. It panted happily, proud to have done a good job. ‘You brought them both? Why did you bring them …’
‘Stand aside, Emil!’
‘Kaspar, you’re only making things worse …’
And then they were here. Abreast of each other they pushed through the hanging boughs, each one dropping at either side of her.
‘Kaspar,’ Emil began, ‘you’ll need to fetch some towels. Hot water too. Some of Papa’s whisky, to dull the pain …’
Cathy was riding the contraction, so she did not see the way Kaspar looked across her, as if disbelieving the evidence of his own ears. Was this really Emil, little brother Emil, brushing the hair out of Miss Wray’s eyes, telling her she would be all right?
Emil’s eyes widened. For a moment, he had the air of their papa, furious at being disobeyed. ‘Please, Kaspar. We’ll need to make her comfortable. There are drugs she could take, if only she were somewhere else. Morphine and scopolamine. Twilight Sleep. But she’ll have to …’ He stopped. ‘Don’t look at me like that, Kaspar. I read every book I could. I sent Mrs Hornung out to track down the journals. I—’
Perhaps Emil meant to go on, but he had seen the incredulous look on his brother’s face and, as he looked to Cathy to reassure her, he could not catch her eye – for she was looking up at Kaspar, her eyes locked with his. Her body was angled that way as well, moving there by imperceptible degrees. She was reaching out for him, thought Emil, reaching out for his brother.