He seized her other hand. ‘I know what to do,’ he whispered. Then, again, until it stopped being a statement and turned into a question. ‘I know what to do. I do know, Kaspar. I know what to …’
‘Emil, you’d better raid Papa’s cupboard. Brandy, rather than whisky. One of his liqueurs. And the pillows, the pillows from the Wendy House. I stashed a full set under the bed. We have to make her comfortable.’
How daring it had felt to be issuing orders, and yet how familiar to have them being issued at him. Emil was rising to the tips of his toes to do as he was told when a thought occurred to him. It opened up a great pit and swallowed him whole. ‘You’re the one who hid her here, aren’t you, Kaspar?’
Kaspar’s eyes darted at him. ‘Well, what did you think had happened, little brother?’ Then he was stroking Cathy’s face again, drawing a finger gently along the line of her jaw. On the ground, Cathy’s lips moved in imitation of his name. She knew she was close, but Kaspar seemed so far away. ‘I want you to listen to me, Miss Wray. Listen to me and know: it isn’t going to be easy, but it will be all right. Do you understand? Do you believe me, Miss Wray?’
Cathy opened her mouth to say yes, yes she did believe him (and damn you, Kaspar Godman, but I told you to stop calling me that!), but it was too late. Other hands had hold of her now. Kaspar held on to her left, Emil held on to her right, but those other fingers held the rest of her body in their vice-like grasp. She took a breath before they started to close in. Moments later they were squeezing the life out of her and there was nothing Cathy Wray could do but lie back and hope.
THE TRUE HISTORY OF TOYS
PAPA JACK’S EMPORIUM, MAY–SEPTEMBER 1907
Consider Jekabs Godman: older than you think him, though you already think him as old as mountains. Tonight, if you were the kind of person to have taken a post at Papa Jack’s Emporium just to get close to the old wayfarer, to soak up his secrets as a tree soaks up the secrets of earth and rain, you would have found him asleep in his chair, for even toymakers of the highest renown grow tired, and, with the passing years, Papa Jack grows more weary than ever.
Watch him now, as he wakes …
Perhaps it is a dream that stirs him. Perhaps you think Papa Jack dreams of yet more fantastical creations to populate his shelves, but he does not. Papa Jack’s dreams are the dreams of wild places. They are the dreams of a young man who was once a carpenter, who might have been a carpenter still, if only his life had gone according to plan. These are not dreams any child wandering into the Emporium at winter should be permitted to see. If you were a caring parent you would shield your sons and daughters from memories like these. Better they remain where they belong, locked away behind those glacial eyes, while Papa Jack’s hands do their everyday work, threading life into patchwork creatures, spiriting up space out of nowhere, unlocking the world as it appears to a child.
The first thing he saw, as he reared up from those dreams (lest they swallow him whole, as they had on so many nights), was Mrs Hornung. She had arranged his feet in front of the fire, draped the blankets over his lap as she did every night. The teapot at his side (bark, pine needle, nettle – for Papa Jack remained the wild man Jekabs Godman at heart) was still hot, so perhaps he had not slept for long. Mrs Hornung clucked to see him wake, in the same admonishing tone she once used to scold his sons.
‘Is something wrong, Jekabs?’
Papa Jack picked himself up. At first Mrs Hornung thought he might topple, but as always he trudged slowly forward. In the fringes of the room, the patchwork creatures lifted their heads to follow him with their sightless eyes. A threadbare robin, loosely weaved, flapped its stubby wings and flew, in its own ungainly way, to his shoulder, where its motor promptly cut out.
Sometimes, the Emporium itself spoke its secrets to him, whispering through mortar and brick.
Papa Jack wound the little bird back up. As life returned to its motor, so it bounced upon his palm. Cupping it there, he left the Godmans’ quarters and went out on to the gallery skirting the Emporium dome. Far below, the shopfloor was in darkness. The Emporium in summer was at once a sad and glorious thing, filled with anticipation, filled with promise, filled with yearning. Papa Jack brought the bird to his lips, whispered a word and cast it out, into the air.
Follow …
The robin swoops down, as gracefully as a robin made of felt and duck down can. Plummeting and flying are two very different things; this robin conflates them in a dance of its own. Down through the dark, over the tops of empty aisles it comes; then, at last, to the copse of paper trees where the Wendy House lies hidden. Here it crashes through corrugated boughs. In the emptiness beneath, the Wendy House appears. Now the bird can control itself no longer; its motor is tiny, and it must save what energy it can for the return journey. It pretends to peck at the ground, looking for fallen grubs – and, as it does, it looks through the Wendy House door.
Imagine what it sees.
The return flight is an epic. If patchwork creatures had patchwork poets, one would have spun for this robin a myth of classical proportion. As it is, we must content ourselves with the image of the robin’s wings beating furiously as it fought gravity to return to the Godmans’ quarters. There it found Papa Jack’s palm once more. And there, before its motor wound down for a second time, it chirruped its last. Patchwork creatures have no language of their own; remember, they are only toys. But still, Papa Jack understood. Behind his beard, his face blanched as white as the Siberian snows. In seconds, he was in his robe, dark brown like the pelt of a bear; seconds later, he was holding his canes as he tramped through the door.
Papa Jack could not remember the last time he walked the shopfloor. The ways down to it were legion, but it had been so long that not even his feet remembered the way. He found himself in storerooms where patchwork mammoth lay; in the engine room where his flying locomotive still sat, awaiting the moment it might be needed again. He walked past the locked chamber where the Emporium Secret Doors had been barricaded (they opened in one place, but nobody knew where they went to; they had been locked away ever since), and only by sheer chance did he find the old night train and follow its tracks to the paper trees.
How furious he had been to hear of them rearing up, rupturing the boards of his shopfloor, and yet how majestic they now were! He would have stopped to marvel at them, but from deep within the copse there came a cry: somebody in pain, or terror, or both. Papa Jack had known pain before. He had known terror as well. It propelled him on – for there had never been such sounds in his Emporium, not this place he had created as a bulwark against the bitterness, the darkness, that was adult life.
He came out of the trees to find the Wendy House sitting there, crowned in paper vines. On a rock inside its white picket fence slumped Emil. The boy had his head hanging low so that, at first, he did not see Papa Jack arrive. But Papa Jack was a man whose presence could not go unnoticed. Emil felt a shadow cross him, and looked up to see his father.
What words Emil wanted to say withered on his tongue. But his eyes told a story. They directed his father to the Wendy House window. He had to crouch to peer in, for his great bulk towered above the Wendy House roof, his shoulders half as broad as the Wendy House itself. Inside, the space distorted with the quality of a kaleidoscope. And there, at the kaleidoscope’s centre, was his son. Kaspar was on his knees at the edge of a bed, and in that bed lay one of the shop girls, the one who had arrived on first frost. Her legs were parted and her back was arched and she was clinging to Kaspar as if he was the only thing tethering her to the world.
Papa Jack turned his tundra eyes on Emil.
‘Papa, listen …’
‘No.’
‘Papa, please.’
‘He’s taken it too far, these flirtations of his.’
‘No! It isn’t … Papa, it isn’t his.’