‘Cathy, I brought you here to listen. But you have to hear it too.’
Papa Jack reached into his gown and opened his fist to reveal a pinecone figurine, one of the very same ones that Kaspar had shown her in the cabinet above. This was no soldier, but a girl’s ballerina, crafted out of dead grass and bark. And yet – how lifelike its features were. How daintily it twirled en pointe on the tip of his finger.
‘Whenever you feel that way about your mother, about your father, I want you to take this and remember: there was your own first frost, once. They’d have taken you to the step and showed it you, sparkling in the night. And there was a first set of clothes, a first birthday, a first present wrapped in ribbon that you couldn’t quite unwrap yourself. Let it take you back there. You don’t have to do anything, you never have to speak to them again if that’s what you choose – just so long as you remember.’
Cathy took the ballerina, let it twirl around her palm and thought she knew what Papa Jack meant – for on the edges of her vision, she could see her old bedroom again, all of it reconstituted and only just out of reach. This was what had saved him, she remembered – this was the very same magic that had worked itself on Chichikov, Ursa Major, Ursa Minor, all of the rest. She looked at him now and tried to picture how his life had been, in those places at the ends of the earth, bartering for his life with enchanted creations of dead grass and bark. What was it Kaspar had said? A toy cannot save a life, but it can save a soul. How many souls had Jekabs Godman saved, shackled in those frozen prison camps? Could it be real that the man sitting in front of her, the man she trusted entirely to cradle Martha in his hands, had spent so many years out there, among murderers and rapists and thieves, and turned them all into friends with the toys in his hands? She had seen so many magical things in the Emporium, but surely this was a magic too far. And yet, every time she fingered the pinecone ballerina, she felt the same as those prisoners had done. Tiny flashes of halcyon days forked across her eyes: walking along the tow paths with her mother and father (‘hold Mummy’s hand!’ she had shrieked, delighted, ‘hold Daddy’s hand!’), or watching from the kitchen table as her father stole another slice of cake and rewarded her with a corner for not giving him away. Birthdays and Christmases; a ride on a steam train; the smell of her father covered in talc or her mother’s cheap perfume. These little things, and more, exploded in those pockets of recollection hidden behind the eyes; and all her bitterness faded away.
She tried to picture how it might have been: her father, pacing the day away as she and her mother travelled up to Dovercourt and back, prowling along the estuary sands with one hand clasping the other; the way his head had been buried as she came home that evening – might that have been fear, not fury? In her mind’s eye she saw his fingers trembling to clasp his inkpen. London, he might have thought. Yes, you could disappear in a place like that. People go missing in London all of the time.
Ordinary magic. All of the Emporium’s wonders around her, all of the things Papa Jack’s creations could do, but how much more powerful was this?
‘Papa Jack,’ she said, ‘thank you.’
Outside, Kaspar was waiting.
‘Kaspar,’ she said, ‘there’s something I have to do. Will you help me?’
‘Anything, Cathy. I’m your servant.’
Emil was still staring as they disappeared out to the gallery together, Sirius following obediently behind. Then, alone, he returned to his soldiers, began to lay each of them down in its red velvet case. Last of all came his Imperial Kapitan, the original and most precious of the thousands he had made. Emil held him close, a much smaller boy trapped in a young man’s body, until finally he felt foolish and tidied him away.
In the end, it was weeks before she was strong enough to venture out.
Kaspar stayed with her in the nights that came, his toyboxes sitting half-finished on his workshop floor. When Martha woke in the night, so did Kaspar; when Cathy needed somebody there, to bring her tea or toast – or only to tell her that it was good to be tired, that being tired meant she was doing everything that she must – there was Kaspar, beating back his own exhaustion to sit at the foot of her bed. Those nights were long and empty and, when she was not nursing Martha or rocking her basket to try and get her to sleep, she asked Kaspar about his father and those things she had seen. And, ‘Papa’s life is very different to our own,’ he said. ‘Sometimes I wonder if that’s the reason, if that’s why those things he can do seem so natural to him, but so strained to me and Emil. Mightn’t it be, Cathy, that, until you’ve seen the dark, you don’t really know the light?’
‘I hope you never see that dark, Kaspar, not for all the magic in the world.’
They made plans to leave at the start of Martha’s twelfth week. By then, the thought of returning to the world beyond the shopfloor was not tantalising, but disconcerting. ‘I feel as if she’s never really left the womb,’ Cathy said as, with Kaspar and Sirius, she crossed the shopfloor and carried Martha out on to Iron Duke Mews.
Summer was giving way to autumn, the sun growing too weak to properly dispel the London chill. At the bottom of Iron Duke Mews, the motorcar Kaspar had hired was a boxy thing, gleaming black and with wheels half as high as Cathy herself. Sirius was first aboard, sniffing at the leather seats with his cross-stich nose. Only when he was satisfied did he scurry back to allow Cathy aboard. She lifted Martha in carefully, settled her basket on the seat and steeled herself. To run away by train and return in her personal carriage; what they would think of her when she appeared!
Kaspar fancied himself a driver of estimable talent, but driving the carts he and Emil had created up and down the empty Emporium aisles each summer had taught him only recklessness and haste. Cathy had to bark at him more than once, or grapple out with her arm to wrest him from the wheel, as he joined the flow of traffic heading east, along the river and out of the city.
Beyond London the roads lay empty and still. It was a revelation to see greenery again, that trees might sprout leaves in summer that were not curls of paper and corrugated card. Yet nothing was more revelatory than the smell that hit her as they came close to the sea. That smell, only salt, seaweed, perhaps even the barest hint of sewage, was intoxicating. She lifted Martha to breathe it in. Smells, she decided, were like the pine-bark ballerina hidden safely in her pocket. They could make you feel five, six, seven years old again.
Leigh had not changed in the months she had been away. The streets were the same, the shopfronts, the boats basking across the mudflats like beached wrecks. She directed Kaspar quietly, until at last they arrived at the street she had once lived. She had been gone mere months, had travelled only thirty miles, and yet a whole world existed between then and now.
‘Are you certain of this, Cathy?’
She lifted Martha, wrapped her up in a shawl. She had not cried once, in spite of Kaspar’s driving, but as Cathy stepped from the car she strained against her shoulder, putting up a protest.
Before Cathy could approach the first house, Kaspar called out: ‘Miss Wray, wait …’
Before he went after her, he reached into the back of the carriage and produced a lady’s leather purse, with ornamental clasps depicting butterflies in flight. In the middle of the road, beneath the brilliant reds of twilight, he presented it to Cathy.
‘It’s for you. I’ve seen mothers staggering up and down our Emporium aisles with such bulging bags, but not you, not with this …’