‘There are times when it is good and right to feel sad,’ Papa Jack whispered.
It was only now that Emil noticed that the wind-up mechanism from the trunk beneath the shelves, the one with the little figurines and a barren snowscape, had been set on the mantel. Papa Jack had been playing with it, then, visiting that place in the tundra where he had first learned the magic in toys. In that moment, Emil understood the weight of his father’s sadness – for wasn’t Kaspar going where Papa Jack had gone before, marched off into the world with a pack on his shoulder and no certainty he was ever coming home? A new, terrible feeling rose into Emil’s gorge: I want it to be me, he thought; I want it to be me, so that I can be close to my papa.
‘Kaspar will be home soon.’
‘We can hope, at least.’
For a time there was silence. Emil found a felt sack, filled with tiny leather balls, and sank into it; a chair sprang up around him, moulding to the shape of his body. ‘It’s going to be strange without my brother, but we can do it, can’t we, Papa? The Emporium is still going to open. There’s still going to be first frost. And … the people will still come. Kaspar or not, Iron Duke Mews will be filled with them – and, and … they’ll be expecting miracles. They’ll want them, this year more than any. Opening night can still be a spectacle. I know I have my’ – he had to rush the word, because he barely wanted to say it at all – ‘limitations, Papa, but I can do it. I … promise I can.’
Papa Jack threw himself to his feet, the phoenix tumbling to the floor (where it picked itself up and looked disdainfully on). In two great strides he had crossed the workshop and smothered Emil in his arms. It had been an aeon since Emil felt his father up close, smelt the powder gathered in his beard, the heady scent of wood chippings, axle grease and glue.
‘I don’t want to hear you say those things again, Emil. You’re my son, just as Kaspar is. Your toys belong in these aisles just as much as mine, just as much as your brother’s. We have a ship to sail, boy. Let’s do it together.’
Out on the balcony, Emil stared into the shell of the half-finished cloud castle and listened to his father’s words reverberating in his skull. One of his papa’s patchwork pegasi had wound down by the castle portcullis. Kaspar had planted instant trees along the moat, so that the unfinished walls were hidden in tumbling foliage and paper vines. Emil could build neither of those things. He could not replace the magic that had marched off to war with his brother. And yet … a new idea was forming. Not an idea for a toy, nor an idea about opening night – but an idea about himself. His father’s words had opened up something inside him. There were, he decided with something approaching confidence, a dozen different ways to be spectacular. Magic might have been one of them, but there were others. And, if Kaspar was not here this year, if opening night was not to be his, well, perhaps there was something he, Emil, could do. Perhaps this was his moment to stand up, to be noticed, to get the recognition he and his toy soldiers had always deserved.
As he stood on the balcony, he imagined the aisles below thronged with customers. He imagined boys pouring into the dells he had made between the stands, where epic battles were being fought, the air alive with cries of exhilaration and delight. His winter, he thought. His Emporium.
This would be the winter of the Long War. With that in mind, he made haste for his workshop. There was much work to do, and mere months to go.
Kaspar wrote every day, as he promised he would. Days passed without letters, then arrived in a flurry: four, five, six of them landing on the mat, or ferried up to the quarters between Sirius’s soft, felt jaws. Each night Cathy sat at the end of Martha’s bed, Sirius lounging between them (asking either for his tummy to be tickled or for his gears to be wound tighter, that he might beat his tail with even more loyalty for his missing master), and read them aloud. After that, she retired to the empty bed and savoured each sentence alone.
At night the skies are open and Douglas Flood makes merry with his violin. In our billets we eat snail and French sausage and talk of the Emporium this Christmas. I am well my Cathy, my Martha. The French air is bracing and as we march (we march for the sea) I imagine an Emporium in Paris, or one in Liège (one in New York, when I forget where I am, one in St Petersburg, all the grand places of the world) and what we might do together, one day. For the world is more vast than you can tell, and I am living in it now. (PS Here is a design for a Constant Burrow, that boys and girls might have underworld dens in their gardens. We are digging in ourselves now and it is exhilarating work. Perhaps Emil might construct one?)
Sometimes there were notes, hidden in the letters. The capitals might spell out Remember Our Wendy House, or in minute script (illegible except to a magnifying glass, sentences looped inside tiny o’s or crammed up inside a question mark) You would love Paris, Cathy, and I will bring you here when the war is finished. Summer in Paris is divine. Winter would be perfect. Mr Atlee had Martha compiling a scrapbook, all the places her father had seen, all the foods he had eaten and the people he met. Cathy kept a scrapbook of her own and, in it, she counted the days.
August became September. October arrived more swiftly than it ought. Paris was saved from what had seemed a certain fate. An armada of taxicabs came together to deliver soldiers to the city’s defence. Odessa was ravaged by shells from the sea, the Turks drew lots and entered battle in the East; but inside the Emporium, the world did not change. The aisles were replenished in anticipation of first frost: toy soldiers and princesses, patchwork dogs and all the toil of Papa Jack’s summer. The cloud castle anchored in the Emporium dome grew a drawbridge and walls. In the workshops, patchwork reindeer were taught how to walk, then, finally, how to fly. The movements of autumn, heralding the movements of Christmas, were the same as in every other year – and yet sometimes Cathy woke in the night to find her bed empty (or, worse still, that Martha, haunted by some phantom image of her father, was occupying the place where Kaspar once lay), and this was her constant reminder: this year was not like every other, not at all.
Then came the night when Cathy walked through the paper trees, telling Martha the story of how her life had started here, in the little Wendy House beneath the boughs, and looked up to see the glass at the height of the Emporium dome was incandescent with tiny droplets of ice.
‘Look, Martha.’ Her daughter’s eyes were agog as Cathy lifted her up, the better to see the way the crystals caught and trapped the moonlight above. ‘The first frost of winter …’
A magical moment, one for which every devotee of the Emporium hungered, and yet this year it was tinged with sadness, for Kaspar hadn’t made it home after all.
Daylight had not yet fallen upon the grand arcades of Regent Street when the shop hands lined up at the Emporium door. Those who had chanced to see the first frost forming had rapidly packed their bags and made their pilgrimage to Iron Duke Mews. Among them were the flatterers, confidence men and tricksters who thought to try their luck and sneak within – but Emil stood diligently by the door, turning away any ne’er-do-wells who gathered in the alley. When he was done, he hurried back across the shopfloor – and there he met Cathy, standing in the aisle. He looked white as the frost itself.