‘Keep them,’ she said. ‘What use are they to me?’
She was already in the hallway, among hanging jack-in-a-boxes and dismembered clowns, when Papa Jack begged her to stay. Cathy had never liked the sound of Jekabs Godman uncertain of himself, and it was this that compelled her to turn around. Back in the workshop, he was lifting something from the trunk where he kept his winter toy. He grasped a little leather journal in his hands, the stub of a pencil dangling from it on a ribbon.
‘I made them for my sons, the year the Emporium opened. Oh, they were secretive little boys, and me barely a father, so long had I been missing from their lives. All they truly had was each other. They had their own language, a feral little tongue I could no more understand than the English around me. This journal, this one you’re holding, this was Emil’s. The other Kaspar took with him. I entangled the two together, you see. Go now, open it up. See for yourself …’
On the first page were the words, DOES IT WORK? and, below that, in Kaspar’s very particular scrawl, IT REALLY DOES! PAPA IS A GENIUS! The pages after had been torn out, perhaps in some childhood pique. The next were all filled with Kaspar’s hand – and yet the date he had scratched out at the top read 31 August 1914, the very night he had left.
‘How can that be?’
Papa Jack rolled his fingers, urging her to turn the pages.
Here was more of Kaspar’s writing, more and yet more: 2nd September. 19th. 1st October. 2nd, 3rd, 4th. Pages and pages were filled with his missives. She saw Robert Kesey’s name leap out. Robert Kesey is dead.
‘He writes to you in it,’ said Cathy, ‘he sends you letters through his journal …’
‘One more of the old toys you know about, now. One more secret. I built these so that my sons could whisper secrets to each other from one end of the Emporium to the other, or tell stories in the dead of night. Mostly they used it to taunt each other in that Long War of theirs – but boys, as the English say, will be boys. They forgot about them, in the end. Well, there were so many other new toys in those days. Every season some new fascination for them to explore …’
Papa Jack returned to the floor, where he delved again into the belly of the giant beast.
‘Jekabs …’
‘Take it,’ he said. ‘He hasn’t hidden a thing from me. I can assure you of that. It’s all in there, if you want to see it, all of Kaspar Godman’s war.’
THE TOYMAKER’S WAR
PAPA JACK’S EMPORIUM, NOVEMBER 1914–AUGUST 1917
Sirius was waiting for her when she returned to her bedroom. Perhaps he recognised the journal from Kaspar’s boyhood days, for he nosed at it with his cross-stitched snout. ‘Off with you now,’ said Cathy, first making certain his motors were wound. If she was going to do this, she was going to do it alone.
The Emporium at night could be an eerie place, in winter most of all. You could hear the skittering of toys left wound up, and the shop hands – those not making merry hell in the Palace – still roamed the aisles, readying for the morning rush. But Cathy locked the door, remained in her own private world – and, when she found the courage, opened the journal. Kaspar’s handwriting was so like him, elegant and wild, full of bold flourishes and curls.
My papa, I had not known you kept our old journals, but when you pressed this into my hands the morning I left our beloved Emporium, I felt a rush of such nostalgia I cannot set it down in words. But perhaps you know it. I treasured this collection of paper and thread once, and I will treasure it now, as I head into the unknown. My papa at my side! Promise me that you will keep what news you can from Cathy and Martha. To them I send missives of love. To you, who have seen so much more than me, the truth unvarnished.
We have completed our training and embark for Belgium before dawn. Tonight Douglas Flood and I play cards against Robert Kesey and Andrew Dunmore, but I have been forbidden from dealing the pack (they consider me a conjuror). It has been strange to be away from our Emporium for more than a night, and for myself I find it stranger still to remember there was a time when the Emporium was not home. For the boys I travel with, tomorrow will be their first taste of foreign air. They ask me about the world as if I know anything of it, when the truth is that, to me, those years before the Emporium are a dream.
Stranger still is being without Emil. We dedicate meals to him (the food is not near Mrs Hornung’s delectable standard, but Emil would like it all the same), and think of him often. No doubt you find it some comfort that he remains to look over the shopfloor and cultivate marvels this summer, and I admit I find it some comfort that he will be there for Cathy and Martha as well, but I remember the look in Emil’s eyes when the physicians declared him exempt. Of course, they say we shall be home by Christmas, and – adventuring aside – it is that which I hope for. I should like to see Martha marvelling at opening night, and wake with Cathy to give her our gifts come Christmas morning.
There was more. Kaspar described his training in details meant to delight his father, lampooning the other recruits and singing the praises of every Emporium shop hand – who, or so Kaspar professed, showed dexterity beyond the requirements of mortal man, and thus had proven themselves particularly adept at fixing a bayonet, patching a sand-bag, and shoeing a malcontent horse.
Shoeing a stallion is quite different from appending a runner to a rocking horse, but in the end it is not nearly as difficult. Do you remember the Arabians we built for the Christmas of ’99? I recall them as more dastardly than any warhorse I am likely to meet. And this reminds me, Papa: Douglas Flood has been assigned as an ostler’s assistant. It means he must shovel manure all day. Not a duty with which he ever had to contend in the Emporium corrals …
The next time Kaspar wrote he was in Belgium, where the 7th Division had arrived too late to prevent the fall of Antwerp and had turned, instead, toward the Flemish town of Ypres, already overrun. Cathy knew the town only from the stamps on the bails of linen delivered to the Emporium doors, but the image she had of it proved to be remarkably similar to Kaspar’s own: a tumbledown town of stone walls and turrets, more weathered and steeped in history than any model village or foldaway fortress the Emporium had ever made. It was here, Kaspar declared, that the Division would halt the enemy’s advance. And,
Tell me about Cathy. She has written to me that all is well, that Martha remains proud of her Papa and makes pictures of me each night. But – what is the truth, Papa? Are they well?
Cathy almost shut the journal then. The temptation to cast it across the room was almost insurmountable. ‘You’d have known, if only you’d asked,’ she whispered, and her vitriol showed itself in spittle showered across the page. Wherever Kaspar was now, perhaps the ink in his own journal was smearing just as the ink in this.
On the next page Papa Jack had written, for the first time, back to his son.
My Kaspar, how good it feels to see your words. The Emporium continues as you can imagine, with long days and nights, empty of everything but the invention. I will keep my promise, my boy, and say nothing of our communications to Cathy and Martha – yet perhaps you do them little credit, for they are thinking of you and know you too well to believe in the fairy tales you send.
Your patchwork dog whimpers at your bedside at night, but Martha and Cathy are keeping it warm.