So what are you waiting for? he thought, unable to voice it even to the Imperial Kapitan. Down below, Miss Nina Dean had started up the battle. She shrieked with glee that soared up and reached Emil, even standing so high above. He could, he supposed, march down there right now and say: I should like it, if you were to stay. We need help this year more than any, and you have already proven yourself so adept …
His eyes revolved to find the Wendy House, where it still sat between the paper trees. He could see its steepled roof between the branches. Only Kaspar knew how the branches sprouted fresh leaves each summer – but in winter they were skeletal as trees in the wild, revealing the Wendy House beneath. Kaspar had never got much further in learning how their father stretched out the space inside (that summer his toyboxes were abandoned, because he had a baby to care for, and babies eclipsed everything else, even toys …), but the Wendy House remained the most magical of all places on the shopfloor. Not just, Emil thought, for the way it staggered and amazed when you stooped through its door. There was a different sort of magic attached to the Wendy House now, one from which no one could escape. What a perfect story: Kaspar and Cathy and the Wendy House where they used to live.
Sometimes thinking of her just spirited her into being – and, as if by magic, Cathy appeared far below. On seeing her, Emil had to tighten his hold on the balcony rail. He tried to force himself to look back into the glade, but his eyes (such treacherous things!) kept drifting back to Cathy. He remembered visiting her in that Wendy House as well. The books he had read, when he thought he might be the only one holding her hand as she—
His knuckles whitened. He thought he heard the Imperial Kapitan cry out – Stop being a fool, Emil! – but it was only the sound of his own conscience, drumming against his skull, trying to get out.
Because – what do you really think is going to happen, Emil? That this winter, this winter you rule the Emporium floor, she’ll see what she didn’t back then? That she’ll come knocking late at night and tell you she was wrong, that it should have been you, you to help her push Martha out into the world, you to curl around her in bed at night, you to take her hand and marry her, down there in the paper trees? Or (and he hated himself, even as he thought it), are you really thinking … what if he didn’t come home? What if Kaspar stays out there, just like Robert Kesey, and she needs you – needs somebody, but it just happens to be you – to fill the place where he used to lie, a faux-Kaspar, a shadow, something to cling on to, something to fill the void … Is that really what you think?
She wouldn’t even have to change her name.
It was an effort, but he stared at Nina until he was certain Cathy had passed from sight. And he realised, then, what he had never realised before. This jealousy had started out for Cathy, but the feeling had blossomed and changed. He was jealous of it all now, of Kaspar being a father, of the games he played with Martha, of … I never had a mama, thought Emil, but I’ve always wanted to be a father. Even as a boy I would think of one day having boys of my own, and playing with them on the carpets as my papa played with me.
So, yes, he thought, perhaps there is a different way of looking at life … and, in the same moment he thought that, Miss Nina Dean looked up from the shopfloor. She had the look of a sculpture and she had caught his eye.
The Emporium (Cathy wrote) is closed for another winter, but there remains great excitement. Emil is to be married.
Perhaps you are not surprised, given all the stories I have brought to you, but to us in the Emporium it remains a great shock. On the day the snowdrops flowered, Emil cornered me in the storerooms and – can you believe this? – asked my permission. I believe it was only his nerves manifesting. Dear, sweet Emil will never conquer those nerves! He needed my emboldening to give him courage and, duly bolstered, he arrested Miss Dean before she left by the Emporium doors, and led her to the gallery above the Emporium dome. Then, at his signal, Mrs Hornung – who was in place in the aisles below – pulled a cord that wound up a hundred soldiers at once. High above, Nina saw them march out – and there, according to Emil’s design (what geometries it must have taken to make it happen!), they wound to a halt in such a way to spell out his proposal, Will You Marry Me?, in letters across the Emporium floor. I am pleased to say that Nina wept openly, there and then. Through her tears, she agreed to be Emil’s wife.
There is secret history to this. Nina’s brother, Emil tells us, perished at the defence of Muscat. Their grandfather has interests in Arabia and had been tutoring his grandson there when hostilities were declared. He served bravely as an officer, at only twenty-one years of age, and lost his life in that service. The tragedy has hardened Nina to what she wants from life. This, she knows now, is our brother Emil. She has spent the last weeks in cleverly disguised misery that the end of the season might be the end of their relations. Now she will stay with us all summer long and be welcomed to our Emporium famille.
Cathy sent the dispatch expecting a reply as soon as Kaspar opened the journal, but by fall of night none had come. She lost herself, that morning, in joining Martha for her lessons; then, in the afternoon, they threw themselves into the brave task of accounting for the winter’s takings before the man from Lloyd’s arrived for his annual account. When no reply had come by fall of next night, the fear she had been holding at bay finally broke through. Now she stood on the threshold of Papa Jack’s workshop, wondering whether she dared venture in, if what she was about to say might tear apart his world.
At last she found her courage, marched into the workshop – and there Papa Jack slept, his phoenix on his shoulder, Sirius curled up at his feet. He looked so like Kaspar when he slept and something in the image soothed her. She slunk back to her quarters alone, looked in on Martha as she too slept, and lay back in the marital bed.
In the morning, letters reeled across the journal page:
Cathy, please forgive my silence. I am delighted for my brother and wish to fill these pages only with good tidings and salutations for Emil’s future wife. I know I will find my home much changed when I return to you. But I can keep the truth from you no longer. I am writing to you from the base hospital at Arras, behind the line. But Cathy – I am alive.
It was the way Kaspar’s hand had trembled upon writing that final line, causing the letters to tumble uncontrolled across the page, that stopped Cathy’s heart. She sat upright, raced to read on.
By the time the snowdrops had flowered on the Emporium terrace, Private Kaspar Godman had become Lance Corporal, with the Emporium shop hands and a group of other men under his command. Spring had brought with it the thaw that closed the Emporium doors, and it was this same thaw that returned Flanders to open war.
Cathy, they came for us. We had long thought it was coming and waited, each night, for the horns to sound. But when it finally happened, they did not send men. They sent great reefs of gas, ghosts to do their bidding. When men set their minds to it, they accomplish the most terrible things.
Kaspar had not been on the line on the day the gas first came, but he had watched from behind as the French soldiers staggered through. Some had run, cascading out of the little hamlets they had taken oaths to defend. Others, too trusting or too defiant to understand, had stood their ground. But battle could not be fought against an enemy invisible to the eye, and hundreds had perished there, amid the budding leaves of spring, before any had understood what was happening. Kaspar had watched the ambulance wagons flowing, like a line of ants, into the west.