Spring was here, the days already growing longer. They would, Emil decided with a sinking finality, all have to be destroyed. All of those hours spent at his workshop lathe, all of those unsuspecting toy soldiers put to the torch, so that he could begin again.
He was scratching out figures on a slate, trying to quantify the amount of timber he would need, the number of shop hands he would have to hire to replenish the shelves by the time Christmas came, when fists hammered at the workshop door. Behind him, Cathy hung in the frame, gasping for breath.
‘Emil, you must come.’
‘I’m nearly there, Cathy. Whatever he’s done, I’m certain—’
‘No, Emil. Now. It’s now.’
Emil was slow to understand. He began to protest – this was his time, all he needed to do was think, the answer was here, if only the world would let him find it – but then Cathy’s silence revealed all. He dropped his pencil to the worktop, watched it roll down to the feet of the Imperial Kapitan. Then he was up on his feet, finding neither his words nor his balance.
‘Now? But Cathy, there’s a month, two months to go …’
‘It’s twins, Emil. The midwife said, they come sooner if they’re twins …’
Emil stuttered out on to the shopfloor, stumbling over himself as he twirled to look at the galleries above. Perhaps it was only imagination, but he thought he could hear Nina, even all that distance away.
Cathy took him by the hand. ‘Now,’ she said, more firmly.
They reached the Godmans’ quarters by the back stair, the one that couldn’t possibly have climbed so high into the rafters as it did. Martha hung by the terrace door, standing on the tips of her toes. Papa Jack clasped his hand as he came. Mrs Hornung, or so Cathy said, was already by the tradesman’s entrance, awaiting the arrival of the midwife; and Kaspar, well, Kaspar was behind one of those doors, his head in a manual, oblivious to the nephews about to make their entrance to the world.
Nina waited alone in their bedroom. When Cathy left she had been prowling back and forth; now she sat on the edge of the bed, trying to ride the early contractions.
In the passage outside, Emil stopped dead.
‘Cathy, I don’t know if I can.’
How his heart must have been pounding. Cathy stood as close to him as a wife ever could and whispered, ‘You’ve been waiting eleven years. You were ready to help me then, and you’re ready to help her now. Don’t you remember? All of the books you collected, all of the questions you asked? Emil, not once, then or now, did I doubt you could do it. Just go in there, hold her hand until the midwife comes. Tell her you love her. She’s going to need it.’
Emil whispered, ‘Thank you, Cathy,’ and then he was gone through the doors.
Seven hours later there was cheering in the Emporium halls. Cathy – who had waited so anxiously while Emil paced the quarters, panicking each time the midwife emerged to collect more towels, more water, toast and butter to give his wife strength – heard the squawking of a newborn through the wall and breathed out. Until that moment she had not known she was holding so much tension within.
At her side, Emil was suddenly on his feet.
‘Shall I … Should I go, Cathy?’
There were two voices crying now; she was certain of it. The midwife would already be swaddling them. Nina would already be …
Mrs Hornung appeared in the doorway, her sleeves still rolled up as if she herself had been there at the bedside. ‘They’re asking for you, Emil. It’s time.’
But he was rooted to the spot – and until Cathy put her arms around him, and whispered that his work was about to begin, he did not dare take a step.
After he was gone, Martha clung on to Cathy’s hand. ‘Can we go, Mama? Can we see them?’
Cathy made her wait. She remembered the exhaustion that came afterwards, the feeling of plunging back to earth from that otherworld where all that existed was the breathing, the body put to its only real purpose. It was not until darkness had fallen, and the shopfloor lit by the haloes of Papa Jack’s falling stars, that she caught a glimpse of her nephews for the first time. Emil had carried them – tiny as twins often are – out on to the gallery, where they might sneak their first look at the shopfloor. He was whispering to them as Cathy approached: ‘We’ll set it right, the three of us, and there’ll be stars falling every opening night, just like there are now, stars for the two of you … There’s the cloud castle where we’ll camp, and there’s the paper forest where we’ll go hunting patchwork deer – and there, there’s the glade where we’ll play our Long War, all three of us together. They’ll come at Christmas and try to take us on, but nobody will ever win a battle, not against us Godman boys …’ Cathy was almost at Emil’s side, and now he looked around.
‘Cathy,’ he beamed, ‘they’re boys. Come over! Come and meet my boys …’
On the first day of summer, Cathy watched from a gallery high above the shop floor as Emil opened the Emporium doors and a gaggle of shop hands she had not seen before tumbled within. Demanding their silence, Emil produced a flurry of papers, took signatures from each and marched them into the aisles. In the last weeks he had given up tinkering with the toy soldiers and devoted himself, instead, to reordering the shopfloor, erecting barricades along the apexes of aisles, planting Secret Doors that would entrap all but the most ardent cartographer in an infinite loop. The next season’s creations had been left to Papa Jack (who slept, most nights, in his workshop, enduring this family feud with the same stoicism that had once helped him survive a frozen prison camp), and all the while Emil conspired. Cathy watched as he marched the new shop hands into the copse of paper trees – and, once in their heart, to the Wendy House door.
Cathy had seen Mrs Hornung provisioning it. It had bunk beds stacked seven high, sacks of potatoes and crates of canned beef, tea leaves enough to quench the thirst of an army and mint cake enough to sustain an Antarctic expedition. Only now did she understand what it was for. Alone, she saw Emil march the new shop hands inside – and later that day, as she and Martha worked the shopfloor, she saw the boards that nailed the door shut, the blood red sign screaming KEEP OUT!!! and the crude patchwork wolves that had been set to prowl the perimeter as guards. Unsophisticated things, all they knew to do was march and bark.
Later that night, she stood at the workshop door as Martha sat at Kaspar’s feet, learning the intricacies of patchwork design. ‘And he’s locked all the soldiers up in there,’ Martha was saying, darning an eagle’s feathers. ‘And his new shop hands, they’ll undo everything you did, Papa. And how will we ever get in, because Uncle Emil’s turned it into his fortress …’
Kaspar’s face creased with some memory half-forgotten. ‘Let me tell you something, little Martha. When Emil and I were boys, he simply couldn’t bear to lose. He’d build fortresses back then as well, but there was always a way in.’
‘There really isn’t, Papa. Mama and I marched all around, even when those wolves had wound down. He’s put boards across every window. Those shop hands aren’t coming out until opening night, and by then it will already be too late.’
It was strange to see how buoyed the bad news made Kaspar. In a moment he was up on his feet, dancing an ungainly two-step as he dislodged a wooden crate from one of the counters. This he set down by Martha.
‘See …’