‘Sit, Cathy. We’ve talked about so much, you and I.’
Cathy sat at his side.
‘Now that I come to it, it seems a question Martha ought to be asking, not a grown woman like me. But, Papa Jack, is it possible … I mean to say, might it be possible … that a toy might …’ Now she knew it truly was foolish; she had never been as foolish as this, not even as a child. ‘… come to life? Oh, we read about it in books. There are always puppets growing into real live boys.. And of course they come alive in the imagination and that, that’s where a toy truly lives. But I don’t mean that. I mean life. I look at Sirius and I wonder …’
Papa Jack had taken Cathy by the hand. She flushed to look at him, so foolish did she feel. ‘I’ve wondered too, my girl. Of all the patchwork dogs and cats and wolves and bears we’ve sent out into the world, what sets Sirius apart? He was made the same way, made with these same hands.’ And he lifted them up, like a magician might do to show: no tricks. ‘Sometimes you see understanding in those black button eyes, and no cogs and gears could ever account for that.’
‘So what, then? What might it be?’
‘My boys, and now you, have kept Sirius wound since the moment I made him. Wind down has never come to that poor patchwork dog. He just keeps going and going. They show him new tricks, and soon his gears strain to mimic them. They take him new places, and his paws record the way. They poured their teaching into him without even knowing that was what they were doing. And with every new trick he learned, every new habit, well, knowledge grows. The braille cards in his motors that tell him when to walk or when to run, when to sit up or when to wag his tail, they get imprinted with more and more knowledge. And then … why, then, mightn’t that knowledge rub up against itself? Mightn’t one piece of knowledge touch or complement or clash with another? Suddenly it isn’t just a list of tricks. It’s a way of comparing one trick to all the rest. And maybe, just maybe, things begin to mesh. Maybe that meshing is a kind of … intellect. These things are more mysterious than a mere toymaker could hope to account for. But sometimes, when I look into those black button eyes …’ Papa Jack paused. ‘It would feel like murder to let him wind down, would it not?’
Cathy nodded.
‘You cannot murder what never lived, so isn’t that life?’
As if knowing he was being spoken of, Sirius sidled into the room, snouted at Cathy’s hand, and curled up, right there, on her lap.
‘The shop hands have been complaining, complaining about … scuttling in the walls. They think we’ve got mice, or rats – and of course we do, because this is London and …’ Cathy lost her train of thought. ‘What you say about Sirius, is it possible it might happen to other toys? More quickly than you’ve said …’ She took a deep breath. To give voice to it was to make it manifest. ‘Emil’s soldiers. Kaspar changed them so that they can wind themselves. He did it out of spite, because Emil wouldn’t listen any more, not when Kaspar tried to tell him what it was like, to be a soldier and have no control over what you do, where you go, who you are … But since then, they’re … changed, and changed again. Martha showed me them drilling. They took an ordinary soldier and turned it into one of their own.’ And now, she thought: the glades of the Long War brought to ruin, all of the hundreds Emil crafted all summer long, all of the thousands … Toy soldiers, proliferating up and down the Emporium aisles. Emil had ordered the shop hands to lay barricades across the seventh aisle, to shut the snowflake stair. And she couldn’t escape that feeling: the scuttling in the walls, it was nothing to do with mice …
Papa Jack was staring. She thought he would speak of the soldiers but instead he said, ‘How is my son?’
‘I want to talk to him about it. We used to talk. The physicians say he has to, but he won’t. This thing with the soldiers, at first I thought it might help. But now …’ She steadied herself, tracing the blue veins on Papa Jack’s palm. ‘I’m going to speak out of turn, Papa Jack, but you’re the one who showed it to me, so perhaps you won’t mind. All that time ago, when they dragged you into the East, when they chained you up with men like Chichikov and Ursa Major and all of the rest. It did something to you. It could have killed you, here, inside’ – she lifted her hand from his to touch him on the breastbone – ‘but you came home from it. You survived.’
Papa Jack whispered, ‘But not the same. Never the same. It all does something to you. The little things as well as the big. You might go to sleep one person and wake so slightly different, and all because of a dream you had. You can’t hope to go back. Men lose themselves trying it.’
And Cathy thought: those music boxes, the ones Kaspar tinkers with, even now. Even Cathy had felt the pull of the past, wanting to drag her down, wanting to immerse her.
‘Might you speak with him, Papa Jack? You’re his father. Perhaps he’d listen.’
Papa Jack said, ‘I’ll try.’
When Cathy got to her feet, Sirius followed. By the time she was halfway across the workshop, Papa Jack had closed his eyes. The worry was sloughing off her with every step. That was what Kaspar needed, she thought: only to talk.
As she stepped into the hall, Papa Jack stirred. ‘Cathy,’ he called out. She turned around to face him. ‘I haven’t forgotten how you stood here in front of me that day you first arrived. Even then you understood our Emporium, though you didn’t know it. But can a toy come to life? My dear,’ he breathed, ‘it isn’t foolish at all. All of the magic, all of the love we pour into them. I should think the only foolish thing is to wonder why it doesn’t happen all of the time.’
Sleep came more easily when Cathy returned to her bed. Even so, she awoke in the pitch black, to the sound of scurrying in the walls and her heart beating wild. Instinctively she reached out for Kaspar – but he slept on and, in his sleep, cringed from her hand. She trembled as she lit the candle at her bedside, illuminating every corner in dancing orange light. The only thing that moved in the room was Sirius, the bellows of his lungs lifting his fabric hide up and down. And still that infernal scuttling in the walls.
Perhaps it was her imagination, but the scuttling seemed to move up and down the walls, as if the mice in the cavities were constantly surging one way and then the next. She followed it out on to the landing and pressed her ear against the wall. Sometimes it was strong and sometimes it was soft, but always it was there. Not mice. There was no point in keeping up the pretence. She took a deep breath and prepared to retreat to her bed – and it was then that she noticed the candlelight flickering under the opposite door. Martha’s room. Evidently the girl had fallen asleep with her head in a book, and her candles still guttered on the ledge. Inwardly, Cathy sighed. This was how the Emporium would end: in a dancing inferno, patchwork beasts darting hither and thither, paper trees turned to columns of raging ash, and all because of a little girl who loved to read too much.
Quietly, she pushed through the door. Martha ought to have been there, wrapped up in sheets with the old copy of Gulliver’s Travels splayed open on her lap, but instead the bed was empty, the covers drawn back and left in a heap at the end.
Cathy rushed to the window. The girl had left it open and the chill air clawing in made the candle stubs dance a wild fandango on the ledge. For a moment, there was terror – for the window opened on to a steepled roof, and all that separated the roof from the drop into Iron Duke Mews below was a length of iron gutter shot through with rust. She thought to call out, but the November air robbed her of all breath and, when she turned against it, she saw, for the first time, that the closet door was hanging ajar, and more candlelight coming from within.