‘How long before they call the police?’ she whispered, but the baby fluttered inside her and, to Cathy, its inference was clear: they won’t call the police; they couldn’t stand the shame. ‘So it’s only me and you. And hang them,’ she uttered. ‘They would rather you never existed.’
Such thoughts could turn self-righteousness to self-pity, so she concentrated on other things. She whispered, instead, about all the things they would do together in this, their new home. She had not thought about it when she slipped through the back door this afternoon, but now it seemed startlingly clear: this was not about a week, a month, or even a year; this was about a new existence. ‘Perhaps we’ll stay. What better place to grow up than in a toyshop? Why, you’d have everything you’d ever want …’
After she had lain out what few things she had, she climbed to the window ledge and looked out. Oh, but life was a strange and terrifying thing! She was still there, hours later, when the last shoppers flocked out into the winter dark, bound for the horse-drawn buses lined up against the Regent Street arcades. In their hands were bags in which confetti fireworks were already erupting; ballerinas so impatient to get home they were already turning their tours en l’air. Behind one gaggle of shoppers a reindeer in hessian and felt, no doubt the ancestor to whatever half-finished contraption had been resting in Papa Jack’s workshop, trotted out, only for a group of shop hands to hurry after and corral it back on to the Emporium floor.
Cathy cupped her hand to her belly. ‘Funny to think how close we are. An hour on a train, nothing more. And yet …’ This was a different world, though it seemed so guileless to say it. She was not a child, she had to remind herself. She could not be, not with a child of her own budding inside her. ‘It’s hardly like home, is it, little thing?’
No, it didn’t feel like home at all – and yet, as she hummed lullabies to soothe herself to sleep that night, one thought was knocking at the door, determined to be let in: Papa Jack’s Emporium did not feel like home, but home it would have to be.
PAPER FORESTS
PAPA JACK’S EMPORIUM, CHRISTMAS 1906
There are a hundred different clocks in the Emporium. Some keep time with the comings and goings of London seasons. Others tick out of sync, counting down the hours of that faraway coastline the Godman brothers once called home. Still more keep erratic and uncontrollable times: one counts each third second backwards, the better to extend the time between chores; another elongates the evening, all the better to keep bedtime at bay. These are the times that children keep, and which adults are forbidden from remembering. Only a child could understand how one day might last an eternity, while another pass in the flicker of an eye.
Yes, Papa Jack’s Emporium is a place out of step with the world outside. Come here day or night and you will find a place marching to the beat of its own drum. Listen and you might hear it, even now …
Emil Godman was up with the Baltic dawn, for such was the habit of his father’s lifetime, and, above all other things, Emil wanted to impress his father. Consequently, a full three hours before sunlight touched Iron Duke Mews, when it was shedding its pale winter light over the countries of the frozen East, Emil was already out of bed and in his workshop. A miniature of his father’s own, its tables were lined with wooden soldiers in various states of undress. Emil walked among them, trailing his fingers over faces half-etched, oblongs of wood waiting for the workshop lathe. According to the shop ledgers, a full three legions of soldiers had left the Emporium doors in the two weeks since opening night; shelves that had been eighteen thousand strong were now depleted, and the knowledge gave Emil one of the greatest thrills of his life. Most of those soldiers were his summer’s work, or else the work of last winter’s craftsmen, but all of them were Emil’s design. He settled into his chair, rolled up sleeves around his meaty forearms (they had his papa’s girth, though he was some years away from sprouting the same wiry hair), and set to work. Simple infantrymen and cavalry he allowed the shop hands to sculpt and paint, but the Emporium’s most prized pieces were for Emil alone.
By the flick of a wrist, the deft twirl of a brush and a misting of lacquer, the faces of the soldiers became known. Emil worked by rote but he worked as if in a trance, his fingers crafting expressions that astonished him when he set each soldier down to dry. This first was of noble bearing; this second had waged too many battles before; this third carried the scars of some prior campaign and wore a look that revealed his innermost dream: to return to the sweetheart he had left behind. In this way, an hour passed in Emil’s workshop, then two and then three. Not a window here looked out upon the outside world but he knew when dawn was breaking by the rattling in the pipes, the echo of distant footsteps which told him the shop hands were up, about, and preparing for the chaos of the day.
His morning’s work would have to end here, with the final soldier in his hand. With a flurry of paint and varnish he crafted a face, dipped him in lacquer to create jackboots of sparkling green, adorned him with tiny brass medals and a sash of crimson red. It was only when he set the soldier down among the others that he realised what he had created – for this figurine was quite the most venerable of all. This soldier bore the many campaigns he had waged with a quiet dignity; this soldier had a single scar above his left eye, a line in the wood caused by some enemy soldier’s sabre; this soldier had known triumph and disaster and treated those impostors exactly the same. He was, Emil decided, quite extraordinary; any boy would be proud to have him among his collection.
A tingle he had not felt in many months was lighting up every nerve of his body. He would have to set the shop hands to replicating it soon. Their copies would be imperfect, but they would still be toys to shout about, toys to draw the customers back. Thinking of the stories his papa once told, he decided to give it a name like no other. This, he decided, would be the first: the Imperial Kapitan.
The great bell in the Emporium dome was tolling, bringing the rest of the shop hands out from their roosts. Emil hurried out of his workshop and on to the shop floor. While he had been sleeping, the night hands had transformed the displays. Theirs was a job coveted by all the rest: to come out after dark and work wonders along the atriums and aisles. This morning an Oriental dragon snaked from one end of the store to another. The atrium at the Emporium’s heart had become the wilderness lair of two enormous black bears.
The doors would not open for another two hours but the first-shift shop hands were already at work. Emil trod among them, eager to show the Imperial Kapitan to everyone he passed, but most were too engrossed in their tasks to stop. Kesey and Dunmore, who had first come to the Emporium as astonished customers and signed up as shop hands the winter they came of age, were corralling a herd of runnerless rocking horses, painted up as if they had cantered down from the Siberian steppes. Sally-Anne was repopulating the princess aisle, decimated in last night’s deluge, while John Horwood, the Emporium caretaker, was patching holes in the floorboards caused by some boys’ pitched battle. Even the new girl, the one who had arrived on opening night and barely spoken a word ever since, was emerging from the storerooms, heaving a sled spilling over with fresh stock.
Emil fingered the Imperial Kapitan in his pocket. It occurred to him that there was only one person he really wanted to show, and that was the one person who hadn’t even deigned to get out of bed.