But there isn’t much time. Wind Down grows closer each second and, here in his prison, only the daemon lord could help. So the Imperial Kapitan waits for his moment, reaches for the birdcage bars, and begins to strain. He has already seen a knot in the floorboards, and perhaps this is a way back home.
The morning of Papa Jack’s funeral dawned crisp and white. Cathy gazed into the open skies above Iron Duke Mews and wondered: how white were the skies, in that faraway world where Jekabs Godman had become Papa Jack? Last night, she had crept into his workshop and lifted his toy from the trunk with a thousand legs – but when she wound it up, and though the cams drove the prisoners onwards with their march, the walls of the room did not dissolve away, winter did not come howling in, and no phantom Jekabs Godman was waiting to accompany her on the ride. Papa Jack’s story was finished, and the Emporium behind her suddenly seemed a shade more drab, a shade more grey.
She had been up before dawn to help Mrs Hornung in the kitchens, but now she waited in the frigid morning air. Seven dawns had passed since the morning they found him sitting in his workshop chair, and she had spent so long wondering what Kaspar thought, what form his grief was taking behind those sad, vacant eyes, that only now did she ask what she herself was feeling. It had been Papa Jack who welcomed her to his world. She remembered the way he had intoned those questions, so weighted with understanding: are you lost? Are you afraid? And she thought, suddenly, that she would write to her father soon, or visit them out on the estuary sands.
At the end of Iron Duke Mews the first carriage, bearing the coffin, was already manoeuvring to leave. Martha was helping Kaspar up into the second carriage, Nina corralling her boys with stern words and promises of sweet treats to come. Cathy was preparing to join them when the tradesman’s door flew open behind her and out barrelled Emil, his head tucked down like a scalded child. She could see he had been in his workshop by the soot and flecks of woodchip that still coloured his hands. He had been painting too, for his fingernails were rimed a deep and dirty red, the colour of the Imperial Kapitan.
‘For your papa,’ said Cathy.
‘For my children,’ said Emil and, ignoring her further, took his place aboard the carriage.
How strange it was to venture out of the Emporium together. The procession took them north from Iron Duke Mews. Rounding the rails at King’s Cross, they followed the York Road, past the empty granaries and canalside wharves, through the tumbledown redbricks where soot-stained faces ogled them from the terrace – until, finally, they rolled through the green fields of Highgate. Here the cemetery yawned open.
As the funeral procession ground to a halt, Cathy saw the well-wishers already lining the spaces between the graves.
‘Who are they all, Mama?’
Cathy stared. In spite of Kaspar’s whispered protestations, Emil had taken out an announcement in The Times and, accordingly, the grounds were filled with customers past and present. Shop hands from seasons past had come to show their respects. The wives and daughters of those who had been lost along the way had come to catch a glimpse, again, of the gilded world their husbands and fathers once left behind. Beneath hanging hawthorn, Frances Kesey was dressed in funereal grey; Sally-Anne (who later declared that Papa Jack’s was a life of colour and he did not deserve to see only sadness on this, his final day) had come in vaudeville black with lurid sapphire and emerald brocade.
‘Are you ready?’
Wordlessly, Kaspar nodded.
Together, they emerged on to the cold hard ground between the graves. Martha, dressed in one of Nina’s black gowns, cringed from the wind. Cathy took her hand, thinking her still a little girl, but Martha did not resist. In turn, she took Kaspar’s – and, to Cathy’s astonishment, he did not resist either. Cathy looked up. Sally-Anne was right. There ought to have been patchwork horses drawing chariots of fire. The pegasi ought to have been set loose to cavort in the open skies, and to hell with the damage they caused when their motors stopped whirring and they came crashing back down. Ballerinas ought to have twirled en pointe while every tree in Highgate Cemetery was smothered in the tendrils of spreading paper vines. The trees, the sky, the world seemed so ordinary today.
Behind them, Emil and Nina were emerging from the hearse, their boys dressed in miniature black suits. Emil, whose own suit seemed suddenly too small, waited while the pall-bearers lifted the coffin out of the carriage.
‘Are you certain you can do it?’ Cathy asked.
Kaspar’s eyes had not left the coffin for a second. ‘Do you want honesty?’
‘Always, Kaspar.’
‘Then I’m far from certain. But I’m certain that, if I don’t, I would never forgive myself. So I’ll stand at Emil’s side, if only for today.’
Cathy led Martha along the frost-hardened trail, as an honour guard grew up along the wild, untended banks. At its end, the earth was open and the gravediggers standing by. Cathy stood at its head, staring into the ground that would soon swallow Jekabs Godman whole. She had been telling herself: it’s only his husk, only what he left behind, and he left behind so much more, back in our Emporium. But seeing the earth made thoughts like those seem so facile. Jekabs Godman was gone.
‘Mama, there’s something changed in Papa today. Did you see? He held my hand in the carriage.’
There were so few excuses she could make. The years had been a long litany of explaining her husband away, and Martha was not a girl any longer; she could not be persuaded to believe what her heart held as untrue.
‘Today is a strange day.’
They were coming along the trail now: lean, angular Kaspar, still walking with a limp; ragged, rotund Emil, who looked as if he hadn’t slept in nights. Behind them two hired hands bore the second half of the coffin.
‘I remember being scared of him, up in that workshop. Can you believe that? Warm fuzzy Uncle Emil and Papa, just being Papa … and then there was Papa Jack, big as both of them, and with those eyes, and those hands, and that … would you call it hair, Mama?’
‘Tangled and matted, like he hadn’t had a wife in a century or more. But, yes, Martha, I’d call it hair.’
Martha grinned.
‘I was scared of him too. The day I turned up, they took me up to his workshop, and he fixed me with those eyes and asked me those questions and … somewhere along the way, it clean melted away. He stitched you a bear out of spider silk. You lay in his hands, that day you were born, and, do you know, by then I wasn’t afraid at all. I would have let him carry you away.’ Cathy paused. ‘Here they come …’
The funeral procession had arrived. In a succession of stutters and false starts, Kaspar and Emil guided the coffin to the ground at the graveside. Moments later, the cowled undertakers stepped in and began to attach cords.
The graveside was growing crowded at last. There were faces here that Cathy knew, but so many more to which she could put no name. She reached out for Kaspar, guided him to the grave beside her.
‘Are you …’
Kaspar gave her a knowing look. ‘My papa was the heaviest of men.’
The crowd had gathered. The undertakers were in place. The coffin hung, suspended, over the grave – and then, inch by inch, Papa Jack vanished into the ground.
At the head of the grave Emil waited nervously for his moment. The silence around him was absolute – and, with his boys at his side, he began.