Kaspar.
Emil took the short cut to the Godmans’ quarters, high in the Emporium eaves. Mrs Hornung was serving Papa Jack his salt fish for breakfast, but Emil’s brother Kaspar was nowhere to be found. His bed had the air of one that had not been slept in for days, its covers heaped high in a kind of vagabond’s nest (Mrs Hornung had long since forsaken cleaning the Godman boys’ rooms on account of the clockwork spiders she had once caught nesting there). Kaspar’s notebook was open at the side of his bed but Emil was proud enough to resist peeking inside; whatever designs had been scribbled here were Kaspar’s alone and he had no desire to betray him. When the Emporium one day belonged to Emil, he wanted the victory to be clean.
There was another place his brother would be – and sure enough, there he was, bent over the worktable in the attic workshop above their father’s own. Bigger than Emil’s only because they had once shared it (Emil had left three winters ago and built a workshop of his own, a private place where their secrets need not be shared), it was cluttered with more debris than Emil thought possible. A disorderly workshop, Emil knew, meant a disorderly mind. He allowed himself the slightest of all smiles.
Kaspar was at the hearth in the hourglass’s end, though no fire had been kindled in the grate. One year Emil’s senior, he had shed the puppy fat both boys had once had and which Emil’s body stubbornly refused to lose, and crouched over his work table with the same intensity with which Emil had worked on his soldiers. His hair was swept back in an ostentatious peak, revealing eyes more shrill and blue than Emil’s, and a nose that might have befitted a Roman legionnaire. Emil saw, with a sinking feeling, that the Imperial Kapitan had features almost wholly the same, and the thought brought him great displeasure.
Nevertheless, ‘Kaspar,’ he called out, ‘I’ve something to … Wait until you …’
‘One moment, little brother. I’ve something to show you.’
On the worktop in front of Kaspar sat a simple glass jar, etched in sygils and lines. Kaspar took a small candle from the mantel on top of the hearth, struck a match against the wick and dropped it into the jar. Moments later he screwed the lid shut – and reclined as the dark workshop walls turned into a theatre of shadows and lights.
The walls were a kaleidoscope, animals and men picked out in different gradations of shadow and all of them spinning a synchronised arabesque. A princess appeared, blew a kiss at Emil, and vanished in a whirlwind of dancing girls. An armada of galleons manifested, and beneath them there arose a great whale, which devoured each ship in turn. Stick men sailors tossed themselves overboard, lost to the shadowy sea.
‘A night light!’ Kaspar exclaimed. ‘For boys and girls too excitable to go to sleep. Can you imagine it, Emil? Your nursemaid comes, reads you some dull-as-ditch water story – probably with a nice moral at its end – and expects you to roll over and sleep. But – bang! – they close the door, you light your light, and …’
Emil barely heard the rest. On the walls, a swarm of fairies were dancing in pirouette as a vast, fire-breathing serpent struggled to fight them off. A knight on a fierce destrier dropped his lance and cantered in, skewering the dreaded beast in the same moment that his horse revealed itself a pegasus, spread its wings and took flight.
In the jar the candle guttered and died. The shadow spell vanished, leaving behind only naked walls – naked walls and a familiar, obliterated feeling in Emil’s stomach. He had been fingering the Imperial Kapitan all the while, but now he slipped it back into his pocket.
‘Well? What was it you wanted to show me, little brother?’
Kaspar had kicked back, a satisfied grin on his face.
‘I’ll show you a fist full of my knuckles if you aren’t on the shopfloor when those doors open. You’ve had all summer for trying new things, Kaspar. It isn’t fair to shirk all the hard work …’
Kaspar skipped through the detritus of the workshop floor and put an arm around his brother. ‘You’re being a scoundrel. Don’t you think it took hard work, my night light?’
Emil was about to reply when the workshop door blew open, as if under the fist of a blizzard, and there hunched their father. The great bear had to stoop to come into the workshop, for it had been built to the design of a twelve-year-old boy.
‘Papa,’ Kaspar exclaimed, always swift to the attack, ‘might I …’
In a second he had lit a new candle in the jar. This time, the shadow dance was different. Emil tried to resist his delight as a damsel-in-distress fled from the wolf pack of a spidery forest, as a castle made out of clouds descended from on high, as mermaids danced and swam in formation.
All the while, Papa Jack’s glacial eyes flitted between the shadow dance and Emil. Then, when the performance was in full flight, he tramped across the workshop, took Kaspar’s place at the worktop and snuffed the candlelight. A moment later he was pressing a minuscule blade to the jar. A magnifying glass was in his eye and he was scratching particles away, opening up infinitesimal chasms, prompting a billion tiny fractures in the glass.
When he was done, he set the jar back down, relit the candle and fastened the lid.
Fireworks exploded across the walls. What started as shadows turned into blooms of glittering colour. The fairies that fought with the dragon fluttered wings of silver, cyan and gold. The dragon’s scales were emerald green, and the pegasus was white as the world’s most dazzling pearl. Unicorns cantered across rolling dells, castles sat stark while briars rose up around them, burst open with ruby-red roses, and withered away again. A rainbow burst out of the masonry and cascaded from one wall to the next, erupting in gold in every place that it landed.
Papa Jack picked himself up. ‘I don’t want you two fighting today. There’s an example needs setting. It’s well understood.’ Then he pressed a piece of parchment into Emil’s hands and disappeared.
Emil made as if to follow, but Kaspar remained still.
‘Yours was magical, Kaspar. It was.’
More magical than my soldiers, thought Emil, though he said not a word.
‘How does he do it?’
If I knew that, thought Emil, I’d be doing it too. And then – then the Emporium would come to me …
Kaspar raised his hand, as if to swat the jar on to the floor – but something, perhaps his sense of wonder, perhaps his ambition, stayed his hand. ‘Come on, little brother,’ he said, ‘haven’t we got work to do?’
And that was how another day at Papa Jack’s Emporium began.
The paper Papa Jack had passed to them was a list of chores only the Godman brothers were entrusted to undertake. The reindeer which had starred in the opening night extravaganza had wandered into one of the storerooms and set to grazing on the bales of felt warehoused there; their motors needed neutering for they were literally eating the winter’s profits. By the time that was done the shop was open, the first customers swarming the aisles. Emil tramped (and Kaspar sashayed) to the atrium at the centre of the aisles and set to work on the diorama waiting there.
An hour later they were still hard at work, grappling after a nuance that always seemed out of reach. While Emil worked on the landscape of papier maché and clay, Kaspar crouched between the jaws of the two enormous bears, positioning their teeth to provide just the right amount of horror (fear had to be leavened by joy, or a toy had no appeal at all). It was an operation that was taking the brothers much longer than it ought, because Kaspar kept rising on to his haunches to peer through the stacks at the new girl working in the alcove of paper trees. There was something about her that kept drawing his eye, though Emil would have pointed out that every new girl drew Kaspar’s eye. It was one of the many things that exasperated him about his brother.