It seemed important to go on looking into his eyes. They were not eyes you could get lost in; they were open and empty as the oceans, blue threaded with grey like the breakers of waves. The more she stared, the deeper that ocean seemed. And yet she went on staring.
He was on the verge of saying something, but she would never know what – for, at that moment, the paper trunk blocking the door began to buckle and crease. Kaspar leapt to his feet. Without exchanging another word, they watched as the glint of an axe appeared through the bark. It drew back, swung again, and at last the paper monstrosity began to list, revealing the Emporium floor.
In the doorway, showered in scraps of paper and card, stood Emil. His eyes were alive with the joy of discovery.
‘Kaspar,’ he said, shaking shreds of paper bark out of his hair, ‘I just knew it would be you.’
‘Who else?’
‘Papa knows it too. He’s looking for you.’
‘I’ll bet he is,’ beamed Kaspar – and Cathy saw the look they exchanged, the one that said: there’ll be stern words, brother, but every one of them worth it. Because – just look at all this! Look at all this beautiful chaos!
‘You’re a bona-fide Bedlamite,’ Emil laughed. And, with a conspiratorial whisper, ‘Kaspar, we should go up high, after hours, up to the highest gallery and just throw them all down. It would be like that time with Papa’s snow clouds. He’ll know it was us, but it will be—’
Kaspar was poised to revel in the idea when Emil’s face suddenly soured. For the first time, he had looked beyond his brother – and there stood Cathy, plain as day and with no place to hide. Suddenly, all temptations vanished; whatever they had been scheming evaporated into thin air.
‘It isn’t what you think, Emil.’
‘No?’ the younger man breathed. ‘Then what is it?’
Kaspar marched on, kicking the detritus of paper tree aside, and passed Emil. From the aisle, he looked back, his eyes taking in Cathy again: her face, her hair, the curves of her body that she knew, for the first time, were no longer invisible. He mouthed three words – ‘We’ll speak soon’ – and then he disappeared.
Left behind, Emil looked her up and down. ‘I’m sorry,’ he stuttered, ‘but you really can’t be here. If my papa were to …’ He stopped. ‘My brother isn’t a bad man, but … Back to work,’ he said, abandoning the thought. ‘The evening stampede is about to begin.’
And then he too was gone, leaving Cathy to pick her own way out of the ruin. In the aisles outside, the shopkeeps were already descending on the accidental forest. Some of them had hacksaws and more axes; some of them had brought shovels to lever up stumps. Yet more had decided to leave a tree in place and were rushing out boxes of baubles and other decorations.
Ignoring the complaints of the baby putting up a protest inside her, she rolled up her sleeves and returned to her work.
WARGAMES
PAPA JACK’S EMPORIUM, CHRISTMAS 1906
That moment in the Wendy House had frightened her. She had to admit that. The way Kaspar Godman had looked at her – not admiringly, not possessively, as those fishermen’s sons used to do, but curiously. She had thought she was being careful. At the end of every shift she took toast and biscuits and stewed apples from Mrs Hornung’s trolley and retired to her room, just her and her baby to while away the long winter nights. She was keeping her head down, keeping out of sight, keeping herself to herself – and yet … I’m coiled, she admitted. Coiled too tight. Hiding away doesn’t keep you hidden, not in a place like this. Hiding away only gets you seen.
‘We haven’t been thinking straight, little thing. Running away was never just running. It was keeping running, even when you’re standing still. It’s all your fault, you know. When I’m not nauseous I’m dog-tired, and when I’m not dog-tired I’ve moods you wouldn’t believe. I’m up one minute and rock bottom the next, and it’s all your doing.’
Cathy had found her way through the lower storerooms, where the toys of past Christmases waited patiently to revisit the shopfloor. Now she stood outside what seemed a forgotten wardrobe, its door half-hanging from its hinge. Sally-Anne had tried to tempt her here on more than one occasion, but this time, it was a little voice inside her head tempting her on.
‘People with secrets hide away. People with nothing to hide? They make friends. They laugh and they dance and they … live life. Nobody ever came to the Emporium to bury themselves. So … in plain sight,’ she whispered, and was thrilled to feel the flutters of her baby’s response, ‘that’s the only place worth hiding.’
With those words, she opened the wardrobe door.
They called this place the Palace, because that was what Kaspar and Emil had called it when they were just boys and this place one of their secret dens. Now the long hall on to which the wardrobe door opened, decked out like the lodge of some medieval Viking jarl – with thrones carved out of the trunks of great oaks and a dais upon which three of the shop hands were playing fiddles (or more properly being played by those fiddles, for it was the instruments leading the way) – was a retreat for exhausted shop hands to drink and eat and make merry. Cathy stepped through a fug of smoke to find the evening’s banquet already half-devoured. Shop hands were lounging around the long table, or in the corners playing at cards. Some had opened up copies of other Emporium games. Little Douglas Flood was playing a game of backgammon, himself against the board. The West Country boy named Kesey was battling through a game of chess; black had already beaten him to a retreat, the pieces gliding of their own volition across the chequerboard squares.
Cathy might have let her nerves get the better of her and fled there and then, if only Sally-Anne – tall, with flaming red hair and fiery eyes to match – hadn’t appeared out of the haze and thrown her arms around her shoulder. ‘Rapunzel is out of her tower!’ she announced. ‘Make room!’
Sally-Anne’s laughter was infectious. Soon Cathy was being swept across the room and deposited in a seat, where Joe Horner (who worked the production line, replicating Emil’s toy soldiers) and Ted Jacobs (who once trained hounds for the shooting at Sandringham, but now put patchwork dogs through their paces before they could be sold) provided her with food and wine and meringues of the most intricate design. Too used to a diet of toast and stewed apple, the baby inside her started to turn cartwheels of delight. Cathy had to take her first bite just to barter its silence, for she was certain the shop hands would notice the way her body squirmed in response.
‘I’m sorry I’ve been so … locked up. You’ll know how it is. First season nerves.’
‘No apology needed,’ Sally-Anne declared, ‘but you have catching up to do. This,’ she declared, urging an older man, comprised almost entirely of beard, to the table, ‘is Pat Field. He’s one of Papa Jack’s first woodworkers. He prunes and prepares all of the logs from the Forestry Commission. And this is Vera Larkin. She’s a seamstress, touching up the ragdolls. And this – well, this is Ted. He’s with the patchwork dogs.’
‘Blithering things they are as well,’ Ted said as, around him, the rest made their hellos. ‘It’s as well you weren’t here last Christmas. Papa Jack, he can make almost anything with his hands, but you just can’t get loyalty in a patchwork dog.’
‘There were complaints,’ Sally-Anne butted in, as if laying a taunt at Ted.
‘Little boys upset their new toy would only play with their sister. A patchwork Dalmatian, of all things, who took a shining to some old fella’s next-door neighbour and wouldn’t stop howling at the walls. Why, three Christmases ago, I was up and roaming Battersea on Christmas Eve itself – one of his hounds had gone feral, started running with a pack of street dogs down there.’