Cathy realised she’d been staring at the soldier pirouetting in her palm for too long. Now, Kaspar’s hand had closed over it, and she was forced to look up into his eyes. They were imploring her to tell, and every moment she remained with his hand touching hers, more and more of her wanted to say, ‘Kaspar, it isn’t so easy. Your story, it’s full of adventure. Mine …’
She might have said more (her tongue was threatening to), but before she could the bedroom door opened and Emil reappeared. He was comporting himself with more dignity than the moment he’d left, though his eyes were still swollen and raw. In his hands were more wooden soldiers. These ones were roughly hewn, still bearing the marks of his workshop lathe, but there was something magnificent in their minutely sculpted faces as well: once painted, this would be a unit of men of the same standing as the Imperial Kapitan. ‘I declare an ambush,’ Emil announced. Then, when Kaspar’s eyes narrowed in an attempt to send him away, he spluttered, ‘It’s within the rules. Your troops have taken mine as prisoners. My reinforcements arrive late and ambush them on the way …’
Those rules had been codified long before, and it took Kaspar too long to conjure up a reason why the battle had to wait. By then, Cathy had already taken her hand out of his and was hurrying away.
‘Wait!’ called Kaspar. In the doorway, pushing past Emil, she stalled. ‘What are you doing on Christmas Day?’
‘Christmas Day?’ It would be a lie to say she had not thought about it. Christmases at home lingered long in the imagination: the pre-dawn stampede down the stairs, the stories of the night before, the incomparable delight of contemplating presents under the tree and remembering how it had felt when you were five, six, seven years old. Distance might have dulled the pain that she felt, but it only amplified the longing.
‘There’s the banquet,’ Kaspar said. ‘The Emporium Feast, for all of the shopkeeps who can’t go home, all of the sweepers and joiners and tinkers. And … all of us Godmans.’
Cathy faltered in what she meant to say, so instead she asked, ‘Where?’
‘On the shopfloor.’
Before she left, Cathy gave Kaspar a look that might have been either promise or regret. Five days would pass between this Midwinter’s Eve and the Christmas Day when he would find out for certain. He would spend every one of them chasing down the meaning in her eyes, and every night he would lose another battle to Emil. And, in that way, the Long War would continue, while a new war was being waged in Kaspar Godman’s mind.
On Christmas morning, Cathy woke ravenous with the dawn. Sally-Anne, she had discovered, had been secretly meeting with John Horwood, the Emporium caretaker, and he had taken her to a hotel for the evening; Ted Jacobs and Kesey and little Douglas Flood had ventured out into London as well, to go a-wassailing, see their families, or else lose themselves in some uproarious drinking den. The Emporium halls would be quiet without them. She rolled over with her hands to her belly, trying to assure herself that she was not truly alone. And yet – Christmas morning only intensified the feeling: without Sally-Anne to fill her head with gossip from the shopfloor, she felt the absence of her mother more keenly than ever. There were things she wanted to ask. Was it normal to wake up in the night and rush to the toilet bowl, barely to squeeze out a drop? Was it normal for her breasts to feel hard and tender, all at the same time? For the skin around her nipples to darken with tiny raised bumps? She asked the baby all of these things, but when even the answers she invented stopped coming, she knew there was only one option: sooner or later, she was going to have to leave the room.
Some time later she picked her way down the shifting Emporium stairs. And there, on the shopfloor, lay everything Kaspar had spoken of. In the night, the shelves had been rearranged, opening a huge plateau between the exhibits. Through the paper trees, now shimmering in streamers, a huge table was being laid. Mrs Hornung was directing the remaining shop hands like a general with his men. Somebody was bringing out steaming platters of potatoes and parsnips. Somebody else was carving a goose. Even up high, the smells reached out and wrapped around her, tempting her down.
When she came along the aisle and entered the plateau, one of the shop girls called out her name, and soon Cathy found herself laying out miniature wreaths of holly upon each plate. As soon as she had finished, a gong rang out. There must have been thirty shop hands left in the Emporium this Christmas Day, and now they all scrabbled for their seats. Only then did Cathy see that the Godmans were already among them. Papa Jack had a pre-ordained seat at the head of the table (somebody had hewn off its arms, so that he could sit overhanging each side), but Kaspar had found a seat a little further along, pressed up between one of the archivists, a girl with bottle-green eyes, and one of the boys who wrangled the puppets. Both seemed to be vying for his attention; when he looked up, he seemed to stare straight through her, preferring their flirtation instead. Later, Cathy would put it down to the steam billowing up from the food, but she felt herself flushing crimson as the blood rushed to her cheeks. Sirius the patchwork dog appeared, as if to beg for scraps from the table, and then wandered on; even he seemed to be drawn to Kaspar’s company, curling up at his feet.
She was still staring at him when she realised that the figure levering into the chair beside her was Emil. Food materialised upon her plate, but in comparison to the mountain on Emil’s, hers was only a foothill. Even so, the baby inside her began to cavort. She could barely restrain her hands as Papa Jack rose at the head of the table to wish good cheer on all of his guests.
‘We haven’t seen you,’ Emil whispered as his father raised a glass to another Emporium Christmas, another dark winter shot through with Emporium lights. ‘I thought, perhaps, my brother had …’
‘No,’ said Cathy, ‘nothing like that.’
‘So you’re …’
‘I’m well, Emil. I promise.’
She looked up, to see him nodding feverishly. ‘I knew you were. My brother, sometimes he gets … carried away. He thinks everyone ought to worship him. This time, it’s those trees. I’d be sore as all hell if only they weren’t so good. And they are good, Cathy. That’s the problem. When I saw what he’d done with those trees, why, I …’ Cathy did not need him to finish the sentence. She had seen the look on Emil’s face as his axe burst through the tree: there had been envy, that much was true, but eclipsing it was sheer delight. ‘I’ve been trying seasons to work something quite as magical. And Papa, Papa must have noticed. If it wasn’t for my soldiers, why, the game would already be up. Papa might as well have signed the Emporium to Kaspar and be …’ At the head of the table, Papa Jack was finishing his first toast. As the cheer went up, Emil lost track of his thoughts and, by the time the cheering died away, was rambling incoherent. ‘You didn’t want to go home?’ he finally asked, by way of stemming the tide.
‘No.’
‘And your family, won’t they miss you?’
She wondered what the house was like today, whether there had been presents and celebrations, or …
‘No,’ she whispered, half trying to convince herself.
Somewhere in the conversation, as the first food touched her lips, she felt the baby twirling in unconstrained delight, and, by instinct, her hand dropped to the curve of her belly, to feel for it there. She was aware how tight her stomach felt, was marvelling at the way she filled even Sally-Anne’s clothes, when suddenly something pushed back against her hand. She froze, but the sensation came again – and, when she lifted her hand, she could see it there, pushed up through fabric and flesh, a hand or a foot, the touch of her child.
She felt for it with the tip of her finger. Startled, the baby withdrew. Then, its courage returned. It kicked out again.
In the corner of her eye, she saw Emil tense. In an instant reality returned, the cheering from Papa Jack’s toast reached a crescendo, and when she looked up, Emil was staring at the place where her fingers had been, his face livid as a bruise.
‘Emil?’