What the baby thought was: cinnamon! And gingerbread! And – where are we sleeping tonight, Mama? It called out to her through sinew and bone.
The way into Papa Jack’s Emporium was narrow, but soon she stepped into tassels of navy blue – and, through a prickling veil of heat, she entered the shopfloor. It was big in here, bigger than it had seemed from the street – impossibly big, Cathy might have noticed, if she wasn’t so fixed on keeping her nerves at bay. Her eyes were drawn, momentarily, to the serpents of fabric and lace that swooped in the vaulted dome above the aisles. The mannequin of a woodcutter at her side bowed ostentatiously. A pyramid of porcelain ballerinas turned en pointe to display themselves at their best.
The aisles were alive. She took a step, stumbled when her foot caught the locomotive of some steam train chugging past. She was turning to miss it when wooden horses cantered past in their jagged rhythms, their Cossack riders reaching out as if to threaten the train gliding by.
The aisle that she chose was lined with castles at siege. Some of the dioramas were frozen, with siege towers rolled into place, but others clicked into gear at Cathy’s footfall. Knights errant ran sorties with loyal companions across tabletops and shelves. On one shelf, a party of pikemen held the defence against a warband of troglodytes plucked from some Scandinavian saga.
Around the corner, where more dirigible balloons were tethered, a queue was forming at a countertop. Cathy joined it and waited until the shoppers in front had finished having their mammoths wrapped up in paper, or the pieces of their pirate galleons slotted together by expert hands. Then, finally, she reached the head of the queue. At the counter, a boy no older than she was battling to keep the lid of a tiny box stamped EMPORIUM INSTANT TREES from springing open, while simultaneously attending to the spinning tops making a symphony on the shelves behind.
‘I’ll be with you in one moment,’ he said as he finally snapped the box shut. Then he reared up. He was a good-looking young man, with eyes of mountain blue and black hair growing frenzied around his shoulders. He had been attempting a first beard, but the shadow on his chin was pitiful compared to the black thatches that were his eyebrows, and there was chubbiness to his face that gave him the air of a boy much younger.
‘Forgive me,’ said Cathy, ‘but I’m here about the job.’
The boy’s mountain eyes narrowed to ravines, and when he took hold of the gazette that Cathy was holding, they narrowed yet further. ‘Where did you get this?’
Cathy was fumbling a reply when the boy lost himself in a clamour of pages. The newspaper positively exploded around him as he searched for its front page. ‘Leigh-on-Sea? I’m sure we get seashells from … Look,’ he said, stopping dead, ‘you’ve caught us on the hop. It was first frost this morning, which you probably know. Opening night! That means – chaos and plunder, catastrophe and clamour! If you’d wanted a position, if you’d truly wanted a position, you’d have been here …’ The boy seemed to be fighting a battle against himself. Which side won, Cathy could not tell. Stepping back, he fiddled with a latch and the counter groaned open, panels in the wood revolving out of one another at the command of pulleys and gears. As the unit came apart, and only for the briefest of moments, it froze in the air, depicting the perfect image of a snowflake. Then the snowflake fractured to reveal a way through. ‘You’ll have to stay near. If you go wandering, there’s a chance I won’t find you.’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Well, you want a position, do you? Then you’ll have to be interviewed. He’s in his workshop, where he always is. You’ll have to come this way.’
Cathy watched him disappear into a doorway barnacled in yet more perfect crystals of snow and pressed her hand to her belly. ‘I’m sorry, little thing. Not much further now.’ And then, with the cries of some pretend battle exploding behind her, she wandered on.
Behind the counter a set of stairs spiralled up to the galleries above. The boy was already puffing his way around the first bend by the time Cathy reached its bottom. Swiftly, she followed after.
The way was narrow. At the first landing he took her out on to a gallery, from which they could look down across the bustling shopfloor. From here: another door, and another stair, a passageway lined with storerooms in between. Each gallery grew into the next, one door opened into an antechamber from which several other halls sprouted – and, though she could have sworn they had not climbed as far, soon Cathy emerged on to a balcony at the very height of the Emporium’s dome. The shop must have grown into the others around it, one of those tricks of London geography that marked it out as a city much older than most, or perhaps it was a trick of perspective – for, from up here, Cathy believed it almost as big as the cathedral at St Paul’s.
The boy was waiting for her at a single heavy door, oak with rivets of grey-black steel. He had already knocked when Cathy arrived, breathless from her travels. Here the walls were banked in hooks and, from those hooks, there dangled the detritus of a hundred unfinished toys. A jack, uprooted from its box, stared at them with delirium in its eyes.
From beyond the door a voice beckoned the boy to enter and, with an almost apologetic look, he tumbled through. From the hall, Cathy peered in. The workshop was illuminated in the oranges and reds of a great hearthfire, its walls banked in aquariums and shelves where the toys of past Christmases peered out.
Nervously she waited, the silence punctured only by the tolling of the boy’s feet. Finally, the footsteps came to an end. She heard something landing, the newspaper being thrown down, and the boy piped up, ‘I didn’t know we still had this thing out.’
And a gravelly voice, as of a bear still sluggish from hibernation, said, ‘It’s always there when we need it there, Emil. You know that. Why, do you not think we need more help?’
‘We always need more help.’
‘Then show her in. Let’s see if she’s Emporium, through and through.’
Soon after, the boy named Emil reappeared. The look on his face was either panic or exasperation. ‘You’ll have to forgive me. They’ll need me on the shopfloor. It’s not as if Kaspar would rush to the helm when the deluge comes. No, he just preens up in his tower, lording it over the rest – and on opening night as well!’ He ran a hand through his hair, as tangled as briars. ‘I’m Emil, by the way.’
He lingered longer, so that Cathy had no option but to say, ‘I’m … Cathy.’
At this he clapped a heavy paw on her shoulder. ‘Good luck, Cathy. And remember, he isn’t as awful as he sounds. He’s … only my father.’
As Cathy stepped through, her eyes took in the bellows and tools, the bundles of dried fabric that hung from the rafters like the herbs of an apothecary. It was only now, her feet crunching through wood shavings and shreds of felt, startled at a family of wind-up mice who scattered as she accidentally upended their nest, that she wondered if she had done the right thing. Running was easy, she decided; but every runaway had to arrive, and arriving seemed the most difficult thing of all.