‘Every year,’ said Papa Jack. ‘A toyshop’s trade is in the dark winter months, Miss Wray. It’s only then the magic can truly be conjured. Our summers are given over to … creating. The Emporium would not be what it is today were it not for those months. Yes, while the rest of the world is out there lounging in the long grass, the three of us are here, in our workshops, waiting for winter …’
He made them sound like a family of bears – and, now that she thought of it, there was something peculiarly ursine about Papa Jack. Emil had something of the same look about him. She looked his way and found him with his head down, concentrating on dinner. Surely he couldn’t still be brooding on whatever game they had been playing as she walked in? Her eyes danced across the table and found Kaspar instead.
‘This summer was when I made my trees,’ he said. ‘The dirigibles too. Somewhere, out there, there’s a family floating in one of my dirigibles through a forest of paper trees. Tell me – can you think of anything more perfect?’ He stopped and turned on Emil. ‘Emil, what did you make this summer?’
‘You know what I made, Kaspar.’
‘Tell Miss Wray, Emil. There’s no need to be ashamed.’
Pointedly, Emil dropped his fork. ‘I’m not ashamed.’
‘Good, because there’s really no need to be. Your birds are something quite special. The way they explode and flutter up – you’d think they were almost real. And remember last year? What was it? Your picnic hampers. Yes, you’d really believe you were in a park on a lazy summer’s day … Did we ever go through the ledgers for them, little brother? Did we see how they sold? Only, I don’t see the hampers on the shelves this year – and there are still so many boxes of birds in the storerooms, I wonder if we ought to be letting them go, out into the wild? You never know, it might draw some customers in, to see your pipe-cleaner birds in Hyde Park. A spectacle like that – just think of what it did for my trees!’
Cathy had thought Emil had the same ursine look as his father and it intensified now. Every muscle of his face tightened, as if preparing to snarl. Then, quashing whatever had been bubbling up inside him, he stood up. ‘You’d do well to pay attention to the ledgers, Kaspar. It might be your trees, Papa’s patchwork dogs, they write about in the Chronicle, but what is it that boys come back for time and time again? My soldiers. My infantry and cavalry and …’ Cathy could see he was fingering a wooden soldier even now, just beneath the line of the table. This one was so much more striking than any she had seen: noble and distinguished, Imperial somehow. ‘Take all the attention you like, you scoundrel, because if it wasn’t for all those weeks and months I spent with my soldiers, why, there’d hardly be a roof above our head.’
‘You overestimate things, little brother. Your soldiers, they’re commendable little things, but it’s hardly an act of toymaking, is it? No, it’s rather a form of … carpentry, wouldn’t you say?’
He said toymaking like another man might enchantment; he said carpentry like another man might describe his morning ablutions. Cathy saw the way it made Emil shudder. The younger Godman brother brought his fist up from beneath the table and planted this new soldier on the surface, to stand proudly among the dumplings and dishes.
‘We’ll begin again, Kaspar. Victor takes all, Act of God or no.’
Kaspar was still reclining as he weighed up the challenge. ‘That’s the spirit, little brother!’ He stood. ‘Miss Wray. You’ll have to excuse me. My brother has asked for a flogging.’ He was gesturing for Emil to lead the way (Kaspar Godman was nothing if not a gentleman) when he had a sudden thought. ‘Or perhaps you might like to watch?’
Moments later, she was looking over a battlefield in a bedroom above. She took it for Kaspar’s, because a single paper tree stood in the corner, and she doubted this was something to which Emil wanted to wake each morning. The bed had been pushed against the outer wall, candles had been lit, and hillsides and forests, sculpted perfectly in sponge and clay, were being arranged according to rules only Kaspar and Emil seemed to know. Next, each brother took a turn to line up his soldiers. Kaspar’s, Cathy saw, did not have the polish that belonged to Emil’s; some of them were replicas, made by shop hands and sold across the shopfloor, but even those that Kaspar had evidently crafted himself did not live up to Emil’s designs. Their faces betrayed little emotion; their eyes did not glimmer with the story of a life hard-lived, a war being desperately fought. They were mere playthings next to the Imperial Kapitan that Emil so proudly placed at the head of his phalanx.
Between each deployment, the silence stretched out. Once, Cathy tried to venture a word – but Kaspar gave her a grin and begged her to remain quiet, so her eyes wandered instead. She was standing beside a tall glass cabinet and in it stood toy soldiers very different from the ones Kaspar and Emil were winding up. These only looked like soldiers at all in a certain light. They were made out of pinecone and pieces of bark, bound up with bootlaces and string and dead grass.
She was still staring at them while Kaspar and Emil’s game got underway. Through the glass, those little faces, etched and burnt into the bark, gave the impression that they too were watching the battle. She could see the conflict being reflected in miniature. Kaspar’s expeditionary force had already been routed. Emil had wind-up cavalry poised to shatter his flanks. She turned, just in time to see them rolling down one of the hills. The joy on Emil’s face reached a zenith – but then exploded, for he had not seen Kaspar’s reserves marching in from beneath the first bed. With his cavalry divided, Emil’s soldiers were easily scattered. Those who survived the onslaught walked on, only to be upended when they reached the skirting board that ran around the edges of the room, a pile of pillows in place of a mountain. Finally, only the Imperial Kapitan – weighted more heavily than the rest – remained.
‘Do you concede?’
With his bottom lip bulging, Emil strode out of the room.
For a moment Kaspar held himself as if victorious. Then the cost of the victory appeared to him – and, heaving a sigh, he loped to the door. ‘Emil!’ For a moment, he disappeared into the hall and Cathy listened out for the clattering of footsteps. ‘Emil, I didn’t mean to …’ But the words petered out, and then Kaspar was back in the room. His face was missing its customary smile.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘That’s just … Emil.’
‘Oh, I wouldn’t be so sure. I think you may have had a little to do with it.’
Kaspar had got to his knees to sweep the battlefield clear, lining up Emil’s fallen soldiers with his own. Most had wound down; only one or two still kicked feebly in their death throes. ‘I’ll admit it. I’ve been being sore with him. But he takes his soldiers so seriously! You most likely think me frightful. And yet … he’s my little brother. He pains me, but it doesn’t mean I don’t …’
‘It was a rotten trick, Kaspar. The way you baited him back at the table. It wasn’t … honourable.’
‘No?’
‘It isn’t how a family treats itself.’
Kaspar appeared to find this sentiment intriguing. ‘Well, what about your family, Miss Wray? How did they treat you, that you should run away to live in our Emporium?’
‘I never said I ran away.’
‘Oh, Cathy, you say it every time you close your mouth. You say it every time you try so hard not to say it.’ He stopped. ‘You’ll tell me soon enough. I don’t see why you try so hard to keep a secret you’re so desperate to tell.’
But Cathy was practised at silences, and when this one went on too long, Kaspar had to find another way to fill it. ‘You think we’re fools, don’t you? To care so much about a game of soldiers?’
‘No,’ said Cathy, and something drew her eyes back to the pinecone figurines trapped behind the cabinet glass.
‘No?’
‘Because I think there’s something more to it than a game.’ She paused, as if willing Kaspar to enter the silence. ‘I’m right, aren’t I? With you and Emil, it isn’t just a game. It’s … life, of a sort.’
Kaspar breathed out, as if trying to form a word, but no word came. It was, Cathy decided, the first unrehearsed reaction she had seen in him since the moment they’d met.
‘You oughtn’t to grind your brother into the dirt like that.’
‘Miss Wray, you misunderstand. You might not believe it, but there was a time before all this, before the aisles and atriums, before any toys at all. You look at it now, and you imagine the Emporium our entire world. Well, before the Emporium, it was just us, the Brothers Godman, without even our papa to call our own. We were each other’s world back then. I’d do anything for Emil, and Emil for me too – though …’ And here Kaspar could not stop himself from smirking, for the joke was too perfect to resist. ‘… that was generally because I’d have told him to do it. When you see Emil get upset, it’s only because he cares so much about this … Long War of ours. It’s true what you say, Cathy. It isn’t just a game. It’s … who we are.’ He went to the door and peered out. When he was certain that the coast was clear, he looked back – and only then did he say, ‘The Long War has been going on since the very first day we met our papa. Back then, if you can picture it, we weren’t the sorts of boys who had toys. That came much later, once our papa started to teach us all of the things that he’d learned. No, don’t look at me like that. It’s you who wanted to know.’ He paused. ‘You do want to know, don’t you?’
Cathy nodded. It was a long story, he said, but he would tell it, if that was what she wanted. ‘And it started with these.’ He took her back to the cabinet, where the pinecone figurines had been watching, unmoved. ‘I was eight years old the day I first saw these. They came flurrying out of the backwoods, a thin column carried by the wind – and my papa walking behind them, like they were his guards. That was the first time I’d seen him, in anything other than a picture. That was the day the Emporium was born.’
Picture it, if you would: Kaspar Godman is eight years old, dishevelled as all the village children with whom he spends his days. Most of them are simple, certainly too simple for Kaspar, who has had an inkling, ever since he can remember, that he is more intelligent than them, a supposition borne out by the way he can ordinarily get them to do whatever he pleases, whether that be stealing hens’ eggs, raiding the rock pools for crabs, or else taking a beating more properly meant for Kaspar himself. Yes, Kaspar has had the village children trained since before most of them could talk. He runs rings around them like a sheepdog to its sheep, and the only one who ever resists is the one they call Emil. Which is a terrible shame, because Emil is Kaspar’s brother, and has been Kaspar’s to look after ever since the day he was born.
On this particular day, Kaspar has grown bored and is following one of the lesser trails to the headland overlooking the village. From here he can see every house in Carnikava, all of the trails that converge out of the woods, the way the river Gauja broadens and deepens in colour as it joins with the sea. As he comes between the trees, he hears noises in the roots around him. Determined that it can only be Emil following in his footfall, he finds a hiding place beneath an overhang of earth. There, squatting with the woodlice and worms, he waits. But it is not Emil who has been following him out of the undergrowth. Instead there come a procession of little figures, carried along on the wind. At first they are formless, but then he sees: the twigs as arms, the briars that bind them, ringlets of leaves and pinecones for heads. These are stick soldiers and the wind gives them the appearance of marching.
Temptation is a terrible thing for an eight-year-old boy. Before Kaspar has any thought to deny himself, he darts out to scoop up a soldier. And he is standing there, turning that bundle in his hands, when a heavier tread comes along the track. He looks up, into encroaching shadow, and sees a vagrant lurching toward him. In his fists, their nails like horns, are yet more soldiers. He is reaching into his pockets and casting them into the wind.
When he sees Kaspar, he stops. Carnikava is used to wayfarers. They tramp the roads of the coast, living off forage and the kindness of strangers. But this wayfarer is more brutish than most. His face is a lattice of scars, his nose misshapen, what teeth he has are rotted to pits – and all of that is hidden behind a beard so matted he might be part of the undergrowth itself.
Kaspar turns tail and flees – out of the trees, down the escarpments toward the coast, holding the little pinecone soldier all the way. Intermittently, he looks back. The vagrant is following after, but he has not changed the pace of his tread. He lumbers like a man who has come too far already, who would be happy to find a ditch and lie down until sleep takes him away.
Kaspar reaches home, that succession of wooden shacks, and scrambles inside to find his brother Emil leafing through the pages of a book – though neither Godman brother has ever learned to read.
‘What is it?’
‘There’s a wild man, coming out of the woods.’
The door flies open, and there stands the very same vagrant. Emil leaps to his feet, cowers behind Kaspar (among all of the many things he is, Kaspar is first of all Emil’s big brother and would do anything to defend him).
‘Which one of you is Kaspar?’
This is not a man used to talking; his voice is of whispers and wind.
‘I am,’ Kaspar says, defiant.
‘Where is your mama?’
‘My mama is dead,’ he declares, ‘two winters gone.’
Only this gives the vagrant pause. Behind his mask of filth he is quivering, and the only sign of his tears are the patches of pink skin that emerge out of the dark. ‘Then who looks after you boys?’
‘We look after each other,’ declares Kaspar, ‘and we don’t need nobody else.’
‘Well,’ says the vagrant, and his voice is different now, less bestial somehow, though equally deranged, ‘you have me now. I’m your papa, and I need to sleep.’
Somehow, he knows where the old bedroom is, the one where Kaspar and Emil’s mama had lain down to die. He crosses the shack and closes the door behind him, leaving only that coat of badly butchered hide behind. Seconds later, and for long hours to come, the sounds of his snoring reverberate in the house.
‘What now?’ whispers Emil.
‘I think we sleep in the hen hut tonight, little brother.’
And that was exactly what they did, though there was precious little sleep to come. For that was the night that Kaspar and Emil waged the opening battle of the Long War. After dark, they stole back into the shack where this man who claimed to be their blood was sleeping, and found the interloper’s overcoat pockets stuffed full with pinecone soldiers, ballerinas of bark, warhorses the size of thimbles. Kaspar took a handful, Emil took a handful, and out back, where the yard dog barked and the hens clucked anxiously at the suggestion of every fox, they played out the first skirmish in the campaign Cathy had just watched.
‘It wasn’t long after that that we left,’ said Kaspar, taking care as he balanced one of the pinecone figurines upon Cathy’s palm. ‘Papa spent a few days scrubbing himself clean. He butchered every hen in our hen hut, ate every egg in the nests, quartered the piglets and smoked hard sausages on a pyre. We didn’t know it then, we thought he was just an animal, but he was fattening himself up. Until then, he’d been skin and bone. It had taken him two years to walk home. He’d crossed all the Russias, but he wasn’t stopping now. He wanted to carry on west, and he wanted us to come with him …’
‘And you went, just like that?’
Kaspar nodded. ‘It wasn’t just because he told us to. And it wasn’t just because of those soldiers he made! But, Miss Wray, he could have led all the village children away, if that was what he wanted. No, it was something in his eyes. Somebody needed to look after him. Emil and me, we decided that was us.’
‘What about your dog, the one in the yard?’
‘Left to go feral. It took us an age to forgive Papa for that, but he made it up to us, once we’d reached London. You’ve already seen Sirius, the first of all the Emporium patchwork dogs, tramping up and
down on its cotton wad paws. It was a long voyage. I must have held Emil’s hand halfway around the world. Then we were in London, and our papa showing us how to make toys. But that,’ he smiled, ‘is another story. I’ll tell you it some time, but first … isn’t there something you want to tell me?’
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.
The Toymakers Page 7