The Toymakers

by Robert Dinsdale

  ‘Head down, Martha.’

  ‘But Mother—’

  ‘Head down, please.’

  From Martha’s lap, a patchwork face picked itself up. Sirius had grown a little more ragged with the years. His black button eyes had been ripped off by over-eager hands, stitched on and restitched again; his patches were thicker where they had been replaced, and what mechanisms still drove him purred a little more incessantly every time he moved his limbs. Martha held on to him, her face screwed up in a scowl. This was the problem with living in the Emporium, thought Cathy. You did not develop an instinct for the real world when all you knew was toys. Martha had no reason to fear for she had never seen anything like this – but then, so Cathy supposed, neither had she. Two men were scrambling into the boughs of one of the trees, the better to observe the carnage.

  ‘It isn’t safe,’ she whispered. ‘Kaspar, what do you think it is?’

  ‘It’s … the embassy.’

  Sirius was up on his haunches, hackles raised as if to protect Martha. A man crashed alongside the car, brought his arm back and let fly with another rock. More glass shattered in the face of the building above, the volley followed by a dozen and more.

  By now the motorcar had ground to a halt, an island in the sea of men. Kaspar tried to hallo one of them, but to no avail. Instead, he reached down and grabbed him by the scruff of the neck.

  ‘What’s happening here?’

  ‘See for yourself, mister,’ a voice barked back, and soon Kaspar found an afternoon edition pressed into his hands.

  Kaspar unfurled the rag while another stream of men, bank clerks and bricklayers, buffeted the wagon to join the crowds on the other side. With a flick of his wrist it rolled down his arm. Three striking words leapt out of the print:

  HIS MAJESTY DEFIED!

  Kaspar dropped the newspaper into Cathy’s lap, where she read on: war begun without formal declaration, a dreadnought sunk by German privateers in the northern sea, heroes recalled from summer holidays in far-flung climes. And there, underneath it all: YOUR COUNTRY UNDER ATTACK.

  ‘Can I read, Mama?’

  In silence, Cathy folded the newspaper and placed it underneath her seat.

  ‘Perhaps we should return home, Mrs Godman?’

  Mrs Godman. Even now it was a novelty to hear it, in the same taunting tone he used to say Miss Wray.

  Home, she thought, and into her head came an explosion of atriums and aisles, the quarters above and workshops deep below; the pack of patchwork dogs over which Sirius ruled; the phoenix that sat, at all times, in the rafters wherever Papa Jack roamed; and that little Wendy House, hidden now in the paper trees, where it sometimes seemed her very life had begun. ‘Yes,’ she answered, ‘home,’ and put an arm around her daughter as the cacophony faded behind.

  Come back to the Emporium now. It has changed much since we have been away. Eight years have seen the aisles transformed, but so too the sky above them. The cloud castle that floats, forever churning out the steam on which it survives, in the Emporium dome, belongs to Emil; the patchwork pegasi that gambol around it, those were built by Papa Jack. The paper trees that you must remember have long since put down roots, rucking up the floorboards for aisles around. The Secret Doors have been unleashed, their entrances and exits finally tethered together, so that now a customer might enter on the shopfloor and exit on to a gallery high above. The Midnight Express, Emil’s endeavour of two summers past, is a miniature locomotive that will ferry customers from the atrium into the new showrooms, bigger on the inside than the out, that Papa Jack has chipped out of the world. There are too many new delights to mention (though let me mention Kaspar’s Masques – put one of these on and you might find yourself becoming the animal whose likeness you have taken), but some things will never change in this Emporium of ours: Kaspar still cavorts recklessly around, Emil still lines up the soldiers he has diligently made, and Cathy still makes certain their Long War does not rise up out of the battlefield into the Emporium aisles. Yes, come back to the Emporium with me now. You have been away too long …

  The letters arrived before the end of the month. Emil, who was up every morning at dawn to turn his workshop lathe, brought them to Papa Jack’s breakfast table where the whole family gathered. Mrs Hornung had served up devilled eggs but, this morning, there was not an appetite in the entire Emporium. Sirius begged for scraps but, every time Martha sneaked one into his cotton wadding jaws, he turned up his nose, uncertain what to do with things as alien as toast and griddled fish.

  ‘Douglas Flood,’ Emil began, reading the first letter aloud. ‘Kesey and Dunmore. They’re saying they’ll be back by Christmas, that we needn’t worry. This thing will be over by first frost, that’s what they’re being told. But what if it’s not?’

  Kaspar, embroiled in one of his breakfast battles with Martha, would not be drawn on the subject. Cathy saw him pointedly keeping his eyes down.

  ‘Let’s send some more notices into the wild,’ Papa Jack began. His voice was more feathery than it had been; Emil’s rattled like Vickers gun fire, but Papa Jack’s remained a whisper. ‘There are always shop hands.’

  ‘Not good ones. Not like Douglas and Dunmore. Even Robert Kesey! How could we teach a new team to wrangle the rocking horses, or to make more soldiers … or even where everything is? Can you imagine a first-year shop hand teaching one of your unicorns how to walk, let alone the pegasus foals to fly? By the time we were done the snowdrops would be up and …’ There came a knock at the door and Mrs Hornung reappeared, a telegram in her hands. When Emil tore it open, his face blanched. ‘John Arthur,’ he swore. ‘John Arthur signed up too. Well?’

  But the faces around the breakfast table bore the news without the panic that had turned Emil’s features to a parody.

  Kaspar flourished his finger in one direction, drawing Martha’s gaze. While she was looking the other way, he snatched an egg from her plate, made it reappear in her pocket – and, when she cracked it open, it revealed not gleaming white and vibrant yolk, but a patchwork chick who squawked, waiting to be fed. ‘Emil, is there a time in life when you might not think it’s the end? Do you know …’

  Papa Jack lifted a granite hand. ‘Your brother is right to be afraid.’

  ‘I didn’t say I was afraid, Papa …’

  ‘If this is truly what they’re saying it is—’ and here Papa Jack brandished the newspaper ‘—then we would do well to watch ourselves. Godman is a name that might pass, not like Schneider or Schmidt, but there can be scarcely a boy in the city who doesn’t know us for what we are. That we’re not like them. Bring them into our Emporium, sit them down with our toys, and they would see that we were all children, once – but, passing in the street, or looking up at the shuttered-up shopfront with a rock in their hand and a belly full of beer? No, not then.’

  Emil twisted. ‘The Russias are ranged up against the Kaiser, father, just the same as us …’

  ‘A little thing like that oughtn’t matter to the man on the street. Given the excuse, a certain sort of man would put a stone through your window if you so much as had a different colour eye. No, I’ve seen this before. London loves its toymakers from the frozen East … until it doesn’t. Love and hate, they are such very similar things.’

  Cathy had heard quite enough. However much Kaspar was trying to distract her (he was using his pencil to draw figures on the tablecloth, and now those figures were dancing, pulling faces, battling each other back), Martha’s eyes kept darting to Papa Jack. When Papa Jack spoke, the world stopped turning on its axis so that it might listen.

  ‘Martha, perhaps it’s time you cleared the plates away.’

  Martha’s face turned to a rictus. ‘Mother.’

  ‘Now, Martha.’

  Kaspar could see where this was going; the only time Cathy ever turned brittle was when Martha glared like this. But she had Cathy’s pluck, the same pluck that had brought Cathy to the Emporium doors, and that was something that couldn’t be quashed. Better that it
be diverted instead. Even the wildest rivers could be diverted.

  ‘Mademoiselle, shall we?’ In moments Kaspar was bustling Martha through to the parlour where, together, they would tempt Sirius to lick the crockery clean.

  After they had gone, Cathy looked between Emil and Papa Jack. ‘If you must talk of this thing, there are enough locked doors in the Emporium.’ She stood so that she might look down on them, as if it was they who were her children. ‘Whatever this is, she’s eight years old.’

  Emil spent the morning in his workshop, scything more soldiers out of wood while his Imperial Kapitan watched from on high. It was meant to be cathartic work, but today his hands were separate from his body. They kept slipping, so that he planed a soldier’s arm down to a stump, or opened up his belly to reveal the cavity where the wind-up workings were to slot inside. Finally, he gave up. The Imperial Kapitan was still watching, his painted features as proud of Emil’s trembling hands as they were when he spirited perfect soldiers out of scraps left on his workshop floor. It was time, Emil decided, to stop. Down on his knees, he ranged up a troop of wind-up soldiery and set them to battle each other.

  Ordinarily watching his soldiers lifted him out of himself, but today the feeling was not the same. The battle being fought behind his eyes was too strong. The calendar on the wall, which Emil had inscribed himself, read 5 August. There were still two months until he would dare stay up each night, searching for signs of first frost – and yet he was thinking about it every day, and had been since the moment the snowdrops flowered on the Emporium terrace and last season’s magic came to an end. That sweet anticipation, even the anticipation of the anticipation, was enough to sustain him through the long, lonely (yes, he used the word at last) summer. He did not mind the endless days with only him and the Imperial Kapitan, did not mind listening to the sounds of Kaspar and Martha playing in the aisles, nor even of Kaspar and Cathy playing through the bedroom walls at night, not when he knew there would come a day when Douglas Flood and Robert Kesey, Dunmore, John Horwood and all the rest would stream back through the Emporium doors and light the aisles up, play battles in the Palace and stay up late with him, concocting all sorts of stories, playing all sorts of games. Emil had long ago observed that he himself was like one of the Emporium’s backwards bears: in hibernation through the summer, only truly alive when winter was at its most fierce. A whole year’s life could be lived in the space of an Emporium Christmas. And yet … the thought of a winter without them, his boys so far away while Emil remained alone in the Emporium, well, that was what was clouding his thoughts. That was the reason today’s soldiers lay dismembered on the bench, their faces as crude as the ones on sale in all the lesser toyshops of London town.

  ‘What do you think, little thing?’ he said, eyeing the Imperial Kapitan. ‘I’m going to have to talk to you. If I don’t talk to somebody, I’m bound to go mad, and you’re the only one there is …’

  The Imperial Kapitan eyed him with its unflinching face.

  ‘If only you could talk. Why, then we’d see …’

  Clasping the Kapitan, Emil ventured on to the shopfloor. There would be the customers. His days would be filled with showing boys battles, or restacking shelves, or taking the most brave shoppers on tours of the jungles his father was planting, where all manner of patchwork creatures would frolic in the vines. It wasn’t as if there would be no joy. The world would stop turning before there was an Emporium winter without any joy.

  A noise from above drew his eye. Kaspar was dangling from one of the galleries where the frame of Emil’s cloud castle was tethered, its towers and portcullis borne up by a reef of churning steam. Moments later, Martha perched on the balcony beside him and, goaded on by Kaspar, dropped over the edge. Together they released their fingers – and would have plummeted down, if only Kaspar’s longships with their dragon head prows had not appeared underneath. Kaspar dropped into the first, Martha into the second – and the dragons, opening their jaws in the way Kaspar had designed, took off, as if swimming in the cloud castle’s moat.

  Laughter fell around Emil like a deluge of rain. The longships swooped and turned at the command of their mechanical oarsmen, but what was keeping them afloat Emil dared not guess. Impressive as his cloud castle was, any engineer with half an interest in atmospherics might have achieved the same thing. But those longships? Those longships had sailed straight out of Kaspar’s dreams and into the Emporium air.

  Another voice joined the laughter above. And there was Cathy, at the same balcony rail with Sirius yapping at her side. She had been admonishing them (she always admonished their escapades), but as Kaspar’s dragonboat completed its circle and drew near, something changed. Emil saw her head drop to one side (how beautiful she looked when she disapproved and yet approved at the very same time!); then, timing her leap perfectly, she propelled herself over the side.

  The dragonboat tilted as she hit it. Moments later she and Kaspar were off, hunting Martha in the mist, the dragon heads showering sparks as the laughter continued to pour down.

  Yes, the Emporium was a place of joy, but without the shop hands this winter the joy could never be Emil’s. ‘What would you have me do?’ he whispered, but the Imperial Kapitan offered no reply.

  That evening, Martha would not listen to her stories. She asked: ‘What does it mean, Mama? Is there to be a real war, like the ones Papa and Uncle Emil play? With cavalry charges and a noisy cannonade?’

  Cathy stroked the hair out of her eyes. ‘Why do you say that, my treasure?’

  ‘None of the shop hands are coming, are they? They’re to fight their real wars. But why do people fight wars, Mama? Why, when there are toy soldiers to do it for them?’

  What an Emporium thing to say! Only a girl raised in these aisles could think such a thing. And yet, she thought, why not?

  ‘Whatever happens, whatever things they do out there in the world, it won’t touch us, not here, not in our Emporium. What you saw at the embassy, that isn’t coming here. You’re safe here, my treasure, safe with your mama.’

  When she reached their own chamber, Kaspar was already in bed. Cathy ordered Sirius away, off to guard Martha through the long night, and would have sat down herself, if only her feet hadn’t kept on walking.

  ‘I’ve seen you like this before. You’re prowling, prowling like a caged tiger.’

  ‘I’m frightened, Kaspar.’

  This was new. The Cathy Kaspar had fallen in love with had never admitted such a thing. He lifted himself from the covers. ‘Whatever happens, whatever things they do out there in the world—’

  ‘That’s precisely what I just told Martha. You can’t pull the old lines on me, Kaspar. We wrote those lines together, remember?’

  Kaspar said, ‘There’s no need to be afraid.’

  ‘But Dunmore and Kesey and little Douglas Flood … off to carry bayonets like it’s just another game. If they’ve gone, how many others?’

  ‘Thousands, I shouldn’t wonder. Thousands and thousands and thousands.’ Kaspar had said it dreamily, but now he came to his senses. ‘Whatever happens out there, it won’t be like the Long War. What sort of madness might that be? To wind up a battalion of living things and march them at one another, as if that might win a war?’

  Kaspar took her by the hand, drew her down to the bedsheets. If the Emporium’s magics would not make her forget the outside world tonight, well, there were other ways. He rolled over her, staring at her dewy-eyed until she could no longer contain her laughter. He looked pointedly absurd when he glared at her like that, and he knew it.

  ‘You’re a fool. War declared, our shop hands gone, panic in the aisles and blood on the streets – and you, all you can think about is this …’

  All the same, it was Cathy who kissed him first.

  That night, in bed, she had dreamt about blood on the streets; three mornings later, there it was, in lurid smears up and down the Emporium doors, a dried-up pool of viscera spreading out into Iron Duke Mews.

 
Mrs Hornung was already on her hands and knees, the pail of water at her side frothing with scarlet soap, when Cathy arrived. Cathy had come in search of a letter, for Lizzy wrote often and her stories were better than anything in the Reader’s Digest magazines, but no postman had dared a delivery this morning. A pig’s head sat in the middle of the filth, warning strangers away.

  ‘Mrs Hornung …’

  ‘Don’t you mind me, girl. I was here to see it happen, opening up to flush out the cobwebs when they bouldered up the mews. Foreign dogs, they shouted. Foreign dogs, as if their mamas and papas hadn’t brought them to these same doors every Christmas and spoiled them with Mr Godman’s toys. I tried to reason with them, but those butcher’s boys had their bucket and …’

  For the first time she stopped scrubbing and turned to face Cathy. The pig’s blood had made a merry mess of her apron; it ran in the creases of her neck, giving the impression that somebody had come for her with a knife.

  ‘Let’s get you upstairs, Mrs Hornung.’

  ‘Not a chance, girl, not until this is done. I won’t have those blackguards winning. It’s like Mr Godman says. We was all babes once. English and German and even Spaniards, I should say.’

  Cathy rolled up her sleeves. ‘Two backs are better than one, Mrs Hornung. You move on up, those flagstones are going to need some working …’

  She had not yet broken a sweat (though the work was hard, the blood needed scouring from each stone) when she heard more footsteps thundering up Iron Duke Mews. Instinct told her this was another villain come to daub their Emporium walls – just as they had daubed the fronts of every emigrant bookseller, locksmith and chocolatier since the day war was declared – but, when she looked up, an altogether more bewildering sight was coming their way. Emil was hurrying back into the Emporium in great, loping strides. His chest was heaving, his fists were bunched, and though he hopped ungainly through the sea of dried blood, he kept his head steadfastly up, refusing to acknowledge Cathy and Mrs Hornung on their knees at his feet. ‘Emil?’ Cathy cried out, but in response he contorted past them and was lost to the darkness of the summer aisles.