The boys must have been sleeping, safe in their dream worlds, when the toy soldiers arrived, for Cathy saw now that they were lashed down with crimson ribbon. There were bales of the stuff in the storerooms, and perhaps that meant that the Emporium basements had already been breached. The soldiers were plundering wherever, whenever and whatever they could.
Bound so tightly they could barely lift their heads, the boys strained to look at Cathy. She thought she had never seen such fear.
The soldiers had not yet noticed Cathy hanging in the door. She watched with horror as one, more surefooted than the rest, advanced across the bedspread of the closest boy, marched up his breast and lifted his rifle. Before Cathy took another step the soldier fired; a little wooden bullet exploded forth, falling short of the boy’s face, and was promptly wound up again, back into the barrel of the soldier’s gun. Soon, the boy’s screaming had turned into a succession of quiet, breathy sobs.
‘Off them!’ Cathy cried out, and was about to throw herself into the room when somebody pounded up the hall behind her, barrelling Kaspar and Papa Jack out of the way, and thrust her bodily aside.
Emil came into the room in a thunder of footsteps and launched himself at the first bed.
The soldiers turned as one. The mountaineers on the window ledge tumbled in surprise, grappling out for their ropes as they plummeted to the flatlands of the floorboards underneath. A trio emerged from the foot of the bed, lifted their faces at the giant tearing at his son’s ribbon shackles, and scrambled back. Some valiant soldiers lifted rifles and let wooden volleys fly; others turned to escape into the skirting. The siege tower, several of the scaling ladders, were already turned to a ruin under Emil’s boots. He had lifted his first son out of the bed and, cradling him to his shoulder, caught Cathy and Kaspar frozen in the doorway, as he turned to rescue his second.
‘Don’t stand there gawping! Do something! Cathy, you of all people …’
Cathy knelt to loosen the ribbons that bound the second boy. Until now he had been silent, but at the moment of rescue he started shrieking. There was a toy soldier tangled in his hair and, when Cathy lifted him, it dropped to the bedspread.
Emil flailed out with his foot, sending the second siege tower skittering across the room. The soldier on the bedspread marched from one end to the other, finding no way down to the floorboards below. His painted features gave no hint at what he was thinking (if these things, Cathy had to remind herself, really could think), but the way he turned gave the impression of panic.
Emil’s boy was sobbing into her shoulder. She cooed for him to be quiet, told him that he was safe. Now that the worst was over she stepped forward, as if Emil might take him – but his eyes were on the bed, the soldier who marched in circles searching for a way down. It was only now that Cathy noticed its uniform of crimson red, the valiant features with which its face had been etched. The Imperial Kapitan. The soldier who had stood, for so long, on the ledge of Emil’s workshop, looking over everything that he did. Now, he was one of the things building their doll’s house world up and down the Emporium walls.
The venom was gone from Emil. Crestfallen, he stuttered backwards – and, seizing its chance, the Imperial Kapitan cast itself off the edge of the bed. Then, picking itself up (and perhaps amazed that the fall had not corrupted its workings), it joined the last soldiers flooding back into the skirting. On the threshold it turned, threw Emil a defiant salute, and vanished into the dark.
In the hallway outside Nina had arrived. Forcing herself between Kaspar and Papa Jack, she demanded the boy from Cathy’s arms. Before she took him, she drew back a hand and whipped it directly across Kaspar’s cheek. Kaspar turned, only fractionally. Not a word passed his lips.
‘Emil?’ Nina began, as if reminding him of some private discourse.
Emil’s eyes had been on the skirting, but he came to his senses now. ‘It’s gone too far, Kaspar. Too far. You’re to call them off. Summon them up or issue some proclamation, or whatever it is you do, and tell them what’s what.’
Kaspar stammered, ‘Emil, you can’t possibly think I—’
‘I do,’ Emil declared. ‘I saw it. That was my Kapitan. Why else would you take him and fit him out like all the rest, if not for spite? Well, you’ve done it now, Kaspar. They’ve crossed a line. They’re only boys. They’re your nephews, for what that’s worth. Call them off. Call them off or I’ll …’
‘We’ll burn them out,’ Nina said, as poised as Emil was fevered. ‘They come for my sons, well, we’ll come for them. So what’s it to be?’
‘Emil,’ Kaspar began, ‘are you going to let her speak to me like this? This isn’t my doing. I haven’t told them to do a thing. That’s the very point. What they do, that’s up to them. It’s you who tells them. You who …’
Nina opened her other arm, took her second son away from Emil. For a moment, Emil resisted; then he let the boy go to his mama. In the doorway, Nina hesitated, both boys dangling from her neck. ‘Are you coming?’
Emil shouldered his way out into the hall. ‘I’m sorry, Papa,’ he said, ‘but this is just intolerable. They’re only little boys. What did they do to deserve this? To be victimised in their own home? And if he won’t even—’
Kaspar reached out, but Emil only shook him away.
‘Hands off me, Kaspar.’ He had gone three steps before he spoke again. ‘Do you know, we were doing fine. I thought it was going to be impossible without you here. I thought it was going to be hell. I thought there’d be customers turning away, and all because you weren’t here with your fanciful designs. Well, it wasn’t like that. Do you know what the biggest shock was in those years? It wasn’t that the customers didn’t miss you, for I’m certain that they did. It was that … I could do it too. I could make things they’d talk about. Oh, they mightn’t have been the same as yours, but they didn’t have to be, because they were mine. I could bring them in and I could show them how, and, and … and I could have a wife and I could have a family too. The Emporium is ours, Kaspar, and you just couldn’t stand it, so you had to …’
Cathy had been listening from the bedroom, but at last she joined them in the hall. ‘Emil, it’s better if you go. Be there for your boys. Nina will thank you for it. You’ll thank me for it, in the morning.’
‘Thank you? Thank you, Cathy? Do you know, you were better in his absence as well. There isn’t a thing your wife can’t do, Kaspar, and you haven’t deserved her, not for one second since you’ve been back.’
Emil disappeared down the hall, into the room he and Nina shared. The reverberations of their argument moved in the walls, just as surely as the tramping of toy soldiers, but Cathy tried to put it from her mind as they returned to their own side of the quarters.
As soon as the outer door was closed, she heard the crying. She had thought to plead with Kaspar, for there must have been something he could do, but instead she was drawn to Martha’s bedroom door. At the foot of her bed, Martha sat in a ball, her knees tucked into her chin, Sirius trying to inveigle himself inside to give her what comfort he could. Cathy rushed to her side, falling to the floor so that she could wrap her in her arms.
‘It’s all my fault,’ Martha said, between breathy gulps.
‘What is?’
‘The boys. I saw them through the door. I didn’t mean to, Mama, but …’
Kaspar was hovering in the doorway and, with one arm wrapped around Martha, Cathy gestured for him to come in. When he remained outside, her face set hard and her gesture became a demand. She hated to concede it, but Emil had been right about one thing: those years when Kaspar had been away, those endless summers and testing winters, somehow they had been easier than this.
‘Martha, my treasure, how could any of it have been down to you?’
Martha got to her feet and brought Cathy the book that had been half-hidden beneath her pillow. Cathy remembered the book well, though now it was falling apart. The stitches in its seams had long come undone. Martha dropped it into her hands and
it fell open at the colour plates in its middle.
Gulliver’s Travels. In the illustration, the giant Gulliver lay on his back among hills of rolling green, and crawling all over him were the tiny Lilliputians, men no bigger than the little finger of Gulliver’s clenched fist. In his sleep Gulliver had been lashed down with ropes. Scaffolds of wood and wire had been built across both of his shins, his midriff buried beneath the beginnings of a rudimentary fort.
‘I hear them, every night, in the wardrobe and the walls … and I thought that maybe they wanted to listen. Maybe, if I read to them, they might come out and line up and … they did, Mama. They did.’ The tears were threatening to come again, but Martha had learnt stubbornness from her father (perhaps Cathy had something to do with it too) and fought to contain them with a single, sticky snort. ‘I wasn’t sure if they understood. Not at first. But something must have got through, because the second night more came, and the third night even more. After that they just kept pouring out of the wardrobe. It was like they were telling each other, in the walls: come and listen, come and listen to the story …’
The first nights they sat in perfect stillness, the only sound the steady rattle of their motors winding down, and listened. It was weeks before they started reacting. Martha would tell them how Gulliver was enslaved by the Lilliputians and the soldiers would be on their feet, twirling around in what she could only define as sheer, unadulterated joy. When she reached the moment in the story when Gulliver, found guilty of treason, was sentenced to be blinded in both eyes, the righteousness among the soldiers turned into a riot. ‘The Imperial Kapitan had to order them to stand down. He was marching through them and putting them in place and … I think he still cares for Emil, Mama. Maybe he remembers everything that happened before he … woke up. How they were friends, back then.’
In the doorway, Kaspar still lingered. ‘I don’t believe so. Back then the Kapitan was only sandalwood and teak, a little varnish, a little paint.’
Cathy had heard quite enough. Besides, what story Martha was telling was quickly lost in the resurgent scuttling in the walls. On her feet, she stepped through the closet door, parted the hanging dresses and coats, and gazed at the mural carved into the wood. A new etching had appeared among the rest, one with all the florid detail of the best Renaissance painters. Surrounded by soldiers bearing guns, two little boys were lashed to their beds. The giant that was Emil stood horrified behind them. There was something in the way his face had been rendered that gave the impression of despair, of terror, of submission. The way they depicted it, the soldiers had cowed the monster.
Cathy lifted her hand to her mouth.
Back outside the closet, Kaspar had come into the room to sit beside Martha. ‘What if they could learn more, Papa. They might …’
‘They planned it,’ Cathy cut in. ‘They’ll have other plans as well. Surely you could talk to them? They know you, Kaspar. They trust you. They think … they think you’re gods. You the light and Emil the dark, and all because of that stupid Long War of yours.’ What she was saying ought to have seemed a fantasy, but she had been too long in Papa Jack’s Emporium to believe anything else. It meant the soldiers had minds, it meant those minds were growing – but she knew that already, from the way their etchings grew more sophisticated, the way they grew more organised and bold. Her eyes dropped to the copy of Gulliver’s Travels, and she thought of how Papa Jack had described Sirius: his mind a collection of tricks, things performed by rote, until suddenly came ideas and knowledge, intellect and invention. Personality. What else had the soldiers drawn from the story? Stories were like entire lives lived in a few dozen pages. How more swiftly might a mind grow if it could read, if it devoured one story after another?
‘I couldn’t speak with them,’ Kaspar replied, ‘not even if I wanted to. I could only speak at them, and that would never do. I won’t tell them how to live. That would make me as bad as Emil. Worse, because I’d be doing it against my conscience. Something of which my brother is in dire need.’
‘And if they come again?’ Cathy pictured Martha lashed to the bed, but then thought: no, they would never come, not for us, not their saviours … ‘Whatever you think of him now, he is still your brother. And if you won’t tell them what to do, then … we could explain. Come to a parley.’
Kaspar dragged himself back to the door. ‘It’s for them to decide,’ he said, as if betrayed. ‘They’re to choose their own lives.’
After he was gone, Martha went to her mother. ‘I’m sorry, Mama.’
‘Don’t be. Your papa will come round.’ He has to, Cathy thought, or else everything is lost. ‘Martha,’ she ventured, ‘what your papa said is true. He could talk at them, but not with them. But … when you read to them, when they understand, have they ever …’
‘Tried to talk back? Mama, they whirl their arms and march on the spot and throw the wildest salutes. It has to mean something.’
Cathy bent down and kissed her on the brow. ‘If you hear a whisper from the wardrobe, you fetch me that instant. Do you understand? And, for heaven’s sake, leave something out for them. A page from the book, a little coloured stone, one of your dolls. Anything so that, if they come out of the walls while you sleep, they know we’re friends, that we’re not angry for what happened tonight …’
The idea thrilled Martha. It was the way medieval villagers might leave out a butchered calf (or some humdrum village girl) to curry favour with the dragon from the mountaintop, or the demons who rose up every All Hallows’ Eve. She chose one of her ballerinas, thinking that those poor soldiers deserved at least one girl in their lives, and climbed back into bed. Her tears were dry at last. She picked up her Gulliver’s Travels and then, thinking better of it, turned to Jules Verne. These toy soldiers were certainly a thing of which Mr Verne would have approved.
She was halfway into her chapter when a thought occurred, a memory resurfacing as memories sometimes will. Martha had been up in the boughs of one of the paper trees (a place she was forbidden to go) on the day Emil proposed marriage to Nina. Martha had known, even then, that she did not entirely approve of the idea of Nina living among them, not while her father was so far away. But the way Emil had made his proposal had stirred even her to a fit of admiration. The way those toy soldiers (then just simple, wind-up things, without even a mind between them) had been set to march so that they would spell out the words had been an ingenious thing.
The way ideas formed in the mind of a toy soldier was not so different from how they formed in the mind of a girl. One idea gave rise to another, that idea gave rise to an idea greater still. Shapes came together to create bigger, more convincing shapes …
To speak with the soldiers? To teach them how to spell and march out words – not like Emil had done, through timing and expert design, but by thought, by their own volition? Yes, she thought, that would be an accomplishment of which even that stinker Mr Atlee might have been proud. She returned to her Jules Verne with newfound aplomb and (thinking nothing of her mama’s instructions) began to recite out loud.
That night, down on his knees, Emil piped putty into every hole or crack in the skirting. He tossed handfuls of nails into the cavities beyond, smiled as he pictured clots of soldiers entombed in the dark, nothing to do for eternity but endlessly wind each other up. What minds they had were simple, primitive things. It would take so little to drive a mind like that mad …
Nina lay in their bed with her arms around the boys. It had taken some time for them to sleep. Now they rested fitfully, feet kicking out with every dark turn of their dreams. ‘If it isn’t safe to be here,’ she said, ‘we cannot be here.’
Emil continued his work.
‘If our boys can’t sleep soundly in their own home, well, what kind of home is this? What kind of a father are you?’
Emil tensed, contained himself, then returned to his work.
‘Are you listening to me, Emil?’
Emil stood.
‘I’m going to make it safe.’<
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At that moment, there came a burst of scuttling in the walls. In their sleep, the boys grasped their mother more tightly still.
‘I’ll be back,’ Emil said.
In the boys’ bedroom, he heaved the beds away from the walls. Here was where the soldiers had streamed out. Evidently, they had returned while he was gone, for the wreckage of their siege engines had been dragged back into the skirting. On his knees, Emil began his own fortifications. More nails, more putty, more wooden boards. If only half the Emporium had not been wood, he would happily have put them to the torch.
Emil planned to sit up that night, and for all the nights to come, watching over his boys. He would sit with his fishing net and a bucket of rotating blades and, if ever a toy soldier appeared, he would scoop it up and scythe it back into splinters. But after that night, the boys never did return to their own room. Their mother would not allow it. And because there was no room in the marital bed for Emil to join them, that night (and for all the nights to come) Emil sat up alone, or slept where he fell. In his son’s bed he listened to the scuttling in the walls, smiled at the panic he sensed when the soldiers ran into one of his traps of shattered glass, and tried not to think of the Imperial Kapitan, his sparkling creation, standing unyieldingly on his son’s breast with his wooden rifle raised.
If nobody else would help him, he would have to do it himself.
That winter had been punishing, but they had made it through. What a sorry feeling it was, to be actively waiting for the first snowdrops to flower, to long for the big, empty days when the Emporium was closed so that, at least, it was done for another year. This Christmas the customers had still come, but how many came back when they were told to find their toy soldiers elsewhere? How many told their friends? How many remarked upon the ramshackle aisles, the places where the skirting boards had been levered up to reveal great holes in the walls, the constant sounds of chittering in unseen corners? And what of the boy who had come to the shop with his own toy soldiers in his pocket, only to discover them gone when the time came to leave? Where were they now, Emil wondered, if not patrolling the walls with the rest?
The Toymakers Page 29