The Toymakers(53)

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.