The Toymakers(87)

Emil did not see the soldiers as they fanned back into the aisles, looking for others of their kind. He was already carrying his children up the stairs to bed by the time they discovered the aisle with his old workshop waiting at its end – so he did not see them venture in, and he did not see them venture back out, carrying one more inert soldier between them. If he had, perhaps things would have turned out differently for Papa Jack’s Emporium – for there, on the shopfloor, the toy soldiers lay down the Imperial Kapitan, so regal and strong, so perfect, the leader for which (or so Martha believed) they cried out. They gathered about him (they could not have been admiring, because their minds were only useless blocks of wood) and worked in pairs to turn him over. And there, as in Kaspar’s workshop above, they opened his insides, lost themselves in industry, and finally wound him up.

The Imperial Kapitan picked himself up. There was something different about the way he lifted his arm in the salute for which it had first been made, something different in the way that, when one of the soldiers beside him began to wind down, he stepped forward and wound him back up.

The Imperial Kapitan stood where he belonged, at the head of the army. The wind-up host marched on – and not a soul in the Emporium saw it, so not a soul in the Emporium believed.

Cathy always knocked before she entered Papa Jack’s workshop. It was a habit she meant never to shake. It had been a long time since crossing that line made her remember the frightened girl she had been when she first came here, but something of that feeling returned tonight. She did not wait for an answer, but stepped directly through.

Papa Jack was in his chair, where he always was. She had thought to find him stitching more feathers into the hide of his phoenix (the feathers so often failed to survive the bird’s conflagrations, though the mechanism lived on), but instead he was asleep, his fingers twitching in whatever dreams of wilderness and winter still plagued him.

He opened his eyes before Cathy came to his side. That was a habit from those wilderness days as well.

‘How has it been?’

The spectaculars of opening night had diminished in the year Kaspar left for France. It had seemed, to Cathy, an echo of the loss she had been feeling – for how could the Emporium ever be as filled with enchantment as when Kaspar walked its aisles? – but, in truth, it had been because of shipments not reaching London’s wharves, and merchants biding their time while prices rose and fell. In the winters since, Emil and Papa Jack had spent long nights lost in each other’s counsel, seeking a way to dazzle and delight even in these austere times. What did it matter what commodities were at hand? Papa Jack had insisted. Once, he had been a toymaker with only leaves and lengths of twig – and weren’t those toys every bit as fantastic as the things that brought people to the Emporium twenty years later? Tonight had been testament to this, the most muted Opening Night in the Emporium’s history – but the joy in the aisles had been of a different pitch than ever before. First frost had come on the night of the tenth of November, and rumour had it there was an armistice in France, that, this time, all of their boys truly would be home by Christmas night.

‘It was a special kind of chaos, just as it always is. But …’

She did not tell him how the Long War was already off sale, how Emil had filled the shopfloor with his recast soldiers, only to discover hours later that the glade had been pillaged, every box opened and emptied, the toy soldiers he had slaved over all summer gone. She left out the moment Emil tore into Kaspar’s workshop and demanded to know what he had done (even though Mrs Hornung insisted he had not left the workshop all morning and, indeed, had been asleep for almost all of opening night). Perhaps Papa Jack needed no protection, not even in his old age, but those things did not seem right, somehow, to mention.

‘Papa Jack, listen. There’s something I have to ask. It is going to sound foolish. I hope you don’t take me for a fool.’

‘Sit, Cathy. We’ve talked about so much, you and I.’

Cathy sat at his side.

‘Now that I come to it, it seems a question Martha ought to be asking, not a grown woman like me. But, Papa Jack, is it possible … I mean to say, might it be possible … that a toy might …’ Now she knew it truly was foolish; she had never been as foolish as this, not even as a child. ‘… come to life? Oh, we read about it in books. There are always puppets growing into real live boys.. And of course they come alive in the imagination and that, that’s where a toy truly lives. But I don’t mean that. I mean life. I look at Sirius and I wonder …’

Papa Jack had taken Cathy by the hand. She flushed to look at him, so foolish did she feel. ‘I’ve wondered too, my girl. Of all the patchwork dogs and cats and wolves and bears we’ve sent out into the world, what sets Sirius apart? He was made the same way, made with these same hands.’ And he lifted them up, like a magician might do to show: no tricks. ‘Sometimes you see understanding in those black button eyes, and no cogs and gears could ever account for that.’

‘So what, then? What might it be?’

‘My boys, and now you, have kept Sirius wound since the moment I made him. Wind down has never come to that poor patchwork dog. He just keeps going and going. They show him new tricks, and soon his gears strain to mimic them. They take him new places, and his paws record the way. They poured their teaching into him without even knowing that was what they were doing. And with every new trick he learned, every new habit, well, knowledge grows. The braille cards in his motors that tell him when to walk or when to run, when to sit up or when to wag his tail, they get imprinted with more and more knowledge. And then … why, then, mightn’t that knowledge rub up against itself? Mightn’t one piece of knowledge touch or complement or clash with another? Suddenly it isn’t just a list of tricks. It’s a way of comparing one trick to all the rest. And maybe, just maybe, things begin to mesh. Maybe that meshing is a kind of … intellect. These things are more mysterious than a mere toymaker could hope to account for. But sometimes, when I look into those black button eyes …’ Papa Jack paused. ‘It would feel like murder to let him wind down, would it not?’