The Toymakers(90)

Emil bristled.

‘But – nothing!’ Now he had a torch in his hand and was extending it into the hollow. ‘You get to know the signs of rats in this profession. London has some big ones, o’ course, but none as big as them we had in France. Nasty black fellows, big as cats. You remember things like that, don’t you? It’s silly the things you don’t forget. I forget the sounds, but I don’t forget the rats …’

‘I wasn’t in France,’ Emil uttered.

‘Flanders, was it?’

‘I wasn’t there.’

‘Ah, well,’ the ratcatcher said with a modicum of impatience, ‘you won’t know rats then …’

At last, Emil could take no more. He exploded: ‘Whoever said they were rats?’

‘You did call for a ratcatcher, sir. Now, I’m not one for riddles, but what do you call a ratcatcher for if you don’t want to catch rats?’

‘They’re toy soldiers, you fool!’

Emil marched over and, kicking the neighbouring stretch of skirting aside, revealed a trio of soldiers standing stock still in the blackness. Poor fools, but their keys had wound down – and here they waited until some of their brethren happened across them on their patrols.

The ratcatcher laid down his torch and looked up. ‘This some sort of trick, sir? Trying to catch me out, are you?’

‘I just want them gone,’ Emil breathed, but the ratcatcher was already on his feet.

‘It might not seem much to you, sir, not with your flying galleons and castles in the air, but ratcatching’s a noble profession. I’ve caught rats in palaces and sewers. Ain’t no difference between them both.’

The exterminator marched back towards the doors.

‘Please!’ Emil cried after him. ‘They’re up and down the walls. They scurry all night. I haven’t slept properly since Christmas.’ His words were having no effect. ‘I have two sons. Surely you can do something. Lay down traps. Put down poison. Don’t you have ferrets you send in for this sort of thing?’

At the door, the exterminator turned on his heel. ‘I could’ve been smothering fleas in Buckingham Palace,’ he declared – and, on that dubious note, he was gone.

Screams sundered the Emporium night.

Cathy and Kaspar were in the Godmans’ quarters, around the table with Mrs Hornung and Papa Jack, when the screaming began. The doors to the terrace were open, but there was no mistaking this for a scream coming from some Regent Street reveller, or drunkard on his way home. Cathy was on her feet in a second, pulling Martha near. The plates in front of them, piled high with vareniki and chipped potatoes (since she was a babe, Martha would not sanction a meal without chipped potatoes), sent up curls of steam.

‘That’s the boys,’ said Cathy. ‘Where’s Nina?’

‘Dinner in his lordship’s workshop,’ Mrs Hornung muttered darkly – for it had been months, years even, since Emil would sit around a dining table with his brother, and Mrs Hornung was compelled each night to deliver service to the shopfloor.

‘Go for them, Martha. I’ll be in the nursery …’

Cathy hoisted her skirts and was already off, through the door.

The nursery was on Emil’s side of the Godmans’ quarters. As a bachelor, Emil had needed so little, sleeping wherever he fell, but when Nina arrived at the Emporium the old living rooms and larder had been partitioned and new bedrooms built where old storerooms used to lie. Cathy had often wondered if the rooms they all lived in were of a kin with the Wendy House sitting shuttered up on the shopfloor; she seemed to walk down halls too narrow, into rooms that threatened to be the size of a wardrobe but opened up into grand, palatial suites.

The nursery door was closed and the screams still coming from the other side. Cathy lunged for the handle and the door toppled inwards.

The boys were in their beds, old cots shorn of their sides, but they were not alone. The window was wide open, net curtains rippling in the breeze, but no crook nor kidnapper had shimmied up the drainpipe to carry away the Godman boys.

All around, toy soldiers swarmed.

They had come out of the skirting. Cathy could see, in the corners of her eyes, places where little portals had been chipped away, doors opened into the wall beyond. Now they stood along the rails at the foot of the boys’ beds, marching where they could across the undulating battlefields of the bedspreads themselves. Little siege towers and scaling ladders, cobbled together out of salvaged wood (and, Cathy saw to her surprise, pieces of shelving harvested from the shopfloor), had been pushed into place against the beds, and up these the soldiers were scrambling. A scouting party had reached the giddy heights of the window ledge using crampons and cotton rope, while others worked with miniature axe heads (Cathy took them for skittled pennies) to carve notches in the bed legs, like foresters hard at work.

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.