The Toymakers(93)

‘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.’

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.