The Toymakers

‘Good, because there’s really no need to be. Your birds are something quite special. The way they explode and flutter up – you’d think they were almost real. And remember last year? What was it? Your picnic hampers. Yes, you’d really believe you were in a park on a lazy summer’s day … Did we ever go through the ledgers for them, little brother? Did we see how they sold? Only, I don’t see the hampers on the shelves this year – and there are still so many boxes of birds in the storerooms, I wonder if we ought to be letting them go, out into the wild? You never know, it might draw some customers in, to see your pipe-cleaner birds in Hyde Park. A spectacle like that – just think of what it did for my trees!’

Cathy had thought Emil had the same ursine look as his father and it intensified now. Every muscle of his face tightened, as if preparing to snarl. Then, quashing whatever had been bubbling up inside him, he stood up. ‘You’d do well to pay attention to the ledgers, Kaspar. It might be your trees, Papa’s patchwork dogs, they write about in the Chronicle, but what is it that boys come back for time and time again? My soldiers. My infantry and cavalry and …’ Cathy could see he was fingering a wooden soldier even now, just beneath the line of the table. This one was so much more striking than any she had seen: noble and distinguished, Imperial somehow. ‘Take all the attention you like, you scoundrel, because if it wasn’t for all those weeks and months I spent with my soldiers, why, there’d hardly be a roof above our head.’

‘You overestimate things, little brother. Your soldiers, they’re commendable little things, but it’s hardly an act of toymaking, is it? No, it’s rather a form of … carpentry, wouldn’t you say?’

He said toymaking like another man might enchantment; he said carpentry like another man might describe his morning ablutions. Cathy saw the way it made Emil shudder. The younger Godman brother brought his fist up from beneath the table and planted this new soldier on the surface, to stand proudly among the dumplings and dishes.

‘We’ll begin again, Kaspar. Victor takes all, Act of God or no.’

Kaspar was still reclining as he weighed up the challenge. ‘That’s the spirit, little brother!’ He stood. ‘Miss Wray. You’ll have to excuse me. My brother has asked for a flogging.’ He was gesturing for Emil to lead the way (Kaspar Godman was nothing if not a gentleman) when he had a sudden thought. ‘Or perhaps you might like to watch?’

Moments later, she was looking over a battlefield in a bedroom above. She took it for Kaspar’s, because a single paper tree stood in the corner, and she doubted this was something to which Emil wanted to wake each morning. The bed had been pushed against the outer wall, candles had been lit, and hillsides and forests, sculpted perfectly in sponge and clay, were being arranged according to rules only Kaspar and Emil seemed to know. Next, each brother took a turn to line up his soldiers. Kaspar’s, Cathy saw, did not have the polish that belonged to Emil’s; some of them were replicas, made by shop hands and sold across the shopfloor, but even those that Kaspar had evidently crafted himself did not live up to Emil’s designs. Their faces betrayed little emotion; their eyes did not glimmer with the story of a life hard-lived, a war being desperately fought. They were mere playthings next to the Imperial Kapitan that Emil so proudly placed at the head of his phalanx.

Between each deployment, the silence stretched out. Once, Cathy tried to venture a word – but Kaspar gave her a grin and begged her to remain quiet, so her eyes wandered instead. She was standing beside a tall glass cabinet and in it stood toy soldiers very different from the ones Kaspar and Emil were winding up. These only looked like soldiers at all in a certain light. They were made out of pinecone and pieces of bark, bound up with bootlaces and string and dead grass.

She was still staring at them while Kaspar and Emil’s game got underway. Through the glass, those little faces, etched and burnt into the bark, gave the impression that they too were watching the battle. She could see the conflict being reflected in miniature. Kaspar’s expeditionary force had already been routed. Emil had wind-up cavalry poised to shatter his flanks. She turned, just in time to see them rolling down one of the hills. The joy on Emil’s face reached a zenith – but then exploded, for he had not seen Kaspar’s reserves marching in from beneath the first bed. With his cavalry divided, Emil’s soldiers were easily scattered. Those who survived the onslaught walked on, only to be upended when they reached the skirting board that ran around the edges of the room, a pile of pillows in place of a mountain. Finally, only the Imperial Kapitan – weighted more heavily than the rest – remained.

‘Do you concede?’

With his bottom lip bulging, Emil strode out of the room.

For a moment Kaspar held himself as if victorious. Then the cost of the victory appeared to him – and, heaving a sigh, he loped to the door. ‘Emil!’ For a moment, he disappeared into the hall and Cathy listened out for the clattering of footsteps. ‘Emil, I didn’t mean to …’ But the words petered out, and then Kaspar was back in the room. His face was missing its customary smile.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘That’s just … Emil.’

‘Oh, I wouldn’t be so sure. I think you may have had a little to do with it.’

Kaspar had got to his knees to sweep the battlefield clear, lining up Emil’s fallen soldiers with his own. Most had wound down; only one or two still kicked feebly in their death throes. ‘I’ll admit it. I’ve been being sore with him. But he takes his soldiers so seriously! You most likely think me frightful. And yet … he’s my little brother. He pains me, but it doesn’t mean I don’t …’

‘It was a rotten trick, Kaspar. The way you baited him back at the table. It wasn’t … honourable.’

‘No?’

‘It isn’t how a family treats itself.’

Kaspar appeared to find this sentiment intriguing. ‘Well, what about your family, Miss Wray? How did they treat you, that you should run away to live in our Emporium?’

‘I never said I ran away.’

‘Oh, Cathy, you say it every time you close your mouth. You say it every time you try so hard not to say it.’ He stopped. ‘You’ll tell me soon enough. I don’t see why you try so hard to keep a secret you’re so desperate to tell.’

But Cathy was practised at silences, and when this one went on too long, Kaspar had to find another way to fill it. ‘You think we’re fools, don’t you? To care so much about a game of soldiers?’

‘No,’ said Cathy, and something drew her eyes back to the pinecone figurines trapped behind the cabinet glass.

‘No?’

‘Because I think there’s something more to it than a game.’ She paused, as if willing Kaspar to enter the silence. ‘I’m right, aren’t I? With you and Emil, it isn’t just a game. It’s … life, of a sort.’

Kaspar breathed out, as if trying to form a word, but no word came. It was, Cathy decided, the first unrehearsed reaction she had seen in him since the moment they’d met.

‘You oughtn’t to grind your brother into the dirt like that.’

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