Cathy crouched down. At the sudden intrusion the toy soldiers formed ranks and routed, re-forming on the other side of the workshop floor.
‘They need a leader,’ said Martha. ‘Sometimes they just whirl and twirl and collide with one another or end up shaking hands. If they had a leader, they might smarten up a little. That’s what we think.’
‘It’s like nothing else in the Emporium. They perform the same action a hundred times, and for every hundred times, one will go wrong. Perhaps it upsets them, so they simply try over again. But when it offers them an advantage …’ Kaspar’s eyes sparkled like frost. ‘All year they’ve been discovering new things.’
Kaspar opened up a box by his side, one emblazoned with the insignias of the Long War, and set down a static soldier. Moments later, the battalion marched forward to where it lay. From here on, their drill was deftly orchestrated. The soldiers worked in two groups – one to open up the cavity in the soldier’s back, and another to make sure the first group never wound down. The soldiers tasked with attending the static soldier moved with nuance that had not been possible one winter ago. They reached in and upset gears, lifted out a cog to replace it with three of smaller design, shortened the cam shaft and inserted more guide wires into the soldier’s arms. When they were done, they wound their new brother up for the very first time.
Soon, he had taken his place in the battalion – and, to Cathy’s mounting surprise, was winding up the fellows around him with newfound aplomb.
‘You built them to build each other?’
‘It’s better than that,’ beamed Martha. ‘Papa didn’t build them this way at all. They built themselves.’
Emil was diligent in releasing the new shop hands at the end of each summer night. First locking the Wendy House door behind him, he lined the workers up among the paper trees and ran his hands over each, searching for what blueprints or implements they might be stealing away, then marched them in file to the half-moon hall. If any minded the way he emptied their pockets, they did not say it; men returned from war with only half a leg, or mothers raising their children alone, needed what work they could find. And, as Emil released them into Iron Duke Mews each night, he reminded himself: they are not your friends, they are not your friends. They were his workers, that was all, and this seemed the most important lesson of his life.
Tonight he locked the door, made one last circuit of the boarded-up Wendy House, and walked back through the paper trees. There, waiting for him where the forest met the shopfloor, was Nina. Their sons squirmed in their pram, angling for a look at their father, and Emil dropped down to rub his bristly face in theirs.
‘How is it?’ Nina asked.
‘The finishes aren’t right, but there’s time for that yet. Still two months until first frost might come. We’ve boxed up enough to fill the shelves, but they need paint and lacquer. Only I can do that.’ Another night he might have seemed defeated, but on this night he was filled with hope. ‘We’ll be ready. If there’s an armistice this winter, it will be out there, in the world. Not here in my Emporium.’ Emil squeezed Nina’s hand, her fingers threaded through his. ‘Our Emporium.’
They walked together through aisles that would soon live again, past the Long War glade that would soon ring with the sounds of battle – and, as they went, they were so caught up in talking about the way things would be, the first opening night their sons would ever see, that they did not realise there were already toy soldiers walking across the shopfloor, watching their every move. They did not see the wind-up army that marched in the cavities along the bottom of the shelves, did not see them stopping to wind each other up as they came. If only they had looked behind them, they might have seen the army as it marched into the paper trees, turning circles around the Wendy House where more of their kind were being chipped out of branches and trunks.
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.’