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.
‘Off them!’ Cathy cried out, and was about to throw herself into the room when somebody pounded up the hall behind her, barrelling Kaspar and Papa Jack out of the way, and thrust her bodily aside.
Emil came into the room in a thunder of footsteps and launched himself at the first bed.
The soldiers turned as one. The mountaineers on the window ledge tumbled in surprise, grappling out for their ropes as they plummeted to the flatlands of the floorboards underneath. A trio emerged from the foot of the bed, lifted their faces at the giant tearing at his son’s ribbon shackles, and scrambled back. Some valiant soldiers lifted rifles and let wooden volleys fly; others turned to escape into the skirting. The siege tower, several of the scaling ladders, were already turned to a ruin under Emil’s boots. He had lifted his first son out of the bed and, cradling him to his shoulder, caught Cathy and Kaspar frozen in the doorway, as he turned to rescue his second.
‘Don’t stand there gawping! Do something! Cathy, you of all people …’
Cathy knelt to loosen the ribbons that bound the second boy. Until now he had been silent, but at the moment of rescue he started shrieking. There was a toy soldier tangled in his hair and, when Cathy lifted him, it dropped to the bedspread.
Emil flailed out with his foot, sending the second siege tower skittering across the room. The soldier on the bedspread marched from one end to the other, finding no way down to the floorboards below. His painted features gave no hint at what he was thinking (if these things, Cathy had to remind herself, really could think), but the way he turned gave the impression of panic.
Emil’s boy was sobbing into her shoulder. She cooed for him to be quiet, told him that he was safe. Now that the worst was over she stepped forward, as if Emil might take him – but his eyes were on the bed, the soldier who marched in circles searching for a way down. It was only now that Cathy noticed its uniform of crimson red, the valiant features with which its face had been etched. The Imperial Kapitan. The soldier who had stood, for so long, on the ledge of Emil’s workshop, looking over everything that he did. Now, he was one of the things building their doll’s house world up and down the Emporium walls.
The venom was gone from Emil. Crestfallen, he stuttered backwards – and, seizing its chance, the Imperial Kapitan cast itself off the edge of the bed. Then, picking itself up (and perhaps amazed that the fall had not corrupted its workings), it joined the last soldiers flooding back into the skirting. On the threshold it turned, threw Emil a defiant salute, and vanished into the dark.
In the hallway outside Nina had arrived. Forcing herself between Kaspar and Papa Jack, she demanded the boy from Cathy’s arms. Before she took him, she drew back a hand and whipped it directly across Kaspar’s cheek. Kaspar turned, only fractionally. Not a word passed his lips.
‘Emil?’ Nina began, as if reminding him of some private discourse.
Emil’s eyes had been on the skirting, but he came to his senses now. ‘It’s gone too far, Kaspar. Too far. You’re to call them off. Summon them up or issue some proclamation, or whatever it is you do, and tell them what’s what.’
Kaspar stammered, ‘Emil, you can’t possibly think I—’
‘I do,’ Emil declared. ‘I saw it. That was my Kapitan. Why else would you take him and fit him out like all the rest, if not for spite? Well, you’ve done it now, Kaspar. They’ve crossed a line. They’re only boys. They’re your nephews, for what that’s worth. Call them off. Call them off or I’ll …’
‘We’ll burn them out,’ Nina said, as poised as Emil was fevered. ‘They come for my sons, well, we’ll come for them. So what’s it to be?’
‘Emil,’ Kaspar began, ‘are you going to let her speak to me like this? This isn’t my doing. I haven’t told them to do a thing. That’s the very point. What they do, that’s up to them. It’s you who tells them. You who …’