Toymaker, The Read online

  For Lizzie, Jack, Alice and Bea,

  who all came to sea in the sieve.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Prologue

  PART ONE THE CONJUROR’S BOY

  One The Man with the White Face

  Two The Man with the Silver-topped Cane

  Three Boy and Belongings

  Four The Road Through the Wood

  Five Marguerite

  Six The Pile of Barrels

  Seven Through the Dark

  Eight The Stranger on the Horse

  Nine The Burners

  Ten The Piece of Paper

  Eleven The Torn Edge

  Twelve The Tracks in the Snow

  Thirteen The Fight at the Inn

  Fourteen What Katta Had to Do

  Fifteen The Road to Felissehaven

  PART TWO FELISSEHAVEN

  Sixteen Meiserlann

  Seventeen Lost and Found

  Eighteen Things Told

  Nineteen Anna-Maria and Lutsmann Pay a Visit

  Twenty Estella

  Twenty-one The Writing on the Wall

  Twenty-two The Small Lead Box

  Twenty-three Across the Ice

  Twenty-four Death in the Chapel

  Twenty-five The Drum-shaped Room

  Twenty-six The Duchess

  Twenty-seven Last Steps

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Copyright

  Prologue

  Do you know Frausisstrasse?

  You must.

  The street named after that fine Duke who, seeing his army beaten before him, rode his great high-stepping white horse down onto the battlefield, and taking off his hat in one majestic sweep, dismounted before the enemy prince, drew his sword as though to surrender it, and drove it instead straight through the man’s heart, so the lost battle was won and the city saved.

  They named the street after him. You must know it.

  But you must have heard of Menschenmacher, or seen a toy that came from his shop.

  You have not?

  Then I must tell you that they were the most remarkable toys that any man ever made. He made them, you know. He didn’t buy them and sell them on like some cheap shopkeeper. No. He made them. Small moving men and women, and carts and horses, and birds and dogs and cats and fish – all manner of quite astonishing things. They each had their own key – no one Menschenmacher key fitted them all, other than the one that Menschenmacher himself kept on a chain about his waistcoat. No. You had to have the exact key for the exact toy if you were to make it work. And work they did. The keys were remarkable enough in themselves, fine silver and bronze – and small. So small. You had to pinch them tight between your nails to hold them. Each toy had a hidden place for its key. Fit it in and turn and turn, and then stand back and wonder.

  For a moment nothing would happen and then – I swear it is true – the eyes in its head would turn and look at you as if to say, Well, what shall it be today? Then the toy would move and you would never know what it would do next. It never did the same thing twice. If it was a horse, it might rear up and gallop, and you would have to catch it quickly before it jumped off the tabletop; a woman in her fine court dress might curtsey and dance in slow graceful turns, or a soldier or guard might lower his pike and stab at your hand if you didn’t snatch it away in time. And their eyes did move, I tell you. I have tried it. I wound one once – it was not mine but I had the chance – and letting it go, I stood away and watched those small bright eyes turn until they found me, which was unnerving. If I were not as sensible as I am, I might say that they, or something in them, was alive. But of course they were not. They were toys. When their spring had wound down, they would stop quite still and not move again from now until Christmas unless you put the key in again and wound it up.

  They were very expensive. All sorts of wealth and nobility bought them. You sometimes saw the grand carriages stop in Frausisstrasse and the coachman descend and open the door. Then down they would step in their rich clothes, and pass through the wooden arch that led to the small dead-end where Menschenmacher had his shop. And then they would come back carrying a small box looped with a red ribbon and you would know what was in it.

  Menschenmacher would not let anyone watch him make a toy, though his workbench was there to see if you went into his shop. Each day at four o’clock he would close the shutters and pull down the blinds, and that is all that the world would see of him until the next morning when he opened them again. There were tools on the bench, a small lathe for cutting the minute cogs and wheels that filled his toys – so minute that above them there was a large glass to magnify the work so that he could see it all. And screwdrivers no bigger than pins and soldering irons no larger than a needle. That is what he used, but you would not see him do it. When the shop was shut – that was when Menschenmacher worked.

  People were afraid of him. That’s strange, isn’t it – to be afraid of a toymaker? But they were. It was that same feeling of fear that steals up on you in the night when you are alone. It doesn’t need any words. It was wrapped around Menschenmacher like a cloak, as though when he looked at the people who came into his shop, he already knew just what each one of them feared most in the world. Knew it, and could make it happen if he chose.

  No.

  They were glad to be out through the door again and into the busy street, the wonderful toy with its red ribboned box in their hand. They would never have gone in had it not been for that.

  Now let me tell you something that no one else knew. That bench by the workshop window – he had it there to catch the daylight – that wasn’t his only workbench.

  He had another.

  If you went into his shop, the counter was to the right, so, the bench to the left by the window, and the small winding stair over in the corner. At the bottom of the stair was a cupboard. Well, I say a cupboard, but it was not much more than a thick green velvet curtain on a pole that he pulled across to cover up the boxes and wrapping and small things that he needed. You could see them because the curtain was always a little bit open.

  And that was the trick.

  You thought that it was just a curtain and a cupboard because you could see that that was all there was. But it wasn’t. When the shutters were closed and the blinds pulled down, Menschenmacher would draw the curtain back, move the empty boxes away and, finding the key, that small key upon his waistcoat that would fit all the toys, slip it into a crack in the wall – no, not a crack, though it might look like one. A lock. He turned the key and pushed, and the wall opened. He always looked to see that there was no one behind him, then he drew the curtain shut and, going through the wall, closed and locked it.

  And that is where his other workplace was.

  What good is a toy that you wind up? It will wind down and stop. Clever though the toys were that he sold from his shop, they were lumps of metal and clay compared to the things he made down there. What good is a toy that will wind down? What if you could put a heart in one? A real heart. One that beats and beats and doesn’t stop. What couldn’t you do if you could make a toy like that?

  Menschenmacher would sit at his bench and look at his tools with his pale green eyes and think on it.

  At first he had no success. He would set small wicker traps in the little dark yard behind the shop. He sprinkled the ground with crumbs and laid the trap above them – a basket propped up with a stick. Then he would watch until a sparrow or a starling came down and, careless of the trap, pecked up the crumbs, and he would pull on a string, the stick would fall, and down the basket would come. He had tiny cages for them – they were no use to him dead. The cages lined the wall of the workshop. The birds sat and looked
out into the room. A hundred black beady eyes. And he would work at his bench until he was ready, with the half-made toy open before him. Then he would take a sparrow from a cage and, with a quick knife, take out its heart, still beating, and try to fit it into the toy, carefully joining the tiny cogs and wheels so that the fluttering heart might make them move. But he could not make it work.

  There was something that could not be made to work. The toy would lie there as lifeless as the sparrow, and in a fury he would throw them both into the fire and watch them burn.

  Sometimes, even though he worked so fast, the heart would stop beating before he even placed it in the toy. But at other times it would beat on, just for a moment, and the limbs of the toy would jerk and the eyelids flicker as though about to open, but then the heart would stop and there was no starting it again.

  The more he tried, the nearer he came to the answer, until one day he knew what it was. It was the knife. In cutting out the heart of the sparrow he was cutting out its life too. What he needed was a blade so fine, so sharp, so minute, that it could fit between a heart and its life and not sever the two.

  That is what he set himself to make, when the town clocks struck four and the shutters were drawn. In the light of the fire and his brightest lamp, all reflected in the hundred black beady eyes of the birds in the cages on the wall, he tried to make a blade so fine that it could not be seen, so hard that a tempered sword would not break it, so sharp that it could fit between a heart and its life and not sever the two.

  When he made it, he set it into an ivory handle. It was a blade as cruel as frost, so thin that though you might see the ivory handle, try as you might you could not see the blade.

  Nothing had ever been made before that was as sharp as that.

  When Menschenmacher slid the blade into a sparrow’s breast, it looked at him with momentarily puzzled eyes. It never knew that its heart had been taken. Menschenmacher set the tiny thing, still beating, into the open toy upon his bench and joined the wheels and cogs, the minute gears and pins. Then he stood back and waited as the heart beat on.

  The toy moved its limbs as might a man waking.

  And opened its eyes.

  PART ONE

  The Conjuror’s Boy

  1

  The Man with the White Face

  As circuses go, it was not very large. It hardly warranted the name at all. ‘Travelling show’ was more like it. There were only two carts. The wood of their sides was rotten – no amount of bright paint could hide that – and there were only four horses to pull them both, two to each cart. They were old horses, bone thin. How they managed to pull those heavy carts through the winter mud I don’t know, but horses do that. They keep on going while there is breath in their body. They have big hearts, horses. Did you know you can ride a horse to death? You really can. It won’t complain. It will keep going and keep going until it drops dead of exhaustion beneath you. Then you have to walk. So if you have any sense, you don’t do that. You rest the horse when it needs it, and you have to decide when that is because the horse can’t tell you. It will just carry on and on until it drops dead. Imagine that.

  There had once been two more horses than there were now. They would walk behind the second cart on a long rope and be changed over when the others needed a rest. But these were wild times and there were no safe roads. The thick woods hid things – wolves as well as men. It was the wolves that got them. Just before dark they came out of the woods without a sound – silent and hungry and big. They had the two following horses down before anyone could do a thing: the horses were screaming and plunging at their ropes but the wolves just sank their teeth in and wouldn’t let go even though the halters were still tied and the cart was dragging the wolves and the kicking horses along the ground. So the circus men cut the ropes and the two carts went on as fast as they could, leaving those two horses to the wolves. There was a small lamp in each cart and by its light the people could just see the fear on each other’s faces as the wolves killed the screaming horses, and then everything was quiet except for their own scared breathing and the creaking of the carts as they continued on their way.

  The first cart carried everything that was needed: the food, the faded costumes, the props. With that cart went the owner, Lutsmann, and his painted wife, Anna-Maria. He said that this arrangement allowed him to check that everything was always to hand when it was needed, but everyone knew that it was because Lutsmann thought they would steal things if he put them in the second cart. That’s the kind of man he was. He thought that people would steal from him because he never missed a chance to steal from them. He stole from them in the thin food he gave them; he stole from them in the wages he never paid and in the promises he never kept. But they had nowhere else to go. They were people who had once wanted nothing more from life than to juggle and dance, breathe great gouts of fire, turn somersaults and lift enormous weights, but they had never been quite good enough at their art to find a place in a proper show. When they were taken on by Lutsmann, they thought that it was at least something – a start. Only then did they realize that this was all they would ever have, and that all their dreams and their hopes had gone. They had nothing left but Lutsmann’s Travelling Circus. It is a terrible thing to have no dreams, no hopes. So, in many ways, as well as owning the carts, Lutsmann owned them too.

  His wife, Anna-Maria, was a vicious woman. She considered herself a great beauty. Maybe she had been once. She painted her face thick with make-up. Rouged her cheeks, blacked her eyelashes, reddened her lips – dark as blood. She carried herself with a haughty highness and had a riding crop with which she laid about her when her temper was raised. Lutsmann called her crooningly ‘my dove’, ‘my apple’. She called him simply ‘Lutsmann’, and he jumped when she spoke.

  But what of the performers? You might expect that if they weren’t looked after by Lutsmann, then at least they looked after each other. But you’d be wrong. They were petty and vindictive. Maybe that is really why they found themselves where they were. They were that sort of person: Lutsmann’s show was just the lowest sink into which they had all fallen. Perhaps they would have been the same anywhere. Or maybe they could have been better if the world had been better to them. That is a very hard question. It’s not one that I know the answer to. There was a strongman, a fire-eater, a tightrope-walker, a juggler and dancer, a lady who could bend her body in quite impossible ways, a conjuror and a boy. And the boy was the only good thing there, in the back of the cart creaking along the road, while the wolves killed the screaming horses.

  Let me tell you about that boy, then you can make up your own mind about him. His name was Mathias.

  Lutsmann’s Travelling Circus was the only world he could remember. It was not the only one he’d ever known, but it was the only one he could remember. Eleven or twelve years before, there had been another world in which first his mother and then his father had died. And in that world too there had been an uncle – his father’s brother – and an aunt – the uncle’s wife – who both died as well. And then, though this was a part he’d never really understood, there had been his grandfather. He was the reason why Mathias came to be in the creaking cart. His name was Gustav. He was the conjuror. There is something about him which I’ll tell you in a moment. When Mathias was younger, Gustav had kept him close by on a rope tied to his wrist. If he thought that Mathias had been bad, he would hurt him. Sometimes he hurt him very much. But Mathias couldn’t run away from him because of the rope. Those days were very confused in Mathias’s mind. He couldn’t remember them easily – not that he really wanted to. He had to make do with things as they were, because he had no other choice.

  Now, there were two important things that he knew: the first was that Gustav was his grandfather; the second, well, that was something that he almost knew. It was a great secret that Gustav was going to tell him one day. Once, when Gustav had been drunk – often he was very drunk – he had told Mathias that he knew a secret. A secret that would make Gustav rich
beyond all dreams. A secret so big that there were men who would kill him rather than have it told. When Gustav was sober again, Mathias asked him what the secret was and Gustav’s eyes had narrowed because he knew he’d said too much to the boy. ‘You must never tell,’ he told Mathias. ‘If you are a good boy and do all that I say, one day I will tell you what it is, the secret that only I know.’ And he had put his finger to Mathias’s lips and then to his own. ‘One day, if you are always a good boy.’

  The secret was why – and this is the strange thing that I was going to tell you – Gustav had painted his face quite white. He never took the paint off. Ever. What better disguise than a face as white as a corpse? What better place to hide than a travelling circus, what better companion than his grandson? How could such a person know anything?

  When Gustav joined Lutsmann’s circus, he had actually been a very good conjuror. If people do not understand how a thing is done, they are prepared to believe that it might, just might, be magic. If I were to open my hand and, where a moment before there had been nothing there was now a bird, you might not understand how I had done it but you would guess that somehow I had put it there. But if I were to ask you to turn your hand over, peel back your fingers and in your palm was a bird – now how could that have got there? That is what Gustav could do. That and many more things too. He could make a tight scarf appear around a man’s throat if he had called out from the crowd and made him angry. ‘Take care,’ he would say, ‘or next time I will make it a rope.’

  It was not magic, but how could it have been done?

  He was a finer conjuror than Lutsmann could ever have expected to find, and Lutsmann snapped him up having seen only part of what Gustav could do. He took him, child and all, and no questions were ever asked. But Lutsmann knew a man with a past when he saw one. What did it matter to him? He had a conjuror and Gustav had somewhere to hide – what more did either want?