Toymaker, The (4 page)

‘He has need of an assistant and has offered to take you on’ – here Lutsmann put his hand on his heart and shook his head mournfully – ‘now that Gustav is no more.’

‘Oh, Gustav!’ sobbed Anna-Maria.

She lifted her hanky to her face, but Mathias saw that from behind the lace her eyes were watching Dr Leiter as carefully as a stalking cat.

‘The choice is yours, Mathias,’ said Lutsmann. ‘This circus is your family and your home.’ He turned to the other man. ‘We love him as if he were our own dear son,’ he explained. ‘But, Mathias, you must think on your future.’

He’s going to sell me, thought Mathias.

He looked again at the fat purse full of money. Anna-Maria’s hand rested lightly on his shoulder, and though that touch could have been mistaken for something more kindly, Mathias knew exactly what it meant – it meant,
Shut up and don’t say a word
.

He stood there, looking from Lutsmann’s greedy face to the hard eyes of Dr Leiter. His nose still hurt from where the doctor had hit him.

‘See!’ said Lutsmann grandly. ‘The boy is speechless, no doubt with gratitude.’

‘Quite,’ said Leiter coldly. He looked at Mathias, then at Lutsmann. ‘The price includes all his things and those of the grandfather too.’

Lutsmann pulled a new face, thoughtful. ‘I wonder if we should not reconsider that,’ he said.
‘They are after all valuable props and—’

Almost carelessly, while Lutsmann had been speaking, Leiter had picked up his cane. Now he twisted the silver top. It parted from the rest of the stick, just an inch, but enough to show Lutsmann the hard, bright steel of the long blade that was hidden inside. Lutsmann swallowed.

‘The price we agreed was for everything, circus man,’ said Dr Leiter. ‘Boy. Baggage. Belongings. What was the grandfather’s is now the boy’s.’

‘Of c-course,’ said Lutsmann, stammering over the words. ‘But I was just thinking—’

‘Don’t,’ said Leiter. ‘Thinking can have such unfortunate consequences.’

He stood up. ‘The boy can show me everything. He will know what can be taken and what cannot.’

With that, he stepped across to the door and, pushing Mathias in front of him, opened it and went down the steps into the cold darkness.

Anna-Maria closed the door but left enough of a crack to spy through. She pressed her eye up against it.

‘What a price!’ crowed Lutsmann, clapping the leather purse between his hands. ‘What a fool he
was. Did you see how I nearly even got a bit more too.’

‘Ssshhh!’ hissed Anna-Maria. ‘I want to see what they do.’

‘Let the fool go. He has left his money.’

‘You’re the fool! Idiot!’ she hissed. ‘He wasn’t paying for the boy. He was paying for something else. He searched Gustav’s coat. Stripped the lining bare. Now he wants his things. Whatever it is has got to be in there.’

‘Then why did you let me sell them, my plum?’ said Lutsmann stupidly.

‘It was you who sold them, you fool.’ Without taking her eye from the crack in the door, Anna-Maria aimed a kick at Lutsmann. ‘I couldn’t stop you. I said sell the boy, not the old goat’s things. Now shut up and let me watch.’

She could see the door of the stage cart and, by the spill of light from inside it, the shapes of Mathias and the doctor climbing the ladder at the back.

Mathias was too frightened to think as he stepped down into the dark. It was so cold. He put his hands in his pockets, and at once his fingers touched and closed around the little roll of paper. He looked
towards the stables, where Gustav was lying in the straw. Leiter saw him do it. He bent down and whispered in Mathias’s ear.

‘Don’t try to run away, boy. I won’t hurt you.’

But Leiter had already hurt him once. Besides, Mathias had seen what was inside the silver-topped cane.

When they climbed the steps, the stage cart seemed empty, though the small night lamp had been lit. Mathias knew that the others would be drinking and eating in a tavern, parting some fool from his money. Leiter stepped into the cart and turned up the wick of the lamp so that it burned brighter. He seemed suddenly much bigger than he had been in the dark. With his cane he lifted up the hanging canvas that served as the wings of the stage and peered behind it to see if there was anyone there. Mathias prayed there would be, but there wasn’t.

The wooden floor was stacked with boxes and chests containing the things they had used in the show. The false weights for the strongman to lift, the hoops and rings that Estella spun and stepped through. By now they should all have been back in Lutsmann’s cart, but Lutsmann had had other business,
and the boxes and chests lay where they had been left. Leiter took the lamp down.

‘Which were his?’ he said.

Mathias pointed to two canvas bags. ‘That one and that one,’ he said.

Leiter wanted to know if that was all. Mathias nodded.

‘Where did he sleep? Where are his other things?’

‘Over there.’ Mathias pointed to the place where Gustav unrolled his straw mattress to sleep. That’s how they all slept – on straw mattresses that during the day were slung in nets in the roof of the cart above their heads.

Leiter held the lamp up, the better to see. ‘Get his down,’ he said. ‘Get yours too.’

‘I don’t have one,’ said Mathias.

‘Then get his.’

While Mathias stretched up to unhook it, Leiter held the lamp to the wooden walls nearest where Gustav had slept. He was looking intently in every crack and crevice of the wood. The mattress tumbled from the net. Leiter hung the lamp back on its peg, then twisted the top from his cane and drew out the long steel blade. With one stroke he sliced through the canvas cover and shook the straw out
onto the floorboards. Then he spread it about with his foot as though looking for something that might have been hidden. But there was nothing.

‘Get the bags,’ he said.

Mathias picked up the bags.

‘And there is nothing else?’

Mathias shook his head.

‘No secret place?’

He shook his head again.

‘Where did he keep his money?’

‘He had no money.’

Gustav never had any, or if he had, Mathias had never seen it.

Leiter slid the blade back into his cane. He turned the lamp down again, then opened the door.

‘Where are we going?’ Mathias asked.

‘On a short journey,’ said Leiter.

The bags were awkward to carry. By the time Mathias was at the foot of the steps Leiter was already a dimly seen shape in the darkness.

‘What about my grandfather?’ he called.

The shape stopped.

‘If you do not come now, boy,’ said Leiter, ‘something very bad will happen to you.’

There was a movement in the darkness behind
Mathias. He saw it from the corner of his eye. He turned round, but he could see nothing. There was something there though. He could hear it. It was dragging sharp fingernails along the side of the wooden cart. He felt suddenly alone and very frightened. He looked quickly across to the lights of the tavern. They were too far to run to.

‘Very bad,’ breathed a whisper close beside his ear.

He whirled round but there was still no one there. Something picked at his coat sleeve. He tried to brush it away. He could feel a whimper rising in his throat.

‘Come along, boy,’ called Leiter from the dark.

Mathias had no choice. He picked up the bags and, not daring to look behind him, started to run as fast as he could after the disappearing shape of Dr Leiter.

Lamps burned at the corners of the narrow streets. It was late now and quite dark. There were no other people to see them. Leiter walked so fast that his long black coat-tails trailed out behind him. Mathias tried to keep up, but it was hard. The bags were heavy and kept catching him in the same place behind his knee so that it blistered and scraped. If he stopped for breath, he thought he could hear other steps in the dark behind him stop and wait. When he started, they started again. Only once did he dare glance behind him. He snatched a look over his shoulder and saw a shape, small as a child, but much broader, wider, slip out of the lamplight and back into the shadow.

At last Leiter stopped. There was a low black carriage waiting beneath one of the corner lamps.
Its two horses stood strangely still – not shaking their heads or chewing on their bits. They were immobile, like statues of horses. They didn’t even turn their heads when Leiter opened the carriage door and climbed in. Mathias put the bags down on the street beside the carriage and hesitated. He didn’t want to get in, but when he looked back, there was the shape again, flitting from shadow to shadow between the lamps in a low, scuttling run. It was getting nearer. Leiter leaned forward and, crooking his finger through the open door, beckoned to Mathias.

‘Get in, boy,’ he said. ‘Believe me, you really do not want to let him catch you.’

Mathias scrambled through the door and onto the hard leather seat beside Leiter.

‘And the bags,’ said Leiter. ‘Don’t forget the bags.’

Mathias had left them on the ground outside.

‘You’d better be quick, mind,’ said Leiter.

Mathias scrambled down from the carriage, grabbed the bags and pushed them in through the door, but they wedged halfway. He could see the shape – it was in the shadows by the horses. He gave the bags one last desperate heave and, with a sound of tearing canvas, they shot through the door like a cork from a bottle. Leiter grabbed him by the scruff
of his neck and pulled him in after them, then someone slammed the door from outside.

‘Good,’ said Leiter.

The carriage rocked on its springs as though someone had climbed onto the driver’s bench and was picking up the reins. Leiter rapped sharply on the roof with the silver top of his cane. The carriage jolted and began to move.

Back in the circus cart, Anna-Maria held the lamp.

‘Try that one again,’ she said.

Lutsmann was on his hands and knees, opening the chests and boxes that held the circus things.

‘There is nothing of Gustav’s here,’ he said.

‘Look again, fool!’

‘There is not, my lamb. It has all gone.’

The straw from the mattress was spread across the floor. Under Anna-Maria’s direction Lutsmann had emptied everything else from the chests on top of it.

‘Fool!’ she said again. ‘Ass!’

She kicked his fat behind hard with her pointed shoe, so that he fell forward into one of the open boxes.

‘What was he looking for?’

‘I don’t know, my dove,’ said Lutsmann, emerging
from the box, pulling pieces of straw from his mouth and hair.

‘What could it have been?’

‘We’ll never know now, my cake-bread,’ said Lutsmann.

Anna-Maria bent down and, grabbing him by his scarf, twisted it tight. ‘Oh, yes we will,’ she hissed through clenched teeth. ‘Whatever it was, it must be worth a very great deal and we are going to find it.’

‘But how?’

‘Men who can tip gold coins out like that don’t just disappear,’ she said in the singsong voice she reserved for idiots. ‘They go somewhere else, and that is where we are going to go too.’

‘But how?’

‘Dolt!’ she shouted and hit him with the lamp. ‘We follow him and the boy. Don’t forget the boy. He’s a sly one. He knows more than he pretends to.’

The carriage carrying Dr Leiter and Mathias rolled on through the night. Mathias wanted to sleep, but he could not. When he closed his eyes, he kept seeing Gustav’s face washed clean of its paint. If he managed to shut that out, he saw instead Gustav in
the flickering torchlight and shadow, falling from the stage over and over again.

Then there was something else too. Though the leather blinds of the carriage were drawn, Mathias knew where they were. They were on the road that ran away from the town and through the thick forest. The same road that he had come down before in the circus cart. Even if it’s dark and you cannot see a forest, you can hear when you are in one. You can. A forest sounds like no other thing anywhere. It buries sound like a blanket of fallen snow does, but it smells quite different. Even if you cannot see it, you can hear it. Even if you cannot hear it, you can smell the leaf mould and the damp earth.

So Mathias didn’t need to see the forest to know where they were. He could hear the dead sound of it all around them. And he could hear something else as well.

He could hear wolves.

They had been following the carriage for a while now. He was certain of it. Sometimes there would be a bark like that of a dog, far away, then another one in answer, closer. If he listened carefully, he thought that he could hear them too – the sound of their running feet in the brush and bracken, keeping
pace with the carriage.