Lemprière's Dictionary

by Lawrence Norfolk

  ‘The rain.… So cold.’ They stumbled on, Septimus hauling him along upright now, his feet dragging and useless. The rain came in waves, washing in and out of his hearing. They had reached the river. Lemprière tried to turn to his friend.

  ‘What do you know?’ he demanded. ‘Damn you, what do you know of any of it?’ He could hold back no longer.

  ‘What do you know of me? Of what I’ve done? Of what I am!’ He could be crying. It is raining so hard now one cannot be sure.

  Septimus’s face was still, the first time Lemprière had seen it so, like marble, a statue’s face.

  ‘Tell me,’ he said, putting his arm about Lemprière’s shoulders. ‘Tell me everything.’

  But the rain fell harder, drowning the two of them out. They were inaudible almost to each other as Lemprière sat heavily in the wet; almost invisible from the mire of the road where, now, the two women in blue muddied themselves as they tramped leaden-footed through the muck of the storm, homewards. The streets ran with mud; the Strand, past Fleet Market to Ludgate and up, the heavens beating down and drilling into the city. Rain.

  From Ludgate to the women’s destination, not to be reached for an hour yet; a house stood with darkened windows in Stonecutter Lane. The water coursed down its roof, overflowing the gutters, finding out the cracked tiles and advertising them in random pools of water on the floors within. The rain lost its redeeming vigour, crept in black tongues along the bias of the floor-boards before seeping to the ground floor. From there, through gaps in the warped boards, it entered a coal-cellar until the dark earth on which the house was founded grew sodden. Chill air filled the partitioned rooms like an unwanted tenant, smelling of neglect. The house stood against the besieging downpour, abandoned, darkened, but not vacant.

  From within the cellar, the rain sounded in lacklustre, irregular waves. Nazim could see it being slapped down into the street by the wind through the narrow grille which gave a worm’s eye view onto the pavement and the deserted street beyond. Water-drops slapped in a quick pulse from the sill just above. Peering through the chinks in the boards above his head he could make out the dim light of a window in the room directly over his head. The bare-earth floor sloped away from under him as he lay staring up at the joists. It was the driest part, but as he looked up a bead of water gathered, swelled and fell, then another, another, splash! on his forehead and reluctantly he set about moving his makeshift bed for the third time that night. A drop caught him on the back of the neck and he cursed silently. More rain.

  Nazim shuffled the planks carefully away from the drip and lay down once more. His black eyes looked up at nothing and he breathed air heavy with damp. The eyes closed. He stretched his legs out along the plank. He imagined he felt rain seeping into him, his body becoming heavier and heavier. He would awake to find himself waterlogged, unable to shift his own sodden weight. Nonsense.… He would dissolve and be nothing. He would sleep, and wake, and resume. Tomorrow, the docks. Sleep, wake, resume, sleep, wake… down on him in waves. The cellar’s soft earth gave way a little beneath his shoulder, the plank moved and he sighed to himself as the night moved slowly on.

  Morning was hours off yet, the dawn and its grey light by which his dockside vigil would continue. The ship would be there, the Vendragon, with its complement of shunters and porters and he would watch as the cold took the sweat off their backs in clouds. Coker, had that been the name? Coker, the gangleader whose words he had caught from his hiding place amongst the piled gear on the quay. The thin-faced man had watched him as he tipped his hat forward and made off around the corner at a pace. Fake farewells, covert returns. Coker, yes. He meant nothing. Not significant. He had doubled back and crept along the quayside, plenty of cover, easy for him to get in close, to overhear the two of them.

  ‘… within weeks. As the loads arrive; you will be advised. You will be to hand?’ But it was not a question. Nazim heard calculations in the thin-faced man’s voice. Coker had twisted his hands. He would be available, his men too. The crates Nazim had spent the last days watching as they were loaded were arriving irregularly. But from where? And when? Nazim had strained to catch details, but the two had only touched on it. Somewhere in London, in the city. Stop the river at its source. Nazim fancied himself tangled in tributaries and off-shoots, lost, attending the surface hum of the machine. He could not expect to learn much more from keeping watch over the Vendragon. The crates, the men, the ship, they all marked a trail leading him away from the Nine. ‘Mizzer Mara,’ Coker had called the thin-faced man. ‘Mizzer Mara’ was one of them.

  The older face which had appeared in the attic window a little way up the quay that first day, had re-appeared several times since. He thought their eyes had met once, but the distance was too great. The face exercised him, but he was inclined to dismiss it. They would not send two of their own to supervise the loading. ‘Mara’ had given his orders to Coker in a grating monotone. There was almost no inflection in his voice, and its timbre had shocked Nazim.

  ‘… for which two guineas per man no more or less, agreed? Two weeks from today and at six of the morning, agreed? The same men exactly, no one new, no one untried, we understand each other, agreed?’ Agreed, agreed, agreed between them without a sound from Coker whose big red hands still twisted with nerves though they looked the size of the slighter man’s head. It was the voice, and Nazim had heard it many times, issuing from his own lips.

  ‘Buried treasure! Thirty paces!’ A crippled sailor had returned and was waving his crutches, raving at the two of them. His stumps thumped the ground as he confronted them. ‘Thirty paces from here!’ Coker waved him off, but he stayed there, yelling at them like a madman, even when the big man advanced.

  ‘Get. Out.’ The words were spoken quietly, but the cripple fell silent. A wave from his crutch and he had turned to drag himself off, homeward along the quay. Get. Out. The voice seemed to sap the will from him. Yes, Bahadur, your lesson…. Recognition then, for Nazim. It was his voice too; but reserved only for last moments, the intimate intervals that opened between himself and the men, the women.… It was a tool, only that, to fill the space between their knowing and their ending, a bridge. It was the accent which levelled away fear or crowing triumph or pleasure and left only the act. Men and women heard that voice only once, in the moment before the Nawab’s assassin took away their lives. But Nazim, hearing it spoken by another, was momentarily unnerved. He knew what ‘Mara’ did. Mara was a killer too.

  ‘Le Mara,’ came the voice again. He was correcting the other man. ‘Mizzer Le Mara,’ Coker repeated like a child and ‘Le Mara’ muttered again to himself as he shambled back towards his men. Nazim had looked up and caught in the corner of his eye the curtain falling across the attic window up the quay. The cripple had moved off in the opposite direction and was fifty yards distant already.

  The days which followed had added nothing to his understanding. He had watched Coker and the other men carry cases back and forth, and Le Mara watched them too. Ships had passed up and down the river before him, the sun had shone or not but he had learnt no more and now, listening to the steady drip of water into the cellar and the unrelenting rain outside, he began to wonder at his next move. Unfamiliar ground, and then, ‘You may not fail,’ the Nawab simple and direct, which was a mark of respect to him; admittance to the inner sanctum of the Nawab’s unmediated wishes, him and him alone. Nazim, his chosen tool for a task. ‘You may not fail, or fall short,’ the Nawab had told him. He would not fail. He would not fall short. That had been the core of their meeting months before this moment: that request and his assurance that it would be so. The Nawab had sent for him, driven to it by the evidence mounting around him. Nazim had moved through the corridors of the palace whose coolness had a quality found nowhere else in his experience. As always, he found the calm of the interiors sinking into his mood, a sense of stillness. He was motioned into an anonymous reception room which was painted in shades of a pale rose, there to await the arrival of his master. Naz
im had settled and let his mind empty. Hours might go by and he would not stir. The brightly coloured birds tethered within an adjacent garden sang to the sky while fountains spluttered, playing down on a pool of clear water in fine droplets and Nazim would hear neither.

  The Nawab’s thoughts ran thus: he would go into the partnership, accept the caravans arriving by night, close his ears to the advice of his courtiers (who knew nothing) dispatch the locked chest to a destination hundreds of miles distant which he would never see, to the ship which would take them on across the Mediterranean, which too he would never see. Was he a fool? He would turn his palace to use, a glorified clearinghouse, he no better than a money lender, no better than that and the ridicule of his ancestors was easily imagined, easily heard in the shadows of the corridors and sunless corners…. The Nawab, a tenant to his title and later, a borrower from the British whose sweating nabobs dunned him politely, handkerchiefs to their brows, with all the correct observances of rank and custom and without relief. And he could not pay. He could not.

  That was when he had turned, when he had gone to the locked chests with the air of a thief and first thought how it might be done. The Company would scarcely conceive the scale of the fraud, the numberless insignificant leaks from the coffers of the Indies and the tributaries they formed as they flowed, inevitably, unaccountably to the strong-room beneath his palace. There were nine men in England, only nine, and they controlled the whole with subtle touches and twists that the Nawab himself, their servant, could only admire. A partnership, yes, in which he was paid a fee and a large fee, but now they were breaking the contract. The chests, which gradually accumulated in the palace, always arriving by different means and routes, which were collected and dispatched each year to his anonymous masters, had arrived less frequently. He suspected that if he threw them open and peered within he might find only rocks and sand, a mocking note. His use was ending and he felt the full weight of the wealth which had passed through his hands to those of the nine, hundreds and thousands of miles distant, wealth which was indistinguishable from the power he had yielded, which had been stolen from him and what was he now? A puppet and plaything, the butt of the English, his usurpers. No, he would not fall to that and he thought again of the locked chests and their contents, the finest gem-stones, the most pure precious metals, silver and gold clouding and coalescing in his vision, almost within grasp, almost even now. For he knew more than they thought.

  They thought they had the measure of him. They had caught Bahadur and returned him changed, a stranger. But he was a stranger bearing gifts, the wherewithal of the Nawab’s restoration and the retrieval of his fortunes. Poor Bahadur, a faithful servant tested on the cliff-top and found wanting. Now his successor would take up the torch, and flush them out, the nine of them … blinking in the bright light as he now blinked crossing the courtyard with the sunlight reflecting off its high white walls to the narrow arcade beyond. Bahadur had served him well, within his limits. The Nawab turned over these thoughts and drew out their lines like gossamer as he padded through the cool corridors. Tangled webs took shape in the arabesques and mosaics about him. He imagined his servant Nazim, crawling along their haphazard ladders and trapezes, unexpected as the fly stalking the spider, nipping off each of its waving limbs in turn and, at the last, splitting open its swollen sac for the liquid silk within. Yes, Nazim. Nazim would do what his uncle could not do.

  Nazim stood up as the Nawab entered the room. He bowed and the Nawab motioned for him to be seated. The instant he was settled, the Nawab began to speak. The words came out in a long, flat speech, point leading to point, redoubling over this or that passage, crossing lines already taken up and followed through without a single break until Nazim began to grasp the larger pattern taking shape and echo it in his own mind as he listened to the tale of the Nawab and his nine trading partners, their subvention of the Company’s profits, their betrayal of the Nawab, the treasure’s long journey from the palace in which he sat to the distant island where the Company made its home and from where the Nawab’s partners, his betrayers, controlled it from houses of secrecy; find them out - his injunction was unspoken so far, but it would come and Nazim traced the story as it issued from the Nawab’s mouth, of secret deliveries, consignments and stockpiles, broken contracts and ensuing penalties, a story in which he was now already a character and player.

  ‘When Bahadur was sent to France, I believed they made their den in Paris. But, I was … mistaken. They are vicious, and clever. Bahadur found that out, and more….’

  The mention of his mentor’s mission awoke memories of that time in Nazim, Bahadur’s absence, he was still a boy then. Seventeen years ago, a point he marked, for Bahadur was a different man on his eventual return. He had been in France, in Paris.

  ‘He found out my error,’ the Nawab coloured a little, ‘for they make their home in England. Only by chance did he come across them, only by his wits and courage did he return. He was an exceptional man.’ The Nawab’s voice bathed Nazim in its warmth. ‘And you too, Nazim-ud-Dowlah.’

  Bahadur had been changed into something cold and distant. He had never truly returned. He had spoken little of his time away, it seemed to exist as a gap in which something of himself had been lost. They had caught him, and let him go. Perhaps it was his pride.

  ‘Yet he had given his word,’ the Nawab was speaking again, ‘he would find the men who betrayed me.… He kept his word.’

  The implication was clear for Nazim, and it was a familiar sentiment in any case, your assent is the act, another lesson learnt long before, which meant that even the merest notion flitting across the surface of the Nawab’s inner eye was as good as done and he, Nazim, was its agent now. The Nawab talked on, telling Nazim how the steady passage of the treasure through his palace had become less steady, had slackened off and finally, some months before, had stopped altogether.

  ‘They believe I am something to be discarded,’ he said dismissively. Nazim smiled at the lunacy. ‘They are taking it to England, and thence…. They must be stopped. We must take back what has been taken from us. You must find them, and kill them, all nine. You must find what is mine, get it back …’ Nazim gazed curiously at his master, who was looking up distractedly at the corner of the ceiling as he spoke, turning his head as if he expected something to be there that was not.

  ‘There are nine of them.’ He looked down again. ‘They are in the city of London. You must go there, find them.’ He fell silent, then suddenly, ‘And the ship! The ship, it is called the Vendragon. That is how they will move it, yes. You must find the ship, do you understand? The ship is how you will find them.’ The Nawab picked at the hem of his sleeve, then looked Nazim in the face. ‘You will do it.’ Only that. Yes my master. ‘Yes,’ replied Nazim.

  It was done. The audience was at an end and Nazim rose to leave. But as he did so, the Nawab reached out and clutched his arm, astonishing Nazim.

  ‘There is more.’ He spoke urgently. ‘A moment, more; a name. One of the nine perhaps, Bahadur was not certain … but a name.’ Nazim waited for the Nawab to say it, but he must come closer, closer yes like that to whisper it in his ear and Nazim inclined his head as asked. The Nawab leant over, Nazim catching the scent of something sweet on his breath, waiting for the word, then he heard it and, committed it to memory as the Nawab relaxed the grip on his arm and moved back quickly for his servant with an odd shuffling motion. Nazim looked back at his master. The name meant nothing to him, but now he had it and he repeated it aloud. This seemed to delight the Nawab whose mouth opened soundlessly and whose hands moved as if to clap, but stayed outstretched with pleasure. Then, just as suddenly, his expression changed, he turned on his heel and walked quickly out the door. Nazim was left alone in the rose-coloured room staring down the corridor. As he too turned to go, a succession of high-pitched shrieks like laughter reached him from the direction of the Nawab’s disappearance. But the sound did not come from the Nawab. It was a commonplace that the Nawab did not laugh. />
  Nazim left the palace that evening deep in a single thought. Finding the nine men, the ship, his master’s wealth, somehow they must all become the same thing, a single act. He had assented to it already. Now he must learn its nature. And around that central preoccupation the whispered name hovered like an insect drawn towards the web but not yet caught, not yet placed in the lattice. Nazim had walked homewards with Bahadur’s ghost at his side, whispering the same name, telling him the same things, exacting the same promises….

  ‘You don’t! You bloody don’t.’ A voice jerked Nazim out of his reverie and into the present in an instant. He started, breathed in. His body tensed. His ears pricked as a second voice was heard.

  ‘I cannot be sorrier, Bet. Did I say I wished it so?’ Two women were in the street, above him and outside. The second with an accent. Not English. Nazim looked out through the grille but caught only a glimpse of blue, a dress, before they had exceeded the spy-hole’s scope and then he heard them fumbling at the door. The house was unfurnished and boarded up. He had believed it deserted. He had entered through the coal-hatch. They had opened the door and now Nazim heard their boots echo on the floorboards just above his head. They were arguing. Nazim listened, pondering the measures he might have to take.

  ‘… this filthy place. My bones ache with it,’ the one called Bet was complaining. ‘Why did you take the bet? We had money enough, and now we have nothing. Now we are here.’ The voice was venomous, suggesting previous acquaintance with cold, hard floors.