Lemprière's Dictionary

by Lawrence Norfolk

  ‘Anything within reason, you told me, you told me that.’ The foreign woman sounded close to tears. ‘You told me that,’ mimicked the other harshly. And indeed, seconds later a soft sobbing sound reached Nazim’s ears. The complainer relented, walking over to her companion and comforting her.

  ‘Karin, come now. We shall make a fire, dry our clothes. Don’t cry.’ Karin allowed herself to be quieted. Presently, a candle was lit and Nazim could make out the two figures by its faint glow, their bodies distorted and cut across by the angle and narrow slits through which he spied the two of them, both in blue above him. Then began the hunt for fuel, which yielded a few scraps of timber from around the house, not enough, and Karin declared that the cellar must still hold some coal. Bet rooted around the rooms at the back. She would look.

  ‘Yes!’ called Bet over her shoulder. Nazim slipped away from his listening post and reached for his bag. The short knife would be right. The trapdoor would open away from him. Nazim moved quickly, in silence in the cellar.

  ‘Bet!’ called Karin. ‘It will not open.’ But almost as she said this, whatever had held the trapdoor shut gave way and it opened, suddenly, spilling her back onto the floor. A dim shaft of light reached into the cellar. As she crashed back, Nazim crept silently over to the hatch. Bet called back to her but Karin did not hear, picking herself up with a low grunt and moving back to the opening in the floor. Nazim waited out of sight in the darkness below, patient, as Karin dabbed her foot gingerly into space. Her body began to follow and Nazim braced his legs more firmly. Bet called again and Nazim drew his arm back. Karin had not heard her.

  ‘Coal!’ Bet said again, something’… coal here!’ Nazim had to lean back quickly as Karin’s legs scissored the air, she had lost her balance and would fall? No, she scrambled up, back through the hatch which was slammed shut almost before she was through it with a loud bang.

  ‘Hush!’ hissed her companion as she entered the room with the coal and began to lay a fire. ‘It’s the street if we’re made,’ but her attention was on the task before her. Once kindled, the fire caught quickly, the damp coal crackling and throwing an erratic light over the two of them. Clouds of bluish smoke swelled, then broke into the room when the storm forced a downdraught through the chimney.

  In the cellar, Nazim stretched out his limbs and began to think. So they were squatters like himself. Perhaps their presence aided him, masking his own. He listened to their conversation, allowing himself to be lulled by its ebb and flow, its silences and abrupt stops until it was almost as if he were in the room with them, propped up against the wall on one elbow and watching them as they talked in the firelight.

  ‘Poor Rosalie!’ Karin was saying. Her accent softened or thickened with her emotions.

  ‘The poverty is all ours,’ and a few clinks were heard, a few coins dropped to the floor between them.’…all my fault.’ Karin was beginning to sob.

  ‘No-one could have guessed the boy would win, even with Septimus,’ her friend said soothingly, but it was no good.

  ‘And Rosalie was … she was a daughter to me, and now what becomes of her?’ Karin was crying in earnest now. ‘We sold her, like meat, and she was our own.’ Her friend’s voice hardened.

  ‘She was not our own, she was no-one’s. Now she is someone’s….’ Whose? Nazim wondered allowing the drowsiness he felt to advance through his body.’… and there will be more work there. He pays well, this joker-man. The boy fell for it too, thought she was someone else didn’t he?’ But Karin was still snivelling. ‘It was all in play. There’ll be others.’ Poor Rosalie, as the two of them mooched differently around the roles they had played and, despite himself, Nazim cocked half an ear for the sound of their voices above him and listened as the sequence of events emerged from their respective sides. A transaction, a girl, girl as a prop in some masquerade for the benefit of a young man, that evening in another place. A bet taken, and paid, and the money lost in that way, thus grief. Hope came in the form of more work from the same source.

  ‘We meet at Galloways, tomorrow,’ Bet was explaining to her companion. ‘Galloways,’ Karin repeated, but her voice was drifting. It didn’t matter.

  Nazim turned back to his own thoughts, of the ship, the nine men and the name Bahadur had gleaned years before. His own efforts were the continuance of that project which his sinking mind now turned over, mingling it with the voices above. His dreams were of that project’s genesis and through them rose a huge face, Bahadur’s, pressing against his own, into him and out until the familiar scene came to him: the two of them walking in a landscape he recognised as the hills to the north of the palace. He had dreamed this dream many, many times. They were at the edge of a cliff of red sandstone which fell away before them, a hundred feet or more to great tilted slabs of white rock below. They were walking arm in arm, Bahadur and his nephew. Bahadur had returned from Paris which was becoming a magical word for Nazim as his uncle described it. There were buildings higher and whiter than all the palaces he had seen and hordes of people swirling around them. Strange, silent women stood on the street corners, showing their bodies and the streets were crammed with horses, coaches, men and women both rich and poor. All of it was jumbled together, heaped up in a fantastic shape and the word for it was ‘Paris’.

  As they walked, Nazim felt that he was at once the young man on the cliff-top and somewhere else, someone else who could see them both like the birds which circled overhead. It was midday, and Bahadur had grasped his arm tightly. In another time and place, the Nawab was whispering a name in his ear. A secret. Bahadur loved him more than he loved himself, let go, let it go. He was explaining something, something that had happened when he was away, but his hand was a ring of iron and Nazim could only think of that. Above, the women laughed. The cliffs fell away in silence.

  ‘He couldn’t walk! Couldn’t piss in a pot….’ The birds were tiny dots and he was flying away with them.

  ‘Who?’ Karin not paying attention, poking at the fire. Far below, the two figures on the cliff-top seemed to move nearer the edge, one was trying to pull away from the other.

  ‘The boy, the dupe,’ Bet explained. ‘It was a joke I tell you. Perhaps he weds tomorrow….’ Nazim could hardly see the two of them at all, he was trying to get back to before, but the women were in the way, their voices.

  ‘Who though? Septimus’s friend, I know. But who was he?’ And then, suddenly, Nazim was back in the cellar and, at the same time, in the rose-coloured room with the Nawab whispering the name to him, the name Bahadur had won so that he might later find its owner, and he was hearing the name again, in answer to her question: Who was he? The name; the Nawab’s silent, delighted laugh. Nazim gazed up wide awake once more, and saw a gift from heaven, thank you, he thought as the women went on with their gossip and Bahadur was, for the moment, eclipsed by the single word he had himself carried back. The fire crackled and spat, the floorboards creaked as the women shifted their weight and settled for the night. Abundant dismal rain droned on the roof and ran noisily in the street, it dripped into the cellar and the wind roared about the house. Nazim heard these sounds as voices speaking to him, saying the same thing in different tongues, the whispered name which was repeated in the room above.

  ‘Septimus called him Lemprière,’ said Bet. Lemprière, the name the Nawab had whispered in his ear. He was alive, living in London. He could be found.

  The night dragged on with its secrets and its weather, growing frayed as the hours moved it on and dawn made the first ragged inroads into the dark. Showers were falling haphazardly when the sun finally rose and a light, high wind blew the last clouds out towards the sea. The city glistened in its sleek sheen of rainwater and the early-risers that Sunday morning had to shade their eyes to see its glittering surfaces. Nazim’s heart had thudded like a piston when he heard the name. Lemprière, the dupe of a practical joke, a drunkard, a friend of ‘Septimus’, which was a name he did not know. Lemprière, whose own name had travelled from Paris to the Indies
, then back from the Indies to London to meet him here, seventeen years later, and confront him. One of the Nine, perhaps; one who would lead him to the other eight. Lemprière was here, in London, and Nazim would find him. He promised himself that in the cellar, and again in the morning when he awoke, rose and climbed through the outside hatch to the pavement beyond.

  The air was cold and Nazim shivered. He took up station in a doorway opposite and waited for the women to emerge. An hour later, he was walking quietly twenty yards behind Bet who had appeared in the same bedraggled blue dress as before and now strode towards her rendezvous through a hotch-potch of alleys and runs which taxed Nazim as he followed her. Church-bells masked the sound of his footsteps. When they reached Galloway’s Coffee House, Nazim remembered its name from the night before. This was where she was to meet the man who had paid for the trick on Lemprière, who would pay again for other services, who had paid for the girl Rosalie. This was Lemprière’s enemy perhaps. Perhaps his, Nazim’s, greatest ally. Nazim watched as the woman entered. After a few minutes, he followed her inside.

  The interior of the coffee shop extended further than he had thought and was lined with high-sided booths, each with a table and facing benches. The woman had chosen one towards the rear of the shop and was sitting in such a way as to keep watch over the entrance. She looked up as Nazim walked the length of the shop to take the last booth behind her, then resumed her vigil. Nazim sat with his back to the door, his head leaning against the partition. Presently the shop’s proprietor appeared and Nazim ordered a mug of coffee. When the man turned his attention to the woman’s booth it was to order her out, ‘No women’. A short argument followed, the man was firm, but suddenly it seemed an accommodation had been reached. The woman remained seated as before while the man retreated behind a counter at the rear of the shop. Nazim heard coins drop into the drawer.

  A clock mounted on the back wall ticked away the minutes as he waited for Bet’s assignation. Another coffee followed the first. The minutes turned into hours and the shop gradually grew crowded. It was sometime after midday when a movement in the booth behind told him that the woman had risen to indicate her presence. Someone had walked in the door and, though the shop was now almost full, Nazim picked out his footsteps from the general hubbub as they moved to the woman’s booth, then stopped.

  ‘I thought you had abandoned us….’ the woman’s voice. Nazim’s head was only inches from the recipient of the complaint, but he could not make out the reply. A man’s voice, but indistinct, shielded by the wooden partition and talking away from him. He could hear only Bet as their opening remarks grew more businesslike, money was handed over at one point, more coffee was ordered. It seemed Bet was asking after Rosalie, the girl mentioned and lamented by the other woman the previous night, but that transaction was complete, it did not concern her now and she gave it up. A new offer was being made. Her own participation was required, and would be paid for. It was a masquerade of sorts but Nazim could not hear the details, only the woman’s assent. Nazim controlled his frustration and fought down the strong urge to peer over the top of the booth and discover the man’s identity. The woman’s voice was querulous; she wanted more money and was protesting that her services did not come cheap on Christmas Eve. Christmas Eve, Nazim clutched at that. A place, he urged her silently, name the place.

  ‘My family come first.’ She was still wheedling. ‘How can I tell them I must work on Christmas Eve?’ But the man had lost patience, his voice came louder and harder than before, audible at last to Nazim.

  ‘Whores have no family’ he told her flatly, and rose to leave. In the booth behind, Nazim heard the voice and his arm jerked in shock, upsetting the coffee-mug before him. He knew who the man was. The voice was the same flat voice heard at the docks two days before. The woman’s saviour, her paymaster with a pitiless, thin face was Le Mara; Le Mara was the architect of this Lemprière’s deception. At the sound of his exasperated departure, Nazim rose to follow and what he saw confirmed his guess.

  Anarcharsis of Scythia, inventor of anchors, tinder and the potter’s wheel, observed that every vine brings forth three kinds of grape: the first producing mirth, the second drunkenness and the third repentance. A door slammed, bells rang; boots banged up the stairs. The warm bed clothes, impregnated with his own faint odours, enveloped the sleeper who burrowed into the pillow in retreat from the racket. John Lemprière awoke to find his eyelashes sutured by a crust of dried sleep and his skull lined with brittle, crackling paper. His eyes watered, dissolving the sleep, then opened and sunlight hit him in the face. Blood pounded under his skull, pressing on his brain. He rolled over and groaned. When he moved his head it felt oddly heavy at the sides, pulling down his jowls, and his skin seemed to be covered in an oily sheen. When he moved, it hurt and when it hurt, he stopped. He fell back into something that looked for all the world like sleep, but was not sleep. For the moment, he thought to himself, I will do nothing at all. But the banging of boots grew louder and louder until Septimus burst into the room to rouse him, grinning and stomping and immediately urging him to rise. The previous night had nurtured strange and bitter fruit.

  ‘Awake, awake!’ bellowed Septimus, banging about and throwing Lemprière’s clothes at him. The brightness of the sunlight seemed to intensify, heating his insides. A cramp gripped his stomach and for a moment he thought he was going to be sick. But he was not, and when the cramp subsided, Lemprière realised that he was very hungry. It hardly seemed appropriate, but then he remembered he had been sick last night, copiously. Last night … that was why Septimus was here. He had agreed to something. Another cramp gripped him and he clutched his stomach in misery.

  ‘Breakfast,’ prescribed Septimus from the fire-place. ‘Breakfast, then business.’ Lemprière leaned over the side of the bed. He had told Septimus something the previous night and it was a mistake. He was putting on clothes still damp from their recent soaking and that was a mistake too. It was Sunday morning after the Saturday night before…. The sun shone brightly and it was not raining. All mistakes.

  Some minutes later, the two of them were standing in the doorway of the house, Septimus sparky with top o’the morning sentiments while his companion hung back, dreading the streetward plunge. His boots were damp, confirming him in his nausea and silent misery.

  The downpour had washed London’s streets imperfectly. Tide marks of muck and sodden stuff ran along the walls in ridges. Lemprière stepped forward reluctantly. In Southampton Street at eleven on a Sunday morning there was only steam lifting off the cobbles, a little surface scum and churchgoers. The bells made an ear-splitting racket as Septimus and Lemprière joined the jostling throng and were half-carried towards the piazza.

  The square proper was packed with the congregations of London marching to their respective high, low, broad or free churches. Into this doctrinal melting-pot Septimus and Lemprière were sucked, swept, and quickly separated by a hard-faced band of Calvinists who cut a predestined path through pliant Congregationalists. Intervention by latitudinarians resulted in further complication with Lemprière shouting to Septimus, not heard as they were carried further apart. A clump of Quakers tried to simultaneously give way to Glassites, Sandemanians and a party of touring Ultramontanists. An antinomian trod on Lemprière’s toe. He ducked down and emerged in the midst of buoyant supralapsarians who wheeled about, not going anywhere and liking it. His head was a huge hot envelope of air, rising. Methodists shunted episcopalians, deists cut up the odd Sephardic Jew. The sight of this quarrelsome, fractious crowd would have been enough to turn the quondam dreams of George Calixtus to dust but they were dust already. Each sect being free to follow its own chosen, one true path, worship its own golden calf, graven image, Juggernaut or fetish, did just that.

  The congregations swirled, elbowed, snarled, stamped and trampled through each other, muttering cantraps and exsufflations against the horde of unbelievers, damn them all and out of the way…. Peering above the bobbing heads, Septimus scann
ed the crowd for his companion. There he was, just visible amongst the heads of a column of heavy-booted interdenominational interlopers over from the Low Countries to do good works to Flemish-speakers everywhere. Curses offered in the name of twenty subtly variant Gods pursued Septimus as he grasped hold of Lemprière’s arm and hauled him to the safety of the colonnade where they watched as the late churchgoers continued their marches. A nun standing by their side watched with them. Septimus peered down curiously at her. The nun looked up at him and smiled. Septimus smiled back. The nun smiled more broadly, a beautiful smile.

  ‘Papist!’ Septimus shouted at her suddenly and she took fright, her wimple fluttering behind her like an outsize butterfly. ‘The church,’ he commented with undisguised distaste. ‘What are you?’ abruptly to Lemprière, who thought for a moment. There was a word for it. ‘Huguenot,’ Lemprière answered after some reflection. ‘Of course,’ and Septimus was off again, this time skirting the pious scrum in front of them, heading east out of the piazza, across Bow Street and up towards Lincoln’s Inn Fields.

  ‘Breakfast, then we shall call upon the gentleman of whom I told you last night,’ Septimus explained carefully as he spied an eating-house and made for it.

  Last night. Much of it was a mystery to Lemprière, the latter part particularly. They had won the Game of Cups, he remembered that. He had won a prize, he remembered that too, her white back, smooth and her jet-black hair. But it could not be her, not in the cold light of morning, not there or like that, not Juliette. Later, he had found the Thames. He had sat down on a bridge. Septimus had asked him a question.

  ‘In here,’ Septimus ducked within a low door and gestured for him to follow. Then he remembered his mistake. ‘Perfect,’ exclaimed Septimus to Lemprière and the interior in general. He had told Septimus everything.