Lemprière's Dictionary

by Lawrence Norfolk

  Behind him stood the table with his models and plans, little clumps of trees hand-fashioned from sponge and wire, figures modelled in clay and Vaucanson’s engines reproduced in matchwood and string. Boffe was no weak link, the plan before him proved it. Vaucanson disliked him, Cas de l’Île hated him. His poor abused prostituted talents could barely stand it, with Le Mara creeping about like a machine of death and the caves, the horrible caves, he hated it, could hardly bear it, it was too terrible. Boffe patted his stomach in self-regard and dressed. When accoutred he was magnificent, his legs perhaps a little thin in proportion to the rest of him but still serviceable as he walked to the table where he hovered over the miniature mansion and its gardens, the lawn (made of stretched baize) the scrubby ground beyond (dyed hog’s bristles set in papier-mâché) the trees and the centrepiece which was a pyre where the woman would burn in excruciating torment, suffering unimaginable agonies that even Boffe’s ingenuity had found no means to prolong beyond a minute or two.

  Vaucanson’s business would be set up behind the trees. Boffe’s thick digit pressed lightly on the top of the leafy canopy, as he saw it. From here the blinding flash of molten torture would be raised, swung over and deposited as though from the heavens down on the unfortunate woman, into her even. It would be spectacular in the best possible way, giving an illusion of necessity usually only achieved by God.

  Boffe readjusted his crotch which had become snarled in the imagined excitement, then turned his attention to the house whence the boy would emerge. His same finger traced a path over the lawn and scrub into the trees thence to the pyre, mentally reviewing the methods of enticement and distraction he had designed which would lead the boy to the required place at the required time to play his role as witness and (so the leader assured him) oblique participant. Boffe conceived the space around the pyre as an extravagant Chair of State in which the boy-king might sit, at once to see and be seen. Boffe glanced again at his brief, the open volume which lay to one side and told of the flaming conception of Perseus, a fabulous visitation of the virgin by Zeus the cloud-propeller, raining down in guileful drops upon her, a shower of gold. The brazen pit would have to be faked-up of course, and there was the woman to think of, though her active participation was not required…. Most of all it was the boy who troubled Boffe. He would be unrehearsed naturally, ambiguous in his relations with the production, perhaps resistant to the whole affair, hmm. But Boffe had built in leeways, resistances, counter-weights and suggestive encounters which should keep him on track, while allowing latitude too, for every sceptic must have his bone of reason. Boffe stood back and admired. So many niggly, logistical problems and he had found solutions to them all! He acknowledged the rude vigour of Vaucanson’s engines, the crane was good and he liked the dog-machines, splendid contraptions.

  Boffe gathered up his plans and thought of the other seven, but Jacques was in France, six then, their shocked surprise at his cleverness, an excited critique of the finer points (he would dispose of their objections comme ci, comme ça) acclamation, praise and then applause, growing perhaps wild with whole opera-houses rising to their feet, tier after tier, burying him in roses and fame which would last longer than a pharaoh’s tomb. Boffe le Maître, for what was life without the theatre to confirm it as such? A dry shell. One day soon he would emerge from his confinement, very soon, and he would forget that he had ever known the answer to that question. Boffe reached for his lamp and strode towards the chamber’s door. Soon the meeting would begin. His entrance was awaited.

  Boffe’s passage through the inner organs of the beast, though taking the best part of an hour, traversed only a small cross-section of the fossilised hulk. This could partly be explained by the obstructive character of the terrain, the cavity between lung and thorax in particular, for the porous surface of the former offered innumerable pot-holes and irregularities, but the major difficulty was one of scale. All eight of them together, pooling all their knowledge in ideal communion might just conceive the size of the Beast. Singly, they had no chance. It was not simply the length - though a creature extending from a point east of Ludgate to a little way beyond the Haymarket was certainly large enough - but the depth too. None of the eight had penetrated to the lowest of the catacombs. None of them knew just how deep their sanctuary reached. That the whole mass touched the surface at several points, was a familiar fact which foisted the question upon them (though it had no practical value) as if, with the principle of finitude established, the process of measurement must inevitably follow. Then there was the question of the water.

  The proximity of the Thames had been established by survey and eliminated as a factor. Complicated civil engineering, involving buttresses and clay, protected the weakest point. No, the water-problem related to the depth-problem. Later, when Boffe empties his bath, the water will swill about on the floor, gathering in corners and seeping into the furniture as water does, it will stand for a while then begin to drain…. There. That was the problem. The Beast was perfectly, uncannily dry, absolutely and completely parched. There was not a single surface on which water collected, no reservoir lurking in its guts, no secret gushing conduits or vast mass of porous stone dripping with damp. Where did the water go? The question acted on the eight of them in different ways, but the anxious consensus was framed as a further, more worrying question. What, quite, was beneath the Beast? Beneath the city was the ground, beneath the ground the Beast, beneath the Beast though…. An underground sea? A void? The uncertainty infected them, as if the foundations of their lives were suddenly whipped away, or worse, as if they were continually aware of this as a strong possibility - which it was. The effect was an eerie calm, not fatalism but suppressed hysteria. Where did the water go? None of them knew. All speculated.

  The leader bound it in a complex theological speculation on the nature of evil, part of a turmoil of self-loathing in which evil mounted up, harder, blacker and more dense until, collapsing in on itself, it eventually left nothing but wavering outlines which never quite dispersed. He imagined this taking place quite literally beneath the Beast, the accumulation of evil piling up far below until the whole rotten mass was swept away, like a sapper’s fire burning out the supporting braces to undermine the whole construction and bring its secret dreams crashing down into oblivion. If the leader’s two flanking cohorts had thoughts on the matter, they were inaccessible, though their mutual disagreement might be taken as read. Boffe himself, now about to enter the aorta, saw in the Beast’s ponderous suspension, the suspension of disbelief. Illusion was a commonplace to him, a taut membrane which almost begged to be pricked, broken and so reveal the players in states of undress, the stage-hands and the machinery. It was the tragedy of show replayed as a farce of substance, or something like that. Jacques was in Paris, and really could not be expected to speculate at such a distance from the object under investigation. (He thought of it as a geological freak.) Le Mara believed the Beast rested on nothing. One day it would collapse and he would be dead, nothing more. Vaucanson flew from end to beginning, constructing imaginary provenances in which steel eels drilled through the rock, millions of miniscule snapper-contraptions hollowed out vast caverns and armies of pincers tipped with lead to prevent sparks scuttled to pick motes of combustible dust from the air and convey them away in perfect, non-human files to an unknown destination, somewhere beneath him, somewhere down there.

  Down there, yes. That was where it all ended up. Only Casterleigh stared it in the face. Some negative attractor down there had a collar round his neck. Something pulled him down, a slow pressure at first, gradually getting stronger until it became irresistible and he was hurtling headfirst down a subterranean funnel which narrowed until he could barely clear its smooth sides and beyond that was a hole - beyond that, blackness. That was where the water went. That was where everything went, nowhere, into nothing.

  Now, however, Casterleigh stood on the fringes of a pool of light afforded by the oil-lamp marking the meeting room’s entrance. The door a
few metres behind him was air-tight. There was no chink of light. Before him, one of the Beast’s flat areas extended away into darkness. In reality, it was a huge, semi-circular platform carpeted with dry gravel that crunched loudly underfoot, a sound amplified by the vaulted roof almost a hundred feet above. The wall of the meeting room bisected the area, leaving the gravel plate as a kind of apron onto which several passages opened. To one side was a high, sloping wall which eventually became the roof, on the other a sheer drop. The apron was seventy or eighty yards across and unlit for the most part. Most of his colleagues were already within. Not Jacques, who was still in Paris, with the girl…. Not Boffe, who was tardy, dead weight, Casterleigh thought. And not Le Mara, whom he awaited now.

  After some minutes he heard a shuffling sound in the darkness, in front of him and to his left. That would be Le Mara. There was little point in calling out. The acoustics of the cavernous space which opened out in front of him were peculiar. From his station close to the door it was possible to pinpoint sounds from the surrounding area with unerring accuracy. Le Mara was heading straight towards him, towards the door in fact. The Beast seemed to Casterleigh a haven for anomalies, pushed from the ragged fringes of theory to pose their problems here. Other caverns were utterly silent, the walls soaking up sound like a sponge, and unless you spoke directly to the other person, the sound failed, leaving you mouthing inaudibly, to no-one. Temperatures were odd too. You could pass from freezing, bitter cold to sweltering heat in a matter of minutes. Some parts of the Beast were too hot to enter, the lower parts mostly, but there was no order to it. Le Mara advanced, his footsteps growing louder as he emerged from the gloom and saw Casterleigh for the first time. He stopped, blinked. Casterleigh gestured for him to approach. Casterleigh looked for curiosity in the other man’s face. There was none.

  ‘The first consignment is aboard?’ he said. Le Mara nodded.

  ‘The Indian is still content to watch?’ Le Mara nodded again, then spoke.

  ‘He should be stopped. He follows our movements. Searches for something.’ Casterleigh hated the monotone of Le Mara’s voice, the voice of a dead man. He towered over the assassin. The wait had been oppressive.

  ‘I agree.’ Casterleigh knew the leader was against it; more, opposed it adamantly. This fact hovered between the two of them, potential conspirators. Neither spoke. Le Mara turned abruptly and looked back into the darkness behind him. Then Casterleigh heard the sound which had prompted his movement, footsteps. Boffe’s footsteps, as he clambered across the gravel towards the door and the meeting beyond it.

  ‘Shall we go?’ Casterleigh indicated the door. It was time. Le Mara nodded and moved, then stopped. The assassin spoke as if it were the logical outcome of some process that had taken a set amount of time to complete.

  ‘The Indian should be killed.’ There, it was said. ‘The clerk too.’

  ‘Not yet, we wait a little.’ Casterleigh stayed him. Le Mara turned again. Casterleigh smiled. The decision was his. He walked with Le Mara to the door and watched as the smaller man passed through ahead of him. Le Mara was his too.

  Six candles lit the inner chamber. Boffe’s breathless arrival a minute later added a seventh. Jacques’ chair remained empty, and the one to the left of the leader naturally. The latter sat back, as always, his face hidden in the shadows. The hours dragged by in desultory talk, plans. Le Mara reported on the loading of the Vendragon. Coker and his men were proving satisfactory. The next consignment was approved.

  ‘The Indian remains …’

  ‘Not to be touched,’ the leader’s voice cut sharply across Le Mara. Vaucanson looked up. Casterleigh caught his eye. They were thinking the same thought. The Indian was not the first to come, not the first ‘emissary’ from the Nawab. They had hesitated over the earlier incident, they had compromised. Boffe fingered his plans impatiently. That had been a mistake and it had been made at the leader’s insistence. The spy had been sent back. Changed certainly - Vaucanson had seen to that with his pincers and silver wire - but returned nonetheless with the little he had learned. Now his successor was here, knowing more than he should, a threat.

  ‘He is not to be touched,’ the leader reiterated. Le Mara gazed back steadily, then looked away, the order accepted. ‘The clerk too,’ he spoke abruptly.

  ‘The boy has met with him,’ Casterleigh addressed the leader, then went on to describe the meeting between Peppard and the object of their attentions. ‘The boy might be misled. Peppard knows more than he ever admitted.’ The memory of the Neagle scandal occupied all their thoughts. The risk was unacceptable.

  ‘If there is further contact, more than cursory contact,’ the leader spoke carefully to Le Mara, ‘then we must act finally.’ Le Mara nodded. Casterleigh watched as the compromise was reached. He would have imposed his wish without discussion. ‘The boy must be shielded from such people,’ the leader continued in paternal tones. ‘He is vulnerable, impressionable….’ Several of the men smiled. Casterleigh thought of Juliette.

  ‘Are we prepared for him?’ The question required no answer. From the shadows which masked his features, the leader searched the faces around the table.

  ‘The woman is prepared,’ Le Mara said. Casterleigh nodded in confirmation. He and Le Mara exchanged glances.

  ‘The Indian was there, when we took her, he saw….’

  ‘Not to be touched!’ The leader’s voice rasped harshly. The assembly fell silent. Boffe considered presenting his plan at this point, but the leader spoke again.

  ‘Our own friend brings better news….’ Casterleigh scowled. This was the part of the plan he most detested. The endless elaboration, subtleties, the sheer impracticality of it - all these rallied the doubts in his mind, but to bring in an outsider and place him at the very heart of it all, this struck at the root of things. Not just an outsider, but one seemingly without a past. Their best efforts had discovered nothing, nothing at all. They knew only what they saw, and he volunteered no more. The arrangement stank of haste and incaution. The leader saw mistrust written clearly on Casterleigh’s face as he told of the boy’s drunken mistakes, the evening’s chaos. Juliette’s name was mentioned. The incident raised smiles and the leader’s tone was almost affectionate.

  ‘… the girl will be kept safe for the moment. The resemblance will prove useful.’ Le Mara nodded assent at Rosalie’s reprieve. The account moved to the following day, Lemprière’s movements about the city, his visit, his resolution.

  ‘He will write the dictionary,’ the leader announced and perhaps there was a tinge of relief in his voice. The others looked up in approval at this fact. ‘Now, we can proceed …’ and Boffe knew his moment had come. ‘Two weeks from today, we shall plant a second demon in him,’ the leader continued. Boffe shuffled the papers before him, his plans.

  ‘Two weeks?’ Vaucanson queried. Boffe cleared his throat in readiness.

  ‘Yes,’ confirmed the leader, as Boffe rose at last to begin his peroration. ‘Christmas Eve.’

  The fortnight following Lemprière’s decision brought Septimus and several of his friends. Lemprière forgot his friend’s distraction at the coffee-house in the confusion and bustle of their arrival. They came singly, escorted by Septimus who grinned as he introduced them - men of varying use to the project.

  A Mister Stone undid his canvas sack to show Lemprière pieces of paper, little grubby scraps and larger sheets, all dog-eared, which he had scavenged and saved up over long years for just such an occasion.

  ‘To write on,’ explained Septimus. Mister Stone mumbled as he laid out the scraps and poked them about to display their best aspects.

  Two days later Septimus introduced Tom Cadell, bookseller. Mister Cadell spent an hour or more looking through the completed entries in Lemprière’s dictionary. He took snuff, and after scrutinising each sheet of paper would pick it up and flick it so that the loose grains floated invisibly to the floor. Every time thereafter that Lemprière sneezed in the room he would think of Mister Cadell.
<
br />   ‘You are a man of some learning,’ he addressed Lemprière, after he had replaced and degrained the last sheet. ‘I would be happy to buy your book, and sell it too.’ The ‘but’ implied by his ‘would’ grew huge in the silence that followed. ‘A touch more humanity,’ he said at length. ‘It must be readable above all. Your readers need the man as well as the work.’ Lemprière was baffled. ‘Bring a blush to their cheeks, a smile to their lips.’

  ‘Make them laugh?’ he said.

  ‘Make them pay,’ Mister Cadell said with finality. ‘I will be happy to buy, print and sell your book, Mister Lemprière,’ he said, and the two of them shook hands. It was agreed. Septimus would hammer out the fine points, and he gave a clenched fist salute behind Mister Cadell’s back as they both left.

  There followed Jeremy Trindle of the Porson Trindles, who offered to bring Lemprière the books he needed on loan and at a reasonable rate. It was an irregular arrangement, but he would do it for a friend. Septimus looked pleased with himself.