Lemprière's Dictionary

by Lawrence Norfolk

  ‘Thank you,’ said Lemprière, and, a day or two later ‘no thank you,’ following Lydia’s sideways look, an offer of unspecified services through the long winter nights. Septimus kissed her as she left, bringing a practised blush to her cheek.

  Lastly and most puzzling of all there was a non-descript fellow, tall, dressed for the times with brown or black hair, not so tall perhaps, but certainly not short and gaunt rather than full in the face although neither description wholly missed the mark. Septimus brought him in with a minimum of fanfare and at first said nothing at all. Lemprière looked at the man suspiciously.

  ‘Who are you?’ he asked at length.

  ‘This is Mister O’Tristero,’ said Septimus. There was a second long silence.

  ‘I am your rival,’ said Mister O’Tristero. That was the substance of all that was said.

  After he had gone, Lemprière turned to his friend for explanation. ‘Keep you on your toes,’ explained Septimus. He was particularly sprightly that day.

  ‘Do two more entries.’ He pointed to the manuscript already piling up on Lemprière’s desk. ‘Are these all signed and dated?’ He leafed through the sheets.

  ‘Signed? No.’

  ‘And dated. Sign and date every entry. That’s very important, do you understand? Sign and date everything, absolutely of the first importance.’

  ‘Certainly,’ agreed Lemprière.

  ‘Proof,’ Septimus said. ‘Cadell has no scruples about such things. Everything….’

  ‘Of course,’ said Lemprière.

  ‘Two more entries then, no more than that for the present. I will collect and deliver them the evening of Edmund’s ball. Do you have a costume?’

  But Lemprière had no memory of Edmund’s invitation, whispered over his reeling, drink-soaked head the night of the Pork Club two weeks back. It was there somewhere, in the whirl of shining faces, chandeliers, the goose, the girl who was and was not Juliette, the drink, victory and the teeming rain - somewhere beyond recollection. He had no idea what Septimus was talking about.

  ‘Costume?’ Septimus explained that they had both been invited, along with most of the Pork Club and many others, men and women, young and old. They were expected. The De Veres’ seasonal gathering was an occasion, even if it had fallen off a little in recent years.

  ‘But where is it, and when?’ demanded Lemprière.

  ‘They have a pile in Richmond,’ Septimus told him as he moved through the door. He was late.

  ‘Be ready at three.’ He was clumping down the stairs.

  ‘But when? What day?’ Lemprière called after him.

  ‘Three days from now,’ Septimus shouted back. ‘Christmas Eve!’ And he was gone.

  Lemprière sat down at his desk and took in the news. Already he was apprehensive. He knew no-one, or almost no-one. He would be expected to dress his part, and he did not know what that part should be. Most of all, he wondered why he had been invited at all.

  The street noise drifted up chaotically, but he was used to it now. When he wrote, he heard nothing. The earl, as he recalled, had seemed approachable. A little drunk, perhaps…. And hardly forthcoming. Perhaps he was wrong. None of his questions would find answers before Monday in any case. Monday was Christmas Eve.

  Lemprière looked now at the pages piled before him, his dictionary - at least the beginnings of it. He took up the first page, with its competent “A” scrawled at the top. “Aaras’sus, a city of Pisidia.” It was difficult, sometimes, to imagine anyone even interested in such facts, let alone making them laugh or cry. “It is probably the Ariasis of Ptolemy,” he had added. So it was. Who cared? The answer to that was that he cared. It was all whirling around inside him, he had to care. He wrote his name carefully beneath the entry and dated it, “twenty-first day of December, 1787.” After his decision to start the book, after his parting with Septimus, who had been very odd at the end, Lemprière had returned and begun work immediately. The coffee he had drunk made him tireless and nervy. He wrote through the night and took to his bed at dawn, glass-eyed and aching from the head down. After that, he tried to write during the hours of daylight only, but his sleep, which had always been regular, began to choose its own times and occasions. He would take three hours at mid-day, and another four sometime after midnight. Or he would wake and sleep, two hours at a time, or not sleep at all for a day or a night and a day. Then sleep for an age. It felt unnatural. More and more of his waking hours were spent at night and several of Septimus’s visits had found him sound asleep in his bed or slumped on his desk. It was as if his dictionary preferred to be written at night, and this made obscure sense to Lemprière, anxious about it but with little choice in the matter. He had worked on for two weeks, put up with Septimus’ interruptions and the results of his efforts were here before him: thirty-eight closely written leaves, full of holes and errors which he would later have to plug and correct, from Aaras’sus in Pisidia to Cyzicus in the sea of Marmora.

  Now he sat signing and dating, signing and dating like an automaton as the results of his efforts brought back their old antagonisms and fragile graces; the stories, characters and places revisited upon him over the fortnight past and Actaeon especially which was no surprise to him, nor his own dread of it, the dogs and the prone figure as his pen scurried quickly over the candid paper, “John Lemprière, twenty-first day of December, 1787.” There. He had put his name to it, and though when he shut his eyes and let his mind go blank it was the same louring bank of cloud moving above, the corpse his father underneath, he felt the truth of what Kalkbrenner had said. To write it all down, write it out of himself; that was his task, and now the true nature of what that meant was becoming clear. The early optimism of his excited walk from the coffee-shop, already anticipating and planning ahead, had all but evaporated and been replaced by something harder and more durable, determination perhaps, for the work was to prove harder than he thought, more involved and in ways he had not imagined. What began, only a fortnight ago, as a simple list of persons, places and events had since grown strangely, with odd nodules and tendrils sprouting in all directions and linking up with each other to form loops and lattices, the whole thing wriggling under his nib like a mess of worms on a pin. It looked in all directions, spoke scrambled languages and made wild faces at him, an Argus-eyed, Babel-tongued, Chimera-headed catalogue of all the true things that had turned to dreams and the men who had turned to their dreamers. All dead now. “John Lemprière, twenty-first day of December 1787”. Again.

  Even this early, the dictionary had become its own beast, with little twitchings of life carrying out their own commerce, quite apparent to him as he worked steadily, tediously through the entries. Reappearances by major and minor characters folded the story back on itself, places recurred, accruing and expending significance, events paralleled one another. It was a serpentine thing, hardly a list at all. Lemprière paused over his entry on Acrisius, the ill-omened grandfather who had met his appointed death at Larissa, who had shut his grandson in a chest and his daughter too, the vessel of his destruction in a vessel of her own (for which vid. Danae) but they had survived, returned to Argos, and the boy had joined the list: Adrastus, ally of Theseus, Ægisthus, lover of Clytemnestra and Agenor, father of Crotopus - kings of Argos as he Perseus would be, Lemprière’s alter-ego in the Pork Club mime, his Persiad of errors. Perseus had rescued Andromeda (“John Lemprière, twenty-first of December, 1787”), married her with the blessings of Cepheus and thanks of his wife Cassiopeia, and Argos had called him back. Argos, city of altars and usurpations, Admeta’s to Juno and Danaeus of Galenor, whence perhaps the name Danae. He did not know. It was for Admeta that Chiron’s pupil brought back Hippolyte’s girdle and it was he again, Augeus’ stable boy who brought Alceste back from the regions of hell, who caused Charon’s year long confinement and tamed Cerberus, the triple-headed dog. And Alceste was to marry Admetus who won her with a chariot given him by exiled Apollo his shepherd and ward of sorts…. Admetus, Admeta. Danaeus, Danae.r />
  As Lemprière had written he had, from time to time, stepped back and seen accidents and coincidences join lazily to form stories that twisted, broke up and formed new, yet more bizarre chains of circumstance. The whole of his effort shifted. With the Acheron at his back, Antaeus’ killer defied the judges of hell, Æacus amongst them who was conceived by Ægina after Jupiter took her in the guise of a tongue of flame, reminding Lemprière of Danae once more, and the same hero Alcmena’s son (Buphagus as the Argonauts called their gluttonous friend) broke off one of Achelous’ horns, the river god who fought him as a serpent, then an ox, then a one-horned ox for the horn was given to Copia to fill with grain and Lemprière grew further confused as Jupiter took a horn from Amalthea, the goat who suckled him, and gave it to the nymphs. A second Cornucopia, or the same one somehow, Lemprière puzzled. And did it have anything to do with Agrotera, the goat sacrifice at Athens, so lavish it caused famines? Probably not, he thought, and signed “Agrotera” as the rest, then dated it “twenty-first day of December 1787” again. Perhaps he needed an amanuensis. Talk of horns reminded him of Electryon, though he had yet to reach E, who was Alcmene’s father, and grandfather of her twins, conceived through her husband and another, Jupiter again over three nights (her triple moon sign admitting as much) whose efforts produced Achelous’ slayer himself, him again but…. Horns, yes. Electryon had been killed by horns (the Ceraton was a temple made entirely from antlers), cow horns on the cows which Amphitryon gave him and herded for him to the extent of throwing missiles at one which strayed until the missile rebounded from its horns to Electryon’s skull with such force that it killed him. And Amphitryon became king of Argos with Alcmene as his bride. And, of course, Electryon was the son of Andromeda, and his grandmother the woman who had floated on the middle sea, imprisoned in Acrisius’ chest until washed up in the Cyclades: Danae, again. Somehow she seemed to Lemprière to be at the centre of things, though his dictionary had yet to reach her. Danae.

  Electryon’s death seemed the most unlikely of all to Lemprière, until he remembered Æschylus, killed by a blow to the head from a tortoise dropped by a passing eagle, and then Capaneus’ celebrated opinion that a good Cappadocian orator was as common as a flying tortoise. Unfortunate perhaps, but Capaneus had invented the siege and there were monuments enough to that: Carthage with Cato baying for destruction in the Senate, Babylon with its hundred gates of bronze and walls two hundred cubits high cemented with bitumen and, greatest of all, Alexandria where the books burned.… A clatter on the stairs outside his door. The tailor. He had yet to set eyes on the man. Lemprière returned to the drudgery of signing and dating the work he had completed.

  Over the following two days he checked the pages carefully and found time to write a further two entries as instructed. He was not surprised to find that the name left after these labours, hanging over the page, the entry which would have been his third had he written it, was that of Danae.

  ‘Move over Lydia, that’s it.’ Lemprière squeezed onto the seat.

  ‘Spectacles!’ Walter Warburton-Burleigh seemed delighted to see him. The Pug sniggered. They were sitting opposite him in the coach. It was almost four, Christmas Eve and the light was failing. Walter went on. ‘Rosalie sends her regards.’ Septimus clambered in, slammed the door and banged on the woodwork.

  ‘That’s enough,’ he said shortly and the coach set off.

  ‘She brought them in person,’ Lemprière declared in an affected tone. Only Septimus had the good grace not to look amazed, knowing for certain it was untrue.

  ‘So where is she?’ demanded the Pug aggressively.

  ‘That’s enough,’ Septimus said again. Warburton-Burleigh smiled to himself. ‘She disappeared, you know? Saturday last. I came around and she was gone. Got you a souvenir though, and he reached into his pocket. It was one of the anklets. Lemprière saw leather and turquoise, her white ankles tied to the bed.

  ‘Where was she lodging?’ Walter questioned him. Lemprière said something dismissive, Lydia looked sharply at him and he felt he had betrayed the girl in some way. Sisters in arms. Where had she gone? On his other side, Septimus said something about her legs and Lydia laughed suddenly as if trying not to. The atmosphere grew more friendly. The Pug lit a pipe and puffed odorously until Warburton-Burleigh snatched it from him quickly and threw it out the window. After a very short discussion the coach was stopped and they all got out to look for the thing. No-one was sure if it was still alight or not. Septimus claimed that he would be able to find it by smell alone. The city was some miles behind them and the sky was overcast. It was almost dark. They separated and scrabbled about in the road for some minutes. It had snowed the previous night. The fall still filled the ditches on either side of the road and lay on the fields beyond like surf at night, pale and faintly luminous, somehow misplaced. Several roads were still blocked and the mail was late. They were fortunate to find the turnpike clear. Lemprière could see nothing.

  ‘John.’ He turned. It was Lydia. ‘Have you found it?’ he asked.

  ‘No, listen. Did Rosalie truly visit you?’

  ‘Of course, why on earth would I say …’ but then he saw her expression, which was serious. There was a pause.

  ‘No,’ he said quietly, then ‘sorry’ and it was understood by both of them that this was for the earlier comment, not the lie.

  ‘She was dragged off by someone. Strange voice,’ Lydia said. ‘Bet and Karin knew something about it, but they have disappeared too. It’s not my loss, but still….’

  ‘Bet and Karin?’

  ‘Ah ha!’ from further down the road.

  ‘Dressed in blue….’

  ‘Yes….’ And he had seen one of them too, outside the coffee shop, strangely. But no Rosalie. He told Lydia as much.

  ‘Of course, and no matter …’ she began, but the Pug was bellowing that he had found it, that it was broken and Warburton-Burleigh was the son of a whore. They returned to the coach and the journey continued with the Pug in a sulk. He would emerge from it periodically. Warburton-Burleigh would wave the broken pipe about and the Pug would submerge once more. It was amusement of sorts. Lemprière’s apprehension grew as they drew nearer the De Veres’. He was wearing a new frock coat and cloak provided by Septimus earlier that day, a loan.

  ‘Very good,’ Septimus had said when he had tried it on, and the same thing as he had leafed through the completed sheets of the dictionary. Their collection had been his main business. ‘Danae?’ He had been reading the final page.

  ‘Not yet….’ Lemprière was ready to reprise Septimus’ earlier instructions in explanation, but was cut short.

  ‘Good, good …’ from Septimus. It had been very business-like. No trace of the puzzling vagueness when they had parted company at the coffee shop.

  ‘So who will be there, I mean, exactly?’ Lemprière asked brightly during a lull in the talk. But the coach jolted violently and when all had righted themselves the question was forgotten. He had to ask again.

  ‘Everyone,’ Septimus told him. ‘Teddy’s friends and acquaintances, his mother’s.’ Septimus caught the need for reassurance in Lemprière’s silence.

  ‘There is usually music, eating of course and a display of some sort….’

  ‘Fireworks,’ added the Pug. Lemprière nodded.

  ‘Then there’s the meat,’ said Walter Warburton-Burleigh. Lydia sighed theatrically. ‘Fat girls whose paters own things up north.’

  ‘The late earl had shipping interests, lots of old sea men, Company boys,’ Septimus went on. ‘Military types … Teddy knows them all. His mother packs the place with widows and dowagers, but they bring their own friends. Strange mixture truly; I noticed Dundas last year….’

  ‘Dullest man in England,’ interjected Warburton-Burleigh.

  ‘… and Byrne, Byrne was there, who else?’

  ‘Chadwick?’

  ‘Not this year,’ said the Pug. ‘He died.’ Lemprière looked up in surprise at the name of his father’s old solicit
or.

  ‘And that creepy little fellow, said nothing the whole evening….’ Walter Warburton-Burleigh tried to recall a name.

  ‘Who was he with?’ asked Septimus.

  ‘Alone I believe, no, no he was with Croesus.’

  ‘Croesus?’ Lemprière was being startled from several directions by the exchange.

  ‘As in rich as.’

  ‘Viscount Casterleigh,’ Septimus deciphered, taking a look at his friend. Casterleigh.

  ‘And the Pork Club,’ Warburton-Burleigh shouted.

  ‘Oink!’ Septimus and the Pug shouted back, raising an imaginary toast.

  ‘Everyone,’ Lydia said in conclusion to this.

  ‘Of course! You would know Casterleigh. His Jersey house….’ Septimus said suddenly to Lemprière, who was sitting back with his face tight and expressionless, Casterleigh’s name and Juliette already rising in his thoughts but he had time also to think of his drunken confession on the bridge in the rain. He had not mentioned Casterleigh to Septimus after all, nor his daughter. A sort of relief flooded privately through him.

  ‘Yes, yes! I know the man,’ he admitted readily and explained about his role in the library on Jersey. Warburton-Burleigh looked at him with renewed interest.

  ‘Naturally you were introduced to his daughter?’ he questioned slyly. Lemprière thought for a moment, he was giving nothing away.

  ‘Naturally,’ he agreed.

  ‘Ah ha,’ said Warburton-Burleigh shortly and Lemprière saw from the expressions on his companions’ faces that he was flatly disbelieved. He protested, describing her in persuasive detail, her manners and habitual gestures, all of it etched indelibly in his memory.

  ‘We’ve all seen her,’ said the Pug.

  ‘He guards her like Acrisius,’ added Septimus. Lemprière looked sharply at him.

  ‘Think what you will,’ he said. And abruptly he hardly cared whether they believed him or not. She might be present that evening. The prospect already raced in his brain. His companions were forgotten. He could see lights in the darkness beyond the window, spelling Juliette, Juliette perhaps.