Lemprière's Dictionary

by Lawrence Norfolk

  ‘John,’ said Lemprière, ‘not Charles. My father died, some months ago….’ The face above took on an expression of deep regret.

  ‘Your father knew more about the western coast of France than any man alive,’ Guardian said warmly. ‘We corresponded, you know? Charles dead. I am truly sorry young man.’ His face grew sorrowful.

  ‘How is your hand?’ Lemprière changed tack.

  ‘Hand? Oh, very well, I suppose. All rather embarrassing. It was the ship that did it, the Falmouth, or Vendragon. She’s moored a little below my house, but that’s a long story. Listen, we shall talk further. I have letters of your father’s and a book he needed in his studies. Everything he asked had a purpose.’ Lemprière’s neck was going stiff from looking up at Captain Guardian.

  ‘We could meet at the front of the house,’ he suggested.

  ‘Excellent,’ Guardian replied. ‘Until then, then.’ His head disappeared, Lemprière heard his feet move towards the door and the door slam shut. He looked about him. then he remembered he was lost.

  An hour later, an hour made up of minutes which stretched like long, pointless corridors, returning Lemprière to places he had left only moments before, he had grown heartily sick of the sprawling pile the De Veres called home. Passages: as fast as he eliminated them, the house seemed to grow new ones, with rows of suites leading to enfilades, which led to further suites and more possibilities and so on until he stood finally in a large empty room which might have been on any one of three floors as far as he knew and cursed Septimus for dragging him here against his will like this, damn him.

  ‘John?’ Septimus? From beyond the door opposite. And footsteps. He heard footsteps.

  ‘Septimus?’ Through the door, an identical room, with an identical door, which was closing as he entered.

  ‘Septimus!’ He ran across and pulled it open to reveal yet another room, but this one was different, more like a short corridor and the door led directly outside. It had been left open. He had reached the back of the house. Where on earth did Septimus think he was going? The snow had banked up against the door whose opening had pushed it back in a perfect semi-circle. Lemprière saw footprints stamped in the crisp fall, leading away across the flat area of the lawn.

  ‘Septimus!’ he shouted once more, but there was no reply. Lemprière stepped outside and began to follow the footprints. The snow crunched under his feet and the light from the doorway faded rapidly making the task of following the trail more difficult. The footprints themselves grew ill-defined, lighter and a few paces later they could not be seen at all. Lemprière found himself staring at a perfectly even blanket of snow as if his quarry had been winched clear from above. Impossible. There was nothing for it but to return and this he did only to find the door was closed. And locked. He had heard nothing. An over-officious servant, or perhaps he had missed Septimus in the pale gloom behind him and his friend was now inside, wondering where he, Lemprière, had got to. Accordingly, Lemprière hammered on the door and shouted, but there was no reply. It was rather cold. Assignations piled up in his mind: Septimus and the others, Guardian, Casterleigh, and he speculated absurdly that the house itself had grown dimly conscious and was now rejecting him, like some foreign body that must be expelled. He knew where he was; the back of the house. It would be a simple matter to walk around to the front and enter as before. The fireworks might still be in progress. Everyone would be outside. Lydia, the Pug, Walter and the rest. Juliette.

  With the door closed the whole house seemed dark, and its jumbled perspectives merging in the gloom seemed even more confused than before. The snow-covered lawn stretched out in front enclosed by neatly clipped box hedges. He thought, keep the house to the right, and then set off on his trek through the white landscape.

  As Lemprière’s eyes adjusted to the darkness, it seemed the snow itself gave off a very faint light, each flake locked in its own tiny ice-cage to produce miniscule glimmers. The scene was very quiet, apart from Lemprière’s boots which squeaked as they sank in the snow and a low rustling sound, branches rubbing together somewhere out of sight. The snow covered everything. Lawn, hedge, stone ornaments, topiary trees. Paths lined with the same high hedges ran off every few yards to left and right and Lemprière took one which ran, as he imagined, parallel to the side of the house. The house itself was lost to view.

  The night air hung between the hedges thick with damp. The path swung Lemprière out in a tangent, away from a destination that he now imagined ringed with faces; reds, blues and greens in the firework-light. The garden was silent. Lemprière listened to the noise his feet made as they scrunched the snow, attempting various leaps and specially angled hops to produce slightly different sounds. A bizarre trail stretched away at his back. Ahead of him the path funnelled out. The ordered lines of the formal garden were giving out, the neatly clipped hedges becoming more shaggy. Not even the snow could conceal it, no longer a smooth blanket as the broken ground beneath puckered and rucked up, rejecting the past violence of gardeners, improvers, projectors, believers in the ideal of extent. Little ridges snaked off like questions claire et distincte? claire et distincte? off into a wild, non-Euclidean yonder.

  Lost in his snow-music, Lemprière only looked up when his feet drew discordant clumps from the frozen ground. The covering of snow had thinned. It was dark. The house was invisible. There was the line of the hedge perhaps, behind him, but the night pulled the ground up like a sheet all around and he found himself staring into walls of silent white which sloped away from him up into the sky. Like limbo, he thought, or the paradise of the Persians. Pairidaeo: an enclosure. But Alice de Vere had told him the land fell away from the house. He must have walked in a wide semi-circle, his constant margin of error first taking him away, then turning and bringing him back along the same lucky parabola. As he looked ahead, the white slope grew in substance until he saw it extend away to either side, a long low hump beyond which would be the house. But the ground began to slope downwards in a gentle incline which was only interrupted by a straggling ditch which Lemprière scrambled down and then up without difficulty. The low white hump grew nearer, and extended back further. The going grew rougher and Lemprière had to place his feet more deliberately to avoid low snow-covered shrubs. He began to hop from tussock to tussock, a new game, then struggled through a cordon of juniper-scrub which encircled the white promontory. It was not a hill. It was trees, preceded by low bushes and saplings on which the snow had settled in a deceitful white canopy, suggesting ground actually lying some feet, or yards, or many yards below. Lemprière forced a path through a patch of dead elder which rose in height about him, as though he were wading into a lake of white powder. His waist, chest, then finally his head were swallowed up until he found himself beneath the canopy.

  Densely tangled upper-branches held the snow suspended above like the roof of a tent. Beneath it, the woodland dripped with life. Wild hawthorn caught against his legs and the trunks of invading beech trees reached up, splitting and proliferating into a mat of branch work high above as though the snow had been peeled off the earth leaving these filaments and threads to mark its earlier adhesion. Great boles swelled out of the trunks. The ground steamed as Lemprière’s feet crunched, crashed then squelched in a mulch of decaying grasses, rotten leaves and branches. A slow combustion seemed to be taking place all around him. Stinking Hellebore, dropwort and henbane surrendered to more virulent life forms. The forest-floor detritus piled up in small, potent volcanoes of steaming compost. Large drops of water formed from condensation fell from somewhere high up in the branches onto the slithery ground. The snow above him seemed to have taken on an orange tinge and the land’s incline was still taking him down. The ground itself was becoming even more squelchy than before, wetter, less pungent, and Lemprière found himself dodging large stagnant puddles. The wood was changing in character, becoming colder and quieter, less secretly active. The trees here were stunted oaks and hazels which had fallen at crazy angles against one another; some were s
tanding, some not but they were all dead in the water which, the occasional gurgle of marsh gas aside, lay in still black pools. Lemprière’s feet were soaked through before he realised that he must be in the flooded pasture to the west of the house. Alice de Vere had not mentioned a century and a half of undergrowth. Obviously it had not been cleared since the fourth earl’s day and Lemprière wondered if she knew. He had gone wrong. He should turn back.

  But he did not turn back, he went on, thinking to emerge on the other side and skirt the forest, back towards the house which must lie at his back, or to either side, or even before him. Just conceivably, yes, for the orange tinge to the snow-canopy was growing stronger the further he advanced.

  There was his cussedness too, and the recent memory of other disjuncted journeys: his country-boy helplessness amidst the barrow boys and fish wives of London when he had first arrived, subsequent meek acquiescence to Septimus’ determined forays through those same streets and at the back of both a path which had led him to the pool above Blanche Pierre on Jersey, but no further. Then, he had not gone on. He had watched like a coward as the story he had read and imagined and brought out and made flesh had unfolded its violence on the twitching corpse who was once his father. Go on, that scene said. Go further.

  The bog was deeper, the dead undergrowth even thicker, but he plunged ahead through it all. The orange glow grew less diffuse and he could hear something, a faint roaring sound. He was streaked with muddy black water which his efforts had thrown up. So many things unanswered, unfinished, meetings yet to take place. He was revisited by his earlier thought: cold, alone, frightened he wished fervently he were back at his desk and the empty page was before him again, headed “Danae”. Below her name the blank page: immaculate as alabaster, or flesh, or the snow field itself. Then his spidery handwriting would put the story down in a mass of tiny black stitches. Danae, in her brazen tower, or pit as Apollodorus had it. Danae, visited by the violence of Zeus, disguised as a shower of gold.

  The orange glow was closer now, a fat diffuse pillar rising out of the ground. The roaring sound had stopped. He splashed closer, walking faster now, wading through the pools and straddling the fallen tree limbs until he noticed the substance of the colour was a kind of mist and it was more yellow than orange. Lemprière almost tripped on a submerged root, righted himself, pulled aside a rotten curtain of ivy, then saw the source of the strange light.

  It was sunk into the ground; a hole, three or four yards across. The waterlogged ground should fall into it, but it did not. The orange-yellow glow was coming from the hole in the ground, a neatly cut circle whose perfection seemed to contradict the decaying logic of the surrounding terrain. It was something that did not belong. His mouth was dry. He knew he would look. The legs which walked to the edge did not seem his own, nor the eyes which looked down. He saw the dull gleam of bronze, and in the pit, a woman. He felt hot. The blue satin dress was in shreds, remembered now from the Pork Club and the street outside the coffee shop. There were things holding her there in the pit, and something in her mouth. A metal ring holding her mouth open. Her eyes were worst, looking past him to something above. Then a roaring sound was in his ears and he looked up suddenly, following her gaze, to see the huge black shape swing over and down out of the black sky and open and the sky was not black but full of light. The heat was in his face, the yellow blur so bright it blinded him to everything else as it hissed past him, a cascade of molten metal down into the pit. Gold. His ears heard flesh crackle; his eyes saw her struggle, her limbs thrashed like a doll’s as the scalding gold fell. Not his eyes. Not his ears. How could she scream like that? Her mouth was filled, her throat. How? His limbs flailed through the marsh before he realised the screams were his own and he could not stop them. Already, his fears were spreading and extending into the wider context. The jailers will come, lock you up. He heard her stomach burst? She was alive for a long time. Lock you up. Little drops of gold like torches moved in a cluster, miles away. He ran forward. The night was a black mouth huge enough for them all. The woman was already dead, burned miles and miles away. Little drops of gold. Lock you up. Bright drops of golden light like fireworks and torches miles behind him as he fled into the night.

  The search party was beginning to lose heart when the shouting was heard. A high wailing sound distorted somehow as though the night air were overloaded and there were certain sounds it would no longer carry. Septimus pricked his ears. ‘Over there.’ He pointed to their left.

  The earl groaned. ‘It’s a bog,’ he said. The band dutifully turned and trudged towards the source of the noise. Flames from their torches flickered in the damp air.

  ‘He said we should meet at the front. Could he truly have wandered all the way out here?’ Guardian’s feet were wet through, his mind on the Falmouth.

  ‘Yes,’ said Septimus, ‘he could.’ They fanned out and, as the earl predicted, quickly found themselves splashing through the sodden west pasture. The shouting had stopped and the searchers moved quietly. The only sound was their feet as they advanced through the wet. They spread out further then one of them said, ‘Oh,’ as if slightly taken aback by something. The others moved towards him and gathered around. Together they looked down into the pit.

  ‘Merciful God,’ said Captain Guardian. The large man at the back of the group was the only one not to peer down. There was a long silence. The earl broke it.

  ‘We shall return to the house,’ he said. It seemed the right decision. He turned to the large man next to him.

  ‘It was good of you to help, Viscount,’ he said. The man moved forward and looked down at the body.

  ‘Not at all,’ said Casterleigh. He looked about him at the faces, red and yellow in the torchlight. ‘Who could do a thing such as this?’ No-one answered.

  He moved left, then right, then left again. Snow on the high ground was thinner. He stumbled and fell, crawled forward, got up, fell again. He moved but without towards or from. Seen close, his breath came quickly. All around, the snow lay quietly on the ground.

  Lemprière’s lungs burned from the cold air. His face still felt hot. He had no idea where he was. He had run, and he had lain here. For how long? Presently, he got up and began to walk. His own footsteps seemed alien to him, the way his legs moved. He went on, he might walk forever on and on like this. He reached for the miniature of his mother, but it was in his own coat. This was the borrowed one. Finding it missing somehow filled him with dread. No-one knew he was here. No-one would know to look. And if they did look, did find him, he would run. If he stopped, he would freeze. His footprints stretched away into the dark.

  Some time later he began to shiver. His head felt larger than it should. His hands too. He began to stomp his feet and the noise cheered him. No going back, Lemprière dragged himself forward feeling the cold creep into his bones. He wondered how cold he would get before ceasing to feel it. He had collided with something. The clouds had lowered, become mist. A fence post. He climbed over, then his ears caught a sound, a dim pounding ahead of him. Lemprière moved forward, still listening, then heard a second sound beneath the first which he recognised. Wheels. The pounding was horses. A coach was moving towards him. For a moment, he saw nothing. Then it was there, a black shape, thirty, forty yards in front of him to his left, moving fast over the road. Lemprière ran forward as a black coach drawn by four snorting horses thundered suddenly out of the fog. He would not be seen, faster. He was shouting. The coach was heading straight towards him, its steel-rimmed wheels were almost on him. But it was not going to stop.

  He hammered at the doors with the palms of his hands and a white face rose up within the black interior, framed in the glass of the window as the coach sped past. Lemprière let his hands drop and stood gazing, panting, open-mouthed at the coach until it was swallowed up again by the night and the mist, leaving him alone on the road with the image of the face only inches from his as it was pulled back into the dark, lost to him. The coach was gone. Juliette’s face.

&n
bsp; Sir John Fielding, portly and bandaged, stepped out on Christmas morning at the insistence of Mister Rudge. Immediately his guide-boy was running ahead.

  ‘Cease!’ he roared, and gave the string a sharp tug.

  ‘S’John.’ The boy’s tones were sheepish. He would be tugging his cap. Sheepish boy, but better than the last, who deserved hoisting. Church bells were ringing. The streets would be crowded. He sensed bustle and adjusted the bandage which covered his eyes.

  ‘On!’ he commanded, and the two of them continued. He heard snatches of conversation, odd words, noises, the usual urban hum and Sir John pricked his ears. His old enemy was in town - he had reports - stirring up trouble from the top of an orange crate, agitating, misrepresenting the great and the good and, more dangerously, the not so good. Sir John could feel him in the streets, in the growing complaints, harangues against imports or the Company or both, an undertone of dissatisfaction that would boil up, bringing street robbers, highwaymen, shoplifters, card sharps, cheats, pickpockets and pilferers of all kinds out of their kennels and rookeries to disturb the good order which was his business. Sir John was the magistrate at Bow Street, the blind beak they called him behind his back and other names. He knew them all and forgot nothing. A grinding sound. ‘Gyp!’ he bellowed across the street.

  ‘Sir John.’ Yes it was Gyp. Another sheepish fellow. He had questioned Gyp over the Healey case and disliked him. Too clever for a knife-grinder, too clever by half.

  ‘Honest trade, Gyp!’ he injuncted the man before moving on. Nasty piece of work. Sir John preferred an out and out rogue, a proper scamp. There was a part of him loved a murderer. Thieving brought the venal out of folk, victim and guilty alike. But a murder, a murder had clarity. It made sense. Murder presented itself as a puzzle begging solution. His forensic powers were famed, he knew this. (He could after all recognise every lawbreaker unlucky enough to cross his path by voice alone.) But fame was garnish. It was the process of solution he relished. There was the body, or the report, a witness or two, or not, and out of that he was supposed to draw motive, means and murderer, all three. He did it too, slowly drawing in the threads, clipping off irrelevances, red herrings and outright lies until some otherwise undistinguished wretch stood before him invested with a black aura that, at the last was of his, Sir John’s, own fabrication. Then he would hang the man. A waste really, but there was nothing Sir John relished more than a murder. Even a horrid one. Even an insoluble one come to that. It was almost like coitus. No, that was wrong, but innocent and vicious pleasures were commingled in it. Sir John took no pleasure in death. It was a frightening and nasty business, his business. He would have it no other way.