Lemprière's Dictionary

by Lawrence Norfolk

  They continued, man and boy, on their journey to Mister Rudge. People’s eyes were on him. He could feel it.

  ‘Farina!’ A shout out of the crowd and Sir John stiffened. A goad, a bait, and if he took it, retorted with a sharp ‘Come forward that man!’ and no-one came forward (no-one would) he would suddenly be a ludicrous figure, a fat blind man led by a boy on a piece of string, bellowing at embarrassed strangers. Restraint, huge restraint, silenced him. Farina was his enemy; also known as the second Wilkes, as the Liberty Man, the People’s Shield. A certain rogue, in Sir John’s opinion. He must not respond, not be a fat blind man. He would pull Farina off his orange crate in time. The voice had come from behind, which pleased him. There was a lurking suspicion amongst the rogues and trouble stirrers that Sir John’s blindness was feigned. It was almost superstitious; himself, the presiding bogeyman. Sir John did not discourage this belief. Farina was in the city, somewhere, popping his head up here and there, denouncing the things he had always denounced. A worthy opponent, but the dish he served was complex, overly spiced. There was the politics. It was not half so appetising as a murder. Too, Farina had the advantage of being loved by the people, which brought Sir John to the matter of Henry.

  Half-brother Henry had similarly held the magistracy at Bow Street. Sir John was respected almost universally. He held loyalties in some quarters, but he was not loved. Truth to tell, Henry had not been a good magistrate -executing Peulez under the Riot Act, dear me, a mistake - but still he had been loved. Why? Henry’s shadow fell over Sir John like an onerous example beneath which all his efforts fell short. Little brother John, the efficient one, the born lieutenant. He might have resented this, but life was short. In times of crisis he touched on it like a talisman: this situation, that situation brought it out like a losing advocate’s leading question, What would Henry have done? What would Henry have done?

  The boy had settled, his pattering footsteps coordinated more exactly with Sir John’s heavier gait. They were almost at Rudge’s and Sir John wondered what mystery it was the pathologist would serve up for him this morning.

  ‘Here, sir,’ said the boy.

  ‘Good lad.’ Sir John mounted the steps and entered the building. Strange chemical smells made his nostrils twitch.

  ‘Good morning, Sir John.’ Perse, Rudge’s assistant, a genius at scrubbing. ‘Mister Rudge is in the laboratorium, Sir John.’

  Laboratorium? ‘Thank you, Perse.’ Sir John had the boy wait and descended to the morgue.

  He enjoyed his encounters with Rudge. Rudge was methodical, his brain worked by cancellation. In another man it might have been called deduction, but Rudge was a plodder. In all the years of their acquaintance, everything the pathologist had said had been true. An extraordinary feat that, though it had to be said that Rudge’s utterances became increasingly pedestrian the further they were removed from the subject of dead bodies. He was a bachelor.

  ‘Sir John! Good morning to you.’ The morgue was a still, quiet place; a haven where all the violent flurries of death came to rest, thought Sir John.

  ‘Mister Rudge.’ There was a body on the table, he could smell it under the carbolic. He suffered himself to be led to the corpse.

  ‘Murder,’ said Mister Rudge. ‘A peculiar case, perhaps the most peculiar I have come across, Sir John.’ Peculiar: that meant violent, horrific, repulsive, obscene, bizarre, uncanny, any, some or all of these in Rudge’s limited lexicon. Most peculiar though. Their game was beginning.

  ‘She was brought in last night, the early hours.’ Sir John rested his hand gingerly on the corpse. ‘I have yet to open her,’ Rudge went on. The flesh was cold, colder than the room.

  ‘She was found outside.’

  ‘She was.’ First point to Sir John. He began with the feet, then the ankles which were swollen. Some sort of constriction, the skin was unbroken, rope perhaps. The legs were thick, a heavy-set woman. Sir John paused over the left thigh, which moved loosely when touched.

  ‘Broken?’ he asked.

  ‘Dislocated,’ said Rudge. ‘I have never come across it before.’ Sir John reached the stomach and felt the ragged edges of a huge wound. But Rudge had not opened her, and this was not knifework of any sort. It was a tearing, a ripping open. Then it came to him. The stomach had burst, and that meant heat, a great deal of heat. Sir John moved his hands quickly over the corpse’s skin. It was smooth, not burnt at all. Several ribs were fractured. Cold hard ridges of something seemed to be stuck to her sides and the flesh around these was puckered. Heat again. The ridges were made of some kind of metal and Sir John thought of outlandish jewellery, some whorish adornment. But Rudge would have already removed any such articles. His mind raced. Heat, metal…. No, it was too horrible. Not that he was squeamish, but it was too strange, too peculiar. He continued up the body.

  The rules of their diagnostic game allowed a certain latitude. Thus, Rudge, in the past had once presented him with a heart, just a heart, found in Poplar and brought to him amidst talk of ritual slaughter and Moorish practices, even grave-robbing. It had vexed Sir John, as he turned the clammy organ over in his hands, much to the amusement of Rudge who had later told him that the heart had indeed belonged to a victim of ritual slaughter. Specifically, a pig. On the other hand, Sir John had once walked in, spent a few seconds feeling the unnaturally constricted waist of a young woman, then announced that she had been killed by exhaustion and want of water brought about by her being tied by the waist to a doorknob so that she could neither sit nor lie, probably over a period of three to four days. Further, she had been found in the gully-hole, probably in Chick Lane or thereabouts and the murder had actually been committed some weeks before. He had not told Rudge that a Mister Rooker, tea dealer, had informed on the girl’s employers, her murderers, that very morning. Rudge had been impressed, and suspicious. It was an excellent contest, though grisly.

  His hands reached the woman’s shoulders. Both dislocated. Her struggles must have been very fierce. One of her eyes had come out. Sir John let the tips of his fingers run over the face, which was dotted with hard nodules of metal like smooth studs.

  ‘Her expression is violent?’ he queried.

  ‘Very violent,’ confirmed Mister Rudge.

  His early suspicion was coming true, nevertheless he started in shock when his fingers touched her mouth. Rudge would be smirking. The mouth was blocked, filled with the same cold metal which here protruded up like a stump rooted in her throat. Sir John took away his hands. He knew enough. Rudge passed him a cloth.

  ‘You were right,’ he said, wiping his hands. ‘Most peculiar. She was killed very horribly.’ He handed back the cloth. ‘Her mouth was held open. If you dig away the metal in her mouth you will probably find the device. Molten metal was poured into her mouth, a great quantity of it and from height. The splashes on her face.’ He made a gesture. ‘The metal boiled her innards, causing her stomach to burst. More, it burnt through her organs and skin from the inside out. There are traces on her sides. All the wounds would have been cauterised by the heat, thus no blood, am I correct?’

  ‘You are,’ said Rudge.

  ‘More than peculiar,’ Sir John went on. ‘Quite the most barbarous murder I have encountered. Her agonies….’ but he left that sentence unfinished.

  ‘There is more, a further puzzle,’ said Rudge. Sir John brought his head about, what more? ‘It is the metal used….’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Gold,’ said Mister Rudge. ‘This corpse is worth a small fortune.’

  Minutes later, Rudge was writing down the details of the corpse’s discovery at Sir John’s request.

  ‘Below Richmond?’

  ‘The De Veres’, a mile or so to the west of the house.’

  ‘How was she found?’

  ‘There was a ball. A guest went missing. The search party came across the corpse in a bog on the estate.’

  ‘She would not have been killed there.’

  ‘It seems that she was.’

&
nbsp; ‘The search party….’

  ‘I have a list. Edmund de Vere.’

  ‘The earl?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I knew his father, and mother. A formidable woman, though infirm nowadays.’

  ‘The earl then, Mister Warburton-Burleigh, a Mister Septimus Praeceps, Captains Pannell, Guardian and Stokeley, three serving-men and Viscount Casterleigh.’

  ‘Casterleigh eh? Odd company for him to be keeping.’ Sir John Fielding reviewed the list in his mind, but the corpse on the table pulled his attention away.

  ‘None of them knew who she was, so they said.’

  A dead woman. Gold. Both common enough, but combined like this they became something different. Like sulphur, saltpetre and charcoal. Sir John Fielding was filled with unease. And the woman was nameless. Public order was an instinct with him. He could feel disturbances welling up under the city’s surface already, shooting up in destructive jets. Gold in her mouth. What would Henry have done? Contain it, make it make sense. Farina built revolts out of such things, the mob trampling appeals to reason, torches in the street. No, not while he could put his stamp on the business. Not while the body politic numbered himself amongst its servants. A body stuffed with gold. He would not countenance it.

  ‘Mister Rudge?’

  ‘Sir John.’

  ‘Who besides ourselves know of this unfortunate’s death?’

  ‘The search party. I told them to keep silent, not to put the investigation in jeopardy.’

  ‘Good. I may speak to them myself. I believe there is a need for discretion, for secrecy not to put too fine a point on it. It is a horrible murder, bad enough and yet I fear more than that if it were known. A focus….’

  ‘I understand.’

  Rudge understood. Of course he did. Like himself, set off to the side of the crowd’s passions, with a perspective on them. Of course he understood.

  ‘For whom were they searching? De Vere and the others?’ he asked abruptly.

  ‘Rudge’s thoughts had been running along similar lines to Sir John’s. He was thrown momentarily. ‘It was mentioned. I wrote it down.’ He looked at his notes. ‘Lemprière,’ he said. ‘A Mister John Lemprière.’

  ‘Lemprière.’ Sir John echoed the name in an absent tone. ‘I may speak with Mister Lemprière too.’ He moved towards the stairs, troubled. Then suddenly he turned and spoke urgently. ‘Mister Rudge, tell no-one of this. Conceal the body. You have my authority.’ He paused, his anxieties gathering inside him. ‘Tell nobody Mister Rudge. Tell no-one at all.’

  III Paris

  TO PARIS, by pacquet-boat from Saint Helier to Saint Malo, by coach along the stages of the Normandy road, wheels clattering over a metalled surface rolled out of Trésaguet’s tripled-tiered genius and the corvée labour system like carpet through mile after mile of flat grey skies and avenues of plane trees and Lombardy poplars, with outriders making up an escort though no-one is encountered for leagues except capped and smocked peasants toting sickles and scythes for the late harvest who wave the mail through by reflex, grinning, waving, scything: Le Nain country.

  On, into the interior, Île de France, where the terrain becomes more intensely rural, pigs, cows, sheep, fields of sorrel shaking in the slight gusts that freshen the shallow slopes the road cuts through and clouds of chickens thrown up by the coach’s commotion tumbling about in the air, apple trees too and stunted vines pushing branches out of the earth like the arms of the dead, flat lawns and neglected parterres. It all helps, even the skies which are still lead-grey, even the peasants though they contribute less, scarcely looking up as the coach approaches the metropolis, their oppidan indifference is a sign meaning the city is not far off and a little later a purple-grey smudge up ahead on the horizon confirms this, four or five hours away at the most. It is late autumn.

  Inside the coach, the two passengers sensed its approach as it crept closer towards them, Paris, city of white plaster walls, leaning tenements and the Palais Royale where the two of them will later stroll and admire the treillage and horse chestnut trees, guess at the humbler structures which will turn out to be extraordinary, though in different ways, trumpet schools, a wallpaper factory, or an entrance to the catacombs which riddle the city guts with passages and channels, for the soil is very chalky and buildings have been known to disappear overnight, or even in broad daylight - it is a city of sudden collapses and rumours of collapse which turn out to be true. Streets run into each other like old friends penetrating one another’s motiveless disguises (later they realise they were sent by distant rival-monarchs to destroy one another), geometry can no longer account for the angles at which they meet but the bonus of constantly surprising and unexpected vistas which this non-plan implies is always around the next corner, always waiting, always deferred. Awful boredom hangs over the place like smoke and even if the fact that the city looks like it were dropped from a great height and shattered into a thousand pieces were true, this too, even this cataclysm, would be dull. The roads which converge on the city from all directions except the north-west and confirm it as the centre of attention do so from necessity, injecting provincial vigour and rough rural bonhomie without which it would grow confused and sluggish and eventually come to a complete halt with everyone frozen forever in place like Phineus and his men turned to stone at the wedding of Danae’s son. At some deep substratum of its soon-to-be collectivised subconscious the metropolis knows and resents this fact, metabolising it as hauteur. The arteries carrying in its life from the outlying districts constrict as they approach their goal, intensifying the commerce of coaches, wagons, cabriolets and post-chaises until they jostle and knock against each other, making their drivers ill-tempered in a frantic preparation for their syringing into the stone scab of the city itself. A rampart of refuse which the city voids and pushes out and which grows a little higher day by day rings the area, somehow investing it with the spurious allure of a walled garden in which, rumour has it, pale-looking young men might pay fruitless attentions to vicious Arabic beauties and neglected orange trees nevertheless bear fruit year after year after year, great rotten-ripe segments fall away from their mouths and everything could turn to dust around them, they would not care, nothing matters. Paris. City of lovers, which the coach has entered by the Rue de Sévre, its pace slowed to a walk by the drovers and carters. Juliette angled her head against the glass to watch the city as it lumbered towards them, its spires and rooftops drawing her eye this way and that until there was nothing but buildings all about them, the driver was passing through the toll gate and they were inching through streets crammed with flower sellers, letter writers, women selling pastries and men selling herrings spiced with vinegar and chives. The smell made her remember everything. The coach came to a halt in Rue Notre Dames des Victoires and she stepped onto the ground which became hard and real beneath her feet, crystallising into Paris, suddenly the city of her return.

  Behind her, the other passenger climbed out more slowly. They had been on the road from first light and now it was late in the afternoon. Jacques watched the girl as she strode about at the back of the coach gabbling in French, pulling the men this way and that as they unloaded the cases, hailing an open carriage. Her activity came in flurries, he had noticed, with periods of lethargy when nothing would animate her but a barked command. Casterleigh’s work, he thought, or the past encounters he had not witnessed and at which he could only guess. The journey from Jersey had exhausted him, though smooth enough compared to the last. He was growing tired of it, but this was the last time, if all went well.

  ‘Wait!’Jaques shouted across to the girl, who froze and looked back over her shoulder with the face of a thief. Casterleigh again. Leaving his stamp. Jaques pointed to the girl’s own case which still sat on the cobbles at the rear of the coach. Battered canvas, a cheap thing. She had hugged it to her all the way from Saint Helier, it had blue flowers painted on its side which were all but faded away.

  The house lay a quarter of a mile away, across the
Rue Montmartre in a court off the Rue du Bout du Monde. It was entered via a courtyard. The porte-cochère’s heavy gates were closed behind them as the carriage rolled through, a three-storey villa, plastered white with the lower windows protected by iron grilles set into the stonework. The footmen were waiting to unload the baggage. Stable lads unharnessed the horses. Inside, the maids curtseyed to Juliette before going about their business. A faint smell of dust hung in the air. She could hear pails and mops clattering somewhere out of sight. The house had lain empty and was now being opened for the two of them. Other than the servants they were the only occupants. Jaques had already disappeared. She was alone in the entrance hall with her cases and a footman who waited quietly at the foot of the staircase, the familiar scene, tens, perhaps hundreds of such halls, cool echoing interiors with alabaster columns and Japanned urns, intricate stucco work, and herself, waiting for the serving man who would fetch her upstairs in silence only broken by their footsteps.

  This time it was he who waited for her, but the silence was unchanged as she motioned him to guide her to her room where a maid stood in attendance, curtsied and began to unpack the cases. She clutched the canvas bag to her chest. High windows looked south, out over the city with its rooftops which looked like scales, the river and the spire of Notre Dame, until the detail was lost in distance and the onset of evening. Between her vantage point and the spire lay the Marché des Innocens, just beyond that the tangle of streets bounded by the Saint Denis highway and Quai de la Mégisserie. She might have reeled off every street in that quarter, every ally, court, even the nameless passages that connected some of the establishments with discreet back entrances onto the quieter thorough-fares. She knew them all, running through with her playmates who stank of the river, scabs on her knees and her hair cut like a boy’s, pretty even then. They had watched as the floods brought small boats crashing down the river and cheered as they splintered against the stones of the Pont Neuf. Her mother had cuffed her till she saw double but she had forgotten why, almost forgotten when. Almost forgotten Maman.