Lemprière's Dictionary

by Lawrence Norfolk

  He had walked the few yards to Stonecutter Lane, which was almost deserted: two basket women, a gang of children and two more distant figures beyond them, all looking the other way as he slipped quickly through the coal-hatch, except that one of the two distant figures looked about as he slid into the darkened cellar and Nazim’s last glimpse of the afternoon sun was its reflection glinting off something on the figure’s face, off something which must have been a pair of eye-glasses.

  The new year came and this incident apart, the routine was as dreary as before. Le Mara’s area had narrowed to focus on the streets below Chequer Alley to the east of Germey Row, principally Blue Anchor Lane. The assassin was waiting and watching for something or someone and, as Nazim was forced to do the same, he sensed the long accumulation of minutes and hours that the other would be taking on, a slow build up towards some conclusive act. He was eager for it, even though it was not his, waiting and watching.

  The weeks went by. By the middle of January, Nazim believed he knew the object of Le Mara’s interest: a short man, less than five feet tall. He rented rooms in Blue Anchor Lane. The man would depart before seven each morning, and return at about the same hour in the evening. Where he went, or what he did between these hours, was a mystery to Nazim, though not, he presumed, to Le Mara. Perhaps other agents were engaged to track him during the day, but the arrangement seemed a loose one. And why was Le Mara waiting? He could finish it now if he wished. He was waiting for some other event, something more, something else that Nazim did not know.

  And so the three-cornered vigil went on; the short man watched by Le Mara, Le Mara watched by Nazim. Cool evenings and cold nights, long days of rain or shine, the days trooped on one after another uniform and eventless. Nazim would sometimes find himself exhausted, barred from direct entrance to the cellar in Stonecutter Lane by the early morning crowds who filled the street leading to Fleet Market. Then, he would gain entry to the house by the exposed back entrance, chancing an encounter with the woman who still squatted in the rooms above, alone now, abandoned by her friend it seemed.

  His nights in the cellar were silent receptions for wilder flights and imaginings. His quarry would visit him in these hours in disguise: as the winged Lemprière or the horned Lemprière, the submarine or subterranean Lemprière. But his most vivid dreams were still of Bahadur whose face pressed against his own through the hours of broken sleep. As before they would walk on the red cliff. They were silhouettes against a huge blue sky. Their shadows were blacker than black on the ground at their backs. The sun glared down. Strange gliding motions from the machine. They would continue until the scrubby terrain at the foot of the cliffs became the white stones he remembered more clearly. White stones, and Bahadur’s hand about his arm. They were talking and soon the three words he dreaded would come and then, then they would rock back and forth on the brink of the cliff. He would feel the pores of his skin squeezing out beads of sweat and he would see that Bahadur’s face was dry. Back and forth, rocking back and forth. His eyes were twitching under their lids. Like a pendulum … change inside. His face was wet. Bahadur became a child, a doll, a tiny struggling thing thrashing its limbs and dwindling to nothing.

  The woman had returned, Karin. The gaps in the floorboards gave him a slatted view of the woman, her blue dress more filthy and ragged than before. The woman was crooning to herself in French, a lullaby. It occurred to Nazim suddenly that since the disappearance of her companion he had not seen the woman eat. Her movements in the rooms above were hesitant and feeble affairs. She spent more and more time in the house. A corpse would present problems; the dead invariably excited more attention than the dying. She was talking to herself in an accent that jumbled the street talk of the market women with baby talk, and underneath both the inflections of Paris.

  ‘Won’t leave will she? Willshe, willshe, willshe? Nooo….’ The sound was a mellifluous jumble of half-words and phrases. It soothed Nazim as he drifted slowly back into a sleep where the faces of the Nawab and Bahadur awaited him. Behind them both the features of the Lemprière rose up slowly to arrange themselves as ciphers of his ignorance.

  Answers. The following morning found Nazim at his station at the entrance to Blue Anchor Lane. Le Mara waited a hundred yards or more further up, forty yards beyond the door from which the little man had already emerged and walked briskly off. The weather was very fine, the sky clear and cold. A north easterly cut down the street in gusts.

  Nazim had spent the night plagued with dreams, tossing and turning on the cold earth of the cellar and throughout the day their vivid images returned, taunting him. Anyone, everyone might be the Lemprière. Even the little man, when he returned some hours after the late January sun had fallen below the gables of the roofs, excited a silent speculation within Nazim. A woman leading a toddler by the hand stared curiously back at him. A workman met his gaze frankly before Nazim was forced to look away. He looked further down the street to a tall man who was walking towards him. Nazim recognised something in his gait, then saw the silver frames of the thick eye-glasses. He recognised him then from the mob outside the inn and shrank back against the wall, but the young man glanced neither left nor right as he turned into the lane. Nazim watched as he walked down to the door into which the small man had disappeared only minutes before.

  ABC. Lemprière sniffed. D. He wiped his nose, then thought to do the same for his eyeglasses. E. He sniffed again. Lemprière nursed a slight dislike of the letter E. The look of it, but also its pronunciation which seemed to him misleading. Eee. How many times did E sound like Eee? Its vagaries seemed to imply a new vowel, a “yur” or “er”, an “eh”. It was a promiscuous, fawning surd, continually merging with its neighbouring consonants (R in particular) confirming Lemprière’s view of it as a perfidious little hieroglyph; E, ee, eeyurgh. He looked at the page in front of him and noticed that the left lens of his eyeglasses was now lightly smeared with snot. He re-wiped.

  The page emerged as his entry on Euripus a narrow strait between the island of Euboea (three pages back) and the coast of Boeotia (in the batch already with Cadell). The toings and froings of its current were so irregular as to be inexplicable, prompting Aristotle to throw himself in for enlightenment. Either it was regular for the first eighteen days of the month (or nineteen according to some) and then irregular, or it was the same every day, but changed fourteen times in that period. Hence, Euripio Mobilior: ‘I shift about in the manner of the waters of the Euripine Strait’, meaning ‘fickle’, which Lemprière had remembered from Cicero’s letters to Atticus. “John Lemprière. Twenty-third day of January, 1788” he wrote at the foot of the entry.

  The uppermost page of a thin sheaf of papers beside it lifted, slid and seesawed to the floor as a sharp gust of wind found the crack in the window frame. Septimus had called two days previously to collect the completed entries, buoyed up with Cadell’s encomia on the work so far. He transmitted these to Lemprière, encouraging him to attack “E” with a gusto that had now all but evaporated. The coat had not been mentioned. Lemprière had told Septimus of his meeting with the Widow and the professors who lodged with her. He had launched into a long recitation about the whales, secret undersea passages and Captain Neagle’s disappearance, until Septimus had become conspicuously bored and left with the wad of papers under his arm. Later it had rained.

  Now, Lemprière replaced the errant page on the sheaf, eclipsing the entry on Empedocles. The Widow’s extraordinary tale had grown no less improbable in the retelling, the whales especially, but also the strangely complete disappearance of Captain Neagle, his ship and all its crew. Empedocles, nearing death and wishing to be thought a god, had caused himself to vanish into thin air by throwing himself into the fires of Mount Etna. Captain Neagle’s vanishing act had something of the same about it in Lemprière’s view. He was gone certainly, but where? Empedocles had been posthumously discovered by virtue of a charred sandel thrown up from the volcano’s crater. Lemprière imagined various of Captain Neagle’s app
arel and their fates: a cap washed up on the beaches of Arakan, boots navigating between the Mediterranean and the Red Seas, a striped woollen singlet floating aimlessly in the Thames. The wind gusted once more, rattling the panes. Decomposing trousers cut from the stomach of a whale.

  The Widow was devoted to the dead man. Perhaps the Company had engineered his disappearance, but despite her rage it was guilt, not redress, which drove her. His own father’s memory hovered near these thoughts, approaching and receding with their ebb and flow, small ripples lapping at the pool’s edge. And Peppard! The little man had begun life almost as a figure of fun in Lemprière’s perceptions, scurrying about apologetically as the Widow attacked Skewer with her shoe. But Peppard had been the one to decipher the agreement in the chilly room in Blue Anchor Lane. He, Lemprière, had not understood the first word. Then he recalled the awkward moments that night, the slight silences where the man who might have been the Widow’s lover could be glimpsed beneath the broken exterior of the disgraced lawyer, the menial clerk, a lost marker in the game the Widow and her husband had played with the Company.

  He turned to the page before him and raised his pen once more. Peppard had concealed his liaison with the Widow, and there was the matter of the agreement. Farfetched or not, the notion that he might be heir to such a fortune should at least have been mentioned. Lemprière remembered how the Widow’s rage had suddenly ceased in Skewer’s office, the effort of her composure. That had not been for the benefit of Septimus or himself. That had been for Peppard. There was more to Peppard and the Widow than met the eye, and yet his suspicion was a speculative, free-ranging thing; sprung from curiosity rather than fear. Their complicity was too bashful.

  Lemprière contemplated the word which he was about to write, Euripus again, a Greek. His pen wavered over the paper, then his curiosity got the better of him. He rose, put on his pink coat and left Euripus to his own devices.

  Peppard was lying under his bedstead when a knock sounded on the door. He was reading. His head came up too suddenly, colliding with the criss-cross lattice of heavy-gauge wire which gave the mattress it supported its last vestige of spring. Sandwiched between the wire and the mattress, his late reading material, the page pressed down and through the gaps. Caged there and agitated over the last twenty years by the mattress’ weight and Peppard’s slight yet calculable bulk as it tossed and turned above, these gentle motions had caused the wire to abraid the once-soft but increasingly brittle paper so that now the wire held the page by the merest filaments.

  ‘John!’

  ‘George!’ Fraternal handshakes were exchanged between the two before they fell to talk of the three months since their last meeting. As they spoke, Peppard concealed his unease. His various late suspicions centred on figures lurking at his back, unseen at first but then in the street, two different faces, so far unacknowledged by him but out there still, curling about him like the Company’s tentacles, watching and waiting…. For what?

  For his part, Lemprière made no mention of the murder at the De Veres’ and perhaps it was these respective evasions which accounted for the over-heartiness of their first minutes together. Peppard’s earlier explanation came under subtle attack as Lemprière recounted his encounter with the hapless Captain Guardian and the meeting with Alice de Vere. He stressed her eccentricity but nevertheless skirted around the little man’s earlier omission in the manner of a tentative besieger wary of damaging his prize. Lemprière tried to raise abstruse legal points amidst the chatter and tea cups, until after much circumlocution Peppard grasped both point and nettle.

  ‘You wish to know if it is possible that you own a ninth share of the Company,’ he said. ‘And, if you do, why did I not tell you. Is that the case?’ Lemprière flushed and told him that it was. Peppard settled himself more firmly in his chair. ‘You do not,’ he said. ‘Which answers both points. I know that the agreement was made in perpetuity, forever in other words, but it was between individuals. Forever, in that case, means so long as they lived. That, in the strict legal sense, is why you do not own the share stated in the document.’

  ‘And outside the legal?’ Lemprière pressed.

  ‘I am a lawyer,’ Peppard said, ‘or was. I can only advise within the law, but I will tell you this. If your agreement has any value it is because it tells of things the Company does not want told. Not the agreement itself, John, the story behind it. That is its value, and its danger.’

  ‘And what is the story?’ Lemprière asked, leaning forward eagerly.

  ‘How on God’s earth would I know?’ Peppared laughed, then choked it off and his expression changed. ‘Now, listen to me. If these men, these investors of whom the agreement speaks, are still running the Company, then they have survived for almost two centuries. Dangerous men to have as enemies. And if you run after them waving your piece of paper and demanding your family’s share, then they will defend themselves and you will be a blackmailer. Within the law, that is. To be dubbed a blackmailer is an ugly thing, but to stand alone against the Company is madness, as we both know. I by experience, and you, John, by my example.’ Lemprière looked up guiltily, suddenly ashamed that he knew the details of the little man’s disgrace.

  ‘Is that not the case?’ Peppard asked. Lemprière nodded. ‘Annabel, the Widow Neagle, visited the office. She told me you and she had spoken.’

  ‘I did not ask….’ Lemprière began.

  ‘I know,’ said Peppard. ‘But it is better you know. A cautionary tale.’ He smiled.

  ‘I know only that it was something to do with insurance,’ said Lemprière.

  ‘Maritime insurance,’ Peppard added. ‘But the story began a little time before that, with the whales….’ He spoke on, outlining Captain Neagle’s discovery in the Mediterranean just as the Widow had told it, only now it seemed even more fantastic than before.

  ‘A secret route from the Mediterranean to the Indies, and a monopoly on that route would have been a discovery indeed,’ Peppard was saying. ‘Alan Neagle would have gone down in history. In a sense he did of course. And the lawyer who beat the Company in court, for they would have fought it to the last believe me, that lawyer would go down similarly. I was young and full of ambition; one great case would have secured everything I wanted. Alan Neagle had sealed up all his notes and instructions and already set sail. His wife was to engage a lawyer. The case was a gamble, but many would have taken it. I had heard of it long before she came to me. And I heard how the Company was warning people off, bribing, threatening, offering violence or reward. An old story. I was visited myself and offered a sinecure in Leadenhall Street; I threw the wretch out.’ Lemprière saw anger flash across the little man’s face. ‘When the Widow came to me, I wanted to take the case just for that but the more she told me the more hopeless it seemed.’

  ‘But you took the case,’ Lemprière said.

  ‘She knew I would, she had only to ask.… An old promise.’ Peppard’s voice drifted across the table. ‘I was Annabel’s suitor, you see, before Alan Neagle. She came to me last of all, did I say that? It was desperation. I knew that well enough, and she offered…. Oh, I took the case. That was the point. Never mind why.’ Peppard gulped on his tea. ‘Anyway, she left me with Captain Neagle’s papers. They were sealed and she had not seen them.’

  ‘Evidence, about the whales,’ Lemprière hazarded.

  ‘Conclusive evidence, copper-bottomed you might say. I opened the package that night and read Alan Neagle’s account of what had happened in the Mediterranean with bewilderment then amazement. Their ship had been blown off course as they claimed, and the crew had seen the evidence with their own eyes. What they found was every bit as great a revelation as Neagle claimed.’

  ‘The evidence for the whales?’ Lemprière was growing impatient.

  ‘There were no whales,’ Peppard replied. ‘Not then, not ever. That whole story was poppycock. What Alan Neagle discovered that day was a ship, a ship which should never have been there. A ship he should never have seen.’ />
  Outside the house, the earlier gusting winds died slowly. The layered air settled calmly over the city. Far above, the astral fabric rolled silently while all the efforts below it teetered on the celestial contraption, balancing their forces, for the moment.

  Nazim waited in the cold. Le Mara stood at his station further along the street. Between them lay the object of their patient attention. Nazim shivered and pulled the brim of his hat further over his eyes. Le Mara waited. His eyes moved quickly, sweeping the street to left and right, checking and re-checking. Waiting.

  ‘When the storm lifted, Neagle and his crew found themselves drifting in the Sea of Alboran, as he told his wife, but the sight which greeted them was a ship. Unexceptional, and the crew paid it little mind for the most part. It lay less than a league away to port, a three-master. More than that, an Indiaman.’

  ‘An Indiaman? So there was a passage by the Mediterranean!’

  ‘Who knows? It might have been there for any reason. The point is not so immediately why it was there, but that it was there at all. You see, Alan Neagle recognised that ship. It was the Sophie, though that was not the name she sailed under then.’

  ‘So it had been renamed,’ said Lemprière.

  ‘Renamed, yes. And refitted too, according to Neagle’s notes. But most important of all, it had been reported sunk, lost with all hands. And this was over twenty years ago. It should have been rotting on the ocean bed, yet here it was plying the coastal trade up and down the Mediterranean two decades later.’

  ‘An insurance fraud then,’ said Lemprière, remembering the Widow’s words, and Septimus’ before her.

  ‘That was Neagle’s conjecture; not on the ship but its cargo. The Company does not build its own ships. There is a leasing agreement with the shipyards, but it is very complicated. The cargo is owned outright though, an insurance claim would be straightforward, and less quantifiable. “A thousand bolts of cloth” could become “a thousand bolts of silk”, “coloured stones” could be “amethysts” and so on. The ship could be sold as well. It would all add up I suppose.’