Lemprière's Dictionary

by Lawrence Norfolk

  “A is for Avarice and an Anger that will burn John Company’s ship and shrivel his paper promises and send his men to the hangman in a rude cart so that they be pelted with a raiment that suits, rotted things and suchlike. B is for Bastards, for they are all Bastards, John Company too who sold his birthright for a pittance for a foreign whore and her litter now robs and pilfers and murthers too.…”

  The anger of Asiaticus against the Company; it was the first pamphlet, preceding the one Alice de Vere had given him. Lemprière skimmed through its torrent of rage. Could John Company and the foreign whore be the original merchants and the investors from Rochelle; the “birthright” their charter? The “rude cart” must indicate a small band of men. It would hardly hold the hundreds, or thousands, employed by the 1620s. They might be messages but, like the second, the first pamphlet grew vague where it should reveal, vented spleen where it should lay down charges. The identity of the mysterious Asiaticus vexed Lemprière quite as much as the tantalizing withholding of his secrets, but both were distractions to his present search which was for an address.

  He rummaged on, and the pile before him decreased as he discarded more of his father’s papers. The tottering mass collapsed twice, sending the signet ring skating under the bed both times. A draught crept under the ill-hung door. His angry boast to Theobald Peppard, that he would find Neagle’s ship and clear his friend’s name, sounded like so much wind. Besides, if George’s death had a purpose, it was the agreement which would reveal it. Not the agreement, the story behind it. Peppard’s words.

  He went on with his search. A thick bundle of letters tied with yellowing string burst open, scattered and came to rest in a static cascade. He knew the letter he sought was not amongst the bound bundle - he had already seen it, before the Pork Club. Curiosity alone drew letter after letter from the envelopes, Charles Lemprière, Rozel Manor, Island of Jersey, in faded ink on each.

  The correspondents were a bewildering band of informers; priests, spinsters, seamen, bankrupts, second sons back from the Tour, their tutors and dancing masters, chart makers and shipwrights. Without his father’s original enquiries Lemprière could only guess at the purpose behind these replies. One man had fallen through a hole in Houndsditch and broken his ankle. Another said that the harbour at Saint Malo had a draught of fifteen feet four years ago, but now he was not sure. A third had rowed across the straits of Gibraltar and enclosed a haphazard diagram of the currents. After ten or more of these, Lemprière’s picture of his father’s researches was considerably more cluttered but no more intelligible than before. He barely bothered to open the remainder.

  The one letter without an envelope was there by accident. Hardly a letter in truth, more a draft. Crossings-out and corrections fouled the neat handwriting, which he recognised at once. Of all the letters in the bundle, this was the only one written by his father. After the first sentence, Lemprière took off his spectacles, wiped and replaced them. At the end of the paragraph he checked the letter’s signature. He moved to the desk, sat down and continued reading. Several times he stopped and drew deep breaths. At the letter’s end, so far as the son was concerned, his father was a different man. The letter read,

  My dearest Marianne,

  As I write you from this room in Southampton I know at once that I am your husband and your betrayer, both of these things. Would that I were only the former, with all my life I wish it, but it cannot be. I am both.

  That much you know already, my wife, though not the when and where, nor the how. The why is yet beyond me, but I will tell you the rest and you may judge me as you wish with all the accidents and circumstance before you. Iwill tell the story in a plain way, even though the hurt it causes you hurts me too and the writing is an agony in truth. But I will do it. I owe you this and much else besides.

  It was in Paris, when Jake and I sank money in the wallpaper factory (and what a foolhardy venture that was!) The last day of our visit - we had found our factory that morning and celebrated through the afternoon. We ate and drank a good deal in an eating house - Puy’s (Marianne, I do not even know if you wish to learn these things but I must tell you everything now). It was the December of 1769, as you know. The night which followed was almost stranger than I can tell.

  After we left the eating house I was in high spirits, but Jake was sullen, as always after drink. It was raining. We walked down Rue Saint Martin, crossed the Marché des Innocens, as the Paris people term it, and moved into all the little streets below it. As we left the market square, Jake turned and fancied he saw a figure standing in the rain behind us. He was a good way off, but even drunk I too saw him clearly enough, I thought. I had a need to find the Seine then but Jake pulled me into a drinking-shop where we drank hot wine with cloves, two glasses of it I had. The man we had seen in the Marché des Innocens a little time before appeared then in the tavern, an Indian by the look of him. I pointed and Jake took fright. Marianne, all this must seem a putting-off of the story, a prevarication but it is all of a piece I swear. Somehow all these matters had a bearing on what followed; forgive me. Anyway, the two of us quit the tavern in a terrible commotion. I do not know why. It was raining even harder. Jake was extraordinary, pulling me along through the streets. I was quite drunk and could hardly understand his urgency. Later he told me the Indian meant us a mischief but how he knew that is still a mystery. Jake sought a refuge for us in the streets about there but all the houses were dark. We ran and ran, I remember. I was stumbling and cursing and the Indian was still at our backs. That is how we came to the Red House. It was the only one would give us sanctuary. I was soaked through and reeling from the drink. Now, while I sit here writing to you my wife, I can call to mind only parts of what took place. The Red House was a place of ill fame - a bawdy-house to put it plain - and its Madame took us for customers though we only sought refuge. There was a salon, as they call it, where the women of the house wandered about. I remember fires burning. It was very warm. I took a glass or two there. There was a woman called ‘the Contessa’, this much I can still see in my mind’s eye, clambering up the stairs but dimly. My next memory is of Jake shaking me awake and carrying me out of that place. The woman was gone and I had no memory of what had befallen me. Whatever became of the Indian who had chased us there, I do not know.

  The rest of the story you know; the consequences of that night followed me from Paris to Jersey and even into our own home. The payments I have made provided for all her needs, both of theirs I should say, and so far as Paris is concerned that is the end of the matter. Marianne, I have never seen the child and I never will. I sit in this room covered in a shame which is all my own. Would that I could wash it off, but I cannot. If you wish it, I will stay here. I cannot ask you to forget, only to forgive if you can.

  With all my love, your husband,

  Charles

  She had forgiven him, of course. Charles had returned, penitent, reformed and now he was returned to his son, reformed again. The forbidding countenance his father had worn fell away as Lemprière read the letter, to reveal a hapless and luckless adulterer, a loving husband, a frightened man alone in a strange port. Also, he could not help but see it, there was something of the buffoon in Charles’s and Jake’s escapade, the drink, the rain, the women. Something of his own experience at the Pork Club. Septimus had carried him out, as Jake had his father nineteen years before. He spared a thought too for the offspring - so fleeting a mention he might have missed it - lost somewhere in the Paris slums, his own brother or sister. Strangely, he felt very much the only child, as if this other had only a speculative existence, or was an invention of ‘the Contessa’, for the money maybe. The money. That was how Marianne would have found out. She had always settled the accounts.

  Lemprière rummaged quickly through the remaining papers. Yes, he was right. The receipts were sent as acknowledgements, clearances for the next payment, reçue par Madame K., Villa Rouge, Rue Boucher des Deux Boules, Paris, a line of them stretching month after month through the y
ears. It was almost naive of his father to think that his mother would not find out, Lemprière thought, almost as though he wanted to be found out.

  In her dealings, his mother reflected the certain boundaries of life on an island which had always been her home. Within them were the gentle contours of maternal and conjugal love, always given freely and without condition. But transgress those boundaries and a completely other animal arose, an embodied rage which he had seen on infrequent, vividly remembered occasions. He imagined his father looking for his wife in those grey-blue eyes as they turned red and instinctively his hand went to his pocket. Then stopped. Lemprière slammed his hand down against the floorboards and thought again of the night he had bade farewell to Peppard, stopped fifty yards from the house and patted his pockets. He had left the miniature lying open on Peppard’s table. He might have gone back for it. But he had not. His eye had wandered over the room on his return, stunned at the sight of the body, the shock. Would he have seen it, had it been there? Surely yes. The table was right before him. So it had been moved. Taken. By Sir John? No, they asked for “anyone in the vicinity”. They did not have a name. Perhaps Peppard had removed it, hidden it. But all these speculations were only an avoidance of the true conclusion: the miniature had been taken by Peppard’s killer. No one else had the means. Peppard’s killer, whoever that was, held the brass case even now, and on the case was his name. Lemprière. He imagined cold eyes flicking over the inscription, weighing up the threat, the need for silence.

  Wait, wait, wait he told himself. If he, the holder of the agreement, had led the killer to Peppard, then he was already marked. Already spared. He was a symptomless carrier, only those he touched suffered. He thought then of his first night alone in this very room, when he had imagined his father’s ker flying up, carrying all its troubles into the aether, sending them up like so many plague signals to advert his own special pollution. Miasma. For all the exorcisms of his dictionary, all the fixing of his daemons, they were there inside him still, flying out to ring him with the blood of innocents: his father rolling over, an accusing arm lofted heavenwards pleading in futility, the woman in the pit, as the molten gold poured down, and George, his friend, a mess of blood on the bed. How could he tell anyone, when even the breath of it led to death? Only Septimus had heard it and lived. What protected Septimus? You can trust Peppard. Those words grew heavy with significance and yet became no clearer. It was a signal of sorts. Sent to him by Septimus, received by him, imperfectly deciphered. The emphasis fell on all or any of those four words, reshaping them, pulling them this way and that. Septimus had hinted broadly that he should talk to Peppard in the first place. He had contrived both meetings with the De Veres. He had helped him with the dictionary. Septimus had arranged that.

  Morning became afternoon. Lost in his own thoughts, Lemprière did not hear the midday clamour of the city’s bell towers. His search continued in a listless way. Scraps of paper were turned over idly, examined perfunctorily, discarded without regret. His father had become the apex of a host of corridors which opened one by one under his scrutiny, radiating out and revealing paths the dead man had followed, all abandoned now. They all represented aspects that the son had barely guessed at. It was past three when he found the object which had prompted his search.

  From his study, Charles had sat penning questions, notes and letters to unseen recipients near, far and wide. He had corresponded on the subject of the western coast of France, its harbours in particular and their suitability for ships displacing four hundred tons. Another corridor entered blindly.

  Lemprière sat in his own makeshift study in Southampton Street and turned over an envelope. Captain Ebenezer Guardian (retired), the Crow’s Nest, Pillory Lane, Wapping was marked in untidy script on its back, a passport to his father’s earlier enquiry (whatever that might prove to be), thence to Peppard’s ship, which was to say Neagle’s, the Vendragon or the Falmouth, any or all of these.

  So, Captain Ebenezer Guardian (retired) would clear up these confusions? He would explain the mysteries of every port south of the Cherbourg peninsula and Charles’s interest in them, not to mention the significance of a ship lost these twenty years past and recently returned which spawned it. As Lemprière donned coat, pocketed letter and readied himself for the journey, it all seemed very unlikely.

  The problem was radical. The limitations of the material (wood) created complications at the design stage. The notoriously officious Lubeck customs men levied tax on the deck-space, thus the less deck the better. At the same time, crossing the shallows of the Zuider Zee necessitated a vessel with as small a draught as possible. Captain Guardian sat before a well-stoked fire in the Crow’s Nest contemplating these problems.

  Clearly a flat-bottomed ship would be needed for the Zuider Zee, if its holds were to be capacious enough to show a profit, while excessive tumblehome, rising out of the water and curving steeply inwards to the deck, would deny the Lübeck tax-farmers their ill-gotten levy on the deck-space. In short, a fluyt. Viewed head on, it would resemble an upright, swollen triangle with masts; a floating hold really. Problems abounded: with no effective deck, how would the fluyt be manned? And, even supposing its roomy hold was filled to bursting, how would the same cargo be removed? Guardian fiddled imaginatively with hinged fo’c’sles and a drawbridge mechanism but it was an ugly brute, this fluyt. At least it had little need of ballast. The tumblehome would need feathered planks, lots of them. Captain Guardian sighed. He hated planking, and was even beginning to wish he had never embarked on the project when the small brass bell hung in the narrow staircase beyond the door jangled suddenly, announcing a visitor below.

  Eben hurried his stiff limbs down the stairs, curious as to his caller’s identity. At the door he was confronted with an angular individual, tall, dressed in a pink coat, with spectacles, who thrust out his hand and began talking at once.

  ‘Sir, I am….’

  ‘I remember who you are,’ Eben said. ‘You’re Charles Lemprière’s boy. John is it?’ He shook the proffered hand. ‘Come in, come in. We all looked for you at the De Veres’, you know? Bad business that. Come aloft.’ Captain Guardian indicated a narrow staircase which, as they ascended, seemed to grow narrower until the Captain had to literally squeeze himself up between the walls of the final flight, though his guest did not touch them, and which brought them finally, both puffing, to a room crammed with papers, charts and dog-eared volumes of all descriptions in which a small fire burned brightly and four windows looked out to all points of the compass.

  ‘The Crow’s Nest proper,’ Captain Guardian announced. He offered his guest a seat. Lemprière arranged his legs. Eben regarded his guest. A nervy thinness; crumpled in the step ladder’s wreckage he had looked somewhat spidery, comical. The physique was the same, but there was nothing laughable about him now. Tense, he looked. Put him at his ease. Eben had liked the sound of his father, matter of fact sort of chap so far as one could tell. The fluyt could wait.

  ‘My condolences on your father’s death,’ he said and the young man acknowledged them with a solemn nod. ‘I wonder, how was it he….’

  ‘Hunting accident,’ Lemprière said quickly. ‘I am afraid I missed our appointment.’

  Appointment? thought Guardian. Front of the De Veres’, of course. ‘Not at all, no, we were tramping around hunting for you in any case.’ The fluyt resurfaced in Guardian’s thoughts. Port covers, like port holes, bigger though, enough to load the thing. That would do it. Ramps for access.

  ‘I was curious,’ the young man was saying, ‘as to my father’s letters to you.’

  ‘Of course. So you should be. Fascinating man your father. Harbours, he was interested in.’

  Charles Lemprière had fired Eben’s curiosity. Building ships was one thing, and a great thing too no doubt about that. But it hardly stopped there. Launching, floating, steering, navigating, all these actions made the ship fast to its yards, its port, the sea, the sea’s vagaries, and beyond that the stars. All these we
re the life of the thing. Constraints too, but the balance of them all against the tonnage and the will of the men aboard, that was the real ship. A dynamic beast, breasting the headland breakers, nosing inquisitively through sandbanks, a living thing taking harbours for its homes, different from one another as an Adam town-house from a wattle and daub hovel. Eben searched the crammed shelves of the Crow’s Nest.

  ‘Harbours on the western coast of France. Anything that would take a ship of four hundred tons. Your father had an idea a ship of that size was plying the coastal trade. Seemed rather unlikely to me.’ The young man looked puzzled. ‘Too big,’ Eben went on. ‘Coastal trade means rivers. Difficult to navigate and so far as France goes no sailing. Prevailing winds are easterly, inland from the west coast.’ Still puzzled it seemed. ‘You can’t sail,’ Guardian spelled it out. ‘You have to use the currents. A big boat like that would need a big current, and anyway the draught would be too shallow. The Loire flows westwards, but not from the west coast. The Rhone is good as far as Aries, but after that, well…. The charts are useless, that’s the real problem. River beds move around. A deep channel one year can be a sandbar the next. It just isn’t feasible.’

  ‘So what did my father actually want to know?’ Lemprière asked.

  ‘Harbour plans,’ said Eben, ‘any harbour with the right draught.’

  ‘Pardon me, “draught”, I’m not….’

  ‘The depth of water drawn by a vessel, the depth it needs.’ Eben pointed to an engraving above the mantelpiece by way of further explanation. ‘Anthony Deane’s the man. Had it all worked out with tables and suchlike. Invaluable. Charles, your father, wanted charts which would tell him the harbours such a ship could put into.’