Lemprière's Dictionary

by Lawrence Norfolk

  ‘You mean you know the girl, the girl murdered tonight?’

  ‘Oh yes, I know her sir, true enough. She is Rosalie you see sir….’

  ‘Feed this woman,’ ordered Sir John. ‘Bring her to me within the hour.’

  Outside the door, muttering and scuffing their feet, greasy-haired and inky-fingered, frowning already, awaiting bad news in worse odour for they had sensed the censor in Sir John, stood the editors.

  ‘Not a word,’ said Sir John as he approached this mutinous crew. ‘Not a single word….’ which, their nine-pronged protest and the Lud’s Town Monitor’s ill-advised indiscretion aside, would prove to be the case. The editors printed stories on the Lottery Suicides, Lades’ and Bullock’s Great Cock Match, Mendoza’s fight at Epping, the Cornish copper collapse, imprudence in the Linen trade, diatribes against the Easter exodus and articles on riders attacked in the Blackfriar’s Road by a bulldog still at large, an expanded advertisement for Welch’s Pills for Female Obstructions and Complaints peculiar to Virgins and, amongst all these, a report on Lady Yonge’s concert….

  ‘“… attended the Casterleigh’s, both father and daughter.”’ Septimus had taken the paper from the Pug and set off in pursuit of his friend.

  ‘Whatever you saw at Coade’s, it was not Juliette Casterleigh. She was alive and well the night before last, listening to Handel and,’ he peered closer, ‘“Clementi’s Funeral March”’. Hunched over his desk, Lemprière laughed bitterly.

  On the night in question, they had staggered home across the bridge by Westminster, Lemprière on his friend’s arm, drunk and battered from his encounter with the watermen. He slurred nonsensically as they passed the point where, months before, he had first blurted out Juliette’s name while the rain poured down on them both. Hardly aware of the bridge or the dulled rush of the river below, still Lemprière recognised the old woman pestering passersby with her apples and broke free from his companion. Snatching one from the woman, he held it aloft.

  ‘Food of the Gods!’ he shouted, turning this way and that, trying to give it to startled matrons and market-workers until Septimus paid the vendor and dragged him away, still shouting, cursing foully. As they approached Southampton Street, Lemprière grew calmer. At the door, his ranting ceased.

  ‘So they have killed her,’ he said in matter-of-fact tones. ‘They have killed Juliette now.’

  ‘Who?’ Septimus demanded. But Lemprière stayed silent. Juliette’s face sped away through the night, a horse clashed its hooves downstream from the pool, all gone away.

  ‘“… and the evening was attended with the greatest gaiety and bon ton.”’ Septimus concluded. Lemprière’s first reaction was disbelief, followed by relief. He stood up with the room unbalanced as his emotions turned. He had trodden over ice which thinned to a brittle wafer through the two days since her ‘death’. Hour by hour the cold waters awaited a first crack, for his trap door to crash open. She was alive, she was brought back alive, and Lemprière sank onto his bed under the weight of this fact. His head dropped. Then came the first suspicion, a swelling kernel of doubt.

  ‘This Stone-Eater….’ Septimus was reading aloud, but Lemprière paid attention only to his own thoughts. If not Juliette, then who? Who had died in her place? The head hung down, slack-mouthed with Juliette’s face upside down and masked in blood. He heard it drip quickly on the stone floor, the chain links click against one another as she swung in her clammy sling, the goat’s corpse, her substitute. Iphigenia.

  For the story went on. Leaving the goat in her place on the altar at Aulis she was carried to Taurica, Diana’s priestess now, she wielded the knife over sacrifices in her turn. Any stranger caught within that country fell to her altar until two Greeks, fast friends and Argives like herself were dragged before her. Unsurprising that Iphigenia’s long exile should fuel her curiosity, should lead her to ask them for news of her homeland. She wrote letters to her brother Orestes and told the men that one might be spared for her courier. Their friendship led each to entreat the other to go yet, at the last, one of the two, Pylades, agreed to take the letters. When he saw to whom they were addressed however, he told Iphigenia to take them herself. He would not go, he told her. There was no need. Their recipient was already arrived. Orestes was his companion; her own brother. Distant leagues over the Ægean another buttress fell in the house of Atreus. All three fled Taurica together. Of the statue of Diana which the three of them bore away, “it was afterwards placed in the grove of Aricia in Italy.” Some references followed, Pausanias, Ovid, Virgil though he made no mention of the sacrifice at Aulis. Lemprière signed the entry and dated it, Friday 14th March, 1788.

  Orestes and Pylades, Theseus and Pirithous; proverbial friendships. Pirithous, to meet with the renowned Theseus and test the Minotaur-slayer’s mettle, went so far as to invade his country. The two met as instant friends on the battlefield and afterwards the torments of hell could not part them. When Septimus called a day later to collect this and other entries, Lemprière paused to reflect on their own friendship. The bruising to his face had disappeared and the livid mark on his leg was spectacular but painless. The only lasting damage from that night was a cut to his hand sustained through gripping the shard of Coade stone chipped from the tortoise mould. He had found it the next morning still clutched tight in his hand. It now resided on the mantelpiece. The cut was healing well and certainly Septimus had saved him from much worse. Still, would Septimus have insisted on his taking Iphigenia’s letter, or met him as a friend between their opposing armies? Lemprière suspicion was that he would not and, worse, if challenged would come up with any number of dazzlingly plausible excuses for his refusal.

  ‘Perhaps you imagined the whole episode,’ Septimus was saying as he helped himself to the last of a knuckle of ham. But Lemprière had not imagined it, the dead girl was real whether she were Juliette or not. The question turned. He had visited the Manufactory for clues to the nature of the Vendragon’s purpose and found nothing, yet, as the days between then and now went by and he reflected further on the events surrounding that night, it was his own nature which began to emerge. Again, it was Septimus who prompted him.

  ‘What did you mean, “they have killed her”?’ he asked, as Lemprière gathered up the entries. ‘Who are “they”?’ And Lemprière had no real answer to that question, except to recall Peppard’s warning that he was watched, to think of the room in Blue Anchor Lane, the throat slashed as the girl’s had been, a jumbled fear.

  ‘“They” not “me”’ he said distinctly, grasping what it meant as the words emerged. ‘I did not kill that girl. I did not parcel her like meat and hang her from a butcher’s chain. They did that. And I believe they killed Peppard.’ He looked down and might have taken the thought further then, followed it to its conclusion, but at that moment it was enough.

  ‘There is nothing insane about me.’ He spoke clearly and looked at Septimus who froze for a moment and seemed lost for words.

  ‘Well done,’ he said at last. ‘Splendid work. Now, if you intend nothing further with this ham….’ Lemprière felt the distance between them widen, as though they were products of quite separate orders.

  In the weeks which followed he returned to his dictionary. Rather, he threw himself upon it. Where before he worked methodically from A towards Z, now he scribbled and scrawled haphazardly in a kind of fury. His working habits submitted to no particular regime, his entries followed no pattern. He chased the characters of stories which happened to hold his interest until he grew weary and abandoned them for others. He opened texts at random, chose headings by chance, followed whims, flipped coins. Discharged of any therapeutic function, the entries were guided along no course but that of their author’s passions. He wrote at any or all hours and in any circumstance. It was a kind of release, the letting go of an obsession and also, somewhere at the back of his mind where a question turned outside the clutches of the dictionary, a kind of flight. He no longer fussed over the details of this or that corrupted t
ext. He was not overly worried by emendations. His cross references grew erratic and Septimus relayed a stream of minor complaints from Cadell, all of them offset (Septimus was quick to point out) by the fact that at this rate the dictionary would be finished by July. He had begun to call more frequently than the collection of the entries necessarily justified. Often he was accompanied by Lydia. They would tempt Lemprière with a variety of excursions which he saw only as distractions. He grew irritated by their persistence. Why, for instance, should he want to watch a cat-eating contest, or view exotic trees at Burgess’s?

  ‘Orange trees, Citron trees, Jessamine trees….’ Septimus clutched a hand-bill.

  ‘Arabian and Catalanian,’ Lydia read over his shoulder.

  ‘No,’ said Lemprière.

  Lydia thought his work unhealthy, morbid even. His dictionary was a contagion. She added her appeals to those of Septimus and even grew peeved at his refusals which, Lemprière thought, did not suit her. He did not wish to look at trees and had no desire to watch Lord Barrymore eat a cat. He wanted nothing more than to continue with his work and that was all. Nevertheless their invitations continued and even intensified. When Lydia returned from Burgess’s warehouse with an orange tree, Septimus having carried it all the way from Savoy Steps, his resolve began to weaken.

  In truth, it was a horrible thing. Five feet tall in its yellow tub with unpleasant straggly branches, various tree-diseases had already attacked it, pustular boles and resinous sores covered its spindly trunk while its leaves, thankfully few, were brittle and papery, mottled with obscure cicatrices and parasite-scars. Several colonies of insects infested the foliage, compensating for the paucity of living space by vigorous breeding and frequent ill-natured forays about the room.

  ‘It will brighten up the place,’ said Lydia. ‘And when it grows bigger, you can eat the oranges.’

  Looking at the orange tree, Lemprière sensed the refugee’s stubborn resentment of its place of exile. He thought wistfully of orange groves, acre after acre of sandy sun-baked soil with long avenues of fructiferous saplings heavy with swelling gourds etc, how far away they were, how much happier his invader would be there. All the same, he was touched and when Septimus suggested they should go together to watch a man who ate stones at Charing Cross, his response was ‘Not this month,’ rather than ‘No.’

  ‘Excellent,’ said Septimus. ‘We shall go on the fourteenth.’ Lydia added her enthusiasm and Lemprière grew faintly embarrassed by it all.

  ‘The fourteenth,’ he said.

  He worked on furiously, and for the first time since he had begun the project he felt absorbed in his work without its being absorbed in him. He produced mounds of paper which as soon as written might go to the devil for all he cared, his production was heedless. He revised nothing. And at the back of his mind, far away from the centre of this activity, the question still turned. If not Juliette, then who? The question was familiar, but come upon by him from a disguising angle. He would take no pains over it. He was busy, involved and self-indulged. Yet, as the month neared its end, the question rolled as a ship might roll in the few seconds before it sinks to disclose a view which is seen once and never again, turned to him an aspect which would harden his suspicion and still intensify his longing. If the girl were not Juliette, then why did she resemble her so closely? An altered aspect. And in the moment before the air rushes from the hold, and the keel and scarred hull show themselves fatally before sinking into the waters, at the last in this, he asked himself what part would Juliette play?

  Far removed from such concerns, in the sheltered parks and gardens of the city, a mild end to March brought the almond trees and laurustinia bushes into bloom. On the last day of the month the gooseberry bushes were in full leaf and the first of the summer’s flies had appeared. Quite suddenly, March became April.

  Horrid influenza-dreams plagued the Emperor Joseph. Persisting over weeks, they involved borders, edges, lines of defence, faceless aggressors and Catherine the Great, the Russian Empress and his ally in this internecine folly of a war. He awoke habitually in the grip of ill-defined anxieties and his own furious erections, excoriating himself for his stupidity. The Turks should have receded with the snows, but they had not. Belgrade should have fallen like a ripe Croatian plum, but it had not. At the least, his Internuncio should have been returned but in reality nothing much had happened at all. The Empress’ armies were camped idly about Ochakov. His own caught diseases, deserted by the platoon and starved all along the Banat of Timişoara. Bad enough, but over this stalemate a further shadow had fallen, a spectre, an embodied whisper: the Hertzberg Plan.

  Prussian communiqués to their envoy at the Porte, intercepted and deciphered at the Vienna Correspondence office, proposed a realignment at the heart of Mitteleuropa. Pushed through on the back of the old Austro-Hungarian terror, a Prusso-Turkic alliance, it was an equitable system of swaps giving Danzig and Torun to the Prussians, Galicia to the Poles and Moldavia to himself. Unspoken behind this smooth exchange was the Prussian commitment to Turkish reclamations, backed with force if necessary. The Hertzberg Plan hung like bait over his borders, drawing the surrounding powers to press their armies against them. In his dreams, frontiers bent and distorted under the pressure like a jointed trapezium in which he was spread-eagled, bound hand and foot, wriggling, being slowly squeezed as the angles contracted while Catherine looked on coolly and spoke of over-extended supply lines, crop failures in the Ukraine, unavoidable delays. Her hand moved with a practised motion between her legs, a sharp click and a nail-paring fell just-audibly to the floor. She advanced and he could see the polished teeth champ behind lips glistening and gorged with blood, his own member rising in suicidal obedience click, click, click her mute ukase now quite clear: to couple the risen fruit of Austria with the wide Russian mouth. As the trapezium closed, she squatted to draw him in and up, a brief blind nosing of her innards before the serrated edges tickled his uneasy head, took a serious grip about the root and Click!

  He awoke and saw at the level of his groin silvery trails run this way and that across the sheets, as of playful snails. He rose still throbbing and deciphered his glistening idiogram thus: the war did not go well.

  Cryptic slime. Mapped via a camera obscura onto the counsels and committees, scribal offices and divans of the Sublime Porte at Constantinople, the Emperor’s nocturnal emissions take us direct to the heart of the Turkish war-machine. Strange to tell, Joseph’s soiled bed linen provides an exact model of the Porte’s internal dialogues, a flow-chart of memoranda and communiqués, detached recommendations and unassigned brevets, a map of its most secret and tortuous deliberations. Observe en route the Austrian advances across the frontiers of Moldavia and Wallachia, the forays conducted from strengthened garrisons at Boza and Penitska and the unwelcome flight of the Moldavian hospodar. Witness Venetian moves under the gout-ridden admiralship of Chevalier Emo to drive the Turkish squadron currently harassing shipping between Lissa and Ancona out of the Adriatic and into the Ægean archipelago. Take note of General de Vens’ gritty skirmishes on the banks of the Save opposite Belgrade, the ravages of camp-fever in the garrisons on the Unna, the piles of unburied dead, the headless torsos found by scouts in the villages west of the Drave, the massacre of a Turkish prisoner-column only two days’ march from the camp at Karlstadt, the wounded lying in no man’s land within range of Belgrade’s cannon whose cries keep the men awake at night, Christian and Turk alike listening, wishing death as a mercy. Horrible cries of men and the smell, the stink made by men dying and the dead men becoming crow meat, brute matter and ground, the dog-grass will grow very thick here. This is the war in April. Maintain altitude, descend slowly over the Golden Horn, level out above the glittering waters of the Bosporus, trail the messages which pass between the onion-domes and pointed towers of Constantinople. Follow the cryptic slime.

  Already a number of extraordinary consultative assemblies had spilled out of the afternoon divan with the express purpose of resolving thi
s issue. A vicious triangular war had started up between the Beylik, Ruus and Tahvil offices within the Supra-office of the Imperial Divan. Their purse-bearers avoided each other in the corridors and sought ingenious extensions of neglected functions to legitimize their right to sole administration of the growing crisis. (The Beylik section placed it under the heading “Capitulatory Privileges granted to Foreign Governments” and minor scribal officers more used to the donkey-work of checking fine print in border treaties grew bewildered as the correspondence piled up.) The Translator pressed hard on the issue, from personal motives it was suspected, and the Bailiff opposed him. The Reis Effendi took an interest and the Grand Vezir appointed a loyal lieutenant or kaymakam to oversee his interests in the matter. Various palace functionaries, stewards and corresponding secretaries had a hand in the business whose complexity now demanded a dazzling compromise if the interests of all parties were to be honoured. The issue was the continued detention of Peter Rathkael-Herbert, the Imperial Internuncio. The compromise was a crate.

  In the second week of April, a square-rigged two-master lumbered into the harbour at Constantinople. The sloop Tesrifati on detachment from the Ægean squadron was captained by a fresh-faced graduate of Gazi Hassan’s naval school at Midilli. Halil Hamit had taken his first command expecting a well-oiled fighting machine ready to fire off the Tesrifati’s fourteen gun broadside, manoeuvre skilfully through the narrow channels of the archipelago and live for days or weeks on nothing more than a sniff of the enemy and the hope of engagement. He had found a leaking tub crewed by malcontents, stocked with rotting fish and damp powder. The last was unimportant as only three of the Tesrifati’s twenty-eight guns could be relied upon to fire without blowing up itself, its gun crew and, conceivably, the ship’s magazine. Expecting well-drilled obedience, he had found consent by inertia at best, habitual defiance at worst. They were debtors, conscripts, petty thieves, kif and opium addicts to a man. Sweet fumes now lingered on the lower deck. Limping into harbour, Hamit rehearsed his report. It was terse. “Two months sailing between Lissa and Ancona. Nothing sighted.” The Tesrifati docked and Hamit watched his crew shuffle down the gangplank. To a man, he loathed the sight of them. Surely, he hoped against hope, surely they would desert.