Lemprière's Dictionary

by Lawrence Norfolk

  A series of appendices noted several implications from the incident. Without the Tesrifati’s cargo of saltpetre, the stocks of charcoal and sulphur in the arsenal at Midilli were so much useless powder. The matter of the self-destructing cannon should be investigated further. The most codicils concerned the Imperial Internuncio. The abduction of Peter Rathkael-Herbert threw all the delicate negotiations and subtle compromises which had resulted in his transport into hazard. Amongst all the indigestible elements of the engagement, the disappearance of the Internuncio, Peter Rathkael-Herbert, was going to prove hardest to swallow.

  From within the confines of his crate, the Internuncio heard muffled shouting, a thud somewhere above, a deafening explosion, more thuds, a terrible grinding sound and feet running in all directions around him. The ship was being boarded. He heard barrels being rolled along the gangplanks and manhandled out of the well. The hole through which his young friend had fed and watered him allowed a view directly overhead. Useless. Then his own turn came and he braced himself against the “walls” and floor as the crate was shifted up to the deck, then seemed to hang in space before landing on the deck of the Tesrifati’s aggressor. He heard voices speaking in English. The grinding sound came again. The hulls rubbing against one another, he realised belatedly, and then the ships were free of one another. He could hear the crew levering off the lids of the barrels. He raised his head to shout his presence and the sound died in his throat. His crate was positioned directly below the mainmast. Looking up through the feeding-hole he saw swirling fog, bare spars and rigging. At the top of the mast, a tattered pennant flew and on the pennant was a skull and crossed bones. They were working down the line, staving in the barrels with jemmies. Peter Rathkael-Herbert cowered in his crate waiting helplessly, hopelessly for discovery. Then his turn came. Wood splintered above his head and shattered slats rained down on him as he curled up, burying his head in his hands. The lid was prised off and a croaking voice above him said, ‘Ah ha!’ before strong hands reached down to pluck him from his refuge and deposit him on the deck. Crumpled, wracked with aches and pains, exhausted Peter Rathkael-Herbert looked up to see an old man, grizzled and weather-tanned, standing over him. The old man reached down and offered the Imperial Internuncio his hand.

  ‘I am Wilberforce van Clam,’ he told the dishevelled heap. ‘Welcome aboard the Heart of Light.’

  The sirocco began to blow away the fog.

  Aboard the Heart of Light, Peter Rathkael-Herbert saw sunlight for the first time in a fortnight. Looking up into the rigging and around the deck where the crew were making ready to set sail, he could not help but notice the extreme age of the sailors. Not one seemed to be under fifty. Wilberforce van Clam was at the helm.

  ‘Take some tea.’ He gestured to a pot brewing on an occasional table by his side. ‘Wilkins!’ he shouted. ‘A cup for our guest, if you please!’ Webley ‘Mussel’ Wilkins, a spry sixty year old with a long white moustache jumped to the task.

  ‘You are … pirates?’ Peter Rathkael-Herbert ventured, watching as elderly men leapt up and down the rigging.

  ‘Pirates? Oh yes, pirates all right, absolutely pirates we are, aren’t we lads?’

  ‘Oh yes!’ came the reply from all quarters of the vessel.

  ‘But we’re Pantisocratic Pirates,’ Wilberforce van Clam went on. ‘We never really wanted to be pirates at all.’ He paused and sipped his tea. ‘It’s society made us what we is now.’

  ‘Society?’ Peter Rathkael-Herbert was bemused by the notion. ‘But how?’

  ‘Ah ha!’ said Wilberforce for the second time that day. ‘Now that is a tale worth the telling. Wilkins! A chair for my friend!’

  And so, seated in a splendidly upholstered armchair and fortified by tea, the Imperial Internuncio listened while Wilberforce van Clam unfolded the story of the Pantisocratic Pirates.

  ‘We first came together in London in 1753,’ Wilberforce began. ‘This was after the Great Comb Riots and alien dissenters were being interned under the Sedition Act, that was us you see. We were Poles, Prussians, Serbs, Dalmatians, any nation you care to think of. Even a Frenchman. Anyroad, we all fetched up together in Newgate gaol and waited for the business to blow over. Only it didn’t. More tea?’ Peter Rathkael-Herbert shook his head. ‘Very well, we thought, so we wait to be charged. Standard procedure you see. Get charged, plead guilty, be deported, three days at Boulogne and you’re back within the week. But time wore on and we still were not charged. In the meantime we kept ourselves busy, political debates, discussions, a little dialectics. We look back on those days as the birth of Pantisocracy. It was the only compromise we could reach. You see, when you’ve got die-hard anabaptists and Thuringian ultramontanists in the ranks, take it from me, you need something broad. Pantisocracy is broad, if nothing else.’

  Wilberforce reached for his pipe and began packing it with a gluey substance. ‘All men are equal,’ he said as he lit the pipe and Peter Rathkael-Herbert smelt a sweet scent familiar from the Tesrifati. ‘That’s about it really. The stuff about land ownership doesn’t really apply aboard ship. Anyway, in the end we figured out the delay. The section of the Act we’d been charged under had yet to be passed, and with the threat of revolt over, no-one was very interested in getting it onto the statute books. We couldn’t be released until we’d been tried, and we couldn’t be tried because the law didn’t exist. We rotted there for over a year until the magistrate who’d arraigned us in the first place chartered a ship. This ship, in fact, though it was called the Alecto then.’

  Wilberforce sent clouds of sweet blue smoke wafting towards his guest. ‘The idea was: stage an escape, hop aboard this ship, be charged with the escape, plead guilty, be deported to France and back in a few days. The only problem was the magistrate. He retired that very week, leaving us aboard the Alecto. There we were, suddenly fugitives from justice with nothing and nobody between us and the gallows. Technically, we were already pirates. After a quick debate we decided to go the whole hog. We put the master and his crew in the pinnace, hoisted the Jolly Roger and set sail that night for the Barbary Coast. It’s been thirty-odd years now and I can tell you truly, that not a man jack of us has looked back since. I still think of that magistrate and each time I do I raise my glass and toast him: “Happy retirement, Henry Fielding!” Without him, we’d all be living under the English boot, but here we are and here we stay. It’s the rover’s life for us and a damn fine life it is too, right lads?’

  ‘Right Cap’n,’ replied a trio of hoary-headed tars from the quarterdeck.

  Wilberforce van Clam passed the pipe to the Internuncio. ‘Suck on that m’boy.’

  Hot sweet smoke curled in Peter Rathkael-Herbert’s throat. Small metal centipedes raced around the insides of his kneecaps.

  ‘Nn,’ he said exhaling and handing it back.

  The sky was a vacant eye, massively blue. The sun flared low over the sea. He coughed and thanked the Captain.

  ‘Only for today,’ Wilberforce explained to him. ‘Wilkins is Captain tomorrow, then Schell, we rotate you see, all being equals ‘n’all. Gets a bit confusing sometimes.’

  His head was spinning, slow half-rotations which blurred the ship and its aged crew somehow making them even more fabulous than they already were. ‘Pirates,’ he slurred. The chair was so enveloping, a whole world.

  ‘Look at it financially, morally, politically, however you like,’ Captain van Clam leaned across, ‘we’re the most successful pirates these seas have ever known.’

  ‘Bar one.’ Webley ‘Mussel’ Wilkins had come up behind him.

  ‘Uh?’ The insides of his knees were huge wooden cavities now. Hundreds of small metal balls bounced and sprang off the planking.

  ‘The Indiaman’s no pirate,’ van Clam protested.

  ‘The piracy’s on land, but she’s a pirate ship, mark my words,’ Wilkins retorted.

  ‘Thanks.’ The Internuncio took the pipe, drew deeply and passed it on to Wilkins. ‘What Indiaman?’

 
‘Indiamen,’ said the Captain. ‘When we first began she was called the Sophie. She was an open secret. Gazi Hassan warned us of her first, this was in his free-booting days, before he started founding naval academies for the Sultan, re-organising the Turkish Fleet and whatnot.’

  ‘Turkish fleet!’ Wilkins spat.

  ‘Anyway, he told us nothing came within a league of that vessel and lived to tell the tale. “Give her a wide berth,” he said, and we did. No-one knows where she docks, no-one has seen her crew and no-one knows why she sails these seas.’

  ‘She makes two voyages a year.’ Wilkins took up the story. ‘Each year she appears somewhere off the coast around Jaffa, never exactly the same place, but always the south-east corner of the Mediterranean. No-one’s actually seen her being loaded, but on her voyage back she sits low in the water. She sails west, out of the Straits of Gibraltar and then heads north. After that no-one knows, but she’s back within two or three months. Spain perhaps, the west coast of France, she might even make England, but wherever she docks that’s where she unloads. West to east she rides high, empty I’d say.’

  ‘Indiamen, you said.’

  ‘Indiamen, mm. Two of them. There was the Sophie as I said, then there was a second. We’d been sailing these seas, what, seven or eight years I suppose, and the rumours started up about a second ship. Still an Indiaman, well-fitted, lots of guns, lots of tumblehome, but newly built by the look of her. About the same time, the Sophie disappeared, just vanished. No wreckage, nothing. The Corso had lost ships, the corsairs had taken losses too. She was a hell-ship and good riddance, that was the feeling north and south the length of the coast. The celebrations were short-lived though. The second Indiaman took up where the other left off, worse than before even. Whoever commands her seems to know these seas better than us all, and sails that damned ship like an argonaut.’

  The Internuncio let the tale blow gently about his ears. The sky was undulating, a vast eyelid of shadow creeping across the blue. He wanted to know why the voyages were made, he wanted to hear the mystery of the ship’s purpose explained. Perhaps he asked these things, and perhaps van Clam told him about the caravan which arrived on the coast around Jaffa and which was said to meet the ship and load it with the rarest metals, the most precious stones. As he slid into a dream under a sky so clear where all the stars were chances taken or missed, perhaps he asked the name of the ship, a name they had avoided voicing, as the ancients avoided mention of the Furies for fear that the name would summon its owner. But the pirates’ fears were groundless, their object being hundreds of miles distant, never to return and called by them now in syllables reaching down into the Internuncio’s sleep. ‘Vendragon’ said Wilberforce with a shiver. ‘And God help us all if we see that name again.’

  ‘Megaera!’ The name shouted from the crow’s nest, rousing the Internuncio from his sleep with the sun already high, sending elderly pirates scampering up the rigging, bowling along the gangways, diving through the hatches.

  ‘Megaera!’ There she was, a tiny black shape on the horizon and the Internuncio felt the Heart of Light swing about as Captain Wilkins set a course for his prey.

  ‘She’s carrying sulphur,’ Wilkins threw over his shoulder. ‘We’re low on powder, you see. Harder to port! That’s why we needed the Tesrifati’s saltpetre. A few barrels of sulphur, the same of charcoal and we’ll have all we need in no time.’

  The sun rose higher and it seemed to Peter Rathkael-Herbert that they were gaining on their prey. By the afternoon she was less than five leagues’ distance away.

  ‘Put on more sail!’ Wilkins roared aloft. A thin grey smudge hovered on the horizon, gradually becoming land.

  ‘Dammit!’ exploded the Captain. They were overhauling the Megaera, but too slowly. The coast would reach her first.

  ‘Third time this year we’ve missed her. There she goes, look at her.’ Wilkins shook his fist. ‘Next time, you bucket of worms, next time!’

  But the Megaera had indeed escaped and, as the Heart of Light slackened sail to tack away from the coast, she slid safely into harbour at Marseilles cursing, for the third time that year, the lack of a squadron to protect law-abiding vessels from the depredations of privateers.

  A letter was drafted and the mate posted up to Paris that very day. They would petition the King. The master of the Megaera had had enough. Running Caltanissetta sulphur between Cagliare and London should be routine. The Flota two centuries before had had an easier time of it. And waiting for him out there, somewhere on the open sea, was the black ship, Heart of Light. He needed an escort, something with fire power, something to blow the Heart of Light to the deepest pit of hell.

  ‘No,’ said Louis to the Megaera’s request for three twenty-four gun corvettes and ‘No’ to Monsieur Necker’s request to rebutt the charges made by his successor, Monsieur Calonne. Louis had awoken to a radiant dawn, full of decisiveness. Already he had banished the Bordeaux Parlement to Liborne, refused the resignation of a colonel in Toulouse and inveighed against the protests against his Catholic Majesty in Brittany.

  ‘No,’ he said to a request for pay from the Switzers guarding the Palais. Today he would not be cowed. He would make at least ten more decisions before breakfast, and twenty before lunch. The dauphin, he knew, was ill again. A sickly child, the dauphin. And his wife … His wife was not universally loved, it was undeniable. Today was a day for looking matters squarely in the face.

  ‘A petition from Cherbourg, sir.’ A secretary approached. ‘On the matter of a blocked harbour.’

  ‘No,’ Louis replied, ‘absolutely not. If they require a blocked harbour, they may build it themselves.’

  ‘I believe they have it already sir. They wish it removed….’

  ‘They want it, they do not want it. What am I to think? My decision stands. No, wait, send the petition to….’ In his agitation at the Cherbourg petition, Louis had risen from his desk.

  ‘Majesty?’ The secretary’s pen was poised, he looked to his master who now stared down out of his window. Morning sunlight glinted on the artificial lake.

  ‘Majesty?’ again, but Louis’ eyes were fixed on the orange trees. The lines were broken, disordered, confused. They looked as though they had been dropped there by, by balloon. Where had his guards been when the outrage took place? Were they in on the orange tree plot?

  ‘The Switzers’ pay,’ he spoke over his shoulder to the secretary. ‘Double it.’

  ‘And the Cherbourg petition, Majesty?’

  ‘The Marine Board,’ barked Louis as he turned away from the insult which confronted him below. ‘Let them deal with it.’ He paused. ‘That is enough for today,’ he said more quietly. ‘I am tired of it now.’

  And so the Cherbourg Petition was despatched, with other official correspondence, back to Paris and the offices of the Marine Board where, moved by stages from teetering heaps to dishevelled piles, by way of neatly-labelled mahogany drawers, overflowing bureau-desks, laquered memoranda trays and ormolu Louis Quinze side-tables pressed into service by the sheer accumulated bulk of neglected requisition orders, rejected tender offers, minutes of meetings for projects abandoned years before, outline plans of schemes so far in the future that the technologies to execute them had yet to be invented, treasured thumb-nail sketches and speculative costings of notions dear to the hearts of successive directors past, present and even future (infantile executions in bright crayon coupled with the endemic nepotism of the Marine Board’s policy on directorial succession support this last) all of this filed, indexed and cross-referenced under classification systems devised uniquely by a succession of independent minded secretaries who had overlaid them one on the other until every item was enshrined in a category of which it itself was the only example and the whole farrago resembled nothing so much as a bone china tea service dropped from height onto an adamantine and unyielding surface, such as a block of granite, it (the petition) quickly came to the notice of Monsieur Bougainville who recognised at once that this was a matte
r for his trusted lieutenants, Monsieurs Duluc and Protagoras, en route at that moment between Cherbourg and the port of La Rochelle where, weather permitting, the petition would be waiting for them on their arrival. And so it was.

  On the twentieth day of May, a coach and four made weary progress across the plain towards La Rochelle. The coach was red with dust thrown up by its passage along the Bressuire Road. It had passed Marans and was travelling over level terrain though the road, which twisted and turned to avoid the slightest hummock, wheeled the view about this way and that, until the two passengers wondered if they would ever arrive. Duluc peered out of the window at the plain which, a century and a half before, had played host to the red coats of Richelieu’s army. A city of tents had sprung up behind the trenches and mortars, out of range of the walls which came in and out of view with the twists in the road. Behind those walls the Rochelais had fought and starved and, at the last, burned themselves alive rather than be taken by the Cardinal’s dragoons. Old stories. Duluc wondered whether, in years to come, travellers to La Rochelle might look at those same walls, murmur his name, and, closing their eyes, imagine the scene as he would create it in the coming weeks. Passing at last through the gates into the city, he was struck by how few buildings had survived from that time. He knew the facts, but here the facts were stone and wood, flesh and blood, which had turned to nothing years before. The city, he realised suddenly, had never recovered from the siege.

  Low tide showed them the remains of the mole which had blocked the harbour. The harbour itself was a ragged circle, broken where it met the sea. Beyond it was Île de Ré, and to the south, Île d’Oléron where a patch of water seemed darker than that surrounding it. The sea between the two was troubled with cross currents and strange eddies which legend ascribed to the flight of a young child over those waters on the last day of the siege.