In their roles as officers of the Marine Board, Duluc and Protagoras knew the true reason was a complex system of sand-bars which moved invisibly below the surface in response to the tides. Two towers marked the entrance to the inner pool of the harbour. Casting an eye over the humble fishing smacks and lighters which crowded together along the quays, Duluc found it difficult to believe that it was from this harbour that Les Cacouacs’ partners across the sea had first made their fortunes. It was from here the Cabbala had fled, and to here they would return. No, no-one would remember Duluc. Le Mara, Cas de Pile, Romilly, Vaucanson, Boffe, les Blas, Lemprière and their leader, whose identity he had not been told. Those would be the names graven on Rochelle, as the Greek commanders’ were on Troy, as Scipio’s on Carthage. Duluc would be forgotten, a clerk in the service of princes across the water. Eclipsed by their return.
In the week which followed, the inhabitants of the hamlet of Lauzières to the north of the city watched with diminishing curiosity as two men laboured with lines, stakes, compasses and charts on the narrow isthmus of land which ended at Point du Plombe. They were from Paris, surveyors it was thought. The two men walked up and down the shoreline writing figures in small blue notebooks, holding up plumb-lines, even hiring a boat and paddling about to take soundings. These too were written in the notebooks.
Two days later, the news was posted in Lauzières, Nieul-sur-Mer and Marsilly that Monsieurs Duluc and Protagoras of the Marine Board were seeking to recruit a workforce. A jetty was to be built at Point du Plombe. It was to be fifty yards long and at its end would be a mooring post, stout enough to secure a vessel of four hundred tons. The villagers were caught between curiosity and ridicule. With the harbour at Rochelle, no ship would dock at Point du Plombe. For all their measuring and noting and stamping about with tide tables and charts, the men from Paris clearly lacked sense. What could they want such a mooring for? And here of all places? Within the day, Duluc and Protagoras had all the hands they would need.
The survey was a sham. All their efforts were a charade. The jetty had been drawn and its position marked six months before. In the Cardinal’s Paris residence, Jaques had leaned across the table and the girl had peered with sullen eyes as he pointed to the chart. ‘Here, extending to here. The ship will be four hundred tons, do you follow?’ The Cardinal had nodded his acceptance before passing on the commission to his lieutenants. The Marine Board was a convenience.
‘There is a channel, very narrow, the width of a man’s shoulders. As it deepens the ground closes above and it becomes a cave, a tunnel.’ Jaques’ face had tightened. ‘A long tunnel.’ His voice was distant. ‘Build the jetty where the channel meets the sea.’
Duluc had found the channel on the second day, overgrown and blocked with small trees and bushes. Together with Protagoras, he had forced a way through the undergrowth. They walked in single file for the channel was as narrow as Jaques had described it. Gradually the sides of the channel rose up and met above their heads, the vegetation thinned and was replaced by gravel which crunched underfoot. They moved deeper into the chamber until the light from the entrance dwindled and Duluc produced a candle. A few paces more and the passage broadened, then opened out into a long low cavern. Abruptly, the path ended.
They were at the edge of a lake which stretched out and away in front of them and the light from their candle could find the roof, but nothing to right or left or ahead except water extending into the darkness. But what held their attention was the boat. A dinghy perhaps ten feet long, beached on the gravel shore of the lake. Someone, sometime, had rowed across the lake. Duluc took out his compass and watched the needle swing towards him. They were facing south, towards the city. The two of them stood looking out over the darkness of the lake, their thoughts reaching south to Rochelle and back one hundred and sixty years to when the Rochelais had burned with their city and nine men, now their partners, fled under cover of the carnage. As they stood on the lightless shore with the candle flickering over the dinghy, the same realisation dawned on both men.
‘This was how they escaped,’ said Duluc.
Downstream from the Crow’s Nest, the Vendragon displaced four hundred tons of surrounding water, patiently awaiting her masters’ return.
‘Algae blooms off Île de Ré,’ read Captain Guardian from his post at the over-looking window.
‘Fish?’ asked Captain Roy.
‘Belly up by the hundred,’ said Eben. His eye wandered once again from the fine print to the ship moored below. He was waiting for the watchman to reappear.
‘Young Lemprière has no business aboard ships,’ he remarked.
‘Pleasant fellow.’ Roy recalled his enjoyable evening at the Stone Eater’s of a month ago. ‘His friend was in a fine funk.’ Eben saw Septimus pressed up against the wall by harmless flames, white-faced with his eyes screwed shut.
‘The fire,’ he said and both men nodded, remembering similar scenes aboard ship. All men had their private terrors, and the sea brought them out often enough.
‘It might have been the last performance.’ The Stone Eater’s name caught Guardian’s eye in another column. ‘The building is under Sir John’s interdiction and the King believes Cockspur Street a disfigurement to its neighbours. He wants to pull it down.’
‘He’s sickly,’ said Roy. ‘That’s the real reason. I heard he has consulted Bulwer, for blockage of the bowel.’ Eben thought of the final swallow, Lemprière’s creamy-pink stone sliding down the Stone Eater’s throat as Sir John’s men battled with Farina’s ruffians. The strange signal passed between Lemprière and the ruffians’ escaping leader, Stiltz, Stoltz, Farina’s right-hand man at any rate. Roy bit a woman in the leg, not once but several times, and the evening turned into a scrum, a near-riot. Tonight they were to go to the theatre. He could not quell the feeling of rising apprehension. He looked down once more at the ship but nothing had changed. An opera. He hoped Captain Roy would enjoy it as much as he had enjoyed the Stone Eater. His eyes moved over the ship but there was still no sign of the watchman.
On that same morning, seated with the Dukes of Cumberland and Queensbury, Lord Brudenell, Lady Cramer, Sir W. W. Wynne and others of the cognoscenti, Marmaduke Stalkart watched in gloom, his own and that of the surroundings, while Signors Morelli and Morigi swapped the arias of La Frascatana back and forth on the stage before him.
‘Add the tightrope act,’ he called up to Bolger. ‘Richter, whatever his name is.’ Bolger nodded and wrote the instruction down.
‘Yoooo-ooo-hooo!’ sang Signor Morelli.
‘Meee-ee-ee!’ returned Morigi. Lady Cramer waved a handkerchief at her husband who led the skeleton-orchestra on his violin. He waved back as he caught sight of her. The orchestra ground to a halt.
‘Very good, Morigi,’ Stalkart called to the tenor. ‘Very sweet on the rispondi.’ Morigi shrugged and began to wander towards the wings. ‘Could we add an allegro by tonight?’ Stalkart asked Bolger as he climbed down from the stage. ‘Something short?’
‘Se serce, se dice,’ Lady Cramer rolled several non-existent ‘r’s.
‘Something with a bit of spirit,’ the Duke of Cumberland chipped in gruffly.
‘It is far too late,’ said Bolger. Stalkart sighed. ‘We break, back by eleven everyone!’ He clapped his hands, rose and took Bolger by the elbow. Together they walked through the semi-light of the auditorium.
‘This opera house will go dark inside a month. Look here,’ Bolger pointed to the columns of figures in his ledger. Marmaduke glanced down.
‘Morelli is in fine voice, did you hear him?’ Lovely silvery tones banished the column of dwindling figures for a moment.
‘Douse those lamps!’ Bolger called back as they left by the stairs. ‘Do you understand me, Marmaduke? One month and,’ he drew a finger across his throat. ‘Curtains.’ Marmaduke climbed ahead knowing what would follow.
‘There is a time to call a halt, and I am calling it now.’ Marmaduke waited. ‘Your damned tortoises will tip us over
the edge. They will bankrupt this theatre and the interests of anyone with a stake in her….’
There it was. The tortoises. Bolger was right, of course, but he had no vision. Marmaduke had long shouldered the burden of opening the more prosaic eyes of his partner. The dwindling audiences for La Cameriera Astute, Gli Schiavi per Amore and now La Frascatana were nothing new. That really was the point. The people craved novelty and so he packed the programme with tight-rope acts, sword fights, concert pieces and ballets. Still the empty seats stretched back into the cavern of the pit and the galleries were deserted. He had fallen behind their appetites. Sometimes, watching them from the rear of the theatre, their faces would become blanks. Even shouting or coming to blows with their neighbours, the features would dissolve in the absorbent clouts of their rag-doll heads, along with the fire and life of the piece onstage before them, soaking it up in some hungry reaction, some deficiency they had to fill, they had to have more and more. It was a new hunger and he could no longer feed it with the old repertoire. At Sadler’s Wells, a theatre (theatre? A grocer’s shop with three candles and four chairs) packed them in with cudgel-fighting. A man who swallowed stones in Cockspur Street did good business up until three weeks ago and he was left with dance finales when the pit wanted tightropes, tightropes when they wanted horsemanship, and so on and so on. So he clung to his tortoises like a disbelieved prophet; they were far off, but promised and when they arrived, well, then his kingdom would be restored.
‘Cancel the order,’ said Bolger. No, never, not in any event, not if the theatre should crash in flames into the Haymarket.
‘They are part-paid already,’ he said, and watched Bolger swallow back his riposte, which was that the part-payment accounted in large degrees for their troubles. The tortoises should have arrived from Coade’s three months before. A succession of excuses - the last was a chipped mould -held Marmaduke at bay.
‘No-one will see them in any event,’ said Bolger, knowing that discouraging Marmaduke from his folly was ever a lengthy business.
‘Ah, not true, you see….’ and Marmaduke explained how the leading tortoise would be placed on the edge of the roof, rampant, perhaps bearing the legion’s standard which was the Minotaur indicating the secrecy of its battle-plan. Behind it the massed tortoise-ranks would cluster wonderfully. They would be invisible for the most part, this was true. But Marmaduke was no lunatic. Precisely through remaining unseen, his tortoises would prove a novelty the mob could never exhaust, not this season, nor the next, nor the one after that. They would be a mystery, in the best and most alluring, most crowd-pulling sense.
‘I leave you to your dreams.’ Bolger rose and stalked out in search of Richter. Marmaduke watched him leave in silence. Of course even the tortoises would not save the theatre in a single month. He was not foolish enough to believe that. He needed a coup, a revelation, a dazzling surprise, something to shock all London into attendance. In short, he needed Marchesi.
Cobb had him signed up already, but so far not a note had been heard from the famous tenor. A variety of infections bedevilled Marchesi’s throat, there were problems in rehearsal, with the scenery, with his fellow singers…. Marmaduke read these familiar signals without difficulty. Marchesi wanted more money and he, Marmaduke, was determined to give it to him. Damn the tight-rope walkers, fancy riders, dancers, stone eaters and all the other charlatans, a reputation like Marchesi’s was money in the bank. Money, however, was the problem. Bolger presented a persuasive case for this fact two or three times a day. There was no money. No money at all.
Marmaduke leaned back in his chair and smiled to himself. Settled there, twisting this vicious circle inside out, he heard a clattering, clanging kind of a noise scrape up the corridor outside. Marmaduke’s head appeared sideways around the door as Tim, stagehand and dogsbody, side-footed a pail over the floor. Marmaduke looked down at murky grey-green water slopping in the bucket.
‘More daubers?’ Tim grunted in the affirmative and continued on his way. Marmaduke had noticed the slogans appearing on the walls of the theatre two months earlier. At first the cryptic messages intrigued him, then they were a nuisance, taking Tim a morning or more to erase. Now he was worried. The theatre seemed marked out for some kind of special treatment at the hands of Farina’s men, a special defacement for this citadel of the graced and favoured. Sir John had been short in the extreme when he had complained.
‘Nonsense Stalkart. Do you ever look outside your precious theatre? The same slogans are everywhere….’ and then Marmaduke had looked, and it was true. They were all over the city. Farina. Farina.
Tim’s bucket gradually faded from his hearing and he closed the door once more. A few minutes later a knock sounded, signalling the arrival of his visitors. Stalkart, who recognised one vaguely, greeted them familiarly.
‘Did we meet at the De Veres’?’ The taller of the two paced up and down the room while his wiry companion stood quietly and without expression just inside the door as though an attack were expected. This was comical in some way, but Marmaduke did not smile. He listened attentively as conditions and fees were outlined. Already, he was thinking of Marchesi, a fat purse of gold to free the fat gold throat.
‘… access to all areas and facilities, the wardrobe, the properties, stage-machinery….’ the big man was saying.
‘A performance, splendid. The orchestra will….’
‘There is no need for any orchestra.’
‘Of course, of course,’ Marmaduke agreed.
‘We will hire the theatre outright for a single night. You need to know no more than that.’ And then the figure was mentioned, which swept away all Marmaduke’s obscure misgivings about the arrangement, which would later sweep away Bolger’s, although, on learning that the money was already spent, even to secure Marchesi’s retainer, his joy would be less fulsome.
‘That will prove acceptable,’ Marmaduke said calmly, already the golden notes were rising, the vicious circles turning virtuous, the tortoises, Marchesi, the money, all of it falling into place.
‘There remains only the date, Viscount,’ Marmaduke prompted his visitor.
‘Two months’ time. The tenth day of July,’ said Casterleigh as he and Le Mara walked out, leaving Marmaduke Stalkart elated at the coup and wondering, without much caring, for what purpose exactly they required his theatre. In his mind’s eye, the tortoises were already in flight.
No, Sir John had not taken much trouble over Stalkart’s complaint. Farina’s name was scrawled and daubed over every public building from Green Park to Shadwell. The green chalk - was that a clue, a message also to be read? He did not know, and in any case could only imagine green. Farina’s campaign had gone to ground. His lieutenants, Stoltz amongst them, had disappeared and the leader himself, well, the stories multiplied. He was gone to Paris for arms, or Amsterdam, or Lisbon. He had taken the cloth, joined the Wesleyites, he worked as a labourer in Tothil Fields, he had sailed for the Indies, was dead, or risen from the dead as an avenging angel, a cohort of the devil, an invention of himself. His skull was made of solid silver, he drank poison and did not die, he had fought with the corsairs under Gazi Hassan. He could remember his own birth and knew where and how he would die. He was Farina.
For Sir John, who felt the city’s taut skin pulsing beneath his feet, he was a monster hatching in the sewers and underground courses, in the sub-basements and cells, in the lightless spaces beneath the everyday townscape. Once already he had shoved his scrawny ragged neck up into the light, cawed for meat and sunk out of sight. Next time the fledgling would be a harpy, hungry and risen to feed. He was everything that was wrong in the city. The squalor, the stench, the ruin. He was the unexplained deaths and the unforseen collapses and Sir John could not find him.
He asked for more constables, and received polite smiles. He explained the need, talking of the Linen Houses collapsing, flooding the streets with jobless workers, of a new viciousness in the dens and rookeries, of a woman who stamped her foot, broke a vei
n and bled to death in the street, of the urchins who had danced around her and painted their faces with her blood, perhaps they did not know, perhaps it was innocence made them do this but he did not believe it. He was refused. If trouble broke out, the barracks were near. But Sir John told them the prisons were full of deserters from those barracks and still they would not yield. Then he realised that they would not give him the men because they feared a blind man and his force of constables as they feared their own regiments and the mob. They did not trust him. What would Henry have done? He had packed up the foreigners and sent them off in a boat although, remembering the incident across three intervening decades, Sir John recalled it was not a success. They had escaped with the boat, ship rather, or been lost. And that was the Comb Riots, a gentle ripple compared to his present fears. His own men were frightened and mutinous. Even his guide-boy, it was a dreadful incident, he would rather not think of it. It might have ended in disaster; ridicule, a jibe, a prod, a poke, a trip and then a fat blind man rolling under the kicks of the Mob, kicking him and kicking him. The mood could turn like lightning. The boy had untied the string which Sir John had attached about his neck. He had tied it about the neck of a small dog. The dog had led Sir John down the steps of Bow Street towards the market and it was Mister Gyp, the knife-grinder, who had saved him, whispering in his ear, ‘Your boy’s a dog Sir John,’ as he passed. The joke so visible it could not have been missed, a Chief Examining Magistrate led by a small dog through the gauntlet of the market. He had been wrong about Gyp. The boy was padlocked now. The clanking irritated Sir John.
Troubled on all levels, he discharged his duties at Bow Street with a new perfunctoriness. A weather-eye on the coming storm and an ear to the ground which shuddered far below drew his attention this way and that as the catalogues of arson and affray mounted in the Examining Office. He needed a refuge, and found it in the cool halls of Rudge’s mortuary. Rudge hardly noticed the city’s anxieties. So far as Sir John knew, he never ventured beyond the doors of the mortuary. On the pretext of his investigation into the Ritual Murders (a title he half-regretted sharing with Rudge) Sir John spent long hours meandering about details of the women’s and Peppard’s deaths, a kind of purge from which he would emerge briefly free of his cares. The investigation itself was a lonely success in the lists of his recent failures. The figure of Lemprière floated about the affair, never quite connecting with it, never far away. He had been at the De Veres’ the night of the first murder and he had been, perhaps, the last to see Rosalie alive. But five months before….
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