Bent double over his task, his waist cinched for safety, James Bierce packed the socket holding the twenty-seventh and, thank God, the last tortoise with stiff grey cement. The sun beat down on his back and glinted off the tortoise’s supporting leg. Tiny gleams of light sparkled near its base. He looked about quickly, but his work mates had not noticed. One of them, he knew not which, already knew. Twenty-six tortoises stared back at him and he bent once more to his task, pushing cement into the crevices and working it around with his thumb. The cement would hold for a hundred years. But not the leg. He had thought they would find the fault that morning. He had watched with studied calm as Hanley, whose long years of expertise no-one was allowed to forget, had rested his ear against each beast and tapped each in turn with a small mallet. Twenty-seven dull thuds resounded around the loading yard. Hanley had nodded and James Bierce breathed again.
It had begun the night after the business with the girl on King’s Arms Stairs. Beadles all about the place, Sir John Fielding no less talking to old Eleanor Coade in the offices out front and himself going about his business checking the bins in the sheds. That was when he found it. A bucket had been pulled loose and scattered grated glass in the clay in one of the vats. He saw it glittering there and thought; no accident. You might pull it off by chance, but not leave it there unless by design. He looked left and right. No-one in sight. He thought of the day eight months before when Rowlandson had sacked him from the Glass Manufactory, his wife had thrown his own father’s pamphlet-collection into the Thames, a young hothead had knocked him down in Southampton Street and tried to stave his head in with a trunk. He thought of Farina and his call to arms and he thought, here it is, here is my call, a test….
He had reached down and worked the glass into the clay. In the days that followed he had waited for his co-saboteur to show himself, but no-one made a sign. Then he had thought it was only when his tiny rebellion broke out, only when the pediment actually cracked, that he would truly be Farina’s man. He smoothed off the last of the cement and descended to join his workmates.
Together with the meagre crowd who had gathered to watch the elevation, they all gazed up at the only visible evidence of their labours. James Bierce looked up to see a tortoise leaning out into space, two short limbs raised in anger, one leg stepping out over the parapet. It seemed as though the tortoise were about to take flight. Unseen far above, the tortoise was supported only by its one remaining leg and, beneath its thin coating of Coade, that leg, James Bierce knew was composed entirely of glass. Behind him, the twenty-seven empty carts were preparing to return to the yard. The drivers checked their horses for a moment and doffed their hats in respect. A hearse was passing, but as he turned to look with his workmates, James Bierce, the small crowd, the drivers, the other hands, Bolger and lastly Marmaduke Stalkart, all saw that it was empty. Half a mile away to the north, the bells of Saint Anne’s in Dean Street began to chime.
‘Damn!’ Rudge looked at Sir John in surprise. He saw no reason for the outburst. The bells chimed again.
‘The funeral! Damn my forgetfulness!’ Sir John exclaimed. Rudge waited for his colleague to subside, then resumed his questions.
‘With an accent, you say?’
‘Like this.’ Sir John drew a diagonal in the air, left down to right. ‘As you see it. L.E.M.P.R.I.E. with an accent like this,’ he made the motion once again, ‘R.E.’
‘Blackmailing George Peppard?’
‘This Lemprière held an agreement of some sort between an ancestor of his and the East India Company. Apparently a share of the Company was his, a ninth….’
‘A ninth? Good God!’ Rudge sounded incredulous. Sir John nodded.
‘My thought exactly. But Theobald insisted. George was to take the case, or forge some sort of deal, otherwise Lemprière would, well, Theobald became rather vague. Some new aspect of the Neagle Affair, he thought.’
‘That was a dead letter years ago,’ Rudge snorted. He was wiping down the slabs. Sir John could hear a damp cloth moving over the marble, the slight sounds of his colleague’s exertion. Drops of water falling to the stone floor.
‘Anyway, George refused and this Lemprière killed him to close his mouth, so Theobald maintains.’ The last three words hung in the air between the two men. The street above was a faint hum, nothing more. Only the bells seemed to reach this lowest cellar of the mortuary.
Sir John wanted Theobald to tell the truth. He wanted Lemprière guilty, without doubt. Or not guilty, again without doubt. But in his heart he knew George Peppard’s brother for a liar. Perhaps he told the truth, but if that were so it was only in support of some wider, more nebulous lie. Theobald had grown confused or forgetful whenever Sir John had probed his story. Whatever else this Lemprière might be, he did not seem a blackmailer. There was the question of the women too. What part did they play? So far as he knew the murders of George Peppard, the girl Rosalie and the older woman whose body now rotted in a casket in the cellar adjacent to this, were connected only by their suspected assailant. There was no pattern to it and Sir John, above all else these days, sought patterns with a strong passion. That, after all, was what Henry would have done.
‘Another thing.’ Rudge spoke suddenly. ‘If Theobald had never heard of this Lemprière before the night on which they met and, as must be the case, there has been no contact since, how would he know how to spell the name?’
‘The name? Well, it is not so hard….’ Then Sir John caught Rudge’s drift. ‘The accent,’ he said, and made the motion for the third time. ‘You are right. He would have to see the name written down. A tavern, a walk to Blue Anchor Lane…. There was no opportunity.’
At that moment, in a space both anterior and distant, the noose, knot and rope which had tightened about the young man’s neck were lowered very slightly, an easing which brought the hook from which he hung into view as a sickle moon, or a tiny scythe, or a cedilla.
‘By the same token,’ Sir John went on, ‘if they had not met before, why should Theobald invent such a calumny?’ He was thinking aloud. ‘Someone else is involved,’ he said.
‘One at the least,’ Rudge replied.
Walking back to the Examining Office at Bow Street, Sir John would resist this thought. The Lemprière case was sharp and hard. There were inconsistencies certainly, and complications, he would tell himself, but at root, in essence, it was firm. He needed to believe it, needed one single suspect. Not hundreds. One. He felt the case slipping, sliding out from under him to join the general drift which was towards diffuseness, confusion, vagueness. Disorder. Everything might be degenerating into a farrago, but he wanted Lemprière pristine and untouched by all that or, better still, all that to take on more of the characteristics of the Lemprière case.
But ‘all that’ would not oblige in June. The city’s misfortunes came in gangs, in weirdly-themed spates. The heat seemed to cage itself and concentrate, building up to burn holes in the city’s fabric with an eerie specificity. Children: they drowned, two of them while bathing in the Thames; were burned when a draper’s house was consumed in Union Street; crushed by a coach overturning on the Lambeth turnpike; took their own lives after viewing a hanging in Pultney Street; had their skulls caved in, a flower pot, a servant’s carelessness on a third floor in Berwick Street. Collapses: a summer storm would sap the foundations of the Coal Meter’s Office, cracks would appear in the paving over the Fleet River, in the cobbles of Leadenhall Street, four houses in Wapping would disappear overnight heralded by neither agitation of the air, disturbance of the earth nor subterranean rumblings of any sort. A small earthquake would be reported in Norwood, swallowing two, and a whirlwind at Deptford would raze a cottage and four sheds, firing their contents aloft so as to cause a monstrous hazard of the air. A man would be killed by a descending fruitbarrow. Finally, limbs: Lord Chatham’s foot would be taken with gangrene from a gash of his shoe buckle; a leg and thigh, female by the shoe, would be washed up at White Friar’s Dock; arms jutting from the port ho
les of a brig at Blackwall would discover a stowage of slaves, above three hundred dead, above sixty dismembered for concealment; a single finger would be delivered to Sir John at the Examining Office, only that, quite clean and without explanation.
This then would be June, and part of July for Sir John. Behind these perversely grouped events, the dock-dispute would spread out further from the quays, the silk weavers would march, the heat would intensify, the arrival of malcontents by land and sea, agitators, dissenters, alien trouble-makers, would be reported, flocking to the city like flies to a haunch of rotting ham, an old mistake (not his) would return to haunt him and behind all these, even the old mistake, even the heat he suspected, would be Farina.
So Sir John would cling to Lemprière as a single certainty in the midst of this evil flux, talking endlessly about it to Rudge and Mrs Fielding, who would call it an unhealthy obsession and buy him Freaks Tincture of Peruvian Bark, plaguing his guide-boy with confusing rhetorical questions. And then, on the tenth of July, even that last support would be kicked away like the shoring timbers in a besieger’s undermining tunnel and the tower’s foundations would crumble from the corner, spreading through walls, turrets and bastions to the whole city, miles of stone crashing in and the roofs ablaze, when a young man would call at his office quite out of the blue, whose voice he would recognise vaguely, who would know more of the murders and of this Lemprière than Sir John himself, who would call himself a “concerned friend” to Lemprière and treat of the murders in turn and in detail, who would quit the Examining Office without leaving his name which Sir John would only recall, infuriatingly, some hours later, as belonging to one who had carried the first victim back to London on the roof of his coach and spoken to Sir John six months before, and this, naturally, would be Septimus.
He would come late, too late for Sir John and too late for the city. He was still far off as the guide boy clanked ahead of him and Sir John sought to penetrate the opacities of the case on their route back to Bow Street: he was still almost a month away. The guide boy stopped.
‘What now?’ barked Sir John. He had been hoping to remove the chain and collar. The imagery was unfavourable.
‘Funeral sir,’ said the guide-boy. Sir John cursed softly once again.
‘The hearse is empty,’ he told the boy, thus adding another thin coating to his reputation for second sight.
‘I know sir,’ said the boy. ‘We can’t cross, sir, cos of the carts.’ Sir John listened as twenty-seven heavy carts trundled slowly past in front of them both.
‘Good lad,’ he said. Perhaps he might dispense with the chain. Try string again.
When the convoy had passed, the two of them continued. Sir John thought of the hearse’s latest occupant and felt a second twinge of guilt over his absence. Then he thought of the conversation in the mortuary which had delayed him. The two thoughts mingled and he enjoyed a faint sense of serenity from a small certainty that arose from their synthesis. George Peppard’s murder, Theobald’s story, Lemprière and this half-cocked nonsense about an antique agreement was an imbroglio of half-truths with which Alice de Vere at least would have had no truck at all.
Dong!
Lady Alice de Vere of Braith, widow to the late eleventh earl and mother to the twelfth, died peacefully while inspecting her son’s drainage project on Friday the ninth of June at three in the afternoon.
Dong!
All attempts to resuscitate her proving hopeless, her grieving son, Edmund, arranged for the funeral service to take place at Saint Anne’s church in Dean Street five days later.
Dong!
Now, with the notices sent out, the pall-bearers hired, the hearse engaged, Edmund de Vere stood in church while the vicar whose predecessor had married the deceased to the earl over fifty years before, recalled a life stretching over seventy-two years. Beside the earl stood John Lemprière. Together they formed an audience of two.
The vicar addressed them, trying hard not to glance at the rows of empty pews which stretched away at their backs and which provided a testimony that, though mute and obscure in its meaning, seemed to drown out his own entirely. Other than Lemprière, no-one had troubled themselves to attend.
Afterwards, Lemprière sat with the earl in a tavern in Berwick Street. The earl took a mug of porter, then another. Lemprière watched Edmund’s faculties return and heard his vowels more clearly as he supped on the ale.
‘It was very sudden,’ he said. ‘We were viewing my drainage scheme in the west pasture.’
‘Ah.’ Lemprière recalled the project from his singular meeting with Alice de Vere.
‘I think she was surprised by the operation. Or the lack of it. A hole in the ground, a crane…. Not much to look at. The crane should have gone months ago, in any case.’
‘That’s the drainage project?’ Lemprière leaned forward, thinking of the black arm swinging out of the night sky, the blazing pit. ‘That’s all it is?’
‘Yes.’ The earl was a little taken aback. ‘I expected more myself, I was promised more. In fact, I am vexed with Septimus on several counts this morning.’
‘Septimus? What has he….’
‘Recommended the engineers, made the introductions, gave the guarantees. Now they’ve disappeared without trace. Still, it hardly matters now I suppose. My mother was opposed to it all from the start; she had her own enthusiasms.’ Lemprière digested Septimus’ involvement in silence.
‘She spoke of you a few days before her death.’ Lemprière looked up again. ‘The same obsessions as ever. The secret agreement, the fourth earl, a fabulous treasure hidden who knows where, you, the Company.’ He drank deeply from his mug. Lemprière mopped his brow. The heat in the tavern was stifling. The outburst came suddenly, out of context.
‘And not one of them could bother to turn up. Not one!’
Lemprière was caught off-guard. The fact had filled his thoughts in the deserted church. It was the moment he had been dreading from the second the service had ended. Now he listened to himself make excuses for people of whom he knew nothing but their absence that day. It was the heat, the summer flight of aestivating gentry to the country, the erratic coaches, the clogged roads, the Dispute, inadequate notice, even Farina, any or all of these things and the same for those he knew from the merest acquaintance, Stalkart’s overheard remark, Maillardet’s distress and Byrne’s schadenfreude, a dowager’s imperious glance, a gaggle of giggling nieces dismissing him from behind their fans. They were all confused, mistaken, delayed or debarred, but when he came to their own mutual friends he ground to a halt, his invention exhausted.
‘I thought at least the Club would turn up.’ The earl’s voice was shaking. ‘I told Walter the day before last. He was to see to it that everyone knew. I thought at least Septimus might, or Lydia, you know she is a caring sort, I thought she….’ The earl’s expression had changed subtly. ‘I rather thought I might rely on Lydia, you know. I actually rather….’
It was immediately clear to Lemprière that Walter Warburton-Burleigh had not told any of the Pork Club of the funeral and he told Edmund de Vere the same without embroidery. The earl nodded in resignation at the fact, but Lemprière could see that his thoughts were elsewhere.
‘Lydia would not have known,’ he added, and the earl nodded again. He was looking up, out of the open window behind Lemprière. Lemprière turned and scanned the upper storeys of the building opposite which was a bakery. The windows were open and a maid was dusting within.
‘Beautiful geraniums,’ the earl said, and pointed to a row of pots on the ledge, put out to catch the afternoon sun, and it was Lemprière’s turn to nod. ‘But how rude of me!’ the earl exclaimed suddenly. Lemprière turned back quickly in surprise. ‘Here I’ve been, bleating my misfortunes. You must be bored to distraction. Tell me now, how does the great work proceed? Where are you in your dictionary?’
Somewhere before “A” and in a place after “Z”, chained at its centre and clinging to its outermost border, in the margin and
the text, he was halved and quartered as the dictionary neared completion. It was his own monstrous monument, an extension of himself. It was a usurping version, a simulacrum that sapped and displaced him until he was a spent host exhausted by its parasite. Lemprière would rise early and sit at his desk in the sweltering June heat, looking at the manuscript leaves before him, sometimes with pleasure and pride in his achievement, sometimes with boredom. There were days on which he might have shouted from the windows, others on which he might have burned the whole manuscript. He began to see the reason behind Septimus’ prompt collections.
Septimus came twice before the funeral, and twice after. On each of the latter visits Lemprière chided him for his non-attendance, but desisted when Lydia, who accompanied him on all four occasions and, to Lemprière’s annoyance watered the orange tree on each, took the criticism to include herself, grew tearful and professed at length her sympathy for the earl who was the most couth and best mannered of Septimus’ motley associates in her opinion. Septimus made conventional noises and mouthed excuses centring on Walter’s sins of omission the day before, but his expression was distant and Lemprière noticed that Lydia would look quickly at him from time to time as though to reassure herself that he was still there. His flashes of inappropriate bonhomie and roughshod energy were rarer, he seemed to look through Lemprière as he spoke, his eyes fixed on a point somewhere beyond him. When questioned on the matter, he would talk about the weather.
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