Lemprière's Dictionary

by Lawrence Norfolk

  Juliette was high in the rigging already, a tiny blaze of white in the high shadows. As he watched, she pushed open a hatch in the roof. He saw a square of night sky, her body silhouetted against it, and then the hatch was closed. Lemprière started up the ladder after her. Half-way up he paused and looked down. The ground was much further away than he had imagined; too far. He went on, moving slowly up to the highest of the platforms, then along a catwalk which swung freely on its ropes until he reached the hatch. He pushed it open, pulled himself up through the opening and lay panting on his back. Sky, stars, the night. He was on the roof of the Opera House.

  A warm wind blew. The flat roof stretched for forty yards in front of him. It was leaded, but salts deposited there by the rain, the moonlight and oxides of the air combined to bleach it almost white. He was standing to its rear and ahead of him the flat surface was dotted with curious humps, creatures of some sort. Twenty, perhaps thirty of them. Tortoises! A single creature reared up on the low parapet farthest from him. They were huge, standing waist high at least. Apart from himself, the scene was quite still. He called ‘Juliette!’ again. There was no response for a moment then, on the other side of the roof, he saw a figure rise and stroll towards him.

  ‘Good evening, Lemprière! You come for what is mine,’ the figure called as he drew nearer. It was the Viscount. His boots thudded over the lead. Lemprière edged sideways.

  ‘She is not yours,’ he called back. ‘She told me…. You are not her father.’ The Viscount drew closer.

  ‘True, Lemprière, so true….’ He laughed shortly to himself.’ She is not at issue here. Something greater detains me, something far more difficult to grasp.’ He stopped and the two faced one another, still yards apart. The moonlight threw distorting shadows over Casterleigh’s face. He had sought Juliette; only her. What else was there?

  ‘Your share, Lemprière! Your ninth of the Company!’ The Viscount hurled it in his face. He saw Juliette’s expression when he had mentioned the dogs; astonished, aghast. ‘The thing your father sought,’ roared the Viscount.

  ‘My father!’ he gasped.

  ‘Your father, your grandfather, and his father and his before him, all of them. They all sought what you seek. As fast as we cut them down, they sprang up again. All of them, Lemprière. And your father…. Could you really believe it was an accident?’

  Lemprière saw the dogs running low over the ground, springing as his father turned to flee, his arm raised, falling, rolling over and over….

  ‘All of them accidents, Lemprière?’ The Viscount was moving towards him.

  ‘Even François?’ Casterleigh stopped in his tracks. Lemprière edged sideways. His back was to the parapet now. The Viscount advanced again. His bulk towered over Lemprière.

  ‘Everything in time,’ he said and lunged. Lemprière fell back. The first tortoise bumped against the backs of his legs. He scrambled up and the Viscount lunged again. He moved almost casually after his victim, skirting the tortoises, herding Lemprière towards the parapet.

  ‘This time it is you, Lemprière.’ He drew a short dagger. Lemprière stepped back again, shaking his head. Snatches of his father’s letter came to him. If my mode of passing follows the precedent set by our ancestors… doubts and unanswered questions. John, pursue them no further … The Viscount came at him again. Your curiosity will not be appeased. He sensed the parapet close at his back, the sheer drop beyond it, your vengeance never enacted. Fool, he cursed himself. The dagger swung in an arc before him, forcing him back. He retreated and knew that he could go no further. The Viscount grinned and swung again. Lemprière jumped back and up, onto the parapet. Of my papers, burn them. Fool! Casterleigh thrust at him for the last time, the knife an inch from his face, his mouth moving as though about to speak, the parapet slid out from under him and his centre of gravity had already left his body, it was behind him, racing down to the stones a hundred feet below. He was falling backwards into space. He had lost and he was going to die, like all the other Lemprières, and for nothing because he was the last.

  And Casterleigh’s expression froze on his face.

  Lemprière would go over the elements of what followed many times, but he would never be sure of the exact order. He heard a loud rush of air behind him, deafening and rising from below. He saw Casterleigh fall back, staggering as though he had been hit, his eyes focused somewhere above his own head. He tasted salt. He felt a hard hand against his back, sure it was a hand, pushing him forward with extraordinary strength. Strangest of all, he smelt burning.

  But the wind had not risen and no-one had hit the Viscount. Salt? His own mouth was full of spit, fear he supposed. Nothing was on fire though, and the hand at his back, it was a hand, he was quite certain and yet how could it be? The hand of God? He was flung forward off the parapet with great force. The roof was rising to meet him as one huge sheet of lead that seemed to melt and disperse in a fine light mist as his head came down, filling his vision until the Viscount, the tortoises behind him, the hatch behind them and even the sky were sucked away and replaced with lead that was white, then grey and then black.

  John. Hands were around his neck, pulling him forwards, upwards. Pursue them… His face was being hit from side to side. He tried to hit back.

  ‘John.’ Waves of grey were rolling back and lightening. He was asleep, he thought, being hit.

  ‘John! Wake up!’ The greys were sharpening. He looked up and saw a face above his own. It was upside down. He groaned and tried to raise his own head. The blows stopped.

  ‘Get up, for God’s sake. We have to move, come on, John!’ It was Septimus.

  He was lying in the alley beside the theatre. Septimus was kneeling beside him.

  ‘John, we must go! You have to get up.’ He tried. His head pounded.

  ‘Good, now move.’

  ‘Septimus, what are you…. How are you here?’ He was rubbing his forehead. The bone felt soft.

  ‘I saw the girl enter as I left, waited on the stairs….’

  ‘Juliette! Where is she?’

  ‘I don’t know. I followed you both, found you lying on the roof…. We have no time for this. Look.’ He pointed up the alley to the Haymarket where Lemprière saw groups of men moving past in purposeful gangs, shouting to one another, rallying, gathering. ‘The city’s going up, don’t you see? Now, come on!’

  Their journey back took them through all the streets Lemprière had travelled earlier. But now, instead of the solitary girl fleeing ahead of him, he saw gangs of men and women who swirled about carrying staves and torches, wearing strange face-paint and shouting ‘Farina!’ They moved in all directions, clashing, mixing and joining, but the general drift was east. Lemprière and Septimus were carried along and, as his head cleared, Lemprière began to look strangely at his friend. The further they went, the more Septimus seemed to lose his earlier purpose and urgency, and, down the Strand, it was Lemprière who hustled them both through the menacing clusters of the mob. They reached Southampton Street unscathed and Lemprière ushered Septimus through the door and up to his room where his friend slumped down as though some inner reserve had brought him this far, but no further.

  The warm wind blew through the open window, rustling the pages of the pamphlets which lay on his desk, stirring the air which had lain in the room since his departure. Juliette’s scent and his own were mixed together as its heavy volume was disturbed. The street sent up odd shouts and the sounds of footsteps moving quickly over the flagstones. Septimus was slumped in the disorder of the bed. Lemprière stalked about the room, casting glances down at Septimus who seemed deep in thought.

  ‘So you waited at the top of the stairs?’ He broke the silence at last. Septimus propped himself up on his elbows and nodded wearily. ‘By the door of the copyist?’ Septimus looked up in surprise, then resignation, then nodded again.

  ‘Why?’ asked Lemprière. ‘If you wanted the dictionary copied, you might as easily have told me as concealed it.’ Septimus opened his mouth to
speak but the other put up his hand for silence. ‘So you waited, and you followed me, and I suppose you watched the whole pantomime. Was I meant to believe all that? Was I meant to think I was Paris? I am not mad, do you understand?’ He was standing directly over Septimus, who tried to wave him away, but Lemprière had taken hold of his theme and would not let go. ‘It was all a sham, wasn’t it? Tonight, at the theatre, and before….’ His mind was racing back, his voice suddenly colder and more certain. ‘Why were you late the night we were to go to Coade’s?’ he asked. ‘At the De Veres’, who arranged for a pit to be dug and a crane to be placed in the middle of a bog? Come, come Septimus. A drainage project?’

  And then Septimus’s explanations began to tumble out: Juliette had become an obsession with Lemprière, he might have done anything. The night at Coade’s? He was delayed, distracted, he had forgotten, had arrived too late and as for the crane and the pit, he knew nothing. He had merely recommended someone to the earl and if the fellow was a rogue, he was sorry, but that was all. Septimus rallied somewhat as these excuses were offered. He sat up and dealt with Lemprière’s questions in turn. But he was improvising, seeming to form his answers as they fell on Lemprière’s sceptical ears, and they were weak. Before, he knew, Septimus would have blustered and bullied until he, Lemprière, was convinced. But now he was vague and hesitant, stopping and changing tack in mid-sentence to Lemprière’s snorts of disbelief. He seemed unable to concentrate on the matters before him. This unsettled Lemprière. He almost shouted at his companion.

  ‘What is wrong with you? You have been this way for weeks, even before then….’ He thought of Septimus’ terror at the Stone Eater, when tiny harmless flames had ringed him and his body had seized up in fright. Then, before that, at the coffee shop when he had seemed to drift away leaving only a shell, a husk that was and was not Septimus. The husk spoke to him then.

  ‘I … I am not quite myself, John, that is true. I suppose I should have left you there, but I wanted to bring you back. Here, this is where we met most frequently, this room. I thought, after tonight …’ He paused and stood up. ‘You might think, well anything. I believed you were in danger and so I followed. We have been friends, I believe. Friends of a sort, no?’

  ‘Casterleigh tried to kill me,’ Lemprière said. His back was to Septimus as he spoke. The moon had risen higher, its light streaming through the window onto the desk. The wind had risen too. ‘Tried to throw me off the roof.’ Pages stirred in front of him.

  ‘His daughter,’ Septimus said behind him. ‘I told you.’

  ‘No,’ Lemprière said. ‘She is not his daughter; and she was not the reason. It was the thing which brought you and I together first of all.’ Septimus moved behind him. ‘The agreement,’ he said. ‘George was wrong after all. It is still good, though how I do not know. It has been a curse for all of us, all the Lemprières. Even François. I think they tried to cheat him out of his share, after they escaped.’

  The wind lifted and turned the first page from one of the pamplets in front of him. The moon shone brightly and for a moment both sides of the text appeared garbled together as the light shot through the paper. He was thinking of François and Thomas de Vere, their chance meeting after the siege. The note in the fourth earl’s diary recalled itself from his encounter with Alice de Vere. He had taken her for a fool, a mad woman, just as one hundred and fifty years earlier her ancestor had taken his own for the same. Thomas de Vere had quit their meeting with François’ promise ringing in his ears,’… soon I will be richer than any man bar himself, for he made an Agreement with me and will keep it.’ The fourth earl had written those words clinging to his hope, even while noting, ‘All this was said in a grete rage like a madness….’ And then François has disappeared.

  Lemprière thought of Casterleigh’s words on the roof. They had found François and silenced him, and he had left that promise as his legacy. A ninth of the Company was the Lemprières’ and one by one they had all gone after it, even his father, even himself. One by one they had suffered the same fate as François. Somewhere, somehow, the fortune had survived while its true owners had died in its pursuit. Was that the last secret? Was that the reason for the feud between the investors and the Lemprières? It was not enough. Not enough for his father, nor his before him, nor any of them. Not enough for François.

  “I asked him if he mourned his fellow merchants yet for it is now some months since the final slaughter he told me nay, for they lived yet and were they burned to death with the rest his answer would even then be nay for he detested them as he would birds who eat their young and worse. All this was said in a grete rage, like a madness.…”

  Madness. Something in the siege. The wind gusted a little harder and on the desk in front of him the pages of the fourth pamphlet began to turn through the last letters of Asiaticus’ lexicon.

  “X is the initial of Xerxes who stood safe behind his Armies weeping false tears before their fight with the Greeks saying ‘Of all this multitude, who shall say how many will return?’ He is their mentor.…”

  Mentors, foul birds, kings who slaughtered their peoples. The Company piling up its profits year after year, somewhere a vast hoard. The moon was even brighter as it sucked heat from the sun’s rays and threw freezing beams onto the desk. Not enough for François.

  “I believe he means mischief to his old fellows the other eight merchants but talked only of marking their papers, or having marked papers, saying mark you in his accent and winking. For myself I kept my peace and we talked of other matters, like the vile attacks by hacks on the Company….”

  “The Jews have a name, it is called Yom Kippur, it is my Y, it means their Day of Atonement and it is upon them all….” Mischief, revenge, atonement. For what? Their theft? It was not enough. There was more, something beyond the investors’ hoard, something more behind the words on the page which tumbled over slowly as the light drove through it and the answer stared up at him. Then he knew.

  As the moonlight streamed through the paper, he realised that the pages of the fourth pamphlet were the “marked papers” that had so puzzled Thomas de Vere. Lemprière held the pages up to the light and turned them one by one. Each held a watermark, a rough crescent.

  ‘It was never the money,’ he said, half to himself, half to Septimus. Lemprière stared at the watermark. The identity of the symbol before him was unfurling its secret. He knew it already, had seen it twice: as a wide banner and a tight emblem, both greater and smaller. Only the scale had held their correspondence at bay.

  ‘Septimus,’ he said to the figure behind him. ‘In my chest there is a ring, and by its side a large book. Could you….’ He heard the figure shuffle across the room behind him. He was already sure as he took François’ ring and held it next to the watermark and saw the ragged “C” of its signet reproduced in the watermark in Asiaticus’ pamphlet. François’ “grete rage” and the rage of Asiaticus were one and the same. François and Asiaticus were one person. Their hate shared the same object. Septimus was turning the pages of the book on the desk before him. Harbour plans of the western ports presented themselves: Le Havre, Cherbourg, Brest, Lorient, Nantes, ordered by his father, gathered and bound by Ebenezer Guardian, eventually collected and carried home by Lemprière himself.

  ‘There.’ He stayed the other’s hand. The same symbol appeared again, but larger. The ragged crescent was the outline of a harbour, the break in the circle its mouth. As Lemprière read the legend above the plan, he realised that this was the real significance of the watermark embedded in the pages of the pamphlet. This had been François’ real threat to the investors. Not the abuse against John Company, not his ABC of hate, but this symbol, sent to them in the pages of the fourth and last pamphlet. Whatever crime François Lemprière’s former partners had committed to excite his rage, it was somehow tokened here. Its disclosure had frightened them enough to have him killed, and all the Lemprières who followed the trail he had begun. The three images, ring, book and watermark coincide
d in sudden sharp focus before his eyes. The roots of the feud lay in the place whose plan was before him now.

  ‘I know the design,’ he murmured to himself. Septimus drew back.

  ‘Here,’ he pointed to the place, and then the name came. ‘It began here, here at….’

  But he did not finish. Septimus caught him under the arms even before he crumpled from the blow and lowered him to the floor.

  ‘Rochelle,’ he whispered in Lemprière’s unconscious ear. ‘All of it began at Rochelle.’

  IV Rochelle

  THE ANTICYCLONE moved east from the Azores towards Portugal then north as dawn rose on the thirteenth of July. Gradual isobars channelled a sweeping breeze inland east and north in a crescent of summer turbulence. Rippling over the flat plains and mountain ranges, the anticyclone began its passage inland as sunshine fell on the broad waters of the Danube whose banks sucked in the shadows of night. Its pressured heart tightened as the sun rose higher and the winds blew a little harder. Still air over Mitteleurope began to spin in sympathy, setting off further eddies in turn, and more beyond them as the process began to replicate itself in ever fainter and more numerous twists, clockwise and anticlockwise, each frontier more complex and less definite than the last as they spread north and east, kicking up dust and shaking leaves from the Golden Horn to the Hook of Holland. Local prevailing winds - the mistral, sirocco, tramonta, various foehns - disrupted and contributed until the currents and cross-currents, interference patterns and pressure zones were jumbled together in a weather-system whose complexity outran its observers and left them adjusting wind-blown instruments. Whole orders of information wafted and gusted past in secret sweet abandon rippling through the billion blades of grass, grains of sand, motes of dust, and if there was an instrument to register the effects of this system, from its merest nanospan to greatest gigascale it was a land mass nothing short of Europe. Its needles were already twitching, its ports wide open and circuits humming with a music so confused it could only be heard as a monotone. But, for the perfect observer, for the single invested overseer of this straining engine….