Lemprière's Dictionary

by Lawrence Norfolk

  The Emperor Joseph watched from his balcony at Peterwaradin as laundresses pinned out bed linen, his own, in the garden below. Great white squares flapped in the gusting wind, each faintly stained but washed and washed again until the trails he deposited there nightly faded into a general off-whiteness. He was thinking gloomily of the Crimean Tartars who the latest despatches told him had taken their Russian-supplied muskets off to several strategically irrelevant mountain strongholds rather than sit about and starve in the Banat with his own more orderly forces. Perhaps they were right. Perhaps the Turks were right, or Count Ewald von Hertzberg, or his own Internuncio who, he remembered now, had counselled against this war months before. Now he had vanished without trace. The Sublime Porte was currently claiming an Austrian privateer had captured him in the seas off Sicily and was holding him to ransom. And this only a week after his much-bruited execution of Sergeant Vittig for the Karlstadt massacre, which was intended as a conciliatory gesture. Now, he heard, his dragoons were shouting For Vittig and Austria! as they charged the Turkic cannonades and ballads about himself and the Russian Empress circulated freely amongst his forward divisions. By night he acted out their criticisms, appearing before her in his slimy bed linen while she performed in riding boots and spurs above his quivering flesh, a fingertip here, an earlobe there, a refined and exquisite surgery with steel-tipped incisors until his organs lay detached on the table beside her whereupon she would take them one by one and, firmly astride him, drop them into her mouth like so many peeled grapes. He would awake then and view the drainage of his needs on the sheet beneath him. Sometimes he would trace a finger along the thick wet jets, noting convergences and coincident trajectories, how one spurt might veer off to the side and follow the line of another, or cross over it to produce a more tangible gobbet, and sometimes he wondered if all these random emissions were extrapolated and traced forward infinitely, might there be a point, some central node at which they would converge? Might there be a point from which the sense in it all would be plainly visible? He heard a crump and for a moment he thought it might be a howitzer. Below him, the wind was rumpling his sheets. He looked away, disappointed at this anticlimax. He heard the girls from the laundry tittering to each other. He sought the perfect point and wondered where it was all leading. The giggling below came louder. What were they telling him, these secret messages from himself to himself? The wind rose in a quick buoyant gust. Visible and invisible trails criss-crossed in a fabulous lattice as the girls began folding the sheets. Where did they lead, these glistening trails? They were giggling again as the sheets were straightened and folded, laughing louder and louder, shrieking and screaming and the Emperor Joseph clapped his hands over his ears willing them to stop, but the hysterical noise went on and on. What, he demanded of himself, what was the meaning of the cryptic slime?

  The anticyclone moved closer. Its centre shifted north, nudging the edge of the landmass as though searching for an entrance. Inland and out to sea the curved winds got up and pulled against the central pressure zone. The sun rose higher and the sluggish warmth of the preceding days focused itself in a hot breeze. The engine hummed a little louder. In the perfect spheres and cylinders of the topiary trees, along the precise lines of clipped privet, leaves and stipules twitched their lighter undersides in and out of view, light and dark. The mirror of the lake gave way to a new corrugated surface whose diagonals ran west to east and zig-zagged as the wind broke through the restraining surface tension. Lawns flashed indecipherable messages as individual blades of grass flattened themselves this way or that, all in concert, all collaborating against the mown squares and trimmed rectangles. The sun turned them into heliographs reflecting new and confusing ciphers that seemed to curve away from within the straightforward logic of the gardens towards a wilder perspective and a different destination.

  Taking the levée, His Majestry traced the gliding movements of pomaded and powdered figures across the parquet towards him. A bow or curtsey, a rustle of finished silk and away. He thought of the escapement of watches, the movement up the tooth of the cog, a soft trip, and down. Then the next, and the next, around and around forever.

  ‘Ah, Monsieur!’ A sleek figure floated towards him, paused, and then away to be replaced by another. Around and around, like the earth about the sun, or the moon about the earth. When he stood up and made his way out, everyone stood up and he advanced through their neat human corridor to the door, whereupon they closed behind him. Take the sun, he thought. It radiated out, drawing all the planets about it for a retinue. Without it they would fly off who knows where on quite incalculable paths, detrimental ones possibly. The authority of the sun was, in this model, a kind of largesse. One gave commands, gave orders, for example. So far, so good. The planets and their satellites behaved in a certain way, flew along certain paths at certain speeds, reappeared here and there at certain intervals…. This was homage and was needed, he supposed, to keep the sun in place. Now came the difficult part.

  He felt sunlight hot on his face and a hot wind as he stepped onto the terrace. The day was beautiful and breezy. Garden people scattered and melted away. As the planets and so forth went around and around, their lines never met, but their forces (centripetal, centrifugal, gravitational, the pulls of competing masses, in short the sum) were the sun. Or rather, the lines drawn across the diameters of their orbits all met in the sun. That was better. All in the sun.

  He descended the steps and advanced on the orange trees. Behind him, his retinue came to a halt on the last step above the parterre. The lake glittered enticingly in the distance. He waved at them and they retreated backwards up the steps. Possibly he should have continued on around the terrace. All lines met in the sun, even the most divergent. The lines of orange trees drew nearer now and he moved amongst the slatted pots admiring the sculpted spheres his gardeners had created about him. The wind had risen and though the outward forms of the trees remained serried in long lines stretching off into some other quirk of perspective, the leaves within these bulbous globes were all confused as breezes and gusts deranged them, flipping them about until they were all higgledy-piggledy and Louis frowned. His retinue disappeared around the corner of the terrace, following some nominal version of himself. The leaves rustled. He looked again down the long lines, fancying he saw a slight curve. Louis advanced further, then frowned again. He had thought his orange trees had got beyond this, but the rows curled into one another and his vista of the lake was quite spoilt. Behind him, it was the same story. Still, he had come this far….

  He turned and crossed into the adjacent row but the orange trees were placed very close together and when he struggled through he found them quite as disorderly as those he had left. He advanced again, or thought he did, but only found himself back where he started. He paused, then moved off. Much better. Any moment now he would emerge in front of the lake. But he grew confused when he seemed to strike a path that led him at right angles, then in a tight arc, then it narrowed and he might well have been back at the starting point yet again. It was difficult to tell. He moved off, again, but had hardly taken a pace this time before the orange trees clustered so thickly he was forced to stop. The sun shone down unhelpfully. The leaves rustled in relays up, down and across, from all directions and angles. He began to take a step, but the resistance was strong, the impedance high. He stopped, on the point of setting off again. The orange trees shifted behind him. He would set off again soon, or even now. The leaves, the invisible ripples on the artificial lake and the blades of grass on the lawns all jiggled in disorderly concert. Quite soon now. Orange trees moved and closed around like satellites. The sun was fixed above. Quite soon. He stopped. The heliograph-lawns blinked on and off, chattering in staccato binary, the lake made tiny troughs and peaks and the leaves signed on and off, faster and faster until the message was a blur and every port of the machine hovered, every gate swung both open and shut. The difference between its one- and zero-states narrowed to the State, and within the State trails
criss-crossed and spread, interacted and commingled, acted and countered one another so that the field of operations became a field of possibilities, the lattice of trails a cloud in which any event likely to take place was almost as likely not to and now, from this perspective at least, the whole ergodic panoptic salmagundi appears abundantly, blindingly clear.

  The airborne pressure zone hovered off the Iberian peninsula, nosed inquisitively about the Bay of Biscay and moved north. Up the Atlantic coast, past the mouth of the Gironde, the anticyclone spun towards Île d’Oléron. Brisk winds preceded it and followed in its wake. Its centre was quite still. Sitting on the hillside, overlooking the jetty, Duluc and Protagoras felt the novel sensation of an easterly breeze at their backs. The sun was in their faces and still high. They sat patiently. Soon the carts would arrive. Then night would fall. Sometime after that they would ready the signal-beacon and sometime after that the signal would be answered. Out of all their frantic efforts and those of their partners across the water, out of all the freak and engineered meetings, chance collisions, when all the values were weighed one against the other and almost every force had met and countered its opposing force, then, a single super-charged particle would emerge from the carnage and make for them along a single possible vector and, when the Vendragon finally docked at their jetty, this force too would be cancelled with all the others and the final trail would have come to its end.

  Now the wind began to die away and presently the two of them found themselves sitting in a strange calm. They looked at one another, then both turned their gazes out to sea. The engine had reached its most precarious state and the eye of the coming storm looked down on them all. The still centre of the anticyclone rested directly over Rochelle.

  As the months of summer dragged by, Nazim felt his mission drift away from him. He stood in the baking heat behind the tackle of Butler’s Wharf and watched the Vendragon loll in the water for days that stretched into weeks. Sometimes, for variety as much as purpose, he would hang about the back of Thames Street and stare at the lightless windows of Le Mara’s house. But the Vendragon was loaded, or forgotten, or abandoned by her masters - his enemies, he reminded himself- and Le Mara seemed to have disappeared into thin air.

  There was no doubt they knew of his existence. He had advertised his presence on the quay to Le Mara from the outset. He was an alien body, a resistant particle that jammed and fouled the smooth workings of their machine. He tried to believe his watchful presence was a kind of pressure under which their operations would buckle and break, spilling the information he needed like so much oil. But it was not so. Their actions, if he were truthful, were no more apparent to him now than when he had walked down the gangplank of the Nottingham nine months before. They were making ready, they were making ready. But for what?

  The night at Coade’s had revealed their hands more naked than before, and still the incident was opaque. Two girls, seemingly twins and dressed alike, the black coach, Le Mara and his larger partner, the young man in black at the inn: the actions he had witnessed seemed to refer to nothing outside themselves, like a complex and bloody board game or a machine that assembled and disassembled itself. At the centre of these pointless acts stood the pseudo-Lemprière. Player? Prime mover? Pawn? He did not know, and the real Lemprière was dead, slaughtered in the room on Blue Anchor Lane.

  Nazim fished in his pockets for the memento of that night. Did the woman whose grey eyes stared up at him from the miniature know her son was dead and replaced by an ambiguous imposter? They must know he knew these things, yet they ignored him and their inattention diminished him as though he were an irrelevance thrust out on the periphery of their actions. Similarly, the Nawab’s sphere of influence had shrunk, his commands to Nazim were only faint suggestions now, tendencies of behaviour. He remembered his original purpose clearly enough. Find them, kill them, recover what is mine…. The urgency was gone and he was left as a spectator in a dream, between two faltering gyres where he drifted not quite caught up and not quite held by either.

  So he floated in the heat of summer and the sluggish months wore on. When he noticed the dispute which spread through the bustling quays bringing them gradually to a standstill he saw it as the outward expression of his own creeping paralysis. His world contracted to the dark haven of the cellar where he would lie and listen to the feeble movements of the woman above. Nazim retreated further, into sleep where dreams of blinding sunlight and red cliffs gave him a different vista and a different vision of mortality. Bahadur’s unsurprised face was always waiting for him there. He would wake with the human smell of decay in his nostrils, invading the clean silence of the dream. Decay, death, different forms of death. Something told him the two were opposites. Something in the woman’s too-human frailty was missing in Bahadur’s long plunge down the face of the cliff, something in the coldness of his uncle’s face as he pointed to his chest. ‘We change inside….’ Was that what had happened to him? To them both?

  Towards the end of June, with the heat rising a degree of two by the day, he began to note changes in the city. All the pent-up energy of its streets seemed to flow around and around without effect. The citizens, for all their variety, seemed to wear the same face with only the expression varying to distinguish them from each other. He saw the same transactions and heard the same exchanges in the markets. The restlessness of the city seemed always to turn in on itself as though all its energies were required just to keep the engine moving as it did.

  But as June edged closer to July he saw new features pressing through the stucco and brickwork. Slogans began to appear on the bland walls. A more restless creature was emerging, though it looked like simple neglect as rubbish piled up in the streets and the lamps were left unlit. The night patrols passed over the cellar with less and less regularity, eventually ceasing altogether. He ventured out more frequently then and wandered the streets by night, drifting unnoticed through the inns and taverns, listening to the casual metropolitan gossip. He saw new coalitions spring up around brilliant talkers, cells form about a well-turned phrase. July filled the courts and alleys with foreign accents and groups of men who glanced at him suspiciously as he passed in his cape and broad concealing hat. Their muttering followed him until he disappeared from sight. The second week of the month brought a slow hot wind and the gangs grew larger. They began to hang about the main thoroughfares and move down the streets as single units. A new sense of purpose, still suppressed, still unclear was palpable in the heat. He felt it rise with each succeeding day as though any number of different desires were converging to find their satisfactions in the city. All becoming the same.… It was a familiar concentration. Familiar from where, he did not know. He felt himself focus, even draw from it. He resumed his vigil at Le Mara’s house and at the deserted docks which, he realised, were not idle but only waiting, just as he was waiting. The streets hummed with undisclosed purpose, like his own, and the feeling of familiarity grew as the city tensed and stretched around him. His anticipation gathered in a knot inside him, tightening until on the night of the twelfth the first strand broke.

  He was outside Le Mara’s house. The mews was deserted. A livid sunset was daubing pinks and darker blues over the western sky. Heat rolled like a millstone through the streets and Nazim sweated beneath his hat for the slow hot wind offered no relief. He had been watching the house for over an hour when the black coach drew up. Nazim shrank back and watched as it came to a halt. No-one got out. It waited there for several minutes, its driver muffled despite the heat and motionless on his seat. Then the door of the house opened without warning, no lights, no sound, and four figures emerged. Nazim recognised them all from the night at Coade’s. First came the girl, dressed in white and seemingly reluctant as the broad figure behind her pushed her forward: Le Mara’s partner. One of the Nine. Next came Le Mara himself, expressionless as ever. Last of all the one he had seen only twice, before and after the incident at the Manufactory, first here, outside this house, and afterwards at the King’
s Arms tavern where he had faced down the thugs who threatened the pseudo-Lemprière with their clumsy violence. The others addressed him as Septimus.

  The first three disappeared inside the coach, which moved off slowly. Nazim made as if to follow but Septimus still stood outside the house, turning this way and that. Nazim could only watch in frustration as the vehicle turned the corner west into Thames Street. The young man dawdled a few minutes more, then began to walk slowly up the street. Nazim followed. Like the coach, the young man headed west. He walked as far as Bow Street where he seemed to hesitate before the door of an imposing building then, some inner decision resolved upon, he advanced up the steps and entered.

  When the door closed Nazim drew nearer and read the plate set to one side. “Chief Examining Magistrate” and underneath, “Sir John Fielding.” He looked about. The streets were quiet, almost deserted. Strange for this hour. Again he felt the odd sense of familiarity. The changed city was brooding, waiting for something. Underneath Sir John’s name someone had scrawled “Farina”. Only a few minutes had passed before the door opened once more and Nazim saw Sir John himself, bandaged eyes somehow directed at his informant, thanking the young man, shaking his hand and saying, ‘Yes, very helpful Mister Praeceps, very helpful indeed. A thing eliminated is another found …’and the words that followed were on the edge of his hearing, but he heard the name that followed, certain he was right, though the sentence was a low mumble ‘… Lemprière …’ not even sure which of them had said it, and then the door closed and he was following this Septimus across the Piazza and down into Southampton Street where he realised he need not have worried about losing the coach. It was waiting for him at the top of the street. Nazim watched as Mister Praeceps nodded to its occupants then walked down the street and disappeared into one of the houses.