Lemprière's Dictionary

by Lawrence Norfolk

  Stretching first one knee, then the other, arching and straightening his back, rolling his neck, flexing every joint down to his fingers and toes, Nazim waited outside the chamber in the darkness. When the pseudo-Lemprière and his companion had disappeared into the chamber, Nazim settled at the edge of the gravel. His limbs moved rhythmically as the minutes, then hours passed by. His mind raced and once again the pseudo-Lemprière was its quarry. He rehearsed the young man’s encounters to himself: the winner of the women in blue’s protégée at the Pork Club, buffeted by Farina’s men outside the inn, confiding with the real Lemprière the night of his murder in Blue Anchor Lane, mistaking himself for someone called ‘Theobald’ at the Ship in Distress a week later, running like a madman out of Coade’s, running after the girl to the theatre the previous night, hustled unconscious into the coach a matter of hours later by Mister Praeceps, the same man who had spoken to Sir John that night, and their discussion had centered on ‘Lemprière’, although the man was dead months ago, killed by Le Mara and they all seemed in league against his bespectacled successor who was at once the drunken butt of a practical joke at the Pork Club, the near victim of Farina’s mob, betrayer or loyal lieutenant to the true Lemprière, a myopic fool in the Ship in Distress, a lunatic at Coade’s, inamorato at the Opera House, colleague of Praeceps then corpse in Southampton Street, and now it seemed he was allied with, perhaps even one of Nine whom he, Nazim, was here to despatch.

  Nazim wrestled determinedly with these pseudo-Lemprières trying to trace them back as affects to some single ur-Lemprière but the adversary he constructed was still too awkward with his thin arms and legs and his strange angular body which defied all attempts to pin him down as definitely this or certainly that or possibly something else entirely. It was neither dark nor light and Nazim wanted to be clear. Real or not, the Lemprière would not fit. Now of all times, he wanted to be single-minded, but the Beast was as ambiguous as the Lemprière, gulled or guileful, guilty or innocent as he was and its sourceless light drew strange shapes from the wavering hollows and high vaulted spaces which drew his eye in turn. Had the blackness been absolute he might have dismissed them as phantoms, as patterns seen when the eyes are screwed too tightly shut, freaks of the brain’s idling engine. Undefined objects and figures seemed to hover and flit in the half light above him.

  Once or twice he fancied he heard disturbances in the air, wind rushing over some alien body far above and away across the gravel, over the abyss from which the Lemprière and his companion had emerged an hour or more before. Freaks and phantoms: the Beast sent them to beg his unanswered questions and feed on his doubts. He thought back to the wide ribbed tunnel he had followed to the chamber blocked off with planks and buttresses, to the stalactitic teeth and petrified tongue which seemed to lap at the water pressing behind the wall of clay. He remembered the water seeping through the wall whose supports he had kicked away without a second thought, the tiny glistening beads, then a silver trickle as though the Beast were a vast water clock measuring the time to its own destruction. A trickle, a rivulet…. And then?

  And then his anxieties flew back into the dark spaces above him. He heard the air there rush suddenly as though a gust of wind had found its way through the tunnels, a particular kind of gust - he had heard the sound before - and he wondered, a bat? But the shape that swooped in and out of his vision in a blink was larger than that, much larger as it disappeared away to his left and he heard an audible crunch as something landed on the gravel fifty or sixty yards away. The theatre, minutes before Le Mara’s companion had staggered into the coach, he had heard it then. He rose and squinted into the gloom. He saw nothing. It was nothing. Only the scree shifting of its own accord, the air’s susurration, a convection current set off by the heat of his own body, a deferred version of himself, nothing, nothing at all. But he could not rid himself of the suspicion that on the far side of the gravel, away from the entrance to the chamber, someone or something was watching and waiting in the dark, like himself.

  The minutes trickled by and nothing more was heard. Gradually, Nazim’s attention swung back to the chamber. He began flexing his muscles and joints once again, back, neck, shoulders.… A bubble of sound burst into the darkness, a gabble of voices disgorged from the door to the chamber and suddenly bitten off short as the door was closed. Nazim heard a man’s voice barking orders, a choking sound, a deeper voice raging, then silence, and out of the silence the sounds of unguarded footsteps approaching from the chamber. No lights had shone. Two sets of footsteps, he realised as they drew nearer. The door opened again. It seemed the lamp within was alight now. Silhouetted in the light from the doorway behind them, two figures were moving towards Nazim, whilst in the doorway itself, cast like shadows by the stumbling pair ahead of them, two further figures were framed for a moment before they too began to move in pursuit. The door closed, the darkness resumed and there were only the sounds of overlapping footsteps crashing towards him. Nazim clutched the miniature in one hand and his knife in the other then moved towards them. The first pair were very near now, the noise so loud it seemed impossible he could not see them. Suddenly two faces came out of the gloom, scared unguarded faces, first the girl and then, a little behind her wincing with the effort, the pseudo-Lemprière. The sight of himself brought them both to an amazed halt. The pseudo-Lemprière’s eyes narrowed in recognition.

  ‘You!’ he gasped. Behind the pair of them, the steadier footfalls of their pursuers stopped too.

  There was a brief complete silence as the three of them, Lemprière, Juliette and Nazim, looked at one another and the pursuers behind paused, baffled suddenly by the absolute quiet. Then into that noiseless moment dropped a sound, a toneless pop which was followed by something like air but more substantial this time, more forceful and Nazim knew that far behind him through the spongeworks and the broad tunnel, beyond the rotten planking he had disturbed, the clay had failed, the clock had run out and now water was pouring down the throat of the Beast towards them. The girl’s arm was about the pseudo-Lemprière. They looked quickly at one another as he raised his knifehand and stepped forward.

  It was simple. As Casterleigh threw himself forward, Lemprière blew out the candles and the chamber was plunged into darkness. He heard the Viscount’s bulk crash against a chair, a grunt as he fell then a strong hand closed about his wrist and pulled him suddenly towards the door.

  ‘This way,’ Juliette’s voice urged him. She was guiding him out of the chamber and then he felt gravel grinding under his feet; they were out and running, their footsteps echoing like gun shots around the vaults of the cavern. Her dress appeared as his eyes adjusted to the faint light, a wavering area of white ahead of him. At his back he heard at once a match strike and the door open again. The lamp was being re-lit. Two figures appeared in the doorway, one broad and tall, the other shorter and of slighter build. Then the door closed again and there was darkness. He could hear the practised footsteps of their pursuers as they began to come after Juliette and himself.

  They had gained perhaps forty yards, crashing forward together over the gravel, her hand still about his wrist, his breath already short. The ground seemed to slide out from under him dragging him back with every step he took. He heard Juliette’s breath coming more quickly and underneath the sound of their own footfalls, those of Casterleigh and Le Mara drawing closer. Suddenly Juliette’s body slammed into his own. She had stopped dead in her tracks and as he collided with her, her arm sought his own for support. The footsteps behind them stopped. Lemprière looked up and saw a man dressed all in black with a black cloak and hat whose broad brim was raised to disclose a face he knew from the Ship in Distress, the Indian who had been Theobald until the real Theobald arrived.

  ‘You!’he exclaimed. And the hat…. The hat he had seen in the midst of the brawl outside the inn, a strong hand pulling him away from Farina’s thugs, and somewhere else. His rescuer there. The three of them were silent. Lemprière heard a sound somewhere in the distance
ahead of him, like a cork being pulled and the wine rushing out of the bottle. Running water. Juliette looked up at him and her arm tightened about his own. The Indian had raised his arm and begun to move forward. His eyes seemed to look through them both. His hand held a knife. The footsteps behind them began again. Lemprière moved sideways, pulling Juliette with him. The footsteps were faster and louder. The Indian advanced, as though they had not moved, towards the spot they had occupied, and over it towards their pursuers who could be heard plainly now. They watched for a moment as Nazim advanced to meet his quarry. They were passed over, spared, and again it was Juliette who pulled him forward, towards the haven of the spongeworks. As the two of them moved off and the cloaked figure went forward to engage their pursuers, a sixth player, unseen and unheard by the other five, rose from his position on the far edge of the gravel apron and turned his eyes towards the chamber where his own quarry lay.

  The gravel behind them, Lemprière and Juliette ran quickly over hard rock. Their pace slowed again as odd humps of stone began to rise up and obstruct their flight. Behind them Lemprière could hear the footsteps of the three converging, coming to a halt. There was a flurry of sound as the battle was joined. Ahead, the rushing sound was louder and more distinct, more obviously water moving towards them. A pair of footsteps detached itself from the mêlée to his rear, growing louder then abruptly silent as their owner reached the harder ground they now travelled themselves with greater difficulty.

  The humps had grown taller, more like spires, each the height of a man dividing the area into open chambers as though bubbles had been blown in the molten rock and solidified to leave a honeycomb. The sound of water was louder. Lemprière wondered whether it were Casterleigh or Le Mara who had taken up the chase. Casterleigh, he thought. It would be the Viscount. Juliette was ahead of him, weaving a way through the sponge-works. The dull roar was directly ahead of them both, drowning out any sound from behind now.

  Gradually the waisted columns began to shrink to hummocks once more, to swellings and then to vague irregularities in the stone floor. The spongeworks was behind them and they were faced with a wall of rock rising up out of sight. At its centre a gaping mouth broke the sheer cliff - the entrance to a broad tunnel twenty yards across and as many high – from which the roaring of the water was clearly audible. Lemprière began to cast about for an alternative passage but Juliette pulled him forward hissing, ‘This way!’

  ‘The water,’ he protested but she seemed to pay no attention.

  ‘The river has broken through,’ she threw over her shoulder. ‘This place will flood. We must reach the shaft before the water rises or we are drowned.’

  ‘There must be another way,’ Lemprière looked about desperately.

  ‘There are only three entrances to this place. Two of them are in there,’ she pointed into the tunnel.

  ‘The third then….’

  ‘Miles distant. It comes out under the Opera House, back there,’ she pointed behind her. ‘Le Mara will be guarding that, once he deals with the Indian.’ Juliette took his wrist and pulled him forward.

  For the first time since he had fled the chamber, he remembered his dictionary was still in his hand. He jammed the bulky volume into the ripped pocket of his coat and hurried after her. Almost as soon as they had entered the tunnel, Lemprière felt the first tongue of water curl around his boots and seep through their soles. The floor of the tunnel seemed to undulate. The water was collecting in each trough. He stumbled over the ridges. The roar of the water echoing down the tunnel was so loud they could barely hear their own feet splashing as they stumbled forward. Juliette kept glancing over her shoulder as though expecting their pursuer to catch them at any moment. She pulled up her skirts and led the way. Soon the water had risen to their knees and Lemprière could feel the current pushing against him. The tunnel began to rise and the water was a broad flood cascading down the ridges which they used as steps.

  The river water stank. As they clambered up Lemprière felt something soft and clammy wrap itself around his legs then another and another, something white, like cloth. They were racing down towards him, dozens of them carried down by the flood. François’ pamphlets, he realised. He picked one off his leg. Juliette turned back to him.

  ‘Not far now,’ she gasped. The water had reached her waist. As she resumed her struggle, they both heard the sound which grew out of the tunnel behind them: the bellowing of an animal filled with inarticulate rage. Both knew then that it was the Viscount who had followed them. They redoubled their efforts but the current was stronger, the torrent ahead even louder. They could no longer walk in the centre of the tunnel and had to cling to the sides. The water rose higher and Lemprière thought, of all the deaths inflicted on his family by the Cabbala to be drowned underground like a rat would be the most dismal. Then Juliette gave a short cry.

  Lemprière looked up and there, a mere ten yards ahead of them and projecting from a shaft in the ceiling, was the ladder. Juliette turned and pointed to it and tried to speak over the noise of the water. The roar was deafening, impossibly loud. Then, as they struggled and reached the ladder, quite without warning, the noise stopped.

  Lemprière and Juliette looked at each other in complete bafflement. They were sodden and panting. The waters even began to recede. Lemprière grinned and was about to speak but Juliette put her hand to his mouth. Both of them heard the quick irregular splashes and grunted curses of their pursuer. He was close, not visible yet, but moving at speed.

  Juliette had him grasp the first rung. As he climbed up, his boots rang on the metal rungs. Juliette followed, urging him to climb more quickly. The water was almost silent, a placid thing swirling in lazy whorls and framed below them in the circle of the shaft. Above there was only the dark. He heard a creak and at first he thought it was his own weight on the ladder. But the creak seemed to go on and on, getting louder and louder. The sound rose up the shaft, an ear-splitting racket of tortured wood on rock which reached its crescendo with a hideous cracking sound and the water exploded down the tunnel once more as though pent up and suddenly released. Juliette shouted to him to climb faster. The water at the foot of the shaft churned and frothed. It seemed to glow as the torrent was renewed, a phosphorescent white, almost blue-white, almost green. The water was glowing green. Juliette was tugging at his leg. Bright green, and in the light he saw a vague shape moving below. She was shouting at him, pointing down the shaft.

  ‘Green!’ he shouted back. But that was not her message. The light glowed brighter and in it he saw suddenly that the vague shape below was not so distant as he had thought, nor so vague. It was Casterleigh moving up the ladder. He was climbing powerfully and with purpose towards them. Even then Lemprière hesitated, transfixed by the sight below as the circular frame of the shaft was filled with another still stranger prospect. The green light dimmed to a corona about its edges, highlighting a triangular shape that Lemprière recognised though it seemed impossible, moving un-mistakeably down the tunnel through which they had passed. It was the prow of a ship. A three-master, though the masts were snapped off a yard above the deck and the sides were at once scourged and held together by the tight embrace of the tunnel. Then the water stopped. Once again the creaking noise sounded down the passage and Lemprière realised a second ship was straining to enter the Beast.

  Tonight, London is an outpost of the Europe-machine; a place where Rochelle is possible again. The preludes to its end are buried: Troy, Carthage, the first and second Romes. Its echoes search now for resonant surfaces, places fit to replay the old drama: the siege about Belgrade perhaps or the riddled foundations of Paris, Constantinople or even Vienna where the Emperor Joseph’s indecision still hangs over the city. Or London. Tonight, London is the choice and an imperfect translation is already underway, echoes and correspondences are being pumped through the ports and circuits. They are straining under the load. The engine of Europe hums and spins, twitches in and out of its possible states as congruent details are fed
out of the old city, away from the still centre of the anticyclone and into the new metropolitan template.

  Already the cognoscenti are filling the Opera House, huddling there like the doomed masses in the citadel. The streets are lit with torches, thousands of them as invaders gather in the east. At Rochelle, a green beacon shines out along the agreed bearing over a dark sea, waiting, and this too finds its distorted version, its reversed echo as the translation takes ahold and advances upriver to the city. Aboveground, as below, the players are poised. London is ready for Rochelle.

  The sunset was unusually lurid. Eben looked west from the Crow’s Nest as the dying light shot ribbons of colour into the gathering blue-black night. Reds, pinks and golds he had come to expect - the skies this summer were disturbed and erratic - but never more so than tonight. Even the sky’s wildest pallet rarely extended to green. Nevertheless, there it was. A fat glow in the upper air refracted from God knew what meteorological freak, probably miles away, probably Africa he thought, and it was not a muddy green either. It was bright, this green. Pea green.

  ‘Green,’ he said.

  ‘Green, confirmed Captain Roy. He was stationed opposite looking east.

  ‘Probably Africa,’ Eben went on.

  ‘Perhaps to begin with,’ said Roy. ‘Shadwell now though,’ and he pointed downriver as Eben came to look for himself. The Thames’ meanders curled away through the eastern districts, a dark flood until Shadwell where Roy pointed and beyond which Eben saw that the coils of the river were indeed bright green as though a lurid serpent had crawled inland in search of a latter-day Laocoon and its head, silhouetted against the iridescence which snaked away to stern, was a ship. The ship was moving upriver on the last surges of the tide, and its lagging escort of green was following, fanning out across the width of the river.