Lemprière's Dictionary

by Lawrence Norfolk

  He pulls himself out of the water. The dead man’s head bobs gently. He recognises the corpse as his fellow-traveller through the earth’s tonnage. But, as he watches, the waters begin to recede. Jaques’ body begins to sink. The waters fall faster. A gibbous moon hangs low in the sky. He sees Jaques’ face, an answering moon staring up out of the black water and a flurry of silver about him, then even these small signals disappear as the corpse sinks into the fissure’s darkness.

  The smells are of waxy torch-smoke, sweat and excitement, a localised sudor anglicus as the mob heads west after the Militia. Along the way, piles of dried straw, dead trees and various other desiccated garbage, crackle into mysterious flame as frustrated rick-burners make an arsonist’s rus in urbe of the stony urban envelope. Gangs of feral children run about shrieking. Linenworkers and copperminers laid off from the late collapses in their trades wave banners. Barbers, waiters, tailors, shoe-makers, cabinet-makers, milliners, dressmakers, artificial flower makers, saddlers, coachbuilders, farriers, cooks, confectioners and cabmen, find themselves united here and now by a lack of work so complete after the late aestivation of the gentry for the country that their usual rivalries are irrelevant; somehow the Opera House is an irresistible target for their unvented spleen, a symbol de luxe of their late and fickle employers.

  Surrounded by his praetorian guard of silk-weavers, Farina leads the jacquerie on. Mountebanks and their merry-Andrews, gambling-house captains and combination-boys ply their trades as the mob floods west through Fetter Lane and Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Hawkers of pie and porter pass through the moving columns. Fish are available too. Cries of righteous anger and fervent curses mix with the traders’ calls and together drift up towards the moon. Torchlights flash in zigzags down the staggered windows. The railings are slats in a phenakistoscope, rolled out along the route to count the passing of tens of thousands of legs. Four and a half million cobblestones register the tramp of dissident feet, jackboots, sabots, clogs, and the map they could draw between them would cover Europe in a wriggling lattice of lines that all converge on London until that city was black with tracery, a sucking mouth pulling them in towards Stalkart’s squat turret of culture….

  Lemprière pops up, gawky-limbed and squawking, outstanding amidst a zone of short people a hundred yards or so back from the front. He sees the mob stretched out behind him while the vanguard hoofs its way along Fleet Street and the Strand, hooting and jeering, drawing its loose assemblage tighter, throwing the odd rock after the fleeing Militia; a travelling city-state going to war. At Charing Cross it divides to filter through the confusion of little alleys thereabouts but reforms to march as one unit into Haymarket where the last of the Militia are spied disappearing into a large building on the right. The ad hoc alliances have become a single compound, a disgruntled and volatile alloy. Lemprière feels bodies jarring and swirling about his own. He wants a clear idea of what’s going on. He shouts her name again but the mob is baying about the Opera House, banging on the doors which seem to be barred from within. Vague wailing noises drift out of the building and are answered by the antiphonic wind. A tense semicircle opens in the crowd, spreading out from the high doors and down the steps. Lemprière steps into it and surveys the mob from the raised perspective. He sees upturned faces nearest him which, as he overlooks them, spread back through the surging crowd until every visible eye is angled up to the rooftop. Lemprière wonders vaguely why all these people should fix their attention there, and then a body slams into his back, knocking him forward, flat, and winding him as a stunning thud dunts on the spot where he stood. Lemprière wheezes and looks about. He sees his tackier, arms still locked around his legs looking forward at him. Then the grin fades.

  Lying behind them on the steps, an asinine grin on its face, its squat tonnage pinkly complaisant at this precipitous downturn in its fortunes, is the tortoise-rampant. Lemprière barely registers the tortoise. On its back is a body. Its chest is split open from the force of the impact and there is something in the chest, something moving insensibly, something not fully human. Little pistons are twitching amongst the detached ribbons of flesh and a smooth lozenge of brass is trapped in the wrecked machinery. Lemprière looks around him, but the faces of the mob are still looking up, away from himself on the ground, towards the roof. And this time he looks up too.

  From the entrance to the spongeworks deep within the Beast where the battle was joined, Le Mara and Nazim have thrust, parried and counter-thrust their way west through galleries, tunnels and caverns along a subterranean vector exactly matching the howling progress of the mob, hundreds of feet above. Their own conflict is played out in silence. Only their sudden exhalations and short grunts of effort betray their presence. They are armoured insects rehearsing the bloody rite of courtship, tiny horns locked together, segmented legs scrabbling for a footing on the lightless stone. Their motions match one another, question and answer swapped back and forth in arcs and quick lunges, feints and retreats as Nazim is forced backwards by his unblinking foe. It looks equal, but it is not. Only once does Nazim match his strength against the Cabbala’s assassin, bearing down on his knife-hand with all his weight. The arm is cold and hard as metal. The force of the rebuttal astonishes him, tossed aside like a doll before he rises and resumes the struggle. He looks for weaknesses, errors, unguarded moments. There are none and they go on. The rush of water behind them fills their ears; their eyes stay fixed one on the other. His opponent never blinks or stumbles, only advances on him, driving him back.

  Through the deadly semi-light of their struggle come his ghosts, Bahadur and the pseudo-Lemprière. The miniature is a tight lozenge in his hand, counterweight to his knife. Her grey-blue eyes, soft smile … mother to a false son. The real one is dead already by the hand that turns on him now and the wavering outline of his successor is lodged inside him, playing a shadow-game, ducking behind his body’s contours as they shift and whirl away from the assassin. And Bahadur, a more coincident presence guiding his motions, once more the tutor arranging his teenaged frame, like this, yes, drive it in at the side…. The pseudo-Lemprière chuckles at his antics, offering spurious and contradictory advice. Shape-shifter, self-contravener whom Nazim spared, allowed to walk past, wished well in his flight. Why? Why did he do that? Was there something precious back there, something in the way the girl’s arm curled about the boy’s waist and he looked down at her? Let them pass. Something to be preserved in these shifting times of ours. Foolishness, nonsense; Bahadur’s voice breaks in, cold and urgent. He is returned from Paris, the magical city which has worked its metal spell upon him. He is different, changed. They are walking along the clifftop. The pseudo-Lemprière is spared, disappearing into the dark behind him. Le Mara comes at him again. Bahadur is flying down away from him, he has crawled to the very edge of the cliff and looks down but he cannot see, cannot hear. He only has the cold press of his uncle’s body against his own and the arm pointing to his chest, we change…. The tunnel is sloping upwards. Le Mara’s face is blank. Change inside.

  Suddenly the ground seems to jolt and a split-second later a heavy report sounds up through the tunnel. For a single moment, Le Mara’s eyes leave his own. Nazim lunges forward, driving his knife into the assassin’s chest, already twisting the blade as it pierces skin and flesh, throwing his whole weight behind it. But the knife penetrates an inch, then stops, skidding sideways off something smooth and hard beneath the skin, tearing a great flange of flesh away from the underlying surface. Nazim staggers back, staring at what he has uncovered. Le Mara walks towards him as though untouched. For a moment his mind is frozen. Then he sees the dust begin to lift behind Le Mara. A dust cloud is driving up the tunnel behind the assassin, a soundless rose of powdered debris overtaking and engulfing them both as the explosion’s blastwave shoots forward through the Beast’s every pathway, capillary and aperture. In the moment before it blinds him, Nazim turns and shoots his glance up the tunnel, grey sloping sides curving away, something hanging down. He runs. The dust ch
okes his nose and mouth. Le Mara’s footsteps sound dully in steady thuds at his back. Already the dust is clearing as the blast passes over, he is being revealed in flight, being overtaken and caught. Something hanging down.… A ladder!

  A trapdoor opens and he emerges amidst shoddy stage-properties and motheaten wigs and costumes. Rope ladders hang down like rigging. Murmur of conversation, music, someone singing, a girl…. They are in the Opera House and Nazim begins to climb, Le Mara after him, two battling spiders in the web of their own making, scuttling up the ropes and gangplanks to the roof. Fat moon. A warm wind is blowing and the street below is in turmoil, heaving with the men and women whose slow coalescence he has monitored over the past weeks and months. Tiny insects crawling a hundred feet below. The trapdoor slams behind him. His adversary is here, very well, very well. He turns and watches as Le Mara approaches. Now he knows how it will end. He turns again, his back to the man and walks towards the edge. A low parapet is surmounted by a statue like a turtle. Other turtles lie dotted about the roof. Le Mara is coming after him, footsteps sounding heavier than they should. He ignores them. Bahadur understands his intention. Yes, good, like that. The pseudo-Lemprière is silent and puzzled inside him. Le Mara follows as he weaves a casual path through the bulky statues. Properties of some unrevivable production. Be clear, careful steps now. The assassin footfalls quicken to a run. Don’t turn, wait, wait, yes….

  The parapet is suddenly upon him as the footsteps close, running at him now. He turns as Le Mara leaps at him, ducks, feels something burn across his face and then the assassin is past him, flying towards the parapet and the statue as Nazim throws his weight behind the assassin’s flight, urging him over the parapet’s edge.

  The tortoise-rampant saves Le Mara. A single hand of steel closes about the statue as his body swings out into space. For a moment the sight of that gashed, exposed body stays Nazim, then he is on his man, standing on the parapet with the Mob as silent spectators far below. Something hot trickles down his face and he is blind on that side. His knife comes up and his victim twists away. He stabs and feels the blade enter some unprotected joint. The neck, he urges as he turns, let it be the neck. The body is cold and hard. But it is the jaw. His knife has only found the jaw. Le Mara’s mouth is jammed open. He can see the blade inside the mouth, slicing the tongue as it goes into spasm. Le Mara’s face is pressed up against his own, his arm moving down. He has lost. He knows it even before the assassin’s own knife finds his stomach and begins to tear a path up his chest. The pain is like a black wave covering them both. His teeth grind, his nails dig into his palms as his hands clench about the knife and, still, the miniature. Yes, now, like that…. Nazim brings the miniature up and feeds it to the clacking mouth, forcing it down the throat. From somewhere inside the assassin’s chest a screaming sound starts up. Nazim steps back heavily. The assassin is shaking, his limbs juddering uncontrollably. His own are made of lead. He feels very cold. Le Mara’s hand is still fastened about the ludicrous statue. The other is trying to pull Nazim’s knife from his face. It comes free suddenly and Nazim watches as the assassin drives it slowly into his chest. The blade disappears below the breastplate. He is searching there for the resistant lozenge of brass within. The sound is horrible. For an instant the shaking stops. The assassin’s head turns to Nazim. The statue seems to sway. They are both leaning forward, still for a moment, then pitching into space as the base of the statue splinters and takes them both into thin air, down to the street a hundred feet below. Nazim sees stick-like limbs waving and falling into the clean silence of his dream. Now you see … Bahadur? The chest splits open far below and the gaping wound discloses rods of brass and steel, couplings of copper, tiny valves all pumping below. Now he can see the change, the things they did to Bahadur. Change inside … He stands on the parapet and looks out over the moonlit roofs of this city. The heads of the mob are nothing to him, filled with nothing-dreams. He puts his hand to his chest and feels the cold seeping into his limbs. His head is heavier than before and the sky blacker. He sees the street far below. Black sky and the rooflit city. He leans out over the edge and feels his centre of gravity pull him forward into space.

  The mob is silent, every man and woman gazing up at the figure who stands on the parapet above. He looks very calm, all alone up there. Perhaps this is where Farina loses them, where the particular vein he mines gives out. They are so quiet suddenly, so intent on the man above. He folds slowly from the waist, as though bowing to his audience. He leans out into space. He falls. Disappointment and sadness move around the crowd as he pitches forward. For the moment the Militia are forgotten. The Indian’s body lands with a muffled thud beside that of his adversary on the steps of the Opera House. Nazim, Le Mara, tortoise: different challenges to the mob’s comprehension. Silent faces streaked with torch-smoke ring the bodies on the steps. Lemprière clambers to his feet, drawn back to Le Mara’s smashed cadaver. The chest is split from neck to groin. He bends to pick out the object which has caught his attention, a lozenge of brass not belonging amidst the other twisted machinery. Somehow he is not surprised at its presence here. He opens the miniature. Grey-blue eyes meet his own spectacled stare.

  ‘Mother….’

  He speaks aloud as though her painted image might answer him. Nazim’s eyes open. Why should Lemprière turn at this moment to find the Indian’s eyes looking into his own? There are unspecified debts wielding influence between them, something about crowds and gates swinging open for the lovers, lights hung in the lightless spaces. All too late now. Too many mistakes. Like that, yes…. The Indian’s eyes track the secret unfolding before him. His lips move.

  ‘Lemprière … ?’ Lemprière moves towards the Indian but the eyes remain fixed on the space he has left, a faint outline he has left behind to hover and break up in the gusts of wind and weird torchlight, self-usurper, pseudo-Lemprière, he moves his hand over the oval face and the eyes never flicker. The breathing has stopped. Lemprière closes the dead man’s eyes and stands upright. The miniature is closed and dropped into his one good pocket. His dictionary sags from the other. The Viscount’s body sinks away into darkness, he turns and she is gone again. Lemprière pushes aside the nearest bystanders to resume his search for her.

  Now the mob’s energies begin to turn; passive contemplation is not a natural mode for this animal. Eight or nine burly men lead the way, striding through the tight-packed ranks to cluster about the tortoise. A collective grunt and the tortoise is shouldered. They advance up the steps to the doors with their impromptu battering-ram and commence dunting. Colossal thuds ring around the crowd, galvanising them to surge forward as the men find a rhythm and the doors begin to shake under the assault. The Indian was interesting, they feel, but this is more what a good mob is about, banging things, shouting, being numerous and overwhelming. They quake back and forth in time with the rhythm of the assault-party. As the door shudders under the bashing, their whole rapt attention focusses on the point of impact, the irregular creamy-pink ovoid with its fatuous grin now smashing against the stout theatrical portals, the smirking head of the tortoise-rampant which will lead them forward into battle against the cowering Spartans within.

  The Rochelais could never have known, streaming through the drab streets of the dying city far away, long ago, almost forgotten, almost consumed utterly that night for the memories which recorded their burning would prove selective and politic to the replacing order. Other lives would fill the charred space left by their betrayal, the shadows on the walls, other versions of what took place would betray them. Here’s one now….

  Gluey yellow candles mark constellations in the dark domed roofspace of the Opera House, auspicious conjunctions, happy portents for Stalkart. There are gods above, huge ones, heavy ones which bear down on the groaning structure like tortoises. Tortoises! Yes, and the Opera House glows with life tonight for the lamps are lit and the wheezing orchestra tunes up in the Pit and every lobby, aisle, tier and stair is jammed with the cognoscenti. Lord Bru
denell is here, and the Dukes of Cumberland and Queensberry, Mister Edgecumbe and Sir W. W. Wynne, Ladies Harrowby and Fawcett in purple crêpe embroidered with green and silver foil, and the Honourable Miss Petre in her Sleath’s Improver for Defective Shape. The Duke of Norfolk isn’t talking to the Marquis of Lansdowne after that bruising over the Declaratory Bill and Charles Fox, Lord Loughborough, Mister Grey and Miss Sheridan are generally acknowledged, but curtly for it is widely believed that between the opera and the howling of dogs they don’t much care one way or the other. From behind tiny glasses of crême de Canelle and Barbados citron water, Lady Frances Bruce and Lady Clunbrassil eye Mister Hanway whose wealth exceeds that of many provincial towns. Fresh from his triumph as Colonel Downright in I’ll Tell You What!, Mister Aiki consoles the widow of Morris Morris, merchant, dead that afternoon.

  ‘I don’t know why I came,’ she wails. ‘I feel awful!’

  ‘There, there,’ pats the solicitous Colonel Downright.

  Stalkart hops up and down Fop’s Alley pressing flesh and greeting his patrons. He basks in the warmth of his convivium as delicious gossip and anticipation ripple through the eager assembly. What is the opera tonight? He won’t tell, no, not even when Miss Manners gives her most winsome smile, not even when Mister Edgecumbe takes him discreetly aside and certainly not when several of Captain James Hay’s obnoxious nephews surround him and become mildly abusive.