Lemprière's Dictionary

by Lawrence Norfolk

  Out, over the river, Wren’s cathedral resembled a great galleon about which the churches formed a squadron of frigates jostling at anchor. Pannell looked away, but the work of unlading continued without him. Case after case was wrestled from the Nottingham’s hold to the shore.

  Nazim left the ship with the others; home for the last nine months, he did not give it a backward glance. His attention was fixed upon the nondescript vessel which had trailed them to port. It moved slowly up the river, piloted by its captain, towards Rotherhithe. Nazim watched until it rounded a bend in the river to be lost from his sight. It continued on, wallowing upstream towards its berth where it docked without incident and lay at anchor, creaking, taking on water. No stevedores rushed to greet it, only a grizzled and crippled old sea-farer cast more than a glance as he hauled himself slowly along the quay. And a face appeared briefly at the attic window of Captain Guardian’s house further up. The ship’s crew shuffled belowdecks, heads down, hands jammed in pockets. Their vessel rocked gently with the Thames-tide, its return long overdue, long beyond the faith or patience of any who might be expected to await it, tap, tap, tap against the wharf, a drab tattoo for the homecoming of the Vendragon.

  A matter of a few miles down the river, Nazim reflected on the long route he had travelled to find this ship. Chance had brought it alongside the Nottingham a day’s sail from the estuary. There had been no formal contact, no exchange of pleasantries between the captains. That had surprised Pannell, but it had not surprised Nazim. He had felt a keen disappointment as the Vendragon sailed up the Thames and out of his view. It hardly mattered, he told himself, for now he knew its destination. And its purpose. He had been saved the trouble of searching for it. The task before him was huge enough without that. Nine men, nine faceless men. One name.

  His companions were beckoning him over, eager to leave for the barracks. He had gained their trust on the voyage and with it, he hoped, their help. It might yet come to that. Their guileless faces looked out to the city with its fine buildings of brick and stone. The river rolled by, stinking.

  They were waving now. He moved along the quay, weaving between the first crates of tea which were beginning to pile up in impromptu depots. He could hear the shouts and curses of the workers in the hold, but he did not look back.

  ‘Nazim!’ urged his companions. Aboard the ship, a stevedore lost his footing, slipped and a crate tumbled from the gunwales to land on the quay, splinter and spill a black powder-trail of tea along the jetty-boards. Still Nazim did not look back.

  ‘Come on!’ they were shouting, and in amongst their voices there was one stood out. It was nonsense but for that instant he was certain of it, a voice he knew, a freak of the wind, chance perhaps; his uncle’s voice. They were the words he had spoken, the same words, but in another place and years ago. Just a memory, carried on the wind, he told himself. He would not be cowed. He reached his crew-mates who huddled together in a group, shivering and stamping their feet. He motioned, and as one they moved off for the barracks. Behind him, the crates of tea were spreading further along the dock.

  “Sir, your attendance is respectfully requested on the morning of the twenty-second of this month of November at our offices in Chancery Lane. At this time, those effects of your father’s, that is, of Charles Lemprière, kept on his order by Chadwick, Skewer and Soames, will be delivered over to your keeping as his son, agent of his heir and executor of his estate, henceforth. I remain yours with regret at this sad time,

  Ewen Skewer (solicitor)”

  He had journeyed west. He had arrived. John Lemprière sighed as he eased off his boots. His feet ached. The letter had been waiting for him. Underneath the main body of the message, written in a different hand, was a note stating firstly that the majority of the effects were papers and that there would be no need to arrange any particular transportation. Secondly, that an interested party would call on him the next morning and direct him to the solicitor’s office. This note was not signed and Lemprière wondered who the interested party might be. Interested in what?

  He took off his spectacles and worked the skin on the bridge of his nose. Afternoon light draped the room in grey. It was sparsely furnished: a chair, a small writing table, the bed on which he sat and a chest of drawers. His travelling chest lay open on the floor beside the last, the papers through which he had lately rifled in disarray within it. The object of this brief search sat like a lifeless presence beside him. A letter. The excitement of his adventure had already faded to be replaced by a more familiar fatigue. He stared gloomily out the window at the drab sky.

  ‘London,’ he said aloud and to no-one. The din from the street below reached his ears, street-traders and their clients. A dog barked.

  He had barely spoken a sentence in the six days since leaving Jersey. His great voyage had been marred by nausea that had seen him puke from St Peter Port to Southampton. There was something rotten inside him. The coach had scarcely been better. A ruddy-faced man with beer on his breath had told him over and over again that he was in the ‘import-export’ trade; each time with a broad wink, as if this was of some secret importance. A middle-aged woman and her child had sat opposite and nodded a lot. He had not been sick, even on the worst of the turnpikes, but his dull unease had reared up more vigorously. He felt it now as he looked down at the letter beside him, his father’s letter. Lemprière toyed with it, sinking back into the thoughts that had snapped at his heels the fortnight past. Thoughts that, should they catch him, he felt, would not wait for his readiness to confront them.

  The door had been flung wide. An old woman had chattered about the other tenants as she led him up the stairs. The basement held Welsh girls who worked in the market. The ground-floor was empty, but the first was taken. His own room was on the second floor and above him was a tailor, his wife and family. She was eager to be off. Leaving him by his door, she clattered back down the creaking, wooden stairs.

  He had waited there, listening to her noisy departure, and it was when the door to the street outside had slammed shut, at that moment, he felt the first inner prick of conscience, familiar since the day of his father’s death, increasingly dreaded, which had grown over the last hour or two into the feeling that descended upon him now with its fullest and most drab force. He had come to recognise its slow arrival, its obstinate, alien residence. The last weeks had seen him take long, exhausting walks along Jersey’s clifftops. Several times, he had found himself running, coming to himself and not remembering why. But he knew why.

  Miasma, pollution of the soul: the deed and its remembrance divided him between inquisitor and suppliant; questions clogged the chambers of his memory. He deliberated, weighing the letter in his hand. What price the portage of Anchises? The cold air blew the cloying Thames-scent into the room. Other deaths. He shivered and drew his cloak more tightly about him, easing position on the chair. Pride would have held the old man from crying after his son, from reminding him of the debt of blood. His fate would have been accepted.

  He wanted to believe it. Yet, even as he tried, he could see the outraged father meditating recompense against the absconder, shouting in rage, You may escape the sword, you may shrug off your guilt, but my ker will pursue you, I will pursue you. Waiting for the death-blow, the laughing Greek scorning the open, toothless mouth of the betrayed. And as the sword bit, his ker would take wing over the glowing sky of the broken city as it burned. It would flutter like a butterfly, a blighting bacillus to burn channels through the brain for nightmares and fevers to follow. No sacrifices would propitiate it then, no price would be high enough. He grew vaguely aware of a rapid, clattering sound. Dido would not suffice. Delenda est Carthago, buckthorn and pitch. His teeth.

  Lemprière rose and walked to the window. Closing the casement, he looked down at the men and women who jostled in the street below. All of them would, one day, give up the ghost and leave their leaden lives for the aether above. And my father, as harpy, siren or sphinx; different incarnations of the ker. It le
ft the body through the mouth, flying on black wings. It had a woman’s face. Miasma. They had believed it caused plagues, that it fouled the fields; a jealous creditor dunning the carefree debtors below.

  Above, the tailor’s youngest had begun a recitation, ‘Ethelred the Unready, Edward the confessor, Henry the Fifth….’ The unadvised, and he pondered again the letter he had replaced on the bed, his father’s words. Currite fusi…. Snip, snip. Voices from the past and future, ‘Henry the Seventh, Henry the Eighth….’ Someone in the street shouted ‘Good Beef!’

  When its teeth had met in the calf it had made a sucking sound, surprising how loud, suck, like a boot pulled out of thick mud. February was the month of appeasement, too early, he thought. Or too late. Exactness was the heart of the rite. When a man died his remains were placed in a large earthenware jar, a pithos, buried with some ceremony and the family of the dead man would practise rites to soothe the ker, the spirit of the dead man. Sometimes their observances would have no effect, but this did not shake the faith, or fear, of the Athenians. They knew that the ker was a frightened spirit, outliving the trauma of death, and that when, much later, Charon’s coin was to be paid, the waters of Acheron crossed and the shaded land reached, it took with it still the remnant fear. It was a bitter residue in the mouths of the living, the taste of anticipated reunion. ‘You too will follow’ beckoned voices without bodies.

  The reek of the river still hung in the room. The small fire at the far end was almost out. He walked over to poke at it listlessly, adding a few coals. Even the fires burnt differently here. He squatted down and watched fitful flames lick at the coals without conviction. The letter still awaited him. He was filled with foreboding as he turned to fetch it, yet what could he fear? Questions to which he had no answer, accusations from which there was no redress. Nonsense; but its very being there was an accusation of sorts. He rubbed his shoulder and resumed his place on the bed. The envelope in his hand, he thought of Hipponomus, the Bellerophon, sent from the supposed bed of Sthenoboaea to the court of Jobates bearing his death-sentence unwittingly in Proteus’s letter. Yet he had survived, he observed to himself. Charles the First floated down from above. His father’s carefully formed characters stared up at him. He began to read.

  Nazim had made his way to the Ratcliffe barracks with the others. They jostled around him excitedly, jabbering and pointing. Walking from Pelican Stairs where the wherry had left them, all the sights were new. A young woman pulled a small dog along the street on a string. Perched on a packing case, a silver-haired gentleman held up two identical lengths of silk. He addressed one as if it were his mortal enemy. ‘Imports!’ he screamed, and spat on it with hatred. A small grey man with a pencil-thin moustache carried his hat around the circle of people surrounding him. They dropped small coins in it. Many of his companions gazed open-mouthed at the whores who leaned from the windows in Old Gravel Lane. The more pious averted their eyes, but the younger ones understood the contract readily enough, waving their purses at the women who licked their lips at the prospect. Soon, he knew, the novelty would wear away and reveal the side-shows’ colder logic, like the conjuror they had just passed, whose boy did the real business discreetly emptying the pockets of the spectators as his master, the Grand Illuder, picked oranges from nowhere and did clever, quick things with playing cards. Something from nothing, nothing from something; a nice balance, he thought. Those hands would be busy tonight. Relieving lascars of their pay was a flourishing and practised art amidst the dens of Shadwell. They walked along quickly, nearing their destination. Months previously, he had accepted Pannell’s words for what they were, a fairy tale to divert the attention from the tedium of the voyage. But for those who had swallowed the story of luxurious rooms with plenty to eat and believed in the other promises of the Company’s servants, the barracks offered their credulity little support. The long, low wooden building became more and more ramshackle as they progressed along the Ratcliffe Highway towards it. Loose boards flapped on its roof. The windows were out. Their pace slowed as his crew mates took this in and they arrived at their new home in silence.

  At its door stood a small, bespectacled man with two much larger and rougher customers flanking him. A table in front of him was stacked high with blankets. As each man passed through the door he was given one along with the blunt explanation ‘bedding’. They filed past, more subdued than before, to disappear into the gloomy interior. Nazim hung back and thought quickly. As he collected his blanket he hesitated before the official and asked in a plaintive tone when they would be moved to their proper lodging house. He had barely finished this request before the thug to his left swore and swiped clumsily at his face. Nazim allowed him to catch the top of his head and threw himself forward through the door, rolling with the fall. He clutched his head in mock-agony and looked back at the man who now filled the doorway. He was about to advance but something in the Indian’s demeanour checked him. He turned back, throwing out his chest in pride at the victory. The throat, thought Nazim, the throat was the weak-point.

  It had been a rash act, but as he had suspected the man was clumsy and untrained. He found a place in the barracks and sat calmly. Had they known of him they would have sent professionals, or at least competents. And therefore, he concluded, they did not know. Nevertheless, he watched carefully as the smaller man distributed the rest of the blanket to his fellow-inmates. They took their places on the bare boards, bewildered by this sudden reversal in their fortunes. Nazim’s placid acceptance went unnoticed.

  As nightfall approached, many of the younger men decamped to the more welcoming embrace of Shadwell. Shadwell, he knew, would be happy to let them believe it. One or two, he speculated, would not return and as they left he occupied himself trying to guess which ones. A fight, carefully rehearsed no doubt, would break out, quarrels picked against men who did not know the lingua franca of the foreigner abroad; the open pocket, the closed fist.

  Those who remained, the older men, huddled together in groups, talking amongst themselves. He sensed their despondency but, as had been the case many times before, he did not share in the mood. Certainly, the barracks was a foul place; cold, ill-lit, it had lain uncleaned for months. What did it matter? He kept his own counsel and did not join the muted discussion. Some were already talking of finding a berth back to Madras or Goa. The Company would not permit that, he knew. And in any case, few ships would be sailing for the Indies in November; the risk made a nonsense of it. Nazim looked at the lascars. His fingers drummed deliberately on the planked floor, one, two, three, four, the thumb. Flexing of each finger-muscle, one, two, three, four, the thumb. Strings and levers. There were worse places than this. And better.

  Across from where he sat the men grumbled on. His fingers ceased their slow movement. It was only the other side of the coin. Their griping would be replaced by joy, equally inexplicable to him, if the Company’s promises had turned out to be true. A worthless coin. Had it gained him anything, he would have puzzled over their behaviour, but he had lived apart from such concerns for long enough. He had seen the other side. Men struck dumb by what they thought was their desire. Their vanity. Years ago now, when his uncle had still lived, he had made his first visit to the palace of the Nawab. He had seen much that day, much he had not understood, but the point of the visit, one of the points as he had later come to understand them, was a lesson in vanity.

  His thoughts drifted back. He and his uncle stood together outside the huge building. He remembered the burning heat, the glare of red sandstone. And then the cool marble inside. Their feet had slapped on the floors, the sound echoing off the walls and high, gilt ceilings. As they walked through the entrance bazaar, his uncle had pointed at the music pavilion beyond it. He had stared dutifully. They had traversed the audience hall, past the private rooms and the zenãna, the hot baths and gardens where water channels and waterfalls sprinkled the swimming pools. Domes and roof-pavilions looked down on them as they disappeared into the inner chambers where embossed doors
of brass and silver closed silently and faint whispers were heard behind the perforated screens. The two of them had continued down long, shadowed corridors which had led them, finally, to a reception room decorated with arabesques and inscriptions, designs inlaid with agate and carneol, others painted in gold, turquoise and purple, all the most precious colours. Here, a small, shrunken man sat, attended for this occasion by a single servant.

  His uncle had addressed him respectfully. They had talked for some time and he, a gangling twelve year old, had been presented to the little man. He had not guessed it then, and had not been meant to, but at that meeting a bargain had been struck, a succession assured, and from that moment, even unknown to himself, he had become the servant of the Nawab. Eventually, after hours in which his uncle and the Nawab had spoken in a low tone, they had paid their respects and turned to take their leave.

  Before they left the palace, his uncle had taken him to see the Mirror Room. He had heard tell of it from others, it was said to be wondrous. Myriads of tiny glasses mounted in stucco ledges and slabs formed a strange, shifting mosaic. He had seen himself in thousands of tiny pieces, all dislocated from each other. It was a marvel, was it not? He had nodded politely, unmoved by the spectacle. It would have made neither more nor less an impression upon him if the walls had been plain. What was it for? His uncle had watched him carefully and later, much later, he had realised it was a test of sorts. No flicker of interest had passed across his features.

  His uncle had smiled then and led him back through the audience hall where the palace servants cleared a path before them and averted their eyes from theirs. Nazim had not thought his uncle was a man of such import. He had peered at their faces and seen in all of them the same expression. There was respect, certainly, and something else. His uncle had reprimanded him for curiosity, but still he stared, taking quick glances as they passed and seeing then a trace of distaste in the servants’ eyes, and more, unmistakeably, a strong and ill-concealed fear. He tried to think why they should fear a man such as his uncle, a man who, so far as he knew before this day, wielded little influence with anyone. Later, he would smile to recall this misapprehension, but then, as they made their way back through the bazaar and the ornate palace gates, his curiosity had grown. The courtiers, the favoured servants, the professional dissemblers of the palace, all had watched with unobtrusive care as they walked slowly out of the grounds. The two of them: the divinely appointed assassin to the Nawab of the Carnatic and, appointed only that day, his twelve year old apprentice. Hand in hand together, Bahadur-ud-Dowlah had led his young nephew home….