Lemprière's Dictionary

by Lawrence Norfolk

  Twenty-odd years had elapsed since the scandal which had reduced Peppard to his present station. In that time, he had often fancied himself under the scrutiny of the very men who had so successfully ruined him. He had good reason. Faces in crowds had grown inexplicably familiar. He had grown conscious of men who lounged at the corner of his street to little obvious purpose. They would station themselves at this and other vantage points for a few days then disappear, never to be seen again. Three times his room had betrayed traces of subtle examination; a book left open, a basin of water emptied and refilled to a different level. How many details such as these had he missed? When first he had grown aware of their attention, the occasions had seemed quite random. Later he had realised that these intrusions had coincided with crises of one sort or another in his old adversary, the East India Company.

  On impulse he turned about again. Nothing. The courtyard was dark. Anything might hide in the shadows. He wondered what upheaval afflicted John Company now. His curiosity had never left him. Something was afoot, that much was a certainty. Three days before, he had been walking home as usual when, for the first time in all those years of half-confirmed suspicions, he had been confronted directly. In truth, it was trivial. He told himself that it was nothing. He had been walking home by his normal route when a man had fallen into step beside him. He had had a thin face and had been dressed in black. Peppard had ignored him. Perhaps he was a prankster, or a madman of some sort. But after a minute or two the man had stopped him, put a hand to his shoulder and looked him in the face. Peppard had said nothing. The thin-faced man had said only one word, ‘Peppard.’ A voice like metal. Just one word, but the message for him was clear: we know who you are, where you are, you are ours if we wish it at any time … Not this time, not now, Peppard had wanted to protest. He had managed to keep silent. The man had looked him full in the face for several long seconds, then walked back into the crowd to be lost from sight. When Peppard had reached his home, his clothes were drenched in sweat and his hands had shook for an hour. He had been given a warning. Now, as he gained the street, he wondered if the visits of Septimus, or his companion, or the Widow Neagle might be the occasion which had prompted it. He could not know. Damned curiosity. He had imagined the footsteps. It was nonsense, all of it, and here was the street before him. Thousands upon thousands of footsteps.

  Chancery Lane at that hour thronged with clerks and their masters bent, as he was, on their homeward journeys. They jostled and shoved to avoid the filth of the gutter and Peppard was hard-pressed in this struggle to maintain his pace. Slowing, he fell in behind a group of young men who moved in an aggressive group through the crowd, refusing to yield passage to any and jeering at those unfortunates who were relegated with little ceremony to the roadside muck or worse. Peppard felt protected. Holborn was just as crowded, but at Saffron Hill the mass of people thinned. Turning into Vine Street, he chanced to look back and as he did so a figure perhaps a hundred yards behind him froze conspicuously. Peppard held his stare for a second or two then walked quickly down Vine Street and across Clerkenwell Green. From the far side, he scanned anxiously for the figure, but did not see him. No-one had followed him. Why should they? He wished now that he had returned home on his more usual route by Cheapside and up. In this part of the city the main thoroughfares ran north to south and thus the safety their numbers afforded was short-lived as he negotiated from one to the next by means of the network of alleys that served as streets in the north-east quarter. He cursed his timorousness, but the narrow paths of Clerkenwell were ill-lit at the best of times and their twists and turns so frequent that he could rarely see twenty yards before or behind. His pride would not let him run, but he imagined the footsteps of his unknown pursuer every time he slowed his pace and his breath came quickly as he picked his way east.

  Emerging on Golden Lane, he calmed down and even felt somewhat foolish. He was only a few hundred yards from home now. He stepped back as a dray laden with planks trundled noisily past. His eyes followed its passage up the road and there he saw, distinctly and without doubt, the same figure as before, not fifty yards distant.

  Peppard panicked. He ran headlong across the road, his sudden movement alerting the figure further up. He ran into the first opening he found and turned right into another. The footsteps followed him, louder now, and faster than his own. It was not until he reached the dead end at the bottom that Peppard remembered Jermey Row had only one entrance.

  For a moment there was silence and he looked about him for some means of escape. But the blind alley was bare of doors or even windows. Only a single buttress provided any possibility of cover. He cowered behind it, flattening himself against the wall. Then he heard the footsteps again. His pursuer had overshot the alleyway in his haste, but backtracking had found it. Gravel ground underfoot. The footsteps slowed. They advanced down the alley, slower and slower. Peppard tried to make himself believe that he would spring at his unknown opponent, that he would somehow break clear and escape. Slower and slower. He shut his eyes. They were almost upon him now. He cringed as they stopped, awaiting whatever fearful act was to follow. He could hear deep gasps of breath. His pursuer looked down.

  ‘Peppard,’ he said simply, gulping air. Peppard looked up, his mouth falling open.

  ‘Mister Lemprière!’ Peppard exclaimed.

  5,452 vessels lined prow to stern stretched through the mind of Captain Guardian, over the horizon and out of sight. Triremes, barges, brigantines and tugs; carvels, carracks and cogs. Captain Guardian had built every type of ship known to man, it was his pleasure. Every night since the one fifteen years back when he had bade his farewells to the sea and first found his thoughts as empty as the deck he had left, he sat down before a roaring fire, closed his eyes and built a ship. He had read Bouguer, Duhamel Dumonceau and Leonard Euler (although, for himself, any vessel designed by a Swiss mathematician would not have inspired confidence). He had visited boatyards and talked to their shipwrights. He had even visited France.

  On matters of ship-worm, he lent cautious support to the advocates of copper-sheathing, but would not run down the virtues of fir-board, hair and tar, an amalgam whose prophylactic qualities had, after all, served him well for close on thirty years, six of those in the West Indies. He favoured plans rather than models, although the shipwright’s habit was more important than either, and believed in the calculation, not guessing of draughts. A small engraving of Anthony Deane which rested above the mantlepiece attested to this credo and he allowed himself an occasional chuckle when the high spring tide fell short of the launchers’ expectations.

  After all these years, the comings and goings of the Thames’ traffic still held a fascination for him. The sea had never really let him go. Only the previous day, the late afternoon, he had watched as the latest arrival docked and its crew mooched belowdecks. From the window of the Crow’s Nest (for so he styled the attic room of his house) Eben had strained his old eyes against the thickening gloom of dusk to watch the hustling watermen as they went about their business. The fire he had stoked warmed his back from the other side of the tiny room. Along its walls book-cases held well-thumbed volumes. A desk of disproportionate size, far larger than the small door through which it had once presumably negotiated a passage, was strewn with papers, charts and plans. Looking down from the window, he was able to make out the lines of the shabby vessel berthed a hundred yards down the wharf from his house. He had looked once, then again.

  There was something familiar about it. He had seen it somewhere before…. He craned and squinted for a better view. He would go down to the dock later, or perhaps in the morning. The room had been warm and the window was misting over. Eben had retired to his desk, sinking into his chair, thinking, as he always did at this time, that he was glad to be warm, dry and ashore.

  That had been the previous evening and he had yet to take the closer look he had resolved upon. Tomorrow morning perhaps. Tonight he was indulging his passion which was for the imaginary building o
f ships. Tonight he was building an hermaphrodite brig.

  He had already got the keel on its blocks, the stem and stern posts up and scarfed, the keelson bolted onto the floor-timbers. He had left these last loose at the ends, ready to be compassed. The first time he’d caught sight of such a vessel he had laughed. With only a little imagination it had looked as though it were sailing backwards. Somewhere before.… He bent to his task, fixing futtocks to floor-timbers, compassing up and doubling them amidships. Caution and care were the keys. The skeleton of the ship was now recognisable, just, he grudged. Next, the clamps were put in, and the partners which would hold the mast-heels when they were stepped in later. The most wearisome task was the knees: standing, lodging and hanging, all with the grain running right. Eben wondered if his dislike of multiple decks had anything to do with the tedium of knees. He hammered them home with heart of oak nails, then turned his attention to the stern, where the stresses and strains of anchor-cables and rudder could be at their most destructive. He always put an extra transom between half and main and, to the anticipated objections from a cargo-hungry proprietor, opposed his memories, two of them, of clawing out from a lee shore under full sail with ten men on the rudder and the quarter-timbers ready to splinter. That had been on the whaling run. He had thought the call was for him that time. Planking, caulking.

  But now he was out of all that and glad to be so, out of the ‘the roaring forties’, ‘the doldrums’, out of all those yarns that they’d told. He’d absconded before the end, hoped the cast would carry on without him but, dammit, he knew the finale, had seen it before, the widows, the ruined men and he’d have none of it. They could put out the call, but there were no bows left to take, he’d had his call already and he wouldn’t do it. Oh, he understood the need, what lay behind the nudges and winks that bought the old boy another and toddy in hand off he’d go again, tied to the wheel ‘round the Cape, ten hours in the March Atlantic, coming in to port, dry-docked and would you know it, we’d lost the keel. Stripped clean off! Didn’t make a damn of difference, now, take out the rudder and, well there was this time off the Antilles … And they would clap and they would cheer and not believe a word of it, and a week after they’d say, ‘Met a fascinatin’ cove, told this story….’ A month and ‘Heard this tale, tall as you like this is …’ topping it off with, ‘Course it’s true, true as, as….’ But it was all well and good. Nothing was quite so true as the sea. All well and good, because not looking but thinking, thinking out over the sea, throwing the hawser out and hauling in the rag-end, he understood this need. It was for something to pitch against the roll of the thing, against the undertows and cross-currents, against the drab, tropical calms. Against the fact that nothing lasts long in the sea and the bodies that come back at all, come back bleached. So he had some sympathy for these stories of the ocean, even if they were really stories of the land, of something firm beneath the feet and all the eventualities covered. And he had some sympathy with the lubbers who threw their thoughts seawards leaving their bodies safely ashore. But he wouldn’t have sailed in a boat built with protractors by a Genevan two hundred miles from the coast. No, sympathy had its limits.

  He bent to his task once more, planking up to the gunwales, nailing in the decks. Tap, tap, tap, the knocking of mallet on nail, wales on jetty…. Somewhere before, he knew it. It nagged at him, it would not let him go. He cut in the grates. Tap, tap, tap, there was something missing, something niggling like the object taken away in a memory game. Tapping at him until remembrance or fury should plug the gap. Captain Guardian propelled himself out of the armchair, up to the casement and, looking down the quay, realised that this was not the memory game he had thought for there was the object and here was still the gap. The ship berthed a hundred yards down the quay was called the Vendragon. Something in that name, or in that ship jarred with him. Somewhere in all this, something was wrong.

  It rocked gently in the water and the men carrying the cases on board had to adjust their step as they made the gang-plank. They sweated and cursed, but the money was good and paid on the nail. Along the quayside, an old man hauled himself homewards, painfully slow, stumps aching and matches spilling from his pockets. He watched the porters. Coker, the gangleader, counted the paces from cart to gangway, one, two, three….

  ‘Down a minute,’ he instructed his workmate on the other end. He wrung his hands and wiped the sweat from his forehead before continuing. He had worked other such jobs, the double rate and no questions commissions. He remembered a lighter up beyond Richmond, landing twenty cases of French brandy straight onto the lawn and spending the night there, swigging and yarning with a delighted patron. Could have sworn it was the Duke of Marlborough. He hadn’t liked the look of the client this time; thin man, grating voice like metal. Fifteen, sixteen, seventeen … the triple rate jobs he left for Cleaver and his boys, dirty business generally, too risky for a married man. He grimaced, staggering across to the ship, twenty-eight, twenty-nine, thirty steps dead. The two men made the deck and went back for another.

  From his window, Eben watched the human chain at its work. Out and back, loaded and unloaded; this was a pattern he knew on a larger scale. The ship might be called the Vendragon, but that was not the name for which he searched. Some other tag held the key, but it would not come. He would look through his plans, but already, he knew, he would not find the answer there, tap, tap, tapping of something missed. Irritation passed in a wave, a wash, and he returned to his brig.

  It sat there cradled and caulked while an imagined ocean entreated the battle of grey-brown wood and grey-green sea, its baptism, the same old lie, Eben’s gloomy thought here. Baptism? Christening then, yes. And the Teredo was her name…. Certainly he had no right to pour scorn on the old salts or their recitals for, looking askance at the brittle hulls of his creations, what else was he doing here if not dotting the ocean’s trackless monotone with puny coordinates, The Necessary Limitations of the Sea, his patent version, a shanty of uncounted verses. Grease the slipway, hitch the winch, take up the slack and all together now … one, two, three. Oh yes, something was missing. All pull together … tap, tap, tap. And down it ran towards the marbled sea of Eben’s imagination, its surface agitation issuing edicts of topsy-turveydom, as no-nonsense a declaration that the real business is being conducted underneath as anyone who’d played the Macao baccarat tables had a right to. With the sea, second acts run concurrent with the first. Eben couldn’t have forgotten something so basic, so simple could he? But now it’s almost too late even to ask, anagnorisis proceeding, as it is, apace with the Teredo’s inexorable plunge to an aquatic appointment and consequent peripeteia. His ship, a floating melodrama; his face, a study in anticipated loss. He will never see her like again, never, the tears summoned with consummate technique blur his sight for a moment, but the rising gale of laughter would alert him anyway as he stares down in disbelief. How could I have forgotten? And as it leaves the slipway and enters the water, Eben thinks of what he should have thought much earlier than this. As it minces on the sea-surface with brief and impossible buoyancy, as it teeters and topples, wavers, the water attending this doomed, virtuoso performance in the fair certainty of its failure, Captain Guardian thinks of rocks, gravel, sand; of centres of gravity. As it turns turtle, rolling belly-up and floating down the cranial tributary of capsizement and forgetting, he knows what was missing, he remembers what he should have remembered before. He should have remembered the ballast. Shit.

  ‘Here, here, here and here. Here and here and here!’ Peppard’s forensic finger stabbed downward with precision.

  ‘Also here,’ he added, the digit moving up.

  A white enamelled bowl, half-filled with greyish water or perhaps it was the light; books, worn red-leather bindings with dust; a bed, a desk, two chairs. No fire and the room was cold.

  ‘But what is it?’ Lemprière asked, looking back to the little man.

  He had been waiting by the outer entrance to the courtyard only a few minutes bef
ore Peppard’s compact figure was spotted. But only for a second, the stream of passers-by had swallowed the little man immediately and Lemprière had crossed the road several times in search of him. A glimpse, fifty yards up, more a guess. He had used the road, sprinting up to the spot, looking around quickly. Nothing.

  ‘Odd, very odd. Wouldn’t have been a professional … but perhaps.’ He paused. ‘Very odd.’ Peppard bent closer to the document, using his hands like compasses to bridge the paragraphs, linking word to word.

  Then he had seen him again, frozen for a second with the bustle behind him, and he was off, watching as his quarry disappeared from the highway, marking the point and making for it. But Peppard might have taken any one of the off-shoot alleys. No sense trying to pick the right one, he dived in at a run.

  ‘Peppard?’ he reminded his companion.

  ‘George, if you like, a moment please….’ He was still reading.

  Soft dirt underfoot, flagstones the exception rather than the rule. He tripped, almost fell, but regained his feet just in time. Steadying his pace, keeping an even canter with the sound of his feet only slightly louder than the thud of his heart. The alley had twisted and turned, but each time he thought he was being bent too far off his bearing, it veered back. He heard the raucousness of the highway ahead.

  ‘Skewer thought it a curiosity, but not valueless,’ Lemprière prompted again.

  ‘Certainly not valueless,’ murmured Peppard, intent in his examination.

  He had known he must have reached the road before his prey. He moved back and forth, dodging the passers-by and looking out for Peppard. He must emerge soon…. Yes, there! He shouted, but Peppard had moved quickly and Lemprière drew a curse or two as he shoved his way into the road, across and down the path opposite. He could see nothing. It was impossible, Peppard could simply not have moved that fast. Then he noticed the narrow opening to his left.