‘We are here,’ said Lydia as they approached.
‘And late,’ said Septimus.
It was true. Coaches filled the courtyard and spilled down the drive. Hedges and fences extended out into a darkness that harboured trees and scrub land, wild shrubs, rootless brambles and other sprawling plant life: all of it out there, unseen, waiting and being secretly green. Lydia, Lemprière, Warburton-Burleigh, the Pug then Septimus clambered out of the coach stiff-limbed, yawning and stretching into the cold evening air. The night sky was blacker than before.
As Lemprière rounded the coach, the house came into view. A tall construction of white plaster and timbers with transoms and gothic quatrefoils studding its face, more of it kept appearing as his eyes were drawn to either side by gables and straggling roof lines which twisted back into the darkness where they were lost in a scrum of haphazard additions, low galleries and out-houses. The front at least was impressive with mullion windows flanking a massive black door, country oak and a large knocker on it which Septimus took charge of and rapped, one, two, three reports echoing in the hall beyond like a huge stone drum.
All five waited for the door to be opened, silenced for the moment by their different anticipations, and Lemprière thought again of Mister Chadwick, whom he had never met and would never see. ‘Froze,’ hissed the Pug between clenched teeth.
The door was opened. Mister Chadwick had stood here too and wondered at the reason for his invitation. A small bald man in a red coat was being buried under cloaks. The man was asking him, ‘Sir?’ Lemprière handed the man his coat and walked through behind the others. Why had his father’s solicitor been wanted here?
‘Through here, sir.’ Lemprière nodded. ‘Quite a night I would imagine, sir.’ But Lemprière only caught the thread of the butler’s patter as he was led within the house, until that voice was replaced by a more general murmur, a different thread. The general hum grew louder and broke up into a jumble of tones and accents, with odd voices breaking through like heads popping up out of a maze, more and more of them until the sound seemed to reach a new level and then another as the butler threw open a pair of double doors and the gathering beyond was unmuzzled.
The noise crashed out and broke over Lemprière in a rich cackling babble, a roaring noise of chit chat with glasses and cups chinking together and the scene was full of sculpted women jabbering to each other, their menfolk lining the walls disputing amongst themselves with lines of servants nudging their way through the crowd carrying trays and decanters, crates of bottles, table linen and chairs, ’scuse, ’scuse in apologetic procession. Cabriole chairs snarled themselves and hindered the servants’ progress. Garish ormolu side tables resisted any sensible usage. Trays filled with empty glassware littered the floor, inducing mild anxiety in the revellers, and a focus for conversation amongst the women. The men disdained their chit chat, preferring to talk of Godolphin Arabian, Mendoza’s next bout and the curious late explosions aboard a slave ship, the Polly, off Bristol, followed a fortnight later by explosions at Mr Hervey’s gunpowder works in Battle, both something of a mystery.
‘It’s in the nature of the beast,’ said Mister Lifter of the Tenth Foot. ‘Never any evidence.’ He was on edge, a captaincy was in the offing.
‘Darling, she was quite the la Chudleigh. One wonders why they dress at all….’ The speaker all hip pads, bustles and layers of linen as Lemprière squeezed through the crush after Septimus until they reached the far side together and looked about for the others, who were lost to view. The hall was large, its vaulted ceiling providing a great sounding chamber for the hundreds of guests below. Lemprière watched as the women swirled about, gradually prising the men out of their resistant huddles and swapping them about in a freer commingling of the sexes. Elderly ladies hobbled about on silver-topped canes, wearing huge floral hats and malades imaginaires while their stiff-gaited consorts followed in train clutching their sticks. Younger folk clutched glasses to their chests, as the oldsters picked beady-eyed paths through their midst at a snail’s pace. Their eyes rolled heavenwards in mock impatience. Gallants put on little displays. Girls peeked out from behind their nosegays.
Lemprière recognised faces from the Pork Club, the toothy fellow with a moustache, the bottle-banger and others. No Rosalie, but Lydia’s friends and then the earl who looked over and waved. ‘Come over,’ mouthed across the crush of bodies. No Septimus either. He had slid away some little time before, waylaid by a po-faced dowager to whom he was now recounting his adventure in a Sicilian bordello while the woman’s skittish teenaged nieces listened wide-eyed in silence.
‘Appalling!’ barked the dowager after the recitation and a small chunk of her face powder dislodged itself to fall in her glass. The nieces bit their lips and looked away. Septimus winked at them. Lemprière floundered. He had pressed determinedly towards the earl at his signal but somehow had been deflected. Suddenly, the earl was nowhere to be seen. He set off again, but the hall had grown even more crowded with conversations and informal greetings, little frigid exchanges between polite enemies and hearty embraces going on all about him, distracting him so that he found himself eavesdropping on the party-chatter of his fellow guests.
‘… and the cook shuts the dog in, like she was told, gets on with the tripe, and when she looks around again, the dog’s gone.’
‘Gone?’
‘Gone. So she nips out and starts shouting for the dog, but the bloody thing is hiding, or it’s run off. So she puts down a lump of meat and just waits for its stomach, thinks, dog’ll follow.’
‘No stomach, no dog.’
‘Right, so she puts down this lump of meat….’
A dark little man with a dipped moustache carrying a music stand carved a path between Lemprière and the story, forcing him sideways, where a flamboyant gentleman in a purple cravat pitched up a word that fell on him like long expected bad news.
‘… tortoises.’
‘Absurd!’
‘Tortoises, I tell you. Hundreds of gigantic tortoises. Read your Livy. The siege of Sparta.’
‘Marmaduke, are you certain?’
‘Of course I’m certain.’ Lemprière was certain too, sniggering to himself at the confusion of the tortoise battle-formation with the animal itself. Marmaduke was now miming the approach of the massed tortoise-ranks. The dark little man was returning with a large heavy chest, dragging it with difficulty through the least tractable part of the crowd. He barged through, red in the face and panting as Lemprière stepped out of the way for the third time to hear Marmaduke explain how the heroic Roman tortoises had smashed through the Spartan lines to win a great victory.
‘Never heard that before eh? Well everyone will be hearing about it soon, everyone’ll be seeing it, the whole thing….’ His companion looked blank, then aghast.
‘You are not proposing to put this spectacle on the stage, Marmaduke….’ An actor, thought Lemprière.
‘It is my stage,’ Marmaduke came back at him, then noticed the horrified expression. ‘But no, not on the stage. Above it.’
‘Above?’ A theatre manager, Lemprière revised his earlier thought, then imagined the giant tortoises swinging from the wings above a production of, what, the Oresteia? A maniac.
‘On the roof!’ Marmaduke exclaimed. I’ve already commissioned them, the Coade manufactory will cast them six feet across, four guineas each, less if I take more than a dozen.’
‘More than a dozen!’
‘I thought perhaps two dozen or so, with one on the parapet, a tortoise-rampant. We could have tours of the roof before each performance, notices in the news-sheets, that sort of thing….’ Marmaduke’s companion was shaking his head and murmuring, oh dear, oh dear, oh dear, very softly to himself while Marmaduke clapped him on the back and Lemprière thought of Æschylus and the tortoise predestined for his skull, then lurched as the moustachioed man passed by again, this time carrying a sheaf of papers and a small brass screwdriver. Lemprière watched him disappear and thought perhap
s he should follow and make another attempt to find the earl, or Septimus, or Lydia, the Pug even, even perhaps Warburton-Burleigh.
‘John! Good man!’ A great clap on his back knocked the wind out of him so that Lemprière coughed and spluttered, then turned to see Edmund, the Earl of Braith with a broad grin on his face and a funnel-shaped object in his hand which he raised to his lips then bellowed through it, ‘Good to see you!’ Several people turned, including Marmaduke.
‘Have you met Marmaduke Stalkart?’ The earl took them both by the elbow and drew them together. ‘Marmaduke is the proprietor of the Haymarket Opera House, sadly dark at the present….’
‘Soon to re-open.’ Marmaduke offered his hand which Lemprière took. The conversation flagged immediately. The earl looked from one to the other. ‘You must be wondering why you came?’ he said breezily to Lemprière in mock apology for the evening.
‘Yes, why am I here?’ demanded Lemprière.
‘You are here on your merits,’ said the earl. ‘But I believe my mother, Lady de Vere, wanted to speak with you.’
‘Your mother? I have never met your mother. Where is she?’
‘Upstairs. She never attends these affairs, not since father died. Truly, I am as much in the dark as you. She is very old you know.’ The earl kept looking over his shoulder as he said this then abruptly his explanations came to an end. ‘John, I must announce the display. Monsieur Maillardet seems ready at last. Forgive me, we will talk afterwards. It’s all rather silly, I know….’ The earl was sidling off, in the direction of the little man who had taken up a position with his paraphernalia at the far side of the hall nearest the double doors. Lemprière launched a shot into the dark.
‘Mister Chadwick!’ he called after Edmund and the earl turned, his face showing bewildered recognition at the name. ‘Mister Chadwick is why I am here!’ Lemprière repeated with more emphasis and knew that he had scored a hit. He had no idea why.
‘Later John,’ was the best the startled earl could manage as he struggled through his guests to reach Monsieur Maillardet who was now kneeling with his head inside the box doing something with his screwdriver.
‘It’ll never work,’ said a soft Scots voice and Lemprière turned to find himself addressed by a tall man with a mat of jet black hair.
‘Mister Byrne’ he introduced himself, and Lemprière reciprocated.
‘Maillardet’s a bloody toymaker; brilliant mechanic, but he wouldn’t know a command-structure if it hit him in the face.’
‘Yes, I suppose.… I don’t know.’ Lemprière began but was interrupted by a loud banging sound. The earl had climbed on a chair and was begging silence of the company.
‘A merry Christmas to you all,’ he began rather oddly, and, having taken this initial wrong turn, the speech never really recovered. After long rebuttals and qualifications of things he had already said, long embarrassing pauses and fake stops and starts, he waved his glass about in happy confusion while his audience made appreciative noises or murmured “Hear hear!” at various junctures.
‘Much improved,’ said a familiar voice in Lemprière’s ear. It was Septimus. Marmaduke and Mister Byrne nodded their hellos. ‘Last year was far worse. Went on for hours.’
‘… and far be it my intention not to wish to deny, rather wish to deny, on the contrary that is, until we are ready …’ the earl was saying, ‘which, I would hope, there is no doubt surrounding, we are.’ The last word was emphasised, prompting affirmative grunts from those sections of the audience construing his sentence in the positive, while others, believing the opposite to be the case, mumbled “Not at all” or “Have no fear”. Then, when no more was forthcoming, both camps raised the pitch of their support in the belief that the speech was ended and a polite shouting match ensued. In the middle of this, Edmund resumed his sentence, most of which was lost in the hubbub until his audience realised he had started up again. They stopped in time to hear ‘… Monsieur Maillardet, and thank you all,’ which really was the end. There was some confused clapping. Cappadocian, thought Lemprière.
‘Right as ever Mister Praeceps,’ Mister Byrne was saying. ‘A markedly better effort.’ Something was happening at the front. The little man with the moustache was speaking through the horn Lemprière had earlier seen the earl carrying, squeezing alien vowels through its funnel and firing them up into the roof where they crashed about and returned as a jumbled echo. Then he stopped.
‘Shall we move nearer?’ Mister Byrne entreated the other three and they followed him as he wormed his way through to the front of the crowd who were watching Monsieur Maillardet, now assembling his machine. ‘What is it?’ asked Marmaduke.
‘A demonstration,’ said Septimus.
‘Rank amateurism,’ added Mister Byrne. ‘I’ve built machines which could design a better toy than that.’ Lemprière raised his eyebrow at Septimus. ‘A rival,’ whispered Septimus. ‘He gave the demonstration last year.’
Monsieur Maillardet raised his horn again and spoke briefly, pointing to his contraption. It was a chest upon which a life-sized doll dressed in the uniform of a French soldier knelt. In front of the doll was a desk with writing paper on it. One of its arms hung down at its side, the other was raised and crooked at the elbow as if warding off a blow.
‘Rather wonderful, don’t you think?’ said Marmaduke.
‘No,’ said Mister Byrne.
A small group of men in their sixties, naval types by their bearing, shuffled forward to take a closer look.
‘What is it?’ asked Lemprière.
‘Part of you and I,’ said Septimus.
‘An automaton,’ Mister Byrne answered him. ‘A moving statue. An imitation of humanity.’
‘Ernst should see this,’ Lemprière whispered to Septimus. ‘It fits all his theories.’ Septimus laughed noisily at this, drawing an angry look from Monsieur Maillardet.
‘Pipe down there,’ said one of the naval company, who was paying close attention to the goings-on.
Lemprière looked back to the automaton and its maker who was kneeling at its back, winding something and muttering to himself. It seemed he was ready to begin. A few more turns and he stood to one side, quite near to Mister Byrne, who was studying his fingernails. Everyone else watched the automaton. A few seconds passed in which nothing happened, a slow smile spread across Mister Byrne’s face, then suddenly, a shrill squawk was heard from one of the women. The automaton was moving. Monsieur Maillardet gave Mister Byrne a look which suggested he had only just noticed him. The head swivelled sideways and looked up into the faces of the crowd. Its false hair was black under its helmet and its eyes an unnatural blue. A fixed smile was carved on its face. The doll looked down at the paper on the desk and its arm jerked, stopped, jerked again then moved slowly down, the fingers opening then closing with a snap on the pen. Lemprière noticed that the position of the pen was marked exactly on the desk. Towards the rear of the crowd a few individuals clapped. When they fell silent Lemprière heard a low whirring sound interspersed with irregular clicks. As the demonstration proceeded these were joined by several muffled reports from within the chest, less frequent than the other sounds. ‘Didn’t even damp the cam-sets,’ whispered Mister Byrne in his ear.
Within the machine, control passed to and fro between the drive and servo-motors as the index-wheels regulated the programme cams and fusees passed coded power through the gears to jointed levers moving silently inside the automaton’s limbs. Dipping its pen in the inkwell the doll went through a series of tiny mechanical shivers, before its arm moved down to write and the information-flow was resumed. The arm seemed to move very stiffly but Lemprière noticed the pen itself gliding smoothly over the paper. After twelve or fourteen lines of script, Monsieur Maillardet removed the sheet and handed it to a woman who was standing near the front.
‘A love poem! Oh, mon amour!’ she hammed to the machine. Her companions laughed and clapped their hands together. Monsieur Maillardet accepted these compliments on behalf of his creation.
The doll itself stared fixedly ahead. The performance was repeated twice more, each time to similar delight with the ladies comparing the automaton’s efforts, and vying with each other for a place in its affections. After this, Monsieur Maillardet held up his hands for quiet and spoke through his horn as incomprehensibly as before. Then he replaced the pen and paper and rewound a crank behind the chest. Everyone watched in silence. The machine began to move, more quickly this time, the internal clicks and hums louder than before.
‘He’s geared the motor too high,’ said Mister Byrne to Lemprière. The automaton was producing an image with quick slashes and jerky stabs of its pen. It was a ship, a three master with all its rigging and every detail down to the rail-stanchions and the join of the stem-pieces. The naval men edged closer to gain a better view, one in particular moving right up to the machine, obscuring Lemprière’s view. He had a weather tanned face which looked as though it were not much given to extravagant expression, but now, as the man peered down at the emerging image, his look was one of astonishment. Monsieur Maillardet moved protectively towards his creation as it put the last halyards on the ship.
‘Good God!’ the man exclaimed. ‘I tell you I know that ship!’ And with that he reached to snatch the paper just as the doll started inscribing the name on the ship’s bow.
‘Monsieur!’ remonstrated its inventor. He was too late. As the man’s hand closed about the paper, the doll brought over its left arm, the hand opened and closed tight about the man’s wrist. The left side of the machine seemed to freeze as the man tried to prise himself free.
‘Damn,’ he muttered, then suddenly shouted loudly as the right arm descended deliberately and with the pen inscribed the name of the ship in the soft skin of his palm. A mess of blood and ink welled up.
‘Good Christ, get it off!’ shouted the man, shaking the thing furiously. His companions were pulling at the metal arm.
Lemprière's Dictionary Page 26
