Lemprière's Dictionary

by Lawrence Norfolk

  ‘Messieurs! Please!’ cried Monsieur Maillardet. Mister Byrne acted. Walking over to his rival, he snatched the screwdriver which was still in his hand. He knelt behind the automaton, braced himself, then drove the screwdriver in at the back. Instantly, both hands splayed their fingers, releasing the man, and a shrill, ear-piercing whine started up within the machine. The arms flew apart, then slowly, very deliberately, the left hand came over, took hold of the right and twisted. The hand came off at the wrist. Several people looked away. Little brass levers twitched inside the stump. Then the same hand rose up as if to touch its nose. Lemprière watched as the movement simply continued and the automaton drove five fingers through its plaster face. The hand tightened on something inside the head and the arm began to pull back. There was a tearing sound then a loud snap and the head broke off at the neck. The motors inside were screaming, the cams clacking furiously, but the automaton’s movements showed no lack of control. It sat there with its smiling head dangling from its hand, and began to bang the head on the desk, once, twice, three times. The motors screamed louder as the unseen machinery pulled itself apart. The automaton twitched violently and then it was still. The head dropped from its fingers and rolled across the floor. Attention turned to Monsieur Maillardet who was standing theatrically with his hands over his ears and who now rushed to his stricken creation. He picked up the head and hand, then slumped to the floor in despair. The headless automaton had fallen forward, face down over the desk.

  ‘Why?’ cried Monsieur Maillardet to the company at large, then ‘Why?’ again, louder at Mister Byrne who was handing him back his screwdriver.

  ‘Things fall apart,’ said Mister Byrne in laconic tones. ‘It’s scientific’

  The show was over. The earl’s guests looked about for the next spectacle. The injured man was surrounded by a small group of his companions, dabbing at his hand with a handkerchief.

  ‘Damn it, that damn ship. I know that ship,’ he was saying, still shaken by his encounter with the wrecked machine.

  ‘Pipe down, Eben,’ said an elderly lady in imperious tones.

  ‘I tell you, it’s moored right here,’ the man was protesting. ‘Here in the Thames.’ He was sixty or more with steel grey hair and solidly built. Solicitous advice began to pour down on him from all sides as the guests transferred their attentions to his plight. Some of the younger fellows were nudging each other. It was agreed that the hand should be cleaned and dressed. Eben suffered himself to be led away behind a serving girl, still muttering about ships and shocks of recognition, but more quietly, aware perhaps of the spectacle he had provided.

  ‘It’s the Vendragon, I tell you, the damn Vendragon…’ he was saying as he passed Lemprière.

  ‘Why?’ asked Monsieur Maillardet from the floor again. No-one answered him.

  ‘John?’ It was the earl and Lemprière’s thoughts turned forensic once more, remembering the earl’s shocked expression at the mention of Chadwick, his own doubts and a hundred other questions he wanted to ask.

  ‘My mother expressed a wish to see you,’ said the earl. Mister Byrne had joined Maillardet on the floor. Together, they were retrieving tiny brass screws, washers and pieces of motor-housing. The weather-beaten face of the injured man was disappearing through one of the doors to the side of the hall. Septimus was nowhere to be seen. Neither was Casterleigh, Lemprière noted. Nor his daughter. ‘Did you like Monsieur Maillardet’s demonstration?’ asked the earl, to which Lemprière replied that he thought it unique.

  The two of them made their way to the back of the hall. The earl seemed boisterous, passing comments back and forth with his guests, laughing a little louder than they did.

  ‘This way,’ he said and the two of them passed through a door into a long corridor. The racket from the hall died away and their footsteps were the only noise.

  ‘As I said, she is very old.’ The earl talked over his shoulder as he led the way. ‘She wants things just so. You understand me?’ Lemprière shook his head. ‘She wants things as they were, or how she imagines they were.’ They climbed a staircase and moved through a long room with chipped stucco work depicting various mythological scenes, hydras and men with swords, women in towers. The room beyond it was lined with empty shelves. They were moving back through the house, its geography becoming piecemeal and more confusing. Oddly shaped rooms, rooms without windows and innumerable short flights of steps argued a haphazard plan as if it had accreted rather than been designed. Edmund kept up a running commentary as they passed through, explaining to Lemprière that the original building had been built by Thomas, the fourth earl, in Elizabeth’s time with money from his trading interests.

  ‘But, of course, you would know all this….’ he was saying as Lemprière thought of the agreement with Thomas’ name upon it, and François’.

  ‘Tell me more,’ he said but the earl only resumed his domestic travelogue, telling Lemprière of the later additions which seemed not to match the scale or grandeur of the original house, bits and pieces bolted on as necessary through the intervening centuries, the shoddiness of the workmanship evident in some parts of the building. Nevertheless, Lemprière felt compelled to pass appreciative comments as they moved through its interior.

  ‘Oh, it has some fascinating corners,’ the earl said airily. ‘I only wish I was able to show you the gardens. I have a drainage project underway you might find interesting. Something of a family tradition. All the De Veres have added something.’ The earl’s speech began to grow a little slurred during this recital, though still comprehensible. ‘My father built the new stables before he died, but of course we cannot keep the string he maintained. Between the two of us, the whole place is close to collapse. Mother cannot accept it. She thinks of little else. Try to understand, John.’ Lemprière assented to this in all sincerity. They continued, into a wing where the walls were panelled and the furnishings in better repair than before. Pictures lined their route, stiffly posed men and women in odd costumes. The earl paused before one of them.

  ‘Thomas de Vere, the fourth earl as a young man,’ he said. ‘Odd, is it not?’ And Lemprière agreed that it was. But for the yellowing varnish and the garishly discoloured flesh tones, the picture might have been of Edmund. The resemblance was quite disturbing.

  ‘In here.’ The earl opened a door next to the fourth earl’s portrait and they stepped into a long salon with sofas, a piano and several bureaux pushed against the far wall. A fire burned briskly in the hearth. ‘If you would wait here for a moment….’ The earl walked across the room and disappeared through a second door. Lemprière began to look about him but it was only seconds before the earl returned. ‘John Lemprière, let me introduce you to my mother, Lady Alice de Vere,’ he said. As he spoke, a figure appeared in the doorway, a woman, very thin, dressed in very pale blue. Her face was powdered white, a dot of rouge on each cheek and her hair was piled very high, quite unlike the women in the hall. She stopped and held up a pince-nez to peer at Lemprière. Lemprière made a little bow, and the eye glasses were lowered.

  ‘So, this is Lemprière,’ she said in a clear voice. ‘The De Veres welcome you, Mister Lemprière, as they did François, your ancestor.’ Lemprière blinked behind his spectacles. ‘One hundred and fifty years may have changed our circumstances, but our welcome at least remains the same.’

  ‘Thank you, Lady de Vere,’ said Lemprière.

  ‘The snow did not trouble you?’

  ‘No, no.’

  ‘Edmund? Perhaps Mister Lemprière will take some wine.’ The earl had been standing next to an over-stuffed chair, but was now leaning on it as though for support. When he moved to fetch the decanter he stumbled slightly. Lemprière sipped at his glass. The earl gulped, then took another. His mother looked at him.

  ‘I should return to the guests,’ he said. His speech was clearer than before. ‘I will tell Septimus you are here,’ he told Lemprière, then left by the door they had entered.

  Lemprière found himself alone with Lady
de Vere, who now moved nearer.

  ‘You are a young man,’ she said. ‘Children?’ Her steps were fragile tottering affairs. Lemprière wanted her to sit down.

  ‘No, none,’ he said. Close up, she was even thinner than before, hollowed out somehow. Her eyes were very dark and fixed unwaveringly upon Lemprière, or at some definite point behind him.

  ‘It was Skewer,’ she spoke quickly and sat down, indicating that Lemprière should do the same. ‘You are puzzling over your presence here. It was Skewer, not Chadwick. Mister Chadwick is the old school. It was Mister Skewer brought us word of the agreement.’

  ‘Was,’ said Lemprière. ‘Mister Chadwick was the old school. He died some time ago.’

  ‘Dead?’ said Lady de Vere. ‘Yes, of course.’ This last was spoken more to herself than her guest.

  ‘Your father is dead too?’ Lemprière nodded, faintly offended by this flat statement of fact. ‘Your father had some commerce with Mister Chadwick a year or more ago. Skewer was his assistant then. It was he who told us of the agreement. You will have wondered at our late interest. One year ago to this day we invited Mister Chadwick to reveal what he knew. He refused, was even offended that we should ask, but we had to ask: it was in your interest as much as our own.’ Lady de Vere had grown more animated. ‘When your father died, Mister Skewer came to us once again….’

  ‘That is how you knew of the agreement….’ said Lemprière.

  ‘We knew before,’ she replied sharply. ‘As I told you. But the changed circumstances led us to a further attempt, Mister Praecep’s involvement and our offer to buy the document.’ Lemprière thought of Skewer’s face across the desk, full of solicitude, telling him it was a curio. The image of the widow Neagle hitting him with her shoe. ‘In the pay of knaves,’ her angry words. All true.

  ‘You wished to purchase the agreement,’ he said bluntly. ‘You want to buy it. It is something you need.’

  ‘No Mister Lemprière,’ she said more softly. ‘The agreement told us of matters we had imagined long past.’ Lady de Vere contemplated the young man for a second or two, then spoke again. ‘What we need, as you put it, is quite other. The object of our commerce up until now, Mister Lemprière, is not the agreement. It is yourself.’

  Lady de Vere rose from her seat as she said this and walked quickly to a bureau cabinet at the far side of the room. Even in his surprise at her last statement, Lemprière noted her improved stride. The tottering entry, the impression of frailty had all been an act for his benefit. Or hers, he thought as the woman rummaged through the bureau then another to return with a large pile of papers and several roughly bound books.

  ‘Indeed, why should we want your agreement,’ said Lady de Vere, handing him a sheet from the pile, ‘when we do after all have our own.’ It was the agreement, identical in every respect down to the signatures and the serrations along the lower edge. Thomas de Vere. François Lemprière.

  ‘My son told you of its significance,’ Lady de Vere was saying, but Lemprière’s face was blank. A garbled speech mixed in with the Pork Club’s drunken noise, his nausea, the earl’s face upside down before his own saying,’a tenth part… millions by now… in perpetuity….’ There was more, much more than that but it had slipped away like water through his fingers. He could not remember.

  ‘The fourth earl was a venturer, one of the original investors.’ The words were falling from nowhere.’… a merchant. The first voyage was the key to all that befell him later. It was an adventure in every sense.’ Alice de Vere had been rearranging the pile of papers as she spoke. Now she handed Lemprière a dog-eared pamphlet, yellowed with age, and the young man read aloud “The voyage to the Indies and adventures of Captain Lancaster of the Dragon, together with the Hector, the Ascension and the Susan, A true account.”

  ‘That was the first voyage.’ Lemprière nodded, turning the pages over before him, reading idly of the expedition’s trials and triumphs. Lady de Vere spoke again, the facts coming with a quick fluency, a familiar recital.

  ‘There were many investors at the start. The ships left in 1600. All they knew was that beyond the Cape were the spice markets of the East. The Dutch merchants were bringing spice back by the shipload. It was enough. The ships went off and nothing was heard for over two years. Two years, Mister Lemprière. Most of the investors lost their nerve. Only a few kept their stock, and bought the stock of the faint hearts of course. At the last there were only nine of them.’

  ‘Including Thomas de Vere,’ Lemprière said.

  ‘Naturally. All nine were mortgaged to the hilt. The De Veres owed thousands of pounds. The shipwrights had not been paid, nor the victuallers. Their households were living on the patience of the City lenders. All nine had huge debts, but between them they owned all the stock, and they had faith.’ Lemprière was still leafing through the account.

  ‘The ships returned,’ he said. Even over all the years Captain Lancaster came through the stilted prose as an extraordinary man.

  ‘Oh yes, they returned. There was an early report from a Frenchman, Beaudeguerre. Then all four ships were sighted off the west coast of France. The value of the stock doubled, tripled, then tripled again and Thomas could have sold then and there. There were offers. But his nerve had held so long, two years had gone by. As the facts stood, he would have been foolish to give it all up.’ Lady de Vere paused and wiped her mouth.

  ‘The ships were empty?’ ventured Lemprière.

  ‘No! They were full! Their holds were stuffed with pepper. Lancaster had done everything that was asked of him.’

  ‘So, everyone was rich….’

  ‘Everyone was ruined,’ said the woman. ‘The Dutch had been flooding the market for months. Indeed, there was no market. The pepper was all but worthless. No buyers could be found here, nor on the continent. God knows, Thomas tried to sell his share, but….’ There was a short silence. ‘That was how our families first met, Mister Lemprière.’

  The clock ticked softly in its case. Four oil lamps threw an even light over the room. Lady de Vere sat very straight with her hands in her lap. Her fingers twitched about her rings, twisting them round and round as she spoke.

  ‘That was the worst time Thomas de Vere would face, in truth. He himself would later think differently, but that was the worst. The voyage had been successful, and still it had failed. His family had been assured of riches and were all but bankrupt. Creditors were hounding him. He owed sums he knew he could never repay. Worst of all, he knew he had been right all along. Lancaster had proved that the Indies were a stuffed purse, richer even than he had imagined. All the profit in the world was waiting for him, but he could not get to it. No one would advance any one of them the cost of a second voyage. He was stranded, marooned; like Tantalus the waters receded just when he bent to drink. Can you imagine that Mister Lemprière?’ Lemprière thought of his dreams, matters half-known to him, the very story she was telling.

  ‘Yes, I believe I can,’ he said.

  ‘All nine of the investors were in similar straits, all in the same boat, ha!’ The laugh was bitter. ‘But they were saved, after a fashion.’

  ‘François?’ hazarded Lemprière.

  ‘And others. Nine in all, a mirror image. They were merchants and venturers themselves, a kind of club. They sailed from Rochelle some months later, but read for yourself,’ and with that she handed Lemprière a bundle of papers which had once been a book, but the spine was cracked and the pages were spilling out. Lemprière took the bundle of papers and glanced down. Columns of figures, lists.

  ‘An account book?’ he said.

  ‘Of sorts,’ Lady de Vere agreed. ‘But read on.’ She looked over as Lemprière bent his head once more, then pointed to the top of the page. ‘The date, you see? The winter of 1602, shortly after the expedition’s return.’ Lemprière nodded without replying. He was reading a list of names.

  “John Bonwicke senior for £3 wages per annum and the sowing of a mett of barley in the clayes besides 1 s. I gave him fo
r his godspenny. Paid his last quarter.

  “John Bonwicke junior to have £2 10s wages per annum and Is. I gave him for a godspenny. Paid his last quarter.

  “William Crosswood to have £2 6s. and 8d. wages per annum and Is. I gave him for a godspenny. Paid his last quarter.

  “Ellin Sigston to have £1 6s. wages per annum and Is. I gave her for a godspenny…” A figure Lemprière could not make out. Six? “Paid her last quarter.” Other names followed: Symon Huson, Ellin Dixon; other amounts.

  ‘The servants were always paid, even if months in arrears,’ Lady de Vere said, with a touch of pride. Lemprière read on, noting the sale of some sheep early in the following year, then a parcel of land, then another. “February 1603. Mister Woodal called upon me again today for the seventh time, but could give him no pledge. Thomas Wilbert, the same.”

  ‘His creditors,’ said Lady de Vere. The entries grew more frequent, along with, “Meeting. Philp. Sm. and the others” five times in March alone.

  ‘Philpot & Smith,’ explained Lady de Vere. ‘The others were the other six venturers. They were all in trouble together.’ Towards the end of the March accounts was an inventory. “All the goods and chattels in the Long House in our parish here. In the large chamber: Item, a standing bed with a covering, a coverlet, a pair of blankets and the hangings, a feather-bed, a mattress, a bolster, 2 pillows, 3 curtains, a teaster, a chest and a teaster with 2 chairs. For these, £9 9s. In the. Chapel Chamber, Item, ….” and on, through the middle and main parlours, the hall, the buttery and kitchen, two more chambers, each suffixed with “For these” and a figure. As far as Lemprière could see, it was the only money received that month.

  ‘He sold the furniture?’ he asked.

  ‘He had no choice. The long house was the old part of the building. The family closed it up and moved into a wing. Hard times.’ Lemprière looked down again, but Lady de Vere was smiling grimly. ‘Not just the sins of the father Mister Lemprière, the misfortunes are revisited too.’ He could feel his cheeks burning, but a moment later all such thoughts were banished. The next page contained a single word scrawled across it: “Saved” and underneath, in a calmer hand, “Met with the french-man today, a merchaunt, by name François Lemprière.”