Lemprière's Dictionary

by Lawrence Norfolk

  ‘Mademoiselle?’

  ‘Yes, yes of course.’ The maid was finished. A pier-glass mounted on the wall between the windows threw back her reflection. There she was, brought back for a purpose. The Viscount knew but would not tell. She had known better than to ask as they took the carriage down to the waiting boat. He had spoken with Jaques on the jetty. She had watched through the window, then Jaques had taken her back to the house. The Viscount’s departure sharpened her vague sense of betrayal, for she already sensed a new phase in their relations and heard the clatter of gears changing. She thought of the pool. The water had been very cold and when the man, barely a man then, had flopped over and his arm had come up with its hand shredded to rags, she had thought of her own body, white, naked in the water which held her like weights around her ankles. More and more he was the Viscount; not Papa at all. He would be one then the other, she could not follow and was left floundering in his disapproval, a coquette, a precocious harlot all out of step, but in the pool she was frightened in a new way. Later, he had shot the dogs. She had sat in her room. It had taken an hour and each time the gun cracked she had jumped, then tried to settle but all the time waiting for the next report which would jerk her back to the moment in the pool when she had looked up at him on the horse and he had looked down at her and she saw the aftermath of a decision in his face. She was alone and naked and the dogs were there, aimless, waiting; the decision had gone her way. The gun cracked and she jerked again. It was the boy’s father, but she had guessed that. Later, when she went to the Viscount, he had told her that the boy had seen it all. That was the point. She was ashamed he had seen her. Casterleigh had become Papa again, tender or stern as the situation demanded, no longer the Viscount, just as he had been when she had told him what father Calveston had told her, what Lemprière had told him.

  ‘Visions?’ he had demanded.

  ‘He reads things. He believes they come true….’

  ‘What things?’

  The man turning over. The dogs eating him. Letters had been sent to men in London and he had become the Viscount once more, raging and cursing. Children’s games. He wanted to kill the boy and the letters told him no. Juliette spied on him hunched over his desk like an animal with the letters in his fists, little bits of paper telling him no, and the boy was still alive. Jaques had told her during their weeks together on Jersey. The boy had sailed for England, for his father’s will. She and Jaques had left for France a fortnight later. There would be a reason for both these things. There was a reason for the dogs drifting harmlessly back through the stream towards their master, leaving her there shivering, unmarked in the water; reasons like the bits of paper in his fists keeping Lemprière alive. The men in London, his partners, had told him no.

  The maid had returned. A meal had been prepared for her on Monsieur Jaques’ instructions. Juliette gave up her thoughts and followed the woman to the dining room where a long mahogany table was laid for one. Monsieur Jaques had gone out. Juliette ate alone and in silence only broken by the servants as they brought in dishes she remembered: spiced mutton and ham, sweet white onions. When she had finished, Jaques had still not returned. It was quite dark now. The lamps had been lit and Juliette wandered through the house, drawn from room to room by a curiosity which only intensified as one by one, their contents told her nothing; rooms furnished with bow-fronted sideboard tables and fiddle-backed chairs carved from rosewood. There were damask-covered sofas and plain chests of drawers. The pictures on the walls were of old dukes, Rohan, Orléans, Barry and Condé whose woods they had passed through near Chantilly, Jaques had said. Framed charts lined an upper corridor which seemed to stretch the length of the western seaboard of France; Le Havre, Boulogne, Calais, Cherbourg, La Rochelle. They told her nothing. The room at the far end of this passage was a large study, but the desk was bare, its drawers locked and, she suspected, empty too. Leather-bound books lined the walls behind it. They still had their sheen, new, she thought, then fakes. No, they were simply unread. Her finger dawdled along the tooled leather spines with the names picked out in gilt letters, beautiful, all Greek and Latin. Anthologies of fragments. They were ranged chronologically along the shelves and as her eye skipped along the names she realised that she had written them all down, the day Lemprière had come to visit, in the library on Jersey. He had pushed these books through Quint’s protests like battering rams, humiliating him. So he had teeth after all, in a way. Lemprière’s books: growing wings or horns.

  ‘He reads them. And he believes they come true.’ The dogs rounded and trotted back to their master. Lemprière: his thoughts were in the trees of that scene, in the pool, the dogs, even in Casterleigh and herself. All his dreams came true, they were all here. In the pool she was at their centre. The Viscount’s decision and Lemprière’s dreaming her there shuttled her this way and that at their behests while the dogs pulled the body apart. She was them both somehow, all their choices. It was a new phase. Papa was gone. There was only the Viscount now, and Lemprière.

  Her search had taken her to the top of the house. From there, she heard a coach enter the courtyard far below. Juliette slipped from her perch on the desk and ran lightly down the corridor and stairs.

  When Jaques entered the entrance hall she was preparing for bed, seated at her dressing table, picking pins out of her hair. They made tiny clinking sounds as she dropped them one by one into a small glass tray on the table. She was combing her hair. Jaques was in the doorway, she saw him in the mirror. Jaques was almost bald, he had a soft intelligent face. He was hanging there, neither in nor out of the room. She turned to look at him, surprised, she had not thought this required of her. Her comb had caught, she had missed a pin and drew it out carefully with her head bent down. Her hair hung down her back, click, she looked up once more at the slight sound. He had closed the door. The pin fell with the others, ting, into the tray. She looked around. Jaques was gone.

  The following morning found them strolling arm in arm in the triple avenue of the Cour de la Reine. She was his daughter, his ward, a favoured niece, some or all of these as they drifted back along the Port aux Pierres and up into Place de Louis Quinze. Later they admired the arcaded houses which had gone up on three sides of the Tuileries. The next day was much the same, walking along the Quai Pelletiers with the gamblers playing passe dix and biribi seated on folding stools amongst the herring racks.

  Other days, other sights. When the November skies threatened rain she her hair dressed at Baron’s. They ate at the Véry or Beauvilliers and watched the learning riders fall off their mounts at Astley’s. Juliette, for whom routine was a series of coincidences strung together, found it unsettling. In the evenings they played trente et un at Madame Julien’s, or dominoes at the Chocolat Café, or they went to the theatre. Sometimes she was left alone. There was a calculated aimlessness to their days. Each one, somehow, was a facsimile of the last. Only the details varied.

  The days became weeks. Their vague rambles through the streets became vaguer still as though any sort of planning or forethought was forbidden and they found themselves in the Halles or Courtille districts where Juliette would never have ventured of her own accord, or walking through streets where the sewers were choked with straw, animal droppings and offal. There seemed no point or design to these tours, except that not once did they venture into the area below the Marché des Innocens, which she had viewed at a distance on her first evening. They would take long exhausting detours to avoid it, and the sight Juliette dreaded was never encountered. Casterleigh would have told him, must have told him. ‘Papa’ once more, perhaps.

  They were watched. She could not be certain - they were always different - she caught them in the corners of her eyes just within earshot and at irregular times, in places which signified nothing. She kept her peace about them; another component to be weighed up and fitted into the puzzle with the others, like Lemprière’s list of books turning up in the study. Their aimlessness, their waiting, their watching; some central task,
some event would link them but she did not know what. Her role was changed, she was a stranger now. Her first embrace, when the city pressed itself right up against her as she stepped from the carriage, that was gone. She was drifting and floating. Somewhere in these repetitious dawdling days the two of them had come apart. Even the watchers were falling away, or blending more successfully into the crowds. The time was filled with events and diversions, things they had done, or avoided doing. Somewhere in it all was a point.

  December came and nothing was changed. Through salons and lobbies and spacious reception rooms with chandeliers of heavy crystal they went on with their listless promenade. She hardly knew the city, she was lost in it as she made fleeting conversations with people she would meet once and never again and was swept this way and that by the crowds who pressed against her in the streets but they were far away too, already in the next street, already at their doorways, already there, waiting for her the next day when she would join them once again, the same face hundreds and thousands of times a day. Only Jaques was constant. He was waiting for something and she clung to that. The winter bled colour out of their faces. The white buildings were not white but greyish brown, streaked with soot and muck thrown up by the wheels of carts and coaches as they passed by. The city began to freeze. The men and women moved slowly, more slowly through the lanes and byways. The life of the metropolis was a sluggish suspension of liquid solidifying around them. In the Alley of Sighs, dead-eyed creatures lifted limp wrists as they passed shivering with the others, their teeth glittering like paste. The drunks could dream of ice and the bitter cold. Their breath rolled into the gutters.

  To all this, the cold, the dreary threats and lacklustre whispering, the stranger’s glassy flesh, the Palais Royale said No! The coaches rolled up along Rue Saint Honoré to fill it with high and low, comtesse and commoner, journeymen and food sellers, balladeers and musketeers, child actors and pornographers, bankers and their clerks and their wives and their mistresses who were always dancers and singers dressed in levités, light silks and chintz, bright sashes, their fingers sparkling with stones. There were magic lantern shows and players on the parterre, cafés, booksellers and eating houses. Gentlemen in citron jackets and striped satin spoke with kohl-eyed demi-mondaines in feathers and Italian gauze in language that twisted like smoke through candlelight. Red cheeks, white gloves fluttering about their mouths, bands of velvet and the swish of silk as they glided and jostled against one another, their gossip seemed to burn the very air.

  Juliette roamed through it all like a veteran. Jaques held her by the arm, she was an animal in a jewelled collar. Even at this time of the year the gardens were packed with tight clusters of men and women talking quickly in knots. It was an orchestra of voices, undertones mixing with piercing shrieks, hissing sibilants and deep, gurgling laughter. The two of them sliced through all of it in a diagonal left to right and Juliette half-caught, half-saw, she was unsure, there was the staircase and it was jammed with women. She looked again. They passed a group of chevaliers who doffed elaborate hats to her so that she turned away and then she knew that she was right. A man in plain dress. He had moved parallel with them across the length and breadth of the gardens. She caught his silhouette flickering through gaps in the crowd. Then he was gone. He wore a small black hat. They were in the Great Gallery where the women’s heads bobbed and nodded, the movement amplified by their piled hair and the coloured feathers. Suddenly, he was there again, ahead of them now. It was impossible and she twisted about so that Jaques had to pull her back. He was to their right, but he could not have moved so rapidly through the crush. There were two of them, suddenly clear, two of them. Or more. They were inching towards the point where she had glimpsed the first. Juliette looked up at Jaques and saw his face was changed, tight now, his eyes flicking from side to side. She began to open her mouth, to raise her arm and point but he caught her wrist quickly and forced it down.

  ‘Say nothing!’ he hissed at her. The man to their right was converging on them, they would beat him to the doors at the far end of the gallery, but not the other who was ahead of them and slowing. They were closing on him as they threaded a path through the idle talkers and powder-cakes and when they reached the door he was only yards away. She could hear the sharp reports of the second tracker’s heels moving at a pace behind them. The first was moving more quickly than before. Jaques was pulling her along by the wrist. They were almost running across the court, her breath coming fast in the cold air, and then they were running, out into the street beyond and the steps behind them were louder still, closer. Ahead of them, the man moved into the centre of the street as a coach moved past them, slowing, the first man pulling open the door and Jaques was pulling her in behind him as he scrambled into the coach and the second man threw himself in behind, then the first, the door slammed shut and the coach gathered pace quickly with the four of them inside and the horses broke into a gallop.

  The two men were facing them, seated opposite. One of them leant across and Jaques clasped his hand. The other man was impassive.

  ‘Nine weeks,’ said Jaques. ‘Nine weeks we have been here.’

  ‘I know,’ said the other. ‘You were watched,’ and Juliette knew suddenly that the meeting with these men, whoever they were, was the event for which Jaques had been waiting.

  Their destinations rushed towards them. The coach made a clacking racket as it sped east down Rue Saint Honoré. Juliette looked out of the window as the townhouses slid by and crowds spilled off the pavements into the road. Their faces were white blurs right up against the glass. Keep them out, she thought.

  The coach turned left before the Marché des Innocens as though to cross the river by the Pont Neuf, but no, they were slowing to a standstill. Juliette’s skin was prickling. Jaques glanced down at her and caught her eye. The maze of streets and alleys they had skirted like a hostile fortress during their time in the city was now to their left. Ahead of them a dray was over-turned, blocking the road with timber. A horse was dead. Juliette heard the hooves of their own horses clatter awkwardly as the driver had them wheel about and, even without looking, Juliette knew the road which would form their detour. Then she did look, as the coach turned into the Rue Boucher des Deux Boules and she felt something rising in her throat. There was the bakery, and a few doors along the Hotel where she had watched little Restif stand on the parapet and scream - they all had - as he pissed on the heads of the passersby below. Past that was the alley which had no name but they called it the ‘Black and Green’ from the colours of its walls, which glistened with a mould they had found nowhere else. The street bent mid-way along its length and the angle came suddenly giving her the houses further along for a second before the coach gave a violent jolt, found its bearing and that was when Jaques reached across to draw the curtain.

  But she had already seen it, the lights were blazing behind the red drapes - the same ones - and she could see the long room within, remember it vividly, with sofas and chaises dotted about and fires burning in the hearths at either end. In the mornings the sunlight had streamed through the high windows and she had played on the floor while Oudin, Petit Pas, Minette, Grosse Bonne and the other girls had lounged about, talking, yawning, scratching. And Maman too. Upstairs were the bedrooms and above them the attic room were she had kicked and screamed with every ounce of her strength but it was no good. Then a year or two later, the same window, Maman had strode down the street swinging her blue canvas bag, not looking back. She banged on the pane, but no-one heard. Petit Pas had run after her and later returned with the same blue bag. A keepsake. Then she had known that Maman would not return. Madame Stéphanie would not take her back again and she was gone for good. The bag was goodbye and she was left with the long afternoons and her memories of Maman spinning out rambling stories about her lovers, one of whom was Juliette’s father.

  ‘A fine man. A man of his word.’ But she only said that because he sent money every month, money for Juliette which she gave to her mot
her taking for herself only the fact that somewhere her father knew of her existence. He would not come for her, she told herself. She would hunt for him. It was a rage inside her, she let no-one see it.

  Now the coach would be passing the heavy front door which she had last seen four years before when it had closed finally behind her and the Viscount’s coach had stood waiting in the street. She had sat in it while he had concluded the business with Madame Stéphanie. Her face was white, then as now, and she twisted her skirts in her hands. When he joined her in the carriage she learned that she was to leave the city. For Jersey.

  ‘Papa?’ That faint possibility had run out of the island’s name in a rush of false hope. The money was sent from Jersey, her father was on Jersey if he was anywhere. ‘Papa?’ She knew it was not this man who was built like a bull. There was nothing in his face, and it was confirmed to her anyway almost as soon as the coach moved off. He had dealt with her there and then, roughly on the seat of the carriage. Papa: at his insistence she would call him that. She had thought to run, even in her disarray. But when she had burst out that he was no father of hers, that he had tricked her (though he had claimed nothing) the Viscount had laughed at her misery.