Lemprière's Dictionary

by Lawrence Norfolk

  ‘And you told him?’

  ‘Well, no. I had to send to Holland for most of them, old friends over there…. Anyway, the last only arrived a few weeks ago. I had them bound too. All takes time.’ Captain Guardian gave up his post at the bookcase and marched to a plan-chest on the other side of the room against which leant an object Lemprière had taken for a table-top. Eben hoisted it aloft and staggered back. ‘The binding may have been a mistake,’ he grunted. The leather-bound slab was deposited on the floor.

  The two of them squatted down. Eben watched carefully as the young man opened the heavy cover and glanced through charts of Le Havre, Cherbourg and Brest. Charles Lemprière had engaged his enthusiasm and his curiosity in equal measure. The detailed queries of the dead man’s letters seemed to circle about some larger question. He could not be sure of course, but all his experience told him that a ship of four hundred tons tamely hugging the coast of France was an improbable event, if not an impossible one. Four hundred tons: that was an ocean-going vessel. It had no regular business with coasts.

  Lorient. Nantes. This son of his did nothing to damp Eben’s inquisitive-ness. There was more to his visit than a dead man’s effects. Eben regarded him sideways as he turned to the final chart. La Rochelle. The young man was staring down, suddenly intent where his interest moments before had been perfunctory. Rochelle then, thought Guardian. Was Rochelle the home of this phantom vessel?

  ‘Beautiful harbour that, best sort too.’ The young man looked up, distracted from his thoughts.

  ‘Sort?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ Eben said. ‘A natural. You can take a good lagoon harbour, give it five years and the river will silt it solid. Rochelle’s got these natural headlands.’ He indicated the points of Minimés and Chef de Bay. ‘They keep the worst of the weather out. The approach is complicated of course. There are two islands, here and here, and a couple of mudbanks, Pen Breton and La Longe, here and here. Then there’s Richelieu’s ridiculous tower which keeps the channel narrow.’ Lemprière looked up, not understanding. ‘You can see the top of the mainmast, but the rest of the ship is hidden behind the tower. The depth is good though. Only obstacle is the remains of the mole….’

  ‘A mole?’

  ‘Built during the siege. Richelieu blocked off the harbour. There were ships sunk across here,’ Guardian drew a line across the narrowest point, ‘and just behind them he built a mole, a kind of sea rampart. Stop the English ships getting through to relieve the town. It was many years ago, but there are bits of the bloody thing still there.’

  ‘Sixteen twenty-seven,’ said Lemprière. He was staring at the plan.

  ‘Yes, I suppose so. But for Richelieu, La Rochelle would be one of the best ports in Europe. That’s just my opinion, of course.’ The young man traced the outline of the harbour with his fingers. ‘The port itself is at the far end from the mouth; you pass between these two towers and unload in the city itself. Have to go in on the tide naturally.’ He was odd, this spectacled visitor. Was he even listening?

  ‘The shape,’ Lemprière said absently, still staring at the harbour. ‘I know it.’

  ‘What? From where?’

  ‘Pardon me, I thought.… I must be mistaken.’ The young man seemed to gather his thoughts. ‘And La Rochelle would take a ship of four hundred tons then?’

  ‘No doubt at all. A good tide would give you four, five fathoms. More than enough. Of course, that’s not the real question, your father’s I mean.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘Pardon me?’

  ‘Not at all,’ said Guardian. He was hard-going, this Lemprière.

  ‘What I mean is, the real question is about the ship, isn’t it?’

  ‘Oh. Yes, yes I see.’

  ‘A ship of that size going up and down the coast,’ Eben went on. ‘What is she doing? What, more to the point, is she carrying?’

  ‘Quite,’ said the other.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘I have no idea. I rather thought you might know.’

  ‘You have no idea what your father was looking for?’

  ‘None at all,’ said Lemprière with convincing candour.

  Eben sighed, then closed the book. Another mystery. It was the sea, of course. But why a ship? Why at the bottom of everything was there always a ship? His knees cracked as he rose from the floor and walked to the east window.

  It was late afternoon. The light was beginning to fail. His eyes travelled over the jostling ships crammed together in the Upper Pool of the Thames. His spirits were strangely sunk. The legal quays were full as ever. The suffrance wharves on the southside likewise. Three-masters, little brigs and sloops, a few colliers, they were all jammed prow to stern against one another. Only the steps separating the wharves offered a space. Barges nosed clumsily about the larger ships moored in mid-stream like sightless fish. Apart from the Vendragon, of course. The Vendragon was not attended by anyone. Captain Guardian looked over the shambling mess of wharves, piers, stairs and watergates, the greater and lesser vessels with their masts and rigging, their varying states of disrepair, and saw hierarchies, precedences, pecking-orders: all the intricate sub-divisions and degrees of standing which were the sea’s secret language made wood, canvas and rope, different responses to its vagaries. Every sort of sea had its ship, so the shipwrights said, and the sea delivered its rebuttals without favour or discrimination. Eben viewed the vessels before him with a colder eye. So many ships and boats. So many secrets….

  ‘What a lot of masts.’ The young man had joined him. ‘Is this a good harbour?’

  ‘A port,’ Eben corrected him. ‘It would be, if they took the trouble to dredge it once in a while, didn’t choke it with tanneries and mill wheels. The other side of the bridge is practically a weir. You see Dyce’s quay?’ He pointed.

  ‘The one with the big boat?’

  Eben mentally bit his lip. ‘Ship, yes. That’s lost five feet of water in as many years. Most of the others even more. The tide runs out here, and they all discharge ballast on the quiet. Bloody disgrace. The wharfingers block anyone who tries building any more quays. Bristol’s got more frontage than Port of London, and a quarter of the tonnage, would you credit that?’ But he was talking to himself. The young man was looking out over the Pool, this way and that. What did he want?

  ‘Your hand healed, then?’ He was looking at the relic of the incident.

  ‘Damned tattoo,’ replied Eben. The automaton’s wound had marked his flesh in spidery black lines, Falmouth, now indelible on his palm. Part of him. The young man was looking out the window once more.

  ‘I have a friend, had a friend; George Peppard….’ The name rang faintly in Eben’s memory. Peppard, Peppard…. The Neagle affair, of course. Peppard had been the lawyer, gone down with the ship, the Falmouth. This second Lemprière had seen the wound in his hand, heard the root cause of his action as he tried to take the sketch from Maillardet’s contraption. Vendragon. Falmouth. One and the same. The boy was telling him about the Neagle Affair, the whales.… He remembered it all.

  ‘No-one who knew Alan Neagle believed that story about the whales,’ Eben interrupted. ‘A fine sailor, the best of his generation, but ambitious beyond measure. Lied to his own wife, didn’t he?’The young man was still speaking, telling him things he already knew. Neagle’s ship sunk without trace, miles off course, Neagle silenced, an insurance fraud unprosecuted through want of evidence.

  ‘The Company could not afford a scandal, they had to silence him, and his wife, and her lawyer….’ Yes, yes, thought Eben, insurance frauds. Worse things had happened.

  But now the evidence was here in London, moored a cable away in plain view, the Vendragon née Falmouth, Neagle’s lost ship. He had known it for weeks, and he had known Neagle when the ship first put out. Admired him. Disliked him a bit. Clever and hollow. Pretty wife. Youngest commander of an Indiaman in the Company’s history, brilliant talker. Everyone knew Neagle, or knew of him.

  ‘My friend, Geor
ge, he was disgraced even though he was right and then you told me the ship was here, and it proves he was right. They have renamed it, but it’s still Neagle’s ship. It’s not the Vendragon is it? It’s the Falmouth?

  ‘Glad to be of help. If I can clear a man’s name,’ Eben began gruffly.

  ‘You cannot. No-one can. He was killed two weeks ago, the very night I told him what I learned from you.’ Killed him? The point of it all began to dawn on Eben. The Company killed him … yes, he could believe that.

  ‘It was no robbery, nothing was taken. No coincidence either. I promised him I would help. That night, I promised I would help to clear his name.’ The voice was cracking. Lost friends, Eben understood that. Waste and grief, the sea’s toll on its travellers. So they had killed his friend and this gangling specimen would bring them to book, put them before the masthead. Very well, very well. Now he knew why Charles’ son was here. The proof for which he had come was visible still, touching gently against the wharf, tap, tap, tap in time with the slow swell of the river.

  ‘There,’ Eben pointed to the wharf. ‘That’s the Falmouth. That’s Neagle’s ship.’

  Eben watched as the young man leaned forward, his nose almost touching the glass. The porters were at work, shifting rope-handled crates along the quay as before, one man at either end. A cart was disgorging more crates further down the jetty. He could not see the two watchers. Their attendance had been less certain of late. The young man’s face was set, his gaze fixed on the Vendragon. He would not be able to understand the scene; see it, yes, but no more than that.

  ‘If your friend, this Peppard, if he was killed, are you not in some danger yourself?’ Eben asked. They were carrying crates over from the cart.

  ‘I believe not, it’s odd, a long story.’ Absent tone, his eyes were fixed on the ship, and the crates. ‘Why have they brought it back? Why now?’ Eben looked at him. It was more than curiosity, this thin face.

  ‘It arrived empty,’ he said. They off-loaded some ballast, nothing else. And they knew it was coming. That quay was clear a week before it docked. Would’ve cost a small fortune.’

  ‘It has been here long?’

  ‘Months. Usually it would be loaded in days. The pressure on these quays is immense.’

  ‘What is going on?’

  ‘I have little idea. Those are Coker’s men working down there. Hired hands. If it was all above board they would use regulars.’

  ‘I have to find out,’ the young man said abruptly and he was even walking towards the stairs when Eben’s voice sounded loudly in the confines of the room.

  ‘No!’ The young man stopped, looked about, already questioning. Eben thought how he might explain it, that he was not in the Strand or the Adelphi, that he was here, in the docks, at the river’s edge where the laws and rules and codes of the land grew ragged and frayed as the land itself when it petered out into water and became the mudbanks which the tide said were both land and water. To the outsider, a dubious area with its own rules, its own privacies and penalties. They would throw him in the Pool, nail him in a crate and throw him in. They would not think twice. He was ignorant, he would blunder and fall foul of the laws. He did not know them. Tell him that.

  ‘It’s a rough crew, you see,’ he said. ‘You’ll get no answers. Something worse most likely, you follow me? Stay clear of the docks with your questions. That’s good advice young Lemprière….’

  At that moment he was interrupted by a loud crash and a volley of curses from the quay. They met again at the window and craned their necks for a view. One of the crates had fallen, a snapped handle. It lay like matchwood about the smashed crate’s contents. A statue of some sort, someone carrying a pot on his shoulder, six feet or more had it stood upright. Packing straw began to disentangle itself from the statue’s limbs. So that was what they were carrying. A thick-set man was shouting at the men.

  ‘That’s Coker,’ said Eben. Two of them ran to the ship, returning with a shroud that was wrapped hurriedly about the statue. The original carriers and the fetchers hoisted the load between them and the statue continued its journey, swinging between them in a makeshift hammock. ‘There!’ Eben stabbed his finger and Lemprière just saw a wiry man dressed in black, hatless, as he walked behind a row of dockcranes.

  ‘Did you see him? He keeps watch over the loading.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Don’t know. Usually two of them, hiding from each other.’ The statue was half way along the gangplank. ‘Coker takes his orders from that one, the other’s more of a puzzle. But that one’s the commander.’ They both looked again. The man in black had effectively disappeared.

  ‘He’ll be the Company’s man,’ said Lemprière. Eben nodded, both unsure. The statue had disappeared into the hold. The line started up again. ‘Statues,’ said Lemprière. ‘There must be more to it than that. If I knew what statue, perhaps.’

  ‘It was Neptune shouldering an urn,’ said Captain Guardian. ‘Through which water might run, as in a grotto.’

  ‘Neptune? But he didn’t carry a trident, and how can you….’

  ‘Can’t cast a trident. Too fiddly,’ Eben said.

  ‘How, pardon me, how do you know? I hardly saw it myself, but….’

  ‘I’ve seen it fifty times before. Every garden with running water and an owner of the middling sort has one. It’s Coade stone. They turn them out by the hundred. Yours for nine guineas, three shillings and ten pence, if memory serves. That ship is loaded with fake statues,’ Guardian laughed. ‘So now you know.’ The young man offered a tight smile in reply.

  ‘I need more that that,’ he said. ‘They might sail at any time and I would be left with nothing.’ He was staring down at the men and the ship. Guardian could read his thought.

  ‘I tell you no,’ he said. ‘Stay away. If they are working some deception they will deal with you as they did this Peppard. The Company is not to be trifled with.’

  ‘The Company is a vile thing,’ the young man said bitterly. ‘A cold, creeping thing. Am I to do nothing?’

  ‘A regular Asiaticus,’ said Eben genially. Diffuse this Lemprière, he thought, quieten him. Fools rush in…. Keep him away from the hired hands, away from the sharp end. But his guest was gazing peculiarly now, not calm but deflected. By what?

  ‘Asiaticus, how do you know of him?’ the young man asked sharply. Guardian thought back, surprised at this turn to his questions. He told him of the pamphlet which had washed up on the mudbank a little way up the quay some months before, “A. Bierce” inscribed carefully on its fly-leaf, the author’s vitriol and rage all muddied and blurred, caught up and whirled in the tidal waters to fetch up sodden in his hand at the river’s edge. Taken home and dried before the very fire now burning low on the other side of the room, it had amused Guardian to read of such hatred for the Company. In truth, he had little love for it himself. A late autumn evening had been enlivened, lifting him from the melancholy of the Ballast Fiasco which had preceded its arrival by a single night. He handed the pamphlet to Lemprière now, who cast his inured eye over its alphabet of anger. It was the third of four. Again, more promises of revelation than revelations themselves. Promises or threats.

  ‘Keep it, if you have a use….’ Lemprière took the wrinkled, dried-out pages. Yes, he did, not quite knowing what yet, but yes all the same. Thank you. His eyes drifted back to the ship.

  ‘Listen to me, young Lemprière. I will keep a watch over the ship. Leave her alone. If they make ready to sail I will get word to you. And, if time is short, I will take the helm myself, do you understand? You have my word.’ The doubt was already gathering in his guest’s face. Must he offer credentials on top of his word? ‘I sailed from this port man and boy for close on forty years. If matters come to a head, I’ll find the men I need, believe me,’ Eben affirmed. The doubt faded slowly. The two of them shook hands on it.

  ‘I am in your debt,’ Lemprière said solemnly.

  ‘Oh,’ Eben brushed the obligation aside.

 
‘You said two men?’

  ‘Two? Oh yes. The one you caught sight of, that’s one. The other’s an odder creature. Black cloak, hat….’

  ‘What does he look like?’

  ‘Couldn’t say. The hat covers his face. A broad brim, like this,’ Eben drew a wide circle in the air above his head. ‘You know him?’

  Lemprière thought of hats. ‘No,’ he said.

  ‘Now, I have my own question,’ Eben said. ‘What was your father really looking for? This ship of his, what was it up to?’

  ‘I only wish I knew, but until today I had no idea he was looking for a harbour, let alone a ship. In all honesty, I know no more than you.’ Eben accepted this reluctantly. He poked at the fire, then the young man spoke again.

  ‘What was the Falmouth’s tonnage?’ he asked suddenly. Eben smiled.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘four hundred tons, or thereabouts.’

  ‘My father sought a harbour for a ship of that tonnage.’

  ‘There are thirty or forty ships of that size sailing from this port alone. All the older Indiamen are around that size.’

  ‘So my father was looking for an Indiaman,’ Lemprière leapt on the fact.

  ‘There are plenty of other ships of that size, hundreds….’

  ‘But most of them are Indiamen. I mean, what if my father’s lost ship and Neagle’s are connected in some way?’

  ‘You mean, “What if they are the same ship?”’

  ‘Yes.

  ‘Because they are both probably of four hundred tons.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And they both have something to do with the Company, possibly.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘In my opinion,’ said Captain Guardian, ‘that is about as likely as an IJmuiden cargo-boat avoiding ship tax at Lübeck. And that,’ he added with emphasis, ‘is very unlikely indeed.’