Lemprière's Dictionary

by Lawrence Norfolk

  Indeed. Lemprière left the Crow’s Nest a short time later with Guardian’s promise, his warning and the chart book, the latter a black leather sail whose width being an inch or so longer than his reach would be carried two-handed and a foot from his face at the mercy of any gust or other urban turbulence which might blow him off an even keel, spin him about and capsize his fragile bark utterly. There were hats involved: the broad brimmed affair worn by the elusive Watcher No. 2 and mentioned by Guardian, a similar one glimpsed for a panicked split second when a hand of steel dug him out of Farina’s mob, ripping his coat - still unrepaired -and now, as he pushed his flapping atlas against the rogue wind, homewards up the gentle slope of Pillory Lane towards Thames Street, the Indian at the Ship in Distress came to mind, his eyes flicking to the ripped pocket, his cloak (a black cloak) slung over the chair on which rested a black broad brimmed hat, just as Guardian has described. Were all these the same hat? Different hats? The same hat worn by different men, exchanged tête-à-tête at regular intervals; some other, less discoverable arrangement?

  A billow of wind pulled his black shroud along as Thames Street was entered, sailed through and left behind. Lemprière lurched and stumbled, a jolly sight for the passersby. The irregular sail blocked his view. The slight irregularities of the street were keel-crunching reefs, and his fellow citizens becalmed wrecks inviting collision. A hazardous journey and below the surface clutter an old monotone was sounding up from the hadal depths, connecting with him and then diving down once more for a long-dead Greek whose black-sailed ship brought Ægeus tumbling down the cliff, dead from that earlier son’s forgetful mistake. His fingers were numb with the effort and the cold. It was dark. Hints of the coming jacquerie adorned the walls of the capital: Their Banners Will Be Stained With Blood In The Streets, on the wall of Rowlandson’s glass-factory, then, more simply, more coolly partisan: Farina, chalked on the bricks of the adjoining yard, already crumbling, already being lost to the urban mulch which squelched underfoot as he forced the passage home through an unrelenting head wind. He imagined the lashing wind and rain eroding the features of idols until their noses and mouths were bland and picturesque, ready for the restorer’s touch. Theseus with an idiot’s grin. Neptune carrying a pot “through which water may pass, as in a grotto.…” There was more to it than fake statuary, more than the massed productions of Coade.…

  In this manner he continued, pulled by sails which were pictures of the sea, pictures of harbours, a careening rattling hull veering insensibly between known and unknown coasts. The rudderless vessel steered by a hundred different winds, lurched over a sea of old mistakes, its mainmast sinking slowly below the horizon towards the ragged mouth of its last port where it would be pincered between the headlands and becalmed within the basin of Rochelle, a lost ship.

  There was a familiarity to the harbour plan, a half-grasped correspondence. Perhaps, in some other unremembered time, he had drifted within the basin of Rochelle, looked about at the jutting spurs and banks running this way and that, and then, viewing the abstract of that scene on Guardian’s chart, reduced and from above, the earlier surroundings had come back to him as though he had flown above it all and seen the natural harbour with its mouth, the only access, the only break in the haven’s rough circle, making its image a wide and irregular C.

  A drenched messenger boy had waited in the hallway of the brothel. They had read Jaques’ note and left directly. Vaucanson recalled the teeming rain. They had found the Indian in Rue Boucher des Deux Boules, outside the bawdy-house. The lights from the Villa Rouge had blazed through the thin material of the curtains in squares of glowing red. The Indian had stood like a sentinel outside. Le Mara had spun him about, knocked the breath out of him, taken a knife-quick flash of steel to the throat. The hired men had finished it.

  Seventeen: Vaucanson counted the winters since that night. They had carried him to the coach. He remembered the Indian’s oval face looking up at him. They had taken him to England. From Dover to the metropolis, thence down through the hidden shafts and tunnels, Vaucanson had fetched him back to this place, a workshop littered with silver wire, copper rods, angle-joints, spring-loaded governors, tiny ratchets and reticulated chains, watchmaker’s and surgical tools. Here, secreted in a remote gland of the Beast, Vaucanson wasted no time in slitting the Indian’s fingers, sliding in the shiny steel rods, peeling back the flesh of the face and inserting the drilled faceplate. The floor was awash with fluids and his own arms coated to the elbows with gore. He could gaze into the Indian’s eyes and see the original man interpenetrated by the created machine with its gears and tiny winches, its self-governing extensors and sensors, its blank inaction a neutrality which could not be human: the peace of the Zero State.

  Then he had closed the skull and the engraved steel plate had sunk its deep ridges into the brain’s soft fibre, debarring this linkage, freeing that, channelling and prodding the cortex back to a restricted consciousness. The eyelids had slid back and forth as the flux of inputs and outputs started up and feedback cycles and control-loops assembled themselves from strings of unconnected units, then began winking in and out of zero-, one-states, never quite one nor the other, life and not-life, human and not human, somewhere between as the trajectories went purposive, the mouth opened and Vaucanson’s creation choked out its first word, its last bridge back to an existence programmed now as passive memory only.

  ‘Bahadur,’ the machine had croaked.

  That was how he had turned the Nawab’s last “envoy”. That night in Paris, Jaques had emerged red-eyed from the brothel with the dupe, the latest of the Lemprières slumped unconscious over his shoulder; another dangerous game that and who in the end, seventeen years later, had resolved it? Who had sweated long months down here with the dogs howling and spattering him with their shit, as he drew their hates and affections along filaments of steel and sutured their soft brains with silver-wire stitches so that they saw The Pool and they saw The Man, so that they passed safely by the naked girl and the boy who would be concealed in the bushes on the other side, just as he bypassed their canine affections to reach the lupine sub-stream which drove them to tear Charles Lemprière apart?

  Crude engines, the dogs. Casterleigh had shot them later and good riddance. But Bahadur, his earlier and more precious creation, was altogether different, an altogether more delicate balancing-act between necessary human memories and his machining under the screw-thread, scalpel and saw. They had sent him back, this assassin, sent him back to his master the Nawab as a silent fuse, with a steel cage for a body and the murderous control-loops so finely triggered that the very man who had sent him to Paris with orders to destroy them all would be the Indian’s victim in turn. It was a larger loop, the hum of a billion synaptic switches clicking open until the crucial closure, then silence; nothing.

  Somehow, they had lost him. Returned to the Carnatic and his master, they had heard nothing. The Nawab continued as before. And now Bahadur’s successor was in the city, better primed for the task. Better able to reach them.

  So, for that matter, was Charles Lemprière’s son. Vaucanson looked behind him at the ranks of humanoid forms. The dim light caught steel plates festooned in a tracery of wires, nodules of brass and zinc, intersections of metal and non-metal. Their arms and legs were joined rods, their heads circular bands of copper placed at angles to one another, their eyes simple lenses linked to crude photo-sensitive plates mounted behind the metal grill of the ribs. All this would be fleshed out in clay. An amalgam of some sort, they would cast them at the Manufactory, disguise them as garden statues. Another of Boffe’s misbegotten spectacles, and he thought with disfavour of the De Veres’, hauling the smelter and crane down through the gardens to the bog under the guise of drainage equipment. Drainage equipment! The Coade Manufactory was convenient, already suborned, already put to other uses, and yet….

  Vaucanson looked around him. The automata stared dumbly back out of the gloom. They dreamed their own dreams, he knew. He shiv
ered. It was the command-sequences, he couldn’t shut them off; the stimuli. Each machine needed to jump from A direct to Z. Each needed a space that was ‘free’, neutral, a break in the causal loop: a Zero State. And that was where they dreamed. That was where the memories came back, the shredded flesh, the bones drawn out through dripping incisions, nerve-endings telling the brain of his precise mutilations as he stripped away the human and replaced it with gleaming metal plates and rods and wire, here on the pain-stained bench before him. All these traumas were remembered, if at all, in the Zero State. He thought again of the automata lined up behind him. Crude things, limited, built for a single purpose. The leader’s plans encircled them all, baffling them, throwing them this way and that, and he too had been thrown by the request, had nodded and accepted the new parameters. Could this latest Lemprière justify this panoply, this overwhelmingly motley in which the eight of them cowered like puppet-masters dressed in black against a black background, all these layers of camouflage and deceptive armour? The leader encrusted them with his impossible schemes as though a connector which should have ensured a simple loop had worked free somewhere inside him and was thrashing this way and that deluging them with its mad spray of thoughts. What function did these schemes serve when their objective was so simple?

  Vaucanson picked up the oil lamp from the bench and, holding it head high, passed it before the line of automata; a general reviewing his troops. One by one, as he passed the light source before the automata, their lens lids clicked open-shut-open in a perfect game of Chinese Whispers, click click click… until he took the light away and silence fell again. They stood there blankly, immobile. A thousand reflective surfaces distorted his image. What were they thinking in their silence, in the depths of their Zero State? What were any of them thinking?

  Above his bench, the clock whirred and struck. Vaucanson carried the lamp before him as he left the workshop and edged carefully along the ledge beyond it. The Beast’s own dim illumination was hardly enough. He thought again of the Indian and Le Mara, the quick scuffle in a rain-swept Paris street which seemed to play out its moves over and over again, round and round in his brain. His own creator’s pride could not attach itself to them, not to any of them. Even the toymakers, the Maillardets, the other Vaucanson (his namesake), even the mediocrities had that, but it was somehow denied him. For all the flow of inputs, the inter-reactions and abreactions, the twitching senses and corrected dysfunctions, they were closed systems. Le Mara battled with Bahadur, the automata whispered amongst themselves and would act in concert at the Manufactory, but he was left isolated as though they had their own hierarchies and biases which were nothing to do with him, or any construction of flesh and blood for that matter. Perhaps they believed that they too were human, that they possessed some analogue of mortality which deluded them, all unaware that their blood flowed as command-sequences looping through a frame of copper, zinc, steel and glass in life that was the output-functions of a machine. They walked, talked and functioned as men. Why should they not be men? He suspected this thought, buried it deep inside himself in an unconnected loop where it whirled about, round and round endlessly. If it should escape….

  Metal crept through flesh, wire through veins, blood-flows became sequences, billions upon billions of soundless synaptic clicks, one/zero, one/zero, one/zero, as the skin peeled away and a metal plate took its place. A vast automation was spreading, linking senses and receptors, closed system to closed system (but how? How could they do it?) all of them unaware that they were different until the memory of an earlier incarnation came back, touch, sight, smell, hearing, taste, blood pumping, glands secreting, neurons glowing in the skull’s enclosure, a lost paradise, a garden closed off long ago by a wall of metamorphic pain. The meeting chamber’s brazier was before him now, across the gravel apron of the antechamber. Was that Casterleigh? Yes, and with him Le Mara.

  Two silhouettes slipped into the chamber. His footsteps were amplified in the cavern’s vaulted ceiling as the tiny dry stones settled noisily beneath each footstep.

  ‘All they await is our ship….’ Jaques was already speaking as Vaucanson entered. Seven candles burned, his own made it eight. Only the ninth remained. Only the chair next to the leader stayed empty. All were present: the leader flanked by Monopole and Antithe, his two echoing sentinels, Boffe, Le Mara, Casterleigh and Jaques who was telling them of Paris.

  ‘Duluc, Protagoras and the Cardinal have already set their men in place. They understand what is required of them. They have consented to everything. The first disturbances will be minor rehearsals, Paris itself will stay untouched right up to the last moment. It can simmer for weeks, months even before it boils over. Paris is the key. From Paris, it will spread outwards through the provinces all the way to the frontier. Beyond, perhaps. That is when we must act.’

  ‘But can our funds support it? Support the whole enterprise?’ Casterleigh queried. ‘We would be left with nothing if….’

  ‘There are no “ifs”.’ Jaques spoke calmly. ‘Paris will fall. France will fall. And we shall catch her.’

  ‘And if not?’

  ‘Jaques is right.’ The leader’s ruined voice spoke from the shadows. ‘The country will be ours once more. If we lose her, then we lose everything. These matters are already agreed. We are committed. We cannot remain exiles here for eternity. We must act as one. All of us.’ The leader gave the word an unnatural emphasis.

  Vaucanson looked from one to the other. Casterleigh subsided. Jaques was telling them about the ship, the rendezvous at Point Minimés, coloured lights, times, arranged signals.

  ‘Duluc will be there with his men. They will be ready to unload the ship on the appointed night.’ Vaucanson tried to imagine their return, the creaking of the rigging, the slop of the waves as they sailed homewards, but all that came to mind was another, more distant voyage, an ignominious flight past the palisade, the smell of their sweat as they cowered in the boat and behind that a vile stench which hung in a pall over the broken, abandoned city. The smell of burning…. Could they return to that? The burning, the fading screams, but all so long ago, he told himself, dead and left unburied behind them, the price of safe conduct. Now they would repay it, every last sou, give everything they had to regain their demesne. The choice was already made. Casterleigh was hunched silently in his seat, full of silent anger. There had been disagreements over the lawyer, this Peppard, who had buzzed about the Company, a winged irritant for twenty years, who had flown too close. ‘Contain him,’ the leader had commanded. But Le Mara had killed him, and Casterleigh was behind that. It all went back to the boy, Lemprière, whom they were to place in a fabricated world of twilight truths and compromises, of uncertainties and hallucinations, their own world, and all this circling and hedging about was in place of the old solution tried and tested over all the stubborn generations of Lemprières and Le Mara knew best what that was. The lawyer had been an associate of this latest Lemprière and there was no more reason for their procrastination than that; his was an elimination long overdue. Vaucanson thought back as Jaques’ voice droned on. The Lemprières snaked back through the years like segments of a worm which they had diced as each generation took up haphazardly where the last left off. The unequal struggle went on and on until it had seemed there was no end to their snaking enemy. Medusa-like, this John would term it. Now the last of them was here within reach and still the leader held off. Some fear of their extinction gripped the leader, the other bond with this spectacled boy.

  ‘He will approach from here.’ Boffe had his absurd plan laid out before them all, begging their indulgence, their attention so precious to him. The Manufactory was represented by a crude box. The roof came off as Boffe indicated the necessary course of events. ‘… through here, and out the door….’

  ‘Is her participation necessary?’ Jacques asked.

  ‘He must follow her,’ Boffe began to explain.

  ‘She is the bait.’ Casterleigh cut him off. ‘And I will distribute her as
I chose.’ Juliette, Casterleigh’s creature. ‘She will do as I say.’ Vaucanson saw that faint inflection register on Jaques’ face, but he had no claim on the girl, no special interest, her accompanying him to Paris aside. Vaucanson thought briefly of the night it had rained, Jaques emerging from the Villa Rouge.

  ‘You already have a girl for this purpose, this Rosalie, do you not?’

  ‘She is safe enough,’ said Casterleigh. ‘No need for worry, Monsieur Jaques.’ It was almost a sneer.

  ‘Clear enough Monsieur Le Vicomte,’ came the leader’s voice. Vaucanson saw Casterleigh look away with an ill-concealed grimace. ‘Lemprière will play the part we give him,’ the leader went on. ‘Our friend assures us of that, and time is short now for he has found the ship.’

  The others looked up in surprise, none more so than Le Mara whom Vaucanson watched as he wrestled with incompatible facts, saying ‘Not possible’ in his harsh monotone.

  ‘Apparently, he saw a crate break. Our friend tells us he saw the contents….’ And there it was again, something like warmth in the leader’s voice, pride in this Lempriere’s agility at jumping through their hoops. ‘He knows of the ship, he knows of the Manufactory, or will do. Our own friend will see to that. Are we agreed?’ The nods were hesitant, reluctant. Vaucanson’s part in the arrangement was already complete, waiting blindly in his workshop far below, lined up ready, click, click, click….

  The meeting ended. Vaucanson retraced his steps across the antechamber. He heard a sound behind him, stopped and turned. Casterleigh and Le Mara emerged out of the darkness.

  ‘A word, Monsieur….’ A word before he turned once more, with their proposal aligning itself in his thoughts, before he continued his descent through the deserted galleries and stone enfilades, along narrow ridges and tubular corridors with his decision wavering between yes and no, on and off, for and against, into areas of tensed neutrality and fractioned moments before either/or became “this” or “that”, between the stimulus and the reaction, before he answered that yes, he was with them, on the narrow scalpel edge of the Zero State.