Lemprière's Dictionary

by Lawrence Norfolk

  ‘Juliette?’ The dripping sound grew louder, a fraction faster. He looked to left and right. Had she left? Escaped? He thought that for a moment. When he turned he saw the black slick on the floor. The indifferent light caught the drops as they fell in a quick drip, drip, drip. He looked up at the chains. An animal carcass hung ten feet above his head. A goat. Gutted, it formed a sort of hammock. Lemprière saw the loaders struggling with the statue, carrying it aboard the ship in its shroud. Its head hung down. Her hair, long and black hung down. Her feet stuck out the other end, the leather bands still about her ankles. It was hard to see her face. In its passage from her throat to the cool on the floor, blood had run down the chin covering eyes, nose and mouth. And his eyes were wrong. A door was open across the place. Beyond it was the second yard. He walked towards it, a careful step to begin, though when he passed through it he was running, faster through the yard, past the stacked crates, faster it seemed than he had ever run before. Behind him, the girl swung gently in the embrace of the goat. The links of the chain clicked softly, almost inaudibly together, click like nervous military heels, the massed soldiery sniffing and looking at one another, their abashed commanders frozen to the spot, ashen-faced before the sight of the goat tapping its shiny hooves on the altar where, this time, Iphigenia had waited too long for deliverance…. Juliette?

  He had dreamed of Bahadur, the old dream and more. They had walked arm in arm on the cliff top, talking, with his uncle’s words spinning off into space like tumbling birds, we change, climbing the thermals, we change inside, diving down to the rocks, wheeling, returning. Had there been birds? His uncle pointed to his chest, something mute, something he had tried to say. They had argued, come to blows. No, wrestled, dawning on him that it was not in play when the same chest pressed against him, cold as steel with steel fingers and a face falling away…. Then, where the earlier dream had broken off, it went on. Bahadur’s surprised face was falling away from his own to the glaring white stones hundreds of feet below; long seconds before the impact rang up. Nazim had thrown his uncle off the cliff, and it was no accident. A shadow raced up the cliff as the body fell, the arms reaching, hands clutching at air. The shadow reached after him and he dropped full length on the sandstone, his head suspended in space, looking down, thinking he could simply slide forward. Bahadur had tried to kill him.

  Accident and design. He was haunted by one, lost in the other. The cellar’s dark had grown populous with ghosts, telling him different stories in different dialects. Behind them all, some lambent ur-tongue curled gently, caressing them towards accommodation, a sort of sense. Not yet, not yet. The Nine he sought were now eight. They had plotted against one of their own on the night torrential rain had washed through the streets and two women in blue satin had talked before a makeshift fire of a girl, Rosalie, and a ‘prank’ played on the Lemprière. Three months later he was dead, his throat slit in a room on Blue Anchor Lane. Bahadur’s “Lemprière”, and his own: the three were caught in their own triangle. Now it was broken, the Lemprière was dead and some link came free in Nazim with that fact, something which had bound him to his task, find them, words spoken in the Nawab’s place, the strange tense laughter, kill them.

  The Lemprière was his ambiguous guest, who hovered about the paths of his thought and whose outline flickered in and out of view, recognisable suddenly and without warning, as the flock of birds wheeling overhead is suddenly a swiftly moving cloud. Design again. But Nazim imagined each of their thousands of flights as quite autonomous, all flying along unique vectors, faster at the hub and slower nearer the axis, all of their own accord, moving along arcs of greater or lesser radii, all by coincidence. The cloud was a vast accident and he was in its midst, flying along with all of them, somehow puzzled by his direction. The cloud ran naturally along its own determined azimuth, pole to horizon along the arc of the orb which itself curved through an accommodating orbit, pulled this way and that by other greater and lesser spheres of influence. Accident and design.

  He rolled over and felt the hard case dig into his ribs: the miniature, the woman with blue-grey eyes. The Lemprière’s mother. Above him, the remaining of the two women moved listlessly. Again, she had not lit a fire. Almost dawn now.

  In the mêlée outside the inn, in Blue Anchor Lane the night of the Lemprière’s death, at the Ship in Distress a week later where he had almost discovered his name: ‘John….’ left hanging in the air - frustrations followed the tall young man in his absurd pink coat; a travelling accident this henchman of the late Lemprière. He had slipped away as the young man engaged Theobald in conversation and waited outside. He had followed them dutifully to Blue Anchor Lane, though he had known what they would find there, and known too that their discovery would tell him nothing. Another trail followed through until it gave out on a trackless plain where he, Nazim, found himself in familiar limbo once again. He had resorted to the docks, but even the business of loading the Vendragon had grown intermittent. Long days of inaction greeted his renewed vigil and the ease with which he accepted this new mode unsettled him. He thought of Bahadur, the woman depicted in the miniature and, above him at this moment, talking a gibberish he could barely follow in a tone he could hardly hear, Karin, the woman in blue. The smell of decay filled the house and Nazim caught himself following her decline with lessening detachment. Shadows racing up the cliff. He felt the changes.

  In the second week of this new phase of his vigil, a crate had broken open on the quay. A large statue, someone carrying a water pot, had lain briefly on the ground in full view until a length of canvas was found to cover it and haul it aboard. Le Mara had darted out, an eel from its hole, then retreated back into hiding. The statue had been carried aboard in an improvised sling. Nazim had remained where he was, unseen by them all, following the mishap, looking around and about him. And up. The window at the top of the house was lit, a hundred yards away from the ship but barely fifty from his own post. Two faces were staring out over his head at the fiasco on the quay. It was the old man whom he had earlier taken for the building’s sole inhabitant and, beside him, the spectacles identifying him, the thin curves of his face confirming it as he gazed down on the ship and the men wheezing under the statue’s weight, stood the Lemprière’s companion.

  The Lemprière himself was suddenly present, invisible, grinning, announcing the first of his surrogates: Meet them, shake their hands…. Nazim, edging sideways behind a tangle of crates and splintered planking, kept his eyes fixed on the figure above, seeing him in the inn where he had hovered, very erect, remembering the way his head had jerked back a little at each hesitant emphasis as he spoke. He had approached ostrich-like, the rip in his pink coat still unmended. The slight tearing sound had hardly been audible in the angry din. The brawl encompassed him as Farina had shouted for calm, a postponement of hostilities, and he, Nazim, had hauled the young man out by the collar. The brutes fought. Farina shouted. Now, he was growing more significant, present in numberless acts distributed through the city, both great and small, from the rip in the boy’s coat and the slogans, to the tight clusters of men huddled on street corners and, less clearly defined, more urgent acts, quick meetings, referrals, tiny cracks in the city’s glaze forming a slow pattern in the seismic quiet. Soon, thought Nazim, but when?

  And there was the Lemprière again; chuckling, feinting, muttering j’adoube as the stratagem once more failed to unfold and Nazim remembered the first time he had heard the name, in the palace of the Nawab. It marked a point in time and space very distant now. The Nawab’s commands were dim shouts, receding cries, ignorable complaints. The story was the same, for he would find them, and kill them, but it was about himself and others now. Himself and Bahadur. Himself and the Lemprière. Even himself and the woman on the floor above, or the woman in the miniature, or the two who had already disappeared. Even himself and Le Mara.

  The boy, the pseudo-Lemprière, had later left the house overlooking the quay, staggering under a large black book. Nazim had followed L
e Mara back to Thames Street where, over the following days, other events were to unfold.

  It began with the black coach. He had last seen it scattering pedestrians, taking the woman in blue away from the coffee house. It reappeared around the corner from Tower Street and came to a halt outside Le Mara’s house. Three days had elapsed since the incident on the quay. The door opened and a thickset man with a hawkish nose alighted and entered the house directly. Nazim watched as the door was closed. As the afternoon light faded, no lights appeared in the windows. He thought of the trap door in the basement of the house. The man did not re-emerge until the early hours. The coach moved off at speed. Nazim listened until the clatter of hooves on cobbles was replaced by the night’s silence. Another of the Nine, thought Nazim. Eight now, he corrected himself. The Lemprière stirred inside him, relapsed.

  On the second day the same events were repeated and Nazim waited with the coach and the dozing horses. A little after midnight a light appeared in an upper window and shortly after that Nazim shrank into the shadows for there, only twenty or thirty yards from him, was a young man, almost invisible in a black coat, black shoes and stockings, walking down the street towards the house. The door opened to admit him and the young man entered. When he left, an hour or more later, the light at the top of the house was extinguished. Whatever lay beneath the trap door had not been for his eyes; untrusted, thought Nazim, a supporting player.

  The following two days saw Le Mara back at the quay where Nazim watched as the efforts of the preceding months seemed to loop back on themselves. Cases which had earlier been loaded onto the Vendragon were now taken off. The men employed in this task managed their loads with greater ease than before however. It was apparent that the cases were empty. Nazim watched as a wagon was piled with the containers, then driven slowly through the streets to Le Mara’s house.

  Here, the foreman, his helpers and Le Mara alighted. Two further cases, somewhat larger than the others, were added to the load. The hired hands struggled a little under the weight. The wagon moved off once more, and again Nazim followed as it trundled down Thames Street continuing west to London Bridge where it crossed the river. The Borough led both of them south, wagon and its shadow until the wide highway was exchanged for a maze of tiny streets which led them into Narrow Wall Road, thence to the Kings Arms Stairs. The coach turned through a pair of wide gates into a yard. Nazim read the legend: Coade Artificial Stone Manufactory. The sky was leaden, had been so all day. Now a rift opened above, an odd light was streaming through the opening, somewhere north.

  The two crates were unloaded and the lid prised off the first. Nazim watched as a young girl was lifted out. Something was wrong with her legs. She looked dazed, pretty, long black hair hung down her back. The two men frog-marched her around the side of the large brick building which formed one side of the yard with several tall sheds at its rear. Beyond these a lower, more extensive building stretched away until a second yard, identical to the first, completed the Manufactory. Le Mara followed the ugly procession.

  The second crate remained on the ground beside the wagon. Nazim could hear a sharp knocking, a scrabbling sound coming from within it. The noise came in haphazard bursts. Some minutes passed before Le Mara and his accomplices returned. The girl was no longer with them. Le Mara’s countenance was unchanged. His assistants seemed to step hesitantly. A command was barked and they began levering open the second case. The two men wrestled with its contents under Le Mara’s directions, reached in and manhandled the occupant out. It stood there, blinking even in the failing light. A goat. Le Mara knelt quickly at its side and the goat staggered sideways. Its hind legs would not support it. It fell and twitched on the bricks until it was still. Blood ran out of its throat. The two men picked it up and carried it towards the sheds. The gashed sky was closing itself, the evening approaching.

  Events accelerated then. The black coach appeared, driven at speed down the road and into the gates. Le Mara signalled. A figure was making hesitant progress watched by two pairs of eyes. It was the pseudo-Lemprière tripping towards them, stopping midway along the side of the Manufactory, entering a small door set into the brickwork. The black coach disgorged a passenger. The same girl, for a moment, the identical dress, the same long black hair. Were the features finer, subtly different? Difficult to tell in the twilight and at a distance. The pseudo-Lemprière had entered the Manufactory between the brick building and the sheds. Le Mara had the girl by the arm. The same dazed expression, looking about her as though landed blindfold from the air. The coach pulled away, down the road towards the second yard. Le Mara was leading the second girl behind the building by the same route as the first. Nazim used the coach to mask his progress down the road towards the far yard, trotting at a crouch by its side until the gates were passed and he was on the far side of the structure behind the sheds. The girl emerged. She was clutching something to her face. The coach door opened, the thick-set man had caught hold of her. She fought. Nazim watched as she was cuffed, then the man looked down on her.

  ‘The bargain was yours,’ he said coldly. The girl struggled. She was led quickly to the coach which made off again at speed. Nazim heard shuffling footsteps somewhere inside, moving faster and faster until the door flew open and the pseudo-Lemprière was suddenly running across the yard. Nazim ducked behind a crate. The boy stumbled, almost recovered, then tumbled, was up again running even faster out of the gates and down the street. Nazim thought for a second, then gave chase.

  Later, lying in the cool quiet of the cellar, Nazim questioned his choice. He might have searched the Manufactory, its interior would surely have told him more than the events which followed. The pseudo-Lemprière had collapsed, wheezing, a few hundred yards down the road. Passersby stared curiously at him. He seemed oblivious as he continued erratically, veering in and out of the road towards the nearest tavern. Nazim saw him order a glass of brandy, then another. Someone barged against him and he lashed out catching the offender on the top of the head. He was hit back and fell to the ground, then was thrown bodily out the door by a group of men. He reentered and would have suffered worse but a black-garbed figure appeared out of the rough mass and stood by the young man. The group surely might have defeated him but something stayed their hands, something in his bearing. The pseudo-Lemprière was scooped off the floor by his rescuer, whom he then tried to punch. More drinks followed. As he turned from the counter Nazim saw that the rescuer was the visitor to Le Mara’s house two days before, the untrusted one whose footsteps he had not heard. And, as he watched through the grimy window of the tavern, he fancied there was a resemblance between them, very slight, growing slighter as the bruises came up around the pseudo-Lemprière’s face.

  The two of them downed glass after glass and Nazim knew that he had made the wrong choice. He should have followed the coach, or the wagon, or searched the Manufactory. He would learn nothing here. Even posthumously, the Lemprière had deceived him again. He had turned from the tavern and walked home by Westminster Bridge where an old woman had pestered him to buy apples. They filled his pockets as he gained the house in Stonecutter Lane. Karin was asleep, lying on the floor above his head. Nazim had lifted the trap door and climbed silently into the room. Drawing the apples out quietly, one by one, he laid them next to her. He climbed back into the cellar. He had made another error, chosen a blind alley rather than the trail. More than ever before he felt at sea, awash with competing, contradictory waves, out of his depth. More than ever before he felt that he must fail for want of a single good bearing. The woman had woken, found the apples lying next to her. The sun rose finally, a bright brilliant ray. Lying in the cellar, Nazim heard the woman’s teeth crunch on the apples. He listened as she chewed and swallowed. He smiled to himself, and the Lemprière chuckled at his side.

  Now, strong wings unfold over the wider canvas. March peels off the African coast and spreads north over the Mediterranean up into the Adriatic’s stubby pelagic isthmus. Here, where the brave tunny swims amidst
glittering shoals of sardines, the ocean currents have almost given up their ghost. Waters nudging the coast around Trieste, Fiume and Venice have taken four decades to reach this point, four more will flow past before they see the Straits of Gilbraltar again. The March winds which whip fake white crests out of the wave-tops meet this collar of land and shoot up to bring weird weather systems down on the geography hereabouts. Snow still dusts the Hungarian Steppes, drifting in the Klagenfurt Basin where warming foehns blow the loose powder around before threading through the broken country of Bosnia and on through the dry valleys of Herzogovina and Dalmatia. The notorious Hungarian winter is at an end and the Campaign Season is afoot once more. About the valleys of the Save, Drave, Danube and Unna, around Belgrade, Choczim, Wihaoz and the three quite different Gradiskas, the armies of the Emperor Joseph and the Grand Seignor of the Sublime Porte at Constantinople are circling, feinting, indulging one another’s tactical caprices; matching each other’s different territorial claims, though, from far above, a lazy bellyroll and flap, flap, flap in aether warm with spring sunshine, they are different forms of the same imperial tiredness, Roman indeed, but two-headed, the static north versus flesh-bound south. The old empire might have gone either way but having chosen both, Byzantium is coming after the pretender again, and vice versa as the Imperial Internuncio’s declaration of war in Constantinople is printed in the German gazettes and that hoary campaigner General de Vens instantly orders the destruction of Dresnick. Turkic cannonades puff uselessly against the Austrian howitzers’ noiseless smoke-plumes thousands of feet below until the hapless Musselman defenders are marched off to Karlstadt for eventual ransom or the Austrian galleys. A dismal column trudges over the Croatian maize plains, one or two perhaps looking up and seeing a flying, what, a gull perhaps, right size and shape certainly but seemingly much higher, implying a much bigger sort of bird. The names of Mahometan angels pass up and down the column, furtive mutterings with half an eye out for Sergeant Vittig who enjoys battering the infidels to death with a piece of wood he calls The Imam. Soon, the Imperial Internuncio has disappeared without trace and the Venetians have allowed a Turkish squadron to operate out of Castel Nuovo. The emperor himself travels to Trieste. In Vienna, the Venetian ambassador is rarely seen in public, never at court. Stories concerning his private habits circulate the city and, thinly coded, re-appear in those German gazettes. The Turkish squadron sails up and down the Adriatic. On land, matters military go badly. Supply lines are erratic, Belgrade is encircled (General de Vens again, growing ever more sprightly as the campaign gathers pace) and the Reis Effendi argues with the Captain-Pashar who is barred from the Divan by order of the Grand Seignor. Meanwhile, three chasseurs sculling gently over the blue-grey waters of the Unna one day are blown to the right-hand bank and besieged in a farmhouse for a day and a night until relieved by a detachment of Croatian patriots. The three have already killed eighteen of their besiegers and are rightly promoted. Eighteen janissaries lie dead with their hashish-dreams, the first of the summer’s flies drinking from the tear ducts of eyes open to the sky which is bent around and mirrored there. Clouds scudding over the sun, birds, one larger than the others, huge in fact, flying corner to corner are lost for a moment in the pupil’s darkness, before re-emerging and dwindling to an infinitely prolonged point, the rear view of an arrow headed west, away from this fumbling conflict, over the Bavarian Alps and the Swabian hop fields into France. Hundreds of miles away, at Constantinople, the standard of Mahomet is unveiled in the seraglio to excite the war-like ardour of the people. Still no word on the Imperial Internuncio.