On Septimus’ first visit, Lemprière presented him with a sheaf somewhat thinner than usual, and thinner again on his second. The third yielded a meagre four sheets and the fourth only one. Towards the latter half of June, Lemprière would sit at his desk for whole days without once reaching for his pen. The heat dried the ink in the inkwell while a plague of details swarmed about his head like the aphids which invested his orange tree or the flies which settled on his forgotten meals. As the heat of June was exchanged for the still fiercer heat of July, he began to realise that the task begun eight months before might almost be ended and, as the pages and blank spaces of the dictionary grew full, so the city where his mind wandered in search of the book’s subjects was emptied.
It rose out of the scree now as though it were part of the drab landscape which surrounded it; the two hardly distinguishable. At its gates, Laverna’s altar was bare, robbed of her head. The streets were unchanged, the doors and windows smaller perhaps, the interiors more opaque. He knew them to be empty. He walked and the noise of his feet sank into the flagstones. Nothing echoed. Nothing moved in the streets. He found emblems on the grey stones. A snake skin sloughed by the python sent by Juno to pursue the pregnant Latona told him that they had passed and gone. He had them already. He thought he saw the limbs strewn by Lamia as she devoured her children. The air was laced with a scent that Lelaps would follow forever, never finding its prey, never returning with it to its master. The smell of burning. Shadows cast by the facades were the darkness in which Leuc-ippus killed his father by mistake, the red moss grouted in the cracks of the flagstones was goat’s blood from some Lupercalian rite seeping up to say only that the sacrifice was made long ago. He found Magnes’ iron-clewed shoes stuck down and straining for the lodestone below, the dragon’s tooth which would never become Menœceus, the tortoise on which Mercury’s foot would never rest. He had them all. The well in the courtyard showed him a face a hundred times more beautiful than his own, but it was himself not Narcissus peering into the water and the dim dissolving shape which sank as he reached down was the letter which Orestes would never take from Iphigenia, she would never know he was her brother, they would never escape. He had them too. Not her…. His sister. Her brother. The stench of Nessus’ carcass was in the air, from which the Ozoli took their name. In the centre of the square, before the iron doors of the citadel, a thousand shields lay piled. He thought of the Rutuli, first of the Romans, the Sabines, who had mingled with them till they were all Quirites. Tarpeia had pointed to the gold bracelets on their shield arms. ‘The ornament on your left arm for entrance to the city.’ They had agreed, and crushed her under their shields for her treachery, but if he cleared the pile shield by shield he would find nothing. She was gone with all of them, sucked out by the dictionary as Utica sucked out Carthage and later ate it down to the children’s cries reaching after Vagitanus, sinking into waters which hardly rippled as they accepted them, stilled and grew stagnant as those of Velinus where Alecto descended into hell, swallowed sure as Xanthippus sailing from the ingrate Carthage he had saved to the Corinth he would never reach. It was the Saguntum where the Zacynthians had burned themselves alive rather than submit to Annibal. It was Zama where Scipio crushed Annibal; where the long fall of Carthage had begun.
Now he approached the gates of the citadel. He saw long dark marks run up the walls, blacker than the grey stones. He saw them spread from the high arched windows and he smelt burning once again. As he lifted his arm to pound on the doors, the heavy iron swung in, opening away from him. He could hear, but not feel, the wind; a faint wailing within. It was the last of the city, the final page of the dictionary. If he had come this far to bury or drive out his ghosts, then he had arrived. His father was dead, the woman in blue was dead, Rosalie was dead. The ghosts which demanded these sacrifices were figures of his past, gone with their victims. If that was enough, it was done.
He walked in through the doors and found himself in a shell. The walls reached up to a block of grey sky for the roof was gone. Smoke streaked the walls and soot crunched underfoot. Blackened stumps of wood projected from the walls where joists had supported higher floors before the floors and their supports were burned away together. The arched windows were gaps caked with black where the smoke had poured out. Fragments of charred wood littered the place. The smell of burning was everywhere. It stung his nostrils. The stone floor and walls seemed still to radiate a faint heat, but whatever had happened here, however the conflagration was begun and whatever the fate of those caught within, the fire itself was long extinguished. The only clues were ashes, smoke, soot. Nothing, they told him nothing.
In the second week of July, Lemprière put down his pen and gathered together the last leaves of his manuscript. He thought of the time it had taken him to write, the eight months since his arrival. But when he counted through his labours it was not from the A to Z of his dictionary which marked his time in the city.
He saw Septimus handing him the bottle in triumph when they had won the Game of Cups together at the Pork Club. He heard his coat rip when a strong hand pulled him out of Farina’s brawl. He saw George’s expression change from bitterness to joy at the mention of the Vendragon. Then he saw George dead in the same room; he saw the woman die in the pit and the girl already dead at Coade’s with Juliette’s face plastered over her own. He saw Annabel Neagle silent in a darkened room in Thames Street and heard the bitter outburst from Alice de Vere, her hopeless appeal to him. Last of all, he saw the coach emerge out of the darkness only to pass him by in the snow with Juliette’s face framed in its window, a different appeal as she sped away from him into the dark. Then he looked down at the last of his dictionary and thought of a city burned to ashes with all its people, and knew that what he had done was not enough. There was more and even if he had run from A through to Z he had not found it.
The resistance of the air was a precise joy, a balance of balances. He soared up on thermals and slow convections into shimmering blue sky. He felt its curves and pressured troughs pushed up into his belly, downdraughts pressing and releasing his back, his whole body an aerofoil sucking lift from flat resistance and holding him there like a shield against the drag that wanted to pull his wings out by the roots and send him tumbling down at metres per second per second to the city below. But he never fell, had never fallen, would never fall. The air roared over and under his body, telling him this; the air above all, not the ground below, was his element.
Yet, looking down at the stone skin which hid the ones he sought, he knew he would return. His chosen fate was incomplete, and the fates of his proxies. He pitied the citizens who scurried as insects, feeling blindly through the streets far below. They would never see what he saw, all severed from their city, unassigned agents now and easy conscripts to the maverick’s agenda. The July sun blazed down on his back, the air cooling him and holding him. He saw the squat lozenges of Stalkart’s tortoises studding the roof of the Opera House, below and to the right a hospital was hauled on wagon wheels off the terrace of Somerset House. The river eased its meanders in a gentle cut through the tiny squares of the rookeries and courts, across the greater highways, fronting the palaces and speculative monuments, the quays and wharves, the lesser dwellings, huts, shacks, hovels. Barges and lighters crowded about the Upper Pool where the Vendragon, Megaera and Tisiphone were moored with a hundred other ships, the stubby bulk of the Tower seeming to stand guard over them all. He saw the great Indiamen dock and spill their cargoes, the markets’ hungry mouths open to swallow them. The apparatus of docks, warehouses and offices sprawled out and contracted in digestive seizures and at its centre a stone hulk stretched down Leadenhall Street like a petrified carcass which he knew for one of the mouths of the greater beast below. Now, as he angled the charred plate of his face downwards, he saw two figures moving up the street towards it, a shock of pink, a shock of blonde, who crept slowly up the thoroughfare until they disappeared into the hulk of East India House. An initiation? He knew it for an
introduction of sorts, a first encounter. Another detail in their plan which crept steadily forward towards its prize. Enough now, he thought, and turned to descend. Everything in time.
When Lemprière put the last full stop behind the last sentence - already nagged by doubts, certain he had left something out - he found himself at a loss. All his other projects had lain neglected during the last months of his activity and now he was unsure how to pick up the threads. He thought of the agreement which had stayed undisturbed in his travelling chest, the Vendragon which was still moored below Captain Guardian’s house, protected by the Captain’s promise to inform him of its movements. Of Juliette, whose whereabouts, whether indeed she was still in the city, were unknown. For want of anything better, he put on his coat and boots and walked the streets that night.
The city had changed. He knew it in a minute, blind not to have seen it before. The streets were illuminated only by the moon, the lamps unlit. Rubbish lay in heaps on every corner. Piles of bruised fruit and vegetables, broken crates, soiled paper and grosser products which passersby kicked down the thoroughfares until they were littered with the same. Straw blew about when faint gusts of wind disturbed the streets, but this was rare. The heat settled in thick layers between the houses and shops. The gutters were dry as dust. He walked briskly but without aim, north through the market to begin with, then turning east and south. Gangs of men passed him, moving with purpose, their eyes fixed on points he could not see. He stepped smartly out of their way, something about them unnerved him as though they were dogs trained for a single task and were searching for it. Some of these gangs, always more than ten, rarely more than twenty moved in a loping half-run. All their members were dressed alike as though each had an obscure uniform to go with its equally secret purpose: sashes, arm bands, angled hats. Some carried badges or emblems: a riding whip, a light cane, a short sword. He saw them everywhere. They jostled and barged the other citizens, pushing past them as though they did not exist. Standing still, they clustered to talk in low tones and when he walked past such a group they fell silent and watched him as he went on his way. He never saw them stop finally, or discovered the point of these platoons’ marches. He avoided them, crossing quickly from one side of the street to the other as they passed. Even children. Faces of six and seven blank with zeal passed him, and when he plucked up the courage to ask one, a girl in her infancy, what was the purpose of her progress, the girl looked at him as though he were mad not to know and said, ‘For Farina.’
Then he knew that these gangs were the mutated heirs of the silk weavers he had overheard in the tavern where he had met Theobald and his dark-faced imposter, the recent descendants of the brawlers outside the inn, and the purpose behind their marches whether they knew it or not was to find each other and fight, or unite. He returned home unsettled. When he slept that night, he dreamed of fires.
The knock on his door came in the middle of the afternoon the following day. He was certain it was Septimus and he was wrong. As he threw open the door he saw blonde hair and a familiar face.
‘You were right,’ said Theobald Peppard. ‘I was wrong.’ The words did not come easily, his ill-grace was ill-concealed. ‘Everything George said,’-he paused and Lemprière gestured for him to enter - ‘it was all true. I have found the papers which prove it all, under my very nose. George was right from the first.’
‘I know,’ said Lemprière.
East India House rose out of Leadenhall Street, four storeys high stretching fifty feet to either side and back a further three hundred. Lemprière had tried to persuade Theobald to disclose his information but the other had refused and dragged him east across the city, through Fleet Market, past Saint Paul’s and along Cornhill to his place of employment. The menacing gangs he had seen the night before were in evidence again as they moved through the baking streets. In daylight they seemed less threatening, but the tension he had felt amongst the citizens was unchanged.
Theobald seemed nervous too, but they arrived unharmed. After tirades against the Company from George and the Widow Neagle, he had expected a louring prison, a grim towering fortress, a vast house of evil, but East India House was bland and faceless, hardly noticeable despite its size amongst the houses and shops which flanked it. He was sweating in his coat from the heat and strode eagerly behind his guide as Theobald mounted the steps to the cooler corridor within.
‘These are the Proprietors’ and Directors’ Court Rooms.’ Theobald indicated a vast room to the right in which Lemprière saw a horseshoeshaped table large enough to have shod Pegasus. The strong sunlight had blinded him and his eyes adjusted slowly to the dark interior.
‘These are the sale rooms.’ Equally vast empty rooms led off to the left. The long central corridor was crowded with clerks and other officers of the Company, all of them carrying bundles of papers and files, intent on their errands. But as they reached further back into the building the passage began to clear. Theobald pointed out more Committee Rooms and the various offices concerned with the warehouses at the rear of East India House. He took an obvious pride in their number and his own knowledge of their workings which he explained to Lemprière as they passed.
‘The court is a popular senate,’ he said. ‘It makes no distinction between Christian, Turk and Jew, nor between country or sex. The Proprietors elect the Directors, and the Directors appoint the Committees. Here,’ he pointed, ‘the Committee of Correspondence meets, the most important of all the committees. I am Keeper of the Correspondence, you see? Here, the Committee of the Treasury, and here, of Law Suits and of Military Funds.’ They turned then and continued along another corridor where Lemprière was told of the Committees of Buying, Warehousing, Housing and Accounts. These were treated with less reverence by Theobald. A short flight of stairs led them down to a passage identical to the last and running beneath it.
‘The third tier of Committees meets here,’ explained Theobald. Again Lemprière had to listen to anecdotes, about the tardiness of the Committee of Shipping, the acrimony within the Committee of Private Trade, petty disputes in the Committee of Government Troops and the rank stupidity of the Committee of Stores. Each of these committees had its own Chairman, Directors, Chief Clerk and staff of officers whose various peccadilloes and bureaucratic idiosyncrasies were known to Theobald.
‘But, as I said, the Committee of Correspondence is pre-eminent,’ gloated Theobald. He pointed upwards. ‘Up there,’ he said.
‘Is the correspondence really that important?’ asked Lemprière half-innocently and then had to listen as Theobald explained how orders sent to India were prepared in the Examiner’s Office, then sent to the Board of Control to be annotated in red ink. He digressed on the petty feuds between these rival departments and gave a potted history of the battle of the inks before going on to say how the annotated correspondence was sent and the eventual response read in the Court of Directors before being distributed by the Secretary amongst all concerned branches of the Examiners Department, abstracted and copies of the abstracts sent to the Directors whereupon the Examiners would begin to gather all materials and documents necessary for the reply, whereupon the whole process would begin again.
‘And all correspondence is treated in this way?’ asked Lemprière in frank disbelief. Theobald seemed to hesitate while he won or lost a minor internal battle.
‘Not all,’ he said quickly. ‘There is a thirteenth committee which can send orders directly to India without any authority but its own. It is called the Secret Committee.’
‘But you know of it? Others too, presumably. How is it secret?’
‘It is secret,’ said Theobald, ‘because no-one knows who sits on it, or where it sits, or even what it does.’
They went on then, past long rows of glass-fronted bookcases filled with bound papers and room after room of clerks who sat in rows scribbling furiously. Theobald explained the precise function of each, together with its position in the Company’s scheme of things which always seemed to place the department
under discussion somewhere near the bottom and himself, Keeper of the Correspondence, somewhere near the top. The corridors were almost deserted. Theobald nodded curtly to the few clerks who passed them. They took back-staircases and seemed to rise further than the building could possibly extend, then deserted stairwells to descend below its lowest basement. At the bottom of the last flight of stairs, Theobald stopped before a small unmarked door.
‘Only I, of all the Company’s thousands of employees, have a whole floor to myself.’ Then he opened the door and they entered an office which contained two desks, one chair and an oil lamp. ‘The Office of the Keeper of the Correspondence,’ announced Theobald.
‘Your floor seems somewhat smaller than the others,’ said Lemprière as Theobald lit the lamp then reached into a drawer. A large key emerged from the desk by way of an answer and Lemprière noticed a low door with a small grille set into it on the other side of Theobald’s cramped quarters. Theobald struggled with the lock which was stiff with disuse then leaned and pushed back the door whose hinges were stiffer still. A musty smell filled the office as it opened. Theobald took the lamp and beckoned for Lemprière to follow. They entered single file for the door was narrow as well as low. Theobald held the lamp as high as his stature would allow and Lemprière straightened to survey the scene before him.
Theobald’s domain did indeed extend the length and breadth of East India House. Rays from the lamp shone out a hundred feet or more until the gloom of the low interior defeated them and beyond there was only blackness. It was, in effect, a vast cellar.
Lemprière's Dictionary Page 57
