His senses sharpened as he moved through the tunnel. He could see perhaps twenty yards ahead of him. After a minute or more, he noticed a gradual incline as the tunnel began to rise and soon after his path was blocked by a mass of crudely buttressed planking. The barrier extended to the roof of the cavern but the wood was dry and brittle. Nazim pulled the crowbar from his cloak, prised out two of the planks and squeezed himself through the opening. He found himself in a much larger cavern, contiguous with the last as though it had suddenly widened and opened out. He was standing on a long platform of stone seemingly suspended in space. Twenty feet below him a small lake of black water had collected, but the strangest features were the rows of curved and sharpened obelisks that ran in rows to either side of him jutting clear of the water and extending down from the roof, each one thirty feet or more in height and resembling nothing quite so much as huge teeth.
A barrier similar to the first lay twenty yards ahead and Nazim trod gingerly over the tongue to reach it. It was constructed much like the other, although here the timbers were not dry, but sodden. Nazim began to realise he had made a mistake. He pulled at a plank which disintegrated at his touch to expose a wall of red clay packed behind the timbers. As he watched, the slick red surface bulged slightly then began to glisten as the first water drops forced their way through the plug. Nazim thought of the shaft, the position of Le Mara’s house, the direction he had taken through the tunnel and realised then that he had walked south, underneath Thames Street to the river. The water seeping through the clay plug he had unwisely disturbed was the Thames itself and, as he watched, he saw a steady drip begin to run in a thin trickle down the rotted planks. He turned and began to retrace his steps through the mouth and down the throat of the Beast to the foot of the shaft which he passed and behind him the trickle turned into a fine spray as the clay began to break up. Nazim walked more quickly now, not thinking what lay behind him, only what waited ahead.
‘Where are we?’ Lemprière asked.
‘Beneath the city,’ Jaques replied, from behind him. ‘You have been dead to the world for fifteen hours or more.’ They were passing through a succession of caverns so high that even the rays from the lantern could not find their ceilings. Looking up and around him at this series of natural cathedrals, Lemprière could hardly believe that above them the humdrum streets were filled with ordinary men and women who moved through them quite unaware that the solid ground beneath their feet was riddled with tunnels, passages and vast chambers. He remembered the echoing boom which had answered his kick against the locked door in the archive and thought of that sound careering through these same chambers.
‘You knew my father would die that day.’ He threw the accusation over his shoulder.
‘Truly, no,’ came the answer. A heavy silence followed. ‘But when he did not come, I knew it had been done. You cannot understand, John. Not yet.’
‘He believed you were his friend, his partner. You always failed him. Even your business failed him.’
‘I tried to save him, to discourage him. Don’t you realise we tried to ruin him? Don’t you think I did all I could to stop him before he found us?’
‘But he did find you….’
‘You have all found us. Every Lemprière has inherited the mystery, every one has solved it, or come close enough to spur us to action. All of you have perished and passed the obligation on to the next, or somehow found something. We do not know why you persist, or how each Lemprière comes to follow the same path. That is your mystery, but something drew Charles towards us just as it drew his father, and his before him….’
‘And me.’
‘No. The circumstances have changed. We drew you in ourselves. You see, we anticipated you, John. We have been waiting for you for some time.’
They crossed slender bridges of calcites and granite, passed beneath stalactitic needles tipped with quartz and scrambled over smooth sloping plates, sliding down into troughs of powdered stone whose motes spiralled up into hollow spires and honeycombed minarets. Deep boreholes opened to either side of them and filaments brushed their shoulders as they began to ascend a winding sinew of stone which led them into space. The lantern shone out in all directions and found nothing but the path ahead hanging in the middle of a vast darkness. Lemprière kicked a loose stone off the edge and listened for its impact. He heard nothing. They were rising steadily through the dark and presently Lemprière saw the underside of a vast flange of rock above them, but whatever it was joined to remained invisible. They approached it slowly from beneath and as his line of sight cleared the lip, he saw a wide flat apron covered with gravel and small stones. The lamplight found the ceiling of this greatest of caverns at last, a hundred feet above them, sloping down and away to form walls which remained in darkness. Their feet crunched on the gravel as they left the path and the walls loomed out, solid rock to left and right, but formed from strange waisted columns directly ahead of them. Jaques indicated that they should veer to the left and presently Lemprière saw a heavy door set into the wall. They walked across the gravel and when they stood before it, Lemprière stopped and turned to Jaques. He thought of the desiccated corpse lying in the dark tunnels behind them and the city left burning long before his birth.
‘What did François know that all of you feared so much?’ he asked. Jaques’ face stared blankly into his own. He reached over to the door and pushed it open. Candle light flared from the room. Lemprière heard voices which grew quiet as the door swung open. An expectant silence took their place and he knew that within the chamber they were waiting for him to enter.
His mind was racing, his feet skipping quickly over the thick ridges of the tunnel. Bahadur’s face kept coming at him out of the darkness. The calm of the expression haunted him; an inhuman resignation, cold as his body when they grappled on the cliff. He was looking down over the lip of the cliff. He was waiting in the palace. He was walking down the gangplank of the Nottingham. The crew were calling to him. A bundle of white rags was tumbling down hundreds of feet and he was saying yes and the Nawab’s laughter echoed through the corridors of the palace. Bahadur was tumbling to his death, down and down. Why could he not see the impact?
Shortly after he passed the shaft through which he had entered, the cavernous passage began to slope down. It twisted and curved to left and right as he moved deeper into the Beast. Perhaps half a mile from the shaft he stopped suddenly and a lunatic voice inside him said Here is where he fell, here he is. A bundle of white rags lay in the centre of the passage ahead of him. But as Nazim moved closer he saw that they were not cloth, but paper. Small booklets of some kind. They lay spread in a heap in the middle and to one side of the tunnel. A shaft identical to the one he had descended dropped into the tunnel directly above him here. The pamphlets had fallen down, or been thrown, and had come to rest in this spot. Nazim peered up this second shaft but saw and heard nothing. By his own reckoning he was somewhere beneath the Exchange, hundreds of feet below its foundations. The shaft might emerge anywhere at all, he thought. He was about to move on when he remembered Praeceps’ instructions to the driver of the carriage the night before. Leadenhall Street. East India House. He looked up the shaft once again and marvelled that an entity as vast as the Company could be controlled through so narrow a conduit, for this was surely the passage by which their commands were passed to the organisation above.
The tunnel began to descend more steeply and Nazim used the ridges as steps. The air grew warmer and drier. Eventually he found himself walking levelly once more. The passage broadened further, funnelling out until he could no longer see the sides. The ridges grew less prominent and more broken. Strange conical humps rose out of the rocky floor and their mirror images protruded from the ceiling. He began to step around them as they rose higher and those in the ceiling hung lower. The cones began to meet, their thick bases reaching stalactite to stalagmite, joined by attenuated filaments of stone so fine he could pass his hand through them and barely feel them splinter. The
spaces between these thin-waisted columns suggested hundreds of spherical chambers, bubbles of darkness through which he passed as he traversed the spongeworks. Nazim looked up and saw that the ceiling had risen out of sight. In its place the honeycombed stone spread its thick junctions and filaments far above him, from side to side, forward and back. Then, just as it had risen, it began to recede and before long he was again skirting the stumpy pyramids which had heralded its appearance. The dust grew coarser underfoot and he trod more carefully. He seemed to have emerged onto a flat plain of gravel. Walls curved away like cliffs to either side and he was about to follow one when he heard two sets of footsteps moving across the gravel on the far side of the apron.
Nazim stopped and crouched down. The footsteps moved closer, passed before him then receded to his right. He scanned the gloom and fancied he saw the gravel simply stop more than sixty yards’ distance from him. Beyond it there was darkness, nothing at all, an abyss. The footsteps stopped and presently Nazim saw a crack of light far away to his right that widened until it was a doorway and light was streaming out from the chamber behind it. He saw two figures who seemed to pause there for a moment before they entered and the door was closed once more. He turned and walked back into the spongeworks where he would wait. He hardly knew what to make of what he had seen. The eye-glasses, the pink coat, who else could it have been? The pseudo-Lemprière was one of them after all.
The flames of eight candles flared and sent a maze of shadows racing over the surfaces of the ceiling. He saw Juliette, standing with her back to the side wall. Her skin was matte in the low glare. Her eyes never moved from the candle light. She seemed to see nothing. Not the stems of the candelabra, nor the flames from the candles, nor himself, not even the eight men ranged about the table who sat impassively, staring at him as though he should be the one to break the silence. He held his tongue and glanced again at the lamp and its tapers. One was unlit.
The table was shaped like a horseshoe. He stood almost between its pincers and looked about the waiting men. Before him, to his left, Jaques settled in his chair. Next to him a thin-faced man stared coldly forward without expression and beyond him slumped an obese figure, red-faced and breathing audibly through his mouth. This and other slighter susurrations gathered in the ribbed basins of the ceiling and fed on one another there. Casterleigh sat opposite Jaques with Juliette standing behind him and beside him a fifth man whom Lemprière did not recognise. At the head of the table a chair deeper and higher than the others was flanked by two identical cohorts, grey men with faces of stone, standing still and silent as caryatids. Someone sat in the chair but Lemprière only knew this from a pair of hands which grew out of the darkness and rested on the table before him. The shadows seemed to cluster more thickly there and the high sides of the chair enveloped and hid the figure’s face. Between his hands, a book bound in black leather rested on the table. Lemprière looked at the book and the men who contemplated him from their seats. He noticed that the table, though smoothly cut on the outside, was fantastically irregular within with all kinds of indentations and projections jutting in and out. He recognised it from the device on the ring, the watermark in the pamphlet, the map of the harbour; all of these but exceeding them in scale and only exceeded itself by the original, which was the harbour at Rochelle. The figure in the chair seemed to shift. The leader, thought Lemprière and, remembering the last words of François’ last pamphlet, put the name Zamorin. to the man. The shadows moved once more and then the leader spoke.
‘Welcome at last, John Lemprière,’ he said. The voice sounded as though stones were grinding together in his throat. ‘We have waited some time for you.’
The fingers of the hands were moving. Casterleigh stared up at him with disguised hatred and something else, some vestige of his expression on the roof, frustration, amazement, fear. He had seen the thing which terrified him there and, looking back at the man now, Lemprière knew that thing was not himself. The leader’s fingers twitched again, then took the book and opened it. Lemprière squinted over the length of the table as the pages were turned. He saw handwriting, deletions, blots and marginalia. Dates and the same signature, over and over again. The signature was his own. The book was his dictionary.
‘A fine piece of work,’ the leader’s voice rumbled out of the shadows. Lemprière broke his silence.
‘My dictionary! What are you doing with it? Why is it…. Why am I here?’
The leader turned the pages of the manuscript. ‘Everything in time, John Lemprière. There has been so much time, after all. I hardly thought it would take so long, yet you are here and your dictionary with you….’
‘Who are you?’ Lemprière broke in. The hands stopped.
‘You know who we are, John Lemprière. We are the investors you found at the De Veres’, the refugees from the city sacked a century and a half ago, the men your ancestor hunted who you have cornered here. We are your quarry, Lemprière and now you have us. We are the Cabbala.’ The hands moved from side to side, indicating the men ranged about him. ‘Jaques and the Viscount you know from their guises in the world above. Messieurs Le Mara and Boffe to my right, to my left, Monsieur Vaucanson and behind me Monopole and Antithe Bias.
‘Your dictionary is here,’ he paused and breathed out heavily, ‘for so many reasons. Some of them you know already, but there are so very many reasons, John. You could never have known them all. It is here because you knew your mind was not your own; because you believed yourself mad; because the Lemprières have run at a tangent to us for too long and we need you back. The dictionary is here for all these reasons. Even before them, events of many years past, matters which seem distant even to us. Your dictionary began long before you yourself John, long before you, or we, had conceived it. It began with a voyage. A voyage and a siege.’
‘Rochelle.’
‘Rochelle, yes. And the voyage was the first expedition of the Honourable Company of Merchants trading to the East Indies; and it was a disaster.’
Lemprière looked across at Juliette, but she remained motionless, staring into space. She was a shadow. Her real body was elsewhere and this abstraction would not acknowledge him. He looked away and as he did so he saw Casterleigh’s eyes flick across the table to Le Mara.
‘The year was 1600, the century new-struck and we were here, in this city when the ships set sail,’ the leader began. ‘We heard the Queen’s Charter cried from the dais and we watched four ships float downriver on the tide loaded with nothing but hope and daring. We watched all this and we thought of our own sovereign’s mistrust. We thought those ships should be our ships, those men should be sailors from Rochelle and the cargoes they were to bring back…. But you know something of that already.’
‘The voyage was to fail,’ said Lemprière.
‘Naturally; else we would not be here, nor you, nor your dictionary. We suspected it then, even as they set out. Returning to Rochelle the expedition never left our thoughts. We were traders and merchants, shipwrights and bankers, nine men who saw what our English counterparts saw, and the Dutch had seen for decades. The East was a bursting pot of gold and all that was needed were ships, men and sanction. A charter. We knew it was possible, the nine of us, but the Catholic court would grant us nothing. We were of a different persuasion, huguenots. Rochelle was our fortress. Had we mounted such an expedition, and we could have done, it would have brought the King’s frigates to anchor off the coast and his dragoons to our doors. Perhaps we should have launched the venture come what may - the warships and dragoons were to come in any case -but we did not, we were cautious. We waited.
‘Two years passed by and we heard nothing. Our normal business continued, running goods up and down the coast, plying the river trade. We were wealthy, but unsatisfied. We wanted more and, when the four ships returned fully laden late in 1603, we got what we desired.’
Lemprière listened as the tale of the Company’s pepper and the collapsing market unfolded for the second time, but where Alice de Vere�
�s voice had dropped in gloom and despondency, the leader’s rose with excitement. Once more, Thomas de Vere twisted and turned under the weight of his failure, his creditors came after him like hungry dogs and his finances sank into the pit of the whole venture’s foolhardiness. Once again, as the recital continued, the fourth earl’s fellow investors struggled alongside him, all of them chained to a million pounds of worthless pepper which lay warehoused and unwanted, and which dragged them down one by one deeper and deeper into debt. They had gambled, they had lost and Lemprière knew they would go on losing. Not only the fourth earl, but the fifth and sixth and seventh. All of them down to Edmund, the twelfth, who reaped the benefits of Thomas’s error in his turn. It seemed to replenish and repeat itself through successive generations, an indestructible mistake, until the original error was lost and there was only the endless price to pay, over and over again. The venture had failed, the investors were left penniless and their charter was worthless paper.
‘Not to us,’ the leader went on. ‘We coveted that charter above everything and we would have it too, but the matter was beset with troubles. We saw the investors as kindred spirits, Philpot, Smith, De Vere and the others. They had been proved right. Their Dutch rivals had rigged the market, the glut stank of policy, but it gave us the Company. The voyage was possible, the trade was there and when we calculated the profits, they dwarfed all our previous ventures. We pooled our resources and set sail for London the following May. When we arrived, it did not take long to discover the Company’s plight. Every shipwright, victualler and chandler from Deal to the Pool seemed to hold a debt. There was not a financier in the city would commit a farthing to a second venture. We knew at once we had them.
‘The nine of us matched ourselves one to one with the first investors. At first, none knew that the others were being approached. They must all have suspected. We offered them terms they could not refuse: their debts settled, the Company relaunched and a second voyage undertaken. In return, each of us would take a ninth of any profit or loss and pay each investor a tenth of that sum. They would act as our agents in effect. Naturally, all these negotiations were conducted in the strictest secrecy. We may have been Protestants, but we were Frenchmen still and our countries were all but at war. It was this fact which bound us together. Neither party could withdraw from the arrangement without risking exposure from the other. For an Englishman to sell the Queen’s Charter was more than sharp practice. What we did was treason. The agreements were dressed up in all kinds of rhetoric to mask the fact, but it was there and all of us knew it.
Lemprière's Dictionary Page 63
