‘Philpot had already signed his agreement with Jaques a few days before, Smith with Casterleigh, Cas de File as he signed it then, the same. The others even before that. The fourth earl held out longest. He knew what it meant. But in Norwich, in April of that year, Thomas de Vere signed and, when he did, the Company was ours. We returned to Rochelle like conquering kings and celebrated for a month. A club was formed amongst us. We thought the skullduggery and secrecy a kind of joke, a huge prank and we called our club ‘The Cabbala’, thinking that was a kind of joke too. We never dreamed it would become the truth.’
The leader’s voice was almost disbelieving, almost appalled. Lemprière watched his hands as they toyed with the pages of his dictionary. They were old hands, discoloured and the skin hung oddly on the fingers. He thought of the priests he had dragged from the deep twists of their different labyrinths, up through the grey streets of the shrinking city and into his dictionary where they were mounted like exotic trophies, glass-eyed as Ichnabod’s owls. Their layers were no deeper, no less mysterious than this one. The hands twitched about his dictionary. The Cabbala stared at him from their seats. Their eyes chilled him. Of course it became the truth. They had taken what they wanted. They had become masters of their dreams, like himself. Now they sought to disown them. He felt nothing for them. Their disbelief was a lie. The leader sighed in the shadows and then his voice came again.
‘The years which followed brought all we hoped for and more. We mounted other voyages with other ships. We drove the Dutch from pillar to post and our trading posts were such horns of plenty they spilled over with spices, silks and gemstones, rare metals, silver and gold. We had only to lower the bucket to scoop wealth from the sea itself. We grew rich as Croesus, and richer with every passing year. The Company’s ships wallowed back so low in the water a heavy sea would all but swamp them, and every ton paid us back a hundred-fold.
Our partners in England benefited accordingly. De Vere, Philpot, Smith and the others, they all became forces to be reckoned with in this city. The sums were fabulous, exorbitant. Once every year, an Indiaman would moor off the coast a few miles north of Rochelle. We would take the cargo off in ketches and stow it in a cave near the point. It was bullion and gemstones. Jewellery for our barbarous god. It was simple. Once a year, nine-tenths of the Company’s profits would be paddled over open waters from ship to shore. We must have been insane, but no-one ever knew. No-one ever found out. Our fortune mounted until our calculations could hardly measure it. It was all so preposterous, so out of scale. We wanted to invest, or lend but any projects which might have gone unnoticed would not have reduced our fortune by a thousandth and anything larger would have brought attentions we could ill afford. We had everything, and nothing to do with it. That was a problem we would never truly solve, until now perhaps. Back then, we hardly cared. Our agreements held firm and the Company grew. We looked out on a sea that gave us everything we had dreamed of and all that time our nightmare waited for us, in our neglect. We never looked back, we never turned and looked over our shoulders. Perhaps if we had we might have seen it in time, for when our nightmare came it came by land.’
‘The siege,’ said Lemprière.
‘Yes,’ said the leader. ‘The siege of La Rochelle; where we went wrong.’
Flat salt marshes spread inland from the fortress of La Rochelle in all directions like a vast glacis concealing nothing. Small waves lapped in the harbour, subdivisions of the Atlantic swell beyond. The coast ran like a ragged seam stitching Armorica to the Aquitanian basin, marking the abutment of land and sea. Two possibilities, two opposites and the city a point on their buffer-zone. Advancing armies and advancing storms, droughts and even ergot creeping through the corn; these could be seen clearly as though Ptolemy’s lens were mounted atop the citadel. They might advance, but measurably, observed from the watchtowers by sentinels who took that distance for security. But it was false; all these stealthy advances, armies or storms came in camouflage, second skins for a beast which moved across the plains that summer like inevitable weather.
Just as the pack moving fast and low over the ground announces the advancing flurry of the hunt and behind that the design of the hunter, so the weather signals its own cyclonic stillness, its dead centre which is so much hot air, behind that, deep swells and troughs of pressure, behind that the globe’s own whirling momentum, the periodic flashes of the sun called days which are the measures of shrinking distance as the horizon shifts from a far off violet smudge to a red gash of misfortune spilling down on the heads of the besieged who look up for a familiar sky in vain. The rain is not quite rain, the sun not quite sun. The advancing system has its own biases and probabilities, which remain discrete, only visible very suddenly when the rolling swell of corn and the waving vines and faint scarps and slopes of the plains about Rochelle and elsewhere are suddenly pumped high by a surge of energy, when they overload and fold in upon themselves. Then the leeway is swallowed, the distance disappears and energy gathers on the wave’s turbulent cusp. At once it is obvious. Hector realises he is alone, tricked and defenceless. Achilles raises his spear. The worst is arrived.
The flat marshlands unwrinkle and the folds disclose rows of tents, zigzagging trenches, forward emplacements butting up to the bastions and thousands upon thousands of tiny points of red swarming towards the walls while the cannon send smoking prophesies of ruin, fulfilled in a split second when the first cannonball bursts the first wall, explodes into the street, and the first of the Rochelais are killed by debris that seems to fall from a burning heaven which has already abandoned them to the sword and musket-ball, the powder-mine and torch, to the creeping earthworks which coil and tighten about them month by month, to their hopeless defence, their betrayal and ultimate defeat. The siege has begun and already it is over. The real victors are already inside the city.
The chamber was quiet. Lemprière saw Le Mara look across the table at Vaucanson. Jaques looked to the chair, then turned as if some signal had been given.
‘The siege was a means to an end,’ he said. ‘Richelieu meant to take away our privileges, in particular our trading privileges. He meant to charter new companies to take our trade. For his part, the King meant to have La Rochelle for himself one way or another. We meant to deny him. There is more, but….’
‘Tell him,’ Casterleigh broke in. ‘Tell him everything, the other reasons.’
‘What reasons?’ Lemprière searched the faces around the table. Vaucanson spoke.
‘Rochelle was no ordinary city. It had its own laws, own counsel, own church. For the huguenots in France it was a model. What might be, you understand? Louis knew and Richelieu knew. Every reformed congregation in the kingdom looked to Rochelle for guidance. And gradually the guidance became more than that, more like a scheme. A plot even. We had no truck with regicides, but the King was a monarch of Jesuits and dévots, a supporter of the League, of our enemies at home and abroad. We needed our King with us, not against. Do you follow?’ Lemprière shook his head.
‘A coup!’ Boffe burst in. ‘A grand coup! It was years in the planning, went back to the massacre on Saint Bartholomew’s Day, to Duplessis-Mornay and a whole troop of sponsors. Oh, it was a glorious piece of skullduggery….’
‘But it brought the siege to our walls,’ Jaques went on more soberly, ‘as we knew it would. Trade and state were what the siege was about and we had our fingers in both. The King’s forces finally came within sight of the walls in the first week of August 1627. Buckingham’s fleet had arrived from England and landed on Île de Ré the week before. The good duke was already pressing his case against Toiras and the rest of the garrison in Fort Saint Martin. We watched as the royal army dug itself in and repaired the forts to our east….’
‘Such a spectacle, Monsieur Lemprière.’ Boffe shook in his chair. ‘The men, the horses, the cannon. The stage was set with trenches and earthworks, thousands upon thousands of them. And ourselves. The gallant besieged, heroes. All Europe knew of our plight.
’
‘And all Europe ignored it,’ Casterleigh sneered. ‘The English were never to take Fort Saint Martin and even if they had it would have proved of little consequence.’
‘There had been sieges before.’ Vaucanson spoke. ‘But they were formal affairs. Exchanges of words. Terms were agreed and matters would stand much as they had before. We had little enough reason to believe our own predicament would prove any different.’
‘But it was different,’ said Jaques. ‘Perhaps the King knew our plans were more advanced than even our opponents allowed, perhaps our trade was more valuable than we knew ourselves. Whatever the reasons, the royal army grew and grew until by September of that year there must have been twenty thousand troops camped around us. Still we looked out from the walls untroubled. With our own and the English fleets we held the seas to the west and supplies were ferried in with ease. Naturally there were batteries on the points of the outer harbour, but their fire was inaccurate, the mouth too wide, our ships too fast. Then, midway through October, we saw a strange construction begin to take shape. Day by day, little by little, the points of the headlands seemed to be extending further across the mouth of the harbour.’
‘Richelieu was building a mole,’ said Casterleigh. ‘To close off the harbour.’
‘A kind of rampart,’ Vaucanson expanded. ‘Two rough jetties made from piles and rocks. The engineer was Metézeau. I knew his work, but I could not see how it might succeed. A storm, even a strong tide, these would have washed it all away. But they sank ships filled with stones to either side and filled the space with boulders. They left a gap in the middle for the force of the sea to expend itself. If this table were the harbour, the space in which you stand now was eventually no more than inches across. Even then we felt it would never withstand the winter storms. They placed a new battery on Pointe de Coureille and began to harass our ships. The mole was still hardly advanced though and the last months of that year held few terrors for any of us.’
‘To the east,’ said Jaques, ‘the King’s lines were impregnable. There was nothing to be had by land. The sea had always provided for us and now it was our lifeline. We began to understand why, with only twenty-five thousand souls in the city, there had been no great assaults on our walls. They meant to starve us out. That was the purpose behind the mole.’
‘We petitioned for safe conduct for our wives and children, but the King would not hear of it,’ said Casterleigh. ‘We came altogether, or not at all.’
‘Buckingham sailed for England in November,’ Jaques spoke again. ‘He left his promise to return and Saint Martin in the hands of the King’s men.’
‘And did he return?’ asked Lemprière.
‘He was to meet his end at the hands of an assassin later that year, but the English needed the Rochelais if they wished their ships to pass unhindered along the western coast of France. They understood what Richelieu wanted well enough and we knew they would return. When they did we imagined Richelieu’s mole and the King’s fleet would be swept away for flotsam. But then, a few days into the new year, a huge storm blew up from the south. It raged all night and in the morning we looked out over the harbour and for the first time we began to worry.’
‘Why? What had changed?’
‘Nothing, nothing at all. We thought perhaps it was a freak, a piece of the Cardinal’s luck, but the mole was still there. It was untouched when we expected every trace of it to lie five fathoms down. We knew then that the city might fall and that was when we sent François to England.’ Vaucanson had been staring at Jaques during this recital. Now he turned to Lemprière.
‘If the mole could withstand the storm, it might withstand the fleet. We needed to know what the English planned and plan accordingly ourselves. We needed to know if and when to run. That is why we sent François.’
‘He left on the last day of January under cover of night in a dinghy.’ Jaques took up the story from Vaucanson. ‘His scheme was to rendezvous with some Hollanders coming up the coast with salt. But he was sighted passing through the mole. We watched the musket-fire from the walls. We could do nothing and did not know if he lived or died.’
‘He lived though,’ said Lemprière.
‘Oh yes, he lived,’ Casterleigh answered.
Jaques glanced across at him and cleared his throat. ‘We were left inside the walls. No boat larger than a pinnace made it past the mole after that. They had sunk ships to block the opening and their masts rose above the surface like a palisade. We fired on the mole from the walls but to little effect. We were trapped and we knew it.
Lemprière looked in the shadows for the leader who had remained silent throughout. The others had grown animated as the events of the siege were relived, survived a second time. But the shadows were still, the human pillars behind him were still. Even Le Mara seemed more animated and Le Mara had not uttered a word.
‘We were eight then,’ Jaques went on. ‘We waited for word from François, from a nuncio who might have been dead or alive. The city waited too, cut off now by land and sea. We already knew the means of our own escape should it become necessary, but it was hazardous. There were factors beyond our control….’
Lemprière broke in. ‘How could you escape? If you were cut off as you claim….’
‘Wait, for there is more before that. The Rochelais began to realise that they might lose. The city began to change. A series of fires swept through the merchants’ quarter, started by cannon-fire we thought. They were the work of incendiaries, arsonists hidden in our midst. Everything that would burn - straw, hay, faggots, powder from the magazines - was carried to the citadel and stored in the cellars there. Soldiers were seized trying to cross the lines carrying passports signed by Richelieu himself. The traitors we uncovered swung a dozen at a time from gibbets in the square. We racked them and they told us names. We racked the names and they told us others. False witness joined our list of fears. Towards the end of January a sickness spread through the city causing jaws to blacken and gums to bleed. It was scurvy. Food became scarce. We began to kill the horses, then the asses and mules, cats and dogs, rats and mice at the last. Before then there would be cannibalism in the poorest quarters. Anything that lived was killed. Anything that could be swallowed was seized upon for food: ox hides, leather scabbards and boots boiled in tallow, even cinnamon and liquorice from the apothecaries. We made a kind of bread from straw and sugar, or wood pounded in mortars, plaster, earth, even dung. We hardly had the strength to cheer when May brought Denbigh’s expedition off the coast with fifty ships. But the batteries mounted on the mole fought him off and our own fireships drifted harmlessly into the banks. Still there was no word from François. By the end of May the silos were empty and people took to gathering cockles along the coast under the enemies’ guns or foraging for purslane between the walls and the King’s lines. Inside the city, the old and the very young began to die.’
Juliette’s face was perfectly still, almost inhuman in the candle light. The energies of the Cabbala were beginning to ebb. Lemprière listened as Jaques conjured images from the last months of the siege: hollow faces on consumptive bodies, bodies like anatomies, the smell of the unburied dead, flat skies, the dull crump of the cannon which went unanswered though there was powder in plenty for the soldiers could no longer traverse their own guns, skins shining with a mockery of blooming health. So few children. The quiet streets. Sentries posted for the night halved in number by daybreak. The great bell silent. No-one had the strength to toll it by then. The outer walls were already cold and people moved like ghosts towards the centre of the city. Rumour and hearsay brought them by the thousand to the iron-banded doors of the citadel. The city was dying, they knew this, but the manner of its death was still unknown. There were stories, intimations of the revenge to be exacted by their King. These lead them through the drab streets and into the citadel where the doors are shut and barred behind them. High arched windows look down on the mass of bodies. They have nothing to lose, so the story goes. Nothing a
t all.
‘By October we were dying in our hundreds. Deputations were shuttling back and forth between Guiton and Richelieu, trying to arrange terms. Bras de Fer was talking of a suicidal charge for the lines. There were less than eight thousand of us left from a city of twenty-five. In the last week of the month François’ message reached us, coded in a despatch addressed to Guiton, the mayor. We had arranged it before he left: every seventh letter was taken and added to the next, then every ninth from that. Seven and nine were François’ favourite numbers. We pored over the report, which promised new expeditions from England, offered intelligence of Richelieu’s clemency and urged us all to hold the city for another month. But as the real message emerged letter by letter, we knew these distant encouragements for lies. François’ message to us read: There is no expedition. No quarter will be given. Save yourselves. The city was to be sacked, its walls razed. Our deputations were only putting off the hour. There were no terms for we had nothing to offer and everyone in the city suspected as much. They had nothing to lose. Nothing at all. So we planned our escape.’ Lemprière looked down at Jaques, but Jaques would not meet his eye. Vaucanson was watching the other man too.
Lemprière's Dictionary Page 64
