Lemprière's Dictionary

by Lawrence Norfolk

  ‘Extraordinary,’ muttered Eben.

  ‘Algae,’ said Roy.

  It was; and the ship was the Heart of Light. Renamed Alecto, the three-master moved slowly upstream in the baleful glow of its suitors. As far back as Tilbury, the algae had broadened to touch the banks on either side. The river was luminous, molten, uncanny. Green. Peter Rathkael-Herbert watched from the bridge as the lighters and smacks moored downriver gave way to larger vessels, brigs and colliers, then frigates, Indiamen and ships of the line as they neared the Port of London.

  ‘So much for surprise,’ muttered Hörst ‘the Wurst’ Craevisch who stood beside him. They were marooned in a sea of green light that filled the river behind them for as far as they could see. The tide pulled them steadily into the city and their glowing escort followed. Of their mission’s object, the Megaera (and specifically her cargo of Sicilian sulphur) there was as yet no sign. The Imperial Internuncio moved forward and practised a tentative thrust with his newly-issued cutlass.

  ‘Jolly good, Peter!’ Wilberforce van Clam called encouragement for’ard from the quarterdeck. ‘Now lunge, lunge! Yes, yes!’

  Dead fish bobbed up and down in the luminous carpet which encircled them. He had yet to get used to the stench and at night still dreamed of his time in the Tesrifati’s hold, horrible dreams of suffocation and decay. Wilberforce was waving for him to continue but he had lost the urge.

  ‘Pass the pipe.’ He reached over to Hörst who handed it over. Blue smoke rolled thickly around him as he puffed, banishing the redolent fish for a minute. The algae seemed to roll like waves around the ship and Hörst’s voice was far away and tinny as he shouted, ‘There she is, Wilberforce! The Megaera, dead ahead!’ Pirates were gathering around Wilberforce on the quarterdeck, adjusting bandanas and stuffing braces of pistols down their trousers. Most held cutlasses in their teeth. Peter Rathkael-Herbert essayed another lunge. Not good.

  ‘Where?’ he asked Hörst and looked to starboard as directed where, amongst the clutter of masts and jostling hulls that was the Upper Pool, he saw tied up to a long wharf a barge, then what looked like a scaled-down Indiaman, beyond that a cargo vessel, Typhoon, Tisiphone something of the sort and last of all, the Megeara. Lobs de Vin was already practising throws with his grappling hook. Peter Rathkael-Herbert pulled deeply on the pipe. The port seemed deserted, neglected almost. Odd piles and heaps, impromptu depots and careless stacks of bales littered the quays as they drew nearer. The first hooks were flung out over the glowing water to land and snag in the Megaera’s lower rigging. The Alecto swung about and moved towards her prey. A little shudder ran through the vessel as he jumped down to join his fellow pirates, then another.

  The prow collided gently with the stern of the Megaera, the ropes were made fast and then he was leaping forward with the rest of them, feet clattering over the decks of the boarded vessel, cutlass in hand and pistol at the ready while all around the algae glowed greenly and further shudders began to run through both vessels. Peter Rathkael-Herbert looked over the side, frowned, then looked again. The ships began to move more violently, straining at the hawsers. The river swirled. Its surface dipped. No, he thought. He turned to his companions.

  ‘Abandon ship!’ he cried. ‘Wilberforce! Hörst! The water, look! Oh, God no….’

  The luminous river surface was massing, piling up in heaving ramparts of green; solid walls of rising water teetered all about the ship whose deck pitched forward as though old Father Thames was suddenly a muscled giant sporting with the Megaera as a whale with its tub. The pirates skated down the deckspace, sliding and tumbling towards the prow as the first trough opened in the water, an embracing wound which pulled the vessel to itself, sending shudders through her timbers to the elderly pirates who now scrambled over the bows rail, all thoughts of brigandage lost for the moment in a desperate tangle of arms, legs, heads, short swords, cutlasses, cudgels and pistols, a great heap of human panic spilling from ship to shore as the Megaera began to roll.

  The trough deepened, and a terrible sucking sound filled the air. The green light throbbed in deep pulses around the vessel which turned blindly, hawsers snapping like thread as she see-sawed crazily, pitching up and down, yawing in a wild destructive spin. The river was a vortex, sucking the ship down below the pulsing surface, her masts insane fingers pointing to an empty sky. Within her hold the barrels of charcoal were shattering. The Megaera whirled about as the river got a grip on her, the whirling pool spun faster and with a great belch of escaping air she was dragged below the surface. As she disappeared, a wailing sound, a howling of tortured timbers, cut through the murderous gurge, as though the ship were not yet dead. Then the sound stopped. For a brief moment the waters were calm before the ship was swallowed down, and the abysmal undertow surged again. Watching from the quayside, Peter Rathkael-Herbert and the pirates saw their own vessel swing about and turn its blind nose towards the whirlpool. A hole had opened in the riverbed, a hungry mouth to swallow ships.

  What could they do? They stood in silence on the quay, frail spectators to the unfolding catastrophe as their ship was tossed up now and plunged stern-first down into the crashing green waters which tightened about her and pulled her under.

  Again the pause, again the moment of stillness, the shriek of splintering timbers, and then from further down the quay the Tisiphone pulled like a maddened beast to join her furious sisters. The indraught sucked down the third of the sisters, drawing in more of the algae’s carpet of love, dragging that down too. Perhaps they went willingly, as heedless lovers, carrying down a flaming torch of green to the sister-ships, for they will need that too. The whip of scorpions alone will not suffice for the vengeance these Furies have been sent to enact.

  The last luminous green rivulets sank from sight. The waters were black, whorls ceding to eddies, eddies to faint shivers until at last the river was calm, darkly languid and viscous below the pirates’ disbelieving gaze. Peter Rathkael-Herbert, Wilberforce van Clam, Amilcar Buscallopet, Heinrich Winkell, ‘Slim’Jim Pett, Mussel Wilkins, Lobs and Oiß de Vin and all the remainder of the Heart of Light’s gouty, hoary-headed crew stood together on the quay.

  Hörst turned to Wilberforce.

  ‘Now what?’ he demanded of his captain.

  ‘Straordinary,’ adjudged Guardian from his post at the east window of the Crow’s Nest. ‘Never in all my years….’

  ‘Saw something like it off Malacca once,’ rejoined Captain Roy. ‘Turned out to be….’ His voice faded away. Perched atop the plan-chest by the north window, he leaned forward suddenly.

  ‘What? What did it turn out to be?’ But Roy was not listening. He was looking up the short passage which connected the legal quays to Thames Street above.

  ‘You remember the Stone Eater, Eben?’

  ‘What? The Stone Eater at….’

  ‘That evening. When Sir John’s men raided the….’

  ‘Ah! Yes, yes of course.’

  ‘The furtive little devil, slipped out in the confusion, remember him? Signalled to young Lemprière as he nipped down the stairs.’ Eben remembered, remembered too his hasty promise to Lemprière, made here in this very room, and his own misgivings as their tiny alliance had seemed to widen that night to include Farina’s loyal lieutenant and beyond him Farina and God knows who else, the mob itself even? Yes, perhaps even the mob, if it should come to that, but certainly this individual, marching along the quay towards the pirates about now at the head of a dispirited corps (forty? fifty? Certainly no more than that) who followed in a straggling line behind. There was the Vendragon, still safely tied up and seemingly impervious to the river’s late assault, still affirming that earlier pledge. And did Eben remember? Of course he did.

  ‘Stoltz,’ he said. Roy nodded sagely and thought for a moment.

  ‘So where’s Farina?’ he asked.

  Now what?

  ‘We defend ourselves,’ said Wilberforce, and Hörst’s head swivelled aft as he pointed to the gang of loping desperadoes who now
strolled, staves in hands towards them, and at their head a leader who, as he approached, glanced nervously over his shoulder as if to check that the contingent he had set out with half an hour before was still up to strength, present and above all correct.

  Stoltz inspired in his men quiet respect rather than suicidal bloodlust. Not for him were the devil-may-care charges over the blood-caked killing grounds beloved of General de Vens. Any campaign conducted by Stoltz would be strong on lines of supply, maintenance of equipment, reliable communications, logistics and the like. The men would be fed, the horses watered. No-one would shiver for want of a warm winter vest if Stoltz were in charge. The manuals would lie open on his table and the lights would burn late into the night as he built his stratagem from tried and tested models. The campaigns of the great Cunctator would be rehearsed then played out in earnest. No forced marches through Cisalpine Gaul, night attacks or lightning strikes. Steady progress, consolidation and siege would be this second Cunctator’s hallmarks. The enemy would always be outnumbered, would always know this, would somehow always evade the lumbering turns of Stoltz’s war machine which would cast about for opponents, dimly aware that chances had been missed, that the war had dragged on too long, would never end unless by inertia, disinterest or disease. Soldiers would live, grow, marry and die, their sons would inherit the same role and their sons the same. The camp would become the Camp, the war, the War. It could begin tonight. It is just possible. Tonight, Stoltz is here to scuttle ships.

  ‘Two to one. Bad odds, Wilberforce,’ muttered Hörst as he drew his cutlass and adjusted a raffish bandana. Should’ve worn the eye-patch, he thought privately, then winced as his back gave a twinge. Lobs and Oiß de Vin clutched a brace of pistols between them and behind them Peter Rathkael-Herbert dibbed half-heartedly at an imaginary foe. He thrust, foot forward in the improved manner, and turned to Wilberforce for approval. But Wilberforce paid no attention, not to himself, nor Hörst, nor even the motley mob who had drawn themselves up in a pedantic line, staves perfectly aligned not ten yards away from them.

  ‘They don’t look like the Militia,’ murmured Amilcar. ‘Perhaps we should parley? Wilberforce?’ But Wilberforce was looking east down the quay, past the late berths of the Tisiphone, Megaera and their own Alecto to a ship which, had the whirlpool persisted, must surely have followed that hapless trio.

  Along the quay away from the mob went Wilberforce, drawn by bewildered curiosity towards the ship which sat expectantly in the water. Can’t be, he thought. Stoltz’s mob drew closer and raised its staves in readiness. Peter Rathkael-Herbert aimed a tremulous cutlass. It is, thought Wilberforce. He looked back for his men and saw a big-looking cove followed by a smaller one (no legs?) hurrying along the quay into the back of the mob who were poised as the pirates were poised, yes, no legs, he confirmed as the first sword was raised and he looked back and saw the hell-ship’s name writ plain over her bows.

  ‘She’s the bloody Vendragon!’ he roared, but no-one heard, not Hörst, or Amilcar, or the Internuncio, not Stoltz or his mob, not even the Captain stumbling down the quay (though his identification of the vessel Eben is pledged to defend, even if reluctantly, is surely the mainspring of their determined haste) for at that moment the very ground on which they all stood gave a great percussive shudder and from deep within the bowels of the earth a terrible pandemonic shriek exploded into the upper air. All stared as one at the river’s surface which broke open now as if the Charybdis which had swallowed the ships now sought to spew them up once more.

  Love, desperate love. Three times Lemprière heard a ship’s tortured sides scream against adamant rock, three times the waters stilled, then surged again, backing up behind the vessels and rising up the shaft. The viscous escort of algae sought vainly to shield their lover from the Beast’s raking outcrops and jagged stipules which scourged and smashed her timbers as her hellish descent went on. The toxic waters rose and in their glare he saw the Viscount pulling himself up the ladder, an engine of steel clothed in flesh, grunting and roaring behind them.

  ‘Faster!’ he shouted to Juliette. Her limbs moved slowly now. They had climbed a hundred feet or more. His own lungs were burning, his hands numb as they closed about the next rung. The rush of water filled his ears and above him there was only the pitch-black of the shaft. He looked down and saw the waters welling up once more, thrusting up the shaft, overtaking the Viscount, their toxic glare reaching almost to the girl who laboured below him. They fell back and the Viscount was still there, clinging to the ladder, his body a ghostly green from the dunking, still coming after them. Juliette’s energies were beginning to fail her.

  ‘Not far!’ she gasped. Lemprière reached down and felt her hands close about his arm. He hauled her up like a ragdoll, the muscles screaming in his shoulders, feet unable to feel the rungs, each one a mountain as they neared the top. But the Viscount was close. Lemprière hardly dared look down, each rung telling him, stop, breathe, rest, sleep … a kind of trance filled with pain, up, again, and then his hands were scrabbling amongst papers and digging into dry earth. He was at the top of the shaft. A heavy iron grille loomed above him as he scrambled over the lip and reached back to pull Juliette after him. They looked down and saw the Viscount climbing powerfully, the waters rising. Together they heaved the weight of the grille upright until its massive hinge groaned, and it fell with a crash across the opening of the shaft. Juliette dropped to her knees.

  Lemprière ran forward into the cellar. He saw the door he had kicked in frustration and beside it the one he had opened with Theodore. But it was blocked behind a great mound of pamphlets, François’ pamphlets which now he kicked away, tossing them aside to reach the door beyond. For one moment he thought it was locked; he kicked furiously and the old wood grated on its hinges, swinging open at last. Behind him, he could hear the water rising in the shaft.

  Through the bars of the grille Juliette saw the Viscount’s face turn and look up. He was only yards below her. He climbed more rapidly but the water was already at his ankles. Juliette watched his progress calmly then, as he neared the top, she rose and moved forward deliberately to add her own weight to the iron grille. The dark form below rushed up the final rungs of the ladder. The Viscount’s hands closed about the bars. The water was at his waist. He pushed once and the grille shuddered; again, but he could not lift it. His straining face pressed itself between the bars. The waters rose more slowly now. His eyes found her through the bars of his cage.

  ‘Your own father?’ His tone was almost reproachful. ‘You would kill your own father?’ His face disappeared for a moment, then returned.

  ‘You are not my father,’ she spoke flatly, looking down at him. The water inched up his chest. When it touched his neck, his composure seemed to leave him.

  ‘Help me,’ he whispered. Juliette knelt quickly.

  ‘Tell me,’ she hissed. ‘Give me the name. Tell me my father’s name.’

  ‘I will tell you. Please, closer. I want to tell …’ His hands were struggling to reach her through the bars. The mouth swallowed, tried to form itself; then he whispered into her ear.

  Lemprière heard her cry, ‘No! You lie!’ He ran to the shaft as Juliette stumbled back and ran to the door. The water had reached the bars. The Viscount’s face was distorted against them, mouth working to pull air into his lungs. But the water rose inexorably, closing over the mouth, eyes and nose. Lemprière watched as the Viscount’s body plummeted silently down the flooded shaft until it was swallowed by the black waters of the Beast.

  He turned and walked out of the cellar, into the archive beyond. He looked left and right down avenues of mouldering paper and was about to call when he heard the door slam shut on the far side of the archive.

  ‘Juliette?’ he called. ‘Juliette!’ He ran forward into the gloom of the archive but she was gone. She had fled him again. Why?

  Capacious Beast, deep sink and thrashing pit, allow the conflicting versions their measure now; let them meld in these last seizur
es of your stony gut. Give this night its pasts and various provenances in all their aspects….

  Most-seeing eyes saw the departures from the chamber. Most-hearing ears heard wood screaming on rock, frail flesh on several hard and narrow truths. There are wounds can be sutured by truths found only in the margins of the wider view. Now, wide wings begin to fold about the wider canvas, overlaying these truths as poultices, one on the next. Grey sheets seen from a thin altitude some months back over Peterwaradin, flapping over in the buoyant gusts, lattice folded onto lattice … the dog-grass very thick and phosphor trails throw their ships forward through the toiling deceitful seas…. No, no keep the vista clear, keep the thin air clear, the brittle sunshine flooding down to throw the gull’s shadow sharp and hard on the confused and human drama below. Most-seeing eyes saw the departures from the chamber, saw the lovers and their pursuers crash towards the Indian. Limbs cramped from the wait stretched and flexed and moved towards the distant door. An inner eye opened and saw the remembered flames swarming up the walls of the citadel. An inmost thought curled about the men abandoned in the chamber. The waiting was almost at an end.

  Three times Jaques heard the waters stop. Three times he thought he might not drown. He thought there was still time; still time to find her, time to reach the ship, to escape, to live. But the waters surged again, a deep roar rolling inevitably through the caverns and chambers towards him, dashing his false hopes against hard truths. He would not find her, or the boy. The Viscount would find them both. Perhaps he would spare them. Perhaps he would tell them the lie of his own manufacture which Casterleigh knew for a truth and would tell them with such flat conviction that they would believe it too. They had all believed it. Even Charles.

  Jaques had hardly felt the blade, had hardly moved as Le Mara drove home the knife. Now it was a shard of ice lodged against his spine. He leaned forward and heard the hilt knock against the back of the chair which held him prisoner. Below the waist he felt nothing. Boffe’s head twitched again on the table to his left. François muttered in his chair. Behind him, Monopole and Antithe were still as statues. Vaucanson had got to them, tampered with something inside. Now Vaucanson had fled and they were left to wait while Juliette and the boy scrambled through the tunnels with the Viscount at their backs brandishing the lie he had furnished like a cudgel above their hopes. Fathers and false fathers. There had been no time.