Lemprière's Dictionary

by Lawrence Norfolk

  His stomach heaved and more blood ran into his throat. Any moment now his partners would throw open the door and free him, coming for him as angels of mercy, agents of deliverance, as they had that night, the night the lie had begun. Soon, he quelled his fear. They would come as they had before. Or the boy! Yes, he would return to help old Jake, help his father’s old friend, just as Charles himself would have done. Charles would not leave him. Not Charles, with his obstinate decency, his refusal to shrug off the onus, though he should have when the letter came and he, Jaques, had told him so, told him to ignore it. The woman wanted money, nothing more and he should give nothing. He saw the lie swelling her belly. Return it unopened, he heard his own vehement advice and might have said more then but Charles believed the child was his and the onus was his too. So he paid and the Viscount had given his dogs the scent and they had led him back down the trail of receipts to the house in Paris, its windows glowing in squares of red and the rain pouring down on them both as they stumbled dripping into the hallway.

  Casterleigh had found her a dozen years later, had twisted her to the shape he wished and dangled her before them, here in this very chamber, fashioning her as the bastard-Lemprière he would turn on the father and son both. His delight at the prize, at the neat triangle they would form. He might have spoken out then, but he had kept silent, thinking back to the night they found refuge in the Rue Boucher des Deux Boules, in the Villa Rouge; the night it had rained.

  The business with the Indian was over. Vaucanson had him trussed in the coach already. The rain still poured, pounding like the waters outside the door. Inside, the candles burned as they did now behind him and the women moved like beautiful ghosts, wheeling about him in their finery, paste glittering on their fingers and about their necks. It was almost dawn. He had walked upstairs in search of Charles. Outside the door, the first crash sounded. He was opening doors, peering in to find his friend. Again, a crash, louder this time. He felt the blood heaving in his throat. Candles glaring behind him. She was sitting upright in the disorder of the bed. Charles was slumped beside her, dead to the world with the drink. The room was red, but that was not how it had been. His head spun and she moved slightly. She was saying something and the rain was too loud, the water roaring outside the door. The sheet which had covered her fell away. Charles stirred and she looked down sourly. Her whole body was red, and his own, as though the house were burning down around them. Her legs parted in invitation. The ceiling was a dark circle swelling out above them, folds unfurling and eyelids peeling back, a blackened face looking down on him. Not simply black. Charred. The door swung open. Charles stirred beside them. A baby’s face, its charred lips moving and eyes blinking behind peeling eyelids, but not in the bedroom now. In the doorway to the chamber.

  It seemed that time had stood still, pent up behind the remembered scene and now released, it sped forward as the door crashed back, splintering from the force of the entry. A figure stood amidst the wreckage of the door. The sound of roaring water crashed over Jaques’ head. His own blood was filling his eyes with red but the raging torrent beyond the door glared with green light, forcing aside the crimson film until he saw the three ships being tossed and mangled in the torrent rising outside the chamber. The figure in the doorway turned its charred face to him, an avenging angel whispering inside his head of matters they both already knew. The ships were crashing into one another, hulls splintering and spilling their cargoes into the air, barrels which burst open and loosed clouds of choking powder to swirl above the tortured vessels, their work all but done. Now the avenging angel turned from Jaques to the one who sat at the table’s head and Jaques watched as he knelt before François. He seemed to speak but the words were lost in the cacophany of shattering spars and the pounding of Jaques’ own heart. He choked and struggled but he was drowning, dying and no-one would come for him. The light seemed to fade. Juliette? No, she was lost to him now. The angel had risen and François’ mouth was working, trying to speak as the torch was plucked from the wall and the clouds of dust swirled thicker, great swathes of yellow and grey with every combustible surface exposed, only waiting for the spark. Tisiphone, Megaera, Alecto. Matchwood, spent vessels. Jaques gulped for air and found only blood. The dark angel turned, an infant’s smile burned across his face. François was screaming at him but the words were lost. The black figure turned. Jaques saw the arm draw back, then hurl the lamp and its eight flaring candles into the heart of the powder.

  The Europe-machine grows confused. Duplicate messages are crashing through its ports, lagging copies of one another which lap the control-loops in decaying orbits. The congruence is inexact, the once-strong signal breaking up. The beacon pulses from the hillside north of Rochelle but the bearing is off by fractions of degrees and a skewed version is the result in the streets of London tonight. At the Opera House the luckless cognoscenti await Marchesi with hungry ears. On the quayside there are rough rapprochements going on, pirate-ague crossbreeding with Stoltz-fever to derive a new resistant strain. Subterranean vectors lead away from one another, not towards as they should. It’s all going wrong. The assassins wheel away, thrust meeting counterthrust, westwards into the darkness. The Viscount is already spent. Lemprière runs through the echoing corridors of his lost love, up and out of the buried circuits which still wind down and hum with nascent surges as the ships commingle their cargoes and the most-knowing player, the nearest we have to a perfect observer, takes the candles in his hand, waiting to send his signal up, to bridge the two orders and shunt the greatest of all these players forward. Hundreds of feet above this ignition the charge is waiting to go off. The Mob is massed in Leadenhall Street.

  The day’s preceding blazing heat, the whole heat of summer behind it, has baked the fat black ground. The surging river has filled the riven trenches and the saturated mulch has bubbled and thickened to a foaming broth which crystallises in the parching sun. A vast salpeterflöz lies fallow and waiting for the coarser elements of sulphur and charcoal to bring the mixture right. The proportions are shifting, racing each other up and down the columns, small arms, cannon and blasting powders aligning themselves in ratios of saltpetre, sulphur and charcoal, 75:10:15 edging closer towards the magical 75:12:13 where the compounds and elements can recombine and blow apart. The powder is tinder dry, the mixture is close enough. In the entrails of the Beast the match is already lit, is poised above the fuse. A vast powder-mine sits below the city and perhaps the city knows this for the buildings are voiding their interiors into the streets which fill with refugees from the old order, seekers after the new. The alleys and byways contract and expand as if the guts of the monster below have come to life and broken through its stony skin to form a supple exoskeleton here on the crawling surface above. Jostling bodies cram the city’s conduits and the torchlight is a deep red glare after the darkened interior behind him as Lemprière bursts on the scene and runs down the steps of East India House, drilling his way into the mob which stretches away down Leadenhall Street, pushing aside the rioters-in-waiting in his desperate search, for he has lost her again, and now he calls ‘Juliette! Juliette!’ but she cannot hear him, she has gone and all he finds are vulgar insurgents.

  Men’s faces, orange and yellow in the torchlight, fill the street and snake back out of sight, all looking west to the cowering beadles and the Militia who oppose them from a safe distance at the far end of the thoroughfare. So far, the rabble is a torpid beast, its main body still digesting the options, but at the squamid head of this hydra is Farina. A wind is blowing, a hot wind strengthening by the minute. His hair flies out behind him as he addresses the mob.

  Lemprière elbows his way through the sluggish body, drawing curses and the odd cuff as he goes, craning his head for a view, still shouting her name. The crowd shifts and murmurs around him. There are groups who are shouting and groups who are silent in face of the gathering thought. Farina is pointing. The crowd’s mood is beginning to turn. Lemprière looks about him, his urgent gaze sweeping the f
aces who are all intent on something further up. Four men at the front of the crowd bend to pick something up. The mob’s attention focuses on their efforts, its own desires clotting about this new spectacle. Lemprière looks over tousled heads as the four men advance carrying an object he dreaded then, has imagined since, and dreads again now. Could it be?

  Farina’s voice lifts over the crowd, over the howling wind.

  ‘… and this, this is what they conceal from our justice!’ The mob focus as the four men lift their load into plain view. Yes, Lemprière thinks numbly. A part of his nightmare is hoisted up to face him once again, the obscene stump still lodged in her mouth, the tattered blue dress shredded and flying in the wind. The air is close suddenly, the smell of decay strong and he is back at the De Veres’ staring down into the pit as now the corpse seems to stare only at him. But only for a moment. Somewhere beneath his feet, somewhere beneath all their feet, a low rumble starts up. The ground itself begins to shake. Lemprière looks around in a panic as the sound grows and grows until it is not a sound but a physical force. Then, somewhere behind him, from somewhere deep below his feet, the full force of the explosion erupts into the street.

  So it begins, thought Sir John in the dingy brass and varnish of the Examining Office at Bow Street.

  ‘Arm yourselves,’ he injuncted his beadles in tones instilling urgency and calm. ‘The Militia will join us at the Fleet.’ His guide-boy shuffled beside him. Nervous beadles sweated in their tunics. He could smell it. All day the reports came in of people gathering in the east. A hot wind blew and the streets were oddly quiet. Sir John thought of his old adversary. The boy shifted again, tugging on his chain. Farina.

  ‘On!’ he intoned, and heard his beadles wheel about obediently to follow him forth to war.

  He marched at their head, leading his token force east from Bow Street to cross Drury Lane and continue on through Lincoln’s Inn Fields by Portugal Row into Cursitor Street with the boy clanking a short chainslength ahead and the pattering steps of his beadles bringing up the rear. The Fleet reached, the Militia are added to his band which marches more confidently now through Ellarden Street to the north wall of Saint Paul’s and along Cheapside to Cornhill. The streets are all but deserted according to the boy who keeps up a running commentary along the way. Sir John is heartened by this.

  ‘The Militia behind us,’ he ventures to his guide, ‘they would number, perhaps a thousand men?’

  ‘Thousand S’John? I’m not rightly sure on the counting, sir. Not sure about thousands at all, sir.’

  ‘Several hundreds then. Several hundreds added together, do you follow boy?’

  ‘Oh I knows my hundreds sir. S’only my thousands I’m unsure on. I’ll take a look sir….’ Sir John feels the chain jerk as the boy swivels about. ‘Yes, that’d be about right sir.’

  ‘Several hundreds?’

  ‘About a hundred sir. Perhaps a few less. That’d be enough to sort that Farina out, eh sir?’ But Sir John does not answer. ‘Sir?’

  ‘Yes!’ barks Sir John, thinking, no, a thousand times no. The boy falls silent at this outburst. The chain feels terribly heavy in his hand and the wind is against him, blowing hard into his face.

  The boy is cowed momentarily. He soon pipes up again. ‘There they are, sir! Right ahead of us sir!’

  ‘Halt!’ Sir John raises an arm to the beadles close behind. ‘Fall in!’ He hears the shuffling of nervous military heels. So few, he thinks. Too few.

  ‘These rioters,’ he bends conspiratorially towards his boy, ‘they would number, let me guess, hundreds?’

  ‘Hundreds sir? Oh yes, hundreds easily I should say sir. More like thousands….’ Sir John hears movements to his front and rear, the one a massed grumble, the other a timorous fidget as the resolve of the Militia begins to melt.

  ‘Hold steady!’ he calls over his shoulder, but he knows it is already too late. It was too late months ago. The wind rises again and he can hear Farina’s voice as it is carried down Leadenhall Street towards him.

  ‘… and this, this is what they conceal from our justice!’

  Sir John thinks of concealment, a thing devoutly to be wished, the things concealed and he thinks of Rudge. The boy is saying, ‘They’re lifting something up, Sir John,’ and Sir John already knows the thing Farina has unearthed to goad the mob to fury. Henry is silent within him and the chain clanks as the boy says, ‘They’ve got her, Sir John. That woman you’s always talking about, the dead one …’ Sir John already knows, in his mind’s eye he can already see the blue dress, the blue flesh which even the coldest and deepest of Rudge’s crypts has not preserved from decay and the prying eyes of his adversary, Farina. She is being raised as a gagged totem to their own tongue-tied resentment. She is an outrage they can understand.

  ‘Raise arms!’ he commands in stentorian tones and listens behind for the sharp intake of breath, the rustle of starched uniforms, the cocking of musket-hammers. But the sounds he anticipates are overtaken by another.

  A deep rumble sounds from below. The cobbles beneath his feet seem to ripple as the explosion rips its way into the street somewhere ahead of him. He hears water falling to earth and then silence.

  ‘Take aim!’ His own voice sounds tinny and distant after the din of the eruption. He pauses for a brief moment, imagining the raised muskets, then gives the order. ‘Fire!’

  Silence.

  He starts, as if the reports have indeed gone off behind him. He begins to turn, but checks the movement as the boy’s voice sounds beside him.

  ‘They’re coming towards us, Sir John.’

  ‘Fire!’ he commands again. Again there is silence. Sir John feels panic rising from his stomach. He pulls on the chain but it seems to come loose. He can hear footsteps, thousands upon thousands of footsteps all moving towards him. Suddenly he is a fat blind man. He is far from home. He is alone. A faint noise at his side.

  ‘Boy?’

  ‘I’m still here, Sir John.’

  ‘Good lad. You, you took the collar off?’

  ‘I did Sir John.’ He can hear their voices now, the scrape of advancing feet.

  ‘Are we alone boy?’

  ‘The men’s crept off, Sir John.’ Alone. ‘The other lot, they’re quite close now, Sir John.’ Close. The other lot. He has lost and Farina has won.

  ‘Don’t leave me here,’ he whispers. He waits, ‘Boy?’ There is silence. ‘Boy! Where have …’

  Someone takes the free end of the chain from his hand. ‘Not to worry, Sir John.’

  The wind seemed to carry the scent of decay forty, fifty yards down the street as the corpse was raised before the mob. Somewhere behind him a woman’s voice cried ‘Bet!’, and the crowd about her fell back as she slumped to the ground. He saw Farina with his hair streaming out behind him, face turned into the wind and roaring for justice. The redcoats were melting away beyond him and only Sir John remained. The ground shuddered and quaked, then split as the Furies below took their revenge.

  The waiting has been too long, has become too charged in the years since Rochelle and its unexpended force needs fault-lines and fissures, needs access to the real arena now.

  A vigorous wound opens along the length of Leadenhall Street as the detonation below splits the resistant earth. The mob spills to left and right and it seems that the fissure is directed at Farina who raises his arms in defiance. The jagged mouth tears up the street towards him, widening to swallow him whole but still he stands there, proud and isolated and doomed…. No. The fissure stops inches short of its insolent challenger. Farina is suddenly victor, leader, healer, all of these and more to the mob who begin to creep forward, picking themselves up and relighting those torches doused by the spray. They are all his followers now, even Lemprière, if for other reasons. Sir John is slipping away down a sidestreet led by a small boy on what looks like a length of string. The mob inches forward, then swaggers, then runs towards its leader who shouts, ‘To the Opera House!’ as he is swept up and along in the furi
ous surge, westwards in pursuit of the Militia.

  The rag-ends of the mob, its stragglers and wavering followers, walk either side of the water-filled crack which runs the length of Leadenhall Street. Soon the thoroughfare is deserted. Water slops in the fissure. The force of the explosion below has peeled back the surface of the street to form a lip on either side of the crack. Odd bubbles rise through its surface and the wind drives ripples down its length. The water grows agitated. There are other bodies and they are rising now. The liquid shifts more urgently. A dark shape is rolling and rising through the blind waters, snagging and freeing itself on the jagged sides of the fissure. It surfaces as a corpse, slick and shiny, the arms waving vaguely. The street is silent and deserted. East India House looms above. The waters stir again. Further down the fissure, a second body is rising to the surface. For a moment it seems to hang suspended in the water, then the head lifts and its arms reach for the air.

  He could not believe the scale of it, the measureless expansion of candlelight to inferno in a split second and the blistering heat, the black sheet of force which swept out from the explosion as the ships flared like lucifers and dashed the chamber to a paste of wood and water and flesh. Goodbye François. His old fear raced against the flames but the flames won, as they always had. His victim’s throne was splinters, his throne-room crushed. François was melting flesh and it was finished at last. The earth and rocks were his laurels and the cracked passage to the air above was his progress through the applauding ghosts of Rochelle. The earth peeled open and the sky above was his. Why should he linger now? Why waver between water and air? The fires were doused and the screams of the burning were whispers telling him to rise up and leave, to join them at last. Why then should he think of Lemprière?