Lemprière's Dictionary

by Lawrence Norfolk

  Dread runs like a shiver through the body of the crowd. Men carve a swathe as they run for the doors. The first smoke disperses and reaches the nostrils of every mendicant or hopeful traveller to this place, every child and cowering mother. But the doors are barred from without and the first men are signalling in vain, waving back the panicked waves and slowly sinking beneath the bodies of their fellows which pile up in a mound. A woman begins to scream on the far side of the hall. His brothers and sisters cling to one another and his mother holds him tight as if to guard his sight from what follows. He twists in her arms and watches in baby-silence, still indifferent, eyes opened wide to the spectacle. Smoke creeps from between the planking of the floor and the wailing of the men and women grows louder. The men who addressed them are gone. The first flames eat through the boards on the far side and then, for some little time, nothing happens. The Rochelais wheel about and the small fire burns tamely. These are strange minutes. The Rochelais feel that they should panic, but they do not panic. Those standing in the tiered balconies look down in silence on those below. Those below look to each other. The fire burns a little brighter. People begin to turn away and cough into their handkerchiefs. The floor is warm through the thin cloth wrapped about their feet, and growing warmer. The fire is below, in the cellars. He coughs and his eyes begin to stream. His mother draws her children about her and speaks to them in an urgent undertone. Families are huddled together all about the crowded hall, motherless, or fatherless, or childless. None of her words will make any difference. Everyone caught in the quiet of the hiatus knows what is going to happen.

  Even as he watches, the fire shoots suddenly upwards, the nearest spill back, a woman falls and the smoke is thicker than before. The tier above begins to smoulder. They are trying to climb down to the floor below but the floor itself is sagging and coming away from the wall. Abruptly it dips and through the fissure the Rochelais can see the inferno in the cellars below. Men and women clinging to the balconies above drop one by one to the sloping floor and slide very slowly into the flames below. The furnace roars and the men and women shout in terror, but it is the screams of those sliding down into the fire which are loudest. The windows shatter with a crash. The thick smoke wheels about and makes for the cooler air beyond. He can hear the sea very faintly. Flames break through the floor and smoke runs along the ceiling in a black wave. The first tier falls spilling bodies into the conflagration. The air is thick with ash and debris. He howls to his mother who still holds him as she turns to gather the others of her children. The floor groans and shifts. There are men crouching in the alcoves of the windows hauling people up from the floor and she makes for them. The fire roars and forces them back. A figure stumbles forward like a blind man. His body is ablaze and he runs from one person to another, but though his mouth seems to open and close no sound escapes. A second man runs towards him, then he turns and both are lost in the smoke and the bodies. She tries again. He sees her hair melting and changing shape. Her skirts have caught and the other children are already lost. The heat is fiercer, sucking out his breath and drying his face which seems to crackle. She moves to beat out the flames but it is too late. Only the infant matters now. Her mouth is to his ear, whispering her message. He is lifted up and her last quick words are a cry as he is pulled free and shown the vista from the window’s arch which is air falling to earth hundreds of feet below, tumbling and plunging and howling through the night air as the Rochelais burn behind him, his mother, brothers, sisters, friends, neighbours, strangers.… He sees rocks and sea hurtling towards him. He sees his body blazing to earth like a dying comet.

  Falling, he saw the wall of the citadel pierced with fires, his mother’s face dwindling and whirling in and out of view, her words ringing in his ears. His swaddling clothes unfurled in the air’s rush and streamed behind him in blazing fillets as he fell. His skin was blackening and the flesh beneath prickled as though the aether itself were rarified to fire. The air threw him down its dark tunnel and he heard her last injunction spiral about his fall, his vector already governed, already set out. Your father…. These last words. Find him. Tell him. But the betrayal being so great, its embrace so wide this November night, who might escape to tell of it? Tell him. And the air being so thick with escaping souls, black as his charred skin and the water that rushed towards him, how might he be found? Find him. The rocks upon which his blazing frame will break are dull projections covered and uncovered by the racing tide. The last cries and dying falls are behind him but still loud. His own shrill howl is a tiny protest carried on the flood of protestant souls to the cusp of a wailing arc, a preterite wave peaking in the very moment of his impact, breaking and finding no outlet for its overspilling force, descending upon the single soul which hovers between life and death, air and gross earth, choosing then the infant as the only possible vessel, hovering like a blur as the dead fall is bent away from the vertical to a straining ellipse which breaks and shoots its parabola out over the fluid troughs of the harbour water, carrying himself, Septimus, the seventh of seven, a supercharged particle freighted with the souls of the dead and his mother’s last words, skimming the waves with his exact purpose still dormant and unformed, watched in the grey light of dawn by eight pairs of eyes, eight men who will await his return, nameless for the moment, and a ninth who is not present here and yet will come to know him more clearly than any of them. He leaves the burning citadel already christened. He is the Sprite of Rochelle, the Flying Man.

  Gulls over the port of London were dots in an otherwise empty sky. The Vineeta sailed downriver from the jetty. Septimus hung in the air high above the boat. He felt the high winds swing about and when he looked down saw the two of them shiver as the breeze found their hiding-place. Captain Radley threw down a blanket. ‘But why?’ Lemprière was asking. ‘Why should he tell you? He was their creature all along.’ The girl was shaking her head. ‘I should have known, should have guessed it was Jaques….’ But she could never have known, thought the figure above. She had to crawl inside his head to find the truth, and now he was buried deep with his secrets beneath the city. No, she could never have known. Charles himself had been deceived. Jaques’ unsteady progress up the stairway of the Villa Rouge, pushing open the door and finding her unsatisfied with Charles Lemprière slumped oblivious beside her. Perhaps Charles was the catalyst, the fear of his awakening quickening both their appetites as Jaques stood in the doorway there and she sat upright in the dawn light and shrugged. Why not? There would have been no thought of consequences. It would be quick, a matter of low sighs and stifled exhalations in the grey dawn light, the sleeper adding his unknowing frisson to the jade and her client as the contract was made and fulfilled. And then, when both men were gone, she would peer into the book kept by Madame Stéphanie and see Charles’s name…. And then, nine months later, when the product of that encounter was delivered, she would recall the name and write to him. So the deception began which would outrun all Jaques’ efforts to harness it, taking in Charles and Casterleigh and Charles’s son and even the girl until he found her wandering by the burning wreckage of the theatre, told her and walked away. ‘But why?’ The young man was unappeased, his question driven by more than curiosity. ‘Why should he help you?’ he asked the girl. Not her, thought the figure above, it was for you, John Lemprière. For all the Lemprières.

  Heliotrope-Sprite, vector bent about the sun. A drab November fireball climbed over the eastern horizon, rolled west and fell into the night. He skimmed across the waves until Rochelle was a dying ember behind him. The rolling wave of souls extended to either side, thousands of tiny black wings stranded between the sea-surface and rare aether above, weighted with their protests which surrounded him and mingled with his mother’s words until they were garbled and formed anew. Find them, tell him, kill them, tell them…. He tried to flee but they pursued him, shrieking and screaming, never letting him rest until his resolution was made. The task stretched ahead of him like an expanse of empty days. They had been aban
doned, sacrificed, betrayed. But there would be redress. There would be settlement. Eight pairs of eyes turned from the city’s wreck to the seas beyond. Eight men saw him hurled from the window, fall blazing to the harbour, saw the arc of his fall flatten, saw the flames doused and the body rise tempered and directed in a broad curve out to sea. And there was one who saw none of this, a ninth.… He circled high over the dying city and watched as its walls and bastions were razed. He saw columns of men and women trudge east into the marshlands and in the ragged mouth of the harbour engineers toiling to dismantle the mole. He felt constrictions as his orbit grew wider, resistances, as though Rochelle was a mass exerting a force which he could not escape. He ranged about the clear air and sensed a more distant pull. A second body called from the north-east, a different destination which dragged him around until his circle became a wide ellipse. His motions were only partly his own. The souls of the Rochelais were trapped and he with them. The sun would rise and fall and whirl about the earth and he would swing north and east, then spin down in a helical glide to the second focus of his elliptical kingdom. He would see the broad smudge of coastlines hem a glassy sea and abutting that sea with high cliffs an island of grass scored with fences, tracks and roads, the verdure broken by outcrops of red granite. The island is Jersey, called Caesarea by the Romans, where he would find the proxies for his task: the Lemprières.

  Investments: the silence of Jersey’s night would be broken with whispers, rumours, infernal stories. He would come in guises, descending from the air to visit them in turn over the decades which followed. There would be intimations of what had happened, hints of what might be: the flight of the Nine from the burning city, their exile, the Company and its prime movers, mysterious ships disappearing and reappearing, a lost legacy, an inheritance waiting to be claimed and even as he dropped these crumbs to his elected surrogates he would hear the thin wail of the souls start up. Then his face would cloud over, his seeming-casual manner dissolve into vagueness and his persuasive words falter. More than once a Lemprière had leaned across then and inquired solicitously after his health before recalling him to his theme ‘… yes, a ship of four hundred tons …’ or the fire, the treasure or any one of a thousand other details which might combine to drag the Nine from their den up into the light which blazed out of Rochelle. They were buried deep, and he was a creature of the air. The face across the table would nod, or recoil in horror at the charges. He needed these men, investing them as his proxies and sending them after the Nine as his mother had sent him after her lover and husband; his father. He needed the Lemprières, and they served his needs. They went forth under his banner as warriors, scouts, spies, agents provocateurs, seekers after the truth, exacters of revenge. They returned, if at all, as corpses: floating in on the tide, clutching their throats as the poison swelled their tongues, stabbed, crippled, hunted down, torn apart. He would look down on the cadaver, wait, then move on to the next. He never told the successor of his legacy. If he harboured doubts, the unquiet souls would scream and the sky would open its vast reproachful eye which looked down on him un-blinkingly until his purpose was reaffirmed, the next Lemprière invested and the cycle begun again. He was their curse; a miasma or pestilence of the soul. He thought of Asiaticus’s last pamphlet and knew himself as Xerxes, the general who cowered behind his troops and asked how many might survive the slaughter.

  Justice would reach a long arm after the Nine. Expected, allowed for, justice came at intervals and wore different guises and faces. The angles were always altered, the siege or the ships, the Company or citadel, never the same bearing twice. Only the name never changed: Lemprière. From the stony corridors and passages of their lair beneath the city, they sent his emissaries back to him. His hand drove the steady succession on, father to son down generations and decades, the legacy becoming a curse until he saw the Lemprières as a line of dead men stretching back into the past and forward into the future, hardly born before doomed to play the failed revenger and perish. And behind them all, the weight of souls pressed forward urging release, the citadel still burned and his mother’s words ran like a single thread through all the tangle of lives cut short that night. He flew the high altitudes and looked up to the stellar spaces which he could not reach. Cold lights signalled junctions and invisible lines ran across the night sky marking tangents and arcs in the blue-black dome. He saw the map of his ascent traced for him already in the vault of heaven. He wanted to rise higher but his limbs were leaden, the aether too thin to take him up. He looked down and saw the ocean’s basin heave and slop. There were no routes marked for him in its chopping monotone, no possible vectors, only the Lemprières and the Nine and himself lodged between them. He flew on, but the sky was pushing fingers of light into the night-sky which tightened to a balled fist of fire rising over the horizon. The furnace blazed in his face and his old terror rose to meet it. He saw the floor buckle, the Rochelais slide down into the flames below. He saw his own face begin to char from the heat. The fire would always beat him. The sea was a glaring sheet of light, suddenly calm beneath him. Ahead was the island where his latest emissary waited.

  Keeping the arm steady, that was the knack. He was early, waiting for his man at the inn in Saint Helier. Market noises outside disturbed him for a moment. He settled again, then extended his arm, lifted and began to gulp. The liquid slid down his throat, his eyes began to water and then he was coughing and spluttering, handing the emptied yard back to his opponent who was slapping him on the back and passing it over to be refilled. ‘Good man, good man!’ He belched and grinned. His body was tall, his adopted face clean-shaven, with dark colouring. He was a marine surveyor. His drinking companion had learned of this then launched into a long technical monologue to do with lagoon harbours. He was the captain of a vessel unloading in the harbour below, an affable man of forty or more. It was mid-morning and the inn was quiet. They had differed over groynes and the drinking-bout was the result. Now the captain drank in his turn but the yard of ale seemed a furlong, a mile…. Too far and he dashed it down half-drunk, defeated. Septimus offered consolation and the conversation drifted. Presently, a tall man entered, paused and looked around the room. Septimus excused himself and rose to greet the man. ‘Mister Philips?’ Philips, Philpot, Philby, any name but his own. It made no difference. They sat down together and it was only then that he noticed the boy who stood by the man and who watched him in unblinking silence. He talked in an undertone of harbour draughts and tonnages, of a strange ship running unknown cargoes up the coast, of Rochelle. The man knew something of the matter already and talked of his father who had had suspicions, but he was dead now and the matter might have been closed. The boy stared solemnly at him throughout. Yes, it was very interesting, intriguing. He would look into it after his return from Paris. An investment; a wallpaper factory, in partnership with a friend. Then he had risen, but the boy had only stood there, still staring, until his father was forced to call him, ‘Come now, son….’ The boy was in a world of his own. His father called again, ‘John?’

  Looking down on the Vineeta as she entered the estuary he saw the same strange child, full-grown now. The earlier face had remarked itself to him in the inn. The child stared with a peculiar intensity as though he knew the stranger before him for what he was. This stranger had led his forbears to their deaths at the hands of the Nine, now he sought the same for his father. Perhaps Septimus suspected even then that Charles would fail and was already gauging his son for the task. He peered into the boy’s face and his gaze focused on the eyes whose pupils were swollen to black port-holes in the dim interior of the inn. He looked closer. Something moved behind the boy’s eyes. The boy might be the one. He looked again, yes, certain now. He would have to get close, close enough to guide him to the sticking point. But once there, he would not fail. Tiny fingures moved behind the boy’s eyes, like souls but with their features all jumbled together. They were energetic, scrambling and jostling together. The souls of the Rochelais dead could sense them a
nd responded with wailings and protests so insistent that Septimus could hardly keep the visage before him. The boy’s face was perfectly expressionless, his stare quite even and in the end he had to look away. Charles Lemprière called to his son from the door but either the boy chose to ignore the summons or he was lost in some other, private version of the world. He never guessed the boy might simply be short-sighted. Charles called again. The boy turned and walked solemnly across to his father. On the far side of the inn his late drinking-companion shifted in his seat. Captain Guardian stirred himself and called for food. A girl swung her hips around the counter towards him. He would have to get close. The boy was his own omen. There were demons in his head, eumenides and avenging furies. Abandoned gods for the abandoned Rochelais. He looked back to the doorway but Charles and his son were already gone.

  Metamorphoses: Septimus into the Flying Man, the carrier of souls, avenging and recording angel, the Sprite of Rochelle; Rochelle into ashes and ashes into the miasmal fog behind which the Nine had fled to London; London into their unwitting host. He must get closer…. After the meeting on Jersey, Septimus into Company cadre, an eager initiate proving his worth to the unseen powers that be, a young recruit sending false signals to bring the admirals closer. The admirals into the Nine, the Nine into something other.… He sensed it as the Viscount and his partner questioned him, some non-human addition. He must not arouse their suspicions. Septimus into their accomplice, part of the developing plot against this next and latest Lemprière. Charles into a torn corpse by the edge of the pool on Jersey. Septimus will be a trusted lieutenant to the Nine, a false-faced Achates to Lemprière’s doomed Aeneas, a betrayer of both camps. Then, when they told him the plan and his own part in its execution, he remembered the boy’s face from the inn. They would deceive him with their actors, engines and machinery, give him his demons in the flesh. They would send him into madness and bring him back as one of their own. He was the last of the Lemprières, different from the others. At first he thought they knew, that they had seen the same demons in the boy’s eyes that he had seen himself. It was not so. They sought to convince the boy of something that was already true. They did not know how their victim might change. Metamorphoses of the Lemprière: into fatherkiller, into madman, into seeker after truths. Septimus had watched his arrival in the city, his wrong-headed turns about the market, his bungling search for his lodgings. He had flown by the uncurtained window and seen his sleeping face bleached white by the moonlight. He had risen and looked down on the sleeping city, seeing in its network of streets and alleys the emerging tracery of an older conflict. Lemprière into his own revenger.