Lempriere's Dictionary

by Norfolk, Lawrence

  ‘Plan? What plan?’ broke in Wilberforce as he rejoined the disconsolate pirates.

  ‘And who on earth is “Young Lemprière”?’ added Stoltz. ‘Who on earth are any of you for that matter?’ Wilberforce took his pipe from his pocket and began to pack the bowl with resin.

  ‘Well now,’ he said, ‘that is a yarn certainly worth the telling. Perhaps you remember the Comb Riots back in ‘53.’ He patted his pockets. ‘Does anyone have a match?’ A handful were proffered from below. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘That’ll be tuppence,’ said Captain Roy.

  An hour later perhaps, the pipe had made a couple of rounds and no-one was exactly sure, Stoltz’s men and the pirates sat intermingled together in little clumps dotted up and down the quay. From time to time, someone would clamber to his feet and carry the pipe to an adjacent group, swap a word or two and wander back. The wind was lighter now, the river quiet as the tide began to turn. To the west, an orange halo glowed above the city. Pieces of the Heart of Light tapped gently against the jetty below. They were becalmed. Behind them, the Pool was a dim chaotic sculpture of masts and spars. The compact bulk of the Vendragon rocked gently in the tidal swell.

  ‘… so here we are.’ Wilberforce ended up. Stoltz nodded lazily. Peter Rathkael-Herbert sucked on the pipe and handed it to Eben, who refused for the third time. Wilberforce glanced over his shoulder at the darkened vessel behind. Eben watched him.

  ‘You know her?’

  ‘After a fashion,’ said Wilberforce. The two men eyed each other warily. ‘Thought I might take a look belowdecks,’ he offered. Eben nodded. ‘We’re rather in need of a ship. Our own was, well, swallowed.’

  ‘We saw,’ said Eben. Wilberforce rose to address the pirates who lolled about on the quay.

  ‘Men,’ he began. ‘Once again we find ourselves in something of a desperate strait….’ He spoke on, outlining their position and its attendant perils,’ … and so, I propose the following plan.’ One or two of the pirates looked up as Wilberforce pointed to the ship and argued his point. ‘After all, what have we to lose?’ Horst struggled to his elbows and focused wearily on Wilberforce.

  ‘Wilberforce,’ he said, ‘enough is enough,’ then collapsed. The others were shaking their heads. It was late and they were tired and too old. Eben looked about the retiring crew.

  ‘Looks like just the two of us,’ he said to Wilberforce.

  ‘Three,’ said Roy. Eben rose and looked back along the waterfront. The Crow’s Nest stood like a dark turret against the orange sky. Thick plumes of smoke could be seen rising up out of the glare. The roofs of the city were a drab mosaic.

  ‘Fire,’ he said.

  ‘Opera House,’ murmured Stoltz from the depths of an engulfing dream. There but for the grace of God, thought Eben. Wilberforce was moving amongst his comrades, bending to pat shoulders, shake hands. Presently, he straightened and nodded to Eben and Roy.

  The three captains walked down the quay together towards the waiting ship. As they reached the Vendragon’s gangplank, footsteps were heard behind them. They turned as one. Peter Rathkael-Herbert stood there, bleary-eyed, a little self-conscious.

  ‘Thought I’d better, you know, come along. If that’s alright….’

  ‘Good man, said Eben. Wilberforce clapped him on the back. The four men grinned at one another. ‘Come on then,’ said Roy.

  The decks were deserted. They crept over the poop and down onto the quarter-deck.

  ‘We should split up,’ suggested Roy, ‘and….’

  ‘No!’ Wilberforce almost shouted. Eben looked at him in surprise. ‘I mean, stick together, alright?’ he added in quieter tones. Roy nodded.

  ‘If you like.’

  Peter Rathkael-Herbert lifted the hatch and together they looked down into darkness. Eben smelt Stockholm tar and warm stale air. He thought of the procession of months and the men he had watched from the safety of the Crow’s Nest, his rash promise to young Lemprière. Crates, statues…. Not enough. They climbed down, waiting at the foot of the ladder for Roy, who declined to be lifted. Moonlight poured down the open hatch, showing them the bulky column of the mainmast. Beyond it there were only cleared cabins and neatly stowed gear in both directions. They moved along carefully, pushing open hatches from below but the middle deck was empty as the upper. They climbed down once more, to the lower deck. The moonlight did not reach down this far. Wilberforce felt his way forward by the breaches of the Indiaman’s guns which reduced the deck to a narrow gangway. His head knocked against the timbers of the deck above, then on something which swung. A lamp.

  ‘Matches, Captain Roy,’ he whispered over his shoulder. Roy moved forward. A match flared and Roy shouted suddenly, loudly in the confined space. All four looked about the illuminated deck. The cannon stretched away to either side, fore and aft until the light from the lamp gave out. Beside each cannon stood a man and as the light fell on their faces the eyes opened, click, click, click, click, click…. They were surrounded by weather-tanned faces.

  Then, heavy footsteps moved towards them and out of the darkness came a man. His face was tanned as those of his fellows, his beard as full and his eyes as dead. Eben looked once, then again. It was impossible. He pushed past Wilberforce as the figure halted before them. It was true.

  ‘Alan?’ he blurted in disbelieving tones. ‘Captain Neagle? Is that….’

  ‘The command,’ the figure spoke. His eyes were fixed on Guardian. The voice was flat and uninflected, almost metallic. The four looked at one another, puzzled and dumbfounded at once.

  ‘I think it’s a question,’ said Peter Rathkael-Herbert. Roy looked at Neagle and the crew lining the gunports.

  ‘Cast off,’ he commanded and stepped smartly back as the Vendragon’s crew jumped into long-awaited action.

  She was dead weight, a lifeless thing as he dragged her through the smoke and flames. The roof was a pyre exploding above them, hurling down beams into the burning pit below. The structure groaned, then began its final collapse. Lemprière looked up and saw the buckling roof give way. Something massive crashed down through the tiers, cutting through them like matchwood, then another, and another. From their stations far above, the tortoises were plunging earthwards, bringing down the last of the roof as they smashed through the rails and balconies. He felt flames lick his back as he skirted the bombardment. The stairs were a blazing corridor where the smoke spiralled and sucked the air from his lungs. He pulled her along behind him, choking and heaving, never looking back until he saw the street beyond where he knelt suddenly, feeling faint, his chest tightening. He heard glass shatter somewhere behind him. Men running after the soldiers. He closed his eyes and the black smoke seemed to roll over him again in thick protective waves, darker and darker….

  She was standing above, looking down at him. He rose slowly and began to cough the smoke out of his lungs. When he sought her eye, she had turned away.

  ‘Juliette?’ She did not turn back. He took hold of her and pulled her to him, but as she realised his intention she twisted free.

  ‘My own father….’ Her voice was quiet. He barely heard her.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Dead. All dead.’ A whisper.

  ‘But you said … You told me he was nothing to you, nothing….’ She turned on him, her face full of anger.

  ‘Not the Viscount, you fool! Don’t you understand? My father! Can you not know? Can you really not guess what we have done?’

  Behind them both, the blackened walls of the Opera House began to crumble inwards. The high arches of the facade broke and flames roared through the openings. The whole construction seemed to melt, not fall, sagging, then collapsing in on itself, sending a mushroom-cloud of ash and dust up into the sky as notice of its destruction.

  Carried downstream on the ebbing tide past Shadwell, the Isle of Dogs, the yards at Blackwall and the drifting lights of Gravesend, through the shoals and sandbars of the estuary to the open sea beyond, the crew of the Vendragon laboured in
silence with the creaking rigging, as the gyring wind caught her sails, and the race of Alderney thrust her forward, a destined capsule, south with the Channel currents towards Rochelle. Eben, Roy, Wilberforce and Peter Rathkael-Herbert stood together on the quarterdeck and watched the crew at work. Neagle strode up and down the vessel’s decks, passing by them without acknowledgement. The sea was black and silver. Moonlight caught the wavelets and the lights of the western ports were distant beacons, ignored and passed by as they sped south. Water rushed against the hull and Captain Guardian thought of nights in the South China Sea. The air was so warm and laden, the sky so clear.

  High above the deck, the Vendragon’s crew shinned along the yard-arms to put on sail. The canvas swelled above them and the ship sprang forward, prow cutting the water to leave a shimmering wake behind. Wilberforce watched as familiar landmarks slid by to port. The last voyage of the Heart of Light was being reprised, but accelerated and in reverse as Cherbourg and Lorient glimmered out from the low coastline. Spurs, points and cliffs were smudged together in the darkness but he remembered each one. He thought of the journeys undertaken by the vessel which surged beneath him now, the repeated dog-leg, east to west then south to north and back. He imagined the waters where the Mediterranean became the Atlantic, sea became ocean, and in his mind’s eye they were scored over like ice on a skating-pond as the Vendragon turned there year after year before finding its bearing and continuing along its second axis. Could the sea ever become too-travelled, ever become worn? Huge zigzags ran across the ocean’s surface as the voyages of possible ships scored their fading trails. Mats of phosphor and waterspouts were the true coordinates, shifting things. A school of whales was an island; invisible junctions of latitude and longitude marked every scrap of flotsam. The mysteries were not polar, but diffuse, dissolved in the corroding brine. Wilberforce looked out over the stern and saw the last voyage of the Heart of Light reaffirmed in the Vendragon’s glowing then fading wake.

  The dark territory of the Vendée passed by to port and presently the land fell back as the coastline swung away. A low island seemed to weigh anchor and drift out from the shore as the Vendragon headed in. Presently, Peter Rathkael-Herbert squinted, then pointed to a faint glow shining out from one of the points. As he did so, the ship lurched violently to port, changing bearing and heading for the spot as though complying with his signal. All four men watched as the faint glow drew nearer. A green light was signalling to the Vendragon, a beacon drawing her in towards the coast.

  ‘That’s our landfall,’ said Eben with conviction.

  ‘Where are we?’ asked Peter Rathkael-Herbert.

  ‘If that’s Île de Ré,’ Wilberforce pointed to the dark island now to starboard, ‘then we’re about four leagues out from Rochelle.’

  The Opera House was a smouldering pile. Men were running down the street carrying buckets. It was too late. The mob had gone. In its place, bewildered clumps of men and women streaked with smoke from the torches and the fire drifted in the street. They seemed puzzled, as though some expected result had failed to materialise from their efforts. Ash sent up by the theatre’s collapse was returning to earth now, falling as black confetti on Lemprière and Juliette.

  ‘The Viscount told you? He told you the name?’ he questioned her. She nodded. ‘Who?’

  Paper trails formed and dissolved in the air around his head. The smell of burning still stung his nostrils. Little trails formed lines between them, receipts ‘reçu par Madame K.’, forgive me, Marianne …, the short span of her years tracing a shallow arc back to Paris and a house in the Rue Boucher des Deux Boules the night it had rained. Could Casterleigh have drawn these lines right? He saw her dropping down from the coach, slap her hand against the table in the library. Absence of light. Ignorance. He let her go in the archive, lost her at the top of the shaft. Her face was pulled back from his own behind the glass of the coach-window, receding into different kinds of darkness. She was a shifting presence beside him, a hungry mouth feeding on him in the narrow bed, suddenly his lover. His need was quick, easily satisfied there. Charles sat in rented rooms writing to his wife. The ideogram assembled itself as a monstrous engine, a cipher of them both, but counter to their pairing, Casterleigh’s engine, gears clacking as it chases them to the point where she would turn to him dead-eyed and answer: ‘Your father. Yours and mine both.’

  The boy led him in a stumbling run north along Bishopsgate then west into the maze of alleys below London Wall and after that he did not know. He felt soft mud, packed earth, cobbles, flagstones and boards underfoot. He heard the boy’s light footsteps running ahead of him, and from time to time the distant roar of the mob. He was lost in the twists and turns of his guide’s elected path and hardly knew if he were hurrying through some narrow and overhung rat-run or striding in full view down the centre of the Strand. When he called ahead to his guide, the boy answered in terms that meant nothing to him. They were close by that alley by the Magpie, or rounding the corner from Silvero’s. Magpie. Silvero’s. The boy’s city was incomprehensible.

  ‘Wait here, Sir John.’ He stopped and heaved breath into his lungs. The boy ran on ahead. A minute or two passed while he listened to his thudding heart. Then the boy returned. ‘All clear, Sir John.’ He suffered himself to be led around a corner into the silence of the street beyond. Again the boy stopped.

  ‘We’re here, Sir John. You’ll be safe here.’ They climbed a short set of steps and Sir John felt his hand being guided to the handle on the door.

  ‘Where are we?’ he asked, as he pushed and opened the door. The cold interior air drifted out as he stepped within. ‘Boy?’ There was no reply. ‘Are you there?’ A faint, familiar smell of carbolic reached his nostrils from the cellars below. The boy was already gone. He was alone in the mortuary.

  ‘Good lad,’ he murmured as he made his way down the familiar stairs. The months of waiting were over. He had faced Farina at last and now, even in defeat, he felt the weight of his enemy’s presence lift from his shoulders. He had led his men to battle and they had fled. Only the boy had stayed to lead his defeated general to sanctuary.

  The stairs gave out onto a smooth stone floor. At the back of Rudge’s dissection-room, he recalled, stood a high-backed chair. Sir John fumbled a path to it about the slabs and tables. Henry had never faced a night such as this, and if he had, what could he have done? Nothing, thought Sir John. Nothing at all.

  By his later reckoning, two hours had passed when the door to the street opened for a second time. Sir John heard a match strike on the floor above, then listened as heavy footsteps descended with a familiar gait.

  ‘Rudge?’ The footsteps stopped.

  ‘Sir John.’

  ‘Did you see them, Rudge? They had the body. How on earth …’

  ‘I saw, Sir John.’ Sir John paused. There was something in Rudge’s voice he did not like.

  ‘Tell me, Rudge. How do you come to be here?’

  ‘I came to find you, Sir John.’ Sir John rose and faced his visitor.

  ‘You found me before,’ he said carefully, listening for the other’s movements.

  ‘And lost you too,’ said the other. The voice was changed, deeper and more inflected. Changed, and yet still familiar. Could he have been deceived for so long?

  ‘I felt we should meet, Sir John. At least this once.’ He knew now, knew how his every move had been forestalled, his every precaution met and countered by his invisible foe. He had always been too late, always too far behind to catch more than the drift of the situation. Now his phantom had stopped, turned, and come back for him.

  ‘You have won,’ Sir John said. ‘The city is yours. Stay or go as you please. I have nothing to say to you.’

  Sir John heard the glass hood being lifted off the oil-lamp, the intake of breath and sharp exhalation as the flame was blown out. He smelt smoke from the wick.

  ‘No, Sir John,’ Farina said then. ‘I have failed. My own men have failed me. It is you who have won tonight.’
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  As the Vendragon drew nearer her beacon, the crew worked hard aloft to slacken sail. The three captains and Peter Rathkael-Herbert watched as the coast came into view. The green light was set halfway up a shallow slope. A jetty ran out to sea, off the point. On the strand behind it, Eben was able to make out a long line of carts, twenty or more, and assembled loosely about them, a large crowd of men armed with jemmies and long-handled hammers. The jetty was coming up faster than he had thought and for a moment he felt that the ship must collide with it, but no, the broad gangplank was sliding safely to port, the hawsers running over the bitts below, and lines thrown to waiting hands were being made fast. The gang of men ashore began to march towards the ship. Two better dressed than the others were walking ahead up the jetty towards the Vendragon. Wilberforce looked at the forces ranged before them and turned to Eben.

  ‘Don’t like the looks of this much.’ Eben nodded.

  ‘We’ll parley with them,’ he said.

  The four men trooped dutifully down the gangplank to meet the approaching pair, who turned to one another and whispered as they drew close.

  ‘Evening!’ Eben greeted them.

  They whispered again, then one extended his hand. ‘Welcome to you all,’ said the shorter of the two. ‘Monsieur Jaques is still aboard?’

  ‘Jaques? Don’t think I know any Jaques. We’re here for young Lemprière,’ Captain Guardian affirmed stoutly. More whispering followed this statement. The jetty was filled with men who stood behind their two commanders as they conferred between themselves. At length, Duluc turned from his companion to address the crowd behind. He spoke in stirring tones with much pointing to the four of them but all in French, so that only Peter Rathkael-Herbert had the roughest notion of his message.

  ‘They’re congratulating us,’ he relayed. ‘Without our sacrifice, all would have been lost. Something else…. We are the unsung heroes of, of the Revolution.’

  ‘Very nice,’ said Eben.