Lempriere's Dictionary (100 page)

‘Saint Peter Port?’ The young man nodded. ‘No cabin, mind you.’ The young man nodded again and offered him the fare in silence.

‘Cast off!’ shouted Captain Radley. The boat began to swing out.

‘Wait!’ The young man was pointing towards the jetty. ‘My book. I’ve left it.’

‘Hold the rope!’ shouted Radley. ‘Be quick,’ he cautioned his passenger and watched as the young man jumped ashore. He turned to the woman.

‘Forgot his book.’ The woman shrugged again. Captain Radley watched the gulls which sped over the water, gliding, almost touching the surface. Three of them were pursuing a fourth which fled downstream, all of them shrieking together, then up, higher and higher, until they were tiny dots in the enveloping blue of the sky. He looked down once more, to the jetty, but his passenger was almost fifty yards away, miles past his damned book which still lay where he had dropped it.

‘Oi!’ he shouted and waved. The young man turned and waved back. Someone was with him. They were talking and gesturing to one another. Both of them started running back along the waterfront.

‘The bloody book!’ he roared as both of them ran past it. The girl stopped and retrieved it. The young man jumped for the deck and fell clumsily into the chickens. The girl was more sure-footed. When he had picked himself up, Radley saw his demeanour was changed. He was smiling. So was the girl.

‘What?’ he demanded. ‘What’s so funny? Are you coming too now?’ The girl nodded. If anything she was in a more disreputable state than the other.

‘No cabin, mind you,’ he said again. They were paying no attention. The boy was asking, ‘How did you know?’ and the girl was saying, ‘Septimus….’

‘Cast off!’ shouted Radley for the second time, and ducked as the rope was thrown. The chickens squawked, the gulls shrieked and the
Vineeta
swung slowly out into the broad flood of the river to begin the voyage home.

AIR BEING the place of souls, the second element, Juno’s domain and female as the ancients had it, her embrace would swaddle and soothe him in the long years to follow, throw him aloft in her cool streams and ladders and airy wells, baffle him with polar mysteries, draw him to her nowhere-breast and hold him safe there between heaven and the jagged earth below, between the high blaze of light and the task whose weight pulled him earthwards and seawards when he needed air and light and the sun’s oxygen, whose command gave him a dark purpose and shoes of iron when he needed the gull’s wing and a lifting prayer, sunless vaults for bright aether and proxies for his own descending hand as Rochelle was left blazing behind him, behind its betrayers too, and the thin screams of the dying seemed never to die for the air was the place of souls and he must share it with them all until they might ascend together and that portage was his weight, his restraining hawser called in its earthbound term their settlement, and now it was done. Now he might rise, or wait, or simply hang above the scored surface below and watch its fury and bustle unwind to release him upwards and away towards the furious yellow eye which galvanised the vast neutral sky … Wait, he told himself then, wait for these last moments. He hung above the scarred surface of the city and traced the curling river’s meanders east as they flowed towards the wider sea, a glistening, fattening snake whose jaws opened about the estuary in which the ships and boats were tiny splinters blown forward on the freshening wind, the jetty he sought was a single matchstick, the young man a tiny leaping figure and the girl a dot of white as he ran for her along the waterfront and he himself was a gull blown higher than sight on the day’s thermals for which the two below may yet give thanks, a mote of black in the high blue, a dwindling detail shot forward out of the carnage at
Rochelle that night and known to the young man and the girl below as Septimus.

Below now, luggage stowed and slumped down together before the wheelhouse, he saw them embrace, heard his own name, thought yes, myself. Who else after all? The chill air cycled and spiralled around him, dropping wide loops to gather snatches of their conversation and carry them up. Chariots of silence.… He came late, and found her wandering by the burning theatre. The blazing fire pulled dark air into its mouth and spat flames which rouged their faces, though beneath the firelight his own was cold and deathly pale. At his approach through the crowds she seemed to awaken from a trance. Fires burst through the theatre’s windows and reached towards him. He could hardly stand it there, told her the name, turned, walked back into the darkness where the roar of the fire followed him and seemed to grow louder with every step as though the flames were licking at his back and he might fly as fast as the wind, they would follow after, recalling him to the old city and the earlier fire, to the November night when his flight had begun. Now, and then an age away, he saw her turn and look for him, but the crowds which milled about the pyre were stalled in indecision and she could see nothing but faces with the dying fire playing harmlessly upon them. But for her departing angel, this scene, in which she must play Aeneas to Lemprière’s lost Anchises, is still a century and a half in the future. The streets through which he walks, then runs, then leaves never to return are the streets of that other city, a skeletal mimic of this one whose flesh falls away as his own dissolves in the air’s cradle and he rises above to view the burning eye and dark surrounding masonry as an old terror, his own, from which he has fled in a flight come full circle now, both the Greek fire of his launch and the beacon of his return for in the circling air over London, Rochelle is briefly possible once more and amongst the scurrying columns of its citizens, his own tiny body is the one detail to escape the tightening coil of the city’s self-murder, eyes screwed shut in sleep and tiny face buried in the breast of the woman who carried him through the hosts of the betrayed and the already-damned towards their unquiet grave a century and a half before.

Citadel, prison of souls. Bodies crowding and buffeting her as she swung about to gather her children. A babe in arms wakes and howls thinly in the night air. Sharp elbows, shoulders, ribs, jutting chins and cheeks hollowed by hunger jostle about her as her brood is marshalled once more and driven forward with the slow surge of the Rochelais. It is past midnight. The youngest wails again and she clasps him tight to herself to soothe him. She is prosperous, unused to shepherding her children in this way, but the siege has done away with such distinctions and the only true master of her situation has already fled. His partners are preparing to do
the same. They are waiting beneath the citadel. Tomorrow is the day the city falls. The citadel is a rumour which became a hope in the minds of the Rochelais, a place of safety in which their faith can be guarded from the encircling enemy. The citadel is where they will gather to affirm their belief; a place of souls. Again the baby’s shrill voice sounds above the murmur of the crowd. Torchlight reflects in the darkened windows and the citadel lies ahead. Tonight it is served by flooded conduits, hundreds, thousands of souls advancing in columns towards its entrance. The heavy doors are flung open and the dark mass of bodies feeds into a huge hall with balconies rising in tiers and high arched windows. The roof is an infinity away and the Rochelais are insects crawling below it, a scramble of bodies as wave after wave seeks entry through the portals at their backs. They are forced further and further into the cavernous interior, packed tighter and tighter. The siege has inured them to waiting. Behind them, the doors are closed and barred. They are inside the citadel, all waiting together. He turns his face up to hers. He sees her looking over the heads of the crowd. She frowns, sees something on the far side of the citadel, a concentration of the crowd’s murmur, a quickening of its engine. Then, quite without warning, the first shout of alarm cuts through the conversations of the Rochelais. By a later reckoning, he is five months old. His mother gazes down on him. Her eyes are grey-blue.

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.