Lempriere's Dictionary (19 page)

‘Listen, I know that a great deal of all this,’ he waved his arms expansively, ‘is strange to you. If you want to know why Edmund, the earl, wants this scrap of parchment, why not ask him yourself? What I mean is meet him and me both. Yes?’

Lemprière was somewhat taken aback by this invitation.

‘Come this Saturday. We meet at the Craven Arms, at eight o’clock, or thereabouts. You’ll come?’

‘Yes, I will,’ resolved Lemprière in a rush.

‘Good. Now perhaps we might eat.’ But Lemprière remained where he was.

‘I am afraid I have some other business.’ The word sounded alien to his own ears.

‘Business? Well, in that case I shall eat alone.’ Septimus seemed not at all put out by this. He smiled broadly, showing his teeth. ‘Saturday, the Craven Arms,’ he called as he turned, waved and strode purposefully away. Lemprière watched him disappear into the tavern, then turned and walked back into Portugal Street.

Peppard’s grandfather had had a craving for the stage and so, naturally, he had become a barrister. His mother had had a craving for a solicitor but had married a grocer. After the wedding she had been delivered of a boy and, disappointed in the first instance, was resolved to be rewarded in the second. Peppard cursed silently, one more blot and he would have to copy it afresh. She had bought volumes of case law, battered and bound in red leather. Peppard had read them voraciously. By the time he arrived to study law at Cambridge he was ready to take his final examinations. His indenture with Mister Chadwick was a formality.

He had been attracted to commercial law for reasons that even now he could not fathom. His lifelong inability to grasp the value of money was, oddly, a boon to this career. The wealthier merchants and financiers felt secure with a man whose eyes did not widen when the counting was done in thousands and his less fortunate clients appreciated those same eyes not closing in boredom when the talk was of shillings and pence. The offices of George Peppard attracted clients in droves, he was courted by several
levels of society and there was talk of his being ‘too good for the law’. A post in the treasury was in the offing. He began to think of marriage.

But there the dream faded. Recalling the days that followed still hurt and he did not like to dwell on the events that filled them. His pen moved quickly, tracing expert strokes over the complex document before him. He finished the last clause, leaving a good footer for the signatories to add their names, blotted the whole, then placed it carefully in his drawer. Looking up, he saw Mister Skewer leaning against the open door of his office.

‘You may go if you wish, Peppard.’

‘Very well, sir.’ He was both surprised and pleased. Instances of Skewer’s generosity were few and far between. He looked out of his window and saw that the light was failing already.

The air was cold outside and he walked quickly through the courtyard towards the street. As he did so, he fancied that he heard footsteps somewhere behind him, but when he looked about there was no-one to be seen. He turned and quickened his pace. In the usual run of things he would have dismissed it with little hesitation. But the last few days had not conformed to Peppard’s idea of the usual run of things.

Twenty-odd years had elapsed since the scandal which had reduced Peppard to his present station. In that time, he had often fancied himself under the scrutiny of the very men who had so successfully ruined him. He had good reason. Faces in crowds had grown inexplicably familiar. He had grown conscious of men who lounged at the corner of his street to little obvious purpose. They would station themselves at this and other vantage points for a few days then disappear, never to be seen again. Three times his room had betrayed traces of subtle examination; a book left open, a basin of water emptied and refilled to a different level. How many details such as these had he missed? When first he had grown aware of their attention, the occasions had seemed quite random. Later he had realised that these intrusions had coincided with crises of one sort or another in his old adversary, the East India Company.

On impulse he turned about again. Nothing. The courtyard was dark. Anything might hide in the shadows. He wondered what upheaval afflicted John Company now. His curiosity had never left him. Something was afoot, that much was a certainty. Three days before, he had been walking home as usual when, for the first time in all those years of half-confirmed suspicions, he had been confronted directly. In truth, it was trivial. He told himself that it was nothing. He had been walking home by his normal route when a man had fallen into step beside him. He had had a thin face and had been dressed in black. Peppard had ignored him. Perhaps he was a prankster, or a madman of some sort. But after a minute or two the man
had stopped him, put a hand to his shoulder and looked him in the face. Peppard had said nothing. The thin-faced man had said only one word, ‘Peppard.’ A voice like metal. Just one word, but the message for him was clear: we know who you are, where you are, you are ours if we wish it at any time … Not this time, not now, Peppard had wanted to protest. He had managed to keep silent. The man had looked him full in the face for several long seconds, then walked back into the crowd to be lost from sight. When Peppard had reached his home, his clothes were drenched in sweat and his hands had shook for an hour. He had been given a warning. Now, as he gained the street, he wondered if the visits of Septimus, or his companion, or the Widow Neagle might be the occasion which had prompted it. He could not know. Damned curiosity. He had imagined the footsteps. It was nonsense, all of it, and here was the street before him. Thousands upon thousands of footsteps.

Chancery Lane at that hour thronged with clerks and their masters bent, as he was, on their homeward journeys. They jostled and shoved to avoid the filth of the gutter and Peppard was hard-pressed in this struggle to maintain his pace. Slowing, he fell in behind a group of young men who moved in an aggressive group through the crowd, refusing to yield passage to any and jeering at those unfortunates who were relegated with little ceremony to the roadside muck or worse. Peppard felt protected. Holborn was just as crowded, but at Saffron Hill the mass of people thinned. Turning into Vine Street, he chanced to look back and as he did so a figure perhaps a hundred yards behind him froze conspicuously. Peppard held his stare for a second or two then walked quickly down Vine Street and across Clerkenwell Green. From the far side, he scanned anxiously for the figure, but did not see him. No-one had followed him. Why should they? He wished now that he had returned home on his more usual route by Cheapside and up. In this part of the city the main thoroughfares ran north to south and thus the safety their numbers afforded was short-lived as he negotiated from one to the next by means of the network of alleys that served as streets in the north-east quarter. He cursed his timorousness, but the narrow paths of Clerkenwell were ill-lit at the best of times and their twists and turns so frequent that he could rarely see twenty yards before or behind. His pride would not let him run, but he imagined the footsteps of his unknown pursuer every time he slowed his pace and his breath came quickly as he picked his way east.

Emerging on Golden Lane, he calmed down and even felt somewhat foolish. He was only a few hundred yards from home now. He stepped back as a dray laden with planks trundled noisily past. His eyes followed its passage up the road and there he saw, distinctly and without doubt, the same figure as before, not fifty yards distant.

Peppard panicked. He ran headlong across the road, his sudden movement alerting the figure further up. He ran into the first opening he found and turned right into another. The footsteps followed him, louder now, and faster than his own. It was not until he reached the dead end at the bottom that Peppard remembered Jermey Row had only one entrance.

For a moment there was silence and he looked about him for some means of escape. But the blind alley was bare of doors or even windows. Only a single buttress provided any possibility of cover. He cowered behind it, flattening himself against the wall. Then he heard the footsteps again. His pursuer had overshot the alleyway in his haste, but backtracking had found it. Gravel ground underfoot. The footsteps slowed. They advanced down the alley, slower and slower. Peppard tried to make himself believe that he would spring at his unknown opponent, that he would somehow break clear and escape. Slower and slower. He shut his eyes. They were almost upon him now. He cringed as they stopped, awaiting whatever fearful act was to follow. He could hear deep gasps of breath. His pursuer looked down.

‘Peppard,’ he said simply, gulping air. Peppard looked up, his mouth falling open.

‘Mister Lemprière!’ Peppard exclaimed.

5,452 vessels lined prow to stern stretched through the mind of Captain Guardian, over the horizon and out of sight. Triremes, barges, brigantines and tugs; carvels, carracks and cogs. Captain Guardian had built every type of ship known to man, it was his pleasure. Every night since the one fifteen years back when he had bade his farewells to the sea and first found his thoughts as empty as the deck he had left, he sat down before a roaring fire, closed his eyes and built a ship. He had read Bouguer, Duhamel Dumonceau and Leonard Euler (although, for himself, any vessel designed by a Swiss mathematician would not have inspired confidence). He had visited boatyards and talked to their shipwrights. He had even visited France.

On matters of ship-worm, he lent cautious support to the advocates of copper-sheathing, but would not run down the virtues of fir-board, hair and tar, an amalgam whose prophylactic qualities had, after all, served him well for close on thirty years, six of those in the West Indies. He favoured plans rather than models, although the shipwright’s habit was more important than either, and believed in the calculation, not guessing of
draughts. A small engraving of Anthony Deane which rested above the mantlepiece attested to this credo and he allowed himself an occasional chuckle when the high spring tide fell short of the launchers’ expectations.

After all these years, the comings and goings of the Thames’ traffic still held a fascination for him. The sea had never really let him go. Only the previous day, the late afternoon, he had watched as the latest arrival docked and its crew mooched belowdecks. From the window of the Crow’s Nest (for so he styled the attic room of his house) Eben had strained his old eyes against the thickening gloom of dusk to watch the hustling watermen as they went about their business. The fire he had stoked warmed his back from the other side of the tiny room. Along its walls book-cases held well-thumbed volumes. A desk of disproportionate size, far larger than the small door through which it had once presumably negotiated a passage, was strewn with papers, charts and plans. Looking down from the window, he was able to make out the lines of the shabby vessel berthed a hundred yards down the wharf from his house. He had looked once, then again.

There was something familiar about it. He had seen it somewhere before…. He craned and squinted for a better view. He would go down to the dock later, or perhaps in the morning. The room had been warm and the window was misting over. Eben had retired to his desk, sinking into his chair, thinking, as he always did at this time, that he was glad to be warm, dry and ashore.

That had been the previous evening and he had yet to take the closer look he had resolved upon. Tomorrow morning perhaps. Tonight he was indulging his passion which was for the imaginary building of ships. Tonight he was building an hermaphrodite brig.

He had already got the keel on its blocks, the stem and stern posts up and scarfed, the keelson bolted onto the floor-timbers. He had left these last loose at the ends, ready to be compassed. The first time he’d caught sight of such a vessel he had laughed. With only a little imagination it had looked as though it were sailing backwards. Somewhere before.… He bent to his task, fixing futtocks to floor-timbers, compassing up and doubling them amidships. Caution and care were the keys. The skeleton of the ship was now recognisable, just, he grudged. Next, the clamps were put in, and the partners which would hold the mast-heels when they were stepped in later. The most wearisome task was the knees: standing, lodging and hanging, all with the grain running right. Eben wondered if his dislike of multiple decks had anything to do with the tedium of knees. He hammered them home with heart of oak nails, then turned his attention to the stern, where the stresses and strains of anchor-cables and rudder could be at their most destructive. He always put an extra transom between half and main and, to
the anticipated objections from a cargo-hungry proprietor, opposed his memories, two of them, of clawing out from a lee shore under full sail with ten men on the rudder and the quarter-timbers ready to splinter. That had been on the whaling run. He had thought the call was for him that time. Planking, caulking.