Lempriere's Dictionary (20 page)

But now he was out of all that and glad to be so, out of the ‘the roaring forties’, ‘the doldrums’, out of all those yarns that they’d told. He’d absconded before the end, hoped the cast would carry on without him but, dammit, he knew the finale, had seen it before, the widows, the ruined men and he’d have none of it. They could put out the call, but there were no bows left to take, he’d had his call already and he wouldn’t do it. Oh, he understood the need, what lay behind the nudges and winks that bought the old boy another and toddy in hand off he’d go again, tied to the wheel ‘round the Cape, ten hours in the March Atlantic, coming in to port, dry-docked and would you know it, we’d lost the keel. Stripped clean off! Didn’t make a damn of difference, now, take out the rudder and, well there was this time off the Antilles … And they would clap and they would cheer and not believe a word of it, and a week after they’d say, ‘Met a fascinatin’ cove, told this story….’ A month and ‘Heard this tale, tall as you like this is …’ topping it off with, ‘Course it’s true, true as, as….’ But it was all well and good. Nothing was quite so true as the sea. All well and good, because not looking but thinking, thinking out over the sea, throwing the hawser out and hauling in the rag-end, he understood this need. It was for something to pitch against the roll of the thing, against the undertows and cross-currents, against the drab, tropical calms. Against the fact that nothing lasts long in the sea and the bodies that come back at all, come back bleached. So he had some sympathy for these stories of the ocean, even if they were really stories of the land, of something firm beneath the feet and all the eventualities covered. And he had some sympathy with the lubbers who threw their thoughts seawards leaving their bodies safely ashore. But he wouldn’t have sailed in a boat built with protractors by a Genevan two hundred miles from the coast. No, sympathy had its limits.

He bent to his task once more, planking up to the gunwales, nailing in the decks. Tap, tap, tap, the knocking of mallet on nail, wales on jetty…. Somewhere before, he knew it. It nagged at him, it would not let him go. He cut in the grates. Tap, tap, tap, there was something missing, something niggling like the object taken away in a memory game. Tapping at him until remembrance or fury should plug the gap. Captain Guardian propelled himself out of the armchair, up to the casement and, looking down the quay, realised that this was not the memory game he had thought for there was the object and here was still the gap. The ship berthed a
hundred yards down the quay was called the
Vendragon
. Something in that name, or in that ship jarred with him. Somewhere in all this, something was wrong.

It rocked gently in the water and the men carrying the cases on board had to adjust their step as they made the gang-plank. They sweated and cursed, but the money was good and paid on the nail. Along the quayside, an old man hauled himself homewards, painfully slow, stumps aching and matches spilling from his pockets. He watched the porters. Coker, the gangleader, counted the paces from cart to gangway, one, two, three….

‘Down a minute,’ he instructed his workmate on the other end. He wrung his hands and wiped the sweat from his forehead before continuing. He had worked other such jobs, the double rate and no questions commissions. He remembered a lighter up beyond Richmond, landing twenty cases of French brandy straight onto the lawn and spending the night there, swigging and yarning with a delighted patron. Could have sworn it was the Duke of Marlborough. He hadn’t liked the look of the client this time; thin man, grating voice like metal. Fifteen, sixteen, seventeen … the triple rate jobs he left for Cleaver and his boys, dirty business generally, too risky for a married man. He grimaced, staggering across to the ship, twenty-eight, twenty-nine, thirty steps dead. The two men made the deck and went back for another.

From his window, Eben watched the human chain at its work. Out and back, loaded and unloaded; this was a pattern he knew on a larger scale. The ship might be called the
Vendragon
, but that was not the name for which he searched. Some other tag held the key, but it would not come. He would look through his plans, but already, he knew, he would not find the answer there, tap, tap, tapping of something missed. Irritation passed in a wave, a wash, and he returned to his brig.

It sat there cradled and caulked while an imagined ocean entreated the battle of grey-brown wood and grey-green sea, its baptism, the same old lie, Eben’s gloomy thought here. Baptism? Christening then, yes.
And the Teredo was her name
…. Certainly he had no right to pour scorn on the old salts or their recitals for, looking askance at the brittle hulls of his creations, what else was he doing here if not dotting the ocean’s trackless monotone with puny coordinates,
The Necessary Limitations of the Sea
, his patent version, a shanty of uncounted verses. Grease the slipway, hitch the winch, take up the slack and all together now … one, two, three. Oh yes, something was missing. All pull together … tap, tap, tap. And down it ran towards the marbled sea of Eben’s imagination, its surface agitation issuing edicts of topsy-turveydom, as no-nonsense a declaration that the real business is being conducted underneath as anyone who’d played the Macao baccarat tables had a right to. With the sea, second acts run
concurrent with the first. Eben couldn’t have forgotten something so basic, so simple could he? But now it’s almost too late even to ask, anagnorisis proceeding, as it is, apace with the
Teredo’s
inexorable plunge to an aquatic appointment and consequent peripeteia. His ship, a floating melodrama; his face, a study in anticipated loss.
He will never see her like again, never
, the tears summoned with consummate technique blur his sight for a moment, but the rising gale of laughter would alert him anyway as he stares down in disbelief.
How could I have forgotten?
And as it leaves the slipway and enters the water, Eben thinks of what he should have thought much earlier than this. As it minces on the sea-surface with brief and impossible buoyancy, as it teeters and topples, wavers, the water attending this doomed, virtuoso performance in the fair certainty of its failure, Captain Guardian thinks of rocks, gravel, sand; of centres of gravity. As it turns turtle, rolling belly-up and floating down the cranial tributary of capsizement and forgetting, he knows what was missing, he remembers what he should have remembered before. He should have remembered the ballast. Shit.

‘Here, here, here and here. Here and here and here!’ Peppard’s forensic finger stabbed downward with precision.

‘Also here,’ he added, the digit moving up.

A white enamelled bowl, half-filled with greyish water or perhaps it was the light; books, worn red-leather bindings with dust; a bed, a desk, two chairs. No fire and the room was cold.

‘But what is it?’ Lemprière asked, looking back to the little man.

He had been waiting by the outer entrance to the courtyard only a few minutes before Peppard’s compact figure was spotted. But only for a second, the stream of passers-by had swallowed the little man immediately and Lemprière had crossed the road several times in search of him. A glimpse, fifty yards up, more a guess. He had used the road, sprinting up to the spot, looking around quickly. Nothing.

‘Odd, very odd. Wouldn’t have been a professional … but perhaps.’ He paused. ‘Very odd.’ Peppard bent closer to the document, using his hands like compasses to bridge the paragraphs, linking word to word.

Then he had seen him again, frozen for a second with the bustle behind him, and he was off, watching as his quarry disappeared from the highway, marking the point and making for it. But Peppard might have taken any
one of the off-shoot alleys. No sense trying to pick the right one, he dived in at a run.

‘Peppard?’ he reminded his companion.

‘George, if you like, a moment please….’ He was still reading.

Soft dirt underfoot, flagstones the exception rather than the rule. He tripped, almost fell, but regained his feet just in time. Steadying his pace, keeping an even canter with the sound of his feet only slightly louder than the thud of his heart. The alley had twisted and turned, but each time he thought he was being bent too far off his bearing, it veered back. He heard the raucousness of the highway ahead.

‘Skewer thought it a curiosity, but not valueless,’ Lemprière prompted again.

‘Certainly not valueless,’ murmured Peppard, intent in his examination.

He had known he must have reached the road before his prey. He moved back and forth, dodging the passers-by and looking out for Peppard. He must emerge soon…. Yes, there! He shouted, but Peppard had moved quickly and Lemprière drew a curse or two as he shoved his way into the road, across and down the path opposite. He could see nothing. It was impossible, Peppard could simply not have moved that fast. Then he noticed the narrow opening to his left.

Peppard pushed himself back from the table, still staring at the document. The cowering air which he had still worn when they had entered his rooms had now disappeared. He had re-entered a world where he was the orchestrator and now he exuded the confidence of one who had the measure of his task.

‘Not valueless, although it begs the question of value,’ he said at length.

Lempriere’s face remained blank.

‘Pardon me, that was ill-phrased; if perhaps you told me what you wished to learn?’

What he wished to learn? Lemprière’s thought had spun outwards in his waiting and now, as Peppard’s offer drew him back to circle in upon that question, discarded possibilities threw out their tangents. He would have liked to have learned what a man of Peppard’s ability was doing serving someone like Skewer. He would have liked to learn more of the scandal which seemed to have some bearing on this fact. He would like to know a great deal more about Septimus. He warmed to the question. There were whole catalogues of things he wished to learn. The meaning of the sibylline leaves; the location of the omphalos. Why had Alexander killed Hermolaus? The nature of the channels between the living and dead, did they exist, who was the fairest of them all, might she love him, her long, black hair, the water…. Enough?

‘What is it?’ he asked.

Lemprière had looked down the passage. It was only a few feet wide and the walls of the buildings rose up on either side, giving the impression that really they should have met and the space between them existed only by default. But the alley was quite empty and he turned away baffled as to the swiftness of Peppard’s escape.

‘That depends upon how you view it, do you see?’

He did not.

‘It is a crude sort of covenant, an indenture, a blackmail note, even a charter-party, or nothing at all, or all of these.’ He smiled. ‘All to varying degrees and proportions, of course.’

‘Basically though, it is an agreement, isn’t it?’ Lemprière ventured hopefully.

‘Absolutely correct,’ confirmed Peppard, ‘but then, almost every legal document is an agreement. An order for execution is an agreement, although on considerably less favourable terms for one party than the other. I do not think we can leave it at that. The law, remember, is an imprecise instrument, hence lawyers. It finds
in favour
, or not of course, the truth is excluded so far as is possible. Tends to complicate things. Shall we take some tea?’

Peppard the fleet of foot, he thought to himself. The name of the miserable passage had been scrawled on the side of the wall once, but the rain, or whatever liquid fell from the sky in these parts had partially scoured it. Now it read ‘er ow’.

They sat nursing the hot cups, warming their hands by them. Peppard had ensured that he took the chipped one. The two men hunched over the desk with the document laid out before them.

‘An indenture is the simplest explanation,’ began Peppard.

‘An indenture?’

‘These,’ he ran his finger along the fringe of serrations at the parchment’s edge, ‘they indicate the presence of another copy, or copies, most probably one though.’

‘The one held by the Earl of Braith?’

‘If it is still in the family, yes.’ He slurped. ‘It is a kind of security, you see, if the two sets of cuts do not match then one must be a forgery.’ He bent to examine the serrations more closely. ‘Cleanly cut, this would be the top copy, not that that means anything. Of course,’ Peppard changed tack, ‘cutting up bits of paper has no force in law, it is only for the convenience of the parties.’ He paused. ‘Puzzling really, it may have been drafted in a hurry, whatever was to hand …’ and he drifted into some private speculation at which Lemprière, for the moment, could only guess.

Desperate measures were called for; Lemprière had resorted to geometry. If the alley was of that length which meant that Peppard
could not
have disappeared in time before Lemprière’s arrival; and the means of escape, a line derived from Er and Ow was of finite length (the very last of the day’s light revealed a wall blocking the far end) then, then…. One term had to be wrong. The situation was impossible otherwise. He walked a few yards further up, the same few yards back. Then he saw the buttress.