Lempriere's Dictionary (27 page)

‘… who knows where that share is now? The Lemprières’ and De Veres’.… It would be millions, piling up over the centuries, almost unimaginable,’ continues the earl to Lemprière’s queazy indifference. His eyes begin to glaze over behind his spectacles.

‘Millions!’ shouts the earl in Lemprière’s face. This is provocation.

‘Pizz off,’ says Lemprière, trying the phrase for the first time. The earl’s face wavers a little but remains in position a few inches from his own. Then the vague remembrance of a similar scene drifts back to him. Agreements, ancestors, earls of Braith. But that was hours, years ago, some time at any rate, who would remember all that? It was all too late and in the past and it didn’t matter, no, not now.
Your father!

‘Your ancestor!’ yells the earl. But Lemprière will not grasp the point of all this. The earl is a very noisy fellow, he thinks. Drunk perhaps. Lemprière considers vomiting on his boots. The earl is shouting something again, but it’s all too late, too noisy, too drunk and please go away now, just go far away….

The earl will not go away. He is demanding a reply. Lemprière gathers all the resources at his disposal.

‘Ask Sebdimus,’ he manages at length. The earl turns away for a moment.

‘Addled,’ he comments to Septimus, then turns back.

‘Another time, Mister Lemprière!’ bellows the earl. ‘Farewell!’

‘Pizz off!’ Lemprière tries again. This time it seems more successful for the face disappears. The earl’s voice is audible in the near vicinity, then that of Septimus, garbled together with the background burble and the horrible singing. Above him (or below) something large, white and presumably winged collided
clunk!
with the wall. The goose was still flying.

‘Goodbye goose,’ mumbled Lemprière as Septimus hoisted him up and kicked open the door.

Fatherkiller
, hissed the goose. They left for the night outside.

The clouds had broken. Freezing rain fell into the black streets, beating down in rods on the roofs and gables. It fell in sheets on the slates and tiles, bursting the gutters and washing down the walls to the street. It danced on the flags of the pavements and ran into the ditches and drains. Rain scoured the cobbles, dissolving the muck, scum and scurf, sending it down the street in a thick wave of slurry. It sluiced through the rookeries, irrigated the great thoroughfares, baptising the courts, rising as it ate into piles of horse dung, picked up fish heads and old meat wrappers and rats drowned in the open sewers, driving them along in a rich, liquid mulch. Tomorrow, it would stink. But now, the rain brought its violence down to purge the city, drilling into the stonework of breached walls and the stumps of columns, each raindrop exploding in white as it conceded the dissolving city its forms. The details of the buildings seemed to blur and the downpour replaced them with wretched waterfalls and fountains, broken pipes and seeping minarets; templates of appeasement to the preterite, just the weather again to the elect for the sky absolves nothing of course.

Standing clear of these accretions, a dim recognition of the need below hardly disturbs the weather’s deep composure. Its cycle turns and the cities fall. Rain today, tomorrow none. For as long as these structures have offered their pathos or their grey arrogance it has been like this. Seven hills surrounded the paludium, remember? An interim empire, its centre already malarial, spreading the seizures and relapses whose masquerade of health will later conceal the drain of that need, its exile. Now the outlines of its
form are discernible through the fabric, like the girl on the bed, its indistinctness part of the game as it reaches through, finger-tips light and icy, insinuating its return. Each cold raindrop a reminder of his debts, every freezing drop arcing out in silver cusps
an appropriate manner in which to approach one’s god…
.

‘The rain.… So cold.’ They stumbled on, Septimus hauling him along upright now, his feet dragging and useless. The rain came in waves, washing in and out of his hearing. They had reached the river. Lemprière tried to turn to his friend.

‘What do you know?’ he demanded. ‘Damn you, what do you know of any of it?’ He could hold back no longer.

‘What do you know of me? Of what I’ve done? Of what I am!’ He could be crying. It is raining so hard now one cannot be sure.

Septimus’s face was still, the first time Lemprière had seen it so, like marble, a statue’s face.

‘Tell me,’ he said, putting his arm about Lemprière’s shoulders. ‘Tell me everything.’

But the rain fell harder, drowning the two of them out. They were inaudible almost to each other as Lemprière sat heavily in the wet; almost invisible from the mire of the road where, now, the two women in blue muddied themselves as they tramped leaden-footed through the muck of the storm, homewards. The streets ran with mud; the Strand, past Fleet Market to Ludgate and up, the heavens beating down and drilling into the city. Rain.

From Ludgate to the women’s destination, not to be reached for an hour yet; a house stood with darkened windows in Stonecutter Lane. The water coursed down its roof, overflowing the gutters, finding out the cracked tiles and advertising them in random pools of water on the floors within. The rain lost its redeeming vigour, crept in black tongues along the bias of the floor-boards before seeping to the ground floor. From there, through gaps in the warped boards, it entered a coal-cellar until the dark earth on which the house was founded grew sodden. Chill air filled the partitioned rooms like an unwanted tenant, smelling of neglect. The house stood against the besieging downpour, abandoned, darkened, but not vacant.

From within the cellar, the rain sounded in lacklustre, irregular waves. Nazim could see it being slapped down into the street by the wind through the narrow grille which gave a worm’s eye view onto the pavement and the
deserted street beyond. Water-drops slapped in a quick pulse from the sill just above. Peering through the chinks in the boards above his head he could make out the dim light of a window in the room directly over his head. The bare-earth floor sloped away from under him as he lay staring up at the joists. It was the driest part, but as he looked up a bead of water gathered, swelled and fell, then another, another,
splash!
on his forehead and reluctantly he set about moving his makeshift bed for the third time that night. A drop caught him on the back of the neck and he cursed silently. More rain.

Nazim shuffled the planks carefully away from the drip and lay down once more. His black eyes looked up at nothing and he breathed air heavy with damp. The eyes closed. He stretched his legs out along the plank. He imagined he felt rain seeping into him, his body becoming heavier and heavier. He would awake to find himself waterlogged, unable to shift his own sodden weight. Nonsense.… He would dissolve and be nothing. He would sleep, and wake, and resume. Tomorrow, the docks. Sleep, wake, resume, sleep, wake… down on him in waves. The cellar’s soft earth gave way a little beneath his shoulder, the plank moved and he sighed to himself as the night moved slowly on.

Morning was hours off yet, the dawn and its grey light by which his dockside vigil would continue. The ship would be there, the
Vendragon
, with its complement of shunters and porters and he would watch as the cold took the sweat off their backs in clouds. Coker, had that been the name? Coker, the gangleader whose words he had caught from his hiding place amongst the piled gear on the quay. The thin-faced man had watched him as he tipped his hat forward and made off around the corner at a pace. Fake farewells, covert returns. Coker, yes. He meant nothing. Not significant. He had doubled back and crept along the quayside, plenty of cover, easy for him to get in close, to overhear the two of them.

‘… within weeks. As the loads arrive; you will be advised. You will be to hand?’ But it was not a question. Nazim heard calculations in the thin-faced man’s voice. Coker had twisted his hands. He would be available, his men too. The crates Nazim had spent the last days watching as they were loaded were arriving irregularly. But from where? And when? Nazim had strained to catch details, but the two had only touched on it. Somewhere in London, in the city. Stop the river at its source. Nazim fancied himself tangled in tributaries and off-shoots, lost, attending the surface hum of the machine. He could not expect to learn much more from keeping watch over the
Vendragon
. The crates, the men, the ship, they all marked a trail leading him away from the Nine. ‘Mizzer Mara,’ Coker had called the thin-faced man. ‘Mizzer Mara’ was one of them.

The older face which had appeared in the attic window a little way up
the quay that first day, had re-appeared several times since. He thought their eyes had met once, but the distance was too great. The face exercised him, but he was inclined to dismiss it. They would not send two of their own to supervise the loading. ‘Mara’ had given his orders to Coker in a grating monotone. There was almost no inflection in his voice, and its timbre had shocked Nazim.

‘… for which two guineas per man no more or less, agreed? Two weeks from today and at six of the morning, agreed? The same men exactly, no one new, no one untried, we understand each other, agreed?’ Agreed, agreed, agreed between them without a sound from Coker whose big red hands still twisted with nerves though they looked the size of the slighter man’s head. It was the voice, and Nazim had heard it many times, issuing from his own lips.

‘Buried treasure! Thirty paces!’ A crippled sailor had returned and was waving his crutches, raving at the two of them. His stumps thumped the ground as he confronted them. ‘Thirty paces from here!’ Coker waved him off, but he stayed there, yelling at them like a madman, even when the big man advanced.

‘Get. Out.’ The words were spoken quietly, but the cripple fell silent. A wave from his crutch and he had turned to drag himself off, homeward along the quay. Get. Out. The voice seemed to sap the will from him.
Yes, Bahadur, your lesson…
. Recognition then, for Nazim. It was his voice too; but reserved only for last moments, the intimate intervals that opened between himself and the men, the women.… It was a tool, only that, to fill the space between their knowing and their ending, a bridge. It was the accent which levelled away fear or crowing triumph or pleasure and left only the act. Men and women heard that voice only once, in the moment before the Nawab’s assassin took away their lives. But Nazim, hearing it spoken by another, was momentarily unnerved. He knew what ‘Mara’ did. Mara was a killer too.

‘
Le
Mara,’ came the voice again. He was correcting the other man. ‘Mizzer
Le
Mara,’ Coker repeated like a child and ‘
Le
Mara’ muttered again to himself as he shambled back towards his men. Nazim had looked up and caught in the corner of his eye the curtain falling across the attic window up the quay. The cripple had moved off in the opposite direction and was fifty yards distant already.

The days which followed had added nothing to his understanding. He had watched Coker and the other men carry cases back and forth, and Le Mara watched them too. Ships had passed up and down the river before him, the sun had shone or not but he had learnt no more and now, listening to the steady drip of water into the cellar and the unrelenting rain outside, he began to wonder at his next move. Unfamiliar ground, and then, ‘You
may not fail,’ the Nawab simple and direct, which was a mark of respect to him; admittance to the inner sanctum of the Nawab’s unmediated wishes, him and him alone. Nazim, his chosen tool for a task. ‘You may not fail, or fall short,’ the Nawab had told him. He would not fail. He would not fall short. That had been the core of their meeting months before this moment: that request and his assurance that it would be so. The Nawab had sent for him, driven to it by the evidence mounting around him. Nazim had moved through the corridors of the palace whose coolness had a quality found nowhere else in his experience. As always, he found the calm of the interiors sinking into his mood, a sense of stillness. He was motioned into an anonymous reception room which was painted in shades of a pale rose, there to await the arrival of his master. Nazim had settled and let his mind empty. Hours might go by and he would not stir. The brightly coloured birds tethered within an adjacent garden sang to the sky while fountains spluttered, playing down on a pool of clear water in fine droplets and Nazim would hear neither.

The Nawab’s thoughts ran thus: he would go into the partnership, accept the caravans arriving by night, close his ears to the advice of his courtiers (who knew nothing) dispatch the locked chest to a destination hundreds of miles distant which he would never see, to the ship which would take them on across the Mediterranean, which too he would never see. Was he a fool? He would turn his palace to use, a glorified clearinghouse, he no better than a money lender, no better than that and the ridicule of his ancestors was easily imagined, easily heard in the shadows of the corridors and sunless corners…. The Nawab, a tenant to his title and later, a borrower from the British whose sweating nabobs dunned him politely, handkerchiefs to their brows, with all the correct observances of rank and custom and without relief. And he could not pay. He could not.