Lempriere's Dictionary (28 page)

That was when he had turned, when he had gone to the locked chests with the air of a thief and first thought how it might be done. The Company would scarcely conceive the scale of the fraud, the numberless insignificant leaks from the coffers of the Indies and the tributaries they formed as they flowed, inevitably, unaccountably to the strong-room beneath his palace. There were nine men in England, only nine, and they controlled the whole with subtle touches and twists that the Nawab himself, their servant, could only admire. A partnership, yes, in which he was paid a fee and a large fee, but now they were breaking the contract. The chests, which gradually accumulated in the palace, always arriving by different means and routes, which were collected and dispatched each year to his anonymous masters, had arrived less frequently. He suspected that if he threw them open and peered within he might find only rocks and sand, a mocking note. His use was ending and he felt the full weight of the wealth which had passed
through his hands to those of the nine, hundreds and thousands of miles distant, wealth which was indistinguishable from the power he had yielded, which had been stolen from him and what was he now? A puppet and plaything, the butt of the English, his usurpers. No, he would not fall to that and he thought again of the locked chests and their contents, the finest gem-stones, the most pure precious metals, silver and gold clouding and coalescing in his vision, almost within grasp, almost even now. For he knew more than they thought.

They thought they had the measure of him. They had caught Bahadur and returned him changed, a stranger. But he was a stranger bearing gifts, the wherewithal of the Nawab’s restoration and the retrieval of his fortunes. Poor Bahadur, a faithful servant tested on the cliff-top and found wanting. Now his successor would take up the torch, and flush them out, the nine of them … blinking in the bright light as he now blinked crossing the courtyard with the sunlight reflecting off its high white walls to the narrow arcade beyond. Bahadur had served him well, within his limits. The Nawab turned over these thoughts and drew out their lines like gossamer as he padded through the cool corridors. Tangled webs took shape in the arabesques and mosaics about him. He imagined his servant Nazim, crawling along their haphazard ladders and trapezes, unexpected as the fly stalking the spider, nipping off each of its waving limbs in turn and, at the last, splitting open its swollen sac for the liquid silk within. Yes, Nazim. Nazim would do what his uncle could not do.

Nazim stood up as the Nawab entered the room. He bowed and the Nawab motioned for him to be seated. The instant he was settled, the Nawab began to speak. The words came out in a long, flat speech, point leading to point, redoubling over this or that passage, crossing lines already taken up and followed through without a single break until Nazim began to grasp the larger pattern taking shape and echo it in his own mind as he listened to the tale of the Nawab and his nine trading partners, their subvention of the Company’s profits, their betrayal of the Nawab, the treasure’s long journey from the palace in which he sat to the distant island where the Company made its home and from where the Nawab’s partners, his betrayers, controlled it from houses of secrecy; find them out - his injunction was unspoken so far, but it would come and Nazim traced the story as it issued from the Nawab’s mouth, of secret deliveries, consignments and stockpiles, broken contracts and ensuing penalties, a story in which he was now already a character and player.

‘When Bahadur was sent to France, I believed they made their den in Paris. But, I was … mistaken. They are vicious, and clever. Bahadur found that out, and more….’

The mention of his mentor’s mission awoke memories of that time in
Nazim, Bahadur’s absence, he was still a boy then. Seventeen years ago, a point he marked, for Bahadur was a different man on his eventual return. He had been in France, in Paris.

‘He found out my error,’ the Nawab coloured a little, ‘for they make their home in England. Only by chance did he come across them, only by his wits and courage did he return. He was an exceptional man.’ The Nawab’s voice bathed Nazim in its warmth. ‘And you too, Nazim-ud-Dowlah.’

Bahadur had been changed into something cold and distant. He had never truly returned. He had spoken little of his time away, it seemed to exist as a gap in which something of himself had been lost. They had caught him, and let him go. Perhaps it was his pride.

‘Yet he had given his word,’ the Nawab was speaking again, ‘he would find the men who betrayed me.… He kept his word.’

The implication was clear for Nazim, and it was a familiar sentiment in any case,
your assent is the act
, another lesson learnt long before, which meant that even the merest notion flitting across the surface of the Nawab’s inner eye was as good as done and he, Nazim, was its agent now. The Nawab talked on, telling Nazim how the steady passage of the treasure through his palace had become less steady, had slackened off and finally, some months before, had stopped altogether.

‘They believe I am something to be discarded,’ he said dismissively. Nazim smiled at the lunacy. ‘They are taking it to England, and thence…. They must be stopped. We must take back what has been taken from us. You must find them, and kill them, all nine. You must find what is mine, get it back …’ Nazim gazed curiously at his master, who was looking up distractedly at the corner of the ceiling as he spoke, turning his head as if he expected something to be there that was not.

‘There are nine of them.’ He looked down again. ‘They are in the city of London. You must go there, find them.’ He fell silent, then suddenly, ‘And the ship! The ship, it is called the
Vendragon
. That is how they will move it, yes. You must find the ship, do you understand? The ship is how you will find them.’ The Nawab picked at the hem of his sleeve, then looked Nazim in the face. ‘You will do it.’ Only that. Yes my master. ‘Yes,’ replied Nazim.

It was done. The audience was at an end and Nazim rose to leave. But as he did so, the Nawab reached out and clutched his arm, astonishing Nazim.

‘There is more.’ He spoke urgently. ‘A moment, more; a name. One of the nine perhaps, Bahadur was not certain … but a name.’ Nazim waited for the Nawab to say it, but he must come closer, closer yes like that to whisper it in his ear and Nazim inclined his head as asked. The Nawab leant over, Nazim catching the scent of something sweet on his breath, waiting for the word, then he heard it and, committed it to memory as the Nawab
relaxed the grip on his arm and moved back quickly for his servant with an odd shuffling motion. Nazim looked back at his master. The name meant nothing to him, but now he had it and he repeated it aloud. This seemed to delight the Nawab whose mouth opened soundlessly and whose hands moved as if to clap, but stayed outstretched with pleasure. Then, just as suddenly, his expression changed, he turned on his heel and walked quickly out the door. Nazim was left alone in the rose-coloured room staring down the corridor. As he too turned to go, a succession of high-pitched shrieks like laughter reached him from the direction of the Nawab’s disappearance. But the sound did not come from the Nawab. It was a commonplace that the Nawab did not laugh.

Nazim left the palace that evening deep in a single thought. Finding the nine men, the ship, his master’s wealth, somehow they must all become the same thing, a single act. He had assented to it already. Now he must learn its nature. And around that central preoccupation the whispered name hovered like an insect drawn towards the web but not yet caught, not yet placed in the lattice. Nazim had walked homewards with Bahadur’s ghost at his side, whispering the same name, telling him the same things, exacting the same promises….

‘You don’t! You bloody don’t.’ A voice jerked Nazim out of his reverie and into the present in an instant. He started, breathed in. His body tensed. His ears pricked as a second voice was heard.

‘I cannot be sorrier, Bet. Did I say I wished it so?’ Two women were in the street, above him and outside. The second with an accent. Not English. Nazim looked out through the grille but caught only a glimpse of blue, a dress, before they had exceeded the spy-hole’s scope and then he heard them fumbling at the door. The house was unfurnished and boarded up. He had believed it deserted. He had entered through the coal-hatch. They had opened the door and now Nazim heard their boots echo on the floorboards just above his head. They were arguing. Nazim listened, pondering the measures he might have to take.

‘… this filthy place. My bones ache with it,’ the one called Bet was complaining. ‘Why did you take the bet? We had money enough, and now we have nothing. Now we are here.’ The voice was venomous, suggesting previous acquaintance with cold, hard floors.

‘Anything within reason, you told me, you told me that.’ The foreign woman sounded close to tears. ‘You told me that,’ mimicked the other harshly. And indeed, seconds later a soft sobbing sound reached Nazim’s ears. The complainer relented, walking over to her companion and comforting her.

‘Karin, come now. We shall make a fire, dry our clothes. Don’t cry.’ Karin allowed herself to be quieted. Presently, a candle was lit and Nazim
could make out the two figures by its faint glow, their bodies distorted and cut across by the angle and narrow slits through which he spied the two of them, both in blue above him. Then began the hunt for fuel, which yielded a few scraps of timber from around the house, not enough, and Karin declared that the cellar must still hold some coal. Bet rooted around the rooms at the back. She would look.

‘Yes!’ called Bet over her shoulder. Nazim slipped away from his listening post and reached for his bag. The short knife would be right. The trapdoor would open away from him. Nazim moved quickly, in silence in the cellar.

‘Bet!’ called Karin. ‘It will not open.’ But almost as she said this, whatever had held the trapdoor shut gave way and it opened, suddenly, spilling her back onto the floor. A dim shaft of light reached into the cellar. As she crashed back, Nazim crept silently over to the hatch. Bet called back to her but Karin did not hear, picking herself up with a low grunt and moving back to the opening in the floor. Nazim waited out of sight in the darkness below, patient, as Karin dabbed her foot gingerly into space. Her body began to follow and Nazim braced his legs more firmly. Bet called again and Nazim drew his arm back. Karin had not heard her.

‘Coal!’ Bet said again, something’… coal here!’ Nazim had to lean back quickly as Karin’s legs scissored the air, she had lost her balance and would fall? No, she scrambled up, back through the hatch which was slammed shut almost before she was through it with a loud bang.

‘Hush!’ hissed her companion as she entered the room with the coal and began to lay a fire. ‘It’s the street if we’re made,’ but her attention was on the task before her. Once kindled, the fire caught quickly, the damp coal crackling and throwing an erratic light over the two of them. Clouds of bluish smoke swelled, then broke into the room when the storm forced a downdraught through the chimney.

In the cellar, Nazim stretched out his limbs and began to think. So they were squatters like himself. Perhaps their presence aided him, masking his own. He listened to their conversation, allowing himself to be lulled by its ebb and flow, its silences and abrupt stops until it was almost as if he were in the room with them, propped up against the wall on one elbow and watching them as they talked in the firelight.

‘Poor Rosalie!’ Karin was saying. Her accent softened or thickened with her emotions.

‘The poverty is all ours,’ and a few clinks were heard, a few coins dropped to the floor between them.’…all my fault.’ Karin was beginning to sob.

‘No-one could have guessed the boy would win, even with Septimus,’ her friend said soothingly, but it was no good.

‘And Rosalie was … she was a daughter to me, and now what becomes of her?’ Karin was crying in earnest now. ‘We sold her, like meat, and she was our own.’ Her friend’s voice hardened.

‘She was not our own, she was no-one’s. Now she is someone’s….’ Whose? Nazim wondered allowing the drowsiness he felt to advance through his body.’… and there will be more work there. He pays well, this joker-man. The boy fell for it too, thought she was someone else didn’t he?’ But Karin was still snivelling. ‘It was all in play. There’ll be others.’ Poor Rosalie, as the two of them mooched differently around the roles they had played and, despite himself, Nazim cocked half an ear for the sound of their voices above him and listened as the sequence of events emerged from their respective sides. A transaction, a girl, girl as a prop in some masquerade for the benefit of a young man, that evening in another place. A bet taken, and paid, and the money lost in that way, thus grief. Hope came in the form of more work from the same source.

‘We meet at Galloways, tomorrow,’ Bet was explaining to her companion. ‘Galloways,’ Karin repeated, but her voice was drifting. It didn’t matter.

Nazim turned back to his own thoughts, of the ship, the nine men and the name Bahadur had gleaned years before. His own efforts were the continuance of that project which his sinking mind now turned over, mingling it with the voices above. His dreams were of that project’s genesis and through them rose a huge face, Bahadur’s, pressing against his own, into him and out until the familiar scene came to him: the two of them walking in a landscape he recognised as the hills to the north of the palace. He had dreamed this dream many, many times. They were at the edge of a cliff of red sandstone which fell away before them, a hundred feet or more to great tilted slabs of white rock below. They were walking arm in arm, Bahadur and his nephew. Bahadur had returned from Paris which was becoming a magical word for Nazim as his uncle described it. There were buildings higher and whiter than all the palaces he had seen and hordes of people swirling around them. Strange, silent women stood on the street corners, showing their bodies and the streets were crammed with horses, coaches, men and women both rich and poor. All of it was jumbled together, heaped up in a fantastic shape and the word for it was ‘Paris’.