Lempriere's Dictionary (3 page)

Philpot, Alexander Smith, De Vere and the others had met that morning and travelled together to Blackwall. When the four ships had set out, three years before, the investors had imagined all the possible fates which might
befall them. They had foreseen shipwreck, mutiny, disease and death at the hands of natives. Their dreams had been of ships sinking in every imaginable circumstance: driven onto rocks, colliding in the night, attacked by whales and turned to funeral pyres by fire on board. They had thought that should the ships return with their holds full, there were no more perils or disasters to be considered. But now, as Captain Lancaster ordered all hands on deck to oversee their final negotiation through the entrance to the docks, he noticed a downcast air about the investors that had not been apparent from further down the river. How could they have known that the fate of the expedition lay not in the treacherous shoals off Adu, nor the storms around the Cape, nor even in the murderous whim of some distant, black-faced pashar? The fair winds and calm seas that had brought the expedition home safely had not benefited them alone. Scarcely a vessel had been lost on the East Indies route all that year; a fact which had helped keep hope alive in London. The Dutch fleet had brought back a cargo only weeks before that exceeded Lancaster’s many times over. Coincidentally, or perhaps not, it too was pepper, and in quantities that could only be described as a glut. The market had held for a week, wavered, faltered then dropped like a stone. Eight shillings a pound? One was the best price on offer, and hardly a buyer then. As Captain Lancaster bounded down the gang-plank to greet his colleagues in their triumph, it was all the group on the quayside could do to look him in the eye. The cargoes of the four ships that docked at Blackwall after a journey of two years and 22,000 miles were worth little more than sand and the Honourable Company less than that.

In the days that followed their initial, bitter disappointment turned to the deepest gloom. The price fell further and the few remaining buyers departed for the continent. Worry visited each of them and, hard on its heels, their creditors. The part-paid shipwrights, chandlers and victuallers learned soon enough of their difficulties and became nervous in turn. They called daily upon the investors and became brusque in their demands. The investors assured them that buyers had been found, it was only a matter of waiting. The creditors did not want to wait; they wanted their money. One million pounds of pepper lay in a warehouse at Poplar, unwanted. The investors met to resolve their difficulties but could decide on nothing. They would stand firm together and reaffirmed their faith in each other as good fellows and venturers worthy of the name. But solidarity would not pay their debts. What should they do? None of them knew.

No, thought the figure on the jetty, none of them knew. Ignorance and disarray: the beginning, when the Rochelais would wait no longer. The trail began to break up. He could find only brief scenes after that, glimpses of what must have taken place.

By the spring of the following year they would have known no more. The creditors would have called less frequently, not at all when they realised there was nothing to be had. The investors had been relieved, even knowing that the courts could not be far behind this respite. Alexander Smith had filed his bankruptcy in March. They could do nothing but wait for salvation without expectation or hope of its arrival and in this desperate conviction they were, as before, quite mistaken.

No-one would have paid any attention to the nine men walking down the gang-plank in April of that year. They exchanged small talk in an undertone. No-one heard what they said. Lodgings were taken above Lombard Street, but they were not seen there, nor at Saint Paul’s nor even at the market. They did not frequent the taverns. They stayed four days, then left. All nine had waited patiently since the day when they had watched the fleet set sail from Blackwall. Three years later, their business in London was brief and to the point.

The solitary figure imagined their boat sailing away, hazy, out of sight, as it ever was. Out of reach, even of the investors who were left then with their averted ruin and the sense of mutual betrayal that was its price.

Their solidarity had only existed by default. They had no choice but to maintain it. No buyer had split their unity because there were no buyers. Then, out of the blue, came the meetings. Arranged through intermediaries, mention of a small proposition, curiosity driving each to receive his visitor. Dark, foreign accents, courteous. All alike, save one. Then the offers for the stock, nominal amounts, accepted immediately, their company and its debts transferred at a stroke. Solidarity and their common cause would not save any one of them. Singly and unaware of the other, identical meetings, they would each have signed the agreements. Business was business. They were not children.

Fools and their money, thought the lone sitter. Even centuries away, he recognised the stealthy discretion of the Nine. It could only be theirs. He shivered in the cold sunlight.

Rochelle! A boat sliding past the twin turrets to enter the harbour. The long wait over, the stratagem brought to a close. Nine men breaking silence at last, laughing down the quay. They had what they wanted. Their leader, Zamorin, white hair standing out from the dark of his fellows. The end of one campaign and the beginning of another. A new spirit, a slogan to take them further; the resolution of their secret comradeship and a name for it. A joke to begin with, perhaps. Later only the truth.

He mouthed the name, heard for the first time only days before. He had not laughed. New to me as you, François. Or was it your creation? The new proprietors of the Honourable Company of Merchants trading to the
East Indies would call themselves the Cabbala. He rubbed his eyes again. The trail was all but gone, rag-ends and splinters.

Other years, other voyages. Mounted by their new-found agents, bound in silence by betrayal, in honesty by fear. And profit. No, they were not children. The riches piled up as you knew they would. Very shrewd, François.

The crew had piled crates as high as they would go, forming a low tower in the pacquet’s stern. The last few would be lashed down in the bows. A sailor was leading a woman down the gang-plank, leading her by the hand. The
Nottingham
had disappeared and the last fragments of his vision flew after it. But it is mine still, he thought. You are still mine, François. The woman stumbled in her nervousness. You are mine or nothing, all of you. His face was grim again.

Riches even beyond their calculation. Influence even beyond their needs. The nine of them, moving further and further out, never looking back and never thinking that Rochelle itself might be where fortune would take her due. A fatal flaw, waiting for them in their neglect.

A single cloud passed high overhead, darkening the water, the boat and the jetty. The tide was running faster. He could hear it rushing against the wooden piles that supported the jetty beneath him. The woman had recovered her step. He thought of the lost girl. Not here and not now.

His anger seeped back in slow waves which rose and fell against the memory of the episode he had summoned up and whose recession seemed to invite it on. They lived on in his outrage and it was their story still.
Forgive them
. Father? Another unavenged. He thought of the tableau by the shadowed pool, high trees reaching up for the last of the summer sky and the water, red on grey, anger on forgetting. My own beginning, he realised. The beginning of my story, sea-fringed granite, red island in the grey-green sea, home. It seemed so distant, more distant than the Indies. And so long ago! A year, he told himself, only that. But a year like an age and its passing, far older than the first voyage. Impossible time. The young man felt his anger draw back, revealing slow puzzlement beneath. He recognised it as the onset of curiosity which had led him here, guiding his steps through a maze they had planted about him. But as he grasped it in this way, it too dissolved and fear rose to take its place. Then he realised that it was he who was falling, through the succession of his feelings and their memories, crashing through the decks of himself. Fear of pain, fear of blindness; childhood terrors, he dismissed them. Fear of the dead and his own guilt, closer, fear of death as the hard hand pushed him forward, the knife an inch from his throat, fear of losing her. He reached out to grasp the memory, but she slipped away, receding as fear fell away too, carrying her off and he was left alone. On the very lowest deck in the pitch dark and not
a sound to be heard. Solitude was the last stage before the cold sea below. Solitude was a familiar. A young boy of four or five, pretending to read the Greek script, motionless over the page for hours on end, looking into himself. Older, surrounded by the rustling voices of his books and their protective murmur. A lie. The last deck splintered, gave way under his feet and he was falling through into the cold hands below that waited, wanting only to show him the secret beyond solitude, but he was not ready for that, not yet, and he would wait a little longer as the water tried to close over his head, rising up and shuddering back to cold flesh and bone, alone on the jetty.

My life, he thought with dispassion, hardly distracted by the shrill cry from further up the quay. My own beginning. Jersey was still his, even if all else was gone. He could recall it at will. His parents’ house slid back easily to him, and the nights that he knew he would now find eerie, for the intervening year had changed him. High above his head, the cloud passed on, freeing the sun’s rays to dazzle him and the crewman shouted up. The last one left. He started, but he would not give up the memory. He rose, sun-blinded, and felt it flood back into him. Stooping for the chest, he looked up as the quay emerged from white, breaking in on his thoughts for a moment, then falling back to the remembered island’s dark and he saw a slight figure waving, impossibly distant through the depth and silence of Jersey’s night as it came down upon him. Where he had embarked and his journey had begun, his beginning gathered about him as the sailor shouted again and he would not let it go, not then for the love of God, not there for the wealth of the Indies, nor ever save for her and the last call to the voyage out as it reached him across the waves on the island of his childhood.

‘All aboard!’

T
HE WINDS
blew high over Jersey, clearing the sky for the stars to glimmer down on the island below. Its gentle beaches and high cliffs were barely distinguishable from the dark water. The moon had sunk from view hours before. Some nights it shone bright enough to read by, but not tonight. The oil lamp which stood on the desk at which he sat threw a soft, yellow light. A book lay open before him and he studied it intently, his face only inches from the characters. His head followed the movement of the lines, turning slightly from left to right and back, moving slowly down the page. Outside, the murmur of the waves just reached his ears as they washed in and slapped against the cliffs of Bouley Bay.

After some time, the hunched figure brought his head up from his labours and rubbed his eyes with his knuckles. His tall, angular body was cramped, legs twisted around the chair, elbows seeking a resting place amongst the clutter of papers on the desk. He shifted position awkwardly. When he brought his hands away from his eyes, the room had dissolved. The patch of dull red he was able to make out would be his bed and the lighter area beyond it the door. The floor he could feel with his feet and the window he identified by the slight gusts and breezes which blew coolly against his face. At this distance, yards rather than inches, the rest was lost to him in a flux of shadows; nothing but ‘air deprived of light’; he recalled the formula. Lucretius, matter of fact and unhelpful. As the objects about him drifted, disappeared and shaded into one another, John Lemprière felt the slight panic in his stomach to which he had become inured, an unwelcome sensation even now. He bent to the page, trying to focus his eyes once again.

The blurrings of sight had begun when he was fourteen or thereabouts and grown more and more frequent as he had entered his late teens. The
world came to seem as it did now. Objects fogged and merged with other objects. Outlines broke and seeped into their surroundings. His myopia dissolved the world in a mist of possibilities and its vague forms made a playground for his speculations. His youthful panic had later become acceptance and, later still, something akin to pleasure. Only the faintest vestige of unease remained and he allowed his speculations, his daydreams and his visions free rein. The island itself could not compete with the routs of demi-gods and heroes, the noisy unions of nymphs and animals, with which the young scholar populated the fields of his imagination. His head had only to leave the pages of Tully, Terence, Pindar or Propertius to see their most delicate or lurid descriptions made flesh in the wavering dusk outside his window. Galatea had made sport with Acis in that land of visions. And Polyphemus had made sport with them both. There the last Punic war had been fought and lost by the Poeni whose Carthage burnt for seventeen days before twenty miles of its walls crashed in to quell the flames. Scipio Africanus was nothing but a trickster, but got the consulship he craved.
Delenda est Carthago
. So it was. Achilles sulked and raged for Patroclus, Helen awaited the nightly pleasures of Paris’s company. What matter if she were only the most beautiful of
mortal
women? Paris tasted better than any golden apple. Deiphobus better than both. The ancient kings whose lives flickered between natural and supernatural worlds, the ordinary loves of shepherds touched for an instant by hands that transformed flesh to wood, hamadryads and nereids, what vision was it that saw in the simple flames of an Athenian hearth the gory torture of Prometheus, in the nightingale’s song the rape of Philomel, in every tree a face, every stream a voice? And behind them lay the ukases which commanded not with reason, but with the simple certainty that it was their place to do so; perhaps the gods too were victims of that savage simplicity, he wondered? Victims to that clarity with its steel logic, its sentence without redress. Princes and heroes, nymphs and satyrs stalked the antechambers of the young classicist’s mind, disporting and dismembering, playing and replaying the scenes he chased through the pages of the Ancients.