Lempriere's Dictionary (40 page)

Captain Guardian having reached his decision to walk without aim, allowed his thoughts to bore like ship worm through the caulked planking and compass-timbers of the
Vendragon
, creeping up and round the rough hempen braid of the ropes, criss crossing the worn canvas from mainsail to top-gallant and down again to the deck which held him like the fragile platform of thought, but still it would not come - the name. Not
Vendragon
, the true name, there somewhere, locked in the lines and angles of the vessel which formed a template to some elusive original. Where? And when? Captain Guardian snorted in irritation and banged his fist against
the door by his side, a mistake. He swore loudly as pain welled up in his bandaged hand once more, shooting up his arm and jolting his shoulder. The door had swung open at the impact to reveal a room beyond. The lamps were lit.

‘Pardon me, I seem to be….’ Guardian was taken aback, abashed his outburst might have been overheard as he offered these apologies and peered cautiously around the door. But, the light notwithstanding, no-one was there.

‘Hello?’ he called again. There was no reply. He padded in gingerly and looked about, a strong air of trespass hanging about his actions but curiosity had ever been his weak point. Besides, who would know? The room contained a bureau, a writing desk and chair, it was carpeted and at the centre of the carpet stood a low table with chairs clustered about it. A larger desk on the far side of the room was strewn with plans and charts which drew Eben’s gaze. He shut the door behind him quietly and walked over for a closer inspection. There were plans of the estate with dotted lines drawn from east to west and enlarged details on separate sheets along with drawings of machines, huge impractical things to Eben’s untutored eye, with notes about soil composition and water-levels scrawled across them. It appeared to be a drainage project. Casting his eye over all these, Eben could not help but notice a bottle of wine which stood half-empty on the cabinet beside the desk. A moment’s thought convinced him that a tot would not be over-stepping the bounds of hospitality and he opened the cabinet in search of a glass only to find it full of identical bottles, all empty. Odd, he thought, as he swigged direct from the bottle. The evening was improving. Captain Guardian settled back in the chair, took another gulp and resumed work on the imaginary barge whose keel he had scarfed earlier in the day. A rather dull project truth to tell, but he would enliven it somehow. An outrigger perhaps. Lots of pennants … hmm.

An hour or more passed in this matter, the only event of significance being the end of the bottle and Eben’s discovery of another in the desk’s drawers. A series of dull reports announced the beginning of the fireworks somewhere outside. The world began to take on a roseate glow and the chair supplied all the curves and angles his old body demanded. The barge grew in stature within his imagination. A royal barge perhaps, with buglers on a little platform towards the prow and little heraldic things dangling over the side. And more pennants. The barge was a good thought after all, drifting down a river under a purple sky with rain visible far off in the distance where it would never fall on him,
mmth
another swig, and cheering crowds along the bank waving pennants which might be designed to complement the colours of those on his boat, a signalling system of sorts whose only word would be harmony, intricately fleshed out in all
its meanings by a thousand happy wavers, yes, he was drunk and didn’t care.
Thump
And canoes! Ornamental canoes towed in strings behind the
Thump!
This time it registered.

Eben brought his head up, already rehearsing apologies and taking his feet off the desk, he had got lost, safe haven and the rest of it but, as he looked about the room, it was still quite empty. An intruder? Repel boarders! Eben kicked his feet off the desk, and looked about for a weapon. No chance of a belaying pin, but, but the empty bottle, one of them anyway, yes. Now the target….

He was a little drunker than he had thought. The floor in the centre of the room seemed to be moving. The chairs arranged about the low table were creeping towards each other and the table itself was moving up and down. Suddenly the table seemed to leap into the air and fall with a thud on its side. It was the carpet, it was swelling in the middle. Something was coming up through the carpet.

Captain Guardian acted. He marched smartly over to the bulge erupting out of the floor, raised the bottle and brought it down rapping the thing a glancing blow on its highest point. The swelling disappeared and a moment later there was a loud, crashing sound. Then silence. The carpet now dipped where the table had stood. It was a square cavity which Guardian recognised belatedly as a trap door. Perhaps he should have waited before hitting whatever, whoever it was had attempted entry, and mild anxiety began rolling back the alcoholic haze as he shifted the chairs and table to pull the carpet away from the hole in the floor.

An open trap door was revealed and as Guardian peered down into some kind of passage below, he saw his victim, a spindly-looking youth lying splayed out amongst a lot of broken wood.

‘Hey!’ Eben called and waved down at the young man, forgetting the wad of handkerchiefs and the bottle which he held in his right and left hands and which now he let fall, the bottle smashing safely a few feet from his victim, the blood soaked mess landing squarely in his face.

But Eben paid them no mind. All his thoughts were suddenly on his hand where the name of the ship had earlier been inscribed by Maillardet’s wretched contraption and was now revealed to him, a ragged tattoo of the name he had known all along of course, but twenty, twenty-five years ago or more and he spoke it aloud as if to confirm it, the
Falmouth
.

Hey!
A yellow fog was rolling back, becoming red, and wet. There was something on Lemprière’s face. Someone above shouted,
Falmouth!
The thing on his face was preventing him from breathing. Soon he would remove it. Now perhaps. There was something on his head too. Lemprière’s body rose from the pieces of ladder, something red and wet fell into his lap, and above him a bearded face peered through the ceiling
and told him that the
Falmouth
was berthed not one hundred yards from his home. ‘Not the
Vendragon
at all. I guessed as much…. Just think of it! Lost for twenty years and here it is once more. The
Falmouth
, I knew it, just knew it. Never forget a ship….’ His head had an egg-shaped bump on it. The man above had hit him and now he was talking about ships,
Falmouth, Vendragon
. He had fallen off the ladder, that was why it was broken. Now the man had extended his hands down through the trap door. One of them had the word “Falmouth” written on the palm. Painful. Then he recognised the weather-tanned face, which was asking if he was injured.

‘The automaton,’ said Lemprière. His tongue felt thick. ‘You were attacked by the automaton. Your hand….’ That was enough for now.

‘Catch hold,’ said the man. ‘I thought you were, I thought it was an attack, you see. I’ll pull you up.’ Lemprière rose, but there was three or four feet between them, it was simply not possible. ‘Wait,’ said the face. ‘I’ll fetch a rope.’ The face disappeared, then returned with an astonished expression upon it. ‘There’s no rope here,’ it said. ‘Someone must have removed it.’ It was an impasse.

‘I’ll stay here,’ said Lemprière after a moment’s thought, and this seemed to solve the problem. He rubbed his head. ‘Who are you?’ he asked the face.

‘Apologies for striking you. Guardian, Captain Ebenezer Guardian. Retired.’ The name, something inside Lemprière. His face was still wet. He ran a finger down his cheek and saw blood. His nose? No, the cloth. It lay on the floor between his feet. Guardian would have thrown it to revive him. Good idea. He threw it back.

‘Lemprière,’ he told the man whose face broke into a smile.

‘Lemprière! Well, why did you not tell me? I was expecting an older man. Good God, how are you?’ The man knew him, but how? Then Lemprière remembered the letters in his father’s trunk, Captain Ebenezer Guardian (retired), a name he had glanced at the night of the Pork Club. Guardian thought he was his father.

‘John,’ said Lemprière, ‘not Charles. My father died, some months ago….’ The face above took on an expression of deep regret.

‘Your father knew more about the western coast of France than any man alive,’ Guardian said warmly. ‘We corresponded, you know? Charles dead. I am truly sorry young man.’ His face grew sorrowful.

‘How is your hand?’ Lemprière changed tack.

‘Hand? Oh, very well, I suppose. All rather embarrassing. It was the ship that did it, the
Falmouth
, or
Vendragon
. She’s moored a little below my house, but that’s a long story. Listen, we shall talk further. I have letters of your father’s and a book he needed in his studies. Everything he asked had
a purpose.’ Lemprière’s neck was going stiff from looking up at Captain Guardian.

‘We could meet at the front of the house,’ he suggested.

‘Excellent,’ Guardian replied. ‘Until then, then.’ His head disappeared, Lemprière heard his feet move towards the door and the door slam shut. He looked about him. then he remembered he was lost.

An hour later, an hour made up of minutes which stretched like long, pointless corridors, returning Lemprière to places he had left only moments before, he had grown heartily sick of the sprawling pile the De Veres called home. Passages: as fast as he eliminated them, the house seemed to grow new ones, with rows of suites leading to enfilades, which led to further suites and more possibilities and so on until he stood finally in a large empty room which might have been on any one of three floors as far as he knew and cursed Septimus for dragging him here against his will like this, damn him.

‘John?’ Septimus? From beyond the door opposite. And footsteps. He heard footsteps.

‘Septimus?’ Through the door, an identical room, with an identical door, which was closing as he entered.

‘Septimus!’ He ran across and pulled it open to reveal yet another room, but this one was different, more like a short corridor and the door led directly outside. It had been left open. He had reached the back of the house. Where on earth did Septimus think he was going? The snow had banked up against the door whose opening had pushed it back in a perfect semi-circle. Lemprière saw footprints stamped in the crisp fall, leading away across the flat area of the lawn.

‘Septimus!’ he shouted once more, but there was no reply. Lemprière stepped outside and began to follow the footprints. The snow crunched under his feet and the light from the doorway faded rapidly making the task of following the trail more difficult. The footprints themselves grew ill-defined, lighter and a few paces later they could not be seen at all. Lemprière found himself staring at a perfectly even blanket of snow as if his quarry had been winched clear from above. Impossible. There was nothing for it but to return and this he did only to find the door was closed. And locked. He had heard nothing. An over-officious servant, or perhaps he had missed Septimus in the pale gloom behind him and his friend was now inside, wondering where he, Lemprière, had got to. Accordingly, Lemprière hammered on the door and shouted, but there was no reply. It was rather cold. Assignations piled up in his mind: Septimus and the others, Guardian, Casterleigh, and he speculated absurdly that the house itself had grown dimly conscious and was now rejecting him, like some foreign body that must be expelled. He knew where he was; the back of the
house. It would be a simple matter to walk around to the front and enter as before. The fireworks might still be in progress. Everyone would be outside. Lydia, the Pug, Walter and the rest. Juliette.

With the door closed the whole house seemed dark, and its jumbled perspectives merging in the gloom seemed even more confused than before. The snow-covered lawn stretched out in front enclosed by neatly clipped box hedges. He thought, keep the house to the right, and then set off on his trek through the white landscape.

As Lemprière’s eyes adjusted to the darkness, it seemed the snow itself gave off a very faint light, each flake locked in its own tiny ice-cage to produce miniscule glimmers. The scene was very quiet, apart from Lemprière’s boots which squeaked as they sank in the snow and a low rustling sound, branches rubbing together somewhere out of sight. The snow covered everything. Lawn, hedge, stone ornaments, topiary trees. Paths lined with the same high hedges ran off every few yards to left and right and Lemprière took one which ran, as he imagined, parallel to the side of the house. The house itself was lost to view.

The night air hung between the hedges thick with damp. The path swung Lemprière out in a tangent, away from a destination that he now imagined ringed with faces; reds, blues and greens in the firework-light. The garden was silent. Lemprière listened to the noise his feet made as they scrunched the snow, attempting various leaps and specially angled hops to produce slightly different sounds. A bizarre trail stretched away at his back. Ahead of him the path funnelled out. The ordered lines of the formal garden were giving out, the neatly clipped hedges becoming more shaggy. Not even the snow could conceal it, no longer a smooth blanket as the broken ground beneath puckered and rucked up, rejecting the past violence of gardeners, improvers, projectors, believers in the ideal of extent. Little ridges snaked off like questions
claire et distincte? claire et distincte?
off into a wild, non-Euclidean yonder.

Lost in his snow-music, Lemprière only looked up when his feet drew discordant clumps from the frozen ground. The covering of snow had thinned. It was dark. The house was invisible. There was the line of the hedge perhaps, behind him, but the night pulled the ground up like a sheet all around and he found himself staring into walls of silent white which sloped away from him up into the sky. Like limbo, he thought, or the paradise of the Persians.
Pairidae
o:
an enclosure. But Alice de Vere had told him the land fell away from the house. He must have walked in a wide semi-circle, his constant margin of error first taking him away, then turning and bringing him back along the same lucky parabola. As he looked ahead, the white slope grew in substance until he saw it extend away to either side, a long low hump beyond which would be the house.
But the ground began to slope downwards in a gentle incline which was only interrupted by a straggling ditch which Lemprière scrambled down and then up without difficulty. The low white hump grew nearer, and extended back further. The going grew rougher and Lemprière had to place his feet more deliberately to avoid low snow-covered shrubs. He began to hop from tussock to tussock, a new game, then struggled through a cordon of juniper-scrub which encircled the white promontory. It was not a hill. It was trees, preceded by low bushes and saplings on which the snow had settled in a deceitful white canopy, suggesting ground actually lying some feet, or yards, or many yards below. Lemprière forced a path through a patch of dead elder which rose in height about him, as though he were wading into a lake of white powder. His waist, chest, then finally his head were swallowed up until he found himself beneath the canopy.