Lempriere's Dictionary (43 page)

Behind her, the other passenger climbed out more slowly. They had
been on the road from first light and now it was late in the afternoon. Jacques watched the girl as she strode about at the back of the coach gabbling in French, pulling the men this way and that as they unloaded the cases, hailing an open carriage. Her activity came in flurries, he had noticed, with periods of lethargy when nothing would animate her but a barked command. Casterleigh’s work, he thought, or the past encounters he had not witnessed and at which he could only guess. The journey from Jersey had exhausted him, though smooth enough compared to the last. He was growing tired of it, but this was the last time, if all went well.

‘Wait!’Jaques shouted across to the girl, who froze and looked back over her shoulder with the face of a thief. Casterleigh again. Leaving his stamp. Jaques pointed to the girl’s own case which still sat on the cobbles at the rear of the coach. Battered canvas, a cheap thing. She had hugged it to her all the way from Saint Helier, it had blue flowers painted on its side which were all but faded away.

The house lay a quarter of a mile away, across the Rue Montmartre in a court off the Rue du Bout du Monde. It was entered via a courtyard. The porte-cochère’s heavy gates were closed behind them as the carriage rolled through, a three-storey villa, plastered white with the lower windows protected by iron grilles set into the stonework. The footmen were waiting to unload the baggage. Stable lads unharnessed the horses. Inside, the maids curtseyed to Juliette before going about their business. A faint smell of dust hung in the air. She could hear pails and mops clattering somewhere out of sight. The house had lain empty and was now being opened for the two of them. Other than the servants they were the only occupants. Jaques had already disappeared. She was alone in the entrance hall with her cases and a footman who waited quietly at the foot of the staircase, the familiar scene, tens, perhaps hundreds of such halls, cool echoing interiors with alabaster columns and Japanned urns, intricate stucco work, and herself, waiting for the serving man who would fetch her upstairs in silence only broken by their footsteps.

This time it was he who waited for her, but the silence was unchanged as she motioned him to guide her to her room where a maid stood in attendance, curtsied and began to unpack the cases. She clutched the canvas bag to her chest. High windows looked south, out over the city with its rooftops which looked like scales, the river and the spire of Notre Dame, until the detail was lost in distance and the onset of evening. Between her vantage point and the spire lay the Marché des Innocens, just beyond that the tangle of streets bounded by the Saint Denis highway and Quai de la Mégisserie. She might have reeled off every street in that quarter, every ally, court, even the nameless passages that connected some of the
establishments with discreet back entrances onto the quieter thorough-fares. She knew them all, running through with her playmates who stank of the river, scabs on her knees and her hair cut like a boy’s, pretty even then. They had watched as the floods brought small boats crashing down the river and cheered as they splintered against the stones of the Pont Neuf. Her mother had cuffed her till she saw double but she had forgotten why, almost forgotten when. Almost forgotten Maman.

‘Mademoiselle?’

‘Yes, yes of course.’ The maid was finished. A pier-glass mounted on the wall between the windows threw back her reflection. There she was, brought back for a purpose. The Viscount knew but would not tell. She had known better than to ask as they took the carriage down to the waiting boat. He had spoken with Jaques on the jetty. She had watched through the window, then Jaques had taken her back to the house. The Viscount’s departure sharpened her vague sense of betrayal, for she already sensed a new phase in their relations and heard the clatter of gears changing. She thought of the pool. The water had been very cold and when the man, barely a man then, had flopped over and his arm had come up with its hand shredded to rags, she had thought of her own body, white, naked in the water which held her like weights around her ankles. More and more he was the Viscount; not Papa at all. He would be one then the other, she could not follow and was left floundering in his disapproval, a coquette, a precocious harlot all out of step, but in the pool she was frightened in a new way. Later, he had shot the dogs. She had sat in her room. It had taken an hour and each time the gun cracked she had jumped, then tried to settle but all the time waiting for the next report which would jerk her back to the moment in the pool when she had looked up at him on the horse and he had looked down at her and she saw the aftermath of a decision in his face. She was alone and naked and the dogs were there, aimless, waiting; the decision had gone her way. The gun cracked and she jerked again. It was the boy’s father, but she had guessed that. Later, when she went to the Viscount, he had told her that the boy had seen it all. That was the point. She was ashamed he had seen her. Casterleigh had become Papa again, tender or stern as the situation demanded, no longer the Viscount, just as he had been when she had told him what father Calveston had told her, what Lemprière had told him.

‘Visions?’ he had demanded.

‘He reads things. He believes they come true….’

‘What things?’

The man turning over. The dogs eating him. Letters had been sent to men in London and he had become the Viscount once more, raging and cursing. Children’s games. He wanted to kill the boy and the letters told
him no. Juliette spied on him hunched over his desk like an animal with the letters in his fists, little bits of paper telling him no, and the boy was still alive. Jaques had told her during their weeks together on Jersey. The boy had sailed for England, for his father’s will. She and Jaques had left for France a fortnight later. There would be a reason for both these things. There was a reason for the dogs drifting harmlessly back through the stream towards their master, leaving her there shivering, unmarked in the water; reasons like the bits of paper in his fists keeping Lemprière alive. The men in London, his partners, had told him no.

The maid had returned. A meal had been prepared for her on Monsieur Jaques’ instructions. Juliette gave up her thoughts and followed the woman to the dining room where a long mahogany table was laid for one. Monsieur Jaques had gone out. Juliette ate alone and in silence only broken by the servants as they brought in dishes she remembered: spiced mutton and ham, sweet white onions. When she had finished, Jaques had still not returned. It was quite dark now. The lamps had been lit and Juliette wandered through the house, drawn from room to room by a curiosity which only intensified as one by one, their contents told her nothing; rooms furnished with bow-fronted sideboard tables and fiddle-backed chairs carved from rosewood. There were damask-covered sofas and plain chests of drawers. The pictures on the walls were of old dukes, Rohan, Orléans, Barry and Condé whose woods they had passed through near Chantilly, Jaques had said. Framed charts lined an upper corridor which seemed to stretch the length of the western seaboard of France; Le Havre, Boulogne, Calais, Cherbourg, La Rochelle. They told her nothing. The room at the far end of this passage was a large study, but the desk was bare, its drawers locked and, she suspected, empty too. Leather-bound books lined the walls behind it. They still had their sheen, new, she thought, then fakes. No, they were simply unread. Her finger dawdled along the tooled leather spines with the names picked out in gilt letters, beautiful, all Greek and Latin. Anthologies of fragments. They were ranged chronologically along the shelves and as her eye skipped along the names she realised that she had written them all down, the day Lemprière had come to visit, in the library on Jersey. He had pushed these books through Quint’s protests like battering rams, humiliating him. So he had teeth after all, in a way. Lemprière’s books: growing wings or horns.

‘He reads them. And he believes they come true.’ The dogs rounded and trotted back to their master. Lemprière: his thoughts were in the trees of that scene, in the pool, the dogs, even in Casterleigh and herself. All his dreams came true, they were all here. In the pool she was at their centre. The Viscount’s decision and Lemprière’s dreaming her there shuttled her this way and that at their behests while the dogs pulled the body apart. She
was them both somehow, all their choices. It was a new phase. Papa was gone. There was only the Viscount now, and Lemprière.

Her search had taken her to the top of the house. From there, she heard a coach enter the courtyard far below. Juliette slipped from her perch on the desk and ran lightly down the corridor and stairs.

When Jaques entered the entrance hall she was preparing for bed, seated at her dressing table, picking pins out of her hair. They made tiny clinking sounds as she dropped them one by one into a small glass tray on the table. She was combing her hair. Jaques was in the doorway, she saw him in the mirror. Jaques was almost bald, he had a soft intelligent face. He was hanging there, neither in nor out of the room. She turned to look at him, surprised, she had not thought this required of her. Her comb had caught, she had missed a pin and drew it out carefully with her head bent down. Her hair hung down her back,
click
, she looked up once more at the slight sound. He had closed the door. The pin fell with the others,
ting
, into the tray. She looked around. Jaques was gone.

The following morning found them strolling arm in arm in the triple avenue of the Cour de la Reine. She was his daughter, his ward, a favoured niece, some or all of these as they drifted back along the Port aux Pierres and up into Place de Louis Quinze. Later they admired the arcaded houses which had gone up on three sides of the Tuileries. The next day was much the same, walking along the Quai Pelletiers with the gamblers playing
passe dix
and
biribi
seated on folding stools amongst the herring racks.

Other days, other sights. When the November skies threatened rain she her hair dressed at Baron’s. They ate at the Véry or Beauvilliers and watched the learning riders fall off their mounts at Astley’s. Juliette, for whom routine was a series of coincidences strung together, found it unsettling. In the evenings they played
trente et un
at Madame Julien’s, or dominoes at the Chocolat Café, or they went to the theatre. Sometimes she was left alone. There was a calculated aimlessness to their days. Each one, somehow, was a facsimile of the last. Only the details varied.

The days became weeks. Their vague rambles through the streets became vaguer still as though any sort of planning or forethought was forbidden and they found themselves in the Halles or Courtille districts where Juliette would never have ventured of her own accord, or walking through streets where the sewers were choked with straw, animal droppings and offal. There seemed no point or design to these tours, except that not once did they venture into the area below the Marché des Innocens, which she had viewed at a distance on her first evening. They would take long exhausting detours to avoid it, and the sight Juliette dreaded was never encountered. Casterleigh would have told him, must have told him. ‘Papa’ once more, perhaps.

They were watched. She could not be certain - they were always different - she caught them in the corners of her eyes just within earshot and at irregular times, in places which signified nothing. She kept her peace about them; another component to be weighed up and fitted into the puzzle with the others, like Lemprière’s list of books turning up in the study. Their aimlessness, their waiting, their watching; some central task, some event would link them but she did not know what. Her role was changed, she was a stranger now. Her first embrace, when the city pressed itself right up against her as she stepped from the carriage, that was gone. She was drifting and floating. Somewhere in these repetitious dawdling days the two of them had come apart. Even the watchers were falling away, or blending more successfully into the crowds. The time was filled with events and diversions, things they had done, or avoided doing. Somewhere in it all was a point.

December came and nothing was changed. Through salons and lobbies and spacious reception rooms with chandeliers of heavy crystal they went on with their listless promenade. She hardly knew the city, she was lost in it as she made fleeting conversations with people she would meet once and never again and was swept this way and that by the crowds who pressed against her in the streets but they were far away too, already in the next street, already at their doorways, already there, waiting for her the next day when she would join them once again, the same face hundreds and thousands of times a day. Only Jaques was constant. He was waiting for something and she clung to that. The winter bled colour out of their faces. The white buildings were not white but greyish brown, streaked with soot and muck thrown up by the wheels of carts and coaches as they passed by. The city began to freeze. The men and women moved slowly, more slowly through the lanes and byways. The life of the metropolis was a sluggish suspension of liquid solidifying around them. In the Alley of Sighs, dead-eyed creatures lifted limp wrists as they passed shivering with the others, their teeth glittering like paste. The drunks could dream of ice and the bitter cold. Their breath rolled into the gutters.

To all this, the cold, the dreary threats and lacklustre whispering, the stranger’s glassy flesh, the Palais Royale said
No!
The coaches rolled up along Rue Saint Honoré to fill it with high and low, comtesse and commoner, journeymen and food sellers, balladeers and musketeers, child actors and pornographers, bankers and their clerks and their wives and their mistresses who were always dancers and singers dressed in levités, light silks and chintz, bright sashes, their fingers sparkling with stones. There were magic lantern shows and players on the
parterre
, cafés, booksellers and eating houses. Gentlemen in citron jackets and striped satin spoke with kohl-eyed demi-mondaines in feathers and Italian gauze
in language that twisted like smoke through candlelight. Red cheeks, white gloves fluttering about their mouths, bands of velvet and the swish of silk as they glided and jostled against one another, their gossip seemed to burn the very air.