Lempriere's Dictionary (48 page)

‘When they write their history books, my name will burn a hole in the page. Farina!’

Lemprière recognised the ranter as they skirted the crowd in the street outside the inn. He and the Widow sat at a table by the window.

‘They have lit the fuse my friends, not I, not you all. They think of their fat daughters, their fat fortunes while the blackbirds of Saint Giles gobble the bread from our mouths and the mothers of Spitalfields uncover their infants on the parish step….’ The crowd rumbled about him. Lemprière had seen him outside the Craven Arms the night of the Pork Club, brandishing a length of silk, shouting to a smaller mob. This time the crowd was larger. More ill-tempered. The Widow looked away from the window.

‘If you hate Skewer so, why do you visit his offices?’ Lemprière asked.

‘Not hate,’ answered the Widow, ‘despise. Skewer is a little man, a nothing, hardly worthy of hate. In any case, Skewer’s office holds more than just Skewer.’

‘He keeps something of yours, a document?’ hazarded Lemprière. The Widow smiled and looked down at the table.

‘In a manner of speaking,’ she said. Lemprière waited for her to continue but she added nothing.

‘Skewer said that you had lost your husband,’ he prompted.

‘Also that I am mad with grief,’ the Widow came back at him. She said something else but the crowd had grown noisier, a low roar drowned out her words.’… popular story in the taverns. I still hear it from time to time: Neagle’s Whale. There was even a ballad. But that was more than twenty years ago.’ She smiled to herself. ‘Neagle’s Whale. My husband would have appreciated it.’

‘So he is dead?’

‘Oh yes, Skewer told the truth about that. The questions for me are how and why. Skewer might know the answers, though I doubt it. But he knows more than he tells; as do the insurers, and the insurers’ lawyers, and my late husband’s colleagues, and, most of all, the Company. Perhaps you know more than you tell, Mister Lemprière?’

‘I only know what you have told me….’ he began to explain, but the Widow was smiling, teasing him.

‘I married at eighteen and was a widow at twenty-four,’ she told him. ‘Alan, my husband, was almost ten years older than I. It hardly mattered. He was one of the youngest captains of an Indiaman ever to take a command. We made a fine couple. He beat off all his competitors, wooed me, won me.’ The Widow flicked a loose lock of her hair back in a coquettish gesture, then replaced her hand quickly.

‘Anyway, we were married, Alan and I, and took a house in Thames Street. I still have it. The next part of the story is Alan’s, Commander Neagle’s, rather. I have it by his report. His ship sailed in 1763 for Madras, it had been re-fitted and it was late in the year, but he believed he could catch the tail of the Trades and convinced the Company too. By anyone’s account he was an expert sailor but the voyage ran into all sorts of troubles. He had to put in at Lisbon for repairs - the Blackwall shipwrights had been hurried you understand - and a squall hit them a few days afterwards. All they could do was run before the storm. They were blown east towards the Gates of Hercules, through the Straits of Gibralter and into the mouth of the Mediterranean. They had their share of fortune too though. When the storm passed they found that they had passed safely through the Gates and were sitting in the Sea of Alboran. The lookouts had not seen either coast.
It was something of a miracle. Alan gathered the men on deck and told them all of their good fortune, there was a prayer and then soundings were taken. It should have been a ritual, they were in open seas after all, but when the readings came back, the whole ship fell silent. They were all but aground. Alan had no charts, but he could not believe it. A second sounding was taken. This time, the starboard side was clear, but the port gave a depth less than the draft of the ship. In other words, they were aground. But they were not. The ship was floating freely. The crew became nervous, peering over the side but seeing nothing. Alan could not understand what was happening. More soundings were taken, but no two were alike. Some of the men began to panic and Alan had stationed his officers around the whole of the ship when the mystery suddenly resolved itself. There was a low rushing sound to port, and great whorls began to appear in the water. Then the same on the starboard side. A huge spout of water gushed up, soaking everyone aft of the mainmast and, almost as one, a school of whales surfaced all about the ship. Ten or fifteen of them at the least and they were huge, more than half the length of the vessel. The soundings had been taken off their backs. For a moment, the ship was silent, then everyone cheered although the danger was hardly over. But the whales circled the ship for a minute or two, then swam off close to the surface, heading east. The ship was safe.’ The Widow peered across the table at Lemprière.

‘Alan returned with his ship and cargo intact the following year. When he told me the story of the whales I was only filled with relief. But it is a strange story and for a number of reasons. Why did the whales not damage the ship, or even sink it?’ Lemprière shook his head.

‘I had no idea there
were
whales in the Mediterranean,’ he said.

‘Exactly!’ the Widow exclaimed. ‘There are very few, or so it was thought. But the most extraordinary thing was the direction the whales took when they left the ship. Whales do not swim without purpose, and these whales swam east. Away from the opening of the Mediterranean, towards Arabia.’

‘Arabia, and then where?’ But the Widow waved the question away.

‘My husband had made sketches showing the fins and flukes, even some notes on how they swam. He showed these to friends of his in the whaling fleets, but he was no draughtsman and they all identified them differently until he mentioned the size, close to one hundred feet. Then they were unanimous: the beasts were blue whales, the greatest of all the whales. But when he was asked where he had seen these leviathans, they scoffed. There were no blue whales in the western Mediterranean, and no whales at all to the east. You see, there was nothing for them to eat. The nearest feeding grounds were in the Northern Indian Ocean and there was no
route from there, unless they could somehow cross the deserts of Egypt. My husband became the butt of a number of jokes, a new kind of whale was dubbed Neagle’s Whale. It was supposed to have legs. But Alan knew what he had seen and, more to the point, what it meant. His request to the Court of Directors to investigate further was turned down flat and when he persisted he was warned off. We discovered an old account of a voyage which convinced us we were correct, the same place, the same whales. A Company ship had made the sighting almost a century and a half ago.’

‘But what
did
it mean?’ Lemprière asked. ‘Where were the whales going?’ The Widow said something in reply, but a roar from the crowd outside drowned her out again.

‘… the Company’s charter gives them the monopoly of the route, you see. Anyone can trade with the Indies provided they do not travel by the tip of Africa. So long as there is only the single route, the Company’s trade is safe.’ The Widow paused, and realised that Lemprière had not heard. ‘The Indies,’ she said. ‘The whales were heading east to the Indian Ocean, to their feeding ground. They had discovered a second route to the Indies, probably through the Red Sea. That is why the Company had to silence my husband.’

Lemprière sat back, trying to imagine schools of whales passing unseen through uncharted channels between the Mediterranean and the Red Seas.

‘It is an unlikely enough story I will own,’ said the Widow. ‘But not so impossible as it appears, and it does not end there.’

Abruptly, the table was thrown into shadow. The crowd had swelled to fill the street until the backs of the men on its periphery were pressed right up against the window.

‘Does not end there?’ Lemprière prompted, but the Widow was looking out of the window. The crowd was growing rowdier. Farina’s voice was only just audible to them inside the tavern.

‘… this is for the Spitalfields’ weavers….’ Even above the crowd a loud tearing sound could be heard and a deafening cheer went up, ‘… and this for the woolpackers who have buried their skills with their children….’ Another tearing-sound, and this time the cheer was louder, angrier.

‘We shall continue our talk elsewhere,’ the Widow spoke quickly to Lemprière. ‘Come.’ He hesitated, bewildered by the turn of events. She spoke sharply. ‘Hurry!’ He rose and the Widow pulled him to the door where the full extent of their situation was revealed.

The crowd which earlier had consisted of two dozen spectators now numbered two hundred or more, rough customers too it seemed to Lemprière as he was pulled along the front of the tavern by the Widow,
squeezing past the men’s backs. Farina was visible raised up at their centre, standing on something. At his side, Lemprière noticed, a small balding man who was referred to from time to time - ‘Give me the figures, Stoltz!’ or ‘True or not, Stoltz?’ - at which the man would reply or nod. Stoltz. His demeanour rendered him almost invisible beside Farina, who now held a length of red silk. Stoltz was doing something to it, kneeling?

‘This way!’ The Widow yanked his arm, and he edged past more of the men who now raised a shout, then another and another. He was deafened and the mob was punching the air. Farina was standing with his head thrown back, the silk tight in his hands, the mob jostling one another, growing more frantic and flames were licking up the cloth when Farina ripped it in two and he was standing there with his head bent back, arms outstretched, in each hand suddenly the silk went up, two burning banners framing him like an unholy avenging angel. The mob’s noise seemed to go on and on. ‘Indian spies!’ Then another voice. ‘Spies! Indian spies!’ The silk was ash. The Widow shoved burly journeymen out of their way. The call went around the mob and Farina looked down. A punch was thrown, then another.

‘Farina!’ A voice like gravel stamped its authority over all the noise of the mob. A man was standing on the far side of the crowd, his stick raised and pointed unwaveringly at the ranter. His eyes were bandaged. A man had gone down and was being kicked.

‘Push!’ the Widow shouted back at Lemprière.

‘No!’ Farina yelled at the mob but the fight spread through them like the flames up the silk.

‘Indian spies!’ The call to violence went up as the blind man pointed and shouted once again. It was too late, the brawl was all about Lemprière who ducked, tripped, fell then felt a hand like steel close around his wrist and pull him along the ground. Not the Widow; a broad brimmed hat, cloak. He was on the edge of the crowd. The Widow was turning. She had seen him, was hauling him up and when he looked around for his rescuer, the man had gone. All he had seen was the hat and cloak. And the hand, which was tanned and brown. A sailor, thought Lemprière.

‘Come,’ said the Widow, then pulled him by the arm and he stumbled after her. Behind them both, the mob’s ferocity was waning. There were men lying on the ground. The blind man shouted ‘Farina!’ once more and his stick still pointed to the centre of the mob. But Farina had disappeared.

‘Hurry now.’ The Widow was talking breathlessly over her shoulder. ‘Sir John will call the militia and we have no wish to encounter those ruffians.’ Lemprière thought he had hurt his knee and matched the Widow’s brisk stride with a lopsided canter down the street, offering silent thanks to his mysterious rescuer. There was something familiar about the hat. His coat
had sustained a tear about the pocket which he picked at as they entered Shoe Lane, then turned into Stonecutter Lane. He was still shaken, half-expecting broad shouldered rioters to appear from nowhere and set about him. At the end of the lane he glanced back anxiously but saw only harmless pedestrians, a crowd of children, behind them two basket-women, further back a slighter figure, a hat which he recognised, its broad brim.

‘Damn!’ the Widow pulled him about. ‘Look there.’ She pointed and through the bustle of Fleet Market, Lemprière could see a squad of redcoats pushing through the crush. He looked back once more, saw the children still, the two women, but the cloaked and hatted figure had disappeared. The street was too long for him to have run back along its length, but before he could reflect further on this second disappearance, the two of them were skirting the marketplace, working their way south and east by way of Ludgate. Another squad, fifteen or twenty of them, with pikes and muskets confronted them in Thames Street. They were fifty yards away and moving towards the two of them. Lemprière moved as though to turn back but the Widow moved forward more purposefully, only twenty yards’ distance from the red-coated thugs who swaggered towards them and Lemprière shrank against the wall, offering silent prayers to the gods of conciliation and calm.

‘Here,’ said the Widow as she removed a key from her pocket, then turned into the nearest doorway. The key turned, the door opened and they were safe inside as it slammed shut behind them.

‘This is my home,’ she said. ‘Welcome. Perhaps you should rest here awhile.’

‘Yes,’ said Lemprière.

‘And then you must meet the professors.’

Some minutes later they sat in a drawing room on the first floor of the house. The furnishings were lavish, the rooms large and airy.

‘My husband set sail the following year in 1766,’ the Widow was saying. ‘We had planned our course of action with care.’ Lemprière sipped tea from a china cup. ‘My husband would take the usual route as far as the Straits of Gibraltar but then, instead of sailing down the west coast of Africa, he would return to the Mediterranean….’

‘And find the passage,’ Lemprière finished the sentence.

‘Exactly. And if a school of whales could pass through it, then so could a fully-laden Indiaman. He would emerge in the Indian Ocean months in advance of all expectation. The Company’s monopoly would be at an end.’

‘And he found the passage?’

‘Wait. I was left in London, I too had a part in all this. If the route were established, it would have to be safeguarded. If one man could find it out, so could another. Accordingly, I was entrusted with my husband’s
sketches, charts, all manner of speculations. They were bundled up and sealed, only our lawyer was to see them, and he only when a firm undertaking of secrecy was given. Only then would he begin to draw up the patents, charters and other documents; in short, put the force of law behind my husband’s claim. But we had great difficulty in persuading any lawyer to take our case.