Lempriere's Dictionary (57 page)

‘There,’ Eben pointed to the wharf. ‘That’s the
Falmouth
. That’s Neagle’s ship.’

Eben watched as the young man leaned forward, his nose almost touching the glass. The porters were at work, shifting rope-handled crates along the quay as before, one man at either end. A cart was disgorging more crates further down the jetty. He could not see the two watchers. Their attendance had been less certain of late. The young man’s face was set, his gaze fixed on the
Vendragon
. He would not be able to understand the scene; see it, yes, but no more than that.

‘If your friend, this Peppard, if he was killed, are you not in some danger yourself?’ Eben asked. They were carrying crates over from the cart.

‘I believe not, it’s odd, a long story.’ Absent tone, his eyes were fixed on the ship, and the crates. ‘Why have they brought it back? Why now?’ Eben looked at him. It was more than curiosity, this thin face.

‘It arrived empty,’ he said. They off-loaded some ballast, nothing else. And they knew it was coming. That quay was clear a week before it docked. Would’ve cost a small fortune.’

‘It has been here long?’

‘Months. Usually it would be loaded in days. The pressure on these quays is immense.’

‘What is going on?’

‘I have little idea. Those are Coker’s men working down there. Hired hands. If it was all above board they would use regulars.’

‘I have to find out,’ the young man said abruptly and he was even walking towards the stairs when Eben’s voice sounded loudly in the confines of the room.

‘No!’ The young man stopped, looked about, already questioning. Eben thought how he might explain it, that he was not in the Strand or the Adelphi, that he was here, in the docks, at the river’s edge where the laws and rules and codes of the land grew ragged and frayed as the land itself when it petered out into water and became the mudbanks which the tide said were both land and water. To the outsider, a dubious area with its own rules, its own privacies and penalties. They would throw him in the Pool, nail him in a crate and throw him in. They would not think twice. He was ignorant, he would blunder and fall foul of the laws. He did not know them. Tell him that.

‘It’s a rough crew, you see,’ he said. ‘You’ll get no answers. Something worse most likely, you follow me? Stay clear of the docks with your questions. That’s good advice young Lemprière….’

At that moment he was interrupted by a loud crash and a volley of curses
from the quay. They met again at the window and craned their necks for a view. One of the crates had fallen, a snapped handle. It lay like matchwood about the smashed crate’s contents. A statue of some sort, someone carrying a pot on his shoulder, six feet or more had it stood upright. Packing straw began to disentangle itself from the statue’s limbs. So that was what they were carrying. A thick-set man was shouting at the men.

‘That’s Coker,’ said Eben. Two of them ran to the ship, returning with a shroud that was wrapped hurriedly about the statue. The original carriers and the fetchers hoisted the load between them and the statue continued its journey, swinging between them in a makeshift hammock. ‘There!’ Eben stabbed his finger and Lemprière just saw a wiry man dressed in black, hatless, as he walked behind a row of dockcranes.

‘Did you see him? He keeps watch over the loading.’

‘Who?’

‘Don’t know. Usually two of them, hiding from each other.’ The statue was half way along the gangplank. ‘Coker takes his orders from that one, the other’s more of a puzzle. But that one’s the commander.’ They both looked again. The man in black had effectively disappeared.

‘He’ll be the Company’s man,’ said Lemprière. Eben nodded, both unsure. The statue had disappeared into the hold. The line started up again. ‘Statues,’ said Lemprière. ‘There must be more to it than that. If I knew what statue, perhaps.’

‘It was Neptune shouldering an urn,’ said Captain Guardian. ‘Through which water might run, as in a grotto.’

‘Neptune? But he didn’t carry a trident, and how can you….’

‘Can’t cast a trident. Too fiddly,’ Eben said.

‘How, pardon me, how do you know? I hardly saw it myself, but….’

‘I’ve seen it fifty times before. Every garden with running water and an owner of the middling sort has one. It’s Coade stone. They turn them out by the hundred. Yours for nine guineas, three shillings and ten pence, if memory serves. That ship is loaded with fake statues,’ Guardian laughed. ‘So now you know.’ The young man offered a tight smile in reply.

‘I need more that that,’ he said. ‘They might sail at any time and I would be left with nothing.’ He was staring down at the men and the ship. Guardian could read his thought.

‘I tell you no,’ he said. ‘Stay away. If they are working some deception they will deal with you as they did this Peppard. The Company is not to be trifled with.’

‘The Company is a vile thing,’ the young man said bitterly. ‘A cold, creeping thing. Am I to do nothing?’

‘A regular Asiaticus,’ said Eben genially. Diffuse this Lemprière, he thought, quieten him. Fools rush in…. Keep him away from the hired
hands, away from the sharp end. But his guest was gazing peculiarly now, not calm but deflected. By what?

‘Asiaticus, how do you know of him?’ the young man asked sharply. Guardian thought back, surprised at this turn to his questions. He told him of the pamphlet which had washed up on the mudbank a little way up the quay some months before, “A. Bierce” inscribed carefully on its fly-leaf, the author’s vitriol and rage all muddied and blurred, caught up and whirled in the tidal waters to fetch up sodden in his hand at the river’s edge. Taken home and dried before the very fire now burning low on the other side of the room, it had amused Guardian to read of such hatred for the Company. In truth, he had little love for it himself. A late autumn evening had been enlivened, lifting him from the melancholy of the Ballast Fiasco which had preceded its arrival by a single night. He handed the pamphlet to Lemprière now, who cast his inured eye over its alphabet of anger. It was the third of four. Again, more promises of revelation than revelations themselves. Promises or threats.

‘Keep it, if you have a use….’ Lemprière took the wrinkled, dried-out pages. Yes, he did, not quite knowing what yet, but yes all the same. Thank you. His eyes drifted back to the ship.

‘Listen to me, young Lemprière. I will keep a watch over the ship. Leave her alone. If they make ready to sail I will get word to you. And, if time is short, I will take the helm myself, do you understand? You have my word.’ The doubt was already gathering in his guest’s face. Must he offer credentials on top of his word? ‘I sailed from this port man and boy for close on forty years. If matters come to a head, I’ll find the men I need, believe me,’ Eben affirmed. The doubt faded slowly. The two of them shook hands on it.

‘I am in your debt,’ Lemprière said solemnly.

‘Oh,’ Eben brushed the obligation aside.

‘You said two men?’

‘Two? Oh yes. The one you caught sight of, that’s one. The other’s an odder creature. Black cloak, hat….’

‘What does he look like?’

‘Couldn’t say. The hat covers his face. A broad brim, like this,’ Eben drew a wide circle in the air above his head. ‘You know him?’

Lemprière thought of hats. ‘No,’ he said.

‘Now, I have my own question,’ Eben said. ‘What was your father really looking for? This ship of his, what was it up to?’

‘I only wish I knew, but until today I had no idea he was looking for a harbour, let alone a ship. In all honesty, I know no more than you.’ Eben accepted this reluctantly. He poked at the fire, then the young man spoke again.

‘What was the
Falmouth
’s tonnage?’ he asked suddenly. Eben smiled.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘four hundred tons, or thereabouts.’

‘My father sought a harbour for a ship of that tonnage.’

‘There are thirty or forty ships of that size sailing from this port alone. All the older Indiamen are around that size.’

‘So my father was looking for an Indiaman,’ Lemprière leapt on the fact.

‘There are plenty of other ships of that size, hundreds….’

‘But most of them are Indiamen. I mean, what if my father’s lost ship and Neagle’s are connected in some way?’

‘You mean, “What if they are the same ship?”’

‘Yes.

‘Because they are both probably of four hundred tons.’

‘Yes.’

‘And they both have something to do with the Company, possibly.’

‘Yes.’

‘In my opinion,’ said Captain Guardian, ‘that is about as likely as an IJmuiden cargo-boat avoiding ship tax at Lübeck. And that,’ he added with emphasis, ‘is very unlikely indeed.’

Indeed. Lemprière left the Crow’s Nest a short time later with Guardian’s promise, his warning and the chart book, the latter a black leather sail whose width being an inch or so longer than his reach would be carried two-handed and a foot from his face at the mercy of any gust or other urban turbulence which might blow him off an even keel, spin him about and capsize his fragile bark utterly. There were hats involved: the broad brimmed affair worn by the elusive Watcher No. 2 and mentioned by Guardian, a similar one glimpsed for a panicked split second when a hand of steel dug him out of Farina’s mob, ripping his coat - still unrepaired -and now, as he pushed his flapping atlas against the rogue wind, homewards up the gentle slope of Pillory Lane towards Thames Street, the Indian at the
Ship in Distress
came to mind, his eyes flicking to the ripped pocket, his cloak (a
black
cloak) slung over the chair on which rested a black broad brimmed hat, just as Guardian has described. Were all these the same hat? Different hats? The same hat worn by different men, exchanged tête-à-tête at regular intervals; some other, less discoverable arrangement?

A billow of wind pulled his black shroud along as Thames Street was entered, sailed through and left behind. Lemprière lurched and stumbled, a jolly sight for the passersby. The irregular sail blocked his view. The slight irregularities of the street were keel-crunching reefs, and his fellow citizens becalmed wrecks inviting collision. A hazardous journey and below the surface clutter an old monotone was sounding up from the hadal depths, connecting with him and then diving down once more for a long-dead
Greek whose black-sailed ship brought Ægeus tumbling down the cliff, dead from that earlier son’s forgetful mistake. His fingers were numb with the effort and the cold. It was dark. Hints of the coming jacquerie adorned the walls of the capital:
Their Banners Will Be Stained With Blood In The Streets
, on the wall of Rowlandson’s glass-factory, then, more simply, more coolly partisan:
Farina
, chalked on the bricks of the adjoining yard, already crumbling, already being lost to the urban mulch which squelched underfoot as he forced the passage home through an unrelenting head wind. He imagined the lashing wind and rain eroding the features of idols until their noses and mouths were bland and picturesque, ready for the restorer’s touch. Theseus with an idiot’s grin. Neptune carrying a pot “through which water may pass, as in a grotto.…” There was more to it than fake statuary, more than the massed productions of Coade.…

In this manner he continued, pulled by sails which were pictures of the sea, pictures of harbours, a careening rattling hull veering insensibly between known and unknown coasts. The rudderless vessel steered by a hundred different winds, lurched over a sea of old mistakes, its mainmast sinking slowly below the horizon towards the ragged mouth of its last port where it would be pincered between the headlands and becalmed within the basin of Rochelle, a lost ship.

There was a familiarity to the harbour plan, a half-grasped correspondence. Perhaps, in some other unremembered time, he had drifted within the basin of Rochelle, looked about at the jutting spurs and banks running this way and that, and then, viewing the abstract of that scene on Guardian’s chart, reduced and from above, the earlier surroundings had come back to him as though he had flown above it all and seen the natural harbour with its mouth, the only access, the only break in the haven’s rough circle, making its image a wide and irregular C.

A drenched messenger boy had waited in the hallway of the brothel. They had read Jaques’ note and left directly. Vaucanson recalled the teeming rain. They had found the Indian in Rue Boucher des Deux Boules, outside the bawdy-house. The lights from the Villa Rouge had blazed through the thin material of the curtains in squares of glowing red. The Indian had stood like a sentinel outside. Le Mara had spun him about, knocked the breath out of him, taken a knife-quick flash of steel to the throat. The hired men had finished it.

Seventeen: Vaucanson counted the winters since that night. They had carried him to the coach. He remembered the Indian’s oval face looking up at
him. They had taken him to England. From Dover to the metropolis, thence down through the hidden shafts and tunnels, Vaucanson had fetched him back to this place, a workshop littered with silver wire, copper rods, angle-joints, spring-loaded governors, tiny ratchets and reticulated chains, watchmaker’s and surgical tools. Here, secreted in a remote gland of the Beast, Vaucanson wasted no time in slitting the Indian’s fingers, sliding in the shiny steel rods, peeling back the flesh of the face and inserting the drilled faceplate. The floor was awash with fluids and his own arms coated to the elbows with gore. He could gaze into the Indian’s eyes and see the original man interpenetrated by the created machine with its gears and tiny winches, its self-governing extensors and sensors, its blank inaction a neutrality which could not be human: the peace of the Zero State.