Lempriere's Dictionary (69 page)

‘Right Cap’n,’ replied a trio of hoary-headed tars from the quarterdeck.

Wilberforce van Clam passed the pipe to the Internuncio. ‘Suck on that m’boy.’

Hot sweet smoke curled in Peter Rathkael-Herbert’s throat. Small metal centipedes raced around the insides of his kneecaps.

‘Nn,’ he said exhaling and handing it back.

The sky was a vacant eye, massively blue. The sun flared low over the sea. He coughed and thanked the Captain.

‘Only for today,’ Wilberforce explained to him. ‘Wilkins is Captain tomorrow, then Schell, we rotate you see, all being equals ‘n’all. Gets a bit confusing sometimes.’

His head was spinning, slow half-rotations which blurred the ship and its aged crew somehow making them even more fabulous than they already were. ‘Pirates,’ he slurred. The chair was so enveloping, a whole world.

‘Look at it financially, morally, politically, however you like,’ Captain van Clam leaned across, ‘we’re the most successful pirates these seas have ever known.’

‘Bar one.’ Webley ‘Mussel’ Wilkins had come up behind him.

‘Uh?’ The insides of his knees were huge wooden cavities now. Hundreds of small metal balls bounced and sprang off the planking.

‘The Indiaman’s no pirate,’ van Clam protested.

‘The piracy’s on land, but she’s a pirate ship, mark my words,’ Wilkins retorted.

‘Thanks.’ The Internuncio took the pipe, drew deeply and passed it on to Wilkins. ‘What Indiaman?’

‘India
men
,’ said the Captain. ‘When we first began she was called the
Sophie
. She was an open secret. Gazi Hassan warned us of her first, this was in his free-booting days, before he started founding naval academies for the Sultan, re-organising the Turkish Fleet and whatnot.’

‘Turkish fleet!’ Wilkins spat.

‘Anyway, he told us nothing came within a league of that vessel and lived to tell the tale. “Give her a wide berth,” he said, and we did. No-one knows where she docks, no-one has seen her crew and no-one knows why she sails these seas.’

‘She makes two voyages a year.’ Wilkins took up the story. ‘Each year she appears somewhere off the coast around Jaffa, never exactly the same place, but always the south-east corner of the Mediterranean. No-one’s actually seen her being loaded, but on her voyage back she sits low in the water. She sails west, out of the Straits of Gibraltar and then heads north. After that no-one knows, but she’s back within two or three months. Spain perhaps, the west coast of France, she might even make England, but
wherever she docks that’s where she unloads. West to east she rides high, empty I’d say.’

‘India
men
, you said.’

‘Indiamen, mm. Two of them. There was the
Sophie
as I said, then there was a second. We’d been sailing these seas, what, seven or eight years I suppose, and the rumours started up about a second ship. Still an Indiaman, well-fitted, lots of guns, lots of tumblehome, but newly built by the look of her. About the same time, the
Sophie
disappeared, just vanished. No wreckage, nothing. The
Corso
had lost ships, the corsairs had taken losses too. She was a hell-ship and good riddance, that was the feeling north and south the length of the coast. The celebrations were short-lived though. The second Indiaman took up where the other left off, worse than before even. Whoever commands her seems to know these seas better than us all, and sails that damned ship like an argonaut.’

The Internuncio let the tale blow gently about his ears. The sky was undulating, a vast eyelid of shadow creeping across the blue. He wanted to know why the voyages were made, he wanted to hear the mystery of the ship’s purpose explained. Perhaps he asked these things, and perhaps van Clam told him about the caravan which arrived on the coast around Jaffa and which was said to meet the ship and load it with the rarest metals, the most precious stones. As he slid into a dream under a sky so clear where all the stars were chances taken or missed, perhaps he asked the name of the ship, a name they had avoided voicing, as the ancients avoided mention of the Furies for fear that the name would summon its owner. But the pirates’ fears were groundless, their object being hundreds of miles distant, never to return and called by them now in syllables reaching down into the Internuncio’s sleep. ‘
Vendragon
’ said Wilberforce with a shiver. ‘And God help us all if we see that name again.’

‘
Megaera!
’ The name shouted from the crow’s nest, rousing the Internuncio from his sleep with the sun already high, sending elderly pirates scampering up the rigging, bowling along the gangways, diving through the hatches.

‘
Megaera!
’ There she was, a tiny black shape on the horizon and the Internuncio felt the
Heart of Light
swing about as Captain Wilkins set a course for his prey.

‘She’s carrying sulphur,’ Wilkins threw over his shoulder. ‘We’re low on powder, you see. Harder to port! That’s why we needed the
Tesrifati
’s saltpetre. A few barrels of sulphur, the same of charcoal and we’ll have all we need in no time.’

The sun rose higher and it seemed to Peter Rathkael-Herbert that they were gaining on their prey. By the afternoon she was less than five leagues’ distance away.

‘Put on more sail!’ Wilkins roared aloft. A thin grey smudge hovered on the horizon, gradually becoming land.

‘Dammit!’ exploded the Captain. They were overhauling the
Megaera
, but too slowly. The coast would reach her first.

‘Third time this year we’ve missed her. There she goes, look at her.’ Wilkins shook his fist. ‘Next time, you bucket of worms, next time!’

But the
Megaera
had indeed escaped and, as the
Heart of Light
slackened sail to tack away from the coast, she slid safely into harbour at Marseilles cursing, for the third time that year, the lack of a squadron to protect law-abiding vessels from the depredations of privateers.

A letter was drafted and the mate posted up to Paris that very day. They would petition the King. The master of the
Megaera
had had enough. Running Caltanissetta sulphur between Cagliare and London should be routine. The
Flota
two centuries before had had an easier time of it. And waiting for him out there, somewhere on the open sea, was the black ship,
Heart of Light
. He needed an escort, something with fire power, something to blow the
Heart of Light
to the deepest pit of hell.

‘No,’ said Louis to the
Megaera’
s request for three twenty-four gun corvettes and ‘No’ to Monsieur Necker’s request to rebutt the charges made by his successor, Monsieur Calonne. Louis had awoken to a radiant dawn, full of decisiveness. Already he had banished the Bordeaux Parlement to Liborne, refused the resignation of a colonel in Toulouse and inveighed against the protests against his Catholic Majesty in Brittany.

‘No,’ he said to a request for pay from the Switzers guarding the Palais. Today he would not be cowed. He would make at least ten more decisions before breakfast, and twenty before lunch. The dauphin, he knew, was ill again. A sickly child, the dauphin. And his wife … His wife was not universally loved, it was undeniable. Today was a day for looking matters squarely in the face.

‘A petition from Cherbourg, sir.’ A secretary approached. ‘On the matter of a blocked harbour.’

‘No,’ Louis replied, ‘absolutely not. If they require a blocked harbour, they may build it themselves.’

‘I believe they have it already sir. They wish it removed….’

‘They want it, they do not want it. What am I to think? My decision stands. No, wait, send the petition to….’ In his agitation at the Cherbourg petition, Louis had risen from his desk.

‘Majesty?’ The secretary’s pen was poised, he looked to his master who now stared down out of his window. Morning sunlight glinted on the artificial lake.

‘Majesty?’ again, but Louis’ eyes were fixed on the orange trees. The lines were broken, disordered, confused. They looked as though they had
been dropped there by, by balloon. Where had his guards been when the outrage took place? Were they in on the orange tree plot?

‘The Switzers’ pay,’ he spoke over his shoulder to the secretary. ‘Double it.’

‘And the Cherbourg petition, Majesty?’

‘The Marine Board,’ barked Louis as he turned away from the insult which confronted him below. ‘Let them deal with it.’ He paused. ‘That is enough for today,’ he said more quietly. ‘I am tired of it now.’

And so the Cherbourg Petition was despatched, with other official correspondence, back to Paris and the offices of the Marine Board where, moved by stages from teetering heaps to dishevelled piles, by way of neatly-labelled mahogany drawers, overflowing bureau-desks, laquered memoranda trays and ormolu Louis Quinze side-tables pressed into service by the sheer accumulated bulk of neglected requisition orders, rejected tender offers, minutes of meetings for projects abandoned years before, outline plans of schemes so far in the future that the technologies to execute them had yet to be invented, treasured thumb-nail sketches and speculative costings of notions dear to the hearts of successive directors past, present and even future (infantile executions in bright crayon coupled with the endemic nepotism of the Marine Board’s policy on directorial succession support this last) all of this filed, indexed and cross-referenced under classification systems devised uniquely by a succession of independent minded secretaries who had overlaid them one on the other until every item was enshrined in a category of which it itself was the only example and the whole farrago resembled nothing so much as a bone china tea service dropped from height onto an adamantine and unyielding surface, such as a block of granite, it (the petition) quickly came to the notice of Monsieur Bougainville who recognised at once that this was a matter for his trusted lieutenants, Monsieurs Duluc and Protagoras, en route at that moment between Cherbourg and the port of La Rochelle where, weather permitting, the petition would be waiting for them on their arrival. And so it was.

On the twentieth day of May, a coach and four made weary progress across the plain towards La Rochelle. The coach was red with dust thrown up by its passage along the Bressuire Road. It had passed Marans and was travelling over level terrain though the road, which twisted and turned to avoid the slightest hummock, wheeled the view about this way and that, until the two passengers wondered if they would ever arrive. Duluc peered out of the window at the plain which, a century and a half before, had played host to the red coats of Richelieu’s army. A city of tents had sprung up behind the trenches and mortars, out of range of the walls which came in and out of view with the twists in the road. Behind those walls the
Rochelais had fought and starved and, at the last, burned themselves alive rather than be taken by the Cardinal’s dragoons. Old stories. Duluc wondered whether, in years to come, travellers to La Rochelle might look at those same walls, murmur his name, and, closing their eyes, imagine the scene as he would create it in the coming weeks. Passing at last through the gates into the city, he was struck by how few buildings had survived from that time. He knew the facts, but here the facts were stone and wood, flesh and blood, which had turned to nothing years before. The city, he realised suddenly, had never recovered from the siege.

Low tide showed them the remains of the mole which had blocked the harbour. The harbour itself was a ragged circle, broken where it met the sea. Beyond it was Île de Ré, and to the south, Île d’Oléron where a patch of water seemed darker than that surrounding it. The sea between the two was troubled with cross currents and strange eddies which legend ascribed to the flight of a young child over those waters on the last day of the siege.

In their roles as officers of the Marine Board, Duluc and Protagoras knew the true reason was a complex system of sand-bars which moved invisibly below the surface in response to the tides. Two towers marked the entrance to the inner pool of the harbour. Casting an eye over the humble fishing smacks and lighters which crowded together along the quays, Duluc found it difficult to believe that it was from this harbour that
Les Cacouacs
’ partners across the sea had first made their fortunes. It was from here the Cabbala had fled, and to here they would return. No, no-one would remember Duluc. Le Mara, Cas de Pile, Romilly, Vaucanson, Boffe, les Blas, Lemprière and their leader, whose identity he had not been told. Those would be the names graven on Rochelle, as the Greek commanders’ were on Troy, as Scipio’s on Carthage. Duluc would be forgotten, a clerk in the service of princes across the water. Eclipsed by their return.

In the week which followed, the inhabitants of the hamlet of Lauzières to the north of the city watched with diminishing curiosity as two men laboured with lines, stakes, compasses and charts on the narrow isthmus of land which ended at Point du Plombe. They were from Paris, surveyors it was thought. The two men walked up and down the shoreline writing figures in small blue notebooks, holding up plumb-lines, even hiring a boat and paddling about to take soundings. These too were written in the notebooks.

Two days later, the news was posted in Lauzières, Nieul-sur-Mer and Marsilly that Monsieurs Duluc and Protagoras of the Marine Board were seeking to recruit a workforce. A jetty was to be built at Point du Plombe. It was to be fifty yards long and at its end would be a mooring post, stout enough to secure a vessel of four hundred tons. The villagers were caught between curiosity and ridicule. With the harbour at Rochelle, no ship
would dock at Point du Plombe. For all their measuring and noting and stamping about with tide tables and charts, the men from Paris clearly lacked sense. What could they want such a mooring for? And here of all places? Within the day, Duluc and Protagoras had all the hands they would need.

The survey was a sham. All their efforts were a charade. The jetty had been drawn and its position marked six months before. In the Cardinal’s Paris residence, Jaques had leaned across the table and the girl had peered with sullen eyes as he pointed to the chart. ‘Here, extending to here. The ship will be four hundred tons, do you follow?’ The Cardinal had nodded his acceptance before passing on the commission to his lieutenants. The Marine Board was a convenience.