Lempriere's Dictionary (70 page)

‘There is a channel, very narrow, the width of a man’s shoulders. As it deepens the ground closes above and it becomes a cave, a tunnel.’ Jaques’ face had tightened. ‘A long tunnel.’ His voice was distant. ‘Build the jetty where the channel meets the sea.’

Duluc had found the channel on the second day, overgrown and blocked with small trees and bushes. Together with Protagoras, he had forced a way through the undergrowth. They walked in single file for the channel was as narrow as Jaques had described it. Gradually the sides of the channel rose up and met above their heads, the vegetation thinned and was replaced by gravel which crunched underfoot. They moved deeper into the chamber until the light from the entrance dwindled and Duluc produced a candle. A few paces more and the passage broadened, then opened out into a long low cavern. Abruptly, the path ended.

They were at the edge of a lake which stretched out and away in front of them and the light from their candle could find the roof, but nothing to right or left or ahead except water extending into the darkness. But what held their attention was the boat. A dinghy perhaps ten feet long, beached on the gravel shore of the lake. Someone, sometime, had rowed across the lake. Duluc took out his compass and watched the needle swing towards him. They were facing south, towards the city. The two of them stood looking out over the darkness of the lake, their thoughts reaching south to Rochelle and back one hundred and sixty years to when the Rochelais had burned with their city and nine men, now their partners, fled under cover of the carnage. As they stood on the lightless shore with the candle flickering over the dinghy, the same realisation dawned on both men.

‘This was how they escaped,’ said Duluc.

Downstream from the Crow’s Nest, the
Vendragon
displaced four hundred tons of surrounding water, patiently awaiting her masters’ return.

‘Algae blooms off Île de Ré,’ read Captain Guardian from his post at the over-looking window.

‘Fish?’ asked Captain Roy.

‘Belly up by the hundred,’ said Eben. His eye wandered once again from the fine print to the ship moored below. He was waiting for the watchman to reappear.

‘Young Lemprière has no business aboard ships,’ he remarked.

‘Pleasant fellow.’ Roy recalled his enjoyable evening at the Stone Eater’s of a month ago. ‘His friend was in a fine funk.’ Eben saw Septimus pressed up against the wall by harmless flames, white-faced with his eyes screwed shut.

‘The fire,’ he said and both men nodded, remembering similar scenes aboard ship. All men had their private terrors, and the sea brought them out often enough.

‘It might have been the last performance.’ The Stone Eater’s name caught Guardian’s eye in another column. ‘The building is under Sir John’s interdiction and the King believes Cockspur Street a disfigurement to its neighbours. He wants to pull it down.’

‘He’s sickly,’ said Roy. ‘That’s the real reason. I heard he has consulted Bulwer, for blockage of the bowel.’ Eben thought of the final swallow, Lemprière’s creamy-pink stone sliding down the Stone Eater’s throat as Sir John’s men battled with Farina’s ruffians. The strange signal passed between Lemprière and the ruffians’ escaping leader, Stiltz, Stoltz, Farina’s right-hand man at any rate. Roy bit a woman in the leg, not once but several times, and the evening turned into a scrum, a near-riot. Tonight they were to go to the theatre. He could not quell the feeling of rising apprehension. He looked down once more at the ship but nothing had changed. An opera. He hoped Captain Roy would enjoy it as much as he had enjoyed the Stone Eater. His eyes moved over the ship but there was still no sign of the watchman.

On that same morning, seated with the Dukes of Cumberland and Queensbury, Lord Brudenell, Lady Cramer, Sir W. W. Wynne and others of the cognoscenti, Marmaduke Stalkart watched in gloom, his own and that of the surroundings, while Signors Morelli and Morigi swapped the arias of
La Frascatana
back and forth on the stage before him.

‘Add the tightrope act,’ he called up to Bolger. ‘Richter, whatever his name is.’ Bolger nodded and wrote the instruction down.

‘Yoooo-ooo-hooo!’ sang Signor Morelli.

‘Meee-ee-ee!’ returned Morigi. Lady Cramer waved a handkerchief at
her husband who led the skeleton-orchestra on his violin. He waved back as he caught sight of her. The orchestra ground to a halt.

‘Very good, Morigi,’ Stalkart called to the tenor. ‘Very sweet on the
rispondi
.’ Morigi shrugged and began to wander towards the wings. ‘Could we add an
allegro
by tonight?’ Stalkart asked Bolger as he climbed down from the stage. ‘Something short?’

‘
Se serce, se dice,’
Lady Cramer rolled several non-existent ‘r’s.

‘Something with a bit of spirit,’ the Duke of Cumberland chipped in gruffly.

‘It is far too late,’ said Bolger. Stalkart sighed. ‘We break, back by eleven everyone!’ He clapped his hands, rose and took Bolger by the elbow. Together they walked through the semi-light of the auditorium.

‘This opera house will go dark inside a month. Look here,’ Bolger pointed to the columns of figures in his ledger. Marmaduke glanced down.

‘Morelli is in fine voice, did you hear him?’ Lovely silvery tones banished the column of dwindling figures for a moment.

‘Douse those lamps!’ Bolger called back as they left by the stairs. ‘Do you understand me, Marmaduke? One month and,’ he drew a finger across his throat. ‘Curtains.’ Marmaduke climbed ahead knowing what would follow.

‘There is a time to call a halt, and I am calling it now.’ Marmaduke waited. ‘Your damned tortoises will tip us over the edge. They will bankrupt this theatre and the interests of anyone with a stake in her….’

There it was. The tortoises. Bolger was right, of course, but he had no vision. Marmaduke had long shouldered the burden of opening the more prosaic eyes of his partner. The dwindling audiences for
La Cameriera Astute, Gli Schiavi per Amore
and now
La Frascatana
were nothing new. That really was the point. The people craved novelty and so he packed the programme with tight-rope acts, sword fights, concert pieces and ballets. Still the empty seats stretched back into the cavern of the pit and the galleries were deserted. He had fallen behind their appetites. Sometimes, watching them from the rear of the theatre, their faces would become blanks. Even shouting or coming to blows with their neighbours, the features would dissolve in the absorbent clouts of their rag-doll heads, along with the fire and life of the piece onstage before them, soaking it up in some hungry reaction, some deficiency they had to fill, they had to have more and more. It was a new hunger and he could no longer feed it with the old repertoire. At Sadler’s Wells, a theatre (theatre? A grocer’s shop with three candles and four chairs) packed them in with cudgel-fighting. A man who swallowed stones in Cockspur Street did good business up until three weeks ago and he was left with dance finales when the pit wanted
tightropes, tightropes when they wanted horsemanship, and so on and so on. So he clung to his tortoises like a disbelieved prophet; they were far off, but promised and when they arrived, well, then his kingdom would be restored.

‘Cancel the order,’ said Bolger. No, never, not in any event, not if the theatre should crash in flames into the Haymarket.

‘They are part-paid already,’ he said, and watched Bolger swallow back his riposte, which was that the part-payment accounted in large degrees for their troubles. The tortoises should have arrived from Coade’s three months before. A succession of excuses - the last was a chipped mould -held Marmaduke at bay.

‘No-one will see them in any event,’ said Bolger, knowing that discouraging Marmaduke from his folly was ever a lengthy business.

‘Ah, not true, you see….’ and Marmaduke explained how the leading tortoise would be placed on the edge of the roof, rampant, perhaps bearing the legion’s standard which was the Minotaur indicating the secrecy of its battle-plan. Behind it the massed tortoise-ranks would cluster wonderfully. They would be invisible for the most part, this was true. But Marmaduke was no lunatic. Precisely through remaining unseen, his tortoises would prove a novelty the mob could never exhaust, not this season, nor the next, nor the one after that. They would be a mystery, in the best and most alluring, most crowd-pulling sense.

‘I leave you to your dreams.’ Bolger rose and stalked out in search of Richter. Marmaduke watched him leave in silence. Of course even the tortoises would not save the theatre in a single month. He was not foolish enough to believe that. He needed a coup, a revelation, a dazzling surprise, something to shock all London into attendance. In short, he needed Marchesi.

Cobb had him signed up already, but so far not a note had been heard from the famous tenor. A variety of infections bedevilled Marchesi’s throat, there were problems in rehearsal, with the scenery, with his fellow singers…. Marmaduke read these familiar signals without difficulty. Marchesi wanted more money and he, Marmaduke, was determined to give it to him. Damn the tight-rope walkers, fancy riders, dancers, stone eaters and all the other charlatans, a reputation like Marchesi’s was money in the bank. Money, however, was the problem. Bolger presented a persuasive case for this fact two or three times a day. There was no money. No money at all.

Marmaduke leaned back in his chair and smiled to himself. Settled there, twisting this vicious circle inside out, he heard a clattering, clanging kind of a noise scrape up the corridor outside. Marmaduke’s head appeared sideways around the door as Tim, stagehand and dogsbody, side-footed a
pail over the floor. Marmaduke looked down at murky grey-green water slopping in the bucket.

‘More daubers?’ Tim grunted in the affirmative and continued on his way. Marmaduke had noticed the slogans appearing on the walls of the theatre two months earlier. At first the cryptic messages intrigued him, then they were a nuisance, taking Tim a morning or more to erase. Now he was worried. The theatre seemed marked out for some kind of special treatment at the hands of Farina’s men, a special defacement for this citadel of the graced and favoured. Sir John had been short in the extreme when he had complained.

‘Nonsense Stalkart. Do you ever look outside your precious theatre? The same slogans are everywhere….’ and then Marmaduke
had
looked, and it was true. They were all over the city. Farina.
Farina
.

Tim’s bucket gradually faded from his hearing and he closed the door once more. A few minutes later a knock sounded, signalling the arrival of his visitors. Stalkart, who recognised one vaguely, greeted them familiarly.

‘Did we meet at the De Veres’?’ The taller of the two paced up and down the room while his wiry companion stood quietly and without expression just inside the door as though an attack were expected. This was comical in some way, but Marmaduke did not smile. He listened attentively as conditions and fees were outlined. Already, he was thinking of Marchesi, a fat purse of gold to free the fat gold throat.

‘… access to all areas and facilities, the wardrobe, the properties, stage-machinery….’ the big man was saying.

‘A performance, splendid. The orchestra will….’

‘There is no need for any orchestra.’

‘Of course, of course,’ Marmaduke agreed.

‘We will hire the theatre outright for a single night. You need to know no more than that.’ And then the figure was mentioned, which swept away all Marmaduke’s obscure misgivings about the arrangement, which would later sweep away Bolger’s, although, on learning that the money was already spent, even to secure Marchesi’s retainer, his joy would be less fulsome.

‘That will prove acceptable,’ Marmaduke said calmly, already the golden notes were rising, the vicious circles turning virtuous, the tortoises, Marchesi, the money, all of it falling into place.

‘There remains only the date, Viscount,’ Marmaduke prompted his visitor.

‘Two months’ time. The tenth day of July,’ said Casterleigh as he and Le Mara walked out, leaving Marmaduke Stalkart elated at the coup and wondering, without much caring, for what purpose exactly they required his theatre. In his mind’s eye, the tortoises were already in flight.