Lempriere's Dictionary (71 page)

No, Sir John had not taken much trouble over Stalkart’s complaint. Farina’s name was scrawled and daubed over every public building from Green Park to Shadwell. The green chalk - was that a clue, a message also to be read? He did not know, and in any case could only imagine green. Farina’s campaign had gone to ground. His lieutenants, Stoltz amongst them, had disappeared and the leader himself, well, the stories multiplied. He was gone to Paris for arms, or Amsterdam, or Lisbon. He had taken the cloth, joined the Wesleyites, he worked as a labourer in Tothil Fields, he had sailed for the Indies, was dead, or risen from the dead as an avenging angel, a cohort of the devil, an invention of himself. His skull was made of solid silver, he drank poison and did not die, he had fought with the corsairs under Gazi Hassan. He could remember his own birth and knew where and how he would die. He was Farina.

For Sir John, who felt the city’s taut skin pulsing beneath his feet, he was a monster hatching in the sewers and underground courses, in the sub-basements and cells, in the lightless spaces beneath the everyday townscape. Once already he had shoved his scrawny ragged neck up into the light, cawed for meat and sunk out of sight. Next time the fledgling would be a harpy, hungry and risen to feed. He was everything that was wrong in the city. The squalor, the stench, the ruin. He was the unexplained deaths and the unforseen collapses and Sir John could not find him.

He asked for more constables, and received polite smiles. He explained the need, talking of the Linen Houses collapsing, flooding the streets with jobless workers, of a new viciousness in the dens and rookeries, of a woman who stamped her foot, broke a vein and bled to death in the street, of the urchins who had danced around her and painted their faces with her blood, perhaps they did not know, perhaps it was innocence made them do this but he did not believe it. He was refused. If trouble broke out, the barracks were near. But Sir John told them the prisons were full of deserters from those barracks and still they would not yield. Then he realised that they would not give him the men because they feared a blind man and his force of constables as they feared their own regiments and the mob. They did not trust him. What would Henry have done? He had packed up the foreigners and sent them off in a boat although, remembering the incident across three intervening decades, Sir John recalled it was not a success. They had escaped with the boat, ship rather, or been lost. And that was the Comb Riots, a gentle ripple compared to his present
fears. His own men were frightened and mutinous. Even his guide-boy, it was a dreadful incident, he would rather not think of it. It might have ended in disaster; ridicule, a jibe, a prod, a poke, a trip and then a fat blind man rolling under the kicks of the Mob, kicking him and kicking him. The mood could turn like lightning. The boy had untied the string which Sir John had attached about his neck. He had tied it about the neck of a small dog. The dog had led Sir John down the steps of Bow Street towards the market and it was Mister Gyp, the knife-grinder, who had saved him, whispering in his ear, ‘Your boy’s a dog Sir John,’ as he passed. The joke so visible it could not have been missed, a Chief Examining Magistrate led by a small dog through the gauntlet of the market. He had been wrong about Gyp. The boy was padlocked now. The clanking irritated Sir John.

Troubled on all levels, he discharged his duties at Bow Street with a new perfunctoriness. A weather-eye on the coming storm and an ear to the ground which shuddered far below drew his attention this way and that as the catalogues of arson and affray mounted in the Examining Office. He needed a refuge, and found it in the cool halls of Rudge’s mortuary. Rudge hardly noticed the city’s anxieties. So far as Sir John knew, he never ventured beyond the doors of the mortuary. On the pretext of his investigation into the Ritual Murders (a title he half-regretted sharing with Rudge) Sir John spent long hours meandering about details of the women’s and Peppard’s deaths, a kind of purge from which he would emerge briefly free of his cares. The investigation itself was a lonely success in the lists of his recent failures. The figure of Lemprière floated about the affair, never quite connecting with it, never far away. He had been at the De Veres’ the night of the first murder and he had been, perhaps, the last to see Rosalie alive. But five months before….

Doubts nagged Sir John. He had a sniff of his quarry, but no more. On the strength of his visit to the Craven Arms, he had recalled the lightermen who had found Rosalie’s body, and they had told him of a one-sided fight between themselves and a madman in the King’s Arms tavern. That was the night of the murder, and their assailant had worn eyeglasses and a pink coat. He had asked Rudge if he remembered the boy from George Peppard’s room, Theobald Peppard’s companion, and Rudge had confirmed “John Smith” had been seen at the King’s Arms that night, except John Smith was not his true name.

Sir John waited in the Examining Office for his summoned witness to appear. He could not fault his own deductions. There was no missing element in the causal chains by which he hooked the killings to one another. And yet something marred the composure of his logic, something which told him all his deductions led him falsely, that his steps were actually theirs, and they served other masters. Doubts and more doubts
clouded the case before him, adding another layer to his troubles. A knock sounded at his door.

‘Come!’ instructed Sir John. He heard the door open and fussy footsteps move across the floor. ‘A seat, Mister Peppard.’ He gestured before him.

‘Sir John,’ Theobald said by way of greeting as he sat.

‘You are Theobald Peppard, brother of the late George, an employee at East India House in Leadenhall Street?’

‘Chief Archivist and Keeper of the Correspondence, I am yes,’ Theobald answered. Sir John leaned forward.

‘On the night your brother’s body was discovered, you arrived in company with another gentleman. Do you recall that night?’

‘Naturally Sir John, my own brother’s death, how could I forget?’ Because, by all accounts, you had not spoken to him since his good name sank with the
Falmouth
and Captain Neagle twenty years before, Sir John thought to himself.

Aloud he said, ‘Do you recall the name of your friend that night?’

‘He was no friend of mine! Not at all, no. I met him only that evening, he was trying to force George into a terrible business. Blackmail, would you believe? I tell you I have my own suspicions about
that
gentleman….’

‘Naturally.’ Sir John sought to stem the flow. ‘But do you have his name, Mister Peppard?’

‘Lemprière,’ said Theobald promptly. ‘L-E-M-P-R-I-E with an accent like this.’ He gestured with his hand and Sir John sighed inwardly. ‘R-E’.

A future-ghost stirred in the city of the dead, rose and walked amongst the shades of forgotten heroes, through streets which rose and leaned in until the sky was a narrow slat of light far above. The powerful gods were only local deities here, weakened to lares, the lemures of untended graves. He saw the false prophet, Laocoon, whose errors would now lead no-one astray, there being nowhere for them to be led. He saw the unheeded prophets, Nereus and Œenone, who told Paris of the outcome of the rape and his own end, but it made no difference then and never would again. Larga and Lais walked arm in arm taunting the shades of Lycurgus who hobbled on his stumps through the streets which were all so similar with their shallow curving gradients and regular flagstones and clean too, as though invisible sweepers were always at work over the next rise, around the last corner, erasing all traces of the inhabitants. Macco gabbled and
Mandana looked askance at her groom. Manto was silent for there was nothing to foretell there. Niobie’s hybris trailed behind her, the shade of a shade as she drifted past. Odatis, weeping bitter tears which seemed to sink into the flagstones, stood by Pasiphae who waited for the attentions of her lover with a patience borne of certainty he would not come; the Minotaur would never be born, would never be slaughtered in the labyrinth by Perseus, who would never escape to leave his accomplice wailing on the beach at Naxos. He would never return. She would never wait for him. Penelope would weave by day and unravel by night and never abandon her task, for her husband too would never reach Ithaca. He wandered ashen and insubstantial as them all, a grey man in grey streets which wound round and about and back, doubling and re-doubling. Theseus and Pirithous passed without recognising one another; Volumnius and Lucullus forgot their old friendship. Xenodice and her mother were nearby or so, over there it was Zenobia she knew her child was lost somewhere round the twisting streets in the city doubled on itself and tiered in time, the first and second and third and fourth and all the cities of Rome, all the cities of Carthage and all the cities which had folded one inside the other until every last stone was the stone of a thousand such cities, every wall had fallen a thousand times and every gate led to the same flat landscape, scree rolling for miles under skies which would never rain or shine….

And here was where his search went on, this future-ghost, for the city was counter-weight to his dictionary which filled itself at the expense of these streets, and he was the agent of an exchange between different versions of the same past: the city and the book. The faces came greyer and greyer, almost transparent as the streets coiled about some unseen central node and their gentle gradients grew steeper. They were fewer now and they fumbled like blind men in the expanding light for the roofs were drawing back and the streets opened out into broad bland swathes of grey stone. Still he noted the shrinking ghosts although now they seemed to fade at his touch. He saw them fall away to nothing but knew they were safe, serried in columns and rows down the page like the bodies washed ashore from a wreck which are lined up along the beach. At the centre of the city was the citadel and already, even at a distance, he seemed to be pounding on its doors, a huge thudding sound against the heavy iron, because she must be inside, whatever he sought had to be there for there was nowhere else but the space beyond these portals and his fists were crashing into them,
thud, thud, thud
…

…
thud, thud, thud
, ‘John!’
Thud
. Are you there?’ His hand jerked spilling a tongue of ink over the entry for Xenodice. ‘John!’

‘Yes! A moment….’ He dabbed at the ink, then ran to open the door. Septimus walked past him into the room.

‘Ah,’ he added his own efforts to those of Lemprière as the last of the ink was mopped away. ‘Splendid work.’ He leafed through the entries picking one out. ‘Unsigned?’ Lemprière scribbled a signature and date, still gathering his thoughts.

He had been at work, transcribing the ghosts into his dictionary in a waking dream. Septimus brandished the sheaf of completed entries as though to congratulate him on his industry. He was nearing completion. Another month and the strange grey city would be empty, all its citizens interred with only his entries for headstones. Septimus was talking of his work, telling him of an obscure incident involving the Pug and Warburton-Burleigh. Lydia was well. He spoke of Cadell’s enthusiasm for the project, the weather, a contretemps amongst the opera set, the Lottery Suicides, Lemprière’s orange tree which simultaneously flourished and caught tree-diseases in the corner and Lemprière, who had resolved to ask him about the night they had visited the Stone Eater - he had not seen him in the meantime, three perhaps four weeks - listened instead as this compelling chatter led further and further away from that night towards far-flung matters: the shoals of dead fish floating in the Channel, a moveable hospital erected in Somerset House, the defection of a dwarf-troupe from the circus at Magdeberg.

‘They were sighted in Perpignan a week yesterday,’ he said. But Lemprière saw his face with its eyes shut and all the colour drained away and he heard Lydia’s comment that it was a harmless fire had terrified him. He did not think of Septimus as particularly brave, but neither could he connect terror with his friend. He had faced down the lightermen in the King’s Arms. He was never at a loss. Why had he stayed away these last weeks if not to hide the face behind that undaunted mask? He would ask. Now, he thought. Do not wait.

‘Septimus,’ he interrupted, and was about to form the question when a second knock sounded at his door.

‘That will be Lydia,’ said Septimus as he opened it.

But it was not Lydia. It was the three professors: Ledwitch, Linebarger and Chegwyn who burst in and began talking all at once.

‘Mister Lemprière!’ said Ledwitch. ‘We rushed as soon as we heard.’

‘We remembered your investigations,’ added Chegwyn.

‘Flying men.’ Linebarger drew Septimus into the conversation. ‘Firm proof at last.’

‘What on earth are you talking about?’ said Lemprière, which the professors thought very good indeed.

‘Ho, ho! On
earth
, ha ha!’

‘Who
are
these people?’ asked Septimus.

An hour later, Lemprière, Septimus and the three professors sat in the
room where Lemprière had once listened to the Widow Neagle as she spun a tale of her husband and her lover, a ship and a whale. Ledwitch brandished a copy of the
Morning Chronicle
. Septimus sat with his fingertips touching, his posture conveying intense scepticism as Ledwitch spoke of Turkic prisoners marching north from the Banat who witnessed a flying man.