Lempriere's Dictionary (72 page)

‘At first they thought it was a gull,’ he said.

‘It was no gull,’ said Chegwyn. ‘No gull is the size of a man.’

‘No gull,’ said Ledwitch.

‘We remembered your interest in the Rochelle Sprite,’ Linebarger spoke to Lemprière, ‘and this sighting is so similar, so strikingly similar.’

‘They saw its face,’ Ledwitch continued. ‘Blackened it was, just like the Sprite’s, an infant’s face …’

‘You never told me those things before,’ said Lemprière.

‘Hardly surprising,’ muttered Septimus.

‘An infant’s charred face,’ said Lemprière, more to himself than his companions.

‘From the fire,’ said Ledwitch. ‘The fire in the citadel, when the Rochelais died. Of course the Turks took it for a Mahometan angel….’

‘What else do they say?’ asked Septimus.

‘Nothing,’ said Ledwitch. ‘They are dead. They were found two days’ march from Karlstadt with their heads caved in. A “Sergeant Vittig” is under arrest.’

‘So there are no more details. A flying man, a blackened face, an infant’s face….’

‘The Sprite, yes. There are records, Richelieu’s men saw….’

‘I mean the Karlstadt sighting. You say an infant’s blackened face?’

‘The face of a Moor, a musselman. If it were a Mahometan angel as they say, its face would be dark, would it not?’

‘But then it would not be the Sprite, if such a thing ever existed, would it?’ Septimus came back. ‘And the report makes no mention of an infant, or an infant’s face, and this report is taken from the Vienna despatches, is it not?’ He turned to Lemprière. ‘Would it not be convenient for the Austrians if such a miracle took place in this way; it does after all rather distract from Mister Vittig’s massacre, does it not? And a massacre of prisoners by an Austrian renegade when the Emperor is clearly trying to extricate himself from this war, when his own Internuncio is, they say, held hostage by the Turks, would be at the least an inconvenience, would it not? And, regarding your Sprite,’ he gave the word an incredulous inflection, ‘how convenient for Richelieu and his friends, would this Sprite have been? An angel, a flying man. So much more engaging than the squalid details of a siege. Who would talk of women and children burned alive when one
could tell the story of the Sprite? Can you really give any of this credence, John?’ His tone was hurt, amazed, angry all at once.

The professors were silenced by his demolition. Lemprière read quickly through the article.

‘It does seem largely concerned with the massacre,’ he said. ‘You could have told me this at my lodgings.’

‘There is no such animal,’ Septimus weighed in. ‘Not at Karlstadt, not at Rochelle, not here or anywhere. Why do you waste my colleague’s time in this way? He has business enough without such nonsense. Come John, Lydia will be waiting for us in any case….’

‘No, wait!’ said Ledwitch. Lemprière had risen and was putting on his coat. He turned in surprise.

‘I mean, please wait,’ Ledwitch repeated. ‘If you could….’

‘John?’ Septimus was ready to leave.

‘We did not mean to deceive you,’ said Linebarger.

‘Deceive me?’

‘We need your help Mister Lemprière. We had to bring you here.’ He paused and looked at the other two, who nodded for him to go on.

‘It concerns the Widow,’ he began.

And of course Lemprière had thought of the Widow. He had thought of her the night he had shouted after Theobald Peppard in Blue Anchor Lane, which was the night she had lost George though she did not know it then. She might have had him; they might have had each other. Against all the odds, between them they had kept their chances alive. Against all the odds, their stock had risen, their long-awaited cargo delivered by the ship which was moored below the Captain’s house. But George was dead and Lemprière had thought of the Widow and done nothing. Now he had been called to account. The professors knew nothing of his involvement in Peppard’s death, nothing of the agreement which had led the killer to George’s room. If it was strange the professors had not previously mentioned their hostess, it was stranger Lemprière had not asked after her. To sit in her house and talk and not say her name; it was a small lie to which a larger evasion was attached. When Lemprière asked how he might help, and Ledwitch said that he was the only one who knew “a Mister Peppard”, he felt the full weight take hold of him as though the intervening months were so much slack which was now used up.

‘She is much changed,’ Ledwitch said, ‘since she heard of his death. She rarely leaves her room now and we, we hardly know what to do. We thought if you spoke to her perhaps….’ His words trailed away, lost somewhere in her loss.

‘Of course,’ said Lemprière and he began to climb the stairs, thinking of the things he might say and those he might leave unsaid.

Later, when he had bade his farewells to the professors and told them to think nothing of their slight deception, thinking of his own being so much greater, when he walked back through the noise and chaos of Thames Street with Septimus, typically his counter-weight, in buoyant mood, when his gloomy silence proved resistant to all Septimus’ sallies and his friend was at last forced to ask how he had consoled the Widow, Lemprière would say only that he had not told the truth. Now, as he knocked and opened the door to the Widow’s room, he still entertained the thought that he might blow a little of George’s hope on the ashes and she would rise up, fiery and full of the outrage which was how her own hopes had been preserved through all the years of the lawyer’s disgrace. But one glance at the old woman sitting in the high-backed chair facing away from the curtained windows and he knew that it was not so.

The Widow did not look up as he entered. He began the long litany of condolence standing in front of her in the darkened room. He ended by mumbling and twisting his fingers together. He took off his spectacles and the room dissolved. He could not see her face, which was blank, or her eyes, which never looked at him or blamed him. He knew the truth and the truth had moved on leaving her marooned in this room which she would leave rarely now, there being nothing to draw her out. No angry visits to Skewer’s office, no strangers to accost and fix with her pertinent questions, no lover across the water waiting to claim her and be claimed in turn. Lemprière thought of these as he stumbled through the smooth phrases which he remembered d’Aubisson saying to his mother when they had gone to his office together. He could tell her that he was sorry, that he had liked George, that he too grieved, and all these things were true. He might have told her that George loved her, that had he lived he would have married her for he had found the means to clear his name, that George had told him exactly that and meant every word. He might have sailed off, caulked with these truths, insured against later discovery. He replaced his spectacles and looked down at the frail woman.

‘George loved you,’ he said. ‘But he could not come to you. I know he understood that. Too much had conspired against you both.’ Lemprière thought of Peppard’s jubilation at the mention of Neagle’s ship, returned at last to save them both. ‘He could never have married you,’ he said and flinched inwardly at the lie. The Widow seemed to stir and Lemprière waited for a long moment, but at last turned to the door. The Widow spoke then.

‘We always lose,’ she said.

‘That is not true,’ said Lemprière. He was thinking of Juliette. ‘It is not always true,’ he said, but this time the Widow made no reply.

In the early hours of the first day of June he gave up his efforts and took to the air. The night sky drew him up with its stars and sickle moon, high over the city and river, the sky gods pulling him south and east, the dark country falling away beneath until the air was still and cold around him and he was covered in silver-white light. He turned and saw the land give out and the sea butt against tall cliffs, the swell scending up the heights, falling back. He moved south, twisting, gliding, feeling the night air roar under his body. A sea of glass stretched to either side of him, bordered with dim lights from the western ports and to the east a silver highway as the moon reflected off the water’s surface. Between these lines, one ragged and real, one perfectly insubstantial, ship-lights glimmered in tiny points. Smacks and lighters moved close to the coast. Farther out he could see larger vessels with their masts bare for the night’s passage. The sun was invisible below the horizon, racing along an arc which would soon bring dawn to chase him back to the city and the last, he savoured the thought, the last labours of his settlement. Too long, he thought then. Too many years.

The lights of Cherbourg, Lorient and Nantes slipped by far below. The moonlight was a steady beam drawing him south. He saw blue-green algae glow as the sea’s currents stirred off La Rochelle and, from a hillside to the north of the town, a green light shone out and seemed to answer them. A ship sailing north a few leagues below the city showed no lights at all. The moon caught its sails as it crossed the trail of lunar light. Then, still further south, he saw the reason for its carrying sail but no lights. A second ship pursued the first through the night. A three-master, in full sail like the first, her hull was invisible, black against a black sea, and it seemed that her sails moved over the water connected to nothing but the gentle wind which filled them and drove them north after the first vessel.

He would have dived then and skimmed low across the tops of the waves to find the secret of this black ship, but away to his left the sky was lifting itself clear of Europe’s dark mass, growing lighter as the sun moved up from the east. It was time to turn north and return once more to the city. Rochelle slipped by and he looked away from the citadel, away from the twin towers marking the entrance to the harbour, away from the lies de Ré and Oléron. The moonlight shone at his back, its reflection running ahead of him over the water and above the sky the stellar spaces were an invitation to rise higher and higher, to forget it all and never return, to leave the old debt unsettled. But the citadel was a monument hollowed out by loss and it pulled him down as the troughs in certain seas can pull down
a ship. Below him the waves toppled one on the next, their susurration drifting up as distant cries. The city lights drifted out of Rochelle and in his mind’s eye they were human flares stumbling and falling, men and women burning long ago. Too long, he thought again. The cold pull of the stars went unheeded and he set his face north towards the city where he would lay the ghosts to rest; to London, where the guilty awaited the justice of Rochelle. He would not deny them.

To the east, the sky was a gash of pink and gold. Dawn spread in a stain across the horizon. Morning sunlight caught the peaks and scarps and threw long shadows which shortened then disappeared as the sun climbed higher in the sky. The sea chopped and glittered under its rays and the moon shrank to a pale detail in a luminous blue sky.

Aboard the
Heart of Light
, Peter Rathkael-Herbert opened his eyes to the glow of a summer dawn and reflected that there was no better thing for a man than to sail the high seas in June and be a pirate.

‘Aye aye!’ Wilberforce van Clam greeted the Internuncio. Twenty-three days had passed since his liberation from the
Tesrifati
’s hold and the helm had rotated back to Wilberforce.

‘Where is she?’ he asked. They had lain in wait for the
Megaera
outside the port of Marseilles. When her master had finally despaired of an escort, he had slipped out under cover of darkness, hoping to lose his pursuer. Her topgallants had just been visible on the horizon as the dawn came up. Another hour of darkness and her escape would have been complete, but the chase had resumed.

‘Ten, fifteen leagues,’ Wilberforce pointed dead ahead. ‘She’ll be passing Rochelle about now.’ The pursuit had taken them west across the Mediterranean through the Pillars of Hercules and into the broad swell of the Atlantic. The
Megaera
ploughed north towards the western coast of France with the
Heart of Light
following in her wake.

In truth, the pirate ship was much the faster vessel, but amongst its mariners, in the matter of helmsmanship at least, some were more equal than others. Whole days had been lost in dead calms. Canvas had been rigged for winds which never came. All this time the
Megaera
would pull away until a better helmsman took the wheel and the gap began to narrow once more. The pursuit had now gone on day and night for a week and both vessels stood ten miles off the western coast of France separated by a single day’s sailing. Even fully laden with her cargo of sulphur, the
Megaera
expertly rode the swell until Wilberforce, speaking to the Imperial Internuncio during one of their evening chin-wags when they would sit together blowing sweet blue smoke off the stern as the sky turned orange or green, remarked of her captain that he “knew a thing or two about his tack,” which the Internuncio took to be high praise indeed.

Now the sun rose higher and elderly pirates began to appear on deck. Heinrich Winkell, once Bavaria’s only Jansenist, today the
Heart of Light’s
midshipman, tentatively arched his back, walked slowly to the side, hawked, spat and greeted the De Vin brothers, Oiß and Lobs. Amilcar Buscallopet, Smyrna mystic and ordinary seaman, dragged his bad leg for’ard. ‘Slim’ Jim Pett emerged from a difficult visit to the heads.