Lempriere's Dictionary (75 page)

Leaving the theatre, they met Stalkart on the stairs. Tousled, unshaven, red-eyed, he grasped Eben by the elbow.

‘Did you see him?’ he asked, eyes staring ahead.

‘We gathered he was indisposed….’ Eben began stiffly.

‘Not him! The tortoise, you saw him?’

Eben recalled the fragments of the set he had glimpsed between the mass of bodies. ‘Ah, yes….’

‘Twenty-seven of them! Imagine it! Just wait, you’ll see, you’ll see. They all will. Tortoises, eh? Where, do you think? Where?’ Eben shook his head, edging sideways. ‘The roof! We’ll put them,’ Marmaduke pointed at the ceiling, ‘on the roof. A week today, you just wait. A ton apiece they are, the beauties, hoist ‘em up, stick ‘em down. Come and watch, everyone’s invited and’ - he looked about conspiratorially before lowering his voice -’when they’re up, no-one’ll ever see ‘em again. You see? They’re a mystery!’ and he began to laugh softly to himself. Eben watched him carefully. When he was calm again, he asked Eben if he had enjoyed the performance and, hearing to the contrary, dragged both men down to the foyer where he scribbled quickly on a scrap of paper.

‘There.’ He gave it to Eben. ‘That’ll get you both in. Not a word mind you …’ Eben looked down and read “The Secret Gala. Thirteenth day of July. Admit Two.” It was signed “M. Stalkart”.

‘Five weeks’ time. Only for the cognoscenti, mind you. Marchesi will sing in a performance of …’ He did a little dance of frustration. ‘I cannot tell you, it is a secret you see? Yes, a secret. But the tortoises.’ He was suddenly serious again. ‘They are the true spectacle. The elevation will begin at two. Come!’ he exhorted them. ‘Enjoy!’ He waved goodbye as Eben and Roy shuffled out of the foyer. ‘Come one, come all!’

He was still waving as they made their escape. Roy was silent for most of the journey home then, turning into Thames Street, he cleared his throat.

‘Quite fancy the sound of those tortoises,’ he said. Eben looked at him in surprise.

‘Then we’ll attend,’ he said, glad to salvage something from the evening’s wreck.

Now, eight days later, walking back along the quay and learning of the date, the elevation of Marmaduke’s tortoises was the first of two reasons for Eben’s curse. They had missed it.

‘Never mind,’ said Roy. They were passing the
Vendragon
in their quayside promenade.

‘It’s not only that,’ said Eben. He was distinctly irritated with himself. ‘I should have attended a funeral today.’

Across the city, through the heat and haze of a blazing afternoon, over the Fleet, down the Strand beyond the sweltering rookeries of Charing Cross, the tortoises were rising. Fat pink torpid tortoises, baked twice already in the Manufactory kilns, once more in the heat of this June afternoon, swung left to right and seesawed in their slings like improbable pendulums as they rose inch by inch skywards, roofwards, up to the men who manned the ramshackle derrick on the summit of the Opera House, who sweated, cursed and pulled the beasts across the parapet - a yard or more across, half a ton each - while the men on the hawsers below sank twenty-six times to their knees as they heard the gross statuary dunt finally on the roof far above. Twenty-seven wagons had left Coade’s that morning to trundle in convoy along Narrow Wall, crossing the river at Westminster, straining through Whitehall, pulling hard up the short rise of Cockspur Street to their destination in Haymarket. Each wagon carried a crate packed tight with straw, and in the midst of each a tortoise lay cocooned with its bland herbivore’s smirk and stumpy legs and every other detail down to the individual plates of its shell perfectly realised in creamy-pink Coade stone.

Straw and splintered crates lay scattered all about the Opera House. Twenty-six carts lay empty. Marmaduke Stalkart ran hither and thither in excitement as the last tortoise emerged from its packing, was lashed about the midriff and slowly elevated to its prime position amongst them all, the parapet itself, for this was the leader of the battalion, the
primus inter pares
, the only one which would ever be seen by the hordes who would now surely flock to the theatre, the tortoise-rampant himself. Bolger pursued him with his ledger, but he didn’t care. He didn’t care that Marchesi was fleecing them, inventing maladies and contractual breaches to up his already considerable ante. He didn’t care that Casterleigh’s money was already spent, that there was no more and the cognoscenti stayed away in droves. He didn’t care that Bolger worried over the leasing of the theatre to the Viscount, thinking that on July the tenth any manner of disturbances might wreck the theatre once and for all leaving him, Marmaduke, ruined, meaning himself, Bolger, liable for the loss. He didn’t care about the
slogans, or Farina, or the ruffians who were said to stalk the streets in organised gangs and beat passersby for nothing at all, or the heat, or the funeral he, like Eben and others, should have attended this morning (she would have understood), or the labours of Coade’s hired hands. No, all he cared about as he looked up to see the last beast clamped into place and rise rampant on one leg to grin down over the parapet, was his tortoises. Come one, come all, he thought triumphantly to himself. Come friend or foe alike, my tortoises will defeat you all!

Bent double over his task, his waist cinched for safety, James Bierce packed the socket holding the twenty-seventh and, thank God, the last tortoise with stiff grey cement. The sun beat down on his back and glinted off the tortoise’s supporting leg. Tiny gleams of light sparkled near its base. He looked about quickly, but his work mates had not noticed. One of them, he knew not which, already knew. Twenty-six tortoises stared back at him and he bent once more to his task, pushing cement into the crevices and working it around with his thumb. The cement would hold for a hundred years. But not the leg. He had thought they would find the fault that morning. He had watched with studied calm as Hanley, whose long years of expertise no-one was allowed to forget, had rested his ear against each beast and tapped each in turn with a small mallet. Twenty-seven dull thuds resounded around the loading yard. Hanley had nodded and James Bierce breathed again.

It had begun the night after the business with the girl on King’s Arms Stairs. Beadles all about the place, Sir John Fielding no less talking to old Eleanor Coade in the offices out front and himself going about his business checking the bins in the sheds. That was when he found it. A bucket had been pulled loose and scattered grated glass in the clay in one of the vats. He saw it glittering there and thought; no accident. You might pull it off by chance, but not leave it there unless by design. He looked left and right. No-one in sight. He thought of the day eight months before when Rowlandson had sacked him from the Glass Manufactory, his wife had thrown his own father’s pamphlet-collection into the Thames, a young hothead had knocked him down in Southampton Street and tried to stave his head in with a trunk. He thought of Farina and his call to arms and he thought, here it is, here is my call, a test….

He had reached down and worked the glass into the clay. In the days that followed he had waited for his co-saboteur to show himself, but no-one made a sign. Then he had thought it was only when his tiny rebellion broke out, only when the pediment actually cracked, that he would truly be Farina’s man. He smoothed off the last of the cement and descended to join his workmates.

Together with the meagre crowd who had gathered to watch the
elevation, they all gazed up at the only visible evidence of their labours. James Bierce looked up to see a tortoise leaning out into space, two short limbs raised in anger, one leg stepping out over the parapet. It seemed as though the tortoise were about to take flight. Unseen far above, the tortoise was supported only by its one remaining leg and, beneath its thin coating of Coade, that leg, James Bierce knew was composed entirely of glass. Behind him, the twenty-seven empty carts were preparing to return to the yard. The drivers checked their horses for a moment and doffed their hats in respect. A hearse was passing, but as he turned to look with his workmates, James Bierce, the small crowd, the drivers, the other hands, Bolger and lastly Marmaduke Stalkart, all saw that it was empty. Half a mile away to the north, the bells of Saint Anne’s in Dean Street began to chime.

‘Damn!’ Rudge looked at Sir John in surprise. He saw no reason for the outburst. The bells chimed again.

‘The funeral! Damn my forgetfulness!’ Sir John exclaimed. Rudge waited for his colleague to subside, then resumed his questions.

‘With an accent, you say?’

‘Like this.’ Sir John drew a diagonal in the air, left down to right. ‘As you see it. L.E.M.P.R.I.E. with an accent like this,’ he made the motion once again, ‘R.E.’

‘Blackmailing George Peppard?’

‘This Lemprière held an agreement of some sort between an ancestor of his and the East India Company. Apparently a share of the Company was his, a ninth….’

‘A ninth? Good God!’ Rudge sounded incredulous. Sir John nodded.

‘My thought exactly. But Theobald insisted. George was to take the case, or forge some sort of deal, otherwise Lemprière would, well, Theobald became rather vague. Some new aspect of the Neagle Affair, he thought.’

‘That was a dead letter years ago,’ Rudge snorted. He was wiping down the slabs. Sir John could hear a damp cloth moving over the marble, the slight sounds of his colleague’s exertion. Drops of water falling to the stone floor.

‘Anyway, George refused and this Lemprière killed him to close his mouth, so Theobald maintains.’ The last three words hung in the air
between the two men. The street above was a faint hum, nothing more. Only the bells seemed to reach this lowest cellar of the mortuary.

Sir John wanted Theobald to tell the truth. He wanted Lemprière guilty, without doubt. Or not guilty, again without doubt. But in his heart he knew George Peppard’s brother for a liar. Perhaps he told the truth, but if that were so it was only in support of some wider, more nebulous lie. Theobald had grown confused or forgetful whenever Sir John had probed his story. Whatever else this Lemprière might be, he did not seem a blackmailer. There was the question of the women too. What part did they play? So far as he knew the murders of George Peppard, the girl Rosalie and the older woman whose body now rotted in a casket in the cellar adjacent to this, were connected only by their suspected assailant. There was no pattern to it and Sir John, above all else these days, sought patterns with a strong passion. That, after all, was what Henry would have done.

‘Another thing.’ Rudge spoke suddenly. ‘If Theobald had never heard of this Lemprière before the night on which they met and, as must be the case, there has been no contact since, how would he know how to spell the name?’

‘The name? Well, it is not so hard….’ Then Sir John caught Rudge’s drift. ‘The accent,’ he said, and made the motion for the third time. ‘You are right. He would have to see the name written down. A tavern, a walk to Blue Anchor Lane…. There was no opportunity.’

At that moment, in a space both anterior and distant, the noose, knot and rope which had tightened about the young man’s neck were lowered very slightly, an easing which brought the hook from which he hung into view as a sickle moon, or a tiny scythe, or a cedilla.

‘By the same token,’ Sir John went on, ‘if they had not met before, why should Theobald invent such a calumny?’ He was thinking aloud. ‘Someone else is involved,’ he said.

‘One at the least,’ Rudge replied.

Walking back to the Examining Office at Bow Street, Sir John would resist this thought. The Lemprière case was sharp and hard. There were inconsistencies certainly, and complications, he would tell himself, but at root, in essence, it was firm. He needed to believe it, needed one single suspect. Not hundreds. One. He felt the case slipping, sliding out from under him to join the general drift which was towards diffuseness, confusion, vagueness. Disorder. Everything might be degenerating into a farrago, but he wanted Lemprière pristine and untouched by all that or, better still, all that to take on more of the characteristics of the Lemprière case.

But ‘all that’ would not oblige in June. The city’s misfortunes came in gangs, in weirdly-themed spates. The heat seemed to cage itself and
concentrate, building up to burn holes in the city’s fabric with an eerie specificity. Children: they drowned, two of them while bathing in the Thames; were burned when a draper’s house was consumed in Union Street; crushed by a coach overturning on the Lambeth turnpike; took their own lives after viewing a hanging in Pultney Street; had their skulls caved in, a flower pot, a servant’s carelessness on a third floor in Berwick Street. Collapses: a summer storm would sap the foundations of the Coal Meter’s Office, cracks would appear in the paving over the Fleet River, in the cobbles of Leadenhall Street, four houses in Wapping would disappear overnight heralded by neither agitation of the air, disturbance of the earth nor subterranean rumblings of any sort. A small earthquake would be reported in Norwood, swallowing two, and a whirlwind at Deptford would raze a cottage and four sheds, firing their contents aloft so as to cause a monstrous hazard of the air. A man would be killed by a descending fruitbarrow. Finally, limbs: Lord Chatham’s foot would be taken with gangrene from a gash of his shoe buckle; a leg and thigh, female by the shoe, would be washed up at White Friar’s Dock; arms jutting from the port holes of a brig at Blackwall would discover a stowage of slaves, above three hundred dead, above sixty dismembered for concealment; a single finger would be delivered to Sir John at the Examining Office, only that, quite clean and without explanation.