Lempriere's Dictionary (76 page)

This then would be June, and part of July for Sir John. Behind these perversely grouped events, the dock-dispute would spread out further from the quays, the silk weavers would march, the heat would intensify, the arrival of malcontents by land and sea, agitators, dissenters, alien trouble-makers, would be reported, flocking to the city like flies to a haunch of rotting ham, an old mistake (not his) would return to haunt him and behind all these, even the old mistake, even the heat he suspected, would be Farina.

So Sir John would cling to Lemprière as a single certainty in the midst of this evil flux, talking endlessly about it to Rudge and Mrs Fielding, who would call it an unhealthy obsession and buy him Freaks Tincture of Peruvian Bark, plaguing his guide-boy with confusing rhetorical questions. And then, on the tenth of July, even that last support would be kicked away like the shoring timbers in a besieger’s undermining tunnel and the tower’s foundations would crumble from the corner, spreading through walls, turrets and bastions to the whole city, miles of stone crashing in and the roofs ablaze, when a young man would call at his office quite out of the blue, whose voice he would recognise vaguely, who would know more of the murders and of this Lemprière than Sir John himself, who would call himself a “concerned friend” to Lemprière and treat of the murders in turn and in detail, who would quit the Examining Office without leaving his
name which Sir John would only recall, infuriatingly, some hours later, as belonging to one who had carried the first victim back to London on the roof of his coach and spoken to Sir John six months before, and this, naturally, would be Septimus.

He would come late, too late for Sir John and too late for the city. He was still far off as the guide boy clanked ahead of him and Sir John sought to penetrate the opacities of the case on their route back to Bow Street: he was still almost a month away. The guide boy stopped.

‘What now?’ barked Sir John. He had been hoping to remove the chain and collar. The imagery was unfavourable.

‘Funeral sir,’ said the guide-boy. Sir John cursed softly once again.

‘The hearse is empty,’ he told the boy, thus adding another thin coating to his reputation for second sight.

‘I know sir,’ said the boy. ‘We can’t cross, sir, cos of the carts.’ Sir John listened as twenty-seven heavy carts trundled slowly past in front of them both.

‘Good lad,’ he said. Perhaps he might dispense with the chain. Try string again.

When the convoy had passed, the two of them continued. Sir John thought of the hearse’s latest occupant and felt a second twinge of guilt over his absence. Then he thought of the conversation in the mortuary which had delayed him. The two thoughts mingled and he enjoyed a faint sense of serenity from a small certainty that arose from their synthesis. George Peppard’s murder, Theobald’s story, Lemprière and this half-cocked nonsense about an antique agreement was an imbroglio of half-truths with which Alice de Vere at least would have had no truck at all.

Dong!

Lady Alice de Vere of Braith, widow to the late eleventh earl and mother to the twelfth, died peacefully while inspecting her son’s drainage project on Friday the ninth of June at three in the afternoon.

Dong!

All attempts to resuscitate her proving hopeless, her grieving son, Edmund, arranged for the funeral service to take place at Saint Anne’s church in Dean Street five days later.

Dong!

Now, with the notices sent out, the pall-bearers hired, the hearse engaged, Edmund de Vere stood in church while the vicar whose predecessor had married the deceased to the earl over fifty years before, recalled a
life stretching over seventy-two years. Beside the earl stood John Lemprière. Together they formed an audience of two.

The vicar addressed them, trying hard not to glance at the rows of empty pews which stretched away at their backs and which provided a testimony that, though mute and obscure in its meaning, seemed to drown out his own entirely. Other than Lemprière, no-one had troubled themselves to attend.

Afterwards, Lemprière sat with the earl in a tavern in Berwick Street. The earl took a mug of porter, then another. Lemprière watched Edmund’s faculties return and heard his vowels more clearly as he supped on the ale.

‘It was very sudden,’ he said. ‘We were viewing my drainage scheme in the west pasture.’

‘Ah.’ Lemprière recalled the project from his singular meeting with Alice de Vere.

‘I think she was surprised by the operation. Or the lack of it. A hole in the ground, a crane…. Not much to look at. The crane should have gone months ago, in any case.’

‘
That’s
the drainage project?’ Lemprière leaned forward, thinking of the black arm swinging out of the night sky, the blazing pit. ‘That’s all it is?’

‘Yes.’ The earl was a little taken aback. ‘I expected more myself, I was promised more. In fact, I am vexed with Septimus on several counts this morning.’

‘Septimus? What has he….’

‘Recommended the engineers, made the introductions, gave the guarantees. Now they’ve disappeared without trace. Still, it hardly matters now I suppose. My mother was opposed to it all from the start; she had her own enthusiasms.’ Lemprière digested Septimus’ involvement in silence.

‘She spoke of you a few days before her death.’ Lemprière looked up again. ‘The same obsessions as ever. The secret agreement, the fourth earl, a fabulous treasure hidden who knows where, you, the Company.’ He drank deeply from his mug. Lemprière mopped his brow. The heat in the tavern was stifling. The outburst came suddenly, out of context.

‘And not one of them could bother to turn up. Not one!’

Lemprière was caught off-guard. The fact had filled his thoughts in the deserted church. It was the moment he had been dreading from the second the service had ended. Now he listened to himself make excuses for people of whom he knew nothing but their absence that day. It was the heat, the summer flight of aestivating gentry to the country, the erratic coaches, the clogged roads, the Dispute, inadequate notice, even Farina, any or all of these things and the same for those he knew from the merest acquaintance, Stalkart’s overheard remark, Maillardet’s distress and Byrne’s
schadenfreude
, a dowager’s imperious glance, a gaggle of giggling nieces
dismissing him from behind their fans. They were all confused, mistaken, delayed or debarred, but when he came to their own mutual friends he ground to a halt, his invention exhausted.

‘I thought at least the Club would turn up.’ The earl’s voice was shaking. ‘I told Walter the day before last. He was to see to it that everyone knew. I thought at least Septimus might, or Lydia, you know she is a caring sort, I thought she….’ The earl’s expression had changed subtly. ‘I rather thought I might rely on Lydia, you know. I actually rather….’

It was immediately clear to Lemprière that Walter Warburton-Burleigh had not told any of the Pork Club of the funeral and he told Edmund de Vere the same without embroidery. The earl nodded in resignation at the fact, but Lemprière could see that his thoughts were elsewhere.

‘Lydia would not have known,’ he added, and the earl nodded again. He was looking up, out of the open window behind Lemprière. Lemprière turned and scanned the upper storeys of the building opposite which was a bakery. The windows were open and a maid was dusting within.

‘Beautiful geraniums,’ the earl said, and pointed to a row of pots on the ledge, put out to catch the afternoon sun, and it was Lemprière’s turn to nod. ‘But how rude of me!’ the earl exclaimed suddenly. Lemprière turned back quickly in surprise. ‘Here I’ve been, bleating my misfortunes. You must be bored to distraction. Tell me now, how does the great work proceed? Where are you in your dictionary?’

Somewhere before “A” and in a place after “Z”, chained at its centre and clinging to its outermost border, in the margin and the text, he was halved and quartered as the dictionary neared completion. It was his own monstrous monument, an extension of himself. It was a usurping version, a simulacrum that sapped and displaced him until he was a spent host exhausted by its parasite. Lemprière would rise early and sit at his desk in the sweltering June heat, looking at the manuscript leaves before him, sometimes with pleasure and pride in his achievement, sometimes with boredom. There were days on which he might have shouted from the windows, others on which he might have burned the whole manuscript. He began to see the reason behind Septimus’ prompt collections.

Septimus came twice before the funeral, and twice after. On each of the latter visits Lemprière chided him for his non-attendance, but desisted when Lydia, who accompanied him on all four occasions and, to Lemprière’s annoyance watered the orange tree on each, took the criticism to include herself, grew tearful and professed at length her sympathy for the earl who was the most couth and best mannered of Septimus’ motley associates in her opinion. Septimus made conventional noises and mouthed excuses centring on Walter’s sins of omission the day before, but his expression was distant and Lemprière noticed that Lydia would look
quickly at him from time to time as though to reassure herself that he was still there. His flashes of inappropriate bonhomie and roughshod energy were rarer, he seemed to look through Lemprière as he spoke, his eyes fixed on a point somewhere beyond him. When questioned on the matter, he would talk about the weather.

On Septimus’ first visit, Lemprière presented him with a sheaf somewhat thinner than usual, and thinner again on his second. The third yielded a meagre four sheets and the fourth only one. Towards the latter half of June, Lemprière would sit at his desk for whole days without once reaching for his pen. The heat dried the ink in the inkwell while a plague of details swarmed about his head like the aphids which invested his orange tree or the flies which settled on his forgotten meals. As the heat of June was exchanged for the still fiercer heat of July, he began to realise that the task begun eight months before might almost be ended and, as the pages and blank spaces of the dictionary grew full, so the city where his mind wandered in search of the book’s subjects was emptied.

It rose out of the scree now as though it were part of the drab landscape which surrounded it; the two hardly distinguishable. At its gates, Laverna’s altar was bare, robbed of her head. The streets were unchanged, the doors and windows smaller perhaps, the interiors more opaque. He knew them to be empty. He walked and the noise of his feet sank into the flagstones. Nothing echoed. Nothing moved in the streets. He found emblems on the grey stones. A snake skin sloughed by the python sent by Juno to pursue the pregnant Latona told him that they had passed and gone. He had them already. He thought he saw the limbs strewn by Lamia as she devoured her children. The air was laced with a scent that Lelaps would follow forever, never finding its prey, never returning with it to its master. The smell of burning. Shadows cast by the facades were the darkness in which Leuc-ippus killed his father by mistake, the red moss grouted in the cracks of the flagstones was goat’s blood from some Lupercalian rite seeping up to say only that the sacrifice was made long ago. He found Magnes’ iron-clewed shoes stuck down and straining for the lodestone below, the dragon’s tooth which would never become Men
œ
ceus, the tortoise on which Mercury’s foot would never rest. He had them all. The well in the courtyard showed him a face a hundred times more beautiful than his own, but it was himself not Narcissus peering into the water and the dim dissolving shape which sank as he reached down was the letter which Orestes would never take from Iphigenia, she would never know he was her brother, they would never escape. He had them too. Not her…. His sister. Her brother. The stench of Nessus’ carcass was in the air, from which the Ozoli took their name. In the centre of the square, before the iron doors of the citadel, a thousand shields lay piled. He thought of the Rutuli, first of the Romans,
the Sabines, who had mingled with them till they were all Quirites. Tarpeia had pointed to the gold bracelets on their shield arms. ‘The ornament on your left arm for entrance to the city.’ They had agreed, and crushed her under their shields for her treachery, but if he cleared the pile shield by shield he would find nothing. She was gone with all of them, sucked out by the dictionary as Utica sucked out Carthage and later ate it down to the children’s cries reaching after Vagitanus, sinking into waters which hardly rippled as they accepted them, stilled and grew stagnant as those of Velinus where Alecto descended into hell, swallowed sure as Xanthippus sailing from the ingrate Carthage he had saved to the Corinth he would never reach. It was the Saguntum where the Zacynthians had burned themselves alive rather than submit to Annibal. It was Zama where Scipio crushed Annibal; where the long fall of Carthage had begun.

Now he approached the gates of the citadel. He saw long dark marks run up the walls, blacker than the grey stones. He saw them spread from the high arched windows and he smelt burning once again. As he lifted his arm to pound on the doors, the heavy iron swung in, opening away from him. He could hear, but not feel, the wind; a faint wailing within. It was the last of the city, the final page of the dictionary. If he had come this far to bury or drive out his ghosts, then he had arrived. His father was dead, the woman in blue was dead, Rosalie was dead. The ghosts which demanded these sacrifices were figures of his past, gone with their victims. If that was enough, it was done.