Lempriere's Dictionary (78 page)

‘It is secret,’ said Theobald, ‘because no-one knows who sits on it, or where it sits, or even what it does.’

They went on then, past long rows of glass-fronted bookcases filled with bound papers and room after room of clerks who sat in rows scribbling furiously. Theobald explained the precise function of each, together with its position in the Company’s scheme of things which always seemed to place the department under discussion somewhere near the bottom and himself, Keeper of the Correspondence, somewhere near the top. The corridors were almost deserted. Theobald nodded curtly to the few clerks who passed them. They took back-staircases and seemed to rise further than the building could possibly extend, then deserted stairwells to descend below its lowest basement. At the bottom of the last flight of stairs, Theobald stopped before a small unmarked door.

‘Only I, of all the Company’s thousands of employees, have a whole floor to myself.’ Then he opened the door and they entered an office which contained two desks, one chair and an oil lamp. ‘The Office of the Keeper of the Correspondence,’ announced Theobald.

‘Your floor seems somewhat smaller than the others,’ said Lemprière as Theobald lit the lamp then reached into a drawer. A large key emerged from the desk by way of an answer and Lemprière noticed a low door with a small grille set into it on the other side of Theobald’s cramped quarters. Theobald struggled with the lock which was stiff with disuse then leaned and pushed back the door whose hinges were stiffer still. A musty smell filled the office as it opened. Theobald took the lamp and beckoned for Lemprière to follow. They entered single file for the door was narrow as well as low. Theobald held the lamp as high as his stature would allow and Lemprière straightened to survey the scene before him.

Theobald’s domain did indeed extend the length and breadth of East India House. Rays from the lamp shone out a hundred feet or more until the gloom of the low interior defeated them and beyond there was only blackness. It was, in effect, a vast cellar.

Rough corridors ran forward and to either side between hundreds of thick blocks. Each was ten feet or more across and reached from floor to roof. Lemprière took them for squat supporting columns. The musty smell was much stronger inside, the air cold with damp. Then he saw that the
columns were paper; vast piles of sheaves of papers stacked in blocks. The cellar was an archive of monstrous proportions. Theobald walked ahead of him, turning this way and that between the mouldering piles until they could no longer see the door through which they had entered, the side walls, nor yet the far end of the cellar. Lemprière heard the faint drip of water somewhere in the darkness. The smell of damp paper was all around him.

‘This,’ said Theobald, as he came to a halt beside a malodorous pile of papers spotted with green mould and gestured into the blackness about them, ‘is the Correspondence. All of it. Everything. From the first venturers right up until today.’ Then he paused and looked about. ‘There are secrets here, if you can find them,’ he said in an undertone. ‘Matters the Company wouldn’t wish public a thousand years from now. Some of them, terrible things….’ Lemprière thought he heard a note of regret in Theobald’s voice as though it were his brother and the unlucky players in the Neagle Affair to whom he alluded. But then his tone changed and he was the bureaucrat again.

‘Only I have the right to enter the Archive,’ he asserted. ‘Even the directors must apply for permission. Now look,’ and he pulled a sheaf from mid-way up the pile and handed it to Lemprière. ‘The accounts from the
Falmouth
, Neagle’s ship,’ he said. Lemprière saw columns of figures next to lists of provisions, shipwrights’ bills and other expenses.

‘The end,’ Theobald said and Lemprière turned until the columns ended suddenly in 1766 on a page yellowed with age and dotted with mould, but otherwise quite empty.

‘What?’ he asked. He saw nothing significant. ‘This was when she sank?’

Theobald nodded. ‘No total,’ he said. ‘And no payment. The insurance was never claimed. Not on the cargo, not on the lease of the ship.’

It began to dawn on Lemprière that this was the extent of the “proof” Theobald had bruited on the other side of the city and he was on the point of becoming annoyed when he saw Theobald’s shoulders shaking and crocodile tears run down his cheeks.

‘George was right all along,’ he sobbed as Lemprière joined the pantomime by patting him on the back. But his hand froze and Theobald’s tears stopped in an instant as both heard the door behind them being pushed open for a second time.

They turned and saw two slight figures enter the archive, lit from behind by a lamp held by the third, a larger man who squeezed his shoulders through the door only with difficulty. Theobald doused his lamp and led Lemprière away from them, further into the gloom of the archive. Lemprière looked quickly at Theobald, expecting panic, but he was cool and collected. Behind them, the three figures fanned out.

Two were lost almost instantly to view, the third only a dim shape in the lamplight sixty feet away. Powerfully built, thought Lemprière. The low tones of a conversation whose words they could not make out pursued them as Lemprière and Theobald moved noiselessly about the mouldering piles. They caught glimpses of the lamp and its holder but the other two were invisible.

‘What are they doing? Who are they?’ Lemprière whispered. Theobald only shook his head and pulled him further back again. But whichever direction they took, it seemed that the lamp eventually followed, slowly quartering the archive and narrowing their avenue of escape. Now and again they heard sounds which might have been the footsteps of the other two and they would back away slowly until the sound faded. They manoeuvred about the archive in this way for what seemed like hours; only minutes in reality. Then Lemprière rounded a corner and there, only feet away, was a shape which turned at his sharp intake of breath, the head coming around and Lemprière grabbed with both hands to seal off the cry, pulling it down and pressing as hard as he could, the lamp moving closer, only twenty feet away now and its yellow light creeping around the corner until it lit the body beneath his own and a voice came which he recognised, as he recognised the silhouette from the doorway and now the girl beneath him. The voice was Casterleigh’s. The girl was Juliette. The Viscount was calling her and moving towards them both. Her eyes were wide with fright. Casterleigh called again.

‘Answer him!’ he hissed into her ear. She looked mutely up at him as he released his hand from her mouth. A long moment passed. Insanely, he wanted it to go on longer. The lamp was only feet away and he could hear the Viscount’s footsteps moving nearer.

‘Wait!’ Juliette called, then rose and as she did so whispered, ‘Tomorrow,’ only that, and he saw the fear still in her face as she slipped away.

‘Come!’ the Viscount ordered her and Lemprière heard her half stumble as she was pulled forward. Then he realised that her fright was not at him at all.

He would have risen but Theobald pulled him back. Together they watched as Casterleigh’s lamp moved away, its yellow light catching the corners of each squat pile whose shadows closed like teeth on one another as the three of them moved towards the wall farthest from the door. When it was a faint glow almost seventy yards away, Lemprière rose and crept slowly after it. He moved sideways, looking down the length of each passage in turn. He heard a sound like a door, the light wavered then suddenly went out. A key scraped. He ran forward in the sudden pitch black.

Theobald re-lit his lamp and followed at a more leisurely pace. Its rays
shone out throwing a giant shadow onto the far wall which rushed to meet Lemprière as he penetrated to the end of the archive. It ended in a wall in which alcoves were set, hundreds of them running to left and right. A door was set in each, lower even than the one through which they had entered.

‘Where is it?’ Lemprière stalked up and down peering at the doors as Theobald drew near. ‘The one they left by, where is it?’ He pulled the nearest door open. It was heavy oak, inches thick and banded with iron. A hinge snapped as it came free. Paper. However deep the chamber he had opened extended it was stacked floor to ceiling with paper. He opened another. The same.

‘It isn’t,’ said Theobald. ‘They are just little cellars, extra storerooms for the archive. None of them go anywhere.’

‘You have looked?’ Lemprière pulled open another, and another. He fancied the lamp light had disappeared somewhere to his right.

‘There is no other way.’ He was working his way down the line, Theobald, despite his avowed scepticism, holding the lamp over his labours. Then he pulled and the door was fast. Again, but it would not move an inch.

‘Here,’ he directed Theobald and they both saw the fresh scratch marks around the key hole. ‘The key,’ he demanded, but Theobald shook his head.

‘I did not know they were locked. I did not know there
was
a key.’ Lemprière’s head dropped, then he rose and tried the next door in line. Like the others it was opened with some effort and like them it was stacked high with papers. But badly.

Lemprière was half-buried as an avalanche of paper descended on him which he kicked away in irritation. He pulled at the locked door again and clawed at the jamb but it was futile. Then he kicked the barrier in frustration as hard as he could and heard a deep boom echo up from somewhere behind it. The two men looked at one another.

‘I didn’t know,’said Theobald. ‘I thought…. I never looked.’ Theobald bent to pick up the papers which had spilled from the adjacent door. They were bound for the most part, making the task easier. Lemprière bent to help him. As his hands closed about the first armful, a familiar frontispiece stared him in the face. He stopped.

‘What?’ asked Theobald, but Lemprière only continued to look at the pamphlet. ‘What is it?’ the other asked again.

‘Asiaticus,’ said Lemprière. He picked up others of the booklets. They were all the same, thousands of them. ‘The fourth pamphlet,’ he said. Then to himself, ‘Here of all places….’

Below them both, hundreds of feet below, at the foot of the ladder
pinned to the side of the shaft, the three of them stopped and looked up as the thin beam of light shone through the keyhole. Le Mara turned away first. The Viscount pulled Juliette about. As the three of them walked down the slight incline of the cavern, a pounding thud echoed down the shaft from the door, the sound rolling through the broader tunnel in which they walked. Casterleigh smiled to himself, imagining the impetuous blow. The girl seemed to hesitate at the sound.

‘Move!’ he barked. The command joined the dying echoes of the first report, the two mingling and ricocheting together down the throat of the Beast. He pushed her forward again. She was wavering, weakening, he knew it and he wondered how far she might be trusted. A little further he urged her silently. After that it would not matter. After tomorrow, none of it would matter.

“U is for the fat white
Underbelly
which hangs and sways beneath this Great Kingdom of
England
where
John Company
clings like a Savage Horseman, a Secret Rider, and on his back an
Ulcer
grows that is affixed there and draws out his strength and through him the strength of the Kingdom. And I, Asiaticus, know this
Ulcer
for a foreign growth, an unlicensed importation into this Realm, a Cabbala.…”

He had given up his struggle with the door and helped Theobald pile the pamphlets back into the store, retaining a single copy. They had shut it, wedged it, then made their way back through the length of the archive to Theobald’s office. Theobald had opened all the drawers in his desk to show that he did not hold the key. Lemprière had thanked the little man for his efforts. Theobald had seemed smug and not at all nervous at their discovery. The echo had died very slowly.

“V is for this
Cabbala’
;s
Venial
Sins, in the papists’ term, for so they believe them, but they are mortal, thirty thousands of times Mortal then, and now
Vampirick
as the peoples of the Banat say it, for they suck Blood where before they spilled it, but I have some of that blood too and have stained my battle flag red with it for V too is for the
Vexillum
I fly to token my revenge. I shall march on them as
Vlad
and make their cellars mine.…”

He walked home in a kind of cloud. A hot wind shifted slowly through the streets in sluggish segments, fat blocks of heated air. It was evening. The moon was almost full. The gangs were more numerous, the citizens fewer. On one corner a group of people had gathered and clapped in
unison. He saw people exchange signals as they passed one another, strange little salutes, nods of the head. He saw a woman with a babe in arms, but the infant was still and smelt of decay. On the road in the snow, amongst the piles of rotting paper, he had let her slip by again.

“W is the
Wolf
I hold now by the ears and the
Worm
that twists upon my tongue. I go to
War
with them, the
Words
being near an end. To the
Web
they have wove from the guts of the dead, their own will be added for the
White Ladies
are with them now, these new
Worthies
of London, foretelling death. Soon shall I arrive to tell them more.…”