Lempriere's Dictionary (86 page)

‘Your dictionary is here,’ he paused and breathed out heavily, ‘for so many reasons. Some of them you know already, but there are so very many reasons, John. You could never have known them all. It is here because you knew your mind was not your own; because you believed yourself mad; because the Lemprières have run at a tangent to us for too long and we need you back. The dictionary is here for all these reasons. Even before them, events of many years past, matters which seem distant even to us. Your dictionary began long before you yourself John, long before you, or we, had conceived it. It began with a voyage. A voyage and a siege.’

‘Rochelle.’

‘Rochelle, yes. And the voyage was the first expedition of the Honourable Company of Merchants trading to the East Indies; and it was a disaster.’

Lemprière looked across at Juliette, but she remained motionless, staring into space. She was a shadow. Her real body was elsewhere and this abstraction would not acknowledge him. He looked away and as he did so he saw Casterleigh’s eyes flick across the table to Le Mara.

‘The year was 1600, the century new-struck and we were here, in this city when the ships set sail,’ the leader began. ‘We heard the Queen’s Charter cried from the dais and we watched four ships float downriver on the tide loaded with nothing but hope and daring. We watched all this and we thought of our own sovereign’s mistrust. We thought those ships should be our ships, those men should be sailors from Rochelle and the cargoes they were to bring back…. But you know something of that already.’

‘The voyage was to fail,’ said Lemprière.

‘Naturally; else we would not be here, nor you, nor your dictionary. We suspected it then, even as they set out. Returning to Rochelle the expedition never left our thoughts. We were traders and merchants, shipwrights and bankers, nine men who saw what our English counterparts saw, and the Dutch had seen for decades. The East was a bursting pot of gold and all that was needed were ships, men and sanction. A charter. We knew it was possible, the nine of us, but the Catholic court would grant us nothing. We were of a different persuasion, huguenots. Rochelle was our fortress. Had we mounted such an expedition, and we could have done, it would have brought the King’s frigates to anchor off the coast and his dragoons to our doors. Perhaps we should have launched the venture come what may - the warships and dragoons were to come in any case -but we did not, we were cautious. We waited.

‘Two years passed by and we heard nothing. Our normal business continued, running goods up and down the coast, plying the river trade. We were wealthy, but unsatisfied. We wanted more and, when the four ships returned fully laden late in 1603, we got what we desired.’

Lemprière listened as the tale of the Company’s pepper and the collapsing market unfolded for the second time, but where Alice de Vere’s voice had dropped in gloom and despondency, the leader’s rose with excitement. Once more, Thomas de Vere twisted and turned under the weight of his failure, his creditors came after him like hungry dogs and his finances sank into the pit of the whole venture’s foolhardiness. Once again, as the recital continued, the fourth earl’s fellow investors struggled alongside him, all of them chained to a million pounds of worthless pepper which lay warehoused and unwanted, and which dragged them down one by one deeper and deeper into debt. They had gambled, they had lost and Lemprière knew they would go on losing. Not only the fourth earl, but the fifth and sixth and seventh. All of them down to Edmund, the twelfth, who reaped the benefits of Thomas’s error in his turn. It seemed to replenish and repeat itself through successive generations, an indestructible mistake, until the original error was lost and there was only the endless price to pay, over and over again. The venture had failed, the investors were left penniless and their charter was worthless paper.

‘Not to us,’ the leader went on. ‘We coveted that charter above everything and we would have it too, but the matter was beset with troubles. We saw the investors as kindred spirits, Philpot, Smith, De Vere and the others. They had been proved right. Their Dutch rivals had rigged the market, the glut stank of policy, but it gave us the Company. The voyage was possible, the trade was there and when we calculated the profits, they dwarfed all our previous ventures. We pooled our resources and set sail for London the following May. When we arrived, it did not take long to discover the Company’s plight. Every shipwright, victualler and chandler from Deal to the Pool seemed to hold a debt. There was not a financier in the city would commit a farthing to a second venture. We knew at once we had them.

‘The nine of us matched ourselves one to one with the first investors. At first, none knew that the others were being approached. They must all have suspected. We offered them terms they could not refuse: their debts settled, the Company relaunched and a second voyage undertaken. In return, each of us would take a ninth of any profit or loss and pay each investor a tenth of that sum. They would act as our agents in effect. Naturally, all these negotiations were conducted in the strictest secrecy. We may have been Protestants, but we were Frenchmen still and our countries were all but at war. It was this fact which bound us together.
Neither party could withdraw from the arrangement without risking exposure from the other. For an Englishman to sell the Queen’s Charter was more than sharp practice. What we did was treason. The agreements were dressed up in all kinds of rhetoric to mask the fact, but it was there and all of us knew it.

‘Philpot had already signed his agreement with Jaques a few days before, Smith with Casterleigh, Cas de File as he signed it then, the same. The others even before that. The fourth earl held out longest. He knew what it meant. But in Norwich, in April of that year, Thomas de Vere signed and, when he did, the Company was ours. We returned to Rochelle like conquering kings and celebrated for a month. A club was formed amongst us. We thought the skullduggery and secrecy a kind of joke, a huge prank and we called our club ‘The Cabbala’, thinking that was a kind of joke too. We never dreamed it would become the truth.’

The leader’s voice was almost disbelieving, almost appalled. Lemprière watched his hands as they toyed with the pages of his dictionary. They were old hands, discoloured and the skin hung oddly on the fingers. He thought of the priests he had dragged from the deep twists of their different labyrinths, up through the grey streets of the shrinking city and into his dictionary where they were mounted like exotic trophies, glass-eyed as Ichnabod’s owls. Their layers were no deeper, no less mysterious than this one. The hands twitched about his dictionary. The Cabbala stared at him from their seats. Their eyes chilled him. Of course it became the truth. They had taken what they wanted. They had become masters of their dreams, like himself. Now they sought to disown them. He felt nothing for them. Their disbelief was a lie. The leader sighed in the shadows and then his voice came again.

‘The years which followed brought all we hoped for and more. We mounted other voyages with other ships. We drove the Dutch from pillar to post and our trading posts were such horns of plenty they spilled over with spices, silks and gemstones, rare metals, silver and gold. We had only to lower the bucket to scoop wealth from the sea itself. We grew rich as Croesus, and richer with every passing year. The Company’s ships wallowed back so low in the water a heavy sea would all but swamp them, and every ton paid us back a hundred-fold.

Our partners in England benefited accordingly. De Vere, Philpot, Smith and the others, they all became forces to be reckoned with in this city. The sums were fabulous, exorbitant. Once every year, an Indiaman would moor off the coast a few miles north of Rochelle. We would take the cargo off in ketches and stow it in a cave near the point. It was bullion and gemstones. Jewellery for our barbarous god. It was simple. Once a year, nine-tenths of the Company’s profits would be paddled over open waters
from ship to shore. We must have been insane, but no-one ever knew. No-one ever found out. Our fortune mounted until our calculations could hardly measure it. It was all so preposterous, so out of scale. We wanted to invest, or lend but any projects which might have gone unnoticed would not have reduced our fortune by a thousandth and anything larger would have brought attentions we could ill afford. We had everything, and nothing to do with it. That was a problem we would never truly solve, until now perhaps. Back then, we hardly cared. Our agreements held firm and the Company grew. We looked out on a sea that gave us everything we had dreamed of and all that time our nightmare waited for us, in our neglect. We never looked back, we never turned and looked over our shoulders. Perhaps if we had we might have seen it in time, for when our nightmare came it came by land.’

‘The siege,’ said Lemprière.

‘Yes,’ said the leader. ‘The siege of La Rochelle; where we went wrong.’

Flat salt marshes spread inland from the fortress of La Rochelle in all directions like a vast glacis concealing nothing. Small waves lapped in the harbour, subdivisions of the Atlantic swell beyond. The coast ran like a ragged seam stitching Armorica to the Aquitanian basin, marking the abutment of land and sea. Two possibilities, two opposites and the city a point on their buffer-zone. Advancing armies and advancing storms, droughts and even ergot creeping through the corn; these could be seen clearly as though Ptolemy’s lens were mounted atop the citadel. They might advance, but measurably, observed from the watchtowers by sentinels who took that distance for security. But it was false; all these stealthy advances, armies or storms came in camouflage, second skins for a beast which moved across the plains that summer like inevitable weather.

Just as the pack moving fast and low over the ground announces the advancing flurry of the hunt and behind that the design of the hunter, so the weather signals its own cyclonic stillness, its dead centre which is so much hot air, behind that, deep swells and troughs of pressure, behind that the globe’s own whirling momentum, the periodic flashes of the sun called days which are the measures of shrinking distance as the horizon shifts from a far off violet smudge to a red gash of misfortune spilling down on the heads of the besieged who look up for a familiar sky in vain. The rain is not quite rain, the sun not quite sun. The advancing system has its own biases and probabilities, which remain discrete, only visible very suddenly when the rolling swell of corn and the waving vines and faint scarps and slopes of the plains about Rochelle and elsewhere are suddenly pumped high by a surge of energy, when they overload and fold in upon themselves. Then the leeway is swallowed, the distance disappears and energy gathers on the wave’s turbulent cusp. At once it is obvious. Hector realises
he is alone, tricked and defenceless. Achilles raises his spear. The worst is arrived.

The flat marshlands unwrinkle and the folds disclose rows of tents, zigzagging trenches, forward emplacements butting up to the bastions and thousands upon thousands of tiny points of red swarming towards the walls while the cannon send smoking prophesies of ruin, fulfilled in a split second when the first cannonball bursts the first wall, explodes into the street, and the first of the Rochelais are killed by debris that seems to fall from a burning heaven which has already abandoned them to the sword and musket-ball, the powder-mine and torch, to the creeping earthworks which coil and tighten about them month by month, to their hopeless defence, their betrayal and ultimate defeat. The siege has begun and already it is over. The real victors are already inside the city.

The chamber was quiet. Lemprière saw Le Mara look across the table at Vaucanson. Jaques looked to the chair, then turned as if some signal had been given.

‘The siege was a means to an end,’ he said. ‘Richelieu meant to take away our privileges, in particular our trading privileges. He meant to charter new companies to take our trade. For his part, the King meant to have La Rochelle for himself one way or another. We meant to deny him. There is more, but….’

‘Tell him,’ Casterleigh broke in. ‘Tell him everything, the other reasons.’

‘What reasons?’ Lemprière searched the faces around the table. Vaucanson spoke.

‘Rochelle was no ordinary city. It had its own laws, own counsel, own church. For the huguenots in France it was a model. What might be, you understand? Louis knew and Richelieu knew. Every reformed congregation in the kingdom looked to Rochelle for guidance. And gradually the guidance became more than that, more like a scheme. A plot even. We had no truck with regicides, but the King was a monarch of Jesuits and
dévots
, a supporter of the League, of our enemies at home and abroad. We needed our King with us, not against. Do you follow?’ Lemprière shook his head.

‘A coup!’ Boffe burst in. ‘A grand coup! It was years in the planning, went back to the massacre on Saint Bartholomew’s Day, to Duplessis-Mornay and a whole troop of sponsors. Oh, it was a glorious piece of skullduggery….’

‘But it brought the siege to our walls,’ Jaques went on more soberly, ‘as we knew it would. Trade and state were what the siege was about and we had our fingers in both. The King’s forces finally came within sight of the walls in the first week of August 1627. Buckingham’s fleet had arrived from England and landed on Île de Ré the week before. The good duke was
already pressing his case against Toiras and the rest of the garrison in Fort Saint Martin. We watched as the royal army dug itself in and repaired the forts to our east….’

‘Such a spectacle, Monsieur Lemprière.’ Boffe shook in his chair. ‘The men, the horses, the cannon. The stage was set with trenches and earthworks, thousands upon thousands of them. And ourselves. The gallant besieged, heroes. All Europe knew of our plight.’

‘And all Europe ignored it,’ Casterleigh sneered. ‘The English were never to take Fort Saint Martin and even if they had it would have proved of little consequence.’

‘There had been sieges before.’ Vaucanson spoke. ‘But they were formal affairs. Exchanges of words. Terms were agreed and matters would stand much as they had before. We had little enough reason to believe our own predicament would prove any different.’