Lempriere's Dictionary (93 page)

Three times Jaques heard the waters stop. Three times he thought he might not drown. He thought there was still time; still time to find her, time to reach the ship, to escape, to live. But the waters surged again, a deep roar rolling inevitably through the caverns and chambers towards him, dashing his false hopes against hard truths. He would not find her, or the boy. The Viscount would find them both. Perhaps he would spare them. Perhaps he would tell them the lie of his own manufacture which Casterleigh knew for a truth and would tell them with such flat conviction that they would believe it too. They had all believed it. Even Charles.

Jaques had hardly felt the blade, had hardly moved as Le Mara drove home the knife. Now it was a shard of ice lodged against his spine. He leaned forward and heard the hilt knock against the back of the chair which held him prisoner. Below the waist he felt nothing. Boffe’s head twitched again on the table to his left. François muttered in his chair. Behind him, Monopole and Antithe were still as statues. Vaucanson had got to them, tampered with something inside. Now Vaucanson had fled and they were left to wait while Juliette and the boy scrambled through the tunnels with the Viscount at their backs brandishing the lie he had furnished like a cudgel above their hopes. Fathers and false fathers. There had been no time.

His stomach heaved and more blood ran into his throat. Any moment now his partners would throw open the door and free him, coming for him as angels of mercy, agents of deliverance, as they had that night, the night the lie had begun. Soon, he quelled his fear. They would come as they had before. Or the boy! Yes, he would return to help old Jake, help his father’s old friend, just as Charles himself would have done. Charles would not leave him. Not Charles, with his obstinate decency, his refusal to shrug off the onus, though he should have when the letter came and he, Jaques, had told him so, told him to ignore it. The woman wanted money, nothing more and he should give nothing. He saw the lie swelling her belly. Return it unopened, he heard his own vehement advice and might have said more then but Charles believed the child was his and the onus was his too. So he paid and the Viscount had given his dogs the scent and they had led him back down the trail of receipts to the house in Paris, its windows glowing in squares of red and the rain pouring down on them both as they stumbled dripping into the hallway.

Casterleigh had found her a dozen years later, had twisted her to the shape he wished and dangled her before them, here in this very chamber, fashioning her as the bastard-Lemprière he would turn on the father and son both. His delight at the prize, at the neat triangle they would form. He might have spoken out then, but he had kept silent, thinking back to the
night they found refuge in the Rue Boucher des Deux Boules, in the Villa Rouge; the night it had rained.

The business with the Indian was over. Vaucanson had him trussed in the coach already. The rain still poured, pounding like the waters outside the door. Inside, the candles burned as they did now behind him and the women moved like beautiful ghosts, wheeling about him in their finery, paste glittering on their fingers and about their necks. It was almost dawn. He had walked upstairs in search of Charles. Outside the door, the first crash sounded. He was opening doors, peering in to find his friend. Again, a crash, louder this time. He felt the blood heaving in his throat. Candles glaring behind him. She was sitting upright in the disorder of the bed. Charles was slumped beside her, dead to the world with the drink. The room was red, but that was not how it had been. His head spun and she moved slightly. She was saying something and the rain was too loud, the water roaring outside the door. The sheet which had covered her fell away. Charles stirred and she looked down sourly. Her whole body was red, and his own, as though the house were burning down around them. Her legs parted in invitation. The ceiling was a dark circle swelling out above them, folds unfurling and eyelids peeling back, a blackened face looking down on him. Not simply black. Charred. The door swung open. Charles stirred beside them. A baby’s face, its charred lips moving and eyes blinking behind peeling eyelids, but not in the bedroom now. In the doorway to the chamber.

It seemed that time had stood still, pent up behind the remembered scene and now released, it sped forward as the door crashed back, splintering from the force of the entry. A figure stood amidst the wreckage of the door. The sound of roaring water crashed over Jaques’ head. His own blood was filling his eyes with red but the raging torrent beyond the door glared with green light, forcing aside the crimson film until he saw the three ships being tossed and mangled in the torrent rising outside the chamber. The figure in the doorway turned its charred face to him, an avenging angel whispering inside his head of matters they both already knew. The ships were crashing into one another, hulls splintering and spilling their cargoes into the air, barrels which burst open and loosed clouds of choking powder to swirl above the tortured vessels, their work all but done. Now the avenging angel turned from Jaques to the one who sat at the table’s head and Jaques watched as he knelt before François. He seemed to speak but the words were lost in the cacophany of shattering spars and the pounding of Jaques’ own heart. He choked and struggled but he was drowning, dying and no-one would come for him. The light seemed to fade. Juliette? No, she was lost to him now. The angel had risen and François’ mouth was working, trying to speak as the torch was plucked from the wall and
the clouds of dust swirled thicker, great swathes of yellow and grey with every combustible surface exposed, only waiting for the spark.
Tisiphone, Megaera, Alecto
. Matchwood, spent vessels. Jaques gulped for air and found only blood. The dark angel turned, an infant’s smile burned across his face. François was screaming at him but the words were lost. The black figure turned. Jaques saw the arm draw back, then hurl the lamp and its eight flaring candles into the heart of the powder.

The Europe-machine grows confused. Duplicate messages are crashing through its ports, lagging copies of one another which lap the control-loops in decaying orbits. The congruence is inexact, the once-strong signal breaking up. The beacon pulses from the hillside north of Rochelle but the bearing is off by fractions of degrees and a skewed version is the result in the streets of London tonight. At the Opera House the luckless cognoscenti await Marchesi with hungry ears. On the quayside there are rough rapprochements going on, pirate-ague crossbreeding with Stoltz-fever to derive a new resistant strain. Subterranean vectors lead away from one another, not towards as they should. It’s all going wrong. The assassins wheel away, thrust meeting counterthrust, westwards into the darkness. The Viscount is already spent. Lemprière runs through the echoing corridors of his lost love, up and out of the buried circuits which still wind down and hum with nascent surges as the ships commingle their cargoes and the most-knowing player, the nearest we have to a perfect observer, takes the candles in his hand, waiting to send his signal up, to bridge the two orders and shunt the greatest of all these players forward. Hundreds of feet above this ignition the charge is waiting to go off. The Mob is massed in Leadenhall Street.

The day’s preceding blazing heat, the whole heat of summer behind it, has baked the fat black ground. The surging river has filled the riven trenches and the saturated mulch has bubbled and thickened to a foaming broth which crystallises in the parching sun. A vast
salpeterflöz
lies fallow and waiting for the coarser elements of sulphur and charcoal to bring the mixture right. The proportions are shifting, racing each other up and down the columns, small arms, cannon and blasting powders aligning themselves in ratios of saltpetre, sulphur and charcoal, 75:10:15 edging closer towards the magical 75:12:13 where the compounds and elements can recombine and blow apart. The powder is tinder dry, the mixture is close enough. In the entrails of the Beast the match is already lit, is poised above
the fuse. A vast powder-mine sits below the city and perhaps the city knows this for the buildings are voiding their interiors into the streets which fill with refugees from the old order, seekers after the new. The alleys and byways contract and expand as if the guts of the monster below have come to life and broken through its stony skin to form a supple exoskeleton here on the crawling surface above. Jostling bodies cram the city’s conduits and the torchlight is a deep red glare after the darkened interior behind him as Lemprière bursts on the scene and runs down the steps of East India House, drilling his way into the mob which stretches away down Leadenhall Street, pushing aside the rioters-in-waiting in his desperate search, for he has lost her again, and now he calls ‘Juliette! Juliette!’ but she cannot hear him, she has gone and all he finds are vulgar insurgents.

Men’s faces, orange and yellow in the torchlight, fill the street and snake back out of sight, all looking west to the cowering beadles and the Militia who oppose them from a safe distance at the far end of the thoroughfare. So far, the rabble is a torpid beast, its main body still digesting the options, but at the squamid head of this hydra is Farina. A wind is blowing, a hot wind strengthening by the minute. His hair flies out behind him as he addresses the mob.

Lemprière elbows his way through the sluggish body, drawing curses and the odd cuff as he goes, craning his head for a view, still shouting her name. The crowd shifts and murmurs around him. There are groups who are shouting and groups who are silent in face of the gathering thought. Farina is pointing. The crowd’s mood is beginning to turn. Lemprière looks about him, his urgent gaze sweeping the faces who are all intent on something further up. Four men at the front of the crowd bend to pick something up. The mob’s attention focuses on their efforts, its own desires clotting about this new spectacle. Lemprière looks over tousled heads as the four men advance carrying an object he dreaded then, has imagined since, and dreads again now. Could it be?

Farina’s voice lifts over the crowd, over the howling wind.

‘… and this, this is what they conceal from our justice!’ The mob focus as the four men lift their load into plain view. Yes, Lemprière thinks numbly. A part of his nightmare is hoisted up to face him once again, the obscene stump still lodged in her mouth, the tattered blue dress shredded and flying in the wind. The air is close suddenly, the smell of decay strong and he is back at the De Veres’ staring down into the pit as now the corpse seems to stare only at him. But only for a moment. Somewhere beneath his feet, somewhere beneath all their feet, a low rumble starts up. The ground itself begins to shake. Lemprière looks around in a panic as the sound grows and grows until it is not a sound but a physical force. Then,
somewhere behind him, from somewhere deep below his feet, the full force of the explosion erupts into the street.

So it begins, thought Sir John in the dingy brass and varnish of the Examining Office at Bow Street.

‘Arm yourselves,’ he injuncted his beadles in tones instilling urgency and calm. ‘The Militia will join us at the Fleet.’ His guide-boy shuffled beside him. Nervous beadles sweated in their tunics. He could smell it. All day the reports came in of people gathering in the east. A hot wind blew and the streets were oddly quiet. Sir John thought of his old adversary. The boy shifted again, tugging on his chain. Farina.