Lempriere's Dictionary (94 page)

‘On!’ he intoned, and heard his beadles wheel about obediently to follow him forth to war.

He marched at their head, leading his token force east from Bow Street to cross Drury Lane and continue on through Lincoln’s Inn Fields by Portugal Row into Cursitor Street with the boy clanking a short chainslength ahead and the pattering steps of his beadles bringing up the rear. The Fleet reached, the Militia are added to his band which marches more confidently now through Ellarden Street to the north wall of Saint Paul’s and along Cheapside to Cornhill. The streets are all but deserted according to the boy who keeps up a running commentary along the way. Sir John is heartened by this.

‘The Militia behind us,’ he ventures to his guide, ‘they would number, perhaps a thousand men?’

‘Thousand S’John? I’m not rightly sure on the counting, sir. Not sure about thousands at all, sir.’

‘Several hundreds then. Several hundreds added together, do you follow boy?’

‘Oh I knows my hundreds sir. S’only my thousands I’m unsure on. I’ll take a look sir….’ Sir John feels the chain jerk as the boy swivels about. ‘Yes, that’d be about right sir.’

‘Several hundreds?’

‘About a hundred sir. Perhaps a few less. That’d be enough to sort that Farina out, eh sir?’ But Sir John does not answer. ‘Sir?’

‘Yes!’ barks Sir John, thinking, no, a thousand times no. The boy falls silent at this outburst. The chain feels terribly heavy in his hand and the wind is against him, blowing hard into his face.

The boy is cowed momentarily. He soon pipes up again. ‘There they are, sir! Right ahead of us sir!’

‘Halt!’ Sir John raises an arm to the beadles close behind. ‘Fall in!’ He hears the shuffling of nervous military heels. So few, he thinks. Too few.

‘These rioters,’ he bends conspiratorially towards his boy, ‘they would number, let me guess, hundreds?’

‘Hundreds sir? Oh yes, hundreds easily I should say sir. More like thousands….’ Sir John hears movements to his front and rear, the one a massed grumble, the other a timorous fidget as the resolve of the Militia begins to melt.

‘Hold steady!’ he calls over his shoulder, but he knows it is already too late. It was too late months ago. The wind rises again and he can hear Farina’s voice as it is carried down Leadenhall Street towards him.

‘… and this, this is what they conceal from our justice!’

Sir John thinks of concealment, a thing devoutly to be wished, the things concealed and he thinks of Rudge. The boy is saying, ‘They’re lifting something up, Sir John,’ and Sir John already knows the thing Farina has unearthed to goad the mob to fury. Henry is silent within him and the chain clanks as the boy says, ‘They’ve got her, Sir John. That woman you’s always talking about, the dead one …’ Sir John already knows, in his mind’s eye he can already see the blue dress, the blue flesh which even the coldest and deepest of Rudge’s crypts has not preserved from decay and the prying eyes of his adversary, Farina. She is being raised as a gagged totem to their own tongue-tied resentment. She is an outrage they can understand.

‘Raise arms!’ he commands in stentorian tones and listens behind for the sharp intake of breath, the rustle of starched uniforms, the cocking of musket-hammers. But the sounds he anticipates are overtaken by another.

A deep rumble sounds from below. The cobbles beneath his feet seem to ripple as the explosion rips its way into the street somewhere ahead of him. He hears water falling to earth and then silence.

‘Take aim!’ His own voice sounds tinny and distant after the din of the eruption. He pauses for a brief moment, imagining the raised muskets, then gives the order. ‘Fire!’

Silence.

He starts, as if the reports have indeed gone off behind him. He begins to turn, but checks the movement as the boy’s voice sounds beside him.

‘They’re coming towards us, Sir John.’

‘Fire!’ he commands again. Again there is silence. Sir John feels panic rising from his stomach. He pulls on the chain but it seems to come loose. He can hear footsteps, thousands upon thousands of footsteps all moving towards him. Suddenly he is a fat blind man. He is far from home. He is alone. A faint noise at his side.

‘Boy?’

‘I’m still here, Sir John.’

‘Good lad. You, you took the collar off?’

‘I did Sir John.’ He can hear their voices now, the scrape of advancing feet.

‘Are we alone boy?’

‘The men’s crept off, Sir John.’ Alone. ‘The other lot, they’re quite close now, Sir John.’ Close. The other lot. He has lost and Farina has won.

‘Don’t leave me here,’ he whispers. He waits, ‘Boy?’ There is silence. ‘Boy! Where have …’

Someone takes the free end of the chain from his hand. ‘Not to worry, Sir John.’

The wind seemed to carry the scent of decay forty, fifty yards down the street as the corpse was raised before the mob. Somewhere behind him a woman’s voice cried ‘Bet!’, and the crowd about her fell back as she slumped to the ground. He saw Farina with his hair streaming out behind him, face turned into the wind and roaring for justice. The redcoats were melting away beyond him and only Sir John remained. The ground shuddered and quaked, then split as the Furies below took their revenge.

The waiting has been too long, has become too charged in the years since Rochelle and its unexpended force needs fault-lines and fissures, needs access to the real arena now.

A vigorous wound opens along the length of Leadenhall Street as the detonation below splits the resistant earth. The mob spills to left and right and it seems that the fissure is directed at Farina who raises his arms in defiance. The jagged mouth tears up the street towards him, widening to swallow him whole but still he stands there, proud and isolated and doomed…. No. The fissure stops inches short of its insolent challenger. Farina is suddenly victor, leader, healer, all of these and more to the mob who begin to creep forward, picking themselves up and relighting those torches doused by the spray. They are all his followers now, even Lemprière, if for other reasons. Sir John is slipping away down a sidestreet led by a small boy on what looks like a length of string. The mob inches forward, then swaggers, then runs towards its leader who shouts, ‘To the Opera House!’ as he is swept up and along in the furious surge, westwards in pursuit of the Militia.

The rag-ends of the mob, its stragglers and wavering followers, walk either side of the water-filled crack which runs the length of Leadenhall
Street. Soon the thoroughfare is deserted. Water slops in the fissure. The force of the explosion below has peeled back the surface of the street to form a lip on either side of the crack. Odd bubbles rise through its surface and the wind drives ripples down its length. The water grows agitated. There are other bodies and they are rising now. The liquid shifts more urgently. A dark shape is rolling and rising through the blind waters, snagging and freeing itself on the jagged sides of the fissure. It surfaces as a corpse, slick and shiny, the arms waving vaguely. The street is silent and deserted. East India House looms above. The waters stir again. Further down the fissure, a second body is rising to the surface. For a moment it seems to hang suspended in the water, then the head lifts and its arms reach for the air.

He could not believe the scale of it, the measureless expansion of candlelight to inferno in a split second and the blistering heat, the black sheet of force which swept out from the explosion as the ships flared like lucifers and dashed the chamber to a paste of wood and water and flesh.
Goodbye François
. His old fear raced against the flames but the flames won, as they always had. His victim’s throne was splinters, his throne-room crushed. François was melting flesh and it was finished at last. The earth and rocks were his laurels and the cracked passage to the air above was his progress through the applauding ghosts of Rochelle. The earth peeled open and the sky above was his. Why should he linger now? Why waver between water and air? The fires were doused and the screams of the burning were whispers telling him to rise up and leave, to join them at last. Why then should he think of Lemprière?

He pulls himself out of the water. The dead man’s head bobs gently. He recognises the corpse as his fellow-traveller through the earth’s tonnage. But, as he watches, the waters begin to recede. Jaques’ body begins to sink. The waters fall faster. A gibbous moon hangs low in the sky. He sees Jaques’ face, an answering moon staring up out of the black water and a flurry of silver about him, then even these small signals disappear as the corpse sinks into the fissure’s darkness.

The smells are of waxy torch-smoke, sweat and excitement, a localised
sudor anglicus
as the mob heads west after the Militia. Along the way, piles of dried straw, dead trees and various other desiccated garbage, crackle into mysterious flame as frustrated rick-burners make an arsonist’s
rus in urbe
of the stony urban envelope. Gangs of feral children run about shrieking. Linenworkers and copperminers laid off from the late collapses in their trades wave banners. Barbers, waiters, tailors, shoe-makers, cabinet-makers, milliners, dressmakers, artificial flower makers, saddlers, coachbuilders, farriers, cooks, confectioners and cabmen, find themselves united here and now by a lack of work so complete after the late aestivation of the gentry for the country that their usual rivalries are irrelevant; somehow the Opera House is an irresistible target for their unvented spleen, a symbol de luxe of their late and fickle employers.

Surrounded by his praetorian guard of silk-weavers, Farina leads the jacquerie on. Mountebanks and their merry-Andrews, gambling-house captains and combination-boys ply their trades as the mob floods west through Fetter Lane and Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Hawkers of pie and porter pass through the moving columns. Fish are available too. Cries of righteous anger and fervent curses mix with the traders’ calls and together drift up towards the moon. Torchlights flash in zigzags down the staggered windows. The railings are slats in a phenakistoscope, rolled out along the route to count the passing of tens of thousands of legs. Four and a half million cobblestones register the tramp of dissident feet, jackboots, sabots, clogs, and the map they could draw between them would cover Europe in a wriggling lattice of lines that all converge on London until that city was black with tracery, a sucking mouth pulling them in towards Stalkart’s squat turret of culture….

Lemprière pops up, gawky-limbed and squawking, outstanding amidst a zone of short people a hundred yards or so back from the front. He sees the mob stretched out behind him while the vanguard hoofs its way along Fleet Street and the Strand, hooting and jeering, drawing its loose assemblage tighter, throwing the odd rock after the fleeing Militia; a travelling city-state going to war. At Charing Cross it divides to filter through the confusion of little alleys thereabouts but reforms to march as one unit into Haymarket where the last of the Militia are spied disappearing into a large building on the right. The ad hoc alliances have become a single compound, a disgruntled and volatile alloy. Lemprière feels bodies jarring and swirling about his own. He wants a clear idea of what’s going on. He shouts her name again but the mob is baying about the Opera House, banging on the doors which seem to be barred from within. Vague wailing noises drift out of the building and are answered by the antiphonic wind. A tense semicircle opens in the crowd, spreading out from the high
doors and down the steps. Lemprière steps into it and surveys the mob from the raised perspective. He sees upturned faces nearest him which, as he overlooks them, spread back through the surging crowd until every visible eye is angled up to the rooftop. Lemprière wonders vaguely why all these people should fix their attention there, and then a body slams into his back, knocking him forward, flat, and winding him as a stunning thud dunts on the spot where he stood. Lemprière wheezes and looks about. He sees his tackier, arms still locked around his legs looking forward at him. Then the grin fades.