Lempriere's Dictionary (60 page)

A soft clanking reached his ears from somewhere above. He held the light up and saw chains, long looping chains hung with hooks every ten feet or so suspended from heavy rails, a lattice of them criss-crossing the
whole warehouse. Some sort of lifting system. The statues were arranged too closely for….

Bang!
It was the door, the door to the first shed and Lemprière was a trespasser, a thief, a spy come for the formula. He froze, then moved towards the statues thinking to hide himself in their midst.
Click
, from somewhere in their ranks, then,
click, click, click
…. Something crashed to the floor in the second shed.

…
click, click, click
, taut mental surfaces rose out of zero-states. Lemprière heard stone grind on stone, somewhere back there, in the dark they were moving. Footsteps? Footsteps! Coming closer, in the third shed now, and he could not bring himself to walk into the mass of statues, with their limbs twitching in the half-light, stone moving against stone. He looked around quickly, thought to douse the lamp and, even as he cast around for a hiding place, even in his panic as the steps grew louder, drew nearer, a cool clear voice in his head which was not his voice said, ‘
it begins again, you know its outline, only your attendance is required now
….’ Not his head. Where else?

Lemprière pulled a tortoise mould away from the wall, heavier than he thought. He crawled under the bowl of its shell and lowered it like a trapdoor to cover him as the footsteps rounded the corner of the last shed. He stuffed his fingers in his mouth, not because he was frightened, though he was, but because as the lip of the shell had lowered he saw the three goddesses he had earlier sniggered at close their fingers on the apples and apple pulp ooze between their stone knuckles and drip to the floor. Dead. He was shaking, trying not to breathe as the footsteps halted and the manoeuvres began.

An air hole. Lemprière pressed his eye to it, cowering in the tortoise mould. He heard footsteps circle about him. He could see the blank faces of statues lit by yellow lamp light. Not his light. A shadow, close up to the air hole, another, someone had walked past, ankles, skirts, long black hair as she moved further away. Were those anklets, leather bands set with turquoise? Recognition dawned as she half-turned, he tried to rise, an inch and something slammed down on the mould, something covered the air hole.

‘Juliette!’ he shouted. She was walking into the midst of the statues.

‘Get away!’ He heard the grinding sound grow louder, penetrating the shell of the mould and then a soft exclamation, ‘Oh’, an unsurprised tone. The grinding grew louder and he strained his back to throw off the mould but it was held fast. He kicked and shouted again. Something cracked inside the mould, a shard of Coade Stone which his feet had broken off. He grasped it and hammered blindly but it was no good. He could feel the shard cutting his hand. Outside, there was a softer sound, a sucking sound,
like a boot caught in mud as it comes free,
suck
…. The chains began to move and rattle dully.

Click
. The air hole was uncovered. The statues were unchanged, unmoved. He pushed again and found he was able to lift the weight of the mould. He rose and stood upright. A lamp was burning, placed on the floor some yards behind him.

‘Juliette?’ he called hesitantly, then again, louder. The chains swung softly, their links clicking against one another. He picked up the lamp and held it high, trying to peer through the ranks of statues. Somewhere, a tank was leaking. He moved a little closer, craning his head. A steady drip, somewhere in the sheds, behind him.

‘Juliette?’ The dripping sound grew louder, a fraction faster. He looked to left and right. Had she left? Escaped? He thought that for a moment. When he turned he saw the black slick on the floor. The indifferent light caught the drops as they fell in a quick
drip, drip, drip
. He looked up at the chains. An animal carcass hung ten feet above his head. A goat. Gutted, it formed a sort of hammock. Lemprière saw the loaders struggling with the statue, carrying it aboard the ship in its shroud. Its head hung down. Her hair, long and black hung down. Her feet stuck out the other end, the leather bands still about her ankles. It was hard to see her face. In its passage from her throat to the cool on the floor, blood had run down the chin covering eyes, nose and mouth. And his eyes were wrong. A door was open across the place. Beyond it was the second yard. He walked towards it, a careful step to begin, though when he passed through it he was running, faster through the yard, past the stacked crates, faster it seemed than he had ever run before. Behind him, the girl swung gently in the embrace of the goat. The links of the chain clicked softly, almost inaudibly together,
click
like nervous military heels, the massed soldiery sniffing and looking at one another, their abashed commanders frozen to the spot, ashen-faced before the sight of the goat tapping its shiny hooves on the altar where, this time, Iphigenia had waited too long for deliverance…. Juliette?

He had dreamed of Bahadur, the old dream and more. They had walked arm in arm on the cliff top, talking, with his uncle’s words spinning off into space like tumbling birds,
we change
, climbing the thermals,
we change inside
, diving down to the rocks, wheeling, returning. Had there been birds? His uncle pointed to his chest, something mute, something he had tried to say.
They had argued, come to blows. No, wrestled, dawning on him that it was not in play when the same chest pressed against him, cold as steel with steel fingers and a face falling away…. Then, where the earlier dream had broken off, it went on. Bahadur’s surprised face was falling away from his own to the glaring white stones hundreds of feet below; long seconds before the impact rang up. Nazim had thrown his uncle off the cliff, and it was no accident. A shadow raced up the cliff as the body fell, the arms reaching, hands clutching at air. The shadow reached after him and he dropped full length on the sandstone, his head suspended in space, looking down, thinking he could simply slide forward. Bahadur had tried to kill him.

Accident and design. He was haunted by one, lost in the other. The cellar’s dark had grown populous with ghosts, telling him different stories in different dialects. Behind them all, some lambent ur-tongue curled gently, caressing them towards accommodation, a sort of sense. Not yet, not yet. The Nine he sought were now eight. They had plotted against one of their own on the night torrential rain had washed through the streets and two women in blue satin had talked before a makeshift fire of a girl, Rosalie, and a ‘prank’ played on the Lemprière. Three months later he was dead, his throat slit in a room on Blue Anchor Lane. Bahadur’s “Lemprière”, and his own: the three were caught in their own triangle. Now it was broken, the Lemprière was dead and some link came free in Nazim with that fact, something which had bound him to his task,
find them
, words spoken in the Nawab’s place, the strange tense laughter,
kill them
.

The Lemprière was his ambiguous guest, who hovered about the paths of his thought and whose outline flickered in and out of view, recognisable suddenly and without warning, as the flock of birds wheeling overhead is suddenly a swiftly moving cloud. Design again. But Nazim imagined each of their thousands of flights as quite autonomous, all flying along unique vectors, faster at the hub and slower nearer the axis, all of their own accord, moving along arcs of greater or lesser radii, all by coincidence. The cloud was a vast accident and he was in its midst, flying along with all of them, somehow puzzled by his direction. The cloud ran naturally along its own determined azimuth, pole to horizon along the arc of the orb which itself curved through an accommodating orbit, pulled this way and that by other greater and lesser spheres of influence. Accident and design.

He rolled over and felt the hard case dig into his ribs: the miniature, the woman with blue-grey eyes. The Lemprière’s mother. Above him, the remaining of the two women moved listlessly. Again, she had not lit a fire. Almost dawn now.

In the mêlée outside the inn, in Blue Anchor Lane the night of the Lemprière’s death, at the
Ship in Distress
a week later where he had almost
discovered his name: ‘John….’ left hanging in the air - frustrations followed the tall young man in his absurd pink coat; a travelling accident this henchman of the late Lemprière. He had slipped away as the young man engaged Theobald in conversation and waited outside. He had followed them dutifully to Blue Anchor Lane, though he had known what they would find there, and known too that their discovery would tell him nothing. Another trail followed through until it gave out on a trackless plain where he, Nazim, found himself in familiar limbo once again. He had resorted to the docks, but even the business of loading the
Vendragon
had grown intermittent. Long days of inaction greeted his renewed vigil and the ease with which he accepted this new mode unsettled him. He thought of Bahadur, the woman depicted in the miniature and, above him at this moment, talking a gibberish he could barely follow in a tone he could hardly hear, Karin, the woman in blue. The smell of decay filled the house and Nazim caught himself following her decline with lessening detachment. Shadows racing up the cliff. He felt the changes.

In the second week of this new phase of his vigil, a crate had broken open on the quay. A large statue, someone carrying a water pot, had lain briefly on the ground in full view until a length of canvas was found to cover it and haul it aboard. Le Mara had darted out, an eel from its hole, then retreated back into hiding. The statue had been carried aboard in an improvised sling. Nazim had remained where he was, unseen by them all, following the mishap, looking around and about him. And up. The window at the top of the house was lit, a hundred yards away from the ship but barely fifty from his own post. Two faces were staring out over his head at the fiasco on the quay. It was the old man whom he had earlier taken for the building’s sole inhabitant and, beside him, the spectacles identifying him, the thin curves of his face confirming it as he gazed down on the ship and the men wheezing under the statue’s weight, stood the Lemprière’s companion.

The Lemprière himself was suddenly present, invisible, grinning, announcing the first of his surrogates:
Meet them, shake their hands…
. Nazim, edging sideways behind a tangle of crates and splintered planking, kept his eyes fixed on the figure above, seeing him in the inn where he had hovered, very erect, remembering the way his head had jerked back a little at each hesitant emphasis as he spoke. He had approached ostrich-like, the rip in his pink coat still unmended. The slight tearing sound had hardly been audible in the angry din. The brawl encompassed him as Farina had shouted for calm, a postponement of hostilities, and he, Nazim, had hauled the young man out by the collar. The brutes fought. Farina shouted. Now, he was growing more significant, present in numberless acts distributed through the city, both great and small, from the rip in the boy’s coat and the
slogans, to the tight clusters of men huddled on street corners and, less clearly defined, more urgent acts, quick meetings, referrals, tiny cracks in the city’s glaze forming a slow pattern in the seismic quiet. Soon, thought Nazim, but when?

And there was the Lemprière again; chuckling, feinting, muttering
j’adoube
as the stratagem once more failed to unfold and Nazim remembered the first time he had heard the name, in the palace of the Nawab. It marked a point in time and space very distant now. The Nawab’s commands were dim shouts, receding cries, ignorable complaints. The story was the same, for he would find them, and kill them, but it was about himself and others now. Himself and Bahadur. Himself and the Lemprière. Even himself and the woman on the floor above, or the woman in the miniature, or the two who had already disappeared. Even himself and Le Mara.

The boy, the pseudo-Lemprière, had later left the house overlooking the quay, staggering under a large black book. Nazim had followed Le Mara back to Thames Street where, over the following days, other events were to unfold.

It began with the black coach. He had last seen it scattering pedestrians, taking the woman in blue away from the coffee house. It reappeared around the corner from Tower Street and came to a halt outside Le Mara’s house. Three days had elapsed since the incident on the quay. The door opened and a thickset man with a hawkish nose alighted and entered the house directly. Nazim watched as the door was closed. As the afternoon light faded, no lights appeared in the windows. He thought of the trap door in the basement of the house. The man did not re-emerge until the early hours. The coach moved off at speed. Nazim listened until the clatter of hooves on cobbles was replaced by the night’s silence. Another of the Nine, thought Nazim. Eight now, he corrected himself. The Lemprière stirred inside him, relapsed.

On the second day the same events were repeated and Nazim waited with the coach and the dozing horses. A little after midnight a light appeared in an upper window and shortly after that Nazim shrank into the shadows for there, only twenty or thirty yards from him, was a young man, almost invisible in a black coat, black shoes and stockings, walking down the street towards the house. The door opened to admit him and the young man entered. When he left, an hour or more later, the light at the top of the house was extinguished. Whatever lay beneath the trap door had not been for his eyes; untrusted, thought Nazim, a supporting player.