Lempriere's Dictionary (12 page)

It was two weeks now. He had barely said a word. For the first three days he had not opened his mouth. He had not cried. Jake Stokes had found him. In search of the father, he had found the son, wandering absently in the fields above Blanche Pierre. It had been pouring with rain. He was drenched, so they said. He didn’t remember. His finger still hurt, the nail was growing back slowly. When they took the body back to St Helier he had identified it.

‘That is my father,’ he had said, even though the face was unrecognisable.

He knew from the clothes, the pieces of clothes, he corrected himself. Jake Stokes told him that the coroner had said he would have died quite quickly. From the throat-wound. Casterleigh himself had led the men back to where the body lay, then he had shot the dogs.

He
was
going to be sick, barely made it to the side. The thick, yellow stain floated away from the boat. Mother had broken down in D’Aubisson’s office.

‘The full will is held in London,’ D’Aubisson had said. ‘These are only documents pertaining to it.’ The solicitor liked those kinds of words,
pertaining to it, secondary executor, codicil…
. He had talked for a long time, but all it meant was that John had to go to London. He didn’t care, but that was when Marianne had cried.

He saw Guernsey ahead, half an hour away perhaps. It was me, it was meant to be me, I read of it, I witnessed it…. But his thoughts only led him back to the thought he could not face, the credo that stalked him like a stealthy and invisible enemy. He gazed out, over the side of the boat. There, beneath the familiar surface, what lurks there?

Small waves slapped the side of the boat. Above, gulls wheeled. To them, the sea was transparent. The boat, a tiny point in a vast uniformity, a flaw in the pattern. They caught the thermals as they rose and rode up with them until they saw both islands, Jersey and Guernsey and beyond them the coast of France. And they flew higher still until the coast of England was just visible, a grey smudge on the horizon.

Far below, the pacquet sailed slowly into the harbour of St Peter Port. The young man swung his trunk up and carried it high on his shoulder, down the gang-plank to the jetty. He stopped at the end and looked back, just once, before turning and walking on. Gulls flew up into the clouds, up until they were lost to view in the grey expanse of the sky.

Farewell Caesarea.

G
ULLS SCREECH
and wheel overhead. They can be heard inside the coach as it bumps and slides through the muck and mud, its bevelled wheels cutting deep thin ruts in the road which leads on towards London. From Southampton by way of Guildford and the Holmesdale vale, it has struggled through mud, rain, ice, a broken shaft and the foulness of the North Downs in November. For the moment, the sky is fine. The horses pull hard against the shafts and snort as the driver cracks them on. Their breath comes hard in the cold air. Through shrunken hamlets and empty fields, past abandoned farmhouses, shining green streams, steaming hayricks and churches decked with elder-trees they have come in their drive for the metropolis. The road has cut through valleys, low hills, moors and marshland. Now it moves through George’s Fields.

Meadows and dry stone walls are being replaced by more businesslike fences enclosing terraced cottages with red pantiled roofs, chimneys coughing smoke. The driver pulls his hat down and gets to work on the tired horses again. They pick up and pull on through Southwark to the Borough as the houses gain a storey, then another, growing taller and narrower all the way up to London Bridge where the crowded piles break, suddenly, for the river.

‘… life-blood of my trade, import-export. Any way to turn a penny,’ Cleaver is explaining to his audience as they pass over the sluggish water. Nobody cares. A woman and her young child nod politely, the young man is asleep, lolling on his shoulder. Cleaver shrugs him off.

‘Nobody’ll say Ned Cleaver don’t love the river,’ he declares. The young man knocks himself awake just in time to hear this. The woman nods again.

‘The river? Where’s the river?’ he asks as he comes to. His voice is thick with sleep.

But they are across it now, rattling over the cobbles of Lombard Street.

‘Back there.’ Cleaver jerks his thumb over his shoulder. The carriage slows for the crowds which thicken and grow noisy as they continue down Cheapside and around St Pauls at a snail’s pace. Cleaver sneezes without troubling to cover his nose.

‘Just look at her!’ he exhorts them. ‘No city like her, you know.’ Above, the driver pulls in his reins. The horses stop immediately.

‘Journey’s end!’ he shouts down. Cleaver clambers out, pulls his case from up top and is off without so much as ‘good day’. The woman and child follow, then the young man, less steadily, still rousing himself. The woman clasps her valise in one hand and offers him the other.

‘Thank you, Mrs Jemmer.’

‘Good day to you, Mister….’ She struggles with the name which has been offered her only once, three days previously. ‘My condolences, sir,’ she says instead and takes her leave.

‘This yours?’ asks the driver, handing down his chest. He takes it and feels in his pockets. His hand closes in error about the miniature of herself his mother had pressed into his hand as he boarded the pacquet from Jersey. People are pushing and shoving past him. He fishes again and pulls out the paper upon which she had laboriously drafted a map laying out directions from any point on the Thames. He has only to find the river from the midst of this crush. He cannot fail.

‘Whoa there!’ He jumps back as a handcart rattles past. The chest is hoisted onto his shoulder.

‘Oi!’ He is propelled forward as a burly individual demands passage behind. The thoroughfare is crammed with vendors and their customers who have spilled out of Fleet Market to fill the neighbouring streets. Stallholders cry their wares at the throng which mills and presses all around. Car-men force their way through with kicks and curses, load-carriers the same. The din fills his ears as mistresses haggle pennies and farthings and the sellers protest at their stinginess. Small boys dodge between the legs of the punters. Dogs get in the way.

Across the street, a man sells oranges, a penny apiece from a barrow with his name upon the side.

‘Excuse me, sir?’ he begins.

‘You know me sir?’

‘No, I….’

‘You want oranges?’ He proffers one.

‘No, I….’

‘Then don’t waste my time.’ The rebuff throws him, but no matter.
Other fruit-sellers are further up the street. They will know where the Thames is. They do, but none will tell him. They offer him fruit; persimmons, apples and pears at fourpence, a penny and tuppence. He moves on, chest high upon his shoulder, further into the mart where the crush is at its thickest, buying and selling, bartering and bargaining.

‘Could you direct me to the Thames?’ he asks passing strangers. They look at him as if he were mad. He is offered swedes at a shilling the bushel and turnips for the same. Fishwomen carry on a passing trade, jostling him deeper into the market, where a lad urges him to take a box of snuff for a shilling, or three for two. A customer overhears, knows a good thing when he sees it and takes them, catches a woman by the elbow as she passes to give her thruppence for a turbot. Thruppence from a guinea, a guinea for a watch. She cries on, basket on her back from Billingsgate at six. Her companion will sell you a sausage for less but wouldn’t touch a turbot for a shilling, unless to eat it. Passing the matchseller she drops a penny in his box but leaves the matches with him. Both legs off at the knee, by night he dreams of buried treasure, ‘I buried it but thirty paces from here!’ he rages on his stumps at the young man who declines to ask the question that was on his lips. Business is good for the tripe sellers, fourpence the pound and all you need is vinegar. Vinegar from the chandler’s at tuppence a bottle. The soap-boiler’s stench clogs the nose of Mister Gyp, knifegrinder, before that bunter and bellows-mender. He ground the knife that slit Kieran Healey’s throat and appeared before Sir John to explain it. Healey’s widow is destined for the Pox, his son steals perukes from a basket, in contribution to the wigmaker’s business. No commission paid though. Milady Alice de Vere wears them and is carried in her chair, her spaniel trailed from a lead, languid hand out the window, six tarnished pennies from Albemarle to the Piazza, working out at five hundred and two paces the penny. ‘Careful there, boy! Those spectacles for show?’ Alice’s carrier checks his stride for an instant, then on. Guinea punks have the market tight as Millicent Martyn’s whalebone corset from Stapes of Piccadilly, twenty-three shillings by way of Greenland. Guzzling pie and porter makes her the darling of the vintner at a penny a pint, four-pence ha’penny for gammon and bacon. Her father, sign-carver made good at three hundred pounds the year previous, this one better, despairs of a suitor, blanches at the dowry, applications invited from any with polish on their boots. Candidates to see, the scamp Willem (parents unknown, parish unwilling) who’ll fit them for whatever they can afford. Willem’s brushes are manufactured by Simon Kirkby and Sons of Spitalfields. The sons do a roaring trade with the footpads of Deptford fields, pewter a speciality, the proceeds to be speculated at Jonathan’s coffee house and lost in the shadowy columns of figures drawn on the accounts of his numerous clients by Marmaduke
Oates who took a bet of a thousand to walk every street in the city within a week, lost, and had his creditor deported. Now he walks Change Alley, playing the market in saltpetre and China tea, no young sir, rivers not my line. Consulting his watch, it is close to a quarter past ten. He fingers the gold of its case. 31
l
.17
s
.10½
d
. per oz., the price that morning. It races towards midday. Soon, the druggists’ and grocers’ factors will do their briskest business between the Turkish merchants and the statue of Charles II in the courtyard of the Royal Exchange. They barter furiously, making the odd foray over to the West India interest on the south side, but the real business is done on the benches lining the walks. Obadiah Walker has taken an option off Ducane for twenty tons of sugar, the balance to be discounted at the bank from the biscuit bakers of Lambeth. Today the run is on tea, the
Nottingham
is due in, cargo intact. Those who ran with the rumour that it was nine-tenths spoilt and hung on to their stocks are losing tuppence, tuppence ha’penny in the pound. No-one’s interested, except some bewildered idiot asking if the Thames is still in London, and they’ll spend the afternoon upstairs at the Antwerp where the talk will not be of tea, unless the glass-sellers choose that afternoon to spread their interests. An anxious trader sighs, touts for buyers another farthing down and finding no success stalks out the North Gate into Threadneedle Street. Now, down the table at the Jerusalem, a group plying the inland coastal trade cock half an ear as the shopkeeper turns out a gangling joker who, would you believe it, wants to know where the river is, tumbling his baggage down the stairs behind him, the cheeky sod. A woman looks up at the commotion, sucks on her flask and looks down again as her companion walks past to offer the quester his best advice. ‘Go west, young man.’ He points, is understood and marches on, pursued by that fool question about the river, will he never learn? The advice at least is free and the young man takes it, moving through the bewigged crowds of Holborn, towards the Oxford road, along which a lad leads an enormous pig towards its ritual slaughter the Saturday next while his sister herds a goose. An approachable pair, they don’t rightly know where the waterway is, nor the road to it neither. All they know is pig and goose. He turns back towards the maze of alleys running north and east by Charing Cross. His stride has become a trudging pace. His feet are aching. The chest digs into his narrow shoulder and his arm throbs. He moves on, slowly, through the alleys where the cobbles can barely be seen for dirt. Women shriek from tenement windows and common sense tells him not to look back as his feet drag on through Sheath Alley towards the Piazza. Will he ever find the river? Despair courts him as he skirts the square, inching through the crowds to follow a short street southwards. Half-way down he comes to a halt, exhausted as he lowers the chest to the ground and leans back against a door. A man
carrying a large blue bag weaves an unsteady path towards him. Lemprière shifts position. The man staggers, then lurches. They collide.

‘Damn you!’ Lemprière’s frustrations are suddenly heaped upon his drunken assailant, who falls at his feet. Lemprière thrusts his map before the man’s face.

‘The river,’ he demands. ‘I want the river.’ The man looks up at him fearfully.

‘Where on the river, sir? Where exactly did you want?’ he asks, as he is pulled upright. The hand-drawn map is brandished.

‘There,’ the young man stabs at it, ‘Southampton Street.’

‘Ah now, there’s no need to mock me, sir. I’m in my cups and I’ll own it, but there’s reason enough for that….’

‘Tell me!’

‘I had no mind to knock you like that, you know….’ The young man raises the chest.

‘Just tell me,’ he repeated, slowly, with what he hoped was cold menace. His captive looked from side to side, hesitated, was this an excuse for violence?

‘Why sir, this is Southampton Street. You’re in it!’ he blurted desperately.

‘In it?’

‘This is it, sir. It is.’

He had found it, better, was in it! He let go the man and let his breath out slowly, feeling nothing but relief.

‘Thank you, my man,’ he said as he bent to brush absently at the mud on his breeches. The other made no reply and when the young man looked up to discover the cause of his silence, found that he had fled. He glanced quickly up and down the street but the unfortunate was nowhere to be seen. A little way down, on the far side, he could see his lodging-house. He crossed, took the pavement in his stride and knocked upon the door. Footsteps thudded down the stairs and the bolt flew back.

‘Welcome, Mister Lemprière!’ exclaimed the old woman who opened the door and led him in. He followed, dragging his chest and abandoning his search to the mercy of the street outside. Where was the Thames? He could not have cared less.