Lempriere's Dictionary (52 page)

‘You wish to know if it is possible that you own a ninth share of the Company,’ he said. ‘And, if you do, why did I not tell you. Is that the case?’ Lemprière flushed and told him that it was. Peppard settled himself more firmly in his chair. ‘You do not,’ he said. ‘Which answers both points. I know that the agreement was made in perpetuity, forever in other words,
but it was between individuals. Forever, in that case, means so long as they lived. That, in the strict legal sense, is why you do not own the share stated in the document.’

‘And outside the legal?’ Lemprière pressed.

‘I am a lawyer,’ Peppard said, ‘or was. I can only advise within the law, but I will tell you this. If your agreement has any value it is because it tells of things the Company does not want told. Not the agreement itself, John, the story behind it. That is its value, and its danger.’

‘And what is the story?’ Lemprière asked, leaning forward eagerly.

‘How on God’s earth would I know?’ Peppared laughed, then choked it off and his expression changed. ‘Now, listen to me. If these men, these investors of whom the agreement speaks, are still running the Company, then they have survived for almost two centuries. Dangerous men to have as enemies. And if you run after them waving your piece of paper and demanding your family’s share, then they will defend themselves and you will be a blackmailer. Within the law, that is. To be dubbed a blackmailer is an ugly thing, but to stand alone against the Company is madness, as we both know. I by experience, and you, John, by my example.’ Lemprière looked up guiltily, suddenly ashamed that he knew the details of the little man’s disgrace.

‘Is that not the case?’ Peppard asked. Lemprière nodded. ‘Annabel, the Widow Neagle, visited the office. She told me you and she had spoken.’

‘I did not ask….’ Lemprière began.

‘I know,’ said Peppard. ‘But it is better you know. A cautionary tale.’ He smiled.

‘I know only that it was something to do with insurance,’ said Lemprière.

‘Maritime insurance,’ Peppard added. ‘But the story began a little time before that, with the whales….’ He spoke on, outlining Captain Neagle’s discovery in the Mediterranean just as the Widow had told it, only now it seemed even more fantastic than before.

‘A secret route from the Mediterranean to the Indies, and a monopoly on that route would have been a discovery indeed,’ Peppard was saying. ‘Alan Neagle would have gone down in history. In a sense he did of course. And the lawyer who beat the Company in court, for they would have fought it to the last believe me, that lawyer would go down similarly. I was young and full of ambition; one great case would have secured everything I wanted. Alan Neagle had sealed up all his notes and instructions and already set sail. His wife was to engage a lawyer. The case was a gamble, but many would have taken it. I had heard of it long before she came to me. And I heard how the Company was warning people off, bribing, threatening, offering violence or reward. An old story. I was visited myself and
offered a sinecure in Leadenhall Street; I threw the wretch out.’ Lemprière saw anger flash across the little man’s face. ‘When the Widow came to me, I wanted to take the case just for that but the more she told me the more hopeless it seemed.’

‘But you took the case,’ Lemprière said.

‘She knew I would, she had only to ask.… An old promise.’ Peppard’s voice drifted across the table. ‘I was Annabel’s suitor, you see, before Alan Neagle. She came to me last of all, did I say that? It was desperation. I knew that well enough, and she offered…. Oh, I took the case. That was the point. Never mind why.’ Peppard gulped on his tea. ‘Anyway, she left me with Captain Neagle’s papers. They were sealed and she had not seen them.’

‘Evidence, about the whales,’ Lemprière hazarded.

‘Conclusive evidence, copper-bottomed you might say. I opened the package that night and read Alan Neagle’s account of what had happened in the Mediterranean with bewilderment then amazement. Their ship had been blown off course as they claimed, and the crew had seen the evidence with their own eyes. What they found was every bit as great a revelation as Neagle claimed.’

‘The evidence for the whales?’ Lemprière was growing impatient.

‘There were no whales,’ Peppard replied. ‘Not then, not ever. That whole story was poppycock. What Alan Neagle discovered that day was a ship, a ship which should never have been there. A ship he should never have seen.’

Outside the house, the earlier gusting winds died slowly. The layered air settled calmly over the city. Far above, the astral fabric rolled silently while all the efforts below it teetered on the celestial contraption, balancing their forces, for the moment.

Nazim waited in the cold. Le Mara stood at his station further along the street. Between them lay the object of their patient attention. Nazim shivered and pulled the brim of his hat further over his eyes. Le Mara waited. His eyes moved quickly, sweeping the street to left and right, checking and re-checking. Waiting.

‘When the storm lifted, Neagle and his crew found themselves drifting in the Sea of Alboran, as he told his wife, but the sight which greeted them was a ship. Unexceptional, and the crew paid it little mind for the most part.
It lay less than a league away to port, a three-master. More than that, an Indiaman.’

‘An Indiaman? So there was a passage by the Mediterranean!’

‘Who knows? It might have been there for any reason. The point is not so immediately why it was there, but that it was there at all. You see, Alan Neagle recognised that ship. It was the
Sophie
, though that was not the name she sailed under then.’

‘So it had been renamed,’ said Lemprière.

‘Renamed, yes. And refitted too, according to Neagle’s notes. But most important of all, it had been reported sunk, lost with all hands. And this was over twenty years ago. It should have been rotting on the ocean bed, yet here it was plying the coastal trade up and down the Mediterranean two decades later.’

‘An insurance fraud then,’ said Lemprière, remembering the Widow’s words, and Septimus’ before her.

‘That was Neagle’s conjecture; not on the ship but its cargo. The Company does not build its own ships. There is a leasing agreement with the shipyards, but it is very complicated. The cargo is owned outright though, an insurance claim would be straightforward, and less quantifiable. “A thousand bolts of cloth” could become “a thousand bolts of silk”, “coloured stones” could be “amethysts” and so on. The ship could be sold as well. It would all add up I suppose.’

‘You are not convinced?’

‘When I read Neagle’s account that night it struck me that the sums involved were really very small compared to the risk. A few thousands, no more, and a vast scandal in the offing if it came to light. Risk and profit are two things the Company balances very finely. My own thought was that they needed the ship for some other purpose. After all, why
was
it there?’

‘But they could simply buy a ship.’

‘Certainly, but when it just disappeared, for no visible reason, questions would follow. They must have been trying to avoid that. So, something in secret and the means to do it.’

‘What?’ said Lemprière.

‘I have no idea,’ said Peppard. ‘When I found out Neagle’s real intentions that night, I could no longer take the case. It was blackmail, dressed up a little with a covenant or two and some fine legal prose, but blackmail all the same. That was to be my function. Annabel knew nothing of this, or almost nothing. She believed her husband’s lies about the whales, and still does. I resolved to have nothing to do with the whole business, packed up the evidence, as Captain Neagle termed it, and presented myself at her door the very next morning. I would not take the case.’

‘But you did take the case.’ Lemprière could barely keep track of Peppard’s vacillations.

‘Yes, yes I did. There was more to it than I.… It is a long story, but the point is that I was Annabel’s suitor, before Neagle, you understand? and I was in love.’ Peppard swallowed. ‘But Annabel had made her choice, the Captain. I knew the decision gave her more pain than she ever let me see. But, that day, when I returned the papers, we….’ Peppard had looked away. ‘It was clear to us both, blindingly clear, that Annabel had made the wrong choice. She should have married me, not Alan Neagle. Neither of us said so, but later she wrote to me and told me of her feelings that day. They were as I guessed, and my own were as strong. We were both still young, there was still time. But the betrayal wounded her, the betrayal of Alan Neagle. I think that is why I took the case eventually. We knew what we were doing. Perhaps we thought we had to give Alan something. As it turned out, we gave him everything and we both were left with nothing, not even each other. The case began and from the start I knew it was a calamity. Whales.… I was laughed at. The Company fought back slowly at first. Our own motives came under examination and they became anything the Company wanted them to be. Annabel hardly cared. If we had tried, that was enough. But then the news of the shipwreck arrived and I realised why the Company had been so slow to attack me. They had been waiting for a free hand, and Neagle’s death gave it to them. Without his evidence, the case was a farce. They began to lay suits against me.’

‘But for what?’ Lemprière asked.

‘Everything and nothing, anything they could think of. It hardly mattered. Throw enough mud and some will stick. I held my nerve until they began to implicate Annabel, a Company widow mind you, and then I made my mistake.’

‘Neagle’s real evidence….’

‘The ship, the insurance fraud, yes. I only wanted to end the business. I wanted nothing else from them. In return for that, my silence. But it was blackmail, I had no real proof and they knew it. It was simple for them. A meeting was arranged, witnesses were concealed. My every word was written down as I spoke and at the end the record was presented to me. It was quite explicit. If I should ever breathe a word of the matter I would be tried and sentenced, or worse. In the meantime, I was requested never to practise law again. I was a blackmailer, and anyone who might have helped me was reminded of that fact. The disgrace still hangs over me. A blackmailer. And for Annabel, Alan Neagle was the man who had lost his life for her. She did not love him, but in death he was there between us, as if we had to lie together on his corpse. We lost everything, even each other.’

‘And the ships?’

‘Nothing more was heard of either, and either would have vindicated me. I no longer care about my good name, but Annabel and I….’ Peppard’s voice was drifting again, into regions of what might have been where Lemprière, preoccupied by what might yet be, could hardly follow.

‘You have a family?’ Lemprière asked him, changing the subject.

‘Barely,’ Peppard snorted. Lemprière reached into the pocket of his coat and produced the brass case of the miniature of his mother. ‘“Marianne Lemprière.”’ Peppard read the inscription aloud. ‘She is very beautiful.’

‘She looks a little older now,’ said Lemprière. He left the miniature open on the table where it seemed to slowly draw Peppard back into discussion.

‘You could do better than Skewer though, disgrace or no, surely?’ Peppard’s choice of employment was a puzzle to Lemprière. Skewer was odium in person and for Peppard too, he suspected.

‘Yes, yes I suppose. There are compensations.’ Realisation dawned on Lemprière and the depth of the little man’s longing extended deeper than his earlier estimate.

‘You stay for the Widow,’ he said. Peppard only nodded.

‘You know she still cares for you. That is why she visits.’

‘I hardly think that is so.’

‘It
is
so,’ Lemprière redoubled his emphasis. ‘After all, if you both still feel as before….’

‘“After all”,’ Peppard weighed the phrase. ‘Too much “after”, and too much “all”,’ he said. ‘My hopes are sunk deeper even than the
Falmouth
. Neagle rots in his cabin and I keep him company…. John? You might at least pay attention to my ramblings….’

But Lemprière was not listening. He faced Peppard across the table, his eyes directed at the other man, but focused on a point somewhere far behind him, another room, another face and, most of all, another’s hand. Captain Guardian’s words echoed back to Lemprière from the night at the De Veres’ as Peppard named Neagle’s ship, the
Falmouth
, and there was the name, cut into the palm of the Captain’s hand, and Guardian’s shock of recognition became Lemprière’s own in the room in Blue Anchor Lane. The
Falmouth, “lostfor twenty years and here it is again
” had been the words as he came to in the wreckage of, what? A step ladder!

‘It is here,’ Lemprière said slowly. His eyes found Peppard’s face once again. ‘The
Falmouth
, it is here in London.’ More of the earlier meeting was coming back to him.

‘The
Falmouth?’
Peppard’s mouth was opening and closing.

‘No.’ Lemprière wracked his brains. ‘It is renamed, like the ship Neagle saw. It is called….’ He caught at the name. ‘It is called, I believe it is called the
Vendragon
.’ He brought it out in a rush. ‘You were right, George. They
have done the same thing again. Only now, their ship is not in the Mediterranean. It is here, berthed right here in London!’