Lempriere's Dictionary (56 page)

The problem was radical. The limitations of the material (wood) created complications at the design stage. The notoriously officious Lubeck customs men levied tax on the deck-space, thus the less deck the better. At the same time, crossing the shallows of the Zuider Zee necessitated a vessel with as small a draught as possible. Captain Guardian sat before a well-stoked fire in the Crow’s Nest contemplating these problems.

Clearly a flat-bottomed ship would be needed for the Zuider Zee, if its holds were to be capacious enough to show a profit, while excessive tumblehome, rising out of the water and curving steeply inwards to the deck, would deny the Lübeck tax-farmers their ill-gotten levy on the deck-space. In short, a fluyt. Viewed head on, it would resemble an upright, swollen triangle with masts; a floating hold really. Problems abounded: with no effective deck, how would the fluyt be manned? And, even supposing its roomy hold was filled to bursting, how would the same cargo be removed? Guardian fiddled imaginatively with hinged fo’c’sles and a drawbridge mechanism but it was an ugly brute, this fluyt. At least it had little need of ballast. The tumblehome would need feathered planks, lots of them. Captain Guardian sighed. He hated planking, and was even beginning to wish he had never embarked on the project when the small brass bell hung in the narrow staircase beyond the door jangled suddenly, announcing a visitor below.

Eben hurried his stiff limbs down the stairs, curious as to his caller’s identity. At the door he was confronted with an angular individual, tall, dressed in a pink coat, with spectacles, who thrust out his hand and began talking at once.

‘Sir, I am….’

‘I remember who you are,’ Eben said. ‘You’re Charles Lemprière’s boy. John is it?’ He shook the proffered hand. ‘Come in, come in. We all looked for you at the De Veres’, you know? Bad business that. Come aloft.’ Captain Guardian indicated a narrow staircase which, as they ascended, seemed to grow narrower until the Captain had to literally squeeze himself up between the walls of the final flight, though his guest did not touch them, and which brought them finally, both puffing, to a room crammed with papers, charts and dog-eared volumes of all descriptions in which a small fire burned brightly and four windows looked out to all points of the compass.

‘The Crow’s Nest proper,’ Captain Guardian announced. He offered his guest a seat. Lemprière arranged his legs. Eben regarded his guest. A nervy thinness; crumpled in the step ladder’s wreckage he had looked somewhat spidery, comical. The physique was the same, but there was nothing laughable about him now. Tense, he looked. Put him at his ease. Eben had liked the sound of his father, matter of fact sort of chap so far as one could tell. The fluyt could wait.

‘My condolences on your father’s death,’ he said and the young man acknowledged them with a solemn nod. ‘I wonder, how was it he….’

‘Hunting accident,’ Lemprière said quickly. ‘I am afraid I missed our appointment.’

Appointment? thought Guardian. Front of the De Veres’, of course. ‘Not at all, no, we were tramping around hunting for you in any case.’ The fluyt resurfaced in Guardian’s thoughts. Port covers, like port holes, bigger though, enough to load the thing. That would do it. Ramps for access.

‘I was curious,’ the young man was saying, ‘as to my father’s letters to you.’

‘Of course. So you should be. Fascinating man your father. Harbours, he was interested in.’

Charles Lemprière had fired Eben’s curiosity. Building ships was one thing, and a great thing too no doubt about that. But it hardly stopped there. Launching, floating, steering, navigating, all these actions made the ship fast to its yards, its port, the sea, the sea’s vagaries, and beyond that the stars. All these were the life of the thing. Constraints too, but the balance of them all against the tonnage and the will of the men aboard, that was the real ship. A dynamic beast, breasting the headland breakers, nosing inquisitively through sandbanks, a living thing taking harbours for
its homes, different from one another as an Adam town-house from a wattle and daub hovel. Eben searched the crammed shelves of the Crow’s Nest.

‘Harbours on the western coast of France. Anything that would take a ship of four hundred tons. Your father had an idea a ship of that size was plying the coastal trade. Seemed rather unlikely to me.’ The young man looked puzzled. ‘Too big,’ Eben went on. ‘Coastal trade means rivers. Difficult to navigate and so far as France goes no sailing. Prevailing winds are easterly, inland from the west coast.’ Still puzzled it seemed. ‘You can’t sail,’ Guardian spelled it out. ‘You have to use the currents. A big boat like that would need a big current, and anyway the draught would be too shallow. The Loire flows westwards, but not from the west coast. The Rhone is good as far as Aries, but after that, well…. The charts are useless, that’s the real problem. River beds move around. A deep channel one year can be a sandbar the next. It just isn’t feasible.’

‘So what did my father actually want to know?’ Lemprière asked.

‘Harbour plans,’ said Eben, ‘any harbour with the right draught.’

‘Pardon me, “draught”, I’m not….’

‘The depth of water drawn by a vessel, the depth it needs.’ Eben pointed to an engraving above the mantelpiece by way of further explanation. ‘Anthony Deane’s the man. Had it all worked out with tables and suchlike. Invaluable. Charles, your father, wanted charts which would tell him the harbours such a ship could put into.’

‘And you told him?’

‘Well, no. I had to send to Holland for most of them, old friends over there…. Anyway, the last only arrived a few weeks ago. I had them bound too. All takes time.’ Captain Guardian gave up his post at the bookcase and marched to a plan-chest on the other side of the room against which leant an object Lemprière had taken for a table-top. Eben hoisted it aloft and staggered back. ‘The binding may have been a mistake,’ he grunted. The leather-bound slab was deposited on the floor.

The two of them squatted down. Eben watched carefully as the young man opened the heavy cover and glanced through charts of Le Havre, Cherbourg and Brest. Charles Lemprière had engaged his enthusiasm and his curiosity in equal measure. The detailed queries of the dead man’s letters seemed to circle about some larger question. He could not be sure of course, but all his experience told him that a ship of four hundred tons tamely hugging the coast of France was an improbable event, if not an impossible one. Four hundred tons: that was an ocean-going vessel. It had no regular business with coasts.

Lorient. Nantes. This son of his did nothing to damp Eben’s inquisitive-ness. There was more to his visit than a dead man’s effects. Eben regarded
him sideways as he turned to the final chart. La Rochelle. The young man was staring down, suddenly intent where his interest moments before had been perfunctory. Rochelle then, thought Guardian. Was Rochelle the home of this phantom vessel?

‘Beautiful harbour that, best sort too.’ The young man looked up, distracted from his thoughts.

‘Sort?’

‘Oh yes,’ Eben said. ‘A natural. You can take a good lagoon harbour, give it five years and the river will silt it solid. Rochelle’s got these natural headlands.’ He indicated the points of Minimés and Chef de Bay. ‘They keep the worst of the weather out. The approach is complicated of course. There are two islands, here and here, and a couple of mudbanks, Pen Breton and La Longe, here and here. Then there’s Richelieu’s ridiculous tower which keeps the channel narrow.’ Lemprière looked up, not understanding. ‘You can see the top of the mainmast, but the rest of the ship is hidden behind the tower. The depth is good though. Only obstacle is the remains of the mole….’

‘A mole?’

‘Built during the siege. Richelieu blocked off the harbour. There were ships sunk across here,’ Guardian drew a line across the narrowest point, ‘and just behind them he built a mole, a kind of sea rampart. Stop the English ships getting through to relieve the town. It was many years ago, but there are bits of the bloody thing still there.’

‘Sixteen twenty-seven,’ said Lemprière. He was staring at the plan.

‘Yes, I suppose so. But for Richelieu, La Rochelle would be one of the best ports in Europe. That’s just my opinion, of course.’ The young man traced the outline of the harbour with his fingers. ‘The port itself is at the far end from the mouth; you pass between these two towers and unload in the city itself. Have to go in on the tide naturally.’ He was odd, this spectacled visitor. Was he even listening?

‘The shape,’ Lemprière said absently, still staring at the harbour. ‘I know it.’

‘What? From where?’

‘Pardon me, I thought.… I must be mistaken.’ The young man seemed to gather his thoughts. ‘And La Rochelle would take a ship of four hundred tons then?’

‘No doubt at all. A good tide would give you four, five fathoms. More than enough. Of course, that’s not the real question, your father’s I mean.’

‘No?’

‘Is it?’

‘Pardon me?’

‘Not at all,’ said Guardian. He was hard-going, this Lemprière.

‘What I mean is, the real question is about the ship, isn’t it?’

‘Oh. Yes, yes I see.’

‘A ship of that size going up and down the coast,’ Eben went on. ‘What is she doing? What, more to the point, is she carrying?’

‘Quite,’ said the other.

‘Well?’

‘I have no idea. I rather thought you might know.’

‘You have no idea what your father was looking for?’

‘None at all,’ said Lemprière with convincing candour.

Eben sighed, then closed the book. Another mystery. It was the sea, of course. But why a ship? Why at the bottom of everything was there always a ship? His knees cracked as he rose from the floor and walked to the east window.

It was late afternoon. The light was beginning to fail. His eyes travelled over the jostling ships crammed together in the Upper Pool of the Thames. His spirits were strangely sunk. The legal quays were full as ever. The suffrance wharves on the southside likewise. Three-masters, little brigs and sloops, a few colliers, they were all jammed prow to stern against one another. Only the steps separating the wharves offered a space. Barges nosed clumsily about the larger ships moored in mid-stream like sightless fish. Apart from the
Vendragon
, of course. The
Vendragon
was not attended by anyone. Captain Guardian looked over the shambling mess of wharves, piers, stairs and watergates, the greater and lesser vessels with their masts and rigging, their varying states of disrepair, and saw hierarchies, precedences, pecking-orders: all the intricate sub-divisions and degrees of standing which were the sea’s secret language made wood, canvas and rope, different responses to its vagaries. Every sort of sea had its ship, so the shipwrights said, and the sea delivered its rebuttals without favour or discrimination. Eben viewed the vessels before him with a colder eye. So many ships and boats. So many secrets….

‘What a lot of masts.’ The young man had joined him. ‘Is this a good harbour?’

‘A port,’ Eben corrected him. ‘It would be, if they took the trouble to dredge it once in a while, didn’t choke it with tanneries and mill wheels. The other side of the bridge is practically a weir. You see Dyce’s quay?’ He pointed.

‘The one with the big boat?’

Eben mentally bit his lip. ‘Ship, yes. That’s lost five feet of water in as many years. Most of the others even more. The tide runs out here, and they all discharge ballast on the quiet. Bloody disgrace. The wharfingers block anyone who tries building any more quays. Bristol’s got more frontage than Port of London, and a quarter of the tonnage, would you credit that?’
But he was talking to himself. The young man was looking out over the Pool, this way and that. What did he want?

‘Your hand healed, then?’ He was looking at the relic of the incident.

‘Damned tattoo,’ replied Eben. The automaton’s wound had marked his flesh in spidery black lines,
Falmouth
, now indelible on his palm. Part of him. The young man was looking out the window once more.

‘I have a friend, had a friend; George Peppard….’ The name rang faintly in Eben’s memory. Peppard, Peppard…. The Neagle affair, of course. Peppard had been the lawyer, gone down with the ship, the
Falmouth
. This second Lemprière had seen the wound in his hand, heard the root cause of his action as he tried to take the sketch from Maillardet’s contraption.
Vendragon. Falmouth
. One and the same. The boy was telling him about the Neagle Affair, the whales.… He remembered it all.

‘No-one who knew Alan Neagle believed that story about the whales,’ Eben interrupted. ‘A fine sailor, the best of his generation, but ambitious beyond measure. Lied to his own wife, didn’t he?’The young man was still speaking, telling him things he already knew. Neagle’s ship sunk without trace, miles off course, Neagle silenced, an insurance fraud unprosecuted through want of evidence.

‘The Company could not afford a scandal, they
had
to silence him, and his wife, and her lawyer….’ Yes, yes, thought Eben, insurance frauds. Worse things had happened.

But now the evidence was here in London, moored a cable away in plain view, the
Vendragon
née
Falmouth
, Neagle’s lost ship. He had known it for weeks, and he had known Neagle when the ship first put out. Admired him. Disliked him a bit. Clever and hollow. Pretty wife. Youngest commander of an Indiaman in the Company’s history, brilliant talker. Everyone knew Neagle, or knew of him.

‘My friend, George, he was disgraced even though he was right and then you told me the ship was here, and it proves he was right. They have renamed it, but it’s still Neagle’s ship. It’s not the
Vendragon
is it? It’s the
Falmouth?

‘Glad to be of help. If I can clear a man’s name,’ Eben began gruffly.

‘You cannot. No-one can. He was killed two weeks ago, the very night I told him what I learned from you.’ Killed him? The point of it all began to dawn on Eben. The Company killed him … yes, he could believe that.

‘It was no robbery, nothing was taken. No coincidence either. I promised him I would help. That night, I promised I would help to clear his name.’ The voice was cracking. Lost friends, Eben understood that. Waste and grief, the sea’s toll on its travellers. So they had killed his friend and this gangling specimen would bring them to book, put them before the masthead. Very well, very well. Now he knew why Charles’ son was here.
The proof for which he had come was visible still, touching gently against the wharf, tap, tap, tap in time with the slow swell of the river.