Lempriere's Dictionary (98 page)

She was standing above, looking down at him. He rose slowly and began to cough the smoke out of his lungs. When he sought her eye, she had turned away.

‘Juliette?’ She did not turn back. He took hold of her and pulled her to him, but as she realised his intention she twisted free.

‘My own father….’ Her voice was quiet. He barely heard her.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Dead. All dead.’ A whisper.

‘But you said … You told me he was nothing to you, nothing….’ She turned on him, her face full of anger.

‘Not the Viscount, you fool! Don’t you understand? My father! Can you not know? Can you really not guess what we have done?’

Behind them both, the blackened walls of the Opera House began to crumble inwards. The high arches of the facade broke and flames roared through the openings. The whole construction seemed to melt, not fall, sagging, then collapsing in on itself, sending a mushroom-cloud of ash and dust up into the sky as notice of its destruction.

Carried downstream on the ebbing tide past Shadwell, the Isle of Dogs, the yards at Blackwall and the drifting lights of Gravesend, through the shoals and sandbars of the estuary to the open sea beyond, the crew of the
Vendragon
laboured in silence with the creaking rigging, as the gyring wind caught her sails, and the race of Alderney thrust her forward, a destined
capsule, south with the Channel currents towards Rochelle. Eben, Roy, Wilberforce and Peter Rathkael-Herbert stood together on the quarterdeck and watched the crew at work. Neagle strode up and down the vessel’s decks, passing by them without acknowledgement. The sea was black and silver. Moonlight caught the wavelets and the lights of the western ports were distant beacons, ignored and passed by as they sped south. Water rushed against the hull and Captain Guardian thought of nights in the South China Sea. The air was so warm and laden, the sky so clear.

High above the deck, the
Vendragon’s
crew shinned along the yard-arms to put on sail. The canvas swelled above them and the ship sprang forward, prow cutting the water to leave a shimmering wake behind. Wilberforce watched as familiar landmarks slid by to port. The last voyage of the
Heart of Light
was being reprised, but accelerated and in reverse as Cherbourg and Lorient glimmered out from the low coastline. Spurs, points and cliffs were smudged together in the darkness but he remembered each one. He thought of the journeys undertaken by the vessel which surged beneath him now, the repeated dog-leg, east to west then south to north and back. He imagined the waters where the Mediterranean became the Atlantic, sea became ocean, and in his mind’s eye they were scored over like ice on a skating-pond as the
Vendragon
turned there year after year before finding its bearing and continuing along its second axis. Could the sea ever become too-travelled, ever become worn? Huge zigzags ran across the ocean’s surface as the voyages of possible ships scored their fading trails. Mats of phosphor and waterspouts were the true coordinates, shifting things. A school of whales was an island; invisible junctions of latitude and longitude marked every scrap of flotsam. The mysteries were not polar, but diffuse, dissolved in the corroding brine. Wilberforce looked out over the stern and saw the last voyage of the
Heart of Light
reaffirmed in the
Vendragon’
s glowing then fading wake.

The dark territory of the Vendée passed by to port and presently the land fell back as the coastline swung away. A low island seemed to weigh anchor and drift out from the shore as the
Vendragon
headed in. Presently, Peter Rathkael-Herbert squinted, then pointed to a faint glow shining out from one of the points. As he did so, the ship lurched violently to port, changing bearing and heading for the spot as though complying with his signal. All four men watched as the faint glow drew nearer. A green light was signalling to the
Vendragon
, a beacon drawing her in towards the coast.

‘That’s our landfall,’ said Eben with conviction.

‘Where are we?’ asked Peter Rathkael-Herbert.

‘If that’s Île de Ré,’ Wilberforce pointed to the dark island now to starboard, ‘then we’re about four leagues out from Rochelle.’

The Opera House was a smouldering pile. Men were running down the street carrying buckets. It was too late. The mob had gone. In its place, bewildered clumps of men and women streaked with smoke from the torches and the fire drifted in the street. They seemed puzzled, as though some expected result had failed to materialise from their efforts. Ash sent up by the theatre’s collapse was returning to earth now, falling as black confetti on Lemprière and Juliette.

‘The Viscount told you? He told you the name?’ he questioned her. She nodded. ‘Who?’

Paper trails formed and dissolved in the air around his head. The smell of burning still stung his nostrils. Little trails formed lines between them, receipts ‘reçu par Madame K.’,
forgive me, Marianne
…, the short span of her years tracing a shallow arc back to Paris and a house in the Rue Boucher des Deux Boules the night it had rained. Could Casterleigh have drawn these lines right? He saw her dropping down from the coach, slap her hand against the table in the library. Absence of light. Ignorance. He let her go in the archive, lost her at the top of the shaft. Her face was pulled back from his own behind the glass of the coach-window, receding into different kinds of darkness. She was a shifting presence beside him, a hungry mouth feeding on him in the narrow bed, suddenly his lover. His need was quick, easily satisfied there. Charles sat in rented rooms writing to his wife. The ideogram assembled itself as a monstrous engine, a cipher of them both, but counter to their pairing, Casterleigh’s engine, gears clacking as it chases them to the point where she would turn to him dead-eyed and answer: ‘Your father. Yours and mine both.’

The boy led him in a stumbling run north along Bishopsgate then west into the maze of alleys below London Wall and after that he did not know. He felt soft mud, packed earth, cobbles, flagstones and boards underfoot. He heard the boy’s light footsteps running ahead of him, and from time to time the distant roar of the mob. He was lost in the twists and turns of his guide’s elected path and hardly knew if he were hurrying through some narrow and overhung rat-run or striding in full view down the centre of the Strand. When he called ahead to his guide, the boy answered in terms that
meant nothing to him. They were close by that alley by the Magpie, or rounding the corner from Silvero’s. Magpie. Silvero’s. The boy’s city was incomprehensible.

‘Wait here, Sir John.’ He stopped and heaved breath into his lungs. The boy ran on ahead. A minute or two passed while he listened to his thudding heart. Then the boy returned. ‘All clear, Sir John.’ He suffered himself to be led around a corner into the silence of the street beyond. Again the boy stopped.

‘We’re here, Sir John. You’ll be safe here.’ They climbed a short set of steps and Sir John felt his hand being guided to the handle on the door.

‘Where are we?’ he asked, as he pushed and opened the door. The cold interior air drifted out as he stepped within. ‘Boy?’ There was no reply. ‘Are you there?’ A faint, familiar smell of carbolic reached his nostrils from the cellars below. The boy was already gone. He was alone in the mortuary.

‘Good lad,’ he murmured as he made his way down the familiar stairs. The months of waiting were over. He had faced Farina at last and now, even in defeat, he felt the weight of his enemy’s presence lift from his shoulders. He had led his men to battle and they had fled. Only the boy had stayed to lead his defeated general to sanctuary.

The stairs gave out onto a smooth stone floor. At the back of Rudge’s dissection-room, he recalled, stood a high-backed chair. Sir John fumbled a path to it about the slabs and tables. Henry had never faced a night such as this, and if he had, what could he have done? Nothing, thought Sir John. Nothing at all.

By his later reckoning, two hours had passed when the door to the street opened for a second time. Sir John heard a match strike on the floor above, then listened as heavy footsteps descended with a familiar gait.

‘Rudge?’ The footsteps stopped.

‘Sir John.’

‘Did you see them, Rudge? They had the body. How on earth …’

‘I saw, Sir John.’ Sir John paused. There was something in Rudge’s voice he did not like.

‘Tell me, Rudge. How do you come to be here?’

‘I came to find you, Sir John.’ Sir John rose and faced his visitor.

‘You found me before,’ he said carefully, listening for the other’s movements.

‘And lost you too,’ said the other. The voice was changed, deeper and more inflected. Changed, and yet still familiar. Could he have been deceived for so long?

‘I felt we should meet, Sir John. At least this once.’ He knew now, knew how his every move had been forestalled, his every precaution met and
countered by his invisible foe. He had always been too late, always too far behind to catch more than the drift of the situation. Now his phantom had stopped, turned, and come back for him.

‘You have won,’ Sir John said. ‘The city is yours. Stay or go as you please. I have nothing to say to you.’

Sir John heard the glass hood being lifted off the oil-lamp, the intake of breath and sharp exhalation as the flame was blown out. He smelt smoke from the wick.

‘No, Sir John,’ Farina said then. ‘I have failed. My own men have failed me. It is you who have won tonight.’

As the
Vendragon
drew nearer her beacon, the crew worked hard aloft to slacken sail. The three captains and Peter Rathkael-Herbert watched as the coast came into view. The green light was set halfway up a shallow slope. A jetty ran out to sea, off the point. On the strand behind it, Eben was able to make out a long line of carts, twenty or more, and assembled loosely about them, a large crowd of men armed with jemmies and long-handled hammers. The jetty was coming up faster than he had thought and for a moment he felt that the ship must collide with it, but no, the broad gangplank was sliding safely to port, the hawsers running over the bitts below, and lines thrown to waiting hands were being made fast. The gang of men ashore began to march towards the ship. Two better dressed than the others were walking ahead up the jetty towards the
Vendragon
. Wilberforce looked at the forces ranged before them and turned to Eben.