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  Praise for Lemprière’s Dictionary:

  “Extravagantly spectacular … myriad wonders and pleasures abound … superbly entertaining.”

  —The Washington Post Book World

  “It’s a dazzling … display of intellectual pyrotechnics, one that immediately reveals not only Lemprière’s classical credentials but also his creator’s. Like Eco, he uses intellect to flesh out and give body to a simple mystery, so that knowledge itself becomes part of the point of the story.”

  —Los Angeles Times Book Review

  “An important and inspiring novel.”

  —Voice Literary Supplement

  “Astonishing … Lawrence Norfolk reveals a massive talent.”

  —The Boston Globe

  “A wonderfully ambitious extravaganza teeming with fertile inventiveness.”

  —Detroit News

  “This is an improbable and improbably good first novel of nearepic proportions … a tangled tale of political intrigue and financial chicanery.”

  —Details

  “Remarkable … Think of novelists Umberto Eco, Thomas Pynchon and Charles Dickens…. Then pull up a comfortable chair and settle in for a voyage to the late eighteenth century … an involving, tantalizing tale.”

  —The Orlando Sentinel

  “This is historical fiction of mesmerizing complexity.… It is a masterpiece.”

  —Daily Mail

  “A dazzling linguistic and formal achievement that also takes on a genuinely rich and underexplored subject, the East India Company.”

  —Salman Rushdie

  LEMPRIÈRE’S

  DICTIONARY

  ALSO BY LAWRENCE NORFOLK

  The Pope’s Rhinoceros

  In the Shape of a Boar

  LEMPRIÈRE’S DICTIONARY

  Lawrence Norfolk

  Copyright © 1991 by Lawrence Norfolk

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Any members of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003.

  Originally published in Great Britain by Sinclair-Stevenson Limited in 1991. Printed in 1999 by Vintage, a division of Random House, London, England.

  Printed in the United States of America

  FIRST GROVE PRESS EDITION

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Norfolk, Lawrence, 1963-

  Lemprière’s dictionary / Lawrence Norfolk.

  p. cm.

  ebook ISBN-13: 978-0-8021-9943-0

  1. Lemprière, John, 1765?-1824—Fiction. 2. London

  (England)—History—18th century—Fiction. 3. Mythology,

  Classical—Historiography—Fiction. 4. Lexicographers—Fiction.

  5. Conspiracies—Fiction. 6. Mythologists—Fiction. I. Title.

  PR6064.O65L4 2003

  823’.914—dc21

  2003042196

  Grove Press

  841 Broadway

  New York, NY 10003

  TO

  S B-H

  Barbarus hic ego sum, qui non intellegor ulli

  1600: The Voyage Out

  Schtlaumpp!

  THE YOUNG man dropped the book. The boat would wait for him. He rubbed his tired eyes behind their spectacles and looked out across the river. A gull skimmed over the water, measuring the wind. He wrapped his coat more tightly about him and glanced quickly down the quay. The chest on which he sat shifted slightly, unbalanced on the rough planks of the jetty. She would not come now. In front of him, the pacquet pulled gently on its hawser. A crewman was hard at work stacking crates towards the stern where the rigging obscured his view. Not here and not now. He cursed in silence. The crewman cursed too, the boat would wallow like a pig under the load. Morning sunlight shone down on them all, casting shadows that shortened towards midday. The young man felt it warm on his back. Inside, he was cold and his thoughts grew bitter. I have been brought to this. It was not my doing. The book stared up at him from between his feet. Sunlight glinted off his eye-glasses. Not my doing.

  The gull was gone, but the Thames had other sights for him. Watermen paddled their wherries back and forth between the banks and shouted abuse at any vessel within earshot. A pacquet, identical to the one moored before him, had misjudged the tide and was now anchored a hundred yards downstream. A pinnace tacked hopelessly against the breeze. As the sun rose higher, the river water warmed, then sweated and stank. A fine haze lifted from its surface. The dark mud of Blackwall began to dissolve behind it, a widening strip as the tide turned and began to ebb. Upstream of the jetty, the Nottingham sailed slowly into view, new canvas crackling in the light wind. It passed him, sliding through the black water, until its stern turned, the sound of its sails growing quieter to be replaced by the sound of the water lapping at the jetty.

  But the solitary figure on the jetty did not want to let it go and his gaze trailed in the wake of the Indiaman, shimmering now in the haze as it edged around the bend. The far bank cut across its prow and he saw then, in its slow glide, its massive disappearance, the other ships, the very first of them that had never been his to see before but only to read of, to learn of at a distance, to track belatedly to port. And here, the very wharf on which he stood, was where it had begun. His thoughts reached back after that first day, along the secret trail of years that had directed his steps to this point and extended back long before that; a trail of faded markers, faint signatures. His countenance changed and the bitter memory rose in him again. False modesty! Those names were strong enough to play me like a puppet… Not only me, all of us. All of our lives, mine, my father’s, his father’s and his before him, all the way back to Rochelle. The bloody succession led me here and from here I trace it back to the first of that long line. To you, François, my ancestor, who thought yourself master and ended as victim; to you and your legacy. His bitterness turned to anger at the dead man as he berated him silently from the other side of the grave and the sun glittered on the black water as it sped towards the sea.

  The book lay between his feet. He bent to pick it up and as he grasped the cover its pages fell open and the dead man’s testament slipped from between the leaves. The sun drove its rays down onto the jetty. A gust lifted the folded parchment and pushed it over the rough planks like a tiny sail towards the edge. Let it go, he thought. The tide would carry it away, away down the river. Let it go.

  But he could not. He watched for a moment then bent once more to retrieve it. The parchment was stiff as canvas, crackling as he unfolded it. Away down the river. Out to sea. He adjusted his spectacles. Across the sea, a port they had left too long and too late waited for them in vain. Rochelle, the mistake they could not put behind them, the hard mark his ancestor could not erase. His head dropped and the neat characters stared up at him.

  “I, François Charles Lemprière merchant, to you my descendant, whenever you may read this whosoever you may be, welcome.

  Perhaps you are my son or grandson but I think not. I fear this business will take many generations and more years to reach its settlement. But should you read this then that settlement will be close and writing to you here in this City of London, my refuge and my place of exile, I rejoice that you have come at last.

  I ask myself how much will you know? More I think than I know myself. Tomorrow I go in search of them, to take back what they took from me at Rochelle. Tomorrow too I begin my
search for you. I abandoned my first family when I left Rochelle, my six children and their mother Anne-Marie pregnant with a seventh. Now I must leave my second family on Jersey to settle the account and so I must leave you too, my unborn descendant. Now, while I write these words, I can only hope that you will find them.

  Of my partners and our Company I will say little here. If you are reading this you know already how we took it from the Englanders. They were good years, when we stood firm and fought our battles together. But they are finished now, finished with the siege and forgotten with the dead at Rochelle. You will know much of that too, and of my own escape to press our cause in England. I could only watch from these shores as Rochelle sickened and starved, as rendition became defeat, and my promise to return the conqueror was proved a mockery. I could only wait for the slaughter of my family, my partners and all the citizens of that fated city. At the last I sent my partners word that they should flee for their lives and flee they did. But the manner of their flight I never could have guessed and that debt is yet to be settled. Tomorrow I go to square the account. Should you come to read this, the final tally will be made.

  You have travelled a strange road to find these words, my message to you; strewn with the corpses who fell before you and trammelled with trials and hard labours. Perhaps you have journeyed from Jersey, perhaps the very house I built at Rozel. Like myself you have left home and family behind and perhaps you have grieved for them as I do now. But now you have come to join me. My old promise can still be kept. Together we may yet return to Rochelle as her conquerors. Once again, to you my unborn descendant, my successor, welcome.”

  The young man stared after the last words. So the final tally was made, and he had lost. The debt was owed him, but by dead men and if he was to dun them now then he must find them first in hell. He folded the parchment once more and replaced it within the pages of the book. The debt stayed and he had lost. She would not come now.

  From further down the quay, the young man seemed the centrepiece in a picture of calm. The boat with its busy crew, the jetty, the river rolling by; they might all have been arranged for only this purpose. But within him, his recriminations grew with a life of their own as the memory of the distant day he sought took shape and the man he pursued stirred him to anger. The seeds were sown on the day the ships had sailed. For you would have been here, François, casting your shrewd eye over the ships under cover of the crowd, gauging their holds and the voyage ahead of them, weighing risk against profit. You could not know how many would pay at the last, nor how much. And you could not know the ultimate course your trusted colleagues would take. Yet you began it, even in ignorance you began all of it….

  The long years of the feud and the twisted path he had taken back to its beginning came to the young man then as an image: a line of grey faces falling away at his approach, dead flesh, and behind the last of them a countenance that was alive and that he knew as he knew his own. His knuckles whitened as a vein of grim satisfaction rose to find its voice from within his anger. I found you out, François. I followed you back through every one of one hundred and eighty-eight years, losing all I cared for, watching your failure revisit my every step without knowing it, not even knowing my object until here, at the root of it, at the very beginning, I found you.

  And while he sat on the jetty, he counted back through the catalogue of all that had happened, his inner anger growing until he truly mourned the death of the man he harangued for it meant that his ancestor was safe in the grave and could not be killed. He was cheated even now. But this time he would not be gulled and he would not be denied his recompense. For your ignorance François, and the innocence of those that followed, for the fact that she will not come, not now, and for my father I take you and that time both in payment, the beginning of it all: all I have left.

  He cast his eye again over the dark swell and the wherries paddling hard against the tide which dragged the sluggish water down its channel. The water moved blindly as he looked into it, turning and wheeling upon itself as the unseen sea hauled in its net. The tide gathered pace as it always did, sucking the river down as it had always done, this day as every other. This year as all the rest, he thought, drawing it down the long line of all those years and he with it, all the way back to the time he had sought and found and now held in his mind’s eye, to see then what was there for any to see on the day the trail had begun.

  A day, bright and chill as this one, the century newly struck, an air of promise and the ships, four of them, bobbing slowly at anchor, masts swaying with the river while behind them, on the packed quay, the crier ascends the platform, draws out his parchment and, shouting over the din of the crowd, begins to read,

  “CHARTER GRANTED BY QUEEN ELIZABETH TO THE EAST-INDIA COMPANY, Dated the twentieth Day of April, in the forty-second Year of Her Reign, Anno Domini, 1600. ELIZABETH, by the Grace of God, Queen of England, France and Ireland, Defender of the Faith, &c. To all our Officers, Ministers and Subjects, and to all other people, as well within this our realm of England as elsewhere, under our Obedience and Jurisdiction, or otherwise unto whom these our Letters Patents shall be seen, shewed or read, Greeting.”

  To you too, thought the figure on the jetty, welcome. Finis exordium invocat.

  The crowds shout louder, drowning him out. He continues inaudibly from the platform, waving his arms. No-one watches. All eyes are on the ships, the Hector and the Ascension, the Susan and the Dragon, yard arm and yard arm, decked with pennants, sides rising steep out of the water. Newly caulked, waist and wales encrusted with gingerbread, the closest onlookers can smell Stockholm tar and beneath it the vinegar used to scrub the decks. Below those decks, the stench of the ballast still mingles with both. The hard work has already been done. Sailors scamper up and down the ratlines for show and the junior officers preen. Good order prevails. The crowd has been here an hour and grown no quieter but their enthusiasm is more perfunctory now. They are waiting for a signal to prompt their wildest cheering and from the poop deck of the Dragon, Captain James Lancaster is almost ready to send it.

  He leans over the side of the ship to direct the tying on of the row-boats’ hawsers to the bowsprit of his own vessel and shouts encouragement to the men who strain like galley slaves at the oars. Gradually, so slowly, the prow begins to turn. Captain Lancaster raises his arm and shouts to the men on the aft winch. He feels a slight tremor through the ship as the current catches it. He drops his arm, the men haul the anchor and the crowd erupts. The voyage has begun. The Hector, then the other two follow as the Dragon moves its slow bulk into midstream. The wind catches their sails, but it is the tide that moves them as the ships gather momentum. The sailors wave stiffly. From the shore, they already look like marionettes, tiny figures as the show moves further down the river. The crowds around the docks and the surrounding wharves wave back. Their shouts reach thinly across the intervening water. The sailors can barely hear them now, barely see them as they begin to undrape the bunting festooned about the wales, the ships emerging from the gaudy decoration, vessels of hard oak headed out in line for the East.

  Along the riverbank, the curious have already begun to drift away. A vague disappointment that the spectacle is at an end works its way through the crowd, dividing it into twos and threes, little clumps which move awkwardly through each other as they disperse. The riverside wharves begin to clear, revealing those with reason enough to stay until the ships disappear around the river’s bend. A little way down the quay, the aldermen congratulate themselves on the smoothness of it all. Invited dignitaries criticise them in an undertone. The investors look tense. Was it madness? The risk of it all, will it pay? True venturers, they tell each other not to worry as their money floats down the river. And a close-knit knot of men there, eight or nine of them, set off a little, out of earshot. The orator is audible again as the crowd’s din becomes a buzz, a hum, a thousand private conversations.

  “… that they and every of them, from henceforth be, and shall be one Body
Corporate and Politick, in Deed and in Name, by the Name of The Governor and Company of Merchaunts of London, Trading into the East Indies, really and fully, for us, our Heirs and Successors, we do order, make, ordain, constitute, establish and declare, by these presents, and that by the same name of Honourable Governor and Company of Merchaunts of London, Trading into the East Indies, they shall have succession, and that they and their successors be and shall be, at all Times hereafter, Persons able and capable in Law, and a Body Corporate and Politick, and capable in Law to have, purchase, receive, possess, enjoy and retain, Lands, Rents, Priviledges, Liberties, Jurisdictions, Franchises and Hereditaments of whatsoever Kind, Nature and Quality so ever, they be to them and their Successors.”

  The nine men seem to pay close attention, looking away from each other, heads tilted to catch the words, an act. They do not care what he says. They have reached their decision and the purpose of their long journey from Rochelle is clearer to them. They too have thought of risk. They have counted the hazards of the journey that has just begun. The events that have led them to consider a venture on these hateful shores are unclear even to them but, despite the show of calm as they stand in silence together, the fact of their being so distant from home bespeaks the depth of their need, their restraint and their patience. For they will not invest in this voyage. They have counted the risks and now they count upon them. They will wait for the voyage to founder, for the ships to meet their fate. They will wait for the investors’ nerve to break and the Company to fail. They have their own idea as to what the scene they have witnessed might eventually mean.

  Their hopes of failure sail on, the four of them, drawn by the tide past Gravesend, by the wind a little closer to the east and its dream of riches. They move downriver to the estuary, thence to an anchorage off the Downs to take on victuals. The barter goods are already stowed. They set sail again and news of them grows scarce. Tiny segments of their long journey drift back in the few ships that pass them on the open seas, from traders who have passed through the ports in which these ships berth. Stories that might tell of them, strange incidents without context or meaning which, as days turn to weeks, are seized upon as proof of their continued existence, if only that. The master gunner of the Ascension died after falling from the main yard and a shoal of flying fish swam by. A French vessel brought back his belongings. They had witnessed his burial at sea. And the two that resulted from it, for the firing of the ordnance had been careless. A stray shot had killed the Captain and the boatswain’s mate.