by Robin Adair
The Ghost of Waterloo
Veteran Sydney journalist Robin Adair has had a wide and colourful career at the Daily and Sunday Telegraphs, the Australian Financial Review and the ABC. For many years he reflected on the lighter side of life in a humorous column for the Australian Women’s Weekly. He has been a lifelong student of early colonial history, especially police, pubs, crime and punishment. One of his ancestors was an early Sydney police superintendent; he believes another was a London judge who sent many convicts to Australia. His first novel, Death and the Running Patterer, won the inaugural Penguin’s Most Wanted competition for new Australian crime fiction.
For my daughters, Kristin and Sherry.
And for my favourite Brian, not O’Bannion, but my brother.
The Ghost
OF WATERLOO
An Intriguing Murder Mystery
ROBIN ADAIR
MICHAEL JOSEPH
an imprint of
Penguin Books
And, after all, what is a lie? ’Tis but
The truth in masquerade…
– Lord Byron, ‘Don Juan’ (1819–24)
The Principal Players
THE EXILES
Nicodemus Dunne* – his gaol-time almost up, the news-hawking ex-policeman tackles mass murder – and the devil!
Brian O’Bannion* – an Irish paroled prisoner, at peace with the world; and his brother…
Cornelius O’Bannion* – a man eager to serve new-found friends.
THE MASTERS
Governor Ralph Darling – forget the French and the Irish: the coffee here is even more revolting!
Captain Francis Nicholas Rossi – British to the bootstraps. Or is he a secret Corsican ‘brother’?
John Macarthur – rich and ruthless: a bad man to cross.
The Reverend Samuel Marsden – the unforgiving ‘Flogging Parson’, throwing his weight around as usual.
THE MISFITS
William King – the Flying Pieman: remittance man, scholar, pedlar, champion athlete.
Josiah Bagley* – a secret he’s nursed for ten years could be the death of him.
Obadiah Dawks* – garrulous journalist whose last scoop is deadly dangerous.
The Reverend Laurence Hynes Halloran – his knowledge of Nelson pays off.
Dr Thomas Owens* – as ever, up to his armpits in gore and clever clues.
THE THEATRICALS
Barnett Levey – impresario in the Governor’s bad books.
Miss Susannah Hathaway* – a much-travelled songbird who Yanks at heartstrings (and battles an axis of evil).
Signor Cesare Bello* – a castrato, but he hits an all-time low.
Munito – the talking dog: either a genius or barking mad. His master is…
Dominic Keynes* – a man trying to escape old habits.
THE UNDERBELLY
James Dingle, Thomas Turner, ‘Sudden Solomon’ Blackstone,
George Farrell, John Creighton and Valentine Rourke – robbers with a robust view on making bank withdrawals.
THE MONEY MEN
Samuel Terry – the ex-con with the most money.
Thomas McVitie – who receives no applause for his bank’s balancing act.
Joseph Hyde Potts – another banker, who sees the hole in his rival’s figures.
MEN ABOUT TOWN
Captain Fiddle* – a good soldier who couldn’t help turning a blind eye.
Thomas Hughes – an out-of-work hangman, for whom no noose isn’t good news.
Alexander Harris – old soldier who helps keep Dunne in one piece.
Billy Blue – the famous harbour ferryman, who takes the Patterer for a ride.
Bungaree – a ‘King’, steering a path between his two realms, black and white.
John Shan* – a market gardener; in the great manure debate, he would not accept a point of ordure.
THE FAMILY
Mr William Balcombe, his wife, Jane, and the next generation – friends with the Emperor on St Helena.
THE OTHER LADIES, BLESS ’EM
Norah Robinson* – it’s a worry when her husband interrupts her amorous secret life.
Mrs Elizabeth Macarthur – with a friend like John, who needs enemas?
THE GHOSTS
Prosper Mendoza* – a cliffhanger: did he fall or was he pushed?
And, of course, Napoleon Bonaparte – is he a memory, a phantom or alive and kicking?
Characters marked * are imaginary; other principals are real people, who would hopefully forgive some liberties taken with their lusty actual lives.
Contents
The Principal Players
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-six
Chapter Twenty-seven
Chapter Twenty-eight
Chapter Twenty-nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-one
Chapter Thirty-two
Chapter Thirty-three
Chapter Thirty-four
Chapter Thirty-five
Chapter Thirty-six
Chapter Thirty-seven
Chapter Thirty-eight
Chapter Thirty-nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-one
Chapter Forty-two
Chapter Forty-three
Chapter Forty-four
Chapter Forty-five
Chapter Forty-six
Chapter Forty-seven
Chapter Forty-eight
Chapter Forty-nine
Chapter Fifty
Chapter Fifty-one
Chapter Fifty-two
Chapter Fifty-three
Chapter Fifty-four
Chapter Fifty-five
Chapter Fifty-six
Epilogue
Afterword
Some Sources
Measures and Money
Chapter One
Sydney, Australia – Spring, 1828
O, that a man might know
The end of this day’s business, ere it come!
But it sufficeth, that the day will end,
And then the end is known.
– William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar (1599)
‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…’
No, those words had an agreeable ring, but would not quite serve. Very well, how about ‘It had been the worst of days and the best of nights’? Nicodemus Dunne nodded to himself as he walked to his home and his bed along a George Street lit by a moon that peered fitfully between scudding clouds.
Yes, indeed, that was a telling phrase, Dunne was pleased to acknowledge (banishing any false modesty), a stirring sentiment he could well adapt to announce his regular public readings of daily news in his role as the convict colony’s Running Patterer.
He sighed. What a pity he was 16000 miles from home and England – civilisation would probably never hear such fine words. And his self-satisfaction was completely shattered as he stumbled over a rock lurking in the poor light.
There were some street lamps, and the taverns �
�� of which there were scores – had orders to hang lanterns at their doors, but too many streets were too frequently dark, the whale oil often stolen from their lamps. Only one lamp, at a Pitt Street shop, was lit, after the new fashion in London, by coal gas. This amorphous fuel was of no interest to thieves. The Patterer knew, however, that a certain senior soldier of the town believed gas could power an aerial machine!
He cast his mind back. The worst of the daytime just departed had not been taking pennies and small silver in return for passing on distasteful and depressing intelligence about brutal bull-baiting at Brickfield village, or the calamitous drought, or a deadly pneumonic epidemic, or drunken rioting, or duels and robbery.
No, the saddest part had been having to describe the execution of a soldier from the 39th Regiment. The garrison private had discharged his piece at a sergeant. No one seemed to know why: the soldier’s jaw had been broken when he was being subdued and he could not read or write a reason.
The sergeant was unharmed but the sentence was still death by firing squad. This had puzzled the Patterer; being shot to death was an unusual punishment – here soldiers guilty of capital crimes were usually hanged, like civilians.
The condemned man’s company had paraded to witness the killing. The six brothers-in-arms chosen by ballot could not miss as they faced him at dawn on the green sward at Lieutenant Dawes’ Point. They stood within the effective accurate range of their Brown Bess muskets – fifty yards – and the orders rang out: ‘Load!’ and ‘Present!’ With the erratic Brown Bess there was no order in the manual of arms for ‘Aim!’ In battle its effectiveness relied on devastating rolling volleys.
Perhaps the prisoner had had time, before he was blindfolded, to take a last look across Sydney Cove towards the sea that had carried him to this foreign fate. He certainly would have seen the open coffin beside the freshly dug grave at his feet.
He had struggled and made strangled cries until the last order came: ‘Fire!’
The band played the soldiers back to barracks in the heart of town. The fifes and drums were part of the rules of punishment. But then some bitter comrades began to chant their own version of an old ballad:
Let me have length
and breadth enough,
And under my head a sod;
That they may say
When I am dead,
A sojer’s gone to God.
‘Pick it up. Close up. Shut up!’ shouted a sergeant. ‘Or yer backs get scratched!’ By which he meant flogged.
The men fell silent. Their thoughts turned to another ritual, to come after the evening stew. It was called ‘settlement’, at which the dead man’s possessions would be auctioned, including his woman, if she agreed. But perhaps no one wanted her, in which case she might have to cook, sew or launder (at a penny a pound weight, dry) for single men. Or become a prostitute. There were few options for a camp follower without her soldier. The proceeds of the auction would never amount to much for either messmates or ‘widow’.
The Patterer’s thoughts had been otherwise as he left the killing field. Beyond his stark memory of the savagery of the shooting, he was still naggingly puzzled by the odd method of dispatch. This had not faded completely, even as the echoes of the musket fire and of the carpenter nailing down the coffin lid had died away.
What of the ‘best of nights’?
Dunne had soon pushed aside his concern and looked forward with great anticipation to a relaxing night at the theatre. There he would sink into a plush seat in a box – five shillings was expensive, he knew, but a box, with good companions, was more congenial than sharing the cheaper pit with the groundlings.
What could possibly have gone wrong? Indeed, the evening had started innocently enough…
Chapter Two
True patriots all, for be it understood,
We left our country, for our country’s good…
And none will doubt, but that our emigration
Has prov’d most useful to the British nation.
– attributed to Henry Carter, excerpt of prologue to convicts’ playbill, Sydney (16 January 1796)
‘The Patterer could not ignore the fine bosom generously displayed in the froth of lace.’
Nicodemus Dunne was pleased with the company he met in the box to which he was ushered. In the low light from the lamps and candles positioned discreetly around the auditorium so as not to distract eyes from the bright stage when the curtain went up, he recognised a comrade, Captain Francis Nicholas Rossi, one of the colony’s leading lawmen – not only Chief Magistrate but also Chief of Police. William Francis King, the peddling ‘Flying Pieman’ famed for his athletic feats, was there too, beside Dr Thomas Owens from the town’s hospital. An empty seat in the box would be filled between bursts of backstage volatility by Mr Barnett Levey, the theatre’s owner, manager and sometime performer.
The Patterer noted that another of the boxes was occupied by four men, only two of whom he could readily identify in the gloom. Certainly, one was Major Thomas Mitchell, the Surveyor-General, and another was Mr William Balcombe, the Colonial Treasurer. The others? Well, Mr Balcombe had been gravely ill: perhaps they were servants, or his sons? Sam Terry, an old lag, or convict, now legally a rich man, sat nearby.
In adjoining boxes, but studiously ignoring each other, were the leader of the so-called Exclusive settlers, Captain John Macarthur, purest of the ‘Pure Merinos’, and Mr William Charles Wentworth, a firebrand publisher and lawyer, friend to emancipated convicts. Dunne was surprised to see Macarthur. Illness had recently kept him out of town, in near seclusion.
The Patterer’s gaze shifted to the people in the pit of the theatre. So too did the Pieman’s, and he sighed. ‘I should also be hawking,’ he grumbled.
Dunne could see the stooped figure of an old pedlar who sold honey on the streets. Tonight, though, he carried no tray of his wares; he was just another theatregoer. But there was a working hawker, a man selling bottles of beer. The Patterer shrugged away William King’s complaint as he recognised below him another friend, a freed felon, the Irishman Brian O’Bannion.
A handsome, well set-up fellow in his thirties, O’Bannion would have been welcome to join the Patterer’s box, but chose not to. Dunne knew it was not because he could afford only the three shillings entry fee for groundlings. No, O’Bannion was accompanied by his brother, Cornelius, or ‘Con’, who was a recently paroled ‘political’. The Patterer had gained the clear impression that Con could not yet feel comfortable in close proximity with any officer even remotely connected to this captivity.
‘God save Ireland!’ Brian O’Bannion had said when he introduced his newly freed brother to the Patterer. ‘We were both eejits.’
Indeed, two quite separate failed endeavours had brought down the O’Bannions. Brian had been caught drunkenly burgling a house in Dublin, while young Con had been swept up running messages for Irish dissidents. Only the burglar’s lack of booty and the tyro rebel’s tender years (even now he was still not long into shaving) had saved them both from dancing the hangman’s hornpipe. Seven years apiece at Botany Bay were their sentences, and now, with early tickets of leave, they were free together.
But not quite together, for ‘black Irish’ Brian was open-faced and bold, while the slight and fair Con, though he had seemed to thaw around the Patterer lately, was a cooler soul, less at home in his new world.
The audience was drawn to the matters at hand by the appearance of Mr Levey’s rotund figure on stage before the closed curtains. He raised his hands. ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ he announced, ‘we begin this evening’s entertainment with a rare item. I find in Mr George Barrington’s History of New South Wales the very prologue that was spoken at the opening of one of our earliest theatres – only eight years after humble settlement here.
‘Mr Barrington writes that the prologue was “certainly particularly descriptive of the theatrical corps”.’
‘Aye,’ a man interjected. ‘They was all government men’ – the label ‘co
nvict’ was often avoided – ‘and he’d know…He were one too!’
‘Of course he was!’ shot back Barnett Levey excitedly. ‘And of course they were, and no shame to it.’
The Patterer knew what the little entrepreneur meant and what he left unsaid. George Barrington and those early thespians had been felons – Barrington was a pickpocket who ended up a colonial chief constable – and, although Levey had arrived as Sydney’s first free Jewish settler, his brother, Solomon, was a convict before he became a wealthy businessman.
‘So,’ continued the master of ceremonies, ‘I crave your indulgence to present the superior couplets of the prologue in question, delivered for your delectation tonight by –’ he paused dramatically – ‘a young lady! I give you Mistress Susannah Hathaway!’
There was an excited murmur as Mr Levey scuttled off and the curtains parted to reveal a stage unadorned but for a lone figure picked out as brightly as possible by oil lamps concentrated by polished reflectors.
A beautiful girl stood before them. She could not be lovelier, thought Dunne, not even if she were illuminated by the magical new light they marvelled about in the London journals: there, it seemed, they were somehow igniting lime and projecting the incandescent result directly onto the subject desired.
Miss Susannah bobbed a curtsey as the Patterer’s eyes studied and approved her. As she straightened, he could not ignore the fine bosom generously displayed in the froth of lace decorating the décolletage of the wasp-waisted, wide-skirted gingham day dress (normally unseemly at this hour). Nor could he fail to study the unimpaired aspect of well-turned calves in patterned stockings. Her blonde hair was tightly constrained into a chignon, with small curls escaping over the forehead and near delicate ears. Dunne understood (as much as any man could understand) that this style was called à la chinoise. Her face, he recorded for future pleasant recall, was a perfect heart shape unspoiled even by the obvious application of heavy theatrical maquillage.
