by Robin Adair
While he was consumed by charting her charms, Miss Hathaway had spoken the beginning of the prologue. Now he approved her voice, light yet firm, as she continued. He enjoyed the verses’ wit and admired the bravado of the author and his long-gone players as she recited:
What in the practice of our former days,
Could shape our talents to exhibit plays?…
Macbeth, a harvest of applause will reap,
For some of us, I fear, have murder’d sleep;
His lady too with grace will sleep and talk,
Our females have been us’d at night to walk…
Grant us your favour, put us to the test,
To gain your smiles we’ll do our very best;
And, without dread of future Turnkey Lockits,
Thus, in an honest way, still pick your pockets!
Susannah bowed and retired, to rapturous applause.
The Patterer was pleased, but also worried. He wasn’t sure that Barnett Levey had been at all wise to invoke the spirits of the old convict cast. He knew that their humble theatre had soon been shut down by government decree – the houses of too many in the audience were being burgled as they watched! Even now, the Governor of the day was conscious of the possible side effects of a theatre and would not issue a formal licence. Levey circumvented the ban by calling his venue the Sydney Amateur Theatre, selling subscriptions, not tickets, and describing his performances as ‘At Homes’ or concerts. Still, Dunne saw that Lieutenant-General Darling could feel further provoked, particularly as Levey also planned to restage the colony’s first taste of theatre, played in 1789 by convicts. Now, as then, redcoats would be the comic butt of The Recruiting Officer.
Meanwhile, tonight’s next act was ready to perform.
The last time the Patterer visited the George Street theatre, Mr Barnett Levey had used a mysterious theatrical expression – about the show not being over ‘until the fat lady had sung’. At the time, the phrase had achieved an unintended, macabre meaning: the obese artiste referred to had collapsed on stage, a prelude to eventually dying. Dramatically, of course.
Tonight, however, there was a twist: although he was only second on the bill, the show was almost over before the fat man had finished singing. Certainly, the choice of Signor Cesare Bello was doomed to failure from the moment the Italian singer opened his mouth.
It had seemed all right even when Mr Levey had announced the artist as one who had performed before the royal court in Paris. The French wars were dead and buried with perhaps four million souls; the Froggies were only hated mildly now. Even when told that the offering was an aria entitled Ombra adorata aspetta, the mood of the mob in the pit had been good-humoured, even anticipatory.
The trouble started when the man (who, even charitably, could only be described as plump) poured out the first notes and they cut through the fog of pipe and segar smoke, whale oil and candle fumes, and the reek of closely packed, overripe bodies.
The first line of lyrics signalled the shambles to come. Soon the singer was drowned out by catcalls from the audience. One such taken up and repeated by the crowd was strident and unambiguous: ‘Get the molly off!’
The people had been ready to accept a foreigner, even a foreign language, but they were not ready for their first castrato.
Nicodemus Dunne felt doubly sorry for the singer. Not only had the audience rejected his art, but it had also made a mockery of the sacrifice required to achieve a voice like that – to keep his crystalline boy-soprano notes pure into adulthood, Bello had been castrated before puberty. Dunne knew that the practice had mutilated countless thousands of boys since it rose to prominence in the sixteenth century, when the church decided that, as women were barred from sacred music, young males were needed in great numbers – and a good voice should not be wasted by nature but kept forever young.
Barnett Levey called down the curtain and mingled with the crowd to calm the protesters. Dunne felt he should commiserate with the humiliated Italian. He found Signor Bello still on the stage, wringing his plump hands, pausing only to peer regularly at his tormentors through a peephole in the curtains. ‘This has never happened to us before,’ he piped distractedly to no one in particular.
The Patterer frowned. ‘To us?’
The singer, who close up was clearly older than he appeared at a distance, nodded, taking in his inquisitor for the first time. ‘Yes, to me, or to Crescentini – Girolamo Crescentini.
‘He wrote tonight’s aria, but we, singing together, we were the toast of Paris, from the turning of the century. We were never apart, sharing the fame. We —’ He had once more pressed his eye to the curtain’s spy-hole and now suddenly interrupted his flow.
‘Madonna!’ he exclaimed, ‘I thought … It cannot be! … I never thought to see that face again. And laughing, like all the other hyenas – at me!’ Bello was pale – with anger or fear, Dunne could not be sure.
‘Who? What do you see?’ He pushed the older man aside, not so gently, and squinted through the hole. He imagined he could see all that Bello had seen – a small section of groundlings in the pit, murkily lit, then a row of boxes for the better off, although these were not much brighter. He studied the faces. He could make out Captain Rossi, Barnett Levey (who was certainly laughing, perhaps nervously?), Dr Owens, Mr William Balcombe and his attendants, Sam Terry, similarly chaperoned, Captain Macarthur and Surveyor Mitchell. The Patterer also caught a flash of the faces of Brian and Cornelius O’Bannion.
‘I must see him!’ Bello cried, shoving his new companion aside and parting the curtains. ‘Ecco!’ he called loudly and waved towards the audience. But whatever he hoped to achieve was swamped by the crowd’s response.
‘Get the molly off!’ a voice called again, at which the mob cheered and took up the chant. ‘Cock-a-doodle-doo!’ yelled another. ‘Cook the capon’s goose!’
Bello shook his head and rushed off stage to the artists’ retiring rooms. By the time Dunne could again survey the audience, whatever the shattered castrato may have seen was distorted and lost in the chaos that reigned throughout the theatre.
Chapter Three
Where the nightingale doth sing
Not a senseless, trancèd thing.
But divine melodious truth.
– John Keats, ‘Bards of Passion and of Mirth’ (1820)
Somehow the show revived, saved by the appearance of a more acceptable star, a large dog of ambiguous ancestry named Munito, who was billed as the canine that could speak seven languages – and play dominoes!
The Patterer was as fascinated as the rest of the now calm audience. The dog’s master took Munito through a series of tricks, giving his orders in several different languages. Dunne studied the act carefully and first decided it would not be a mystery if each of the dog’s tricks was a response to an order in a particular language. Thus, if Munito had learnt to ‘sit’ to an English command, but to ‘roll over’ to a Spanish call, it showed a very well-trained dog, but no miracle worker.
The dog’s controller, however, changed the spoken commands for the same reactions. For example, he would ask the audience to call for the tongue to which they wished Munito to react. It became clear that, somehow, the orders could be mixed, yet the dog could still respond correctly.
Munito next played dominoes by barking once for each spot on the tile his master held up and announced to the audience. ‘Double six’ was extremely noisy.
Dunne was sure he was not alone in being unable to see how it was done. This puzzlement made everyone clap even louder.
Sadly, the dog’s good work at restoring order to the program was soon undone by an unhappy (though not for the audience, mind) turn of events in the following act. It was intended to be a stern performance of Act IV, Scene i, the court scene, of The Merchant of Venice.
The actors advanced to the point where Bassanio asked, ‘Why dost thou whet thy knife so earnestly?’
Shylock explained, ‘To cut the forfeiture from that bankrupt there.’
&
nbsp; To emphasise the point he waved his hand. And his nose fell off.
There was stunned silence as the silver nose – a metal contraption meant to conceal a cruel cavity exposed by either disease or injury, but inadequately masked by stage maquillage – landed with a clatter on the stage.
Alas, Munito, too, soon let the company down. The perambulating proboscis was the cue for the dog to take an unwonted curtain call. He ran on, seized the nose and made his exit, pursued by a crimsoncheeked Shylock.
It brought the house down, and the curtain.
Thankfully for Mr Barnett Levey’s peace of mind, the programme could be closed successfully – and quietly. After some had lost control – the Italian singer, who was not (as horse-fanciers would say) ‘entire’; a thespian who also had an important feature missing; and a talking dog that too vividly recalled its hunting instincts – it fell on the slender shoulders of Miss Susannah Hathaway to send the spectators smoothly on their way. The handsome young woman hushed the agitated audience as she poured out a sad song.
She is a nightingale! thought Nicodemus Dunne.
The same previously approved bosom heaved as she melodiously lamented:
Come blind, come lame, come cripple,
Come someone and take me away!
For ’tis O! What will become of me,
O! What shall I do?
Nobody coming to marry me,
Nobody coming to woo!
In the flickering lights the Patterer could see that some women in the crowd were openly dabbing at their eyes, and not a few gentlemen cleared their throats to mask their emotion.
When she had finished, Dunne turned to Levey. ‘I have never heard that lament before,’ he remarked against the wave of applause.
‘Ah,’ said the showman. ‘It is quite famous in America. And the story of the original singer and her family is just as sorrowful as the song.’
The Patterer smiled. He knew that the true, abiding love of the rotund Levey was the romance of the theatre; he knew how much he revelled in the colourful, if sometimes tawdry, world behind the lights. He indulged his friend. ‘How is the story sad?’ he asked.
Mr Levey did not miss his chance. ‘Well, the original singer was known as the Divine Eliza. As Elizabeth Arnold, she made her debut in Boston in 1796. She did marry, in 1806, and had a son three years later. Alas, her husband deserted both of his charges in the year of her death, 1811.
‘The boy – a young man now, of course – is, unfortunately, a troubled creature. He joined the army in America a year or so ago, but he shirks his duty and is always in strife.’ The entrepreneur tapped his nose. ‘The drink, y’know.’
Dunne’s curiosity was roused. ‘Pray, sir, how do you know all this?’
‘Well,’ said Levey, now settled firmly and comfortably in the saddle of his favourite steed – gossip of grease-paint – ‘after the tragic passing of the Divine Eliza, the lad became foster child to a Mr and Mrs John Allan, rich folk, very rich Virginians.
‘Mr Allan and my brother, Solomon – you know, of course, that Solomon runs, with Mr Cooper, our Waterloo Stores here?’ The Patterer nodded; he was familiar with the huge emporium. ‘Well,’ continued the showman, ‘they have long traded together and correspond closely. It has been an odd friendship – a prosperous Gentile and a once-imprisoned Hebrew – but the families continue to share confidences.
‘It appears that the young man – he’s, what, nineteen now – desires nothing but to become a student of crime in general and the occult in particular. And, oddly, murder as well as phantasmagorical matters tax his mind.
‘It seems he neglects his soldiering to read stories about secret rooms and other impossible plots. He prefers such dubious literature as Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho to his manual of arms. He does his own scribbling, too.
‘And he concocts intricate hoaxes. Why, he even fashioned a fake attack by hot-air balloon on Mr Allan’s home in Richmond. For his pains, and his foster-father’s, he lost his allowance.’
‘Well,’ said Dunne, ‘I know that Captain Rossi often has gruesome mysteries enough here to haunt him. And I,’ he added modestly, ‘attempt to help him.’
Mr Levey clapped his hands and grinned. ‘That’s so! Then perhaps one day you and he may need the help of our young American friend. What a pity he is so far away.
‘Yes, indeed, you could secure the services of young Mr Edgar Allan or, to use his enlisted name, Edgar A. Perry. But he usually chooses to keep his father’s surname.’
‘Which is?’ asked the Patterer idly.
‘Why,’ Barnett Levey answered, ‘it is Poe.’
That’s that, mused Dunne, as he walked home through the night – ‘home’ being the Bag o’ Nails (properly called the Bacchanal), a tavern in the village at the brickfields, to the south of the settlement’s centre. Many townspeople scorned Brickfield – and not simply because its relative isolation made it a magnet for devotees of cruel blood sports: bull-baiting, cock-fighting and terriers ratting and pit dogs tearing each other to death. As well, a regular wind flowing from the south picked up red dust from the workings and deposited it in a choking film over the houses and shops as far as the Cove to the north. Such a wind was called a ‘Brickfielder’.
The Patterer decided that his visit to the theatre had afforded relief from his day’s draining work, but it had been ephemeral fun. Surely he was finished with such carnivals of lost causes. Why should he ever again see the unmanned opera star, the noseless Shylock, the disgraced domino-playing dog? And who, anywhere else on earth, would ever again hear of the troubled young American who had lost his way?
He would not, however, object to hearing (and, of course, seeing) once more the nightingale Miss Susannah Hathaway. And often.
In the meantime, he wondered if the Police Chief would involve him in some new, exacting criminal investigation to break the routine of news-reading and allow him to use once more the skills he had gained as a policeman in London – before a fateful lapse had put him on the wrong side of the law, in chains and shipped to an eight-year sentence at Botany Bay.
His old work was what he wished for. He wished? He shook his head. No, wishing could be dangerous.
He remembered two recent conversations. He had been enlisted as a collector of information for the colony’s first census and it had taken him to some odd places and people. Mysteriously, the ten Mahometans living in Clarence Street were English; the head of the family was one William Wooden and he had two servants, one Protestant and one Catholic. And the only Hindoostani was a free settler named Ramdial. When he wasn’t a stockman he worked at Thatchcutters Bay, to the near east of the town.
Of the three ‘pagans’ recorded, he remembered John Shan, a Chinee market gardener near the Lachlan Swamps, who came to Sydney only to sell his produce, filling his empty cart with manure for the return trip. Animal shit only, he assured anyone who asked, not human shit. But the Patterer, who had seen him fossicking at household and public privies, had reported him to the charleys.
In response, the smarting Celestial had spat out, ‘May you live in interesting times!’
On a subject that Dunne could no longer recall, Ramdial the thatchcutter had more benignly, but opaquely, remarked, ‘Be careful what you wish for.’
The Patterer wondered if Signor Cesare Bello would be comforted if he were told, ‘Que sera, sera.’
Chapter Four
Come not between the dragon and his wrath.
– William Shakespeare, King Lear (1605–6)
British Army’s Brown Bess musket, with its wicked seventeen-inch (43-centimetre) bayonet.
‘Going somewhere, are we, John?’ The target of the quiet inquiry whirled and squinted into the night gloom that shrouded the shoreline of Cockle Bay. He had been trying in vain to right an overturned dinghy.
‘Jesus, man, you gave me a turn!’ He laughed nervously. ‘What the hell are you doing here? Come to give me a hand?’
‘Why not, John?’ But the h
and offered became an iron-hard closed fist to the temple, bringing the boatman to his knees and into dazed helplessness.
If it had been daytime, men swimming off Soldiers Point, behind the barracks, may have seen his distress. From dawn, market traders would go about their business, loading and unloading at the nearby wharf. Others, black and white, would be casting nets or foraging for shellfish, although these were fast being wiped out by the poisons spewed from the steam mill downstream, or the fullers and other polluters.
But there were no screams to be heard anyway. The attacker plunged his victim’s head under the water. Desperate snorts only pumped the salty liquid into his burning lungs.
Abruptly, the strong hand released its grip and the man called John reared up, hawking and gulping air. His hands clawed for his tormentor’s throat but found scant purchase, barely a wisp of what felt like fabric.
As he scrabbled, a blast from a long-barrelled gun bored into his chest, killing him instantly. An ounce of lead fired from fifty yards could blow a man off his feet or tear away a limb: this explosion was at point-blank range. The body cartwheeled back into the water.
The killer dropped the gun on the strand and splashed out quickly to search the man. He cursed as he found nothing he wanted.
Ashore, he paused only long enough to arrange beside the gun a collection of small, circular objects. Footfalls froze him and then he melted into the shadows.
Josiah Bagley jerked awake and opened his eyes. If this was death, he decided, then hell – or, more unlikely, heaven – was damned cold and hard, and reeked of rotting vegetables and chicken shit. Especially chicken shit.
Bagley slowly came to remember the reason for the cold and the stench. Of course. He had been sleeping off a bellyful of cheap rum in a filthy stall at the town markets. He also identified the sound that had scared him into consciousness. It had been a gunshot. The army had taught him that. And he could tell the difference between the muscular punch of a Brown Bess musket and the snap of a Baker rifle. There was no doubt he had just heard a musket discharge.
