by Robin Adair
The recognition of the weapon came hand in hand with a visceral wave of relief that he was still alive. They said that if you heard the bullet’s detonation, then it hadn’t killed you; that the balls or cannon shot had simply announced their presence and were safely past. For the men these missiles brained or gutted – the men beside you – for those poor sods they had come too quickly, as silent assassins.
He knew he should be able to command some science that explained the phenomenon; his drunk’s brain dredged up debris involving Newton, the speeds of sound and light, thunder and lightning … it should be crystal-clear. Before going for a soldier he had been a schoolteacher. The propensity of tutors for flogging their charges earned them the label ‘bum brushers’. His involvement with his pupils’ posteriors was more sinister: he had been sacked for shirtlifting and saved from the gallows only by taking the King’s shilling and becoming an infantryman.
Bagley now stood up in the market stall and shook himself free of the putrid debris of bird droppings, rotting fruit and old vegetables. He imagined he could pass for one of the poor wretches pinioned during the daytime in the public stocks and pillory near the market, whom jeering shoppers and passers-by would festoon with refuse.
He laughed wryly. In a manner of speaking, at one time he had been a ‘vegetable’! Back north along the main road, in the military barracks, were soldiers of the 39th Regiment of Foot, popularly known as ‘Green Linnets’ for the colour of the facings on their scarlet coats. Before them, Sydney had been guarded by the 3rd Regiment – the ‘Buffs’, with tan on their collars and cuffs.
Bagley’s old unit had been the 47th, whose jackets were decorated with white patches, likened to cauliflower florets. Like it or not, they were forever ‘Cauliflowers’. At least, he thought, he hadn’t been an 11th Hussar with tight pink breeches, a bloody ‘Cherry Bum’!
When his service ended he had worked his way to Botany Bay – he was no convict, no ‘government man’ – but fortune had not smiled upon him. He drifted between menial jobs, finding even those hard to come by, competing as he was with cheap convict labour. It was a hand-to-mouth existence, he slept rough, dossing down anywhere.
Not that sleep could continue this night. He did what good soldiers were always supposed to do: march to the sound of the guns. His curiosity tempered by caution, he slipped down steep Market Street until it petered out at Cockle Bay – few people were yet ready to call it by its new name, Darling Harbour, after the Governor, whom most thought a pompous prick.
As he walked he had a foreboding about the shot: guns meant death or dismemberment for someone. Grog and gallows humour kept most soldiers sane. Only the other day he had heard the Running Patterer, who roamed the dusty streets hawking news and small entertainments, tell a story to a squad from the 57th, the ‘Die Hards’. They had seen the darkly funny side to a recital of Mr Thomas Hood’s new verse, ‘Faithless Nelly Gray’. The Patterer had read:
Ben Battle was a soldier bold,
And used to war’s alarms:
But a cannon-ball took off his legs,
So he laid down his arms!
The soldiers nodded at the jingle’s bittersweet jibe:
For here I leave my second leg,
And the Forty-second Foot!
With the reality of having reached the water’s edge, Bagley’s reverie suddenly ceased. On a stretch of the bay lapping towards Captain Macarthur’s jetty, a boat bobbed gently upside down. In mocking imitation beside the skiff there floated, face down, what the cloud filtered moonlight showed to be a human body.
Bagley waited, scouting the area with his eyes. No unusual sound. No one. Nothing. So he carefully pulled the figure in and onto the narrow beach and turned it over. It was, or had been, a man. The bloody blossom and black hole in the shattered shell of the chest left no doubt that he was dead.
Near where Bagley had placed the corpse he found the weapon. He nodded in satisfaction. It was a musket, though of a style he had not seen for years. The French Army’s voltigeurs had used such a weapon when they skirmished ahead of their advancing infantry columns. A smooth-bore carbine with a barrel slightly shorter than that of the Brown Bess issued to redcoats, the carbine would also be fired by a French dragoon – hence its exotic (to the British ear), fire-breathing name: fusil de dragon.
Bagley frowned. What the devil was a Froggy weapon doing here? And what had happened? He realised he couldn’t loiter. Someone else would surely have heard the shot. A patrolling police charley could turn up at any time, and a penniless drifter could be a ready answer to a messy problem.
But before he left he also did the other thing that soldiers, the survivors, did on a battlefield when the guns fell silent and the smoke cleared. He robbed the dead.
The coat, shirt and trousers were fouled beyond salvage by water, blood and bodily wastes. But from a pocket he plundered a leather purse that spoke to him with the unmistakeable chink of gold. He also took a fine silver watch and broke a finger knuckle of the corpse to rip clear a signet ring that was engraved ‘J. C.’ He stripped the body of its sound boots. Now he could throw away his own battered ‘straights’, the cheap, formless shoes made by convicts.
But he didn’t take, or even touch the musket. That would have been too dangerous. If he were caught thieving, he could be flogged then imprisoned on brutal Norfolk Island … but a vagabond with a murder weapon in his hands would surely dance the Newgate jig.
Had it been murder, though? Or was it suicide? Either way, the strength of the blast could explain the wide separation between weapon and target. And anyway, just who was ‘J. C.’?
Bagley suddenly shivered with excitement. He was rich! No going back to that stinking stall. He would find an all-night drinking hell and enjoy himself until morning. Then he could bathe, be shaved and look to a future that would immediately involve a fine meal somewhere sumptuous, perhaps Polack’s flash London Tavern, where, he’d heard, the serving girls were as plump as the oysters and as soft as the fine white bread. Even better, perhaps a pretty pot-boy could be persuaded to extend the range of his services.
Before he left, however, Bagley pondered the significance, if any, of what he had discovered sitting in a neat pile near where the dragon gun rested. After close examination he left these odd items undisturbed. He had decided that they were valueless, even though they were coins…
Pieces of silver. Thirty of them.
They had searched, but neither killer nor corpse-looter found the small secret that stayed clenched in the dead man’s stiffening right fist. It was one of the rare times in thirty years that the object had been more than a heartbeat away from its rightful owner.
Chapter Five
Cairo, Egypt – July 1798
With the French Army of the Orient
When his potion and his pill,
Has, or none, or little skill,
Meet for nothing but to kill;
Sweet Spirit, comfort me!
– Robert Herrick, ‘His Litany to the Holy Spirit’ (1647)
‘Are you sure you really want this, Excellency?’ the doctor asked as he handed his patient a small leather bag. It was sealed with a knot of a bright ribbon that extended into a long loop. The bag, little more than a sachet, was decorated with a tiny golden button depicting a honey bee.
The object of the deferential, if wary, approach was a stocky man whose curt nod matched the sour expression of his sallow face. He slipped the ribbon noose over his head and the bag rested on his silken stock and shirt front. He rebuttoned his green frockcoat over a badge of Barbara, the saint of gunners. So, even a general welcomed divine aid.
‘You are certain it will work?’ He fingered the sachet.
The doctor sighed. He was supposed to save life, not extinguish it. However … his fee in gold was good, and his patient was too important, even too dangerous, to defy.
‘Of course it will – would – work. In there is Atropa belladonna, also Veratrum album and Hyoscyamus niger —’
&
nbsp; The general held up a hand impatiently. ‘Wait! I know belladonna – deadly nightshade? But the others?’
The doctor nodded. ‘You know of belladonna because it is mydriatic – that is, drops of it in solution dilate the pupils of the eyes …and thus it earned its name: “fair ladies” have used it to beautify themselves.
‘The others here are white hellebore and black henbane, again of the nightshade family and also a stimulant for the heart.’
The patient seemed unconvinced.
In exasperation the doctor said coldly, ‘Well, sir, if you don’t trust me, trust your own eyes.’ He turned to his silently watching assistant. ‘Go, to the streets if you must, but get me a cat!’
His Excellency’s eyes, even without the benefit of belladonna, widened. The assistant scuttled out.
The doctor instructed his man to hold the head of the quickly captured cat firmly. He then approached with a pipette, the tiny glass tube filled with a small amount of a liquid drawn from a bottle.
‘This is a weakened solution of the prescription you now carry,’ the doctor explained. ‘It is less than a quarter of a grain in toxic strength – you know that a grain is 0.0648 grammes?’
The patient shrugged. He did know of the apothecary’s age-old measure, historically equal to the average weight of a grain of wheat. He disapproved of such outdated measures, and said so. ‘Everything should be – and one day will be – in our metricated code. But get on with it.’
The doctor deftly tipped drops into the animal’s eyes. ‘Observe!’ he said. ‘The characteristics of belladonna.’
The men bent down and saw that the cat’s pupils suddenly widened and stayed dilated. ‘Physicians find this useful in the examination and treatment of diseases of the eyes,’ said the doctor.
His superior seemed unimpressed. ‘How can I be sure that the mixture can perform to full, shall we say, satisfaction?’
The doctor lowered the cat to the floor and decanted another draught into a bowl he filled with milk. ‘This,’ he said, ‘is a stronger solution of the same toxins – this time you are seeing much more than a quarter of a grain.’
The animal soon approached, sniffed at the offering and began to lap. Suddenly it went into violent spasms, overturning the bowl. Hacking retching brought up blood-flecked mucous and the cat’s eyes widened, this time also in pain and fear. The spine arched then collapsed. With an almost human wail, the cat died.
The general scowled. ‘We talked of a painless draught!’
‘Yes, indeed,’ agreed the doctor. ‘Dear me. I shall need to add more opiate.’
‘It would seem so,’ said the owner of the leather bag drily, removing it and handing it back. ‘More laudanum, or whatever. Have it ready for me tomorrow. No mistakes.
‘In the meantime, your demonstration was only on a cat. What of a human? Do you have a solution that matches the potency of my sachet?’
The doctor gestured at another vessel and his patient turned to the assistant.
‘Out,’ he ordered. ‘And this time find me an urchin, any street Arab.’ The man looked at his master, who shrugged and waved permission.
The barefoot boy was happy to receive the bright coin from the effendi in the green coat. Indeed, al-Ilah was great! Why, in return, all he had to do was to drink from the glass offered.
Then all he had do was die.
As he turned to leave, His Excellency smiled for the first time, a tight grin that resembled the deadly rictus smile of the poisoned boy.
‘What’s the matter?’ he said to the silent doctor and his stricken assistant. ‘Cat got your tongue?’
Chapter Six
Sydney, Australia – Spring, 1828
From this foul drain pure gold flows forth.
– Alexis de Tocqueville, Voyage en Angleterre et en Irlande(1835)
Not all of the 11 000 souls in the huge, open prison that was Sydney town – settlers, soldiers, old lags, new convicts (and sometimes it was hard to decide which of these had spawned the greatest scoundrel) – slept easy in the dark early hours of a Monday in mid-September. Most were in their own beds, or someone else’s, for there was still a hangover from the Sabbath and the flagrant wildness of weekdays was still to come, on the streets at least. So, the last drained and plucked patrons of the many whorehouses had (except for some wealthy all-nighters) arranged their clothing and their alibis, and gone home.
No miscreant remained fitfully overnight in the stocks or pillory near the old graveyard. If they had, they would have been fresh prey for the rats and pigs that scavenged and rooted among exposed graves. And no sleepless wretch awaited hanging that morning at the jail. The dispossessed natives led secret lives.
Some townsfolk were awake, with good reason.
At various convict billets, men who had recently been flogged until their backbones showed white – often for no more than answering back to their ‘betters’ – tossed as their salted wounds began to heal. Patients also moaned in the wards of the Rum Hospital, which could do little to ease their suffering.
The redcoat guard tramped its lonely rounds at the sprawling barracks and a handful of town constables, each armed with truncheon, cutlass and lantern, plodded on their beats through the black streets. If these charleys stumbled on a rogue grog shop, among the hundreds of pot-houses, that was still pouring rum for determined drunkards, for a consideration they would turn a blind eye.
But there were others afoot who could not afford to be seen or heard…
A man who answered to the name of George Farrell, when he was not being addressed by his convict number, squatted on the rubblestrewn floor of a cramped, filthy drain. The stench from the slowly flowing sludge that was seeping around his boots made him gag, and he started as a rat climbed across his ankles.
He went cold at the touch. Rats! The poor in his and other rookeries 16000 miles away in Britain still had race memories of plagues spread by rats. Even here, he knew, they would attack sleeping babies. They liked buttocks and lips.
What a shite heap! he thought savagely. And, indeed, there was more than enough excrement all around him. There should not have been. This drain was meant to be only a stormwater sluice under George Street and into the Tank Stream nearby, not a sewage conduit.
But manure from horses and oxen on the street escaped into it. And many residents in the area had their privy pits leaking into the drain, some by accident, others for deliberate disposal. And now there was the addition of rain, a rare enough event these days. He felt it falling through the grating above. Perhaps the drought was finally breaking.
Suddenly, body waste was not the only thing he wished was not there.
Farrell registered that there was a moving yellow light wavering above him. And now there were voices, two belonging to strangers – there should have been only one voice, if any. He moved to push away a lantern beside him and bit back a curse as a dislodged block of stone fell and smashed the lamp. He froze. But no one on the other side of the grille seemed to have heard; their conversation had covered his clumsiness.
He caught only a few coherent words: ‘Where … going?’. That was a voice he didn’t know. Then came one that was familiar: something about a ‘glass’ and ‘rum’. Ah, this, muffled though it was, belonged to Dingle. He had a right to be there, on guard. And, thank Christ, he sounded quite calm, if oddly slurred.
Then there was a new voice: ‘Honest … pass … ’
After a silence, the voice Farrell had first heard, said, closer and quite clearly, ‘Get on with it, but be sharp!’
The response was unwelcome – Farrell’s upturned face was thoroughly doused with a fresh shower, not of the rain, but rather a deluge – bittersweet and ammonic – of hot human urine. Farrell ducked and held his breath. He dared not move. Still, he looked on the bright side.
The particularly bright side before him in those dark hours was the fact that he was surrounded by the last load of a treasure trove worth more than a man could earn in a thousand years. And some
of it belonged to him. As he stoically received the golden rain, George Farrell wryly noted that the whole business was simply the result of what could be called another, earlier night on the piss!
Chapter Seven
What a devil is the plot good for, but to bring in fine things?
– George Villiers, 2nd Duke of Buckingham, The Rehearsal (1672)
On that occasion, one evening during the previous month of August, the man called Dingle had found himself thirsty but soon emptypocketed in Mr Samuel Thornton’s George Street tavern, the Union, close to the army barracks.
Dingle was a freed lag, one also free of moral restraint. To confuse his creditors, enemies and, naturally, the authorities, he answered to the forenames of either James or, if it served, Charlie. And his surname fluctuated between Tingle and Ingalls, as well as Dingle.
He already had a head and belly full of rum and porter. To keep a clear brain he had at one time switched to drinking shrub, but soon decided that the sugar and fruit in this mixture (he was certain it couldn’t be the spirits within) were combining to befuddle him further.
Now he had no money, and thus no chance of any drink at all – until a scatter of coins showered along the bar, stopping around his empty glass, and a voice behind him said quietly, ‘Have one for the road, then meet me outside in the lot. There are plenty more coins to come.’
By the time Dingle turned, his benefactor was almost out the door, leaving him only with a glimpse of a stocky figure of middle height and the memory of an odd accent.
