by Robin Adair
‘Dingle also told us of his first meeting with a “Frenchman”; he said that he sounded something like me.’ Rossi said the last words with a tight smile. ‘That’s when he received his instructions. By the by, the mystery man wrote left-handed.’
‘Why would this Dingle tell you all this,’ asked Thomas Owens, ‘when to do so seems most likely to put a rope around his neck?’
‘We, ah, persuaded him,’ the Police Chief replied. ‘He already stood accused by William Blackstone, Sudden Solomon, the blacksmith turncoat, and that could already take him to the gallows. I told him I would not add to his woes by repeating any new statement he might make to me.’
The Governor was puzzled and put out. ‘You treated with a criminal, Captain?’
Rossi raised a calming palm. ‘His further evidence was worth it, if it pointed to other, more important crimes.’
The doctor seemed unconvinced. ‘But I still don’t understand. Why should he tell you anything if he knew you wouldn’t use it against him? What was his motive?’
The Captain smiled. ‘Do you recall, sir, that I said I persuaded him? I decided to adopt – adapt, rather – the ancient Chinese adage “Kill the chicken to scare the monkey”. Which means, of course, inflict punishment on the weaker opponent to frighten the stronger. For this exercise, I would let a weak “chicken” from whom I wanted something see what would happen to him if he did not please me. Yes, Dingle would observe at first hand what dreadful things happened to a “strong monkey”.
‘Well, he let the cat out of the bag – because I let the cat out of the bag.’
And he proceeded to explain his strange remarks.
Captain Rossi had taken the then-silent James Dingle from the gaol in George Street near the Cove. Backed by an escort of four charleys, he steered the suspect to the flogging triangle at the Lumber Yard, the vast convict-manned factory close to the army barracks south along the main street.
A prisoner was already lashed to the eight-feet-tall iron tripod of torture. An official asked the young man, whose name was Paddy Galvin, where Irish troublemakers had hidden pikes and other weapons. Galvin replied that he would not say, even if he did know, which he didn’t.
On the questioner’s orders, an age-old ritual unfolded. The scourger took the ‘cat’, the wicked wood-handled whip with nine tails ending in iron-hard knots, out of its traditional red baize bag. For hundreds of years or more, countless men – and women – in the British Army, Navy and prisons had felt the cat’s familiar claws.
They gave Galvin 300 lashes: 100 on his shoulders, another ‘canary’ on his back and the balance on his calves. He opened his mouth only once during his punishment, to say, ‘You may hang me if you like, but you shall have no music out of my mouth to make others dance upon nothing.’
James Dingle was not as courageous as Paddy Galvin. He decided he would not, could not, face such interrogation. That’s why and when he let the cat out of the bag – and told Rossi about his meeting with the mysterious Frenchman in Thornton’s Paddock.
The Captain continued with the bank robber’s disclosures: ‘There is a strange connection in everything James Dingle told me and something Dr Owens has said and shown us today. Dingle claimed that he was to hand over specified parts of the loot to a delegate of the “Frenchman”, an agent who would have the matching half of the button given to the thief. This is it …’
Rossi dug into a pocket and produced a metal fragment. ‘Dingle thought it was part of an image of a fly,’ he said. ‘Of course, it is a bee and imitates the seal on the poison sachet now held by our good doctor – and perhaps once by Napoleon Bonaparte.’
Ralph Darling sat for some moments deep in thought, then rose to dismiss his visitors. ‘Keep all this to yourselves, gentlemen,’ he directed, ‘unless there is urgent necessity to seek additional help. Captain, devote your energies to the bank and the possibility of this new threat. It seems Dunne knows all anyway, so he might as well assist with informal inquiries. Report to me when you must. Good day.’
The momentous meeting was over.
No one spoke as Rossi drove them back, slowly this time, to the hospital. After Thomas Owens had stepped down from the carriage and made his farewells, Nicodemus Dunne moved to follow him.
‘Where are you going?’ asked their driver.
‘To think deeply, Captain.’ He paused then continued. ‘Why did you not trust me? Take me into your confidence?’
Rossi seemed at a loss. ‘I’m sorry. What can I say? I have been facing a worrying time.’
Dunne looked up at him coldly. ‘Well, I can say something.’ He started to move away.
‘What’s that?’
‘I resign!’
The Police Chief snorted. ‘You can’t resign! You don’t work for me!’
‘Very well.’ The Patterer turned back. ‘I’ll give you three words.’
‘What are they?’
This time Dunne kept walking, back to the heart of the town, as he threw over his shoulder, ‘Go to hell!’
Chapter Seventeen
If a man will begin with certainties,
he shall end in doubts;
but if he will be content to begin with doubts,
he shall end with certainties.
– Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning (1605)
Who gave a rat’s arse if bloody Bonaparte was alive in Sydney town and wanted to raise a riot?
Nicodemus Dunne conceded that he did care, and not just for any patriotic reason. He’d wanted excitement: this should be the case to end all cases. Nevertheless, he would have to indulge his injured pride a little longer.
In truth, the Patterer was angry with himself for being angry with Captain Rossi. He laughed wryly; that was an Irishism almost worthy of the fey words of wisdom frequently offered by another good friend, the convict expiree Brian O’Bannion. No, he knew he would eventually make his peace with the Police Chief.
He was, however, sorely wounded by the Captain’s strange behaviour. Why had his investigation of the bank robbery gone off on such a strange tangent? If John Creighton hadn’t been killed, where would that new pathway have led? And why would Rossi have decided – until now, driven as he was by unfolding events – to keep secret James Dingle’s forced admissions about the ‘French’ mastermind? What game was he playing? Well, Dunne decided, whatever it is, I will not play it. For a time, I’ll go back to mine, he thought.
As he headed to the various newspaper offices to replenish his stock-in-trade, he determined he would give all parties at least a day to cool down.
So he first visited The Gazette, where he took care not to startle the owner, a disturbed young man named Robert Howe, who was still nervously debilitated after an angry reader, Dr William Redfern, horsewhipped him in the street over some perceived slight. Redfern was a man of conviction. After defending his men in a Royal Navy mutiny, he had narrowly escaped being hanged from the yardarm. Transportation to Botany Bay had launched him into a new and successful – if sometimes violent – life.
The Gazette editor, Ralph Mansfield, absent-mindedly blessed Dunne; as well as being a gentleman of the press, the editor was a gentleman of the cloth, a retired missionary. He had another earthly interest: he saw coal gas as the fuel of the future.
Visiting The Gleaner, the Patterer was dismayed to see that its editor, the Reverend Laurence Hynes Halloran, had so few advertisements that he could barely fill two pages. And much of the editorial content was made up of laments by Halloran on his own personal and financial troubles.
The Monitor was healthy, but its publisher, Edward Smith Hall, was away from his desk – he was busy in court, defending a charge of defamation against a leading churchman.
At The Australian, Dunne stood aside to allow its co-owner, the turbulent lawyer and ambitious politician William Charles Wentworth, and his consort, Sarah Cox, to leave. Wentworth scowled when he saw the visitor, and his lady looked away: the Patterer was firmly out of favour with the couple since havi
ng stumbled upon a family secret. To compound the offence, he had publicly aired their strange story – how a parrot had pointed him to the pair’s love affair, one pregnant, literally, with drama.
He well remembered the hot confrontation as Sarah Cox’s mother, then his landlady, had angrily thrown him out into the street. It had been a sad scene, but he thought he had handled it well; with dignity, even panache.
As he passed by Sarah, he had looked intently into her beautiful eyes. What was it he had said that made her blush?
Oh, yes: ‘We’ll always have parrots.’
Charged afresh with material to inform and entertain anyone who would stop him in the street and pay to listen, Dunne renewed himself with a deep draught of ale at the Brown Bear pot-house on George Street (it reminded him sentimentally of the public house of the same name in Bow Street, the favoured watering hole of his beloved Runners, although there he would have drunk gin in hot water). Then he set to work.
His first human contact produced no result, for he simply happened upon a fellow pedlar, a chiropodist who was also wandering the streets, carrying a small stool and displaying his tools of trade: a scalpel and scissors. He had a flourishing business, particularly as the formless, ill-fitting ‘straights’ worn by many poorer citizens could cause constant foot problems. Dunne himself frequently needed to heed the itinerant chiropodist’s hoarse, shouted pitch: ‘Corns to pick, nails too thick?’
A journalistic wit at The Gazette had cleverly linked three news items. When the Patterer had found a worthwhile audience he gave them the first of these, which concerned the progress of Mr John Busby’s tunnel to bring water to the town from the Lachlan Swamps two miles east. His convict navigators, or navvies, some of whom had honed their skills digging English canals, had been working for a year, with the prospect of another nine to go. In the meantime, with the Tank Stream hopelessly fouled, townsfolk would have to continue to buy carted water at sixpence a bucket.
With the second report, Dunne urged his listeners to abandon the expensive postal charges of a certain coach line in favour of the Gazette’s rival delivery – which typically cost four pence for a letter to Parramatta sixteen miles west.
The third recounted that:
A curious model of a tunnel through which mailbags might be projected is now exhibiting in Glasgow. According to a calculation, twelve minutes would be sufficient to transmit the letter bags from London to Portsmouth, a distance of seventy miles.
Now, the Patterer produced the journalist’s deft jingle:
The coaching men might think it droll,
Should Mr Busby bore a hole,
And The Gazette send English mails,
Right through the Earth from New South Wales!
To another group Dunne announced that Messrs Bones & Tyndall, of Pitt Street, had colonial porter at eight shillings per dozen bottles, or six shillings if the patron brought empty bottles.
And Mr Edward Hunt, of George Street, would ‘pay thirty shillings reward for the apprehension of Joseph Smith, his runaway apprentice, a native lad six feet high’.
During all this time, the Patterer nursed high hopes for one particular story, which, however, required a certain, rather specialised audience. It was of a medical nature and now he saw he could try to make his first sale to a pedestrian pacing towards him.
‘Ah, my dear Doctor!’ he cried, hailing Peter Cunningham, a ship’s surgeon who had regularly plied the convict route from Britain. ‘Listen to this intelligence from London: An interesting operation was performed on Hoo Loo, a Chinese, at Guy’s Hospital …’
‘I can read for myself, you know, Dunne,’ interrupted Cunningham, more amused than irritated.
‘But,’ replied the Patterer, ‘you will pay me sixpence – less than the price of the paper – hopefully even a shilling, only if I read it to you!’
The doctor laughed heartily and dug around in the fob pocket of his brocade vest for a coin, and indeed it emerged as a shilling. ‘Oh, very well.’
Nicodemus Dunne continued where he had left off: ‘The operator was Mr Aston Key and he was assisted by Sir A. Cooper, Dr Addison and Mr Callaway, Mr B. Cooper and other eminent men.
‘About sixteen ounces of venous blood was lost in the dissection, but the patient appeared to suffer greatly from the loss of that quantity, which would not have affected a European. Brandy was frequently administered, but failed to rally the action of the heart. Eight ounces of blood, kindly given from the arm of a gentleman present, were transfused into the dying man’s veins, but all proved unavailing, and the poor fellow in a short time expired.
‘The operation had excited surpassing interest, and crowds of professional gentlemen and others were unable to obtain admission to witness it, the theatre being full to overflowing.’
Peter Cunningham’s eyes were bright with interest. He nodded approvingly. ‘Perhaps it will be a commonplace one day, but blood is something we know damn’ all about. I don’t see that Chinese blood cannot safely mingle with European; it may just be that some, from anyone, may not be compatible.
‘We really don’t understand much more than they did 200 years ago – almost to the year, by the by – when William Harvey revealed the magic of the concept of blood circulating in our bodies. I used the word “magic” just now deliberately, because people then (and there are still many today) were superstitious about toying with blood and saw it as a dangerous thing to do.
‘That pioneer, Harvey, had to experiment in secret – and on animals rather than humans – for fear of being accused of sorcery.’
‘How is it done, transfusing?’ asked the Patterer.
‘I don’t know all that much about it,’ admitted the doctor. ‘I have heard of the blood being collected in a bladder then pumped by squeezing through a hollowed goose quill and into a cannula, so to the patient’s veins.
‘A French physician named Denis seems the first to have transfused a human, in the late 1600s. He gave twelve ounces of lamb’s blood each to three patients and only one died. Perhaps it was all chance, not design, but whatever the truth, interest since has been slight.’
Peter Cunningham seemed satisfied with the exchange his shilling had procured, for he smiled and clapped Dunne on the shoulder before continuing on his way.
Similarly pleased, the news-hawker decided he should certainly tell the bloody story to Thomas Owens – but … As the name came into his mind, a thought that had been nothing but a gentle eddy lapping at the recesses of his brain suddenly built up power and broke like a foaming wave on the beach at Boondi.
Was Owens, any more than Captain Rossi, to be trusted completely? For, considering the fact that Dunne and the doctor had never been separated from the instant of the discovery of the mysterious pouch in the corpse’s clenched fist until Rossi picked them up, how in heaven’s name could Owens have tested the contents and decreed them lethal? Yet the doctor was adamant about this, and that it was Bonaparte’s bag. How could he be so sure? Anyway, why had he not reacted to the mention of ‘a certain William Balcombe’ with recognition – even though the Patterer knew the name well?
For that matter, was Owens making too much of the poisons he had identified as having been prescribed for the prisoner on St Helena? That last doubt had been dangled before Dunne (although he had not remarked on it at the time) during an earlier news-reading that day.
This had been to a promising concentration of women near the stone column in Macquarie Place that marked the point of reference for all distances in the colony. The source of entertainment and instruction for these ladies was a description of a druggist shop’s most recently landed stock from London and Paris. It had praised Price & Gosnell’s renowned Essence of Bergamot, Macassar and Russian oils, and violet-scented hair powder.
Now Dunne remembered an unusual thing. On the long list of apothecary’s medicinal stock there had certainly been the Peruvian Bark (for the sweating sickness) and other names that he did not understand: what in God’s name were Lunar Caustic
(an aid for women’s troubles?), Lenitive Electuary, Hellebore Powder or Japan Earth? Most importantly, though, he could recall mentions of opium in various forms – laudanum and poppyheads – all, he knew, widely used.
And, intriguingly, while there was no orgeat, there were emetic tartar and calomel. If they were so damned poisonous, why wasn’t half the town dead or dying?
Both Captain Rossi and Thomas Owens were his friends. Which of them was mistaken, or confused? Or lying?
As the Patterer was about to turn into Bridge Street and make for the main road that would take him to the busy Cove and more business, his renewed daydreaming about death and deceit was interrupted by a clear, familiar voice coming from around the corner:
O! What will become of me,
O! What shall I do?
Nobody coming to marry me,
Nobody coming to woo!…
‘Well, Miss Susannah Hathaway,’ murmured Nicodemus Dunne, ‘I’ll soon remedy that. Here’s a body coming to woo!’
Chapter Eighteen
If the heart of a man is deprest with cares,
The mist is dispelled when a woman appears.
– John Gay, The Beggar’s Opera (1728)
‘The gay provocation of her brief theatre costume was replaced by a more discreet walking-out dress.’
Why, it is surely the tale of Beauty and the Beast come suddenly to life, decided Nicodemus Dunne as he confronted Miss Susannah Hathaway near the bridge over the Tank Stream. And there could be no debate over who played which part.
Not that he was an ugly man. No, indeed; he had fluttered many a heart. But the clothes he was wearing now – well, suffice it to say that his garb should not serve for a social meeting with a young lady.
