by Robin Adair
‘Thus, “clue”, however you spell it, became synonymous with the directions to success. Here we seem to have string involving us with spiked – or stabbed – news!’ He indicated the folded parcel of newspaper. ‘Let us see what is within.’
There were two copies of The Gazette, both of the same issue and dated only a matter of a few days before. Each issue consisted of four pages. Nonetheless, the Patterer knew they were a labour of sweat as well as craftsmanship. Each print run of 500 or so copies could take up to twelve hours at the press of the sort of muscular work he had just now seen performed to produce just one copy of one page.
At the time, he had commiserated with the master printer, who had agreed wholeheartedly. ‘Aye,’ the man had said. ‘The old Albion was heavy, but this new beauty’ – he slapped the gleaming machine with its name ‘Columbian’ picked out in gold paint – ‘is not as cruel. Its counterweighting, that’s what eases the strain, is kinder. And grand to look at, as well.’
All had dutifully admired the beautifully chased cast-metal eagle atop the press, a fierce hunter with wings spread and beak snarling. ‘On a dark night, under the light of only candle and oil, it can be eerie,’ continued the printer, ‘you could swear the wings are beating and those beady eyes will steer that beak right onto you!’ He would have continued, but his guests had politely moved on.
Now, they closely studied the two newspapers that they had found in the parcel on the spike. A casual glance may not have revealed anything amiss, but, because they knew what they were looking for, discrepancies soon came to light.
One page had small ‘monks’ and ‘friars’ and these, when related to the clean comparable page, revealed conjunctions of words – with ‘monks’ linking the word ‘gold’ to the name ‘Sam Terry’ and white ‘friars’ bringing together the words ‘plate’ and ‘Mr William Balcombe’.
Well, well, thought the Patterer. Sam Terry, whose inn had hosted the murder of the castrato, Signor Cesare Bello. And William Balcombe, whose home on St Helena had once hosted who else but Napoleon Bonaparte …Both now linked to the bank vault that had hosted their treasures, treasures that were, strangely, left untouched by the thieves.
And, implicitly, these people and their possessions were connected to the murder of Obadiah Dawks. And to any other recent deaths? Creighton’s?
As they walked away from the newspaper office, Dunne found another twinge to torment him: he felt sure he had just seen, or heard, something, apart from the secrets of the ‘monks’ and ‘friars’, that was vitally important.
But what the hell was it?
Chapter Thirty-six
Does the eagle know what is in the pit?
– William Blake, The Book of Thel (1789)
The thought persisted in the Patterer’s mind that he had missed a significant clue in the Gazette pressroom. But he could not quite pin it down.
As he and Alexander Harris walked back along George Street they passed the main guardhouse and paused at the intersection with Charlotte Place. A lonely bell rang out.
Of course, the church! Dunne grabbed an astonished Harris’s arm and strode up the side street.
The sexton met them as they entered St Phillip’s and walked down the nave to the chancel. ‘Can I help you, gentlemen?’
‘We are just here to, ah, meditate,’ said Dunne, and the man caught a look and sniff of distaste from the visitor. The church was mustier than usual. ‘I’m sorry, sirs,’ said the sexton, ‘we’ve had no sweet beeswax candles, just rank tallow ones – the bees have let us down.’ He left them to ‘meditate’.
What they were really there for, as Harris quickly learnt, was to find the bird of prey that had, in Dr Owens’ outrageous opinion, pecked Obadiah Dawks to death.
The Patterer pointed up to the fierce metal eagle that perched, ready to pounce, on the front of the pulpit’s lectern. ‘I should have looked more closely before,’ he said. They climbed the wooden steps to further examine the bird.
‘It is rather like the one atop the Columbian press. I can see now how it jogged your memory.’ But Alexander Harris voiced his own puzzlement. ‘It’s also, oddly enough, very like the decoration on top of the standards carried by French regiments, just as we carry our banners, the colours.’
‘You’re right,’ said Dunne. ‘And it shouldn’t be here. Churches have their own lectern eagles, phoenixes, whatever. It is a French eagle, as a matter of fact, the first such captured in the Peninsular War, at the Battle of Barrosa, in March 1811. It’s now without its staff, naturally. The “Old Fogs” seized the eagle.’
Harris nodded. As an old soldier, he knew that the Royal Irish Fusiliers, the 87th Regiment, were given that odd nickname because of their fearsome bayonet-charging battle cry: ‘Faugh a ballagh!’ – ‘Clear the way!’
The Patterer could regale him with detail of the action. ‘Sergeant Patrick Masterman and an Ensign Keogh took the prize from the Froggies’ 8th Regiment. They say that the sergeant yelled, “Bejabbers, boys, I have their cuckoo!” Poor Keogh died in the moment of glory.’
‘But how the hell did it get down here?’ insisted Harris.
Dunne shrugged. ‘I gather it was sent to the Prince Regent and then on to Chelsea Barracks. I imagine someone posted here – he may have been in the Irish regiment – souvenired it. Anyway, it’s been doing guard duty here for years. There’s talk of how it must go back, but it has stayed long enough to kill the unfortunate Obadiah Dawks.’
He scraped with a penknife at the sharp metal beak. ‘Observe, there’s still dried blood. The killers must have wrenched it from the lectern and smashed it onto Dawks’s head. Then, to try to make it look like a suicide, they faked – rather clumsily – the “hanging”. And back up here went the real weapon.’
‘I wonder if it was a very deliberate act, using the eagle?’ pondered Harris. ‘I mean, the bank theft and a French plot may well be linked, but who knew that Dawks was going to reveal anything to you? And then, anyway, it was too late to stop him – he’d met and talked to you.
‘It’s possible that he knew something else, a new secret. That’s what they had to muzzle. And there’s another thing: it wasn’t random, that bird; it was a ritual killing.
‘To a mad Bonapartist, what better way to punish an enemy than by arrogantly and openly destroying him with the most potent symbol of Napoleonic power, the eagle?’
Dunne considered his friend’s idea. What could Dawks have learnt after they had parted in the pub? And, very much to the point, when and how could he have learnt it?
His musing was interrupted by the panting arrival of a redcoat, who politely but firmly ordered him to repair with all speed to Government House, where His Excellency impatiently awaited him. The soldier’s face was ruddied with rum. No doubt he had been forced to search more than one tavern before sheer chance – divine intervention? – had brought him to his quarry at the church.
Governor Ralph Darling, as grave as a headstone, was waiting in his study with another man. The Patterer recognised him as Major Thomas Mitchell, who had succeeded the late Mr Oxley as Surveyor-General. His other claim to fame was to have had a cockatoo named after him, decidedly more dignified than the bird’s other names, chockalott and wee juggler.
Dunne thought they made an interesting pair; successful men who were self-made soldiers and powerful officials. Darling, he knew, had made the incredible climb to Lieutenant-General after beginning as a private soldier, one of Wellington’s ‘scum of the earth’. Mitchell, too, had served as a private in Spain with the 95th Regiment of the Rifle Brigade, the famed ‘Greenjackets’. He might well have been at Barrosa, when the French eagle was captured. But Mitchell had trodden a different path from Darling. He had been a ‘gentleman volunteer’, which meant that, although in the field he did the duty and received the pay of a common private, any miserable ‘Johnny Raw’, off the field he was treated as a gentleman. This was the entry card into the officer caste for a young man of breeding who could not afford his first co
mmission.
Darling looked intently at the Patterer as he barked, ‘What do you know about gold, here in the colony?’
Dunne shrugged. ‘Nothing.’
‘Tell him the background then, Mitchell.’
The surveyor steepled his fingers. ‘Mmm, where should I begin?
‘In 1705, an English gentleman named John Harris in a book, The Complete Collection of Voyages, urged settlement of Van Diemen’s Land, which, of course, the Dutch had found sixty years before.’
‘Yes, yes, man,’ said the Governor. ‘Forget the history lesson!’
Mitchell nodded. ‘Very well. Mr Harris proposed that gold and silver might be found in the Great South Land because it shared the same latitudes – and thus could share the same wild wealth – as Peru, Madagascar and Chile.
‘The dream disappeared, or lay dormant, until the appearance of a report that a convict had found gold, somewhere, in the New South Wales settlement. That was on 20 April 1788. It seems the report was judged to be false.
‘It took almost a quarter of a century, until 1814, for the next “discovery”. Convicts cutting a road that crossed the Blue Mountains to Bathurst, said they had found “considerable” gold. Records show they were “compelled to keep silent by menaces and flogging”.’ Dunne raised his eyebrows but said nothing.
‘Closer to our time, in ’23, another convict claimed to have found a large nugget, again near Bathurst. The authorities, however, believed he had melted down a stolen watch. He received no reward, apart from 150 lashes!
‘A most interesting report – with better provenance – had come to us the same year, from the same area. An assistant surveyor, James McBrien, laying his measuring chain, reported he had found and mapped gold on the Fish River, east of Bathurst – that town again.’ He stopped. ‘Any questions?’
‘Two,’ replied the Patterer. ‘Why were the convicts so ignored, even brutally silenced? And what has happened to McBrien’s claim?’
The Governor answered. ‘The colony dare not have a gold rush, certainly not yet – the settlers, the convicts, even the soldiers could break down our society in a mad scramble. The wise advice to anyone finding it would be: “Put it away, or we shall all have our throats cut!” ’
‘We thought the matter was under control,’ interposed Major Mitchell. ‘Mr McBrien is no longer with us and his field book with its map was under lock and key.’
The Patterer trapped the change in tense: ‘The book was under lock and key?’
Mitchell nodded. ‘Yes, in an old campaign box of mine. It was in that damn bank vault for safekeeping. It is not any more.’
Dunne whistled. ‘Who knew it was there?’
Mitchell looked miserable. ‘I don’t know, I just don’t know. I suppose I may have discussed it with colleagues.’
‘And I don’t suppose there’s another copy, or anyone remembers details of what was in the book?’
Mitchell shook his head.
The Major left, but Ralph Darling held the Patterer back. ‘Perhaps you are wondering why Captain Rossi is not here?’
Dunne nodded.
‘He’s been informed of the gold map,’ Darling said, ‘but I wanted to tell you why the Captain has been acting shiftily and out of sorts lately.’ He then proceeded to unburden himself of Rossi’s burden.
Chapter Thirty-seven
Like Dead-Sea fruits, that tempt the eye,
But turn to ashes on the lips!
– Thomas Moore, ‘The Fire-Worshippers’, Lalla Rookh (1817)
‘Did you do as I told you?’
The girl nodded. As this stranger directed, she had approached the well-dressed man pointed out to her in the Market Square, and had offered the small basket of fruit. The gift was well received after she had repeated her instructions: to say that it was a gift ‘from the Patterer’. She knew the donor was not Nicodemus Dunne, but, well, for a shilling, why should she care what games men got up to?
Not this game now, though. In the shadows of a stall the stranger lifted her skirt and shift and savagely clawed her thigh. She gasped and felt herself colour and at first did nothing but squirm. At least the ugly bastard did not want to kiss her. He quickly tired of his tormenting and only when he paid her for her errand did she react. She slapped his face, hard, and ran off and melted into the ebb and flow of shoppers.
He made no effort to pursue her. He knew she was some stallholder’s servant, and had made sure she was a waif, out of the Female Orphan School, not the daughter, sister, or wife of anyone who mattered. She had no one to tell, whatever happened.
Later, if he deigned to, he would find her again and get his revenge for the slights of the slap and the loathing look in her eyes. She had felt good and she would feel even better, with a broken nose or teeth, when he pleasured himself properly upon her.
Josiah Bagley, late of the 47th Regiment of Foot, now, courtesy of robbing a dead body, a gentleman of reasonable means and leisure, gratefully accepted the gift of fruit from the girl.
It was uncommonly civil of Nicodemus Dunne to reward him in this manner for his recital of the events that had occurred all those years earlier on St Helena. He only wished he had been able to help him out further by remembering what had been so interesting at the time about that blasted Shakespearean quote he had overheard on the dock as the Balcombe entourage departed. The answer stirred fitfully in the recesses of his mind. Some other sense stirred more actively.
Bagley was a greedy man. As a schoolteacher he had had an insatiable, almost fatal, appetite for small boys; in the army to which he was banished he had done more than his fair share of scavenging on bloodied battlefields – an ingrained habit that had paid off recently at Cockle Bay.
He also was greedy for food – especially fruit. How had Dunne known that? Oh, yes, of course, he must have mentioned it when they were drinking in that Pitt Street pub, the one where he had met the Patterer in answer to that notice.
The colony, despite its youth and general aridity, was surprisingly kind to European savourers of fruit. Good apples packed in straw made the long sea trip to Sydney from Van Diemen’s Land, but there was a seasonal local abundance of peaches, and grapes came from the Australian Agricultural Company at Port Stephens, up the coast past the Coal River, and were even grown at vineries in the thirty-eight acres of the Government Botanic Gardens, near Sydney Cove.
A summer favourite for many was the green-hided, crimson fleshed watermelon. Extreme devotees would first cut a hole in the skin, gouge a well in the pulp and pour in sherry, perhaps madeira, and steep before feasting.
A surprise to visitors was the ready availability of strawberries, which were perhaps the oldest introduced fruit. Pioneer Governor Arthur Phillip had brought seedlings with his First Fleet forty years earlier and they had thrived.
And now, for Bagley, a rare treat. Oranges. So rare, indeed, that he had never tasted one. Those in the gift basket were smaller than he imagined they would be – they looked rather like golden cricket balls, even smaller perhaps.
Where had they come from? He could only suppose that some rich man – Mr Macarthur at Parramatta, Sir John Jamison at Emu Plains, or Captain Piper way out at Bathurst – could perhaps grow them in a conservatory as some did in Britain. How generous of Dunne.
He looked around. This would be his pleasure, alone. He could not have someone he knew pass by, observe, and desire to share in his juicy good fortune.
He turned into an ill-lit empty market trading stall. He sniffed: ah, memories of his days as a poor man living on the streets. With his penknife he cut out a wedge of the fruit. The flesh was drier than he had expected and the pips were quite large and hard. He took a generous mouthful. There was a musty smell and taste, not particularly unpleasant, but enough to make him wonder what all the fuss was about. As was his fashion, he gorged on the whole fruit, cracking the seeds with his teeth and swallowing the debris.
One fruit was enough to tell him he did not much like oranges, but his greed overwhelme
d his disappointment.
A second gobbled fruit was then enough to tell him, if he could have understood, that he was dying, quickly and painfully. All his bodily functions began to spasm, then freeze. His brain’s instructions to move, speak, see, smell, breathe, were all progressively ignored. Even that usually loyal corporeal servant, the belly, trained to reject unwelcome liquids and solids, could not make him vomit in time, and sufficiently, to save him.
Josiah Bagley, oddly, was back where his good fortune had started not all that long before – here on the refuse-strewn floor of a market stall.
Even his last received smell was a cruel jest of fate. It was the tang of the oranges in the basket near his head. And the old, familiar odour he had once wakened to: the reek of chicken shit.
‘How the hell can an orange kill you?’ asked the Patterer, picking up the basket with its remaining fruit orbs.
‘Wash your hands after playing with them,’ said Dr Owens absently, studying the body on the ground. ‘And don’t even dream of eating one.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because they’re not oranges, Dunne, although I admit one could be fooled into believing so. As was our poor friend here. He actually ate nux vomica, a citrus-like fruit from a tree of much the same name, Strychnos nux-vomica, common in the Spice Islands and thereabouts.
‘He died of profound strychninism, an overdose of, obviously, the poison strychnine. This can be extracted from the seed, or nut – hence nux – of the fruit. We take vomica from vomere, vomit. So, it is – in a nutshell, ha! – the “vomiting nut tree”. Its poison acts in a similar fashion to a nightshade.’
‘If it’s called the “vomiting” whatever, why didn’t he get rid of what ailed him?’
‘Yes, vomiting is a result of ingestion, but it’s not enough of an emetic to purge all its own poison. It soon shuts down what we are beginning to call the nervous system, destroying all functions, the heart and respiration. Medicine has moved on from simply regarding the machina carnis, the “body machine”. We consider now the nerves and the brain. The anatomist Thomas Willis gave us the new word “neurologie”.’
