by Robin Adair
‘Where the hell did he get it?’ asked Dunne. ‘The fruit?’
‘God knows, but pretty well any apothecary here has access to the poison – in its end form as colourless crystals. Some small doses, very small, are often offered to tease flagging appetites.
‘But as actual fruit?’ Owens shrugged and his mind found a path similar to the one the late Mr Bagley had followed: ‘I can only imagine it was grown here, in a greenhouse – I believe Mr Macarthur has such an orangerie.’
Interesting, thought the Patterer. As was the easy manner in which Dr Owens again lapsed into French.
Chapter Thirty-eight
…he who can interpret what has been seen
is a greater prophet than he who has simply seen it.
– St Augustine of Hippo (354–430 AD), De Genesi ad Litteram
John Macarthur … wild colonial boy.
Jesus! thought the Patterer, another one dead. Poor, bloody Bagley – another stolen existence, another person who, alive, he had seen, talked to, pressed for knowledge. Not the soldier, shot and shovelled into Dawes’ Point, of course, not the robber called Creighton. But the castrato, Dawks, Bagley … would they be dead now if he had not been noticed with them, pursuing, in the first case innocently, whatever dangerous secrets they held?
And what had he learnt from them that was so monumentally revealing that a bank robber or a revolutionary – both, or were they one and the same? – felt the need to silence them?
Bello had never said who had alarmed him at the theatre. Dawks had thrown no clear light on the case, and on the vault invasion only perhaps implication. Bagley couldn’t put a finger on whatever was strange about a remark that had teased him on St Helena. And had teased him for years later.
But why hadn’t Dunne, too, already been assassinated? Just to be on the safe side, perhaps. Yes, it could only be because his progress on the case – cases – had to be monitored. Maybe, when he also was judged to know too much, his turn at the murderer’s hand would come.
In the meantime, the killer somehow knew that Dunne was still in the dark. The Patterer had an uncomfortable thought: he was being watched, and reported on – by a traitor in his tribe.
The jingle of harness, the creak of wood and leather and the squirm of iron wheels in the deep dust of the roadway alerted the Patterer to a coach coming fast behind him.
The liveried driver arrogantly made no room for the pedestrian. If Dunne had not heard the coach and moved smartly, he would have been run down.
Dunne recognised the equipage and its passenger and shook his head. No wonder! The face looking out aloofly at him was that of Captain John Macarthur, the immensely wealthy pastoralist.
He was known as a hard man – erratic, to say the least. He would not give a fig for someone like Dunne. He fought with all governors – he had been instrumental in bringing down William Bligh by revolt – and he was physically, chaotically violent. On his voyage to Sydney in 1789, he had fought two duels with ship’s captains. In Cape Town he had first suffered the illness that later came back to haunt him, rheumatic fever.
In 1801 he had insulted the honour of his commanding officer’s wife and fought a duel over the matter. He wounded the offended man, William Paterson, but escaped censure even though duelling was already illegal.
If he had a weakness, it was his obsessive, totally incorrect, suspicion, not hidden from anyone in the colony, that his wife, Elizabeth, had been unfaithful.
The Patterer didn’t react angrily to the near miss. Discretion was the better part of valour when dealing with Captain Macarthur. He was not a man to cross.
Dunne’s feet moved in sympathy with his peripatetic thoughts. He now found himself on the shoreline of Sydney Cove. He took in the scene. Mudflats – once, not all that many years ago, sparkling golden strands – edged out to moored ships, large and small. Yet, to Dunne’s eye, something was different.
Yes, that was it: there were fewer vessels, and those that were there had been towed or warped as far as they could be from a lone ship, which, it seemed, they were avoiding like, well, like the plague.
And why not? The lonely three-masted one-decker, with none of the usual activity on board, flew the dreaded yellow pennant – it was a plague ship. It was the one in quarantine that the Patterer had read and talked about – the Three Bees. God, he thought, I’m surrounded by those insects.
His attention wandered. If there was to be a French-led uprising, a core of professional fighters would be needed to stiffen the ranks of amateur rebellious civilians and convicts.
They would be French soldiers, of course. But how would they arrive, undetected until it was too late?
The colony had lived in fear of a Paris-inspired invasion on and off since its foundation. Settlers at that time had no illusions about what an invader might do. Barely six years before, French sailors and soldiers had pounded and stormed the English trading post at Fort Prince of Wales, on Hudson’s Bay, and burnt it to the ground. The colony’s home-grown uprising by Irish convicts in 1804 had been put down, but left lingering fears.
The threat was sometimes met with bravado, as in the song popular in pubs patronised by loyalists:
Should France, in her fondness for places abroad,
E’er honour our coast with a visit,
Before on the soil many moments they’ve trod,
They’ll find our politeness exquisite.
With a Marseillais dirge, or a Camarguenne dance,
To the music of musketry let them advance.
But dreadful the measure will be to their ears,
Struck up by the phalanx of firm volunteers.
There was a gloomier side. Even long after the Napoleonic Wars had ended, mothers with a race-memory still continued to frighten their children with the lurid lullaby:
Baby, baby, naughty baby,
Hush, you squalling thing, I say;
Hush your squalling, or it may be
Bonaparte may pass this way.
Baby, baby, he will hear you
As he passes by the house,
And he, limb from limb, will tear you
Just as pussy tears a mouse!
One day when the Patterer, the Pieman and Dr Owens had stolen some hours for an excursion, they had watched the ocean waves crash down on the white sands of Boondi, to the east of the town. They were not there to swim; the waters were too wild. Thomas Owens told them a story of how a spy, François Péron, had sailed, in the guise of naturalist, with the expedition to Sydney led by Nicolas Baudin in 1802.
‘He went away,’ said the doctor, ‘with a plan to invade and seize the colony. I say that now, because this beach is where the troops would have landed.’
The anecdote had been of passing interest at the time of telling. But now? Dunne wondered how the doctor knew the inner workings of the French secret service.
Anyway, Péron’s plan, although ambitious, had a key weakness. It was an attack on one front only. With warning and luck, it might never have left the beach to march inland.
Far better to have a two-, even three-pronged assault that could sting from, say, three widely spaced yet coordinated sources.
Suddenly, the Patterer saw the answer. It had been staring him in the face; had even revealed itself in detail. He must act – now.
First, he paid a native fisherman to casually study and report back to him on activity at the small island, east of the Cove, that had been the colony’s first garden.
Meanwhile, he hurried to the Government Commissariat, then to the files of the Naval Office, and on to the dusty tomes in the Colonial Secretary’s building.
Missions accomplished, he picked up Captain Rossi and the passing Flying Pieman, to act as witnesses and offer moral support, and they bullied their way into Government House with a tantalising, terrifying proposition: How do you land a corps of trained, hard-bitten revolutionaries here? Oh, they already are here!
Chapter Thirty-nine
Often the fear of one evil le
ads us into a worse.
– Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux, L’Art Poétique (1674)
A fifth-rater frigate (top) compared with a first-rater (bottom), such as Nelson’s Victory.
‘Think about it,’ urged Nicodemus Dunne. ‘Little has been hidden from our sight. The convict transport Three Bees sailed in through the Heads flying a yellow plague pennant. We didn’t board her – who dared, or cared? – and simply directed the captain to unload half his 210 convicts at the beach just inside the North Head and the other half on Garden Island.
‘The crew – and God knows, we feared it might be literally a skeleton crew – brought the ship right into the Cove. Of course, we’d wanted it further away, but were presented with an accomplished fact. So, from a safe distance, we’ve fed and watered and physicked them all – albeit with no actual oversight – and waited for the sickness to abate.
‘Anything, just so long as it doesn’t touch us. It’s not all that out of the ordinary – a wave of fever ships in 1814 was similar and there have been others. One thing, however, should have stirred our suspicions: there would appear to have been no deaths – not in the quarantine areas and not on the ship. People can be seen moving around normally at all three locations.
‘They’re not sick or convalescing seamen and convicts. They’re French sailors and soldiers, and now most of them are ashore without having had to fire a shot.
‘The Three Bees is, by its size and shape, a disguised frigate. No doubt she has thirty or so cannons behind concealed gunports – and perfectly fit gunners to man them. Let 200, or more, such men loose, armed, and they could be joined by hundreds – perhaps thousands – of our real convicts, and not just the Irish. And they believe that their hero, the Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte, is here to lead them. We must act quickly, for I believe they know that we suspect – that may make them jump sooner.’
The silence that fell was broken at last by the Governor. ‘Do you have any hard proof that this is not the Three Bees, not a real convict transport?’
‘Well,’ said the Patterer, ‘as well as fish sold to the ship by natives in canoes, we provide the bulk of food and water. And one fact, from our Government Stores and Commissariat, is revealing: afloat or ashore no one has requested rum or beer. Only wine. English sailors? Prisoners? I think not! And I sent a native to spy on the “sick” at Garden Island. They are fit and drill “like white redcoats”.
‘That is not all,’ added Dunne. ‘I have been to the Naval Office and the Colonial Secretary’s files.
‘I found record of a convict transport that had sunk and never been raised. It was the real Three Bees. Fourteen years ago.’
‘What can we do?’ Captain Rossi put the only possible question.
Darling was grim: ‘Neutralise the soldiers on shore and destroy the ship! We can’t wait for a rare Royal Navy warship to sail in and bottle her up. Terrible damage could still be inflicted on the town.
‘So, we can readily cut out the men on land, but any normal attack in the Cove would bring down destructive retaliation. We, too, must use stealth – anyway, even if we wanted to, our land artillery in place can’t hit them.’
William King was puzzled. ‘Why not?’
‘You’ll see, soon enough,’ Dunne cut in. ‘However, I have an idea – or two. But straightaway we need a base near the floating Froggies.’ He looked to the Governor.
Darling nodded: ‘So, let us all meet – in three hours, shall we say? – at Macquarie’s Fort?’
They agreed. The Pieman would call up two helpers and the Patterer would seek out Dr Thomas Owens.
Dunne made detours on the way to pick up the doctor.
A most important trip was to the Carters Barracks at the southern edge of the town, near the tollgate that marked the beginning of the sixteen-mile-long road to Parramatta. He had an unhappy memory of his last visit to these barracks, for there stood the two cruel punishment treadmills, upon one of which he had served a body-breaking sentence.
Handlers of horses and oxen lived at the Carters Barracks – as did the convicts who were often used as draught ‘animals’ yoked to drays.
The barracks also housed wayward boys, who were supposedly there to get an education. The Patterer believed one of the best lessons they could pick up would be how to avoid the predatory advances, some subtle, most not, of men starved of women.
‘What do you want us to do, mister?’ said one of the eight strong lads he had selected after dealing with a suspicious superintendent.
‘Oh, I simply want you to come with me, stay up all night and play a game!’ As they walked, he quizzed them on a particular pastime.
‘No funny business, mind,’ warned the boy who had instinctively assumed leadership of his band.
‘I can promise you it’s a very serious business – and one worth a few shillings each.’
The leader, not quite satisfied, asked, ‘Do you speak Spanish?’ Dunne laughed. He knew that was flash talk for ‘Have you’ or ‘Can you make it’ a Spanish dollar, or anything else that added up to five shillings.
‘Five shillings each it is.’
The boys and their new employer spat on their hands and shook to seal the deal.
The Patterer took them to meet Miss Hathaway and next moved the oddly assorted company, first to Mrs Rickard’s Fashionable Repository, where the singer bought a large quantity of light but strong fabric, then on to a carpenter’s shop in Cumberland Street. Dunne was uncomfortable there: his previous business had been the purchase of a coffin in which to bury a dear friend.
Now, he gave full and final instructions to his crew and turned to leave them. His parting words to Miss Hathaway were to ‘pray for a morning westerly wind’, to which he added, ‘Good luck with the Battle of Bunker’s Hill!’
Finding Billy Blue, the ageless West Indian ferryman, at the Cove, the Patterer arranged for the ‘Old Commodore’ (as he was known, for his tall stories of life in the Royal Navy and for his dress, a dusty old officer’s uniform and a battered top hat) to have a sturdy but light skiff waiting around the side of Macquarie’s Fort, out of sight of anyone on the Cove, two hours before dawn the next day.
Nearby, he found another old friend, this one begging on the street – it was Bungaree, a dignified native who wore a cast-off scarlet coat, an outdated military bicorn hat and a brass gorget, a neck-plate declaring him ‘King’ of Sydney town. Bungaree spoke good English and knew other languages; he also knew the ‘new’ country as well as, or better than, any white- or blackfellas. Almost thirty years earlier, he had circumnavigated the island continent with the explorer Matthew Flinders.
Now, the Patterer promised him gold – not the coppers or small silver he usually received – for a service, a delicate but a safe one, if he took care. He asked the ‘King’ to arrange for a fleet of fishermen in their bark canoes to appear in the Cove before dawn. They were not to approach the Three Bees if hailed, even though they had regularly been selling part of their catch to the ship.
If summoned, they should shout back, ‘Soon.’
Bungaree gently corrected his white friend: ‘Wouldn’t it be better if they said, “Bientôt”?’
‘Touché,’ said Dunne, and they both laughed.
Serious again, the Patterer stressed that they were to stay away at least three times the range of a war boomerang, a total of perhaps 150 to 200 yards. But they still had to go through the normal motions of fishing – and that meant each flimsy craft would have a fire burning on a bed of wet clay; it was the custom to eat as they worked. No women or children should go, and as soon as the dawn broke they must be paddling out of the Cove. Dunne told him why and offered a chance to withdraw. But Bungaree grinned and shook his head.
Next, after a long discussion that involved pencil, paper and arithmetic, Alexander Harris (because he was an old soldier and understood such things) was instructed to call on the sergeant of artillery at the fort later in the day and take delivery of thirty pounds of gunpowder. He would also find there a
package from Dunne. Harris nodded as he grasped the Patterer’s purpose.
Dunne’s last deviation saw him call on old friends at the main military barracks. A sapper found him what he needed, then a quartermaster authorised the issue of an item widely available and worth no more than one penny.
Chapter Forty
Ay, now the plot thickens very much upon us.
– George Villiers, 2nd Duke of Buckingham, The Rehearsal (1672)
Macquarie’s Fort … The drawbridge did not work and the guns held an explosive secret.
As the Patterer and Owens trudged along shortcuts, through the Government Domain, that led from the hospital to the fort at the point on the eastern side of Sydney Cove, the younger man reflected that their destination was so in keeping with the spirit of the penal colony. It had been built for Governor Lachlan Macquarie a decade earlier by prison labour, to a design by the brilliant convict architect Francis Greenway.
The fortifications had been thrown up on a small island off the tip of Bennelong’s Point, named after the local Aboriginal who, in the early days of the colony, had befriended and helped the first Governor, Arthur Phillip. Bennelong had sailed with him to Britain and had adopted European ways – until his heart and his blood called him back to his tribe.
Even the rock formation that had to be removed to make way for the fort had eerie links to crime, punishment and death. The outcrop had possessed an appropriate name, the Tarpeian Rock, after the infamous feature in ancient Rome, on the Capitoline Hill, where condemned prisoners had been hurled to their deaths.
