by Robin Adair
The fort, thus far, was silent. Yet there were many figures there, standing still and showing no man-made glimmer, not even the tiny ebbing and flowing intensity of a nervously sucked segar or pipe.
No one was in the tall tower today. They had all gathered on the gun decks of the two smaller buildings. No one put his head above the parapets.
As night at last rolled up its blanket, the lightening sky above the western slopes of the Cove – on Bunker’s Hill, near Dawes’ Battery – was disturbed by an odd interference. Like a giant bird, a black shadow swooped in a graceful arc towards the water. Seconds later it was joined by another bewildering blur.
The quiet was suddenly smashed by a series of loud, hard smacks that came from the cannons on the Three Bees. Heads swivelled to the sounds coming from the western side of the swinging hull wreathed in dirty smoke. In a blink, the rattle of small-arms fire followed.
General Ralph Darling was one of the men on the fire step. He now danced a jig, or the nearest to one that King’s Rules and Regulations permitted a general. ‘The damn fools!’ He turned to Captain Rossi. ‘They have been gulled! Bamboozled! Humbugged!’
‘It’s not over yet, sir,’ warned the Police Chief.
William King and Dr Thomas Owens kept their own counsel, while Brian O’Bannion and his brother exchanged puzzled glances.
But the Governor was convinced and confident and, uncharacteristically, verbose about it. ‘No, Rossi!’ he exclaimed. ‘They are looking to the stars, while Dunne is gnawing at their bowels!’ He shook his head, suddenly subdued. ‘Let us pray our marine sap succeeds.’
‘What’s a sap? Where’s the Patterer?’ asked the younger O’Bannion.
William King turned to peer at him in the thin light. ‘It’s a mine in a tunnel —’
‘Jesus and Mary!’ Cornelius didn’t wait to hear the sentence end.
He leapt up onto the parapet, waving the long scarf he had seized from the doctor’s shoulders. He semaphored incoherently, madly.
‘It’s a trap!’ he screamed. ‘I’m not the footballer. There’s no fookin’ footballer! The danger’s be—’ His word ‘below’ was never completed, as another fusillade of musket and rifle fire opened up from the frigate. Most fell harmlessly short. One ball, however, blessed by the gods of war and perhaps some extra grains of powder, knocked him down.
He fell back onto the flagging, into the arms of the Pieman and his brother.
Owens waved everyone back, but Brian O’Bannion refused to move, cradling the small groaning figure. The doctor’s battle-hardened eyes and hands told him Con O’Bannion would die. Either he had ducked before the ball’s impact or it had been fired by a sniper in the Three Bees rigging – perhaps both quirks of fortune had occurred. The result was the same. The doctor reckoned the ounce of lead had pierced the right shoulder, ruptured the pulmonary artery and one lung, and pulverised the spine. It was probably still somewhere in the body. Cornelius was drowning. In his own blood.
‘Why, brother, why?’ pleaded Brian O’Bannion.
‘Because …we had to keep on…fighting the English pigs,’ the young man’s voice was choked but clear. ‘We could … have put Boney back…on his throne…’
His brother was broken. ‘But these people here – the Patterer, the Pieman, the Doctor – faith, they extended the hand of friendship to you.’
Cornelius O’Bannion spat. Red. ‘Ach, an Irishman has no friends outside of the “poor old woman” …the divil take them all …Even now, it’s the Frenchies who’s killed me…’ He retched a gout of gore, whispered ‘Erin-go-bragh!’ and died.
Good God, thought Owens suddenly, how deuced uncanny. It’s the same wound that killed Nelson at Trafalgar. Two warriors, on different sides, united in death.
His musings were interrupted by a blinding flash, an ear puncturing roar and a breath-sucking wave of concussed air.
The Three Bees had exploded.
‘What happened?’ The Gazette’s editor, the Reverend Ralph Mansfield, wanted the first report on the explosion from his journalist, the man who now sat in the late Obadiah Dawks’s chair.
‘A boy had attended an officer in the hold with a candle,’ he told his new master. ‘Part of the wick must have fallen unextinguished and touched off some oakum.’ He continued to practise his purple prose: ‘The flame burst forth with an impetuosity calculated to astonish and confound…’
‘Yes, yes,’ interrupted Mr Mansfield. ‘Get on with it.’
‘The fire was contiguous to the powder magazine, where it was reported she had 130 casks on board. The crew forsook her. She was cut adrift, threatening desolation to all around her, with all her guns loaded, and every instant expected to throw down or cover with the dreadful blast all the buildings around or near her!’
Mr Mansfield rolled his eyes and held up a hand. ‘Just the detail, please.’
The chastened reporter edited his narrative: ‘Her first gun exploded over Mr Blaxcell’s and the main guardhouse of the barracks in George Street. Fourteen went off in all. A ball entered the Naval Officer’s parlour window on the western side of the Cove, below Bunker’s Hill, destroyed a writing desk and fell expended. The long-dreaded explosion took place.’
‘The guns went off before the magazine, you say?’
‘Yes, and some say they also heard musket fire before the explosion.’
The editor pursed his lips. Musket fire before? And why were so many guns loaded? And on a convict transport? Oh well, the Governor obviously didn’t think it was important.
‘What came next?’
The journalist told how the wind, now from the south, and the currents took what was left of the smouldering hull out of the mouth of the Cove, towards the Pinchgut punishment islet. It sank on the way in eleven or twelve fathoms. The official view ‘that no personal injury occurred’ left the Gazette man without the chance to paint a truly evocative image – of a Viking funeral for the unknown number of Frenchmen who really died aboard.
That was the version (still dramatic, even if distorted by decree) that the 11000 inhabitants of the town subsequently heard as gossip, read in the papers, or absorbed from readings by the Patterer.
Only a handful of people knew the truth…
Chapter Forty-five
And glory, like the phoenix midst her fires,
Exhales her odours, blazes, and expires.
– Lord Byron, English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809)
On Bunker’s Hill, Miss Susannah Hathaway had looked by lamplight at her borrowed watch, then at the two teams, each made up of four Carters Barracks boys, ranged alongside her. She thanked her stars: the wind was fair and from the west; soon the moonless night would turn pale blue and gold.
The repeater watch pinged the quarter-hour she wanted and, like a stage manager, she cued her players – five … four … three … two … one … first light. She waved away four boys, who steadily began the move they had rehearsed. They ran down the slope, their movements this time dragging into the air the huge kite they controlled. It soared, and so too did Miss Hathaway’s heart.
Seconds later, she urged into similar action her second team. The great sails of framed fabric and their tethers cracked and creaked, as the biggest kites that Sydney Town had ever seen soared towards the Cove.
More than an hour before, Nicodemus Dunne had been ready to leave the safety in the lee of Macquarie’s Fort and be rowed with muffled oars around into the Cove. He was dressed all in black; even his face was smeared with stage maquillage the singer had taken from the theatre (‘Othello can spare it,’ she said). Dunne had even blackened his teeth (‘Now I look like Grenville,’ he said).
His oarsman was the ‘Old Commodore’, Billy Blue, who was in his usual sombre garb, under a dark overcoat. ‘My face is no problem in the dark, Mr Dunne,’ he noted. ‘And I’m all gums!’
In the bottom of the light skiff stood a shape that looked like an upturned keg. It was just that, but in an unusual guise. It was first sheathed in a
n envelope of oiled and tightly sewn and proofed silk, sealed further by an outer wrapping of canvas. Only one small aperture existed, at the cask’s top lid. A needle-sharp butcher’s hook was firmly attached to one side, high up and facing outwards.
Alexander Harris and the sergeant gunner had built the strange device during the night. ‘You’re sure of your figures?’ the gunner had asked anxiously as they began the task.
‘Sure as I can be,’ replied Harris. ‘I would not say “no”, however, to some help from Mr Charles Babbage.’ At the look of bafflement on his companion’s face, he expanded: ‘He’s the Cambridge mathematical genius who is working on a machine to accurately calculate the most incredibly difficult sums. He calls it a “difference engine”, or “computer”. We can’t wait for him to finish though, can we?’
They completed their device in sweaty silence.
The fruit of their nervous labour contained thirty pounds of powder from the fort’s magazine. It was sealed tight in the barrel’s base, so that the grains filled only about half the container. The insides above the powder level had, secured to the staves, an unbroken spiralling coil of a grey-white cord, half the thickness of a little finger. One end of the cord tapped deep into the powder. The other end emerged from the aperture at the keg’s top. It nestled in a tin cup that contained, firmly upright, a penny candle cut to only several inches high. This tin had a perforated folding lid. The emerging cord was embedded in the candle, touching the wick half an inch from the top.
The skiff skimmed through the darkness towards the Three Bees. The Patterer was amazed at how the old man found his bearings and effortlessly propelled them along with no sound or light. The rest of the Cove was quiet, too, and Dunne could see in the distance the occasional flicker of fires from the canoes in Bungaree’s distracting fishing fleet. Anyone on the ship with an eye and an ear tuned was likely to be attracted, moth-like, to those glows and movements, which were familiar sights.
Suddenly, they were at the side of the vessel.
As they glided alongside, Dunne reached up and touched the hull. They were closed, but he could feel the lower outlines of shapes that could, should, must be gunports. He imagined he was on the side facing the fort. The other side, facing west to the vulnerable town, might already have its guns run out. But on both sides, and on the open deck above them, all the cannons were probably shotted and ready.
The Patterer pushed until he found the stern. One port there. He tapped Billy Blue to move them slowly along. A second port … two … then more. The thirteenth was just before the bow. They backtracked until his fingers again found the seventh outline.
While the ferryman kept the skiff steady and stopped it bumping against the ship, Dunne found a caulking line and, with a small auger, worried a hole into this join in the hull planking. And the officer had been right: there was no metal sheathing.
Gently, he raised the barrel and, driving the butcher’s hook into the hole he made, suspended his covered charge flush against the ship’s side.
Part of the barrel’s depth was now above the waterline, the rest below. If their information was correct, they were connected, in a very real sense, to the powder hold. And, he believed, an underwater explosion was more concentrated and effective than one above. Let us be greedy, he thought, and hope for the worst of both worlds.
They froze at the sound of movement on the deck above. There was a scraping noise of metal and flint, a familiar sound that the Patterer’s brain registered as the action of flint and steel meeting violently. A tinderbox. A cough followed; someone had lit a pipe? No. A waft of smoke drifted down – it was the pungent evidence of a segar. Dunne cursed silently. For how long would they have alert company on deck? How long does a smoke last? Fifteen minutes? More like half an hour.
But, for some reason, the smoker retreated and a hatch crashed shut.
The Patterer knew he could not safely make any similar noise for their next step. But he had never considered snicking away with a flint and steel until the tinder came to life. From a pouch in the scuppers he took a ‘pocket luminary’, an Italian invention. He opened the small bottle, which was coated on the inside with phosphorus oxide. He rubbed a wooden taper with a tip that had been dipped in sulphur against the bottle’s lining and made a tiny flaming torch.
In one fluid movement, he touched the taper to the candle’s wick. It took. He doused the taper in the water and quietly, gently, lowered the lid over the candle. This allowed air to enter, but cut wind and masked light.
The skiff gently eased away, back towards (Dunne hoped) the arms of the bulking fort.
The candle was seven-eighths of an inch in diameter and was burning steadily at the rate of an inch in length every fifty-eight minutes. When the flame met the coil of cord – an explosive fuse called slow match – that would fizz and race, burning at a foot every thirty seconds. After half an inch and twenty-nine minutes, the candle would touch off four feet of fuse. After a further two minutes…
Nicodemus Dunne and Billy Blue now had less than thirty-one minutes to escape the hoped-for holocaust.
They heard the cannonry and small-arms fire behind them just as they reached the rocky, sandy strand below the fort, only recently revealed by the new day. Then their ears were punished by a louder sound, and a tidal wave threw them the last yards to dry land and safety. They hoped.
Chapter Forty-six
This is the beginning of the end.
– attributed to Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand, on Napoleon’s battle at Borodino (1812)
The Governor invited Nicodemus Dunne, Rossi, the Flying Pieman and Thomas Owens from the fort to Government House for a celebratory drink. Brian O’Bannion had taken up his brother’s body and gone.
‘They’re probably in the Holy Land,’ said the Patterer. ‘I hope O’Bannion comes back to us. He may not. In any sense, it’s better that Con was killed by a Frenchman and not one of us.’
The Governor waved a hand. ‘It is, of course, an occasion tempered by greater loss. We had an easy time of it at North Head and on Garden Island. They were unprepared for us and only lightly armed. Nonetheless, we did suffer casualties – several woundings, and an officer of the 39th died of a random sword thrust he didn’t see coming. How could he, poor devil, he had only one eye.’
The Patterer was distressed. Poor Fiddle: saved as a boy in a bloody battle, only to be cut down in a minor skirmish. Still, he had been given time to return the favour to his saviour. Indeed, luck’s a fortune.
He caught Darling telling Rossi that the captured Frenchmen would be sent north to Moreton Bay, to await repatriation. What delicious irony it would be if they were going south to Van Diemen’s Land, where Fiddle’s killer might face the ‘dead’ Dawes’ Point redcoat!
‘All in all, a quite satisfactory day, gentlemen,’ said His Excellency, ordering their glasses refilled.
‘Not quite,’ said Dunne. ‘We have quashed any idea of an uprising, but we still have a master-plotter and a murderer to catch.
‘I believe, however, inquiries during the rest of today, with perhaps a portion of the evening, will prove the ideas that I have brewed about our phoenix-like Napoleon Bonaparte.
‘I can’t tell you much more – yet,’ he said, frustrating the appeals for enlightenment. ‘In the meantime, Excellency, I suggest you order a detachment of soldiers to the Lachlan Swamps market garden of a Mr John Shan. If they search thoroughly, I’m sure they will find a vast number of French cavalry and skirmisher carbines.
‘Another French vessel, this one clearly a warship, carried them secretly into our waters. It was probably supposed to rendezvous with the Three Bees somewhere at sea and pass over the weapons then. Why? Because the “convict transport” had to look the part and could not have loaded the muskets in France. Once at sea, especially before the run here from the Cape, it could have been inspected by a zealous British man-o’-war checking conditions aboard. Prison-reform agitators at home, such as Mrs Fry, and Mr Wilberforce’s anti-slave
rs, have politicians edgy. However, a “friendly” French warship could not and would not have been interfered with.
‘But the meeting went awry; the musket-carrying ship landed them at some quiet cove and paid John Shan – and very well – to move them onto his property quite openly and safely: in his noxious shit carts!
‘Our éminence grise behind it all here put a notice in the paper alerting local plotters.
‘The advertisement didn’t make much sense to me at first. There surely are not enough Chinese here to celebrate their New Year on any grand scale. And I understand that, even in the Middle Kingdom itself, one dragon would entertain a whole town. But 200? We know the French fusil is widely called a “dragon” gun. Voilà!’
‘Is that all?’ asked Ralph Darling.
‘No. A visit to our splendid Subscription Library finally gave the lie to the concept. You see, the notice referred to the Year of the Dragon, this coming February. Dare I jest, the Year of the Dragon was all bullshit! You see, 1829 will be the Year of the Ox!’
‘You don’t suspect his brother?’ Captain Rossi’s sudden query broke into Dunne’s essay at humour. ‘I mean, of course, the senior O’Bannion.’
‘No,’ replied Dunne firmly. ‘From what I’ve heard, he was as shocked at the defection as anyone.’
‘Did you have any inkling of Con’s treachery?’
‘Of course, for quite a while. That’s why I excluded him from some planning but deliberately included him in other schemes. That’s how he could warn his friends that there was a dangerous “footballer” when there wasn’t one; why he did not know about our mine; why the sorties by the garrison troops against the men on land were a secret; and, of course, why he and they believed Miss Hathaway’s kites were bomb-bearing balloons.
‘I became suspicious when Cornelius broke his rule of shunning authority and attached himself, limpet-like to our gatherings.
