Death and the Running Patterer: A Curious Murder Mystery

by Robin Adair

  AS THE INVESTIGATORS were leaving what was left of the New World printery for the second time that day, heaven smiled on their quest for biblical enlightenment. For they spied in the distance a bulky figure emerging from the nearby Judge’s House, which was now home to the newly arrived junior judge, James Dowling. The fellow steering a stately course for his carriage was the Reverend Samuel Marsden, an old man of sixty-three but still, with his great land-holdings, a leading figure in the colony even though his earlier powers were now in decline.

  “Ah, capital!” said Rossi as he headed toward the cleric. “Who better to give us an opinion on matters spiritual than the gentleman who was once assistant chaplain for the entire colony?”

  The patterer hung back, clearly not as happy as Rossi to see Marsden.

  “Well, you do all the talking,” he muttered. “He’ll ignore us if he knows I’m not free, pass-man though I may be. He even loathes men who have done their time. He’d probably like to cut me dead—literally—if I stepped out of line in any way. He’s not known as the ‘Flogging Parson’ for nothing.”

  He ignored Rossi’s snort and continued. “It’s true. Why, as a magistrate he used to scourge suspects until they confessed. And he had a woman at the Factory chained to a log for two months.”

  Rossi simply snorted again and strode on, so Dunne kept silent and maintained a respectful pace behind him as they intercepted the minister.

  Marsden was clearly interested in what was put to him as an official request and, after hearing the full details, agreed to help. He waved away a suggestion that perhaps he and Rossi should repair to a place that contained a Bible.

  “No,” said the minister. “My sight may be fast failing now, but it has only sharpened my mind. And I have lived the words of the Bible all my years. Tell me the references and doubtless I should be able to identify them.”

  “Well,” replied Rossi, “I believe the book in question is Exodus, but after that all I have is a string of numerals—2, 1, 2, 2 and 3.”

  Marsden was silent for almost a minute, then said, “Hmm. As there is no Chapter 212, there are, it seems to me, only four possibilities that make much sense. There can be either two verses from Chapter 2—and they are verses 12 and 23—or two from Chapter 21—verses 2 and 23.

  “The two verses from Chapter 2 I don’t expect to be of much help to your cause. In verse 12, Moses kills an Egyptian for smiting a Hebrew and hides him in the sand. In verse 23, the King of Egypt dies but the children of Israel are still in bondage.

  “In Chapter 21, verse 2 says that if you buy a Hebrew servant he shall go free in his seventh year of servitude. Perhaps you could draw a long bow and see some link with our system of penal transportation.”

  The old minister paused for breath. “Now, verse 23 may be the interesting one. Everyone has heard of it even if they don’t know its provenance. It and the following verses read, ‘If any mischief follow, then thou shalt give life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burning for burning, wound for wound, stripe for stripe.’ That’s all I can suggest to you.”

  After he had profusely thanked the departing minister, Rossi raised his eyebrows at Dunne.

  “I don’t know,” said the young man. “The last verse seems to reinforce our belief that it is all about revenge, retribution, call it what you will. But does this advance our case at all?”

  “I can’t see it,” admitted the magistrate. “But, anyway, you must admit that the reverend gentleman was very gracious and generous with his time. And you are wrong about him, you know. I believe he has a loyal band of convict servants he could not do without.”

  Yes, the patterer thought bitterly. They can’t live with us and they can’t live without us.

  “Come!” said Rossi. “His Excellency will want to know. We should catch him at the barracks.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  Seldom, very seldom, does complete truth belong to any human disclosure; seldom can it happen that something is not a little disguised, or a little mistaken.

  —Jane Austen, Emma (1815)

  ROSSI AND DUNNE LEFT THE GOVERNOR AND CAREFULLY SKIRTED the barracks’ dusty parade ground to head for a gate onto George Street.

  The barracks were surrounded by hammer-dressed stone walls ten feet high and two feet thick, which kept their fifteen-acre world private from the growing town outside. Drought was in its third year and the fountain at one side of the open ground was dry. Perhaps it always had been; Sydney, apart from ale and rum, was a dry town. The original prime source of water, the Tank Stream, had long become fouled, and fresh water was drawn now from the Lachlan Swamps four miles away to boost inadequate private wells. Carters hawked it at sixpence a bucket.

  The only other movement near the parade ground came from three soldiers on punishment detail. They were passing the shot—each in turn bending to pick up a cannonball, straightening his back and handing it on to the next fellow.

  At Dunne’s grimace, Rossi said, “You have no time for discipline?”

  “Discipline, yes. Bastardry, no.”

  Rossi changed the subject and returned to the cause of the patterer’s transportation. “Tell me, did the English really love Caroline?”

  Dunne shrugged. “Mostly they were sorry for her. George was a drunk and a debauchee. They say he only married her in return for payment of his debts. Anyway, he was married already, wasn’t he?”

  “So they say.” Rossi pondered for a moment how Protestant England would have reacted to the secret bride, a Catholic widow named Maria Fitzherbert, sharing the throne. Anyway, the marriage was a sham—not that the poor lady had any inkling. “Was he married? Yes—and no,” he continued now. “But that’s as you well know. You don’t need me to tell you.” His tone was chiding.

  The patterer grinned and nodded. He did know the story, of course. He had no personal memory of it—it had occurred back in 1785, after all—but he imagined that few in Britain would not know the story, or some version of it: how the then Prince of Wales had taken Mrs. Fitzherbert as his bride, in defiance of his royal father.

  “How did Prinny hope to get away with the marriage?” asked Dunne.

  “Oh.” Rossi shrugged. “I suppose he thought he could present a fait accompli—and, to some extent, he did. He found a clergyman in debtors’ prison and offered him 500 pounds to clear his shortages. And he threw in the bait of offering a bishop’s mitre. He had his wedding.”

  “Did the clergyman get what was promised?”

  “Do you know,” sighed the captain, “I’m not sure. I imagine so. But poor Mrs. Fitzherbert, alas. She hovered as the illegal ‘queen’ for years; the marriage was annulled, naturally. Then, of course, the prince in ’95 properly married your Caroline of Brunswick—and you’re right, it was only for money.”

  “Well, anyway,” said Dunne, “I’m glad I have no interest in the royal family.”

  Rossi stared at him. “Perhaps your lack of interest is misplaced.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Ah, well.” The captain’s frown closed down the conversation. As he walked away he muttered, “Ignore my meandering. Forget I said it.”

  NICODEMUS DUNNE WAS so preoccupied with thoughts of royal goings-on that he collided heavily with the first pedestrian he came across in George Street.

  “Steady, Dunne!” said the offended target.

  Only after he had apologized did the patterer recognize his victim. “Oh, Dr. Cunningham,” he said. “My clumsy fault. How are matters with you?” He had not seen the ship’s surgeon around the town since he had landed after his latest voyage some months before.

  “I fervently wish I could go back,” said Peter Cunningham wryly.

  “Well, that’s surely no problem. Just take a new berth.”

  Cunningham sighed. “If it were only that simple. No, I meant that I would like to be able to reverse my latest passage out here.”

  The patterer was puzzled, and it showed.

  “Look,” said Cunnin
gham, “my voyage involved problems and left me with ghosts I wish I could exorcise. Surely you remember how your fellow prisoners imagined that, if they dreamed hard enough, they could perhaps go back to a time before the law took them. I’ve seen new arrivals walk backward onto the deck on landing—because they fancied that they were boarding to return! That’s all I’m doing, hoping to turn back my last passage on Morley.”

  “Specifically, why?” asked Dunne.

  “Well, since I left the navy, I’ve made five voyages to Australia as a surgeon-supervisor. I’ve cared for 746 prisoners and over these nine-odd years, I’ve lost only three.”

  “That’s outstanding, miraculous. Is it not the best result ever? Why are you concerned?”

  Cunningham grimaced. “Because some say a disease slipped ashore this time, carried by some soldiers’ children—a disease that had never before been here: whooping cough.”

  The patterer knew there had been a fiery epidemic. “But no one could blame you.”

  “One of the victims was the son of a very important personage,” said Cunningham. “He died.”

  “Oh.” There was little more that Dunne could say. He changed the subject. “Well, I must away. I’m off to the hospital—don’t concern yourself, I am well. I must consult a doctor on another matter.”

  Cunningham raised an eyebrow. “Be careful there. Don’t get too close to anyone.” Before Dunne could satisfy his curiosity about this odd remark, the surgeon had nodded and walked off.

  CHAPTER TEN

  ... for a bird of the air shall carry the voice, and that which hath wings shall tell the matter.

  —Ecclesiastes 10:20

  OX-WAGONS AND AN OCCASIONAL CARRIAGE STIRRED THE DUST, but most Sydneysiders walked about their business. The patterer watched as a smart curricle went by, whipped along at a cracking pace by a young dandy and splashing through a mess of fresh dung and urine—to the consternation of a pedestrian who received the spray and shook an angry fist.

  In this part of town, shops and houses of business, some dilapidated, some neatly painted and adorned with flower beds in window boxes, punctuated stands of more impressive private houses in the latest Georgian style.

  Enterprising street traders noisily hawked oysters, apples and pies, their cries mingled with the exotic calls of parrots perched on shoulders and shopfronts. Parrots were everywhere in Sydney. People flocked to Cumberland Street hoping to hear a bird recite the Lord’s Prayer and the Ten Commandments. Even in the colony’s first breach-of-promise case, the patterer recalled, the court heard that a shy young suitor had taught a parrot to sing, “My heart with love is beating.” Although that case had been heard several years before, the patterer had experienced a more recent reminder of the rather bizarre circumstances of the case.

  This jolt to his memory had come one morning when he slept in late in his rented room in a cottage behind Government House. The cottage was one of two built by Mr. Francis Cox, a ship- and anchor-smith, for his wife, Frances, and their four children. Dunne paid one pound a week for board and fifteen shillings for food. On that particular morning, the clatter of his landlady, Mrs. Cox, in the kitchen downstairs had helped awaken him, but the sound that finally drove him into awareness of the advancing day was a strange voice. “My heart with love is beating,” he finally decided the high, scratchy voice was saying. Again. And again.

  Intrigued, he pulled on a banyan, the voluminous and thus discreet Indian silk dressing-gown that society regarded, alone among male robes de chambre, as suitable for a gentleman to wear before ladies. Dunne was, when he could afford to be, quite a dandy, although he usually wore simple working-man’s dress, so as to merge into his general audience.

  Dressed in his banyan, he made a rather grand entrance into the kitchen and found Mrs. Cox with her daughter, Sarah—and a gorgeously plumed parrot.

  Sarah was an equally splendid creature, a young woman in her early twenties, with raven hair and a generous figure. The patterer was, he knew full well, not the only man to admire her. Three years earlier, in May 1825, she had sued Captain John Paine, a ship’s master, for breach of promise. Miss Cox had agreed to marry Captain Paine, but he began pursuing others, first a young heiress, then a rich widow.

  In court, Paine faced the accusation of having injured Sarah’s reputation. She told the jury that she was a respectable girl who “kept good company and was never out late at night.” The court believed her and awarded her 100 pounds plus costs. His Honor had upheld her honor.

  One fact of the case was indelible in Nicodemus Dunne’s memory: Captain Paine’s failed defense had argued that Miss Cox had other beaus—and had produced as evidence the parrot sent to her by a rival suitor. It had been trained to say the very words that had woken the patterer.

  “You kept the bird, I see,” he said to Sarah, who was now better known as the consort of the lawyer who had represented her in court, Mr. William Charles Wentworth, firebrand publisher of The Australian.

  “For sentimental reasons, Mr. Dunne,” she said with a smile.

  At that moment, a small child rushed into the room, panicking the parrot.

  “My daughter, Timmie,” said the young woman proudly, at the same time as she deftly rescued the bird.

  “How she has grown!” said the patterer, who, in truth, had little idea of what a child’s physical progress should be. “How old is she now?”

  “Three years come Christmas,” said her grandmother proudly. “Doesn’t time fly?”

  BIRDSONG OF A different kind dragged Dunne from his reverie back to his slow promenade to the hospital. Shrieks of peacocks came from the gardens of a handsome mansion a block away. Often, the birds’ shrill cries were drowned out by the wails of men being scourged at the Government Lumber Yard nearby.

  With the smell of hops from Matthew Bacon’s Wellington Brewery at his back, Dunne skirted the bold begging of a black man wearing a tattered corporal’s red coat, a cocked hat and a brass nameplate that proclaimed him to be “Bungaree, King of Sydney Cove.” The patterer could also see a group of blacks down an alley, fermenting the head-splitting grog they called “bull” from sugar bags soaked in a pail of water with old potatoes. There were other ways to make bull. Some publicans would let the “Indians” scrub out rum and brandy casks. The first rinse was still rich in alcohol. This bull was pay enough for their work.

  A guarded coffle of government men shuffled to work dressed in a motley of gray, brown and yellow overalls. They held their leg irons clear of the ground in unconscious mimicry of ladies lifting their skirts. They were passed by a wagon groaning under its load, bound for a building site. Its full cargo of 350 bricks was hauled by twelve convicts—cheaper to run and more expendable than animals. They had pulled the cart from the kilns at Brickfield Hill a mile away, one of the five trips they had to do each day.

  The idea of using convicts as beasts of burden wasn’t new, thought the patterer. In earlier years, an enterprising Scot thought to introduce to Sydney the sedan chairs that carried people through the narrow streets of Edinburgh Old Town. He had planned to use assigned convicts as chair-men, but the scheme never caught on.

  Between the barracks and the Cove stood the office of The Gazette. The patterer cribbed from all the papers but found The Gazette the most staid and pro-government, thus the least interesting, even though it had the most colorful history.

  Nicodemus Dunne had never known the first editor, a Creole convict printer named George Howe. As George Happy or Happy George, he had been sentenced to death for shoplifting, then transported to Sydney and assigned to start The Gazette in 1803.

  Happy George’s son, Robert, who had succeeded his father in 1821, could hardly be called “Happy Robert,” mused Dunne. The patterer had not seen Robert since an announcement—and Dunne recalled its odd wording—that he had appointed an editor because he was “debilitated by mental anxiety and domestic disquietude.” Dunne decided that having been whipped in George Street by a certain Dr. Redfern for an insult printed
in the paper could not have helped.

  Although he rarely saw the new editor, a retired Wesleyan missionary named Ralph Mansfield, he idly wondered now if Mansfield had any knowledge of Hebraism that could help elucidate the clue in the letter. But when he entered The Gazette to grab an early copy—he usually took a dirty spoil rather than pay the proper nine pence—there were only printers on hand.

  The composing room that day was probably the brightest interior in the town. Dozens upon dozens of candles were ranged over the type-cases to light the way for the compositors who were laboriously hand-setting every letter. A “printer’s devil” was employed to change the candles regularly and make sure the candle grease did not trickle into the tiny type or onto the copy being set.

  Two sweating men were working at the iron Albion press applying vertical pressure on the paper- and ink-coated type, which was regularly refreshed from ink-filled paddles. They printed only one side of the paper at a time. After each impression, another devil, called a “flyboy,” whipped the sheet from the press and pegged it up like laundry for the tacky ink to dry.

  Dunne was always impressed by the strength and rhythm of the pressmen, who could at best strike 240 impressions in an hour. Thus, a circulation run of a four-page edition could take up to twelve hours to print.

  It all looked too much like hard work. So the patterer tucked his Gazette into the leather satchel that already contained latest copies of the three rival newspapers and left. Walking and talking were easier.

  Rather than go straight to the hospital, the patterer went on to one of his best paying regular engagements, although it was one that always puzzled him. Ever since he had become free to work for himself, he had visited each week the Bank of New South Wales in George Street near the military barracks. He did not query the bank’s strange location, sharing a building with the dismal Thistle Inn.