by Robin Adair
At this, Harris made a discreet departure.
Intrigued though the patterer was at the prospect of Rossi’s news, he insisted on first relaying his own startling intelligence from the hospital visit, about the unsuspected death by firearm and the emergence of yet a third victim, the poisoned army veteran.
In truth, these were the only positive new factors he could grasp and juggle. Of course, he had suspicions, riddles and puzzles. Something about the Gleaner publisher Dr. Laurence Halloran’s avowed Christian charity toward the dead rival publisher did not ring quite true. Even Captain Rossi’s clear ignorance of his old regiment seemed rather odd. And what, nagged a voice at the back of his mind, had Dr. Cunningham meant by his hint to avoid close contact with anyone at the hospital? Did he in fact mean a medical colleague, Dr. Thomas Owens, perhaps?
But Dunne was also conscious of the overriding dictum of the Runners, passed down from their founder, Henry Fielding: Never take anything at face value; suspicions, hunches and doubts are useless without proof. Sound advice, mused the patterer. So he would take all the evidence with a grain of salt—even the mysterious grains of sugar.
He turned to Rossi. “So, what’s your news?”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Each lordly man his taper waist displays,
Combs his sweet locks and laces on his stays,
Ties on his starch’d cravat with nicest care,
And then steps forth to petrify the fair.
—Bernard Blackmantle (C. M. Westmacott), The English Spy (1825)
“I HAD INTERESTING CONVERSATIONS WITH DR. HALLORAN AND Miss Dormin earlier,” Captain Rossi began. “The publisher tells me that the man Abbot was originally an American printer who had supported the loyal—to the Crown, that is—forces in the war of 1812, before having to leave his home and business for Canada. He ultimately enlisted in, or was pressed into, the 57th.”
The patterer raised his eyebrows but was not surprised.
“But, my boy,” Rossi continued, “the very important intelligence is that we can now more accurately estimate the time of the murder. The doctors, I gather, could not be sure of that because the fire distorted the usual signs, such as rigor mortis. We do have a witness, however, to shed new light on the case: Miss Dormin! That’s why she came to the scene with Dr. Halloran, to tell us. But she became upset, and left abruptly. When she had recovered, she was able to tell me that she saw the printer, alive and well, on the morning of the fire. She was a visitor to the shop, by arrangement, to collect a manuscript—I believe they call it ‘copy.’”
“What else did she say?” asked Dunne, trying not to appear eager for any crumb about the young lady.
“I suggest you ask her yourself,” replied Rossi, with a smile. “She will attend morning service tomorrow at St. James’s. Bonne chance!”
NICODEMUS DUNNE LEFT the taproom determined not to rely simply on luck. He headed diagonally across George Street to the huge emporium on the corner of Market Street known as the Waterloo Stores.
He had once done a signal service for the proprietor and now in turn needed help. The stores sold everything imaginable, but Dunne particularly needed a new outfit of smart clothes, if only for a short time. He knew his day-to-day outfit would never do for Miss Dormin, and even his usual Sunday best was not good enough.
Big Cooper was only too happy to oblige. Daniel Cooper was called “Big” to distinguish him from the several Coopers prominent in Sydney life and trade. The stores were an institution in the town, their co-owners, Cooper and Solomon Levey, known to all. During a shortage of coin, the business had even issued its own paper currency, called Waterloo Notes.
So Big Cooper handed the patterer over to a tailor and habit-maker, who had trained in London before stabbing a co-worker with pinking shears and being transported. His instructions were to lend the young man a suitable ready-to-wear wardrobe.
SUNDAY DAWNED WITH the promise of a fine day and Dunne whistled softly as he washed, shaved and dressed carefully in his Bent Street room. Mr. Cooper’s man had excelled himself. As the Patterer headed south to morning service, few acquaintances would have recognized him.
His dark green fitted coat was double-breasted, with a rolled collar, skirts that fell to his knees and tight sleeves puffed at the shoulder. His trousers ended in suspenders under a pair of gleaming boots. The crown of his top hat widened at its peak, and its brim was turned up.
His work uniform was, albeit briefly, a thing of the past, replaced by the mirror image of a fashion plate. He would not, his tame tailor told him, be out of place in such European publications as Harriette Wilson’s Paris Lions and London Tigers, a bible of the beau monde.
Dunne had never heard of this volume; apart from her fame as a courtesan, he knew of Wilson only as the author of her colorful Memoirs, news of which had famously caused the Duke of Wellington one of her conquests, to challenge her to “publish, and be damned.”
Admittedly, conceded the young man as he strode toward St. James’s to the beat of an ivory-topped cane, the tailor had archly warned that this style was really several years old, but he had added that, as they were a world away, few would know the difference. The suit would pass muster.
“Muster,” Dunne thought idly, was quite the word of the day. All convicts were mustered for compulsory church attendance, and the rule applied to pass-men, too. While controlling the men and women in captivity posed few problems, keeping a religious rein on the scattered parolees was a harder task.
But the patterer, though not religious, rather liked the change of pace and the gentle ritual involved. And he liked the music, if not the fire-breathing sermons from the archdeacon, the Venerable Thomas Hobbes Scott, although he had to admit that the man appeared to earn his 2,000 pounds a year. New St. James’s was usually a bit fancy for Dunne, too: He preferred the older St. Phillip’s, between the barracks and The Rocks, where convicts usually predominated on its 800 seats.
As he reached the church, he reflected that it was yet another triumph for the convict architect Francis Greenway, standing opposite his Hyde Park convict barracks. These and his other town works were everyday pleasures for residents’ eyes. But, thought Dunne, perhaps the most enduring memorial to Greenway’s genius was Macquarie’s Tower, the colony’s first lighthouse, a graceful beacon that guided shipping through the stark headlands guarding Port Jackson.
And another aloof creation was a majestic building, largely out of sight for townspeople, across the sprawling Domain. With crenellated parapets, medieval towers, soaring lancet windows, yet suddenly Tudor arches over carriageways, it had been described as “Gothic picturesque.” Newcomers on arriving ships admired it from the harbor and were sure it must be indeed the grand vice-regal castle. In fact, it was the governor’s stables, far nobler than the real, decaying Government House. One critic had bitterly described it as “a palace for horses while people go unhoused.”
It was so typical of Sydney, pondered the patterer as he turned into the redbrick pile of the church. Not everything was as it appeared. This was particularly true of the sedate St. James. Christian amity and charity were often far removed from its four walls. He recalled the startling services in recent months, after the archdeacon was more than usually outraged by attacks in Mr. Edward Smith Hall’s Monitor.
One Sunday evening, Hall arrived to find the way barred to his family’s pew; it had been locked on the church-leader’s instructions. The editor, unperturbed, climbed into the pew and broke the lock. The following week, armed beadles stood guard. Hall and his family sat on the altar steps during the service and refused to budge.
Finally, one evening they found the pew boarded up. “Like the deck of a ship,” in the words of The Monitor, which Dunne repeated to amused listeners.
On this Sunday, when the patterer looked around the church there was no sign of Mr. Hall—but when he looked right he saw Miss Rachel Dormin. She was wearing the same cut of dress as she had during their first brief encounter, only this time in mor
e sober blue, suitable for Sunday.
The sweet message of redemption, punctuated by thunderous threats of damnation from the red-faced minister, wafted past the patterer’s consciousness. He had eyes and thoughts only for the face demurely cast low, apparently in prayer and reflection. Then she caught his eye, and he could have sworn that she winked.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
There is nothing makes a man suspect much, more than to know little.
—Francis Bacon, “Of Suspicion” (1625)
AS THE SERVICE ENDED, THE PATTERER MADE SURE HE WAS OUT THE door first, so that he could “accidentally” cross his quarry’s path.
“Why, Miss Dormin,” he said, raising his hat. “What a pleasant surprise. Do you remember me? I was with Captain Rossi when you and Dr. Halloran visited the unfortunate New World office.”
“Mr. Dunne—of course! Though I barely recognized you. Clothes, indeed, maketh the man.”
“My tailor,” said Dunne, “tells me I would grace Harriette Wilson’s Paris Lions and London Tigers.”
Miss Dormin looked perplexed until her escort explained the reference, then said, “Ah, I was not familiar with the allusion—pray, are you a lion or a tiger?”
“I suppose I am a kangaroo now.”
She laughed delightedly.
The patterer made his next move. “May I walk you to your next destination?”
She smiled. “With pleasure, although you may be soon bored. I am at rare liberty this morning and simply plan to stroll gently until pleased to stop.” She took the arm he offered and looked up, serious now. “I talked to Captain Rossi and he spoke most highly of you. He rather more than hinted that you are someone special, an important ally in the search for the printer’s slayer.”
Nicodemus Dunne flushed and stammered a modest reply.
“Poor Mr. Abbot,” the young woman continued. “As I told the captain, I saw him on both the evening before his death—and the next morning. Sadly, beyond the conventional courtesies, we exchanged barely a word. Business is often like that, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” he replied, and he felt a shiver as she tightened her grip on his arm.
“I delivered to him some matter to be set into type, on the understanding I could pick it up the following morning, to be passed on to the next journal on a list.” Such a round-robin procedure was common, and saved an advertiser from having to write out the material more than once.
“Very economical, I’m sure,” said the patterer. He knew full well that the most sensible system would be for one printer to set the matter and, if their press times did not coincide, share the laboriously set type with rivals. Sometimes this happened, but spirited, often bitter competition usually ruled out cooperation. “Tell me,” he added. “You saw nothing suspicious that morning?”
“Not a thing. But the death and then the fire must have happened soon afterward. Goodness, do you think the killer was there, hiding nearby, when I called?”
“I can’t dismiss the possibility, in all honesty,” said Dunne quietly. “Let us hope not. But, away from that, do you recall the content of the copy you were transporting?”
“Indeed. It was a government order. Dr. Halloran had had it set for The Gleaner and I knew it was Mr. Abbot’s turn, before Mr. Wentworth’s Australian.”
“Would you recognize that text now?” asked Dunne. He took out of his pocket the galley proof he had pulled in the New World office and showed it to her.
She studied the text and said, “It’s very tiny type, isn’t it? Dr. Halloran once showed me the case with it in. It’s called Agate or something, no?”
“I really meant, are the words familiar?”
Miss Dormin nodded. “Oh, yes. I know I probably shouldn’t, but I can’t resist sneaking a look at the copy that comes my way. This seems to be the beginning of the government order. However ...” She broke off and frowned. “I don’t understand the ending, such as it is.”
The patterer hesitated. “What exactly did Captain Rossi tell you about the fire and what we found?”
“He said I was not to tell anyone yet about having been at the scene. I asked why, for goodness’ sake, and he said it was for my own protection. I asked what he meant and he said he had to confide in me that there may have been other slayings connected to this one and that the killer may think I know something I should not. He said, however, that I could talk to you. He added that I could trust you implicitly.”
That was when Nicodemus Dunne nodded, took a deep breath and made Miss Dormin his partner in crime. Detection, that is.
The moment he opened his mouth to tell her all, he knew, of course, that he should not have revealed anything about the investigation. The governor would have been furious, but what chance did duty to a past-middle-aged general stand in the face of the wide-eyed interest of a nubile beauty?
An imp in the patterer’s brain rationalized his capitulation to Cupid with the indelicate words, coarse but true, of love-blinded men throughout the ages: A standing co—. No! In deference to Miss Dormin, he would censor these words! Rather, he would concede that a tumescent male member has no conscience.
Dunne was uneasy thinking even in those terms, but admitted their validity. He consoled himself with the idea that it had been Captain Rossi who had opened the door to the young lady’s curiosity. Come to that, he thought almost indignantly, why had the captain encouraged her? Was he, too, smitten—and sniffing like a dog after Rachel Dormin?
So, omitting the most distressing details, the patterer told Miss Dormin how it now seemed that three men, connected by the thread that they were current, or past, members of the 57th Regiment, had been murdered most foully. He admitted he did not know why. Suddenly hoping that he had not gone too far (and unable to think of anything else that could show him in a good light), he begged her to put the matter out of her mind and try to enjoy the rest of their time out together. Miss Dormin agreed.
On one subject the patterer kept his own counsel. He judged that his fair companion held a certain colonist in high esteem. He guessed that she knew of Laurence Halloran’s transportation. But, given her recent arrival, she may not have known that two years before he had been jailed for his constant condition—debt—or that a year even further back his schoolmaster son had faced complaints of unseemly behavior. She must know that only this year the governor had appointed Halloran Coroner for Sydney, then dismissed him for threatening a defamatory attack on the colorful Archdeacon Scott.
What she did not know, however, and Dunne was convinced of this, was that Halloran was facing final financial ruin; his business was in trouble that would be terminal if yet another new rival flourished. How would a man described as having a “disturbed mind” and a “sense of persecution” react to such a threat? He had been heard to say that he would have to “kill off the opposition.”
And now someone had done just that. Which was why in his notebook, under that heading “Persons of Interest,” Nicodemus Dunne carefully wrote the name of the ailing Gleaner′s Laurence Hynes Halloran.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
I do desire we may be better strangers.
—William Shakespeare, As You Like It (1599)
BY THE TIME THE PATTERER HAD POURED OUT TO HIS FAIR COMPANION a digest of the perplexing details, their walk had taken them farther south along Elizabeth Street, away from the church.
This was not the most fashionable pedestrian promenade. That was in the other direction, toward the water and Mrs. Macquarie’s Point—an earlier vice-regal lady’s favorite resting spot—and the Government Domain. But Dunne had his reasons.
Etiquette dictated that the gentleman must keep the lady on that side of him where she would be least exposed to crowding or receiving thrown-up muck, mud or dust from the gutter and roadway. Though unsaid, it meant that a chamberpot emptied from a window above would, hopefully, miss the lady. Also unsaid, because memories had dimmed, was that walking on the street side had originally had the benefit of leaving free the sword-arms of most me
n.
Here, there were few pedestrians, no bedrooms above with threatening chamberpots and there was no likelihood of lurking attackers crossing swords with Dunne’s walking stick. Still, he kept to convention and walked at Rachel Dormin’s right-hand side. Such courtesies had been drummed into him by his foster parents, who insisted that his mother—about whom they protested no other knowledge—expected him always to act like a gentleman.
To their left as they strolled, Dunne’s long gait easily adapting to his petite partner’s pace, stretched Hyde Park, up to forty acres saved from grazing and brickmakers′ clay-quarrying to become a park, a project that was still in progress.
Bound to the north by the Domain, south by the brickfields, east by what had once been First Fleet pioneer “Little Jack” Palmer’s Woolloomooloo Farm, and west by the town proper, the park was dedicated to serving the recreations and amusement of the populace. It had once been an exercise field for troops, and even for a decade the first racecourse.
Today the southern end was occupied by two separate groups. Strictly speaking (and the ones speaking most strictly were proponents of the official church line of Sunday observance) there should have been little or no activity. But, in fact, the authorities turned a blind eye between the end of morning prayers and the beginning of evening services.
Thus the first group toward which the patterer steered Miss Dormin was a jolly party of adults and children who had just set up a picnic and amusements. There were, for the children, a swing on which to seesaw and running in sacks. For adults, there would be a blindfold wheelbarrow race in which husbands or bachelors would push their squealing partners or sweethearts. A table was loaded with food and drink.
