The Ghost of Waterloo (21 page)

Rossi shrugged. ‘Well, they have priests now, and St Mary’s Chapel – that was the last foundation stone that Governor Macquarie laid, if memory serves me aright, in – what? ’21? And, about that first priest, Father James Dixon was his name, he was a ticket-of-leave convict, for heaven’s sake. He’d been involved in that ’98 plot, the one in the song we just heard, to raise rebellion in Ireland. They called it the Year of the French. Maybe Marsden was right.’

The Patterer preferred to think that the Reverend Samuel Marsden, a bully and a bigot who had richly earned the slur ‘the Flogging Parson’, could be right about nothing, but he patiently prompted his senior. ‘What did Marsden say?’

‘Flatly,’ came the reply, ‘that Irish convicts are of the most wild, ignorant and savage race ever endowed with the light of civilisation … His words. He blamed the church for inflaming the convicts here to rise at Vinegar Hill in ’04, you know.’

Dunne had not known about the parson’s allocation of blame to Irish clerics. He did, of course, understand that the insurrection on the fringes of the settlement had left a permanent dread in the hearts and minds of most town and country people, even if the scars were greater for the 300 rebels. Soldiers killed twelve on the spot during the brief battle and a similar number were hanged afterwards. Others were lashed or more closely confined.

The Patterer considered
their
own many problems – the bank theft that perhaps could loosen purse strings for a rebellion: one orchestrated, impossibly, by an evil enemy mastermind long consigned to memory and a mausoleum.

And there were too many murders. The crime was not a usual one, even for a society in which more than half the population were, or had been, convicted criminals. The intake of transported prisoners rarely included murderers, neither amateur nor professional. Killers in Britain tended to be cut off in their prime on a local scaffold. Similarly, there was no great influx of practised prostitutes: whoring, in itself, was no serious crime.

So, what was the Patterer to make of the case of the castrato, killed in an apparently locked room? Even there he considered a link, admittedly slender, with the broader mystery. For had not Mr Barnett Levey announced that the singer had been at the French court?

He was sure, of course, that the shooting of John Creighton was a key piece in the jigsaw puzzle. The immediate job was to find out what the journalist, Obadiah Dawks, knew about it all.

But, as he trudged up the slopes again, a nagging thought intruded. It was like the first twinge of a toothache, at the stage where oil of cloves may benefit, long before the coming of the roaring pain that could only be relieved by the wrenching of a strong-wristed quack (even, in the case of an obstinate molar, with the aid of an even more powerful farrier!).

He could not stop wondering now about the death of the soldier in the dawn at Lieutenant Dawes’ Battery. Why had the private of the 39th, who had not killed his sergeant, been shot and not hanged? Why kill him at all?

Dunne pushed away these worries. First, he would help find Dawks and attempt to build bridges with Captain Rossi.

Chapter Twenty-eight

As the three men continued their climb into The Rocks, seeking someone who might know something of the fleeing journalist, Nicodemus Dunne drew alongside Captain Rossi.

‘I thought you might have been a trifle more sympathetic back there at our halt.’

The Police Chief frowned. ‘Me? Sympathetic towards whom? And about what?’

‘Well.’ The Patterer paused, instantly regretting that he may have strayed into an indelicate area. ‘I mean, your homeland, Corsica, was Genoese, until they sold it to the French. The brief British occupation made no cultural difference – and Italy and France are firm Catholic countries…’ He trailed off.

The Captain cocked an eyebrow and smiled. ‘So, you think that I may be a Papist, an idolater? But, now, how could that possibly be? Perish the thought that I would have ambitions to be a parliamentarian at Westminster, or hold other high British civil office – they’re all closed to Roman Catholics. But consider that military commissions have been unavailable to Catholics, too – and that I
did
become a captain in the British Army.

‘And, if gossips are telling the truth when they say that I was a special emissary for the King in his divorce action against Queen Caroline, then that was no job for a Catholic.

‘However…’ Rossi tapped his nose, ‘let us not forget that people can and do make adjustments in their circumstances. Consider how many of our reluctant convicts forced to go to church musters are certainly not Protestants. But they bend to the rules, as wise people do.

‘Perhaps matters will change. Politicians in London are, as we speak, deliberating Catholic emancipation. Until then? Well, we are all wise to follow the dictum the army has long used.’

‘Which is?’ asked Dunne.

‘Why,’ replied the Captain, ‘ “Don’t ask, don’t tell.” Anyway, my boy, the real test here is whether one is truly British or not.’

He did not continue the thought and the Patterer prodded him. ‘I fail to follow you.’

Rossi’s look was distant. Then he smiled thinly. ‘Never mind. Just rejoice that I am the very model of a colonial civil servant, British Army officer – and royal spy. For which reasons,’ he added, ‘I will allow you more acceptable citizens to inquire of the missing wordsmith within.’

They had reached Gloucester Street and the Captain was pointing to St Patrick’s Inn. ‘You two go in – I will seek refuge in yon hostelry.’ He nodded at the Lord Wellington, opposite. ‘It’s patently more amenable to Englishmen.’

Dunne and William King smiled. Rossi, who was still, on the surface, a Corsican, with a thick accent one could cut with one of his constable’s cutlasses, was hardly an archetypal Englishman. And, anyway, despite its name, the Lord Wellington was, in fact, as Irish as St Patrick’s Inn, which was as emerald as Paddy’s pig. Not that this was a problem. For although the flesh-and-blood Duke of Wellington was of the Anglo-Irish Protestant Ascendancy, the winner at Waterloo was nonetheless a soldierly hero to the thousands of Irishmen who had taken the King’s shilling and fought under British colours. Dunne knew the Captain, old soldier as he was, would be tolerated. And safe. Maybe they’d think he was a Frog…

What made me think of that? mused the Patterer and shrugged. No matter. Maybe it would come back to him.

Even for Dunne and William King, any questions about Obadiah Dawks – whether addressed to publicans and patrons in the St Patrick’s Inn and other pubs, or to shopkeepers and passers-by – met with blank stares, sullen shrugs and denials of any knowledge. Their Englishness was obvious enough for one drinker to mutter at them, under his rummy breath, ‘
Erin-go-bragh
’ – and obligingly translate it for the ‘strangers’ into ‘Ireland forever’.

‘All that’s left,’ confessed the Patterer, as they found themselves in a certain part of Cambridge Street, ‘is the Hulk.’

He did not mean the gradually rotting wreck of the once good ship
Phoenix
, which slumped sail-less in the harbour, serving out its last days as a makeshift extra prison. Dunne’s Sheer Hulk, though also much decayed, was a tavern, yet a pale shadow of the hostelry it had been when Sam Hulbert had first hung up his sign ten years earlier.

Hulbert had also been a boatman for the fabulously wealthy Naval Officer, which also meant Customs Collector, Captain John Piper. Some of that worthy’s fame rubbed off onto Hulbert – in a most dramatic manner. The Patterer recalled the events of a year earlier, when the Collector, widely known as ‘the Prince of Australia’, had tried to end his life (at the same time burying accusations of incompetence, if not dishonesty) by throwing himself from his yacht at the Heads. Sam was one of the crew that jumped in and saved him. Now, Captain Piper was gone, retired to his country estate, Hulbert was no longer mine host, and the Sheer Hulk had a completely different crew.

The Hulk certainly had a colourful clientele, the Pieman and the Patterer agreed as they stepped from the sunlit street into the taproom. There was a long bar against one wall, with rough tables and benches ranged against the others. Ragged civilians, tanned men who must be sailors and some soldiers drank and talked or played cards, all by the light of sputtering candles.

A small woman with no teeth sang loudly, to the accompaniment of a fiddle scratched by a string bean of a man whose trouser legs were too short, showing scars and scabs left on his ankles by chafing prison leg-irons. A giant islander, perhaps an Otaheitean, danced with a young white girl.

The pub was a sanctuary for people unhappy with the trappings of relatively polite public-house society, which doubtless was happy to see the back of them.

The Patterer needed only one outsider – and he found him – a man whose difficult life now left him no inclination for political or cultural considerations. Survival was all that worried Thomas Hughes, who had not been resilient or lucky enough to overcome the stigma of having been a hangman, and a bad one to boot.

Hughes bleated that
he
could – nay, should – have had a tavern of his own. Mr Redman, in the heart of the town, was supposed to have been a hangman, but the flawed Jack Ketch in the Sheer Hulk wasn’t sure if that was true. He suspected it was just malicious gossip. Anyway, as some retired executioners in Britain appeared to have done, he would call his pub the Help the Poor Struggler, a reference to the time-honoured tradition of a hangman being merciful in his duty and dragging down on the legs of a slowly choking victim to break their neck.

Therein lurked the problem that had destroyed his career and way of life. The days of simply ‘turning off’ – kicking away a ladder under a condemned man or driving away a cart, either way leaving the prisoner strangling on the gibbet – were doomed.

The newfangled ‘drop’ system required an executioner to ensure mathematically the instant success of the hanging by relating the distance of fall to the body’s height and weight. Too short a rope and the subject was slowly strangled, too long and the head was in danger of being ripped off.

It was most unfair, he moaned. How was an unlettered cove supposed to know, for instance, that a man (or woman) weighing 142 pounds and standing five feet and four inches tall needed a long drop of seven feet and nine inches to make the falling body break at the third cervical vertebra? After all, no one expected a scourger to know that his ‘cat’ should have a handle twenty inches long and cord tails each thirty-one inches. It was all bullshite!

So, he found it hard to find a friendly nod or even nourishment, let alone lodgings and employment. The
habitués
of the Sheer Hulk were less censorious – and then, today, there were these two friendly fellers who bought him a bottle and gave him money for a feed. And all he had to do was tell them the whereabouts of that scribbler from
The Gazette
who would get himself arseholes on rum, brandy, anything, and bore everyone in the bar witless with his mad jingles.

The Patterer and the Flying Pieman finished their drams of watered rum, for once grateful a barman had cheated them – they would need clear heads. They stepped out into the sunlight, to plunge into the Lord Wellington and hope that Captain Francis Nicholas Rossi had not met his Waterloo.

Chapter Twenty-nine

St Phillip’s church, sketched by Joseph Fowles.

The inky-fingered, penny-a-liner, Grub Street hack, Obadiah Dawks, according to hangman Hughes, was of late in the habit of hanging his hat (and, no doubt, hopefully his trousers) at the home of a young widow, a seamstress, in Cumberland Street. The house turned out to be at the southern end of the street, near Charlotte Place, which ran at right angles to the main road, George Street, and between the army barracks’ main guardhouse and St Phillip’s church.