The Ghost of Waterloo (30 page)

‘I thought the Montgolfier brothers were the first,’ said Cornelius O’Bannion.

‘Same year,’ Dunne replied, ‘but they only sent up a sheep, a duck and a rooster.’

Ralph Darling coughed. ‘Can we move on?’

But the Patterer was undeterred; he seemed determined, for whatever reason, to impress his listeners with the power of flight. ‘In some battles, our old friend, Bonaparte, used tethered balloons as manned observation posts. He also, by the way, wanted windmill-powered boats for an invasion of Britain.

‘But there has been an advance since the birth of ballooning. And, luckily for our enterprise, Colonel Shadforth, of the 57th stationed here, believes we could build what he calls an “
atmotic
machine” – from the Greek word for “vapour” – lifted by coal gas, which is about to be generated for lighting our streets.’

William King shook his head in wonder. Was the tension affecting his friend’s mental equilibrium? Only hours earlier, Dunne had taken the Pieman aside and sought to tap his knowledge not of balloons, but of kites! He had seemed impressed by King’s dredging of arcane facts that revealed an event two years earlier, when a Mr George Pocock and a Colonel Viney harnessed two large kites to a carriage. The kites pulled it from Bristol to London, a distance of 110 miles. A year later, on a sixty-mile stretch of road between Reading and Gloucester, gallopers with the Duke of Gloucester’s coach could not keep up with another kite-carriage. But now, here he was, talking of an attack by balloon?

Dunne continued his flight of fancy: ‘I have learnt of how a young American man of mystery and imagination, Mr Edgar Allan Poe, hatched a plan – never realised – to drop bombs on land targets from a balloon.

‘I am inspired to complete his idea. We will build a gas-filled balloon and I – the passenger – will drop grenades as the
Three Bees
appears below me. Our envelope and basket will rise from opposite here, near Lieutenant Dawes’ Battery across the Cove, tomorrow morning at dawn. The machine is now being assembled, from every piece of suitable fabric, light canvas and cane we can find.’

The Patterer paused. ‘Should these efforts fail, I have a last, forlorn hope. A young “Indian”, who has great distance and accuracy with a football, will attempt to lob from the parapets below us, an infernal device primed to explode.’

The Flying Pieman, who understood athletic endeavours, said nothing, but looked at his friend as if he were, indeed, totally mad. Strangely, though, the Governor seemed unshaken.

‘Gentlemen,’ continued Dunne, ‘there is little more we can do here now – what is the time?’ He turned to Con O’Bannion, who was nearest.

‘Me? A watch?’ scowled the young man. ‘I’m a bloody convict. What would a charley say if he saw me with a turnip? He’d say that I’d fingered it. No, your honour, I leave watches to my betters. It’s looking at a clock, for me.’

The Patterer laughed. ‘Never mind, Con. Let us meet here just before the dawn.’ Most of the plotters drifted away and soon only Dunne, Rossi, Darling, the Pieman and Dr Owens were left.

‘If he’s so important,’ queried the Police Chief, ‘why isn’t Colonel Shadforth here?’

Dunne feigned surprise. ‘Oh, didn’t the Governor tell everyone? Shadforth has a company of 57th redcoats already marching to contain the French at North Head. Actually, of course, they are going most of the way by boat, making only the last stage by foot, for the element of surprise. The “convicts” are at Store Beach. Our men will land at Manly and move behind Spring Cove to catch our prey unawares.

‘Captain Crotty has another company, from his 39th Regiment, storming Garden Island from barges coming on all sides.’

‘Good God, man,’ Dr Owens burst out. ‘As Wellington said of Waterloo, this will be a hard pounding, let us see who will pound longest. It could be a blood-bath!’

The meeting concluded and Dunne alone began the long walk back into the town. He had arranged to meet Alexander Harris well before the dawn deadline. On the secluded path, a native accosted him. It wasn’t the vaunted young footballer. And it wasn’t King Bungaree again, or a compatriot seeking money or drink. The Patterer recognised not the man, rather the uniform he wore. It was a garish crimson and yellow coat of military cut, worn over blue breeches. A black soldierly shako gave the well-built man even greater stature.

Of course. He was a member of John Macarthur’s private, spearcarrying guard-of-honour, with which the rich grazier often travelled to show off his wealth and power – to prove that he had come a long way from being a corset-maker’s son. He hated the nickname that still stuck – ‘Jack Bodice’!

This guard seemed to be on important business; certainly, he had a closed carriage standing idle nearby. His voice, like Bungaree’s, was surprisingly polished: ‘Mr Nicodemus Dunne, sir?’

The Patterer nodded and raised his hand in salute. The man returned the gesture and, for a fraction of a second, Dunne saw a small nulla-nulla sweep through the air.

Then everything exploded, like Guido Fawkes’ night in Vauxhall Gardens at home, before the Patterer fell, without a splash, into a well of pitch.

Chapter Forty-two

When Nicodemus Dunne’s brain finally decided to swim back into consciousness, it alerted his eyes, but he could see nothing; he was in pitch darkness.

His newly awakened nose, however, told him a more confident story. He readily identified the slightly acrid tang of sawn and dressed sandstone. And there was something else: he smelled the rankness of a sewer somewhere close by.

His fingers confirmed the presence of stone, beneath and beside him. He reasoned he was propped against a cold wall and was sitting on an unforgiving floor.

He got up on all fours, even though his head had not stopped reeling, and began to explore this dank new domain. He soon decided that he was in a large room, the ceiling of which was clearly too high to reach. Halfway into his circuit he bumped against a steep staircase, guarded by a wooden banister. At the top, after nineteen steps, there was a doorway. He pushed gently against the solid wooden barrier there but it would not budge. He decided not to rattle the metal handle his fingers found; he was not yet ready to alert whoever might be on the other side. They were unlikely to be any friendlier than they had been so far.

Exploring down at floor level again, one wall, low down, provided a surprise. The stench of mud, stagnant water, urine and dung was strongest here, and the reason was clear and simple: there was a hole in the wall, letting in fetid air.

Dunne traced the space with his hands and tried to push his body through. Going feet first, his hips checked further progress. A head- first attempt ended with his shoulders wedged tightly.

Retreating near to the foot of the stairs, his groping hand collided on the floor with a new obstacle, something hard that was not a wall. His fingers traced the dimensions of a small wooden and metal box; he could feel the grain, metal bindings and hinges and the clasp of a lock. The chest was heavy for its size and proved willing to reveal its contents. The Patterer opened the lid and felt inside.

There were what he was certain could be nothing but coins, small but heavy. He took one out and smelled it. Yes, acrid, like money. He bit it and it felt as a sov should. A bitter, metallic taste? Sure. He slipped the find into a pocket.

He rummaged gently in a lower layer. These discs felt different from the start. They were the same size but were – what?
Softer
was the closest word he could think of. He picked one up – it smelt and tasted much the same, but it was less resilient to his bite. He added it to his other souvenir.

A swirl of unconnected thoughts suddenly settled and took shape, much after the fashion of the pieces in one of those picture puzzles where one had to make sense of a myriad of segments cut out by a carpenter’s jigsaw…

Think of it: a stone chamber … steep steps… the reek of sewage so close … a hole in one wall … the feel, the smell, the taste of money …

Somehow he was back in the Bank of Australia’s defiled vault!

A shaft of watery light crept down the stairway as the door at its head slowly swung open. The distorted silhouette of a human figure came to the top step.

‘Are you awake, Dunne?’ growled a voice that the Patterer recognised as John Macarthur’s.

‘No thanks to you, yes,’ replied Dunne coldly.

‘You’ll soon find even fewer reasons to thank me.’ There seemed an edge of excitement mixed with his captor’s usual angry tone. Dunne tensed.

‘All right, you’ve proved your powers. What in God’s name do want from me?’ His voice echoed in the chamber.

‘I want to know how you know so damned much about the robbery – you don’t fool me, pretending to read from the rags about it. You know who did it, don’t you? Well, it’s
my
money,
my
bank!’

‘My money too, John,’ There was another voice and the prisoner recognised the speaker: well, well, the Reverend Marsden.

Macarthur overrode him. ‘I’ll have you flogged till your backbone’s showing unless you confess what you know. And there’s another reason you’re here – this accursed pipe!’ His hand released a roll of paper and it floated down to Dunne.

He squinted in the poor light and managed to read it. It was one of those damned things Dawks had talked of. The writing was clear, with no signature…

‘That’s nonsense, Macarthur!’ he cried. ‘No one in the colony has anything other than the utmost respect for your wife. And I have only met her once or twice.’

‘Don’t lie, sir!’ raged his accuser. ‘You will pay for prying too much – and for your fornication!’

Jesus, he had heard of the man’s mad, misplaced jealously and his mania for money, and now he was seeing and hearing the frothing proof. Thomas Owens had once said that he believed such men were unbalanced in their animating psyche. Which meant? ‘Oh, that they have bouts of insanity,’ said the doctor. God, and I had to cross his path in one such mood.

Marsden was talking now, calming his companion. ‘I have, sir, a different measure, more subtle and still satisfying. I have in mind a holy inquisition.’

‘Capital!’ John Macarthur received the Reverend Marsden’s suggestion of an inquisition enthusiastically – and quite literally. Thus, he saw weaknesses in the scheme of things. ‘But we have no rack, no thumbscrews,’ he complained. ‘Where are there weights to crush the chest, an iron maiden with a deadly, spiked embrace, the
strappado
to dislocate limbs?’

Lord save us, thought Dunne, he sounds like a goodwife finding her larder lacking certain delicacies.

Samuel Marsden was amused. ‘Oh, we could not condone such things in this civilised colony, sir. But it does not alter my plan, which is to have, for our testing time, the hand of God instead of a temporal torturer’s. My idea is to conduct a spiritual and sporting contest to determine Dunne’s fate.’

The Patterer shook his head in wonder. They’re mad, of course, both of them, mad as hatters – who had a reason to be deranged, poisoned as they were too often by the mercurous nitrate used in the making of felt hats. Their body control and mind were lost to chorea, also known as St Vitus’s Dance. Sydney as yet had no St Mary of Bethlehem asylum, but Dunne believed visitors who paid a shilling a visit London’s Bedlam would be satisfied in seeing the antics of Macarthur and Marsden.

The minister continued to soothe Macarthur. ‘I put forward this proposition: I will ask him a number of questions – shall we say fifteen? – all from the Bible, for is it not the source of all knowledge and wisdom? He must answer ten questions correctly. If you’ – he now remembered to include the prisoner in the conversation – ‘fail, Mr Macarthur can deal with you, ah, appropriately.’

‘And if I succeed?’ Dunne called up the stairs.

‘Then,’ Marsden’s voice boomed, ‘we will consider it to be a divine judgement. We will believe you told the truth. And we will let you go – after a suitable period of incarceration down there to reflect on your many other sins, of course. No one may come for days. At least.’

And in the meantime, Dunne thought,
my
plans to repel the French invaders are also locked away!