The Ghost of Waterloo (33 page)

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

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-slavers, 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.

‘I suppose I knew for certain he was tainted when he killed, or at least helped to kill, poor Dawks at the church.’

‘He killed him?’

‘Sure, with someone else, whose identity I will know and reveal soon.

‘But what gave him away?’

‘He wasn’t alone when I was in the Cat and Fiddle with Dawks. His companion must have overheard our conversation and felt a threat in the journalist’s ramblings…’ He broke off. ‘Or, perhaps Dawks wasn’t as drunk as he seemed to be, and
he
heard something, from Con’s table, and had to be silenced.’ He paused. ‘Of course! Up until then, the journalist had not known of the theft of Major Mitchell’s map case.
That’s
why he had to die. The two men lured him to the church.

‘Now remember, as we saw and heard at the fort only yesterday, Con did not own a watch; he always relied on public clocks, almost as a perverse matter of pride. Recall, too, that he volunteered that Dawks had just left him at the bar at noon, “only minutes ago”.

‘Inadvertently, he was telling us that he had been in sight of a public clock very recently. It couldn’t have been the only other one, far away at Hyde Park. But how could he have seen the church clock – and its peculiar timing – unless he had been there, though he said he had not followed Dawks from the Cat and Fiddle?

‘He and another killed Dawks in the church.’

‘Another? Who? And what of the other deaths?’

‘Patience again, Excellency. All will be revealed if I may ask you to host a luncheon tomorrow of interested parties.’ He passed over a sheet of notepaper. ‘I have this in mind.’

Darling read the message:

‘I will have them printed and delivered,’ said the Patterer, ‘with your permission, of course. I take it tomorrow’s date will be suitable? Here is the guest list.’ He handed over another sheet. ‘Requests’, of course, meant ‘demands’.

His Excellency studied it and his gaze bored into the Patterer’s. He shrugged, then nodded. ‘Oh, and Dunne,’ he instructed, ‘no damned dago coffee, eh?’

Chapter Forty-seven

For what was left of that day and in the early hours of the following morning, Nicodemus Dunne made his final checks and adjusted the balances of the complex case – or, rather, cases.

With the murder of the castrato, Signor Bello, he had some loose ends to tie up – the exact ‘how’ if not the ‘why’ of it. On this score, Munito’s enthusiasm for his new human friend (perhaps he sensed he would be a guest at the Barley Mow) brought sartorial disaster and intellectual rigour, in equal parts. The excited dog leapt onto the fresh clothes laid out on the bed in readiness for the luncheon, smearing the trousers with muddy red ochre from the works at Brickfield, near the Bag o’ Nails.

‘Eureka!’ said the Patterer.

‘Arf!’ replied Munito, or, educated dog that he was, perhaps he had started to say, ‘Archimedes.’