The pennies of bored and lounging soldiers earned them the news that a terrier at Brickfield village had killed sixty rats in one minute and that, in pugilistic news, “Three regular pitched battles took place, one for fifteen pounds, the second for ten pounds and the third for five pounds. All the parties were prisoners of the Crown who, together with seven others looking on in a like situation, were sentenced half for ten days in the cells on bread and water and the remainder for fourteen days on the mill.”
Boos at these punishments turned to laughter when the soldiers next heard how Sarah Lackaday, “With locks disheveled, and fire in her eyes, threatening destruction to the whole of the police posse, a strong party of whom were put into requisition to put her at the bar. The charge against her was insolence and being excessively liberal in the use of her muscle to her fellow servants and mistress …” She was sentenced to “one month of the factory, where an attempt would be made to reduce her strength like Sam-son, by having her locks shorn off.”
Their fun was interrupted by the sudden arrival of one of Rossi’s uniformed men, who dragged Nicodemus Dunne out of earshot of the curious soldiers.
“The captain wants you, urgent like,” he said excitedly. “He said to tell you that there’s been another one!”
CHAPTER FIVE
It is evident that we are hurrying onward to some exciting knowledge—some never-to-be imparted secret, whose attainment is destruction.
—Edgar Allan Poe, “MS. Found in a Bottle” (1833)
T
HE POLICEMAN LED DUNNE TO THEIR DESTINATION, THE
NEW World
office. It was off the beaten track, near the Judge’s House, on the better side of Kent Street, which ran behind the barracks.
Dunne had never visited the
New World
before, with good reason: it had yet to publish its first number. When he arrived, he soon realized there would be no new paper any time soon, if ever. From the outside, the building looked like a smoldering ruin. Most of the hardwood shingled roof had caved in, leaving only the stone-and-brick walls standing.
Captain Rossi stepped gingerly through the doorway to greet Dunne, who had pushed through a line of gawkers being held back by constables. Inside, surprisingly, part of the large open press room had remained relatively untouched by the flames. The fire had died down once the fuel of paper and roof batting was exhausted.
In one corner of the room stood a metal press similar to the one Dunne had seen at
The Gazette
. But that thought left the patterer’s mind when, through the smoke and dust, he made out what was sitting on the exposed press bed and what, apparently, had taken the full pressure of the machine’s powerful jaws.
It was what was left of a human head. An exploded human head.
Dunne gagged; it took him a major effort not to vomit on the floor. He had seen plenty of men and women die on the ship that had carried its cargo of convicts, including him. And violent death was a commonplace in the colony. Locals were used to seeing dangling hanged bodies, once eight in a row, over the walls of the George Street jail. But this, this thing, was the worst he had ever seen, a catastrophe of ruined bone and scattered, bloodied tissue. He turned away, shaking.
“Here’s the rest,” said Rossi quietly, pointing to the floor in the shadowy corner behind the press.
The headless body lay sprawled on its belly, arms and legs splayed. Dunne had never seen so much blood.
Rossi seemed calm as he asked, “How can you fit a head under the press?”
“Yes, well,” said Dunne, collecting himself, “the assembly of type normally sits on the bed and then there’s only room, between this type and the descending mechanism, for a padded frame and the paper about to receive the impression. But, if you haven’t placed any type form or paper frame, or any other paraphernalia between the bed and the downward thrust—well, there must be just enough room for a head. Any locksmith will tell you that a human body can be squeezed through a window open no more than six inches. Just ask any of the thousands of burglars here.”
Rossi held up his hands in mock surrender. “I didn’t know you understood so much about printing.”
Dunne smiled wanly, starting to feel less queasy. “You don’t frequent newspaper offices without learning a little. And you should know, Monsieur, that on arrival I was assigned to
The Gazette
—before the outdoor life called.”
Rossi nodded and turned his attention back to the body. “The decapitation was a clean cut. How? Knife? Sword? It’s too neat for an axe.”
The patterer looked around what was left of the composing room. Near the press stood a guillotine for cutting paper to size. “There.” He pointed. “That blade would do the job as well as any in the Terror. And, judging by the blood around it, it did. But, Captain, the burning question—if you’ll pardon my lapse in taste—is, who is our victim?”
They steeled themselves to look more closely at the shattered remains. Once the head had been eased from the maw of the press, they could see that the face was blanched from loss of blood but still showed hints of a leathery tan. The long hair was drawn back into a pigtail tied with a black lace ribbon. Dunne examined the head carefully, especially the right cheek and temple.
When they turned over the body, they found it was dressed in a shabby linen jacket over a cotton shirt. The trousers were of a rough weave and the chest-high linen apron was soiled with black drops and smears. All the clothes were otherwise clean, apart from where gouts of blood had fouled them. The boots, although well worn and often repaired, were clean and polished.
Rossi pointed to the apron and the corpse’s blackened fingers. “A printer?”
“Most certainly,” the patterer agreed. “But he was also once—and not too long ago—a soldier.”
At Rossi’s raised eyebrows, Dunne pointed to the victim’s face. “What is left of the right temple and cheek is heavily pocked with deeply ingrained black specks. A soldier can never rid himself of the tiny powder burns and spots he gets there from firing a musket. I’d also wager that his teeth are blackened from biting cartridges. And the boots are army issue and kept in good order from habit.”
Their conversation was interrupted by the arrival of two constables carrying a litter and a sheet of canvas. They were to remove the remains to the hospital in Macquarie Street for examination.
“If this is connected to the other murder and our murderer
is
deranged,” mused Rossi, “is it possible he’s left another message for us?”
The fire had spared no scrap of paper that might have offered a clue.
“Let’s see what he might have been working at,” said the patterer. “It’s a forlorn hope, I know, but it may give us something.”
There were no complete page forms of typesetting, as far as Dunne could see. Type was usually so scarce that any page had to be broken up as soon as it was printed and the characters distributed for use again. But then Rossi called out to Dunne; all he could find that looked like new work was a narrow and shallow metal tray—a galley—part-filled with lines of type.
“Can you read what the type says?” asked Dunne.
Rossi stood facing the open end of the unfinished galley. “I can’t really make much of it.” He bent closer and squinted. “It’s gibberish to me. My eyes aren’t what they used to be … But wait, the last line is clearer, after a fashion.” He produced a quizzing glass. “It says, no, I give up. It just seems to say ‘exobus SISSE.′ Latin, perhaps?”
Any further discussion was halted by two new arrivals, who suddenly burst into the ruined room. The first was a short elderly man in clerical dress. He was followed by a figure who took all Dunne’s attention.
It was a very young and very beautiful woman. She was tiny but perfectly formed—as far as the patterer could tell through the barriers of her walking-out ensemble, which covered her from chin to toe. Her full, high-necked red dress was frilled from knee to ankle and its leg-of-mutton sleeves ended where her white gloves began. Her tiny waist was nipped in by a broad belt that matched the long ribbons falling from a large feathered confection of a hat. Blond hair touched her shoulders.
In a town starved of women, she was a vision.
The young man was in love. Or lust. He didn’t know which. Or care.
CHAPTER SIX
And when a lady’s in the case,
You know, all other things give place.
—John Gay,
Fables
(1727)
R
ELUCTANTLY TEARING HIS ATTENTION FROM THE FAIR NEWCOMER′S solemn, handsome face, Nicodemus Dunne recognized the man as Laurence Hynes Halloran, publisher of
The Gleaner
.
From what the patterer could gather, Dr. Halloran had been an academic and schoolmaster in England and a chaplain in the Royal Navy at Trafalgar. In 1818, it seemed, his respectability had suffered a setback when he received seven years for forgery. On regaining his freedom he had opened first a school then a newspaper.
“Rossi … Dunne!” he said, seeming flustered. “Well, gentlemen. This is a pretty pickle. My dear, should you be here? All this, ah, blood …” At this he shooed his lovely companion out the door, even though she had not seemed at all distressed.
Halloran waved as she departed then turned back to Dunne and Rossi. “Goodness, my manners … that was Miss Rachel Dormin. She earns her living as a seamstress, but has evinced an interest in the workings of our colonial society at all levels and I have attached her to our intelligence-gathering enterprise. I believe in equal opportunity for the genders, you know.”
He gestured defensively, as if expecting an attack from the other, less-enlightened males. When none was forthcoming he came back to the matter at hand. “This is terrible, terrible. I heard the news from one of your men.”
“Do you know who the poor fellow is?” asked Rossi.
“But of course! He must be Will Abbot, the printer and publisher of the
New World
. I helped him to set up his endeavor.”
“You would help a rival?”
“Of course. It was my Christian duty.”
“Was he a free man?” asked Dunne.
“Naturally. He was an old soldier with an honorable discharge.”
“Do you perhaps know his regiment?”
“As it happens, I do. I believe it was our own 57th.”
At this, Rossi and the patterer exchanged glances, then Dunne went off on what seemed to Halloran to be a tangent: “Doctor, you are a man of erudition. How or where would we find out about an arcane piece of Hebraism, something that appears to be a cipher perhaps?”
The publisher preened himself. “Why, sir, it may sound immodest but you may do no better than ask my good self. I have deeply studied Hebraic lore and indeed did mission work among Jewish people in the East End of London.”
“Well, sir,” said Dunne, “what or who is a
zuzim
?”
“Ah,” replied Halloran. “Are you familiar with this popular rhyme, which only the other day I heard some children in the street reciting?
This is the man all tattered and torn,
That kissed the maiden all forlorn,
That milked the cow with the crumpled horn,
That tossed the dog,
That worried the cat, that killed the rat …
That dwelt in the house that Jack built.
“Et cetera. Well, your mention of the word
zuzim
brings to mind that in a similar vein there is a Hebrew parable. It goes, in essence, if my memory serves me right:
Then came the Most Holy, blessed be He, and slew,
The angel of death who had slain,
The slaughterer who had slaughtered,
The ox which had drunk,
The water which had extinguished,
The fire which had burned,
The staff which had smitten,
The dog which had bitten,
The cat which had devoured,
The kid which my father had bought for two
zuzim.”
Dr. Halloran paused, pleased with his performance; then added, “The sainted Isaac Newton had the right of it when he wrote, as you will doubtless recall,
′Actioni contrarium semper et aequalem esse reactionem
.’ ”
Rossi looked blankly uncomfortable, but Dunne surprised both his companions (and perhaps even the shades of his childhood teachers) by nodding and saying, “Yes, I see, ‘to every action there is always opposed an equal reaction.’ ”
“Indeed,” said Halloran enthusiastically. “The Hebrew verse simply means that life is a chain.”
Dunne nodded. “And there seems to be a running theme of retribution. Be that as it may, would I be correct in thinking that two
zuzim
are worth about a halfpenny?” The meaning of the coin in the governor’s letter had constantly nagged him.