The Ghost of Waterloo (12 page)

He
was
, however, sorely wounded by the Captain’s strange behaviour. Why had his investigation of the bank robbery gone off on such a strange tangent? If John Creighton hadn’t been killed, where would that new pathway have led? And why would Rossi have decided – until now, driven as he was by unfolding events – to keep secret James Dingle’s forced admissions about the ‘French’ mastermind? What game was he playing? Well, Dunne decided, whatever it is, I will not play it. For a time, I’ll go back to mine, he thought.

As he headed to the various newspaper offices to replenish his stock-in-trade, he determined he would give all parties at least a day to cool down.

So he first visited
The Gazette
, where he took care not to startle the owner, a disturbed young man named Robert Howe, who was still nervously debilitated after an angry reader, Dr William Redfern, horsewhipped him in the street over some perceived slight. Redfern was a man of conviction. After defending his men in a Royal Navy mutiny, he had narrowly escaped being hanged from the yardarm. Transportation to Botany Bay had launched him into a new and successful – if sometimes violent – life.

The
Gazette
editor, Ralph Mansfield, absent-mindedly blessed Dunne; as well as being a gentleman of the press, the editor was a gentleman of the cloth, a retired missionary. He had another earthly interest: he saw coal gas as the fuel of the future.

Visiting
The Gleaner
, the Patterer was dismayed to see that its editor, the Reverend Laurence Hynes Halloran, had so few advertisements that he could barely fill two pages. And much of the editorial content was made up of laments by Halloran on his own personal and financial troubles.

The Monitor
was healthy, but its publisher, Edward Smith Hall, was away from his desk – he was busy in court, defending a charge of defamation against a leading churchman.

At
The Australian
, Dunne stood aside to allow its co-owner, the turbulent lawyer and ambitious politician William Charles Wentworth, and his consort, Sarah Cox, to leave. Wentworth scowled when he saw the visitor, and his lady looked away: the Patterer was firmly out of favour with the couple since having stumbled upon a family secret. To compound the offence, he had publicly aired their strange story – how a parrot had pointed him to the pair’s love affair, one pregnant, literally, with drama.

He well remembered the hot confrontation as Sarah Cox’s mother, then his landlady, had angrily thrown him out into the street. It had been a sad scene, but he thought he had handled it well; with dignity, even panache.

As he passed by Sarah, he had looked intently into her beautiful eyes. What was it he had said that made her blush?

Oh, yes: ‘We’ll always have parrots.’

Charged afresh with material to inform and entertain anyone who would stop him in the street and pay to listen, Dunne renewed himself with a deep draught of ale at the Brown Bear pot-house on George Street (it reminded him sentimentally of the public house of the same name in Bow Street, the favoured watering hole of his beloved Runners, although there he would have drunk gin in hot water). Then he set to work.

His first human contact produced no result, for he simply happened upon a fellow pedlar, a chiropodist who was also wandering the streets, carrying a small stool and displaying his tools of trade: a scalpel and scissors. He had a flourishing business, particularly as the formless, ill-fitting ‘straights’ worn by many poorer citizens could cause constant foot problems. Dunne himself frequently needed to heed the itinerant chiropodist’s hoarse, shouted pitch: ‘Corns to pick, nails too thick?’

A journalistic wit at
The Gazette
had cleverly linked three news items. When the Patterer had found a worthwhile audience he gave them the first of these, which concerned the progress of Mr John Busby’s tunnel to bring water to the town from the Lachlan Swamps two miles east. His convict navigators, or navvies, some of whom had honed their skills digging English canals, had been working for a year, with the prospect of another nine to go. In the meantime, with the Tank Stream hopelessly fouled, townsfolk would have to continue to buy carted water at sixpence a bucket.

With the second report, Dunne urged his listeners to abandon the expensive postal charges of a certain coach line in favour of the
Gazette
’s rival delivery – which typically cost four pence for a letter to Parramatta sixteen miles west.

The third recounted that:

Now, the Patterer produced the journalist’s deft jingle:

To another group Dunne announced that Messrs Bones & Tyndall, of Pitt Street, had colonial porter at eight shillings per dozen bottles, or six shillings if the patron brought empty bottles.

And Mr Edward Hunt, of George Street, would ‘pay thirty shillings reward for the apprehension of Joseph Smith, his runaway apprentice, a native lad six feet high’.

During all this time, the Patterer nursed high hopes for one particular story, which, however, required a certain, rather specialised audience. It was of a medical nature and now he saw he could try to make his first sale to a pedestrian pacing towards him.

‘Ah, my dear Doctor!’ he cried, hailing Peter Cunningham, a ship’s surgeon who had regularly plied the convict route from Britain. ‘Listen to this intelligence from London: An interesting operation was performed on Hoo Loo, a Chinese, at Guy’s Hospital …’

‘I can read for myself, you know, Dunne,’ interrupted Cunningham, more amused than irritated.

‘But,’ replied the Patterer, ‘
you
will pay
me
sixpence – less than the price of the paper – hopefully even a shilling, only if
I
read it to
you
!’

The doctor laughed heartily and dug around in the fob pocket of his brocade vest for a coin, and indeed it emerged as a shilling. ‘Oh, very well.’

Nicodemus Dunne continued where he had left off: ‘The operator was Mr Aston Key and he was assisted by Sir A. Cooper, Dr Addison and Mr Callaway, Mr B. Cooper and other eminent men.

‘About sixteen ounces of venous blood was lost in the dissection, but the patient appeared to suffer greatly from the loss of that quantity, which would not have affected a European. Brandy was frequently administered, but failed to rally the action of the heart. Eight ounces of blood, kindly given from the arm of a gentleman present, were transfused into the dying man’s veins, but all proved unavailing, and the poor fellow in a short time expired.

‘The operation had excited surpassing interest, and crowds of professional gentlemen and others were unable to obtain admission to witness it, the theatre being full to overflowing.’

Peter Cunningham’s eyes were bright with interest. He nodded approvingly. ‘Perhaps it will be a commonplace one day, but blood is something we know damn’ all about. I don’t see that Chinese blood cannot safely mingle with European; it may just be that some, from anyone, may not be compatible.

‘We really don’t understand much more than they did 200 years ago – almost to the year, by the by – when William Harvey revealed the magic of the concept of blood circulating in our bodies. I used the word “magic” just now deliberately, because people then (and there are still many today) were superstitious about toying with blood and saw it as a dangerous thing to do.

‘That pioneer, Harvey, had to experiment in secret – and on animals rather than humans – for fear of being accused of sorcery.’

‘How is it done, transfusing?’ asked the Patterer.

‘I don’t know all that much about it,’ admitted the doctor. ‘I have heard of the blood being collected in a bladder then pumped by squeezing through a hollowed goose quill and into a cannula, so to the patient’s veins.

‘A French physician named Denis seems the first to have transfused a human, in the late 1600s. He gave twelve ounces of lamb’s blood each to three patients and only one died. Perhaps it was all chance, not design, but whatever the truth, interest since has been slight.’

Peter Cunningham seemed satisfied with the exchange his shilling had procured, for he smiled and clapped Dunne on the shoulder before continuing on his way.

Similarly pleased, the news-hawker decided he should certainly tell the bloody story to Thomas Owens – but … As the name came into his mind, a thought that had been nothing but a gentle eddy lapping at the recesses of his brain suddenly built up power and broke like a foaming wave on the beach at Boondi.

Was Owens, any more than Captain Rossi, to be trusted completely? For, considering the fact that Dunne and the doctor had never been separated from the instant of the discovery of the mysterious pouch in the corpse’s clenched fist until Rossi picked them up, how in heaven’s name could Owens have tested the contents and decreed them lethal? Yet the doctor was adamant about this, and that it was Bonaparte’s bag. How could he be so sure? Anyway, why had he not reacted to the mention of ‘a certain William Balcombe’ with recognition – even though the Patterer knew the name well?

For that matter, was Owens making too much of the poisons he had identified as having been prescribed for the prisoner on St Helena? That last doubt had been dangled before Dunne (although he had not remarked on it at the time) during an earlier news-reading that day.

This had been to a promising concentration of women near the stone column in Macquarie Place that marked the point of reference for all distances in the colony. The source of entertainment and instruction for these ladies was a description of a druggist shop’s most recently landed stock from London and Paris. It had praised Price & Gosnell’s renowned Essence of Bergamot, Macassar and Russian oils, and violet-scented hair powder.

Now Dunne remembered an unusual thing. On the long list of apothecary’s medicinal stock there had certainly been the Peruvian Bark (for the sweating sickness) and other names that he did not understand: what in God’s name were Lunar Caustic (an aid for women’s troubles?), Lenitive Electuary, Hellebore Powder or Japan Earth? Most importantly, though, he could recall mentions of opium in various forms – laudanum and poppyheads – all, he knew, widely used.

And, intriguingly, while there was no orgeat, there were emetic tartar and calomel. If they were so damned poisonous, why wasn’t half the town dead or dying?

Both Captain Rossi and Thomas Owens were his friends. Which of them was mistaken, or confused? Or lying?

As the Patterer was about to turn into Bridge Street and make for the main road that would take him to the busy Cove and more business, his renewed daydreaming about death and deceit was interrupted by a clear, familiar voice coming from around the corner:

‘Well, Miss Susannah Hathaway,’ murmured Nicodemus Dunne, ‘I’ll soon remedy that.
Here’s
a body coming to woo!’

Chapter Eighteen