The Ghost of Waterloo (25 page)

Dunne had an idea. ‘If I were to have the dead man’s grave opened, would I find anything to my advantage?’

Captain Fiddle absent-mindedly touched his eye-patch. ‘Nothing,’ he replied carefully.

‘Are you familiar with the nickname of the 15th Regiment – the “Snappers”?’

Fiddle shook his head.

‘In the American War, at the Battle of Brandywine, in 1777, they had powder, but ran out of shot. So they “loaded” without ball, and “snapped” off blank fire. It fooled the enemy, who retreated.’

Fiddle blinked his good eye and smiled thinly.

Dunne asked for the dead man’s service record and it was produced. He had been a good soldier. He had been particularly praised years earlier for rescuing under fire a young wounded officer. An Ensign Fiddle.

The visitor asked to see the travel orders for the six privates. A sergeant produced them. The army had paid the captain of the sloop
Fly
thirty-five pounds for passages on the 628-nautical-mile journey. The sergeant said stolidly that cabin passage was ten pounds, steerage five pounds. Dunne thanked him and the soldier left.

‘I see,’ said the Patterer giving the young captain a parting handshake.

Captain Fiddle nodded. ‘I believe you do.’

A meeting to cudgel brains, metaphorically speaking, was progressing slowly in the Hope and Anchor taproom. As well as the Pieman, Dr Owens and Brian O’Bannion, there was a new face, an old friend of Dunne’s, Alexander Harris, who described himself as ‘an immigrant mechanic’: he was a jack of all trades. As always, young Con O’Bannion was there, keen as a puppy.

One observation from the Pieman piqued the Patterer’s interest. He said, idly, ‘Your young artist friend Thomas Balcombe should be careful in the company he keeps.’

‘Why so?’

‘Well, he’s running with that dog trainer from the theatre – that’s all right, I suppose – but before the robbery he also used to associate with Sudden Solomon Blackstone and in Sam Terry’s crib.’

Did he, indeed? Dunne filed the facts away.

That mention of Munito’s master spurred Dunne to regale the company with the story of the clever pun used as the former friar’s new identity.

The Flying Pieman, who answered to that name more often than his real one, shrugged. ‘What’s it matter what one is called? Everyone has to have a name that suits them.’

Dr Owens seemed cheerful. The Patterer did not know how, or even if, he should talk to him about his apparently increasing Napoleonic links. But then, the doctor raised the matter himself, after a fashion.

‘You know, thinking of Bonaparte as we all have been, that he had a nickname, the “Little Corporal”?’

Dunne nodded.

‘Well,’ confided Owens with a chuckle, ‘he was also known as “General Liquorice”! Why? Because he had an inordinate fondness for
Glycyrrhiza glabra
, the dried root of which provides sweetmeats.

‘Just as I furiously chew lozenges of peppermint and such to sweeten my breath and comfort the unease of my stomach when faced with rotting flesh, he chewed liquorice, purely for pleasure. It is foul stuff, leaves a filthy mouth.’

He paused and made an aside to Dunne. ‘Come to think of it, the teeth I saw on St Helena were clean and white; well, yellow.’

The Patterer shrugged – maybe Bonaparte had a ‘Waterloo smile’. Who better?

Alexander Harris, who before becoming a free settler had been a soldier and a printer, was obviously puzzled by something in the newspaper he had been reading. ‘It says that one of the men arrested for the bank job, one Dingle, claims he was engaged by a Frenchman who called himself Colonel Moulin. If it’s suggested that a resurrected Bonaparte is the brains behind the robbery, that can’t be right! Boney would have called himself
Muiron
– after the soldier who saved him on the Italian campaign. That even was the name the old devil wrote and told Prinny he would adopt if he were allowed to go into exile in Britain instead of on St Helena.’

The Patterer recalled the mention of Muiron in Mr McGarvie’s Napoleon Bonaparte picture book.

Harris was not finished. ‘And it’s an odd robbery to start with. Why were the strangest things taken – and not taken?’ Dunne paid attention. Two other people had said that – the unfortunate Dawks and Mr Potts at the other bank. ‘It smacks to me,’ continued Harris, ‘of an Irish pendant.’

‘A what?’ asked Dr Owens. He looked at the Irishmen in the room, but both Brian and Con O’Bannion indicated ignorance of the term.

‘I don’t know why it has that name; it’s lost in the mists of time,’ explained Harris. ‘It’s an old military custom – used by both sides – officers and rankers. When there’s something to cover up, when men are undergoing close inspection by a visiting dignitary or senior officer, for example, a sergeant makes sure he always has some trifling mistake to correct. Nothing serious enough to merit punishment, just at most admonition. The visitor’s knowledge and eagle eye is reinforced for all to see, he feels good about it, and he excuses the “problem” and misses some real one. Everyone’s happy.’

He trailed off. ‘I sometimes think printers are playing “Irish pendants” when I find monks and friars.’

‘Say that again!’ The Patterer was urgent.

‘Say what again – weren’t you listening to me about the army’s fun and games?’

‘No. You said “monks and friars”.’

‘So I did.’

‘Well, where are they, here in Sydney?’

‘I need a walk,’ replied Alexander Harris. ‘Come with me and you’ll see where they come from.’ He pulled the Patterer to his feet and guided him though the door to the street, the meeting at an end.

Chapter Thirty-five

The Columbian press … Can a machine jog the Patterer’s memory of murder?

‘There are barely any priests in Sydney, let alone monks and friars,’ protested Nicodemus Dunne as Alexander Harris steered him north along George Street towards the Cove.

‘Oh, one may come across them any day,’ replied his guide cheerfully. And mysteriously.

Arriving at the office of
The Gazette
, they entered the composing and press room. Harris introduced himself to the master printer as a fellow adept, albeit a retired one, and asked permission to experiment with a typographical operation that would aid in solving the crime that had felled their writing colleague. ‘I have to approach the matter in that formal manner,’ explained Harris to Dunne, in an aside. ‘Printers hold their craft’s mysteries very close – no layman is allowed even to touch the type or the press.’

Accompanied by the intrigued printer, the visitors now stood alongside the press. On the exposed flat bed lay an already completely composed page of the newspaper. To the Patterer’s largely untrained eye, it looked simply a mass of upraised letters and numerals, all of which could only be reduced to any sense if they were read in reverse and upside down. Having been for a time assigned to the paper when he first arrived in irons, he could do this, after a fashion.

Harris began his lesson: ‘In the private language of printers, a “friar” is an area of the printed paper that has failed to take the ink completely, and is thus paler than the rest – or totally blank. A “monk”, on the other hand, is a disfiguring black blob that obscures the typescript. I will now give you a simple demonstration of what we are talking about. Bear in mind that, usually, “monks” or “friars” are accidental and not as pronounced as the ones you’re about to see. Yes, indeed, most times an errant blob of ink or a fleck of paper may be enough to do the damage.’

He then pointed down to a word in the type and guided Dunne to recognise the fact that it was in a police report and was the word ‘murderer’. He then indicated three other words on the page: ‘Sippe’ (who the Patterer knew was the bandmaster of the garrison’s 57th Regiment), ‘Lyons’ (an auctioneer) and the gloomy description, ‘dead’. All the words were in separate stories or advertisements.

‘Observe,’ said Harris. ‘I will send you a message, in cypher.’

First, he evenly coated the page of type with ink. He used what he described as the best tool for the job: an ink-covered dabbing ball made of leather and filled with fine sand for even pressure. What a useful thing humble sand is, the Patterer thought idly; it smoothes rough wood and even artists must use it: he recalled seeing young Thomas Balcombe fingering a bowl of the minuscule crystals.

He now watched Harris attach small slips of clean paper over two of the chosen words. Then, with a small spatula he completely obliterated with thick ink the two remaining words he had picked.

‘To disguise those whitened words,’ he pointed out to Dunne, ‘I could instead have battered the type with a chisel to create two blank spaces. But, of course, type is in such short supply that no compositor would countenance such a sacrifice. As it is, printers sometimes do run out of sufficient characters for setting. Finished work is always broken up and smartly redistributed – or “dissed” – for “sorting”. A compositor low on type is said to be “out of sorts” – which, some say, is where we get our wider euphemism for being unsettled.

‘But back to business. We will proceed to pull a proof from the page as it stands now.’ Placing over the type clean paper in a padded frame that absorbed and evened the pressure, Harris guided the bed under the heavy plate of the press. The master printer grasped the main arm and forced down the plate to make an impression. He released the pressure and Harris wheeled out the bed and extracted the newly printed page.

This proof looked at first glance as if it were part of a normal issue sold for nine pence. But a closer examination revealed two white patches and two black smears.

‘Why,’ demanded the Patterer, ‘are there such clerical names for what are, after all, very secular mistakes?’

Alexander Harris smiled. ‘It was a logical extension of monastic copying. William Caxton, the father of English printing, in the 15th century even had his press in the scriptorium of Westminster Abbey.’

Dunne persisted. ‘Even so, why are your “friars” white? As well as the White Friars – Carmelites – there really are Black Friars – Dominicans. Why are your monks black?’

His companion frowned and shrugged. ‘Maybe there are no whitegarbed monks?’ he essayed valiantly.

‘Anyway, enough monkey-business,’ quipped Harris. ‘We have a copy in which this page appeared, correctly printed. When we relate our altered spaces to the complete original, you can see that we have drawn attention thus: the whitened words are “Lyons” and “dead”, and the blackened words are “Sippe” and “murderer”. If it were true, it would be pretty unambiguous, no? In our secret tongue, Mr Lyons is dead and Mr Sippe murdered him!

‘I believe we’ll find that Obadiah Dawks did what we’ve done, encrypt a message on a page of his paper. He must have felt it was important, to have worked covertly.’

The master printer, who had followed the experiment with interest, had real work to do and made only one remark: ‘Clean up that mess before you go.’

When they moved into the editorial rooms, Alexander Harris pressed the Patterer about what other messages had been in the writer’s verse, apart from those about ‘monks’ and ‘friars’.