The Ghost of Waterloo (27 page)

‘Did you do as I told you?’

The girl nodded. As this stranger directed, she had approached the well-dressed man pointed out to her in the Market Square, and had offered the small basket of fruit. The gift was well received after she had repeated her instructions: to say that it was a gift ‘from the Patterer’. She knew the donor was not Nicodemus Dunne, but, well, for a shilling, why should she care what games men got up to?

Not this game now, though. In the shadows of a stall the stranger lifted her skirt and shift and savagely clawed her thigh. She gasped and felt herself colour and at first did nothing but squirm. At least the ugly bastard did not want to kiss her. He quickly tired of his tormenting and only when he paid her for her errand did she react. She slapped his face, hard, and ran off and melted into the ebb and flow of shoppers.

He made no effort to pursue her. He knew she was some stallholder’s servant, and had made sure she was a waif, out of the Female Orphan School, not the daughter, sister, or wife of anyone who mattered. She had no one to tell, whatever happened.

Later, if he deigned to, he would find her again and get his revenge for the slights of the slap and the loathing look in her eyes. She had felt good and she would feel even better, with a broken nose or teeth, when he pleasured himself properly upon her.

Josiah Bagley, late of the 47th Regiment of Foot, now, courtesy of robbing a dead body, a gentleman of reasonable means and leisure, gratefully accepted the gift of fruit from the girl.

It was uncommonly civil of Nicodemus Dunne to reward him in this manner for his recital of the events that had occurred all those years earlier on St Helena. He only wished he had been able to help him out further by remembering what had been so interesting at the time about that blasted Shakespearean quote he had overheard on the dock as the Balcombe entourage departed. The answer stirred fitfully in the recesses of his mind. Some other sense stirred more actively.

Bagley was a greedy man. As a schoolteacher he had had an insatiable, almost fatal, appetite for small boys; in the army to which he was banished he had done more than his fair share of scavenging on bloodied battlefields – an ingrained habit that had paid off recently at Cockle Bay.

He also was greedy for food – especially fruit. How had Dunne known that? Oh, yes, of course, he must have mentioned it when they were drinking in that Pitt Street pub, the one where he had met the Patterer in answer to that notice.

The colony, despite its youth and general aridity, was surprisingly kind to European savourers of fruit. Good apples packed in straw made the long sea trip to Sydney from Van Diemen’s Land, but there was a seasonal local abundance of peaches, and grapes came from the Australian Agricultural Company at Port Stephens, up the coast past the Coal River, and were even grown at vineries in the thirty-eight acres of the Government Botanic Gardens, near Sydney Cove.

A summer favourite for many was the green-hided, crimson fleshed watermelon. Extreme devotees would first cut a hole in the skin, gouge a well in the pulp and pour in sherry, perhaps madeira, and steep before feasting.

A surprise to visitors was the ready availability of strawberries, which were perhaps the oldest introduced fruit. Pioneer Governor Arthur Phillip had brought seedlings with his First Fleet forty years earlier and they had thrived.

And now, for Bagley, a rare treat. Oranges. So rare, indeed, that he had never tasted one. Those in the gift basket were smaller than he imagined they would be – they looked rather like golden cricket balls, even smaller perhaps.

Where had they come from? He could only suppose that some rich man – Mr Macarthur at Parramatta, Sir John Jamison at Emu Plains, or Captain Piper way out at Bathurst – could perhaps grow them in a conservatory as some did in Britain. How generous of Dunne.

He looked around. This would be
his
pleasure, alone. He could not have someone he knew pass by, observe, and desire to share in his juicy good fortune.

He turned into an ill-lit empty market trading stall. He sniffed: ah, memories of his days as a poor man living on the streets. With his penknife he cut out a wedge of the fruit. The flesh was drier than he had expected and the pips were quite large and hard. He took a generous mouthful. There was a musty smell and taste, not particularly unpleasant, but enough to make him wonder what all the fuss was about. As was his fashion, he gorged on the whole fruit, cracking the seeds with his teeth and swallowing the debris.

One fruit was enough to tell him he did not much like oranges, but his greed overwhelmed his disappointment.

A second gobbled fruit was then enough to tell him, if he could have understood, that he was dying, quickly and painfully. All his bodily functions began to spasm, then freeze. His brain’s instructions to move, speak, see, smell, breathe, were all progressively ignored. Even that usually loyal corporeal servant, the belly, trained to reject unwelcome liquids and solids, could not make him vomit in time, and sufficiently, to save him.

Josiah Bagley, oddly, was back where his good fortune had started not all that long before – here on the refuse-strewn floor of a market stall.

Even his last received smell was a cruel jest of fate. It was the tang of the oranges in the basket near his head. And the old, familiar odour he had once wakened to: the reek of chicken shit.

‘How the hell can an orange kill you?’ asked the Patterer, picking up the basket with its remaining fruit orbs.

‘Wash your hands after playing with them,’ said Dr Owens absently, studying the body on the ground. ‘And don’t even dream of eating one.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because they’re not oranges, Dunne, although I admit one could be fooled into believing so. As was our poor friend here. He actually ate nux vomica, a citrus-like fruit from a tree of much the same name,
Strychnos nux-vomica
, common in the Spice Islands and thereabouts.

‘He died of profound strychninism, an overdose of, obviously, the poison strychnine. This can be extracted from the seed, or nut – hence
nux
– of the fruit. We take vomica from
vomere
, vomit. So, it is – in a nutshell, ha! – the “vomiting nut tree”. Its poison acts in a similar fashion to a nightshade.’

‘If it’s called the “vomiting” whatever, why didn’t he get rid of what ailed him?’

‘Yes, vomiting
is
a result of ingestion, but it’s not enough of an emetic to purge all its own poison. It soon shuts down what we are beginning to call the nervous system, destroying all functions, the heart and respiration. Medicine has moved on from simply regarding the
machina carnis
, the “body machine”. We consider now the nerves and the brain. The anatomist Thomas Willis gave us the new word “
neurologie
”.’

‘Where the hell did he get it?’ asked Dunne. ‘The fruit?’

‘God knows, but pretty well any apothecary here has access to the poison – in its end form as colourless crystals. Some small doses, very small, are often offered to tease flagging appetites.

‘But as actual fruit?’ Owens shrugged and his mind found a path similar to the one the late Mr Bagley had followed: ‘I can only imagine it was grown here, in a greenhouse – I believe Mr Macarthur has such an
orangerie
.’

Interesting, thought the Patterer. As was the easy manner in which Dr Owens again lapsed into French.

Chapter Thirty-eight

John Macarthur … wild colonial boy.

Jesus! thought the Patterer, another one dead. Poor, bloody Bagley – another stolen existence, another person who, alive, he had seen, talked to, pressed for knowledge. Not the soldier, shot and shovelled into Dawes’ Point, of course, not the robber called Creighton. But the castrato, Dawks, Bagley … would they be dead now if he had not been noticed with them, pursuing, in the first case innocently, whatever dangerous secrets they held?

And what had he learnt from them that was so monumentally revealing that a bank robber or a revolutionary – both, or were they one and the same? – felt the need to silence them?

Bello had never said who had alarmed him at the theatre. Dawks had thrown no clear light on the case, and on the vault invasion only perhaps implication. Bagley couldn’t put a finger on whatever was strange about a remark that had teased him on St Helena. And had teased him for years later.

But why hadn’t Dunne, too, already been assassinated? Just to be on the safe side, perhaps. Yes, it could only be because his progress on the case – cases – had to be monitored. Maybe, when he also was judged to know too much, his turn at the murderer’s hand would come.

In the meantime, the killer somehow knew that Dunne was still in the dark. The Patterer had an uncomfortable thought: he was being watched, and reported on – by a traitor in his tribe.

The jingle of harness, the creak of wood and leather and the squirm of iron wheels in the deep dust of the roadway alerted the Patterer to a coach coming fast behind him.

The liveried driver arrogantly made no room for the pedestrian. If Dunne had not heard the coach and moved smartly, he would have been run down.

Dunne recognised the equipage and its passenger and shook his head. No wonder! The face looking out aloofly at him was that of Captain John Macarthur, the immensely wealthy pastoralist.

He was known as a hard man – erratic, to say the least. He would not give a fig for someone like Dunne. He fought with all governors – he had been instrumental in bringing down William Bligh by revolt – and he was physically, chaotically violent. On his voyage to Sydney in 1789, he had fought two duels with ship’s captains. In Cape Town he had first suffered the illness that later came back to haunt him, rheumatic fever.

In 1801 he had insulted the honour of his commanding officer’s wife and fought a duel over the matter. He wounded the offended man, William Paterson, but escaped censure even though duelling was already illegal.