The Ghost of Waterloo (4 page)

British Army’s Brown Bess musket, with its wicked seventeen-inch (43-centimetre) bayonet.

‘Going somewhere, are we, John?’ The target of the quiet inquiry whirled and squinted into the night gloom that shrouded the shoreline of Cockle Bay. He had been trying in vain to right an overturned dinghy.

‘Jesus, man, you gave me a turn!’ He laughed nervously. ‘What the hell are you doing here? Come to give me a hand?’

‘Why not, John?’ But the hand offered became an iron-hard closed fist to the temple, bringing the boatman to his knees and into dazed helplessness.

If it had been daytime, men swimming off Soldiers Point, behind the barracks, may have seen his distress. From dawn, market traders would go about their business, loading and unloading at the nearby wharf. Others, black and white, would be casting nets or foraging for shellfish, although these were fast being wiped out by the poisons spewed from the steam mill downstream, or the fullers and other polluters.

But there were no screams to be heard anyway. The attacker plunged his victim’s head under the water. Desperate snorts only pumped the salty liquid into his burning lungs.

Abruptly, the strong hand released its grip and the man called John reared up, hawking and gulping air. His hands clawed for his tormentor’s throat but found scant purchase, barely a wisp of what felt like fabric.

As he scrabbled, a blast from a long-barrelled gun bored into his chest, killing him instantly. An ounce of lead fired from fifty yards could blow a man off his feet or tear away a limb: this explosion was at point-blank range. The body cartwheeled back into the water.

The killer dropped the gun on the strand and splashed out quickly to search the man. He cursed as he found nothing he wanted.

Ashore, he paused only long enough to arrange beside the gun a collection of small, circular objects. Footfalls froze him and then he melted into the shadows.

Josiah Bagley jerked awake and opened his eyes. If this was death, he decided, then hell – or, more unlikely, heaven – was damned cold and hard, and reeked of rotting vegetables and chicken shit. Especially chicken shit.

Bagley slowly came to remember the reason for the cold and the stench. Of course. He had been sleeping off a bellyful of cheap rum in a filthy stall at the town markets. He also identified the sound that had scared him into consciousness. It had been a gunshot. The army had taught him that. And he could tell the difference between the muscular punch of a Brown Bess musket and the snap of a Baker rifle. There was no doubt he had just heard a musket discharge.

The recognition of the weapon came hand in hand with a visceral wave of relief that he was still alive. They said that if you heard the bullet’s detonation, then it hadn’t killed you; that the balls or cannon shot had simply announced their presence and were safely past. For the men these missiles brained or gutted – the men beside you – for those poor sods they had come too quickly, as silent assassins.

He knew he should be able to command some science that explained the phenomenon; his drunk’s brain dredged up debris involving Newton, the speeds of sound and light, thunder and lightning … it should be crystal-clear. Before going for a soldier he had been a schoolteacher. The propensity of tutors for flogging their charges earned them the label ‘bum brushers’. His involvement with his pupils’ posteriors was more sinister: he had been sacked for shirtlifting and saved from the gallows only by taking the King’s shilling and becoming an infantryman.

Bagley now stood up in the market stall and shook himself free of the putrid debris of bird droppings, rotting fruit and old vegetables. He imagined he could pass for one of the poor wretches pinioned during the daytime in the public stocks and pillory near the market, whom jeering shoppers and passers-by would festoon with refuse.

He laughed wryly. In a manner of speaking, at one time he had been a ‘vegetable’! Back north along the main road, in the military barracks, were soldiers of the 39th Regiment of Foot, popularly known as ‘Green Linnets’ for the colour of the facings on their scarlet coats. Before them, Sydney had been guarded by the 3rd Regiment – the ‘Buffs’, with tan on their collars and cuffs.

Bagley’s old unit had been the 47th, whose jackets were decorated with white patches, likened to cauliflower florets. Like it or not, they were forever ‘Cauliflowers’. At least, he thought, he hadn’t been an 11th Hussar with tight pink breeches, a bloody ‘Cherry Bum’!

When his service ended he had worked his way to Botany Bay – he was no convict, no ‘government man’ – but fortune had not smiled upon him. He drifted between menial jobs, finding even those hard to come by, competing as he was with cheap convict labour. It was a hand-to-mouth existence, he slept rough, dossing down anywhere.

Not that sleep could continue this night. He did what good soldiers were always supposed to do: march to the sound of the guns. His curiosity tempered by caution, he slipped down steep Market Street until it petered out at Cockle Bay – few people were yet ready to call it by its new name, Darling Harbour, after the Governor, whom most thought a pompous prick.

As he walked he had a foreboding about the shot: guns meant death or dismemberment for someone. Grog and gallows humour kept most soldiers sane. Only the other day he had heard the Running Patterer, who roamed the dusty streets hawking news and small entertainments, tell a story to a squad from the 57th, the ‘Die Hards’. They had seen the darkly funny side to a recital of Mr Thomas Hood’s new verse, ‘Faithless Nelly Gray’. The Patterer had read:

The soldiers nodded at the jingle’s bittersweet jibe:

With the reality of having reached the water’s edge, Bagley’s reverie suddenly ceased. On a stretch of the bay lapping towards Captain Macarthur’s jetty, a boat bobbed gently upside down. In mocking imitation beside the skiff there floated, face down, what the cloud filtered moonlight showed to be a human body.

Bagley waited, scouting the area with his eyes. No unusual sound. No one. Nothing. So he carefully pulled the figure in and onto the narrow beach and turned it over. It was, or had been, a man. The bloody blossom and black hole in the shattered shell of the chest left no doubt that he was dead.

Near where Bagley had placed the corpse he found the weapon. He nodded in satisfaction. It was a musket, though of a style he had not seen for years. The French Army’s
voltigeurs
had used such a weapon when they skirmished ahead of their advancing infantry columns. A smooth-bore carbine with a barrel slightly shorter than that of the Brown Bess issued to redcoats, the carbine would also be fired by a French dragoon – hence its exotic (to the British ear), fire-breathing name:
fusil de dragon
.

Bagley frowned. What the devil was a Froggy weapon doing here? And what had happened? He realised he couldn’t loiter. Someone else would surely have heard the shot. A patrolling police charley could turn up at any time, and a penniless drifter could be a ready answer to a messy problem.

But before he left he also did the other thing that soldiers, the survivors, did on a battlefield when the guns fell silent and the smoke cleared. He robbed the dead.

The coat, shirt and trousers were fouled beyond salvage by water, blood and bodily wastes. But from a pocket he plundered a leather purse that spoke to him with the unmistakeable chink of gold. He also took a fine silver watch and broke a finger knuckle of the corpse to rip clear a signet ring that was engraved ‘J. C.’ He stripped the body of its sound boots. Now he could throw away his own battered ‘straights’, the cheap, formless shoes made by convicts.

But he didn’t take, or even touch the musket. That would have been too dangerous. If he were caught thieving, he could be flogged then imprisoned on brutal Norfolk Island … but a vagabond with a murder weapon in his hands would surely dance the Newgate jig.

Had it been murder, though? Or was it suicide? Either way, the strength of the blast could explain the wide separation between weapon and target. And anyway, just who was ‘J. C.’?

Bagley suddenly shivered with excitement. He was rich! No going back to that stinking stall. He would find an all-night drinking hell and enjoy himself until morning. Then he could bathe, be shaved and look to a future that would immediately involve a fine meal somewhere sumptuous, perhaps Polack’s flash London Tavern, where, he’d heard, the serving girls were as plump as the oysters and as soft as the fine white bread. Even better, perhaps a pretty pot-boy could be persuaded to extend the range of his services.

Before he left, however, Bagley pondered the significance, if any, of what he had discovered sitting in a neat pile near where the dragon gun rested. After close examination he left these odd items undisturbed. He had decided that they were valueless, even though they were coins…

Pieces of silver. Thirty of them.

They had searched, but neither killer nor corpse-looter found the small secret that stayed clenched in the dead man’s stiffening right fist. It was one of the rare times in thirty years that the object had been more than a heartbeat away from its rightful owner.

Chapter Five

Cairo, Egypt – July 1798

‘Are you sure you really want this, Excellency?’ the doctor asked as he handed his patient a small leather bag. It was sealed with a knot of a bright ribbon that extended into a long loop. The bag, little more than a sachet, was decorated with a tiny golden button depicting a honey bee.

The object of the deferential, if wary, approach was a stocky man whose curt nod matched the sour expression of his sallow face. He slipped the ribbon noose over his head and the bag rested on his silken stock and shirt front. He rebuttoned his green frockcoat over a badge of Barbara, the saint of gunners. So, even a general welcomed divine aid.

‘You are certain it will work?’ He fingered the sachet.

The doctor sighed. He was supposed to save life, not extinguish it. However … his fee in gold was good, and his patient was too important, even too dangerous, to defy.

‘Of course it will – would – work. In there is
Atropa belladonna,
also
Veratrum album
and
Hyoscyamus niger —’

The general held up a hand impatiently. ‘Wait! I know belladonna – deadly nightshade? But the others?’

The doctor nodded. ‘You know of belladonna because it is mydriatic – that is, drops of it in solution dilate the pupils of the eyes …and thus it earned its name: “fair ladies” have used it to beautify themselves.

‘The others here are white hellebore and black henbane, again of the nightshade family and also a stimulant for the heart.’

The patient seemed unconvinced.

In exasperation the doctor said coldly, ‘Well, sir, if you don’t trust me, trust your own eyes.’ He turned to his silently watching assistant. ‘Go, to the streets if you must, but get me a cat!’

His Excellency’s eyes, even without the benefit of belladonna, widened. The assistant scuttled out.