The Ghost of Waterloo

by Robin Adair

  As William Balcombe and his little party sailed away on that day in 1818, the solitary figure standing outside Longwood House attracted little attention from the nearby guard. This, by chance, was Bagley, the redcoat who had seen off the Balcombes. Now he was tired – this was his last sentry post for the day – and bored. What was there to see? The bicorn hat with its tricolore rosette was familiar and, while a chestnutcoloured frockcoat and blue trousers had replaced the prisoner’s usual attire of green coat and white breeches, the cut of the clothing was not remarkable.

  But Bagley did recall the tale of a civilian prisoner on the run who had left his folded clothes on a cliff-top and disappeared into the boiling sea below. The seething island gossip had soon tired of the story. Instead, talk now centred on how so many people close to the General were abandoning him.

  Even Bonaparte’s mistress, Madame de Montholon, the wife of his chamberlain, Count de Montholon, was going; leaving behind her husband but taking the child that Bonaparte (and most others) believed was his. The child would be christened Joséphine-Napoléone. The story was that the General was put out that Madame Bertrand would not fill the role left vacant by Mme de Montholon’s departure.

  Was all that, then, why the shoulders of the figure at the farmhouse now were shaking almost uncontrollably? Was it a paroxysm of sorrow? If asked (and he was not), the sole witness, that bored sentry, would have sworn that the General was laughing.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Sydney, Australia – Spring, 1828

  Come, let us take our fill of love until the morning:

  let us solace ourselves with loves.

  For the goodman is not at home, he is gone a long journey…

  – Proverbs 7:18–19

  Nicodemus Dunne reported the summary he had made of his findings to Captain Rossi in the Police Office at the Market Square. Even though the women’s holding cells were far away, across a courtyard, the men’s conversation had to compete with the raucous singing by a chorus of women convicted earlier by a magistrate of being drunk and using lewd and abusive language to a constable. They were awaiting transfer next day to the Female Factory, the stocks or the pillory. A woman would not be put ‘on the step’ – the dreaded treadmill, the ‘stairway to nowhere’ – for the gaolers’ superstitious male belief was that climbing the mill would induce menstruation. No woman had been flogged since 1817, but they could, of course, still be hanged.

  The singing was really quite harmonious and made much sense. It told how a woman prisoner had been seduced, or raped, by a guard in Ireland, impregnated and abandoned to carry the child, literally, to Botany Bay. Dunne had read similar popular, sad and cynical verses, called eclogues, on his newspaper rounds. This ditty lamented:

  She got ‘death’ commuted in Newry Town,

  For stealing her mistress’s watch and gown;

  Her little boy, Paddy, can tell you the tale,

  His father was turnkey of Newry gaol.

  Such was the racket that the Patterer and his interlocutor were finally forced to pause until the serenaders had stopped. Such quieting was often achieved by the threat, or application, of a bucket of water.

  ‘So, there may be something to what Dr Owens says about Bonaparte, at that,’ summed up the Patterer. ‘He found irregularities in 1821 at the autopsy. And Bagley’s story tends to back him up. I believe something unusual did happen in March ten years ago.

  ‘The strange offering then of a quotation from Shakespeare may hold a key. I must talk again to our “Cauliflower”. What was it exactly? Who said it? And I don’t mean which character.’

  ‘Well,’ said Rossi, ‘from Bagley’s evidence it appears it was spoken on the dock by a male – Mr Balcombe, Thomas, Grenville, or the manservant.’

  Dunne grimaced. ‘On the other hand, the Balcombes say they did not notice any such wordplay. Bagley, by the way, appears to have a good memory. He still recalls the name of the escaped criminal who committed suicide at that time. He was a Prosper Mendoza.

  ‘Now, that name got me thinking. It smacks of being Spanish, but not quite. So – and this is quite a leap of faith, and there’s irony there – what if, just if, this Mendoza fellow didn’t go off that cliff, but took the place of Bonaparte?’

  ‘Who went exactly where?’ countered the Police Chief, ‘over the cliff in his stead?’ He snorted.

  ‘No, no!’ said the Patterer. ‘He escaped – somehow. Not alongside the Balcombes, the only ones who boarded the Winchelsea; Sir Hudson Lowe, we know, checked them personally.

  ‘I think Mendoza may have been a Spanish Marrano, a Jew converted (to all appearances) to Catholicism. But you cannot convert an absent foreskin. Perhaps that is why Dr Owens’ post mortem “Bonaparte” was circumcised.’

  Captain Rossi stretched his arms above his head and yawned. ‘Somehow, we’ve had a locked-room murder and now we have an invisible man. You’re tired. We’re both tired. Enough for today. Go home and sleep on it.’

  Dunne nodded and left. However, with Mrs Robinson’s earlier smile of promise, he did not know how much sleep he would be having.

  Only now that he had discharged his duty to Rossi could the Patterer, at long last, return the Bonaparte book he had borrowed to the stationery office.

  Mr McGarvie had a surprise in store. ‘Knowing your interest in Napoleon,’ he greeted his customer, ‘I thought you might like to peruse this latest folio of coloured prints involving him.’

  There were indeed beautiful reproductions, including one of Antoine-Jean Gros’s painting of the General at the 1796 Italian campaign’s Battle of Arcola. The accompanying text noted that the subject was particularly stern because a favourite, Colonel Muiron, had just fallen, sacrificing himself for his leader.

  Another by Gros showed Bonaparte at the Battle of the Pyramids in ’98…but then there was a quite shocking picture. By Horace Vernet, it depicted the then-Emperor farewelling his Imperial Guard at Fontainebleau as he prepared to leave for his first exile, on Elba. The scene was dated 20 April 1814.

  In the sea of long, loyal faces worn by the uniformed French soldiers, one officer stood out – and his presence paralysed the Patterer. There could be no doubt. It was the familiar face of Dr Thomas Owens.

  Dunne was badly shaken. The doctor’s admission that he had faced – if only briefly – a dead Napoleon Bonaparte could be seen as surprising enough. But according to his story, that had only been innocent happenstance. A thought strayed: at the time of that admission, what had Owens meant when he remarked that he was ‘one of the relatively few’ men to have seen Bonaparte at Waterloo?

  The Vernet picture clearly showed Owens in uniform, a very wrong one, more than year before Waterloo and peace – it showed him as obviously a devoted disciple of the Devil of Europe.

  Dunne shook his head. Who could, or should, he tell? The answer, in the name of friendship, was no one. At least, not yet. Not even the Janus-faced doctor.

  ‘You look like you’ve seen a ghost, love.’ Mrs Norah Robinson was concerned as she followed the Patterer into his bedchamber.

  ‘Maybe I have,’ he replied.

  ‘I certainly have,’ she said seriously, then added, ‘but we’re not here for that, are we? Come, darlin’.’ They walked to the bed…

  Soon she broke his embrace and reached onto the bedside table for a small wooden box she had carried in. She took out and passed to him a prophylactic, a ‘guardian’, a French letter, a cock-sheath – so many names for a simple purpose. It was made of proofed and oiled silk and sewn with minute stitches. Men flush with money as well as ardour would pay a pound or more for such a barrier to fecundity and disease. Poorer people made do with one sewn from pig intestines.

  Pressing it back into her hot hand, he murmured, ‘Why do we want this now? I thought there was nothing to come between us.’ He waited for her throaty chuckle but it never came. Something is different, he decided. She had not previously demanded protection, explaining that both of them were clean and adding that sh
e was as ‘barren as Pinchgut’, the harbour island where they starved recalcitrant prisoners.

  ‘Trust me,’ was all she said, deftly tying the tiny silken ribbons that sealed the sheath. ‘Just trust me.’ She cried out when he entered her and when they finished.

  ‘Why did you change your mind?’ whispered the Patterer later, as they lay drowsily locked together, bathed in sweat.

  ‘For your sake, sweetheart,’ she said at last. ‘Women need them if they don’t want to get with child. Both need them so they don’t risk getting a poxy present from a partner. That’s why we can’t ride bareback any more.’

  Dunne was puzzled. She punched his arm and he felt a hot tear roll from her cheek onto his shoulder. ‘Oh, Nicodemus,’ she said softly, ‘I need you to wear a protector because I daren’t risk poxing you. I’ve had another man, and I can’t trust him to be clean. There!’

  He was silent, his mind racing. He had no hold over her, it was true. Perhaps his pride was hurt, but…

  She broke the stillness. ‘Don’t you want to know, care, who it was? Well, it was that bastard husband of mine. He made a rare visit home – oh, don’t fret, he’s long gone tonight – and he forced me.

  ‘God knows where else he puts it. He’s got a young cow at Parramatta in the pudding club and now, more than ever, he strays like a bloody randy alley cat. It was his right, he shouted, the law said so, the church said so …I begged him to use a sheath, to keep me clean, but he just laughed – said that would be like drinking beer through a straw.

  ‘And now he keeps coming after me again and again, just pops up out from bloody nowhere with his breeches on fire. I’d kill him, but why should I hang?’

  The Patterer broke the flow. ‘Are you…?’

  She laughed bitterly. ‘Diseased? I pray to God not, though I panic at every itch. But I won’t take a chance, for your sake.’

  ‘What will you do?’

  ‘I won’t leave here; I’ve done all the work. And I can’t refuse him. He’s my legal husband, we didn’t just jump over a broomstick, so he owns me. I just have to be a good wife. But I’ll still have time for you, Nicodemus Dunne, if you need me. It won’t be as easy or as often – I’ll always be someone else’s wife – but I’ll still be a mistress …What do they call them? Oh yes, “watercolour wives” … pretty, but not quite the real thing. And always hanging around!’

  She sighed. ‘It’s funny, you know. You men think you control us. You’re stronger. You can knock us around and force your will. You snigger and boast of taking our cherries. But the truth is that we are the takers. At the end, we take your seed and make something of it. Some of us anyway.’

  She cried softly and he kissed her lips and caressed her back to arousal.

  Christ, he thought, I should be helping her now, offering to cripple her husband, steering her to Thomas Owens, whatever he’s done. He, of all people, could help. Shit! What if they both ended up like the doctor, rotting from the inside, a slave to a murderous mercury purge.

  One last coherent thought, however, was what John Wilmot, the scandalous Earl of Rochester, was supposed to have said: ‘When the prick stands up, the brain stands down.’

  Not quite. When he mounted Mrs Robinson, another guilty, automatic action was to make sure those damned ribbons were tied tight.

  Chapter Twenty-six

  The newspapers! Sir, they are the most villainous – licentious – abominable – infernal – Not that I ever read them – No – I make it a rule never to look into a newspaper.

  – Richard Brinsley Sheridan, The Critic (1779)

  When Dunne at last tracked down the Gazette journalist who had written the robbery story, he found that the man was queer. Queer to the eyeballs. An alcoholic aura seemed to wreathe around his florid face, and each rasping bibulous breath pushed the effluvium further forward, threatening to envelop anyone within rum-laden range.

  Why do we say ‘queer’ for ‘drunk’, pondered the Patterer as he dubiously eyed the man he had hoped would be (literally, considering his profession) a font of new knowledge about the theft. For that matter, why do people say ‘mazed’? Was this because too much drink put one’s senses in a labyrinth? Now, ‘pickled’ made more sense, particularly to anyone who had ever seen a dead drunk’s corroded liver. A fitting phrase was ‘full as a boot’, not to be confused with that other pub expression, ‘to fill your boots’ – that last simply acknowledged that a drinker who was losing coordination would probably miss direction with his urine stream and foul his footwear. No, people said ‘full as a boot’ because a common old container of ale was called a ‘jack’. It was made, like a boot, of tough, treated leather.

  Dunne cut off his reflections – he had wasted enough time already simply in locating the fellow, who had not been at the newspaper office. There, the editor, the Reverend Ralph Mansfield, had readily identified the author of the article in question but had not been very helpful beyond that. All he would say, rather coldly, was that the writer, who rejoiced in the name Obadiah Dawks, was ‘out on a job’ and he did not know when he would return.

  Seeing the Patterer’s disappointment, he relented. ‘Someone might know if you go through to the ship,’ he said. For a moment Dunne, puzzled already by the editor’s unhelpfulness, did not understand. Then light dawned.

  He remembered that a busy composing room was often called a ‘ship’ – because, some said, of the companionship of the men working there; or, according to others, because in churches of old the nave was sometimes referred to as the ‘ship’. Printers had long associations with religious institutions, still calling themselves ‘brothers’ of a ‘chapel’. The Reverend Mansfield would have liked the link and pursued it.

  His visitor now watched the compositors, who, like black-taloned birds, stood and dipped feverishly into the wooden trays holding the tiny pieces of type as they assembled the lines. These gradually slotted together to make up the columns that would become part of the pages to then go under the machine that loomed in a corner like some strange winepress.

  A boy, eyes bright in a smudged face, with even his hair spiked into horns by ink – a truly satanic-looking ‘printer’s devil’ – knew where the errant scribbler had gone. For a penny he gave directions that explained the Reverend Mansfield’s cool detachment and dissatisfaction.

  That was why and how Nicodemus Dunne was now in the Cat and Fiddle, a drinking crib in George Street, very near the Cove. The past always chases even drinkers, he thought. The Brown Bear tavern nearby bore the name of his Bow Street Runners’ pub in London. And the one he had entered was a corruption over the ages of a pilgrims’ rest stop on the route to Canterbury – perhaps even Chaucer’s taletellers had stopped there – the St Catherine’s Fidelis inn.

  Well, his quest seemed over, even if the quarry was no saint, very queer and not very communicative at first.

  The Patterer looked around the taproom. It was more respectable than many, with the common arrangement of a servery on one side and tables and stools placed along the other walls. It smelt clean, helped by the tang of new-laid sawdust that carpeted the floor.

  He scanned the room as he ordered a glass of ale. The seating was only lightly filled but it still took him a moment to find the journalist – the small windows did little to lift the gloomy light and the occasional whale-oil lamp or candle in a sconce fought through the clouds of pipe smoke.

  Before he located him sitting alone at a table, Dunne spotted a familiar face at another bench alongside Dawks. It was Cornelius O’Bannion. His drinking companion was facing the other way, but the young Irishman answered the Patterer’s nod with a wave and a smile.

  The Patterer invited himself to sit down opposite the writer. He carried a pint bottle of rum from the bar, hoping the two shillings thus laid out would be rewarded.

  ‘What do you want?’ Dawks grunted.

  ‘To buy you a drink.’

  The bloodshot eyes narrowed. ‘And then what?’

  ‘A courteous word of thanks to s
tart with, and then a gesture in return: information.’

  The journalist belched and scowled. ‘Did His Holiness send you – the sainted Reverend Ralph?’

  Dunne shook his head and poured a generous measure into the empty glass opposite, leaving himself out of the round.

  ‘I don’t get on with editors,’ Dawks complained. The Patterer noted with interest that the drunk’s speech was slowed, but still clear and coherent, not slurred. ‘Oh, old Mansfield’s not a bad stick, but I know he only tolerates my habits because he thinks he can “save” me – and because I’m good at what I do. Most of the time. I’m no hack, y’know. I don’t get on with generals, dukes and kings, either.’

  The Patterer frowned in incomprehension and Obadiah Dawks elaborated. ‘’Twas the great general himself – wonderful Wellington – who brought me down. Twice. Although I own that one slap was my damn’ fault. Nothing personal.’

  The writer reached for a refill. ‘Ah, yes, 20 June 1815. How can I ever forget it? I was working for the London Gazette, the official paper. Sent down the coast, I was, waiting for the cutter to come from Belgium with the news from Waterloo. Not just the result; we knew that, but not in official detail. No, the big intelligence coming was a fair copy of the actual letter from the Duke himself to Prinny, the First Minister and the brass at Horse Guards.

  ‘They said later that it all went arse-up and all happened – rather, didn’t happen – because I was queer. Again. Well, it was bloody cold waiting and I may have dosed myself with too much brandy.

  ‘So, the cutter arrived and I was rowed out alongside to receive the magic missive and then rush it to London. When the bloody sailor tossed the oilskin package to me – I missed badly and it ended up in the briny.