by Robin Adair
‘Of course, damn his eyes, a fellow from The Times was there and he scooped me.’
‘He did what to you?’ queried Dunne.
‘Well,’ replied Dawks. ‘He fished the parcel out of the water with his hat – scooped it up like a fish. Back in Printing House Square and the rest of Grub Street the word gained currency and, so, when one is outmanoeuvred for intelligence by a rival, one is said to have been “scooped”.’ He shrugged. ‘Well, at least I’m famous for something.
‘Any old road, on 22 June The Times had the story of the ages. I can still remember the opening words…’ He shook his head but continued faultlessly: ‘ “The attack succeeded in every point, the enemy was forced from his position on the heights, and fled in the utmost confusion…” And I had lost it!’ As tears welled in the journalist’s eyes and his voice shook, the Patterer looked away, touched by his pain.
The pressman sniffed noisily, drank deeply and continued. ‘And then, in ’26, I wrote a squib for The Times, that Wellington had taken his good friend, Mrs Arbuthnot, to a masquerade ball dressed as a man. Mrs A. complained that she had, in fact, worn a costume as Mary Queen of Scots. The Peer threatened to sue the editor, Thomas Barnes, and I was dismissed. Again.
‘Our Gracious King did for me, too. Do you know what a pipe is? Not the tobacco one, the agitator’s pipe?’
Dunne did know that those pipes were pamphlets, usually handwritten and in doggerel. They were anonymous and scandalous and, by tradition, rolled up (hence their name) and widely distributed, tucked into public places where they would be readily found.
They were popular in the colony as well as in London. An earlier Governor, Philip Gidley King, yet another among many an adversary of Captain John Macarthur, had suffered greatly from attacks in pipes. A notorious one read:
Dejected, here forlorn, by all despised.
Of every human turpitude possest,
He sinks beneath those sins to none disguised,
A wretch, to whom all pity is bereft.
Even when the Governor was recovering from illness, a tormentor wrote:
… Te Deum sing,
Escaped from death and gibbet
Is our King.
‘Yes, yes, I know about pipes,’ said the Patterer, ‘but what are they to do with your troubles?’ He wished the man, who was fast becoming maudlin, would get down to brass tacks – and gold and silver ones, too.
But, no, Dawks rambled on. ‘You also know about limericks, the verses?’ The Patterer nodded with a sigh. Yes, he knew the popular entertainments, usually five lines of improbable event and innuendo. They had begun lusty life as cheeky songs composed on the march by bored Irish soldiers, hence their name.
‘A jealous gentleman paid me to write one, to go into a pipe,’ said the journalist. ‘It was against the King’s mistress, Lady Conyngham – what was I thinking of? – who was rumoured to be receiving special lessons in the arts of mounting and jumping from her riding master; and she was famed for her breasts, which she flaunted scandalously.’ He cleared his throat and recited:
‘I’m undone!’ – Mistress Lowbodice swoons,
And her titties appear, like full moons.
Her horse-master heeds calls
For remount in his falls,
And attacks, like a troop of dragoons.
‘I was unmasked as the author and self-preservation suggested that exile in Botany Bay was the wisest course.’
The Patterer’s patience had evaporated. ‘That’s all very interesting, I’m sure, but I want to know what you meant in your report on the bank robbery: why it was a wise move by the thieves to leave the plate and the sovereigns.’
A cunning look crossed Dawks’s face. ‘So would a lot of other people, I am sure.’ He tossed down the freshly filled glass before him. ‘I know something that could be very valuable, and dangerous, yes. So for that reason, and because you and I are together in almost the same line of business, perhaps I should give you a clue, free.
‘The answer to your question is not so much what, but who. And the monks and friars know all.
Dunne was baffled. ‘Who “knows all”?’
Dawks focused with difficulty. ‘I’m an inky-fingered scribbler. Indeed, you shall have a limerick of your own, a valuable verse. Yes, why not? I’ll write out the matter for you now.’
He fumbled in his pockets and produced a crumpled piece of paper and a stubby pencil. Drunk though he was, he wrote deftly and handed the sheet to his companion, who read the beautiful copperplate script aloud:
‘The monks and friars give their views
On gold and silver clews.
The secret’s free
For all to see –
Where I have stabbed the gnus.’
But, before the Patterer could question the meaning, if indeed there was one, the opportunity was lost. Suddenly Dawks’s eyes glazed and he flopped across the table and began to snore. Vigorous shaking failed to rouse him.
I must let Rossi hear more from the journalist, Dunne decided. And if this mountain of mystery can’t go to Mahomet, then Captain Mahomet must come here. He turned away from the unconscious man. ‘Cornelius, lad, will you keep an eye on him until I return shortly?’
‘With pleasure, your honour,’ said the Irishman cheerily.
The Patterer headed back south along George Street, for the Police Office at the marketplace.
Chapter Twenty-seven
’Tis like the howling of Irish wolves against the moon.
– William Shakespeare, As You Like It (1599)
When Nicodemus Dunne, leading Captain Rossi and the Flying Pieman, returned to the Cat and Fiddle taproom, the inebriated bard had flown.
The rum bottle was gone, too. The only reminder of the recent rendezvous was the continued presence of Cornelius O’Bannion. He was alone now and embarrassed at having to explain that the journalist had apparently woken abruptly from his drunken daze, charged out of the bar and disappeared. At noon, he volunteered, only minutes ago.
‘How did he give you the slip, Con?’ asked the Patterer.
‘I was in the necessary, having a slash,’ said the young Irishman scowling. ‘And when I got back, sure, he was gone. I looked outside but he was nowhere to be seen along George Street. He must have gone uphill – there.’ He gestured towards the higher parts of The Rocks.
Rossi hesitated, fractionally, as he digested this information. ‘Please God,’ he sighed. ‘Don’t let him be in the Holy Land!’
The Pieman, who was a relative new chum in the colony, frowned, so Dunne patiently explained the perceived problem.
The Holy Land, also called Little Dublin, was, he said, a common nickname for that part of The Rocks most favoured by the many Irish in Sydney. Oh, to be sure, there were some Mahometans along the narrow streets, and Jews had been there since the First Fleet arrived forty years earlier; but perhaps a quarter of the 2000 or so Rocks residents – men and women, free settlers, sailors, whores, Emancipists or ticket-of-leave lags – were Hibernian by birth, kinship, association or simply inclination. Even many of the soldiers who visited the knocking shops and drinking kennels were Irish recruits.
And the proportion was even higher in a certain part of town: there at least half wore the green. Captain Rossi’s disquiet, and the Patterer shared it, centred on the fact that if the man they were after lived or hid in the area from Harrington Street up to Cumberland Street, in particular the parts of these streets flanking Surrey Lane, and wanted no truck with outsiders, then the wall of silence would be unbreachable.
Dawks may well be a ‘stranger’, as the Irish called anyone without Liffey water, milk stout, whiskey or any poteen gladdening their hearts, but if he was somehow involved in the robbery he would be protected, and anyone nosing around and asking too many of the wrong questions might well be silenced forever. Dark, crooked alleyways, even tunnels, led from The Rocks down to the water and men could disappear, into the Cove or even press-ganged into servitude on ships short of crew
. On the other hand, if the journalist had simply stumbled on some clues, he could become the target.
The Patterer shrugged. There was only one way to find out and one direction to go: up, into the tangled tenements and onto the spine of the violent village, where life matched the hardness of its name, The Rocks.
The climb began to snatch the Captain’s wind – he was, after all, a man of fifty-two, more used to driving than walking. As William King and Dunne paused to let the older man catch his breath, the Pieman pointed to a narrow lane lined with roughly constructed terraces and tiny cottages. The pavement was uneven, in places it was simply carelessly hewn stone steps. ‘You can see why I don’t know this area,’ he said. ‘I could not wheel my pie-cart here!
‘And the people.’ He nodded at a man and woman, cheaply dressed and both smoking dudeens, short clay pipes, as they lazed on doorsteps, studiously ignoring the visitors. ‘They’re clearly town people; they could be from St Giles or Seven Dials, or any other London rookery. Why do they still call all the Irish here “croppies” when they clearly are no longer small farmers? And they pick at old scabs, old wounds.’
‘What prompted that?’ asked Rossi.
William King put a forefinger to his lips. ‘Listen.’
They obeyed and could now clearly hear voices raised in song and drifting from a building at the end of the lane…
‘It was early, early in the Spring,
The birds did whistle and sweetly sing,
Changing their notes from tree to tree,
And the song they sang was Old Ireland Free.’
The singers soared sadly:
‘It was early, early in the night,
The yeoman cavalry gave me a fright,
The yeoman cavalry was my downfall,
And taken was I by Lord Cornwall.’
‘That,’ said the Pieman when the last notes had faded away, ‘is called “The Croppy Boy” and was the rallying song, the anthem of rebels in Ireland in ’98. And the name seems to have stuck, even here. As have all the old animosities, on both sides.’
‘Bah!’ exclaimed Captain Rossi. ‘It’s officially a “treason song”, like the one hailing the bushranger – you know it, “Bold Jack Donohoe”. What that dirge fails to say is that “bold” Donohoe was a lifer from Dublin who started his career here as a thief robbing oxcarts because they were slow enough for him to stalk on foot – he had no horse. Then there’s “The Wearing of the Green”. Sing any of those in most other parts of the colony and you’d get arrested. Only Irish troublemakers – Whiteboys, Rightboys, Ribbon Men, Hearts of Steel, whatever gang it is – favour them.’
‘So,’ said the Pieman, ‘it’s all about sectarian differences, for an Irish community here?’
Rossi shook his head. ‘Oh, they wear their religion quite lightly. There’s talk of a grand church coming, but now they’re content to worship in their homes or at a small chapel. No, William, their real religion is their clannishness.’
Dunne had said little to the Police Chief during their journey. He was still smarting from the strange earlier snub over John Creighton’s secret role, but now he felt he should speak up. ‘They don’t have many options,’ he said mildly but firmly. ‘I mean that although perhaps half of the 16000 convicts here and many of the 1000 or more soldiers guarding them are Irish and Catholic, they had to wait fifteen years for the colony to have a mass or a Romish wedding. And even then masses could only be celebrated every three weeks – and under the eyes of the police.’
Rossi shrugged. ‘Well, they have priests now, and St Mary’s Chapel – that was the last foundation stone that Governor Macquarie laid, if memory serves me aright, in – what? ’21? And, about that first priest, Father James Dixon was his name, he was a ticket-of-leave convict, for heaven’s sake. He’d been involved in that ’98 plot, the one in the song we just heard, to raise rebellion in Ireland. They called it the Year of the French. Maybe Marsden was right.’
The Patterer preferred to think that the Reverend Samuel Marsden, a bully and a bigot who had richly earned the slur ‘the Flogging Parson’, could be right about nothing, but he patiently prompted his senior. ‘What did Marsden say?’
‘Flatly,’ came the reply, ‘that Irish convicts are of the most wild, ignorant and savage race ever endowed with the light of civilisation … His words. He blamed the church for inflaming the convicts here to rise at Vinegar Hill in ’04, you know.’
Dunne had not known about the parson’s allocation of blame to Irish clerics. He did, of course, understand that the insurrection on the fringes of the settlement had left a permanent dread in the hearts and minds of most town and country people, even if the scars were greater for the 300 rebels. Soldiers killed twelve on the spot during the brief battle and a similar number were hanged afterwards. Others were lashed or more closely confined.
The Patterer considered their own many problems – the bank theft that perhaps could loosen purse strings for a rebellion: one orchestrated, impossibly, by an evil enemy mastermind long consigned to memory and a mausoleum.
And there were too many murders. The crime was not a usual one, even for a society in which more than half the population were, or had been, convicted criminals. The intake of transported prisoners rarely included murderers, neither amateur nor professional. Killers in Britain tended to be cut off in their prime on a local scaffold. Similarly, there was no great influx of practised prostitutes: whoring, in itself, was no serious crime.
So, what was the Patterer to make of the case of the castrato, killed in an apparently locked room? Even there he considered a link, admittedly slender, with the broader mystery. For had not Mr Barnett Levey announced that the singer had been at the French court?
He was sure, of course, that the shooting of John Creighton was a key piece in the jigsaw puzzle. The immediate job was to find out what the journalist, Obadiah Dawks, knew about it all.
But, as he trudged up the slopes again, a nagging thought intruded. It was like the first twinge of a toothache, at the stage where oil of cloves may benefit, long before the coming of the roaring pain that could only be relieved by the wrenching of a strong-wristed quack (even, in the case of an obstinate molar, with the aid of an even more powerful farrier!).
He could not stop wondering now about the death of the soldier in the dawn at Lieutenant Dawes’ Battery. Why had the private of the 39th, who had not killed his sergeant, been shot and not hanged? Why kill him at all?
Dunne pushed away these worries. First, he would help find Dawks and attempt to build bridges with Captain Rossi.
Chapter Twenty-eight
Who are you running from, you crazy man?
– Virgil (70–19 BC), Eclogue No. 2
As the three men continued their climb into The Rocks, seeking someone who might know something of the fleeing journalist, Nicodemus Dunne drew alongside Captain Rossi.
‘I thought you might have been a trifle more sympathetic back there at our halt.’
The Police Chief frowned. ‘Me? Sympathetic towards whom? And about what?’
‘Well.’ The Patterer paused, instantly regretting that he may have strayed into an indelicate area. ‘I mean, your homeland, Corsica, was Genoese, until they sold it to the French. The brief British occupation made no cultural difference – and Italy and France are firm Catholic countries…’ He trailed off.
The Captain cocked an eyebrow and smiled. ‘So, you think that I may be a Papist, an idolater? But, now, how could that possibly be? Perish the thought that I would have ambitions to be a parliamentarian at Westminster, or hold other high British civil office – they’re all closed to Roman Catholics. But consider that military commissions have been unavailable to Catholics, too – and that I did become a captain in the British Army.
‘And, if gossips are telling the truth when they say that I was a special emissary for the King in his divorce action against Queen Caroline, then that was no job for a Catholic.
‘However…’ Rossi tapped his nose, ‘l
et us not forget that people can and do make adjustments in their circumstances. Consider how many of our reluctant convicts forced to go to church musters are certainly not Protestants. But they bend to the rules, as wise people do.
‘Perhaps matters will change. Politicians in London are, as we speak, deliberating Catholic emancipation. Until then? Well, we are all wise to follow the dictum the army has long used.’
‘Which is?’ asked Dunne.
‘Why,’ replied the Captain, ‘ “Don’t ask, don’t tell.” Anyway, my boy, the real test here is whether one is truly British or not.’
He did not continue the thought and the Patterer prodded him. ‘I fail to follow you.’
Rossi’s look was distant. Then he smiled thinly. ‘Never mind. Just rejoice that I am the very model of a colonial civil servant, British Army officer – and royal spy. For which reasons,’ he added, ‘I will allow you more acceptable citizens to inquire of the missing wordsmith within.’
They had reached Gloucester Street and the Captain was pointing to St Patrick’s Inn. ‘You two go in – I will seek refuge in yon hostelry.’ He nodded at the Lord Wellington, opposite. ‘It’s patently more amenable to Englishmen.’
Dunne and William King smiled. Rossi, who was still, on the surface, a Corsican, with a thick accent one could cut with one of his constable’s cutlasses, was hardly an archetypal Englishman. And, anyway, despite its name, the Lord Wellington was, in fact, as Irish as St Patrick’s Inn, which was as emerald as Paddy’s pig. Not that this was a problem. For although the flesh-and-blood Duke of Wellington was of the Anglo-Irish Protestant Ascendancy, the winner at Waterloo was nonetheless a soldierly hero to the thousands of Irishmen who had taken the King’s shilling and fought under British colours. Dunne knew the Captain, old soldier as he was, would be tolerated. And safe. Maybe they’d think he was a Frog…