The Ghost of Waterloo

by Robin Adair

  ‘Never heard of her? They say she put a curse on the place. She was a French spy, y’know. And a cockteaser, to boot. But all she squeezed out of the King turned out to be a base son nine months later.’

  The girl shivered. ‘Don’t even jest about it!’ She paused. ‘But we just cannot be together.’ And she began to rise.

  ‘Can’t we, by God! This is being together!’ He dragged her to him, raking at her clothing, and pulled close the curtain, plunging the bed into darkness.

  Her protests changed to whimpers, then ragged moans until she suddenly cried out in pain. When he was finished with her, only her weeping broke the silence. Then she groaned: ‘What will happen if he finds out?’

  The man laughed. ‘My dear, he’s as mad as a loon – and no one can touch us – Hush!’ He broke off and ripped open the curtain.

  A figure was slowly advancing, soon shown by the aura of the candelabrum to be dressed in the house livery of a manservant.

  ‘Oh, sir! … Highness!’ he stammered. ‘I thought you were alone. Not…’ Then, even in the weak, golden light, his face lost colour as he saw, for the first time, the girl’s face. And recognised her.

  ‘No,’ he whispered. ‘No. God! No! I saw nothing, sir. I won’t tell, sir. I’ll be the very soul of discretion!’

  ‘Oh, I’m certain of that,’ his master soothed. ‘Of course you won’t tell, Sallis. Come here, man.’

  He gently pulled the shaking servant nearer. ‘Yes, you will be silent, won’t you, Sallis?’

  Even as the intruder nodded, the man quickly picked up the dagger from the table and drew the blade, bright even in the candlelight, deeply across the trembling throat, splitting it from ear to ear. The promises and protestations ended in a gurgle and a gout of blood.

  The girl looked down in horror at the twitching bundle on the floor. ‘What have you done?’ she whispered.

  ‘What have we done, my love?’ He laughed. ‘Think, sweetheart, I did this for both our sakes.’ He knelt beside the body and placed the dagger in the dead left hand, closing the fingers.

  ‘Details,’ he said conversationally. ‘He is – was – left-handed. I will say he killed himself. Perhaps after he attacked me? Yes, that may answer well, very well.’ He recovered the blade and calmly slashed his own breast keenly enough to draw blood. Then he returned the weapon to the corpse.

  ‘You.’ He turned to the girl. ‘You will go before I call for help. But not yet.’ He pushed her roughly back on to the bed. The blood-letting had excited him.

  ‘What are you – No! I cannot. You must not. Not again, I beg. I don’t want to!’

  ‘But, my heart’ – he pinned her – ‘I want to!’ He covered her again, ignoring the pleas.

  She smelled the coppery reek of the spilled blood and tasted it on the fingers that pressed over her mouth.

  Ah, he thought, after she had left, this was all a damned, double-damned nuisance.

  But, he had had to act to save himself. Her, too.

  After all, nothing should be too much trouble for one’s sister.

  Weymouth, southern England – August, 1800

  The Princess Sophia, fifth daughter of King George III, secretly gave birth to a son. She was not married. A retired senior army officer and his wife, childless, took into their home a newborn boy. The Dunnes called him Nicodemus. The day was 15 August.

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Sydney, Australia – Spring, 1828

  The grave’s a fine and private place,

  But none, I think, do there embrace.

  – Andrew Marvell, ‘To His Coy Mistress’ (1681)

  To exorcise old ghosts, Nicodemus Dunne contemplated graverobbing, if that turned out to be the only way he could scratch his itch about the soldier who should have been hanged, not shot. He wanted to know more about the body that had fallen into the grave at Dawes’ Point.

  If he did have to have it dug up, he would be in illustrious company. He recalled how Dr Thomas Owens had told him about famous surgeons who bought, no questions asked, bodies for dissection. He also knew that Mr Thomas Hood had wittily versified about one such client of the ‘sack-’em-up’ men, Sir Astley Cooper. Owens had happily recited it:

  ‘The body-snatchers they have come,

  and made a snatch at me;

  ’Tis very hard them kind of men

  Won’t let a body be.

  The cock it crows – I must be gone –

  My William, we must part;

  But I’ll be yours in death although

  Sir Astley has my heart.’

  At the barracks in George Street Dunne found the officer of the 39th who had overseen the execution. He had sought out the men who had been in the firing squad, but learnt that immediately after the event they had all been transferred to Hobart Town, in Van Diemen’s Land. The officer, a Captain Fiddle, very young for the rank, and wearing a black eye-patch, was helpful; he was well aware of the Patterer’s links with authority.

  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

  Others hide their secrets … by their method of writing.

  – Franciscan friar Roger Bacon, Opus Majus (1266)

  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 maste
r 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’.

  ‘Well,’ said Dunne, ‘the “gold” and “silver” must mean the sovereigns and plate deliberately left in the vault. And he spells “clues” as “c-l-e-w-s”. Why? And I don’t understand where the secret is hidden – where he “stabbed the g-n-u-s”, using, of course, the other name for the wildebeest, a denizen of the Cape, I understand.’

  ‘We should look at his desk, if he had one,’ offered Harris. Indeed he had, and a distressed Reverend Mansfield was keen to let them see it.

  The late journalist left few possessions: some plain writing paper, a dry inkwell, several pens, a much-chewed pencil, a half-filled rum bottle and a bill from Mr Thomas Brett’s St John’s Tavern, in George Street. It acknowledged that Mr Dawks had paid his account for Manilla segars and Negrohead tobacco, but begged to remind him that a matter of thirty shillings was outstanding for a dozen bottles of best sherry.

  On the surface of the desk, standing upright, was a metal spike on a heavy base. It speared odd pieces of paper.

  Dunne stared hard at it. ‘What if “stabbing the gnus” in his rhyme is just a bad pun on “n-e-w-s”? In which case, I think I know how “they” or “it” became stabbed.’

  He indicated the spike. All newspapermen used one. It was a rough and ready filing system; and Dawks’s proved to hold many items – notes that had been transcribed, letters, galley proofs. And a small, neat fold of printed paper tied with string.

  Harris nodded slowly. ‘I think you have guessed well, for do you know the origins of the work “clue”? Well, a “c-l-e-w” meant a ball of string, and I believe something similar, some twine, was even supposedly used by Theseus to trace his path safely during his foray into the labyrinth hunting the Minotaur.