The Ghost of Waterloo

by Robin Adair

  It wasn’t much of a fort, thought Dunne, as he and his companion walked across the only access, a drawbridge that was purely ornamental and could not be raised or lowered.

  They climbed the staircase within the stone walls to the meeting place, in a high tower room.

  There was a pall of silence hanging over the fort. It had been bustling until the Governor’s party arrived, but the regular military detail – a sergeant and twelve gunners – had been ordered out of sight and earshot. Another artillery officer stayed. Dunne and Owens were the last arrivals.

  Attending Darling were two officers from the town garrison’s 57th Regiment of Foot, the ‘Die Hards’; and its brother regiment, the 39th, the ‘Green Linnets’; and a naval captain come ashore. Captain Rossi was pacing nervously, pausing to murmur to the civilians already there, the Flying Pieman and Brian and Cornelius O’Bannion.

  The Governor had raised both eyebrows at the inclusion of the Pieman and the Paddies in the party, but Rossi explained that he and Dunne needed runners. Merde, he thought, what would have happened if Miss Susannah Hathaway had been allowed to breeze in? Earlier, the Patterer had vaguely said she was ‘busy’.

  Darling was in one of his frequent fits of anger. He seemed to be under attack from both the ‘Pure Merino’, Exclusive gentlemen, and their rivals, the free settlers and Emancipists. And, dammit, he was also accused of letting a sick soldier be tortured to death in gaol. Now those bloody Frogs were up to no good. Again. And here. A pox on everything!

  Dunne was now only a few paces away from the glowering Governor. Any hotter, he joked to himself, and His Excellency’s incandescent ire could touch off the 350 barrels of black gunpowder stored in the magazine deep beneath their feet. Where, then, he wondered, would the tons of round shot also stored in the fort go? He jerked his mind back to grim reality.

  Below the tall, narrow windows of the conference room and slapped by high tide, were the two low, round towers that housed the fort’s nineteen cannons. A critic of the building’s appearance complained that from the aspect of the water, the fort, with its twin low buildings, ‘squatted like a toad that was swallowing a Tudor tower’.

  ‘Surely we can shiver the Three Bees to splinters from here?’ said the Pieman.

  The Patterer shook his head and pointed to the emplacements below.

  The artillery officer took over. ‘Our guns’ field of fire is across the mouth of the Cove, northward, so as to intersect with any bombardment from that smaller battery on the opposite horn of the Cove, at Lieutenant Dawes’ Point. That contains fewer guns, fourteen, though some are of larger calibre than ours. The intention is that, if the two installations – fort and battery – fire rolling volleys, their enfilading crossfire would rake any ship or ships entering or leaving the Cove. They could not, however, for danger to town buildings and each other, be aimed at any ship inside the Cove. They can’t make the traverse back, anyway, and the guns can’t be handspiked into different positions, unlike mobile, limbered field guns. A nine-foot-long, eighteen-pounder weighs 2388 pounds.’

  The ‘Die Hard’ redcoat nodded.

  Dunne made a point. ‘There are more guns in the unfinished Fort Phillip, up behind Dawes’ Battery. But,’ he grimaced, ‘these have been turned back towards the town, in case of a convict rising. That move may yet come in handy!’

  Darling scowled.

  ‘How vulnerable is this fort to attack by the frigate?’ asked Rossi.

  The gunner calmly answered that broadsides of perhaps sixteen guns – when a swing on the anchor permitted – could demolish the tower they were in, collapsing it on much of the fortifications. He added that the shipboard guns, and there could be thirty-two of them, were almost certainly loaded, ready to respond to any fire from land emplacements. They threw twelve- or eighteen-pound balls; perhaps there were even 24-pounders.

  ‘What happens to our useless powder and shot?’

  ‘With a bit of luck – nothing.’ The artillery man explained the security system that should protect the fort’s lethal load of explosives. Down deep in the sandstone bowels of the building were two separate chambers. Inactive, they were sealed and safe. When the guns were firing, in the room that contained the raw explosive a gunner’s mate would hand six-pound cartridges of powder protected in soft cloth to a fellow soldier. He, in turn, passed them to a third man, the ‘powder monkey’, through dampened, thick curtains. All three wore felt slippers to counter the dangers of static electrical sparking. The unavoidable risk period was between that stage and loading and firing. Any explosion then would mean mayhem for the men actually serving the guns. But it would not be fatal to the fort.

  ‘How secure is the Three Bees’ powder and shot?’ the Patterer asked the navy man. It appeared that on bigger ships of the line, three-deck monsters like Victory, the precautions were much the same as those in the fort. But, in a smaller frigate, 130 feet or so in length, there was not the same luxury of space, movement and manpower. There were not the same checks and balances.

  These fifth- and sixth-raters didn’t get into as many fights as ships of the line – they were, rather, raiders, like the Three Bees, and scouts.

  ‘Where would the powder locker be?’

  It would be on the faux-pont, or the orlop, the lowest deck, at and below the waterline, in what was called the cockpit.

  The Patterer mined from the naval officer two nuggets: the frigate below them, for some reason – age? economy?; it had cost only the equivalent of about 11000 pounds to build – did not appear to have the customary copper sheathing on her hull to protect from worms and speed-sapping barnacles.

  And, it seemed, there was a rule of thumb that such frigates invariably had the shot-locker at the dead centre of the gun deck. Count an equal number of gunports in from both bow and stern and all that gunpowder is at a waterline central point.

  The Patterer pondered then asked the artillery officer quite casually, ‘Can your clever, careful fellows get me a keg – say, a sixty-pound one – half-filled with His Majesty’s best black powder? An associate will call about it later.’

  The soldier conferred with Ralph Darling who frowned, then nodded. Dunne was relieved; Alexander Harris would have the powder they needed.

  Now it was time to lay out his schemes…

  Chapter Forty-one

  The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men

  Gang aft agley.

  – Robert Burns, ‘To a Mouse’ (1786)

  The Patterer addressed his lopsided fighting force, which ranged in rank from a Governor with a general’s crimson sash to a paroled Irish patriot not all that long out of pimples.

  ‘Because we cannot attack the Three Bees from the land or sea,’ he began, ‘why, then, we must assault it from the sky!’ He raised a hand to still the murmur of disbelief. ‘Yes,’ he insisted, ‘I’m serious, deadly serious.

  ‘I know that men first flew by balloon only forty-five years ago, when two Frenchmen, Jean-François de Rozier and the Marquis d’Arlandes, soared for twenty-five minutes across Paris in a wicker basket. Their envelope above was filled with hot air from a fire of straw and wool.’

  ‘I thought the Montgolfier brothers were the first,’ said Cornelius O’Bannion.

  ‘Same year,’ Dunne replied, ‘but they only sent up a sheep, a duck and a rooster.’

  Ralph Darling coughed. ‘Can we move on?’

  But the Patterer was undeterred; he seemed determined, for whatever reason, to impress his listeners with the power of flight. ‘In some battles, our old friend, Bonaparte, used tethered balloons as manned observation posts. He also, by the way, wanted windmill-powered boats for an invasion of Britain.

  ‘But there has been an advance since the birth of ballooning. And, luckily for our enterprise, Colonel Shadforth, of the 57th stationed here, believes we could build what he calls an “atmotic machine” – from the Greek word for “vapour” – lifted by coal gas, which is about to be generated for lighting our streets.’

  W
illiam King shook his head in wonder. Was the tension affecting his friend’s mental equilibrium? Only hours earlier, Dunne had taken the Pieman aside and sought to tap his knowledge not of balloons, but of kites! He had seemed impressed by King’s dredging of arcane facts that revealed an event two years earlier, when a Mr George Pocock and a Colonel Viney harnessed two large kites to a carriage. The kites pulled it from Bristol to London, a distance of 110 miles. A year later, on a sixty-mile stretch of road between Reading and Gloucester, gallopers with the Duke of Gloucester’s coach could not keep up with another kite-carriage. But now, here he was, talking of an attack by balloon?

  Dunne continued his flight of fancy: ‘I have learnt of how a young American man of mystery and imagination, Mr Edgar Allan Poe, hatched a plan – never realised – to drop bombs on land targets from a balloon.

  ‘I am inspired to complete his idea. We will build a gas-filled balloon and I – the passenger – will drop grenades as the Three Bees appears below me. Our envelope and basket will rise from opposite here, near Lieutenant Dawes’ Battery across the Cove, tomorrow morning at dawn. The machine is now being assembled, from every piece of suitable fabric, light canvas and cane we can find.’

  The Patterer paused. ‘Should these efforts fail, I have a last, forlorn hope. A young “Indian”, who has great distance and accuracy with a football, will attempt to lob from the parapets below us, an infernal device primed to explode.’

  The Flying Pieman, who understood athletic endeavours, said nothing, but looked at his friend as if he were, indeed, totally mad. Strangely, though, the Governor seemed unshaken.

  ‘Gentlemen,’ continued Dunne, ‘there is little more we can do here now – what is the time?’ He turned to Con O’Bannion, who was nearest.

  ‘Me? A watch?’ scowled the young man. ‘I’m a bloody convict. What would a charley say if he saw me with a turnip? He’d say that I’d fingered it. No, your honour, I leave watches to my betters. It’s looking at a clock, for me.’

  The Patterer laughed. ‘Never mind, Con. Let us meet here just before the dawn.’ Most of the plotters drifted away and soon only Dunne, Rossi, Darling, the Pieman and Dr Owens were left.

  ‘If he’s so important,’ queried the Police Chief, ‘why isn’t Colonel Shadforth here?’

  Dunne feigned surprise. ‘Oh, didn’t the Governor tell everyone? Shadforth has a company of 57th redcoats already marching to contain the French at North Head. Actually, of course, they are going most of the way by boat, making only the last stage by foot, for the element of surprise. The “convicts” are at Store Beach. Our men will land at Manly and move behind Spring Cove to catch our prey unawares.

  ‘Captain Crotty has another company, from his 39th Regiment, storming Garden Island from barges coming on all sides.’

  ‘Good God, man,’ Dr Owens burst out. ‘As Wellington said of Waterloo, this will be a hard pounding, let us see who will pound longest. It could be a blood-bath!’

  The meeting concluded and Dunne alone began the long walk back into the town. He had arranged to meet Alexander Harris well before the dawn deadline. On the secluded path, a native accosted him. It wasn’t the vaunted young footballer. And it wasn’t King Bungaree again, or a compatriot seeking money or drink. The Patterer recognised not the man, rather the uniform he wore. It was a garish crimson and yellow coat of military cut, worn over blue breeches. A black soldierly shako gave the well-built man even greater stature.

  Of course. He was a member of John Macarthur’s private, spearcarrying guard-of-honour, with which the rich grazier often travelled to show off his wealth and power – to prove that he had come a long way from being a corset-maker’s son. He hated the nickname that still stuck – ‘Jack Bodice’!

  This guard seemed to be on important business; certainly, he had a closed carriage standing idle nearby. His voice, like Bungaree’s, was surprisingly polished: ‘Mr Nicodemus Dunne, sir?’

  The Patterer nodded and raised his hand in salute. The man returned the gesture and, for a fraction of a second, Dunne saw a small nulla-nulla sweep through the air.

  Then everything exploded, like Guido Fawkes’ night in Vauxhall Gardens at home, before the Patterer fell, without a splash, into a well of pitch.

  Chapter Forty-two

  Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch’entrate!

  (Abandon all hope, ye who enter here!)

  – Dante Alighieri, La Divina Commedia, ‘Inferno’, Canto 3 (1307–21)

  When Nicodemus Dunne’s brain finally decided to swim back into consciousness, it alerted his eyes, but he could see nothing; he was in pitch darkness.

  His newly awakened nose, however, told him a more confident story. He readily identified the slightly acrid tang of sawn and dressed sandstone. And there was something else: he smelled the rankness of a sewer somewhere close by.

  His fingers confirmed the presence of stone, beneath and beside him. He reasoned he was propped against a cold wall and was sitting on an unforgiving floor.

  He got up on all fours, even though his head had not stopped reeling, and began to explore this dank new domain. He soon decided that he was in a large room, the ceiling of which was clearly too high to reach. Halfway into his circuit he bumped against a steep staircase, guarded by a wooden banister. At the top, after nineteen steps, there was a doorway. He pushed gently against the solid wooden barrier there but it would not budge. He decided not to rattle the metal handle his fingers found; he was not yet ready to alert whoever might be on the other side. They were unlikely to be any friendlier than they had been so far.

  Exploring down at floor level again, one wall, low down, provided a surprise. The stench of mud, stagnant water, urine and dung was strongest here, and the reason was clear and simple: there was a hole in the wall, letting in fetid air.

  Dunne traced the space with his hands and tried to push his body through. Going feet first, his hips checked further progress. A head- first attempt ended with his shoulders wedged tightly.

  Retreating near to the foot of the stairs, his groping hand collided on the floor with a new obstacle, something hard that was not a wall. His fingers traced the dimensions of a small wooden and metal box; he could feel the grain, metal bindings and hinges and the clasp of a lock. The chest was heavy for its size and proved willing to reveal its contents. The Patterer opened the lid and felt inside.

  There were what he was certain could be nothing but coins, small but heavy. He took one out and smelled it. Yes, acrid, like money. He bit it and it felt as a sov should. A bitter, metallic taste? Sure. He slipped the find into a pocket.

  He rummaged gently in a lower layer. These discs felt different from the start. They were the same size but were – what? Softer was the closest word he could think of. He picked one up – it smelt and tasted much the same, but it was less resilient to his bite. He added it to his other souvenir.

  A swirl of unconnected thoughts suddenly settled and took shape, much after the fashion of the pieces in one of those picture puzzles where one had to make sense of a myriad of segments cut out by a carpenter’s jigsaw…

  Think of it: a stone chamber … steep steps… the reek of sewage so close … a hole in one wall … the feel, the smell, the taste of money …

  Somehow he was back in the Bank of Australia’s defiled vault!

  A shaft of watery light crept down the stairway as the door at its head slowly swung open. The distorted silhouette of a human figure came to the top step.

  ‘Are you awake, Dunne?’ growled a voice that the Patterer recognised as John Macarthur’s.

  ‘No thanks to you, yes,’ replied Dunne coldly.

  ‘You’ll soon find even fewer reasons to thank me.’ There seemed an edge of excitement mixed with his captor’s usual angry tone. Dunne tensed.

  ‘All right, you’ve proved your powers. What in God’s name do want from me?’ His voice echoed in the chamber.

  ‘I want to know how you know so damned much about the robbery – you don’t fool me, pretending to
read from the rags about it. You know who did it, don’t you? Well, it’s my money, my bank!’

  ‘My money too, John,’ There was another voice and the prisoner recognised the speaker: well, well, the Reverend Marsden.

  Macarthur overrode him. ‘I’ll have you flogged till your backbone’s showing unless you confess what you know. And there’s another reason you’re here – this accursed pipe!’ His hand released a roll of paper and it floated down to Dunne.

  He squinted in the poor light and managed to read it. It was one of those damned things Dawks had talked of. The writing was clear, with no signature…

  Jack Bodice was a sheepish man,

  who fleeced and duelled and thundered.

  He left his wife alone for years

  and, so it seems, he blundered.

  She soon exhausted all her rams

  and herdsman of that kidney,

  So now she’s even loosed her stays

  for the Patterer in Sydney.

  ‘That’s nonsense, Macarthur!’ he cried. ‘No one in the colony has anything other than the utmost respect for your wife. And I have only met her once or twice.’

  ‘Don’t lie, sir!’ raged his accuser. ‘You will pay for prying too much – and for your fornication!’

  Jesus, he had heard of the man’s mad, misplaced jealously and his mania for money, and now he was seeing and hearing the frothing proof. Thomas Owens had once said that he believed such men were unbalanced in their animating psyche. Which meant? ‘Oh, that they have bouts of insanity,’ said the doctor. God, and I had to cross his path in one such mood.

  Marsden was talking now, calming his companion. ‘I have, sir, a different measure, more subtle and still satisfying. I have in mind a holy inquisition.’