by Robin Adair
‘We fell out, you understand,’ the old man continued, ‘just as I did with my Marshals who had failed me. I lost faith in this last aide, too.
‘I realised that his enthusiasm had been transferred from the coup to the quest for gold. Pah! I had to remove that temptation. So I took the map – I suppose you could say that I was the traitor he suspected poor Creighton of being.
‘It was easy. Only Grenville knew of the gold.’ He paused for breath. ‘In the end, I did not have to worry about young Cornelius. I dealt secretly with one of the gang – he could have everything except the japanned box. So he dug up Dingle’s floor.
‘The map is now in a safe repository – in fact, the epitome of safety. But nothing more: I’m weary now…’ He closed his eyes. Clearly, they had run out of things to say.
The visitor drew from his pocket a small bag with a button that winked in a ray of fading sunlight. He placed the bag on the table, near the water, then sketched a salute with his cabbage-tree hat with its lavender band. As he withdrew, he said softly, but clearly: ‘Adieu, General…’
He received in return a tight smile from the 59-year-old man the census called Prosper Mendoza…
Or, as he had been better known for years to Sydneysiders, Garden Honey.
He could hear his own voice growing fainter: ‘Garden honey, garden . . . honey . . .’ But other sounds were quite clear. A thousand strong voices chanted, in unison, ‘Vive l’Empereur, vive l’Empereur’. It was his Old Guard, on the march. And the boy drummers with the fearsome columns were beating the tattoo that sounded the Pas de Charge. Onward, mes braves! . . . And he could see Josephine, as lovely as ever. Had he really said, ‘Not tonight, Josephine’? He knew he had said, one night, ‘Don’t wash’ . . .
Was the phantom now Madame Balcombe, or her bursting rosebud daughter? And had he really seen, again, that horse-faced English doctor, who had tried to ease his bladder and done unspeakable things to his derrière? He felt, suddenly, so tired and so cold . . .
He had a last visitor. Death spoke: ‘Well, sirrah, you’ve led me on a merry dance, you old scoundrel. You know, I was expecting to see you on St Helena. I even believed for a moment that the man I found there was you and . . .’ Death chuckled, ‘I took the poor devil. Didn’t look good, I can tell you!
‘And, ’pon my word, in my time I’ve been to Baghdad and Samarra, but, let me tell you, this is the most Godforsaken (pardon the blasphemy) place on Lucifer’s earth.
‘Still, as they say, better late than never and all’s well that ends well. Now, put down that confounded drink.
‘Come along, then.’
And, strange to say, if any mortal had been at an impossible vantage point, the clocks at both St Phillip’s church and the Hyde Park convict barracks for once in their working lives could be seen to be in horological harmony, with their hands in sweet accord.
It was, without a doubt, 5.49 p.m.
At least everyone got that right. Finally.
Chapter Fifty-six
How little room
Do we take up in death, that, living know
No bounds?
– James Shirley, The Wedding (1629)
Nicodemus Dunne kept the hawker’s (or the General’s, or the Emperor’s, call him what you will) secret, after a fashion. He told Dr Owens, Captain Rossi, the Flying Pieman, the Governor and Miss Hathaway. Alexander Harris, too. Brian O’Bannion had not resurfaced.
‘What gave him away?’ asked Rossi. ‘The name, Mendoza?’
‘He was betrayed by his beloved bees – and by his father.’
‘By his bees? How?’
‘He could go anywhere, see anyone, with his tray of honey. But, lately, I learnt that, because of the drought, the bees were dying off and the supply of honey had dried up. And, Harris, you will recall how the sexton apologised for the lack of beeswax candles in St Phillip’s. Then, I realised I had actually watched him still hawking, but with an empty tray.
‘He had to be the ghost from the past that shocked Signor Bello at the theatre. There, the Pieman even referred to him, when he complained to me that he, too, should be hawking. I thought he had referred to the beer-seller, but it was really the sight there of Garden Honey.
‘Bello saw him and thought he was laughing at him. But Garden Honey had gone, ill, to hear his best loved aria once more. In fact, he was crying for the castrato’s shame.’
‘But his father,’ said Owens. ‘He’s long dead – he told me so.’
‘Yes, I agree,’ Dunne replied. ‘But when my census colleague mustered him, “Prosper Mendoza” gave his own birth date and that of his father. He saw no harm in that, nor should there have been any. Carlo is a common enough name.’
‘Then,’ Rossi was testy, ‘how did that undo him? … Of course! His birth date, 15 August, gave him away. That is Napoleon’s birthday?’
The Patterer smiled. ‘But it is shared with many other people – even me!’ He added, almost inaudibly, ‘I think,’ which no one caught. ‘So, is his 15 August birthday enough?
‘No, he said that his sire was born on 7 September 1752, in England.’
‘That was the truth?’
‘Oh, it was – and it wasn’t! Even if he quickly invented that date it was a fatal slip: it shows that the father must have been born somewhere else – in the circumstances, undoubtedly in Corsica – but assuredly not in England.’
He took pity on his friends’ frowns. ‘In England, in 1752 there simply was no 7 September! Britain was slow to move to the Gregorian calendar from the Julian version. So, in September 1752, to catch up with the rest, the country dropped eleven days. The date jumped from 2 September to 14 September. In between just didn’t happen!
‘But there’s no doubt that 7 September existed in Ajaccio, Corsica, home town of the Bonapartes.’
All agreed that Dunne was a very clever fellow indeed.
Garden Honey had a quiet funeral in the Sandhills cemetery on the town’s southern outskirts, paid for by the Patterer and his friends. There were not many mourners; it seemed that most other people soon forgot the familiar figure. To elevate the occasion and cover several shades of belief, Dr Halloran of The Gleaner and the Reverend Mansfield, both staunch adherents to the Protestant Ascendancy, accepted invitations to read a service of Christian burial.
They made a fine team, thought Dunne. Each took a handful of sandy loam and scattered it down onto the coffin. Mr Mansfield, of The Gazette, first intoned, ‘Forasmuch as it hath pleased Almighty God of His great mercy to receive unto Himself the soul of our dear brother departed, we therefore commit his body to the ground…’
And Dr Halloran continued, or at least began to. After a coughing fit overtook him, he faltered at ‘Earth to earth…’ But all was not lost: a nightingale flew to the rescue.
Miss Hathaway steadied Halloran’s shoulder and took over for him, intoning sweetly: ‘Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust; in sure and certain hope of the Resurrection to eternal life…’
For a belated farewell to the real, long-gone Mendoza on St Helena, Mr Barnett Levey had been asked to send up a silent Jewish prayer. He was mystified, but obliged.
To quietly speed the way for Bonaparte, who may have returned to Catholicism, Dunne also had paid for a mass to be celebrated at St Mary’s Chapel, across Hyde Park. For Colonel Muiron, he told the priest there, spelling the name for him.
The Patterer, with Munito, was the last of the mourners left beside the new grave. ‘The story should end here,’ he said aloud. ‘Did not Chaucer say, “It is nought good a slepyng hound to wake”, eh?’ Munito who, of course, understood colloquialism (even an arcane one) in the English language, just nodded in agreement. Then he cocked his leg at the newly erected cross. Dunne didn’t chastise him; perhaps, in dog language, what would be an insult by a man was a high canine honour.
The Patterer considered the cross, which was made of freshly sawn timber. It would age soon and the carved name, ‘Prosper Mendoza, 1769–1828’, would
fade and rot. So, too, would the words that Dunne had engaged a man to burn with a red-hot poker onto a board tablet attached to the cross. The engraving read:
Wm Shakespeare
Henry V
Act I Sc. ii l.187
Anyone without a folio who cared would have to look up the reference at the library or at Mr McGarvie’s shop. They would discover the words that the erudite Flying Pieman vowed would pay suitable tribute to a flawed genius:
For so work the honey-bees,
Creatures that by a rule in nature teach
The act of order to a peopled kingdom.
As if on celestial cue, an insect settled on the bunch of wild violets Dunne had picked on the way and now laid on the raw grave. It began industriously, desperately to pillage whatever pollen was there.
The Patterer smiled in wonder. Of course, it was a wild honey bee!
Doubtless for the last time anyone would say it, he murmured the magic words once more with feeling: ‘Votre Majesté.’
Miss Susannah Hathaway, naturally, winkled all the truth out of him.
She even extracted further details of how Munito had ‘arrested’ Grenville. The Patterer told his friends, truly, that he had given the dog the scent of liquorice and trusted to its nose. What he had not revealed before now was that he had taken out insurance: he had reinforced the trail by slipping extra lozenges into the prey’s pockets as the guests were seated.
‘He is still the cleverest dog,’ said Miss Hathaway loyally, ‘though I confess I cannot fathom how he performs his wonders.’
‘His master told me how – in confidence.’
She nodded solemnly. ‘I will not tell a soul.’
‘Well,’ said Dunne, ‘much of it is our old friend “misdirection” at work again. I mean, a fakir in India appears to charm a cobra with the music of a shawm. In truth, I understand such snakes are deaf. They are really responding to the movement of the instrument. In a similar vein, I believe the dog responds to changing voice tones and different hand signals.’
‘But the dominoes…’
‘Ah, well. In their travels his master learnt from a wandering magician the art of ventriloquism. Munito doesn’t “talk” numbers, Dominic does, “throwing” the barking sounds as required onto the dog’s head.’
‘How clever – of both of them!’
‘The name comes from the Latin words, venter, meaning “stomach” and loqui, for “speaking”. Thus, you have “stomach-speaking” – but that’s not strictly accurate. Actually, the sound is projected, after much practice, from way down in the throat.
‘It’s nothing new, going back as far as the ancient Egyptians and Greeks. In medieval Europe, a Monsieur Meskyllene – another Froggy! – roamed around with an act in which petitioners asked questions of a “magic” casket that “answered” them. He narrowly escaped execution for practising black magic! … But I’m boring you…’
That night, long after he had finished telling her his tale, she sighed and said, ‘I think I like best the parts the violets played – the romantic parts.’
‘I gauged you would like such flowers,’ replied the Patterer. ‘Consider the roguish names of some of the varieties – Tittle My Fancy, Kiss Me at the Garden Gate, not to mention Love in Idleness.’
‘Oh!’ She slapped him lightly.
Later, much later, she knifed his bare back with sharp nails. ‘Shut up, Nicodemus Dunne,’ she whispered.
He ignored her, breathing: ‘Revelation, chapter 22, verse 12…’
She paused, for a heartbeat, then laughed.
‘Shut up!’ she repeated, this time with mounting urgency.
Epilogue
All that is finished, finished, finished;
The circle of our days is done.
And what illusion, and what power,
Recalls you, Past, when you have gone?
– Alexander Blok, ‘Russia’ (1908)
Miss Susannah Hathaway and Mr Nicodemus Dunne – both in their Sunday-best raiment – attended morning service together in St James’ Church, the ‘heaven’ to the Rum Hospital’s ‘hell’ across the road.
The Patterer had paid for Miss Hathaway’s plumage, which replaced the costume she had ruined in rescuing him. The lady’s fine Madras handkerchief alone cost nine shillings. Accordingly, his finery was hired from the Waterloo Stores, the emporium conducted by Mr Barnett Levey’s brother.
The preacher was Archdeacon, the Venerable Thomas Hobbes Scott, who thunderously announced the subject of his sermon: ‘My message this morning deals with the timeliness of acknowledging an undeniable power. Thus, I take as my text, from the Book of Revelation, chapter 22, verse 12…’
He paused and nodded to himself in satisfaction, if surprise – why, even before he could continue, he had noticed a young couple in the congregation lower their heads and silently shake with emotion. The fear of God, he’d be bound! Well, it certainly gave the lie to his critics, who sneered that he was not worth his 2000 pounds a year stipend.
Capital! He went on: ‘which says, “And, behold, I come quickly.” ’
On Monday, a convict was assigned to clear the birds and animals from the corridor of the Rum Hospital. They were to be stored in an attic high upstairs until the new Colonial Museum of natural history was built alongside the college opposite the eastern swathe of Hyde Park.
The man, a ‘trusty’, worked without supervision, which allowed him to pace his labour to what was called, unofficially, the ‘government stroke’. This meant working just hard and fast enough to satisfy demands and avoid being tickled by the knout or numbed by the treadmill, the pillory or the stocks.
The gallery of exhibits eventually thinned to just the bulk of the blue kangaroo. She was judged to be too big and too damned heavy and awkward for one man to drag all that way upstairs. There would be an easier resolution. He dragged her out into a backyard that contained a large incinerator. Its firebox took rubbish and old dressings, sometimes even amputated limbs. The man began to break up the kangaroo with an axe and feed it into the fire.
The torso delayed him temporarily, for in its pouch he found a folded sheet of stout paper. He held it every which way, but the letters and numerals – he could tell that much – did not make any sense. Unlike Sam Terry, the convict was unlettered.
Thus, the words that the assistant surveyor named James McBrien had written in his field book on 15 February 1823 – ‘I found numerous particles of gold in the sand and in the hills convenient to the river’ – meant absolutely nothing to the trusty.
The reference to ‘the Fish River, 15 miles east of Bathurst, 8 chains, 50 links to river and marked gum’ – were all just a garble of chicken tracks.
What a pity, grunted the convict, that it weren’t one o’ them stolen banknotes. He’d recognise money. Now that might be worth something.
With a shrug, he consigned the paper to the flames.
Afterword
A mixture of a lie doth ever add pleasure.
– Francis Bacon, ‘Of Truth’ (1625)
This has been a work of what I call friction – facts and real people rubbing along with plausible ‘what-ifs’.
Chancing on the 17 September 1828 Sydney Gazette story (page 120) prompted me to ponder why it was so ‘cunning’ to leave ‘untouched’ gold and silver. The game was afoot!
First, on the money trail …The bank robbery (and the robbers) are factual. Because the prosecution and many inside details did not appear until several years after the event, I have telescoped much of the action, but the basic tale remains true to the fruit.
The value of the plunder is a grey area today, as it was then. Conversions are complex. The bank’s records, especially of notes, were unreliable and some loot was quite quickly recovered. A man found notes in a Rocks dunny. A lucky, and honest, orphan was rewarded for handing in more notes, found in the vicinity of where I killed Creighton (a death based on reality, as you’ll see). The rough value for the treasure taken, adjusted for the times, co
uld be as high as $20 million.
The men in the sewer given up to police by Sudden Solomon Blackstone were punished unevenly by life and the law. Apparently, John Creighton did die in Cockle Bay, in most strange circumstances. His ultimate fate is unclear. There was only a note to the 1828 census documents referring to his disappearance, seemingly drowned from an overturned boat. No body was found; no newspaper record and no coroner’s hearing followed. Yet his ‘widow’ soon married James Dingle.
The cases against Dingle and Farrell were clouded by doubts about Blackstone’s legal competence as a witness. In the wash-up, both men went to dreaded Norfolk Island, whence Dingle escaped in a stolen boat and was never heard of again. Farrell, in and out of trouble, appears to be last recorded as a paroled felon in 1859.
Blackstone told police Thomas Turner was innocent, but many Sydneysiders, men and women, were collateral damage, being convicted, rightly or wrongly, as receivers. The disloyal blacksmith received his pardon, his ticket ‘home’ and 100 pounds – but he blew his chance by committing another, petty crime before he could leave. He remained a habitual criminal, dying destitute in 1850, murdered, some said, as pay-back for being a ‘snout’, or ‘dog’.
And Valentine Rourke, the other robber? Ah, thereby hangs a particular tale, retailed later, below.
The bank never fully recovered from the scandal, despite a land boom soon after. It crashed in 1843 and, in 1849, there was a controversial public lottery of its remaining assets. The curse continued, when a prominent winner, a Scottish settler, rode happily home with the news of his prize – and fell from his horse and died. I found the definitive study of the crime to be Carol Baxter’s Breaking the Bank. Any fiddles with the facts in the foregoing friction are mine.