by Adair, Robin
Rossi looked blankly. “What remark was that, pray?”
“You must have heard it. He said that he—meaning the blacksmith—had served with the 45th Regiment in Grenada.”
“So?”
“But he added that the man had boasted of having served over the governor—and the familiar way it was said indicates the reference was to our governor. What could be the possible meaning?”
“Oh, that.” Rossi waved his hand dismissively. “I had a short word to the overseer about that. He must have misunderstood. I believe the smith never rose higher than corporal.”
The patterer persisted. “All this is supposed to have happened before the turn of the century. You know His Excellency well. When did he begin his career as an officer? Did he buy an elevated commission?”
Rossi looked affronted. “No, he did not. He stepped onto the lowest rung. He became an ensign in the 45th—in which his father was also a soldier—in May ’93. It was in Grenada or Barbados, I don’t recall. He’s come a long way since then, hasn’t he? And even if that smith did happen to serve in the regiment at the same time as the governor, I ask you, what would a rising young officer have to do with a lowly noncommissioned officer—especially a black one?” He looked keenly at Dunne. “My advice to you is to put the matter out of your mind. Forget about it.”
Captain Rossi started to walk away and the patterer shrugged and followed. But, and but … He still felt as though something had eluded him. Strangely, it was almost as if he had asked the wrong question.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
For now we see through a glass, darkly …
—I Corinthians 13:12
CAPTAIN ROSSI HAD ARRANGED FOR THE THREE MEN TO MEET that afternoon, when Dr. Thomas Owens could report on the results of his closer examination of the blacksmith’s corpse. They would rendezvous at the Hope and Anchor Tavern.
But which one? It could all be very confusing. Due to some ancient dispute now lost in the mists of time, and no doubt in an alcoholic haze, drinkers bestowed the name on two widely separated establishments. One was in Sussex Street and the other on the northwest corner of King and Pitt streets.
The Sussex Street rival perhaps had the best claim to the name; after all it was closer to the sea, as an anchor should be. Nevertheless, the Hope and Anchor in King Street had its devotees, who often tried to avoid confusion (but just as often created more mental mayhem) by referring to it by its previous name, the Bunch of Grapes, or even an earlier name, the Three Legs o’ Man.
Rossi and Dunne arrived at this tavern at the appointed hour and were served in the taproom by a powerfully built young man perhaps in his early twenties. He had a drooping moustache, which accentuated his generally sad demeanor.
“Gentlemen?” he queried in a well-modulated, cultured voice. Rossi ordered a brandy and the patterer a porter, just as Owens bustled through the door and joined them at the bar. The doctor surprised his companions with his order: “Adam’s ale, please.” He explained that he was drinking water because he had a lady patient to see and alcoholic breath might distress her.
Dunne was not convinced. “You, Doctor, water?” He laughed. “I recall you once warning me off the very stuff! You said it could carry disease, as miasmas and suchlike do. Why, you declared that the Tank Stream was not the only fouled water here, that most well water was unsuitable for drinking.”
Owens looked down his long nose. “If it has been boiled—and I am assured that it is served here thus—then it is quite safe. Anyway, there are worse things than dirty water.”
“Would you care to elaborate on that?” asked the patterer, intrigued by the doctor’s serious tone.
“No,” said Owens flatly. And the topic was dropped.
The doctor then confirmed that the smith had received injuries during flogging (obviously from a tyro thrasher) but had actually died of apoplexy. And yes, a number of the cuts came not from whip knots but somehow from a sharp blade, which had also been used to cut off the penis and inflict wounds mirroring those on the first victim.
“And the intriguing matter of the usual sugar in the mouth being green?” asked Rossi.
“Analysis showed normal sugar with the simple addition of copperas, or ferrous sulphate, also called green vitriol. It’s used in dyeing.”
“Dying?” repeated Rossi, startled.
“With an e in the middle, Captain—meaning for coloring.” Owens then changed the subject suddenly. “I’m hungry,” he said. “Does that go for anyone else?”
“Any pies, William?” Dunne called to the barman. The man left his counter and walked to the corner of the room in which stood a brightly painted handcart. The upper part of the cart had compartments for pies and gravy pans and below was a glowing charcoal brazier. He returned to his customers with three pies and accepted the nine pence tendered.
William Francis King made most of his pie sales outside the pub. Between shifts tending bar, he tramped the streets of the town and beyond, trundling his pie-cart. Behind the bar this day he wore rather conventional clothing but, when hawking, he affected an eye-catching outfit. He was as well known a character throughout the small settlement as Paddy the Ram, Old Mother Five Bob, Garden Honey or any of the other perambulating peddlers: oyster-sellers, butchers, fishmongers, fruit-traders, bakers, even apothecaries. He cried his wares on street corners, outside the barracks, at horse races, cricket matches, bull-baiting and dogfights.
It was an odd life for a man of King’s background. The well-educated son of an influential Treasury official in London, he had been intended for a career in the Church. Somehow, no one in the colony seemed quite sure of the dark secrets involved, he drifted, or was bundled off, to Botany Bay. He had been a schoolteacher here briefly. But again events—some people said it was boredom, others yet another secret setback—deflected him, this time into serving beer and pies.
His main fame rested, however, on his powerful body, which carried him on endeavors that constantly amazed settlers and made (or lost) money for gamblers betting on his success or failure.
He would don an eccentric costume with either a tall hat or a jockey’s cap and stout boots, and would capture the public’s attention by walking the thirty-two miles from Macquarie Place, in the heart of the town, to Parramatta—and back—in six hours. He could even beat the coach to Parramatta.
He had once carried a boy on his back to the same outer town in three hours; and once lumped, on his back and at a run, a ninety-pound goat for a mile and a half in twelve minutes.
Nothing they saw William Francis King doing could surprise the citizens of Sydney town. Thus, and little wonder, he was known far and wide simply as the “Flying Pieman.”
King was modest about his exploits. “I’m not in the same class as Walking Stuart,” he had once replied when congratulated by the patterer on some extraordinary piece of pedestrianism.
He explained, after Dunne professed ignorance, that John Stuart, who had died six years earlier, was the son of a London draper. As a young man, he had gone to work for the East India Company in Madras. After resigning over an argument he soon earned the epithet “Walking” by doing just that, throughout Hindoostan, Persia, Nubia and across the Arabian Desert. He then trekked through Europe from Constantinople to England. Later, he walked across known America and Canada.
He was the Pieman’s hero. “Thomas de Quincey,” King told Dunne earnestly, “said that Walking Stuart as a pedestrian traveler saw more of the earth’s surface than any man before or since.”
The patterer was not sure how good a judge of reality Mr. de Quincey might be. After all, his claim to fame was far from down-to-earth: authorship of Confessions of an English Opium-Eater.
Nonetheless, Nicodemus Dunne appreciated the merit in Walking Stuart’s athleticism. And William King’s ability was no pipe dream either.
THEIR PIES (AND some further liquid lubricants) gone, the three companions turned to further digestion of the fruits, so far, of their investigative labors. They ret
ired to the comfort and privacy of a bench against one wall.
Captain Rossi leaned back against one high wooden divider and summed up: They had three murders (they could not believe that the death of the man known as The Ox was due to suicide), all connected by the victims’ service in the same regiment. The fourth killing, in the Lumber Yard, seemed different, despite similarities. The captain’s listeners agreed.
Then the patterer raised a thought: “I have been wondering what the convict overseer meant when he referred to the late blacksmith regretting some work he had performed.”
“Can you take any notice of anything a convict overseer says?” grunted Rossi. “They’re usually the scum of the system. They’re generally lags themselves who get a year’s remission on their sentences for every two years they’re willing to drive the poor devils under them. They’re distrusted on both sides. And with good reason.”
“Still,” said Owens, “it’s worth considering. What did the keeper say? Yes, that’s it; he said the blacksmith—a hard man, mind you, no doubt made insensitive by his work—nonetheless had felt badly about how some shackles he once made were too punishing for a prisoner. And not just any prisoner, mind you. He specified that it was a soldier.”
“Soldiers seem to bob up everywhere,” said the patterer. “So, clutching at straws, can we link our earlier beliefs and conclude that the motives are revenge for some injury or injustice done by the action of a soldier?”
“Or done to a soldier by the system?” added Owens.
At that moment they were interrupted by a voice that carried clearly over the wooden divide between their bench and the next. All the voice said was, “Try suds.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Though this be madness, yet there is method in’t.
—William Shakespeare, Hamlet (1601)
“I BEG YOUR PARDON, SIR!” CALLED CAPTAIN ROSSI BACK TO THE interrupting voice, testily.
A figure appeared around the partition and the patterer recognized his friend Alexander Harris.
“I beg your pardon,” Harris said to Rossi, after acknowledging Dunne with a nod. “I couldn’t help but overhear some of your conversation. It appears such a serious matter, and I believe I may be able to help you.”
“He is my good friend and an honest man,” said Dunne, introducing Harris to Rossi and the doctor.
“That may be,” said Rossi coolly. “Still, the damage is done … Very well. If you will swear to keep the problem to yourself, perhaps you can help. And, God knows, we need all the help we can get. But please, gentlemen, I beg of you—no more collaborators. If the governor ever found out …”
And so Rossi outlined the task, once Harris had promised to be discreet.
“What did you mean by your remark that ‘suds’ could perhaps throw light on our quest?” asked Owens, first to raise the obvious question. “What does soap have to do with it?”
Harris laughed. “Nothing of the washing variety, gentlemen. No, I was referring to a person, one of considerable renown: Sudds, with an extra d—Private Joseph Sudds.”
His companions showed great interest. It was a safe wager—almost as good as backing the Flying Pieman—that almost all in the colony, even those in the outblocks, had heard of, and had an opinion on, Joseph Sudds.
The three men with Harris certainly knew of the cause célèbre surrounding the name. Two years earlier almost to the day, Sudds and a fellow soldier named Patrick Thompson, both of the 57th Regiment, had stolen fabric from a town shop—and calmly awaited arrest.
The thinking behind this strange behavior was not particularly original; disgruntled men serving in the Buffs had done it before. If history repeated itself, Sudds and Thompson expected to receive a sentence of seven years’ transportation, which in Sydney meant to a secondary punishment settlement, such as Moreton Bay to the north. They would hope to receive tickets of leave after a few years in jail and then become Emancipists, freed settlers.
At the start, such soldiers were right; a civil court leaned that way. But Governor Ralph Darling, fearing a flood of imitators, stepped in and changed the sentence to hard labor on the roads in the ironed gangs, then a return to service. The men were thrown into jail and barely five days later Sudds died. Mr. Wentworth’s Australian and Mr. Hall’s Monitor accused the governor of murder and sought his impeachment. The battle still raged on, long after the regiment had first drummed the men out.
“But why,” asked the patterer, “does the unfortunate Sudds come into our calculations?”
“Here’s why,” said Alexander Harris triumphantly. “Simply because the governor had ordered that the pair be shackled with irons many times heavier than usual—each set made an extra stone’s weight. That is surely what the overseer was referring to when he said the dead man—and you say he was a smith at the Lumber Yard?—was so sorely haunted. That’s why the matters came together in my mind when I overheard you.”
“Jove!” said Rossi. “You may have something there.” He jumped to his feet. “Will you all wait here? I’ll dash to my office and get a file that should refresh our memories of the case and may tell us more.”
The others agreed.
While Rossi was absent, Harris told the patterer he would be interested to see the puzzling proof pulled from the type discovered in the burned-out printery where Abbot had been murdered. Owens also evinced curiosity. Dunne produced the sheet, which was becoming creased and even more difficult to read.
“I was a compositor once myself, you know,” Harris remarked. “In London years ago.”
The patterer had not known, although he was aware of other matters in his friend’s life. The son of a parson, Harris had confided that he had fallen into the ways of atheism and drink and among fallen women. Yet his closest secret—and a dangerous one to reveal—was that he had enlisted in the army but had deserted. He had just managed to slip away to Botany Bay.
Now he examined the printed slip proffered. “Rather small, isn’t it?” he remarked. “I refer, of course, to the typeface.”
“Ruby, I think,” said Dunne.
Harris shook his head. “No, I mean that it was wanted by the author in a larger size. See the first words, ‘All eight point.’ That makes no sense in the subsequent copy”—Dunne looked again and agreed—“because it was simply a reminder by the compositor to set the material all in eight-point type. Which he obviously hasn’t. You know that there are about seventy-two points to the inch, thus Ruby is five-and-a-half point and Nonpareil six point.” His discourse plowed on. “There’s a newspaper setting record, you know—152 lines in two hours.”
Owens showed mild interest. “How is changing the sizes done?”
Harris was happy to have an attentive audience. “Why, the compositor simply changes to another case. I’m not referring to ‘uppercase,’ as we know capital letters, and their brethren ‘lowercase’ pieces of type. By ‘case,’ I mean the whole wooden case that contains many complete sets of that particular style of type. Our man seems to have put aside his case of eight-point letters requested and taken up before him a case of the smaller Ruby. That’s how the case is altered.
“I’ve forgotten many of the names, but the really small ones are usually used for pocket books—dictionaries, for instance. Breviaries, too; indeed, that’s why one type is called Brevier. They have lovely names. They differ from place to place, you know.”
The patterer did not know and he could see that Owens was becoming bored by the former compositor’s loving recital of his lost craft’s arcane detail.
“There are in America bourgeois and minion, which is our emerald. Nonpareil occurs in both countries, then there is Agate—or our type you mentioned, Ruby …” Harris rambled on but could throw no fresh light on the printed message. The discussion ended with the return of Captain Rossi.
The chief of police was happily waving a fat folder of documents.
“Here, gentlemen, is the official report on the matter. We can analyze it fully in the light of all we have
discussed. In the meantime, I have sent a message to the barracks for another possible missing link—information on the men directly involved in the drumming-out. If we now believe that the blacksmith may have been a target for some sort of vengeance, who else may be seen to have persecuted Sudds?
“So let us start at the beginning.” Rossi opened the folder. “Ah, yes. It seems it all started on September 20 two years ago, between eight and nine P.M. The two soldiers visited the shop in York Street, beside the barracks, of a Mr. Michael Napthali. They walked out with twelve yards of calico, valued—it seems surprisingly low—at five shillings. They were arrested and charged with theft. Their plan worked as desired at first. Quarter Sessions delivered the sentences anticipated. But then, as we know, His Excellency took it out of the hands of the civil court and imposed his own much harsher punishment.”
Rossi cleared his throat with a sip of refreshment. “On October 22 just before noon, they were brought onto the parade ground and suffered much indignity and discomfort, and there was much more of the same, even worse, to come. But let Private Patrick Thompson tell us in his own words …”
Owens gasped. “You mean he’s here? In the flesh?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Smooth the descent and easy is the way (The Gates of Hell stand open night and day) …
—Virgil’s Aeneid, translated by John Dryden (1697)
“I’M AFRAID NOT!” CAPTAIN ROSSI LAUGHED AT DR. OWENS′S SUGGESTION that Private Thompson might be about to show himself. “He went to Emu Plains, then to Moreton Bay, I believe, and to Norfolk Island. There’s talk he will eventually be sent home to Ireland. He’s the relatively lucky one of the pair of miscreants. However,” he said, flourishing a document, “here is a transcript of his examination in April 1827, taken on the prison hulk Phoenix in the harbor.