by Robin Adair
“I did not know she had such teeth,” said the patterer.
“Neither did I,” said the doctor. “Until, that is, I found them beside the commode on which she had been sitting. She obviously took them out when she first called for the bowl, and at the time we were all too busy to notice her putting them down. I only collected them just as we were heading off to the hospital.”
Nicodemus Dunne looked at the gleaming teeth, grim ghosts of Madame’s smile, now vanished forever. He had never before thought to study such things closely. They were rare; only the rich could afford them. He knew that some supposedly were made of wood—that most famous American, George Washington, was reputed to have had a wooden set—but there were people who said that wood was too fragile for the purpose. He did know that some teeth were carved from whalebone. The best though—if the most ghoulish—were sets made using real teeth taken from the dead.
Dragging himself back to the present situation, the patterer said, “That’s all very interesting, but what is the particular significance of the teeth?”
Owens smiled, obviously well pleased with himself. “Before I cleaned the teeth to their current presentable state, I examined their surfaces.”
“So?”
“So they were free of any toxin-bearing vomit.”
Dunne did not want to say “So?” again and further show his ignorance. He remained silent.
“It proves,” said the doctor—rather smugly, the patterer thought—“that no toxic substance passed in through Madame Greene’s mouth while she wore her teeth—and that would be all her waking hours. Yet inside she was stewed with evidence of the arsenic that killed her. Thus the improbable conclusion, which must be the truth, is that somehow she was murdered!”
A trick of the light made Madame’s teeth seem to smile. She was no soldier, but was the similar death of The Ox somehow linked to hers?
It was not until the patterer had left Dr. Owens and his sad charge that he wondered why, if Elsie could be regarded as trustworthy on the matter of food and drink, the doctor could doubt her story of the proffered lozenge.
Dr. Owens was widely known for his habit of offering the sweets to everyone, including Dunne. And he admitted to dosing Madame. Earlier, too, something about Owens had engaged the young man’s imagination. But then he shook his head. If the doctor were in any way connected with the fat lady’s death, he would hardly have tried so hard to save her and then have announced, when he could have said it was accident or suicide, that it was murder.
Still, Dunne now half-heartedly entered Owens’s name on his list of “Persons of Interest.”
And the patterer decided it would do no harm to have a further talk with Elsie.
BUT THAT INTERVIEW never eventuated.
By the end of the day after Madame Greene’s death, Elsie, too, lay dead. She was found in a shed behind the whorehouse. Her wrists were slashed and a bloody knife lay beside her body.
Captain Rossi took control of the case, but had to agree that it seemed a clear case of suicide while in a state of despair over the death of her mistress. Out of respect for the two women, he made sure that their full relationship was left out of the report to the coroner.
At least, Dunne and the captain agreed, Elsie would not be left in a legal limbo, unlike the other poor devils who had died, and whose inquests returned “open” findings as the search for the truth went on.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
What dire offence from am’rous causes springs,
What mighty contests rise from trivial things.
—Alexander Pope, The Rape of the Lock (1714)
ALTHOUGH LIVES WERE BEING EXTINGUISHED WITH OMINOUS regularity, the patterer determined that his life should go on as normally as possible. Thus he continued his regular public readings of the news, although he was not as driven to work as he had been.
When the demands of the investigation began to eat into his bread-and-butter labors, he confided to several people, including Dr. Owens and Alexander Harris, that his income was declining. Captain Rossi, too, showed sympathy.
His fortunes, however, had taken a turn for the better when he last examined his bank account. Mr. Potts, in his impeccable script, added an extra ten pounds to his usual fee. The only explanation that was forthcoming was that Mr. Potts’s principals were very satisfied with the patterer’s service and felt that he had been insufficiently rewarded for it.
Nicodemus Dunne did not argue, but returned to work with a new sense of security and a new spring in his step. And so he went about, bringing tidings of the coming withdrawal from legal tender of the holey dollar, that strange ring-shaped coin that had, in its way, solved the colony’s currency crisis fifteen years earlier. Then, there had not been enough English, Spanish, Dutch or Portuguese coins to go around, and paying visiting traders for imported necessities always drained the purse. Promissory notes and private banknotes, like the famous Waterloo Notes, were of varying value.
Even the arrival from England to the colonial powers of 40,000 coins of that trading benchmark, the Spanish silver dollar (its value of eight reales spawned the legendary piratical label, “pieces of eight”) did not help, because many of them could soon slip back overseas.
Although it was before his time, the patterer knew the story of what happened next. The governor, Lachlan Macquarie, hit on a way to keep the new coins in the colony. And turn a profit at the same time. Naturally, he asked a convict forger for help. William Henshall punched out a small disc—called the dump—from each Spanish coin, leaving a larger ring, called the holey dollar. Macquarie valued the ring at five shillings and the dump at fifteen pence, so each dollar became worth six shillings and threepence.
Now their death knell had sounded.
Dunne moved on, entertaining a crowd with a letter written by the architect Mr. Greenway to The Australian about his plan to throw a soaring bridge across the harbor from Lieutenant Dawes’s Battery to the nearest point on the northern shore, a spot east of Billy Blue’s Murdering Point. He had been proposing the bridge for a decade or more. Ten years before, at the height of his powers, no one had listened. Now, in the decline of his career, the idea seemed doomed forever.
To select audiences, the patterer brought news that was difficult to find in the papers. Prizefighting or kangaroo-coursing might be tolerated by the authorities, but of the shadowy worlds of bull-baiting or cockfighting, aficionados could learn only by word of mouth. It was not nice news. He told them how at Brickfield village, the center of many blood sports, a fighting cock still wearing its spur had raked out the eye of its handler.
To more general acclaim, he lauded that famous eccentric and pedestrian, the Flying Pieman, who had recently hauled a gig with a woman passenger over a distance of half a mile. Some listeners asked him for news on a rumor that only recently the pieman had been involved in fisticuffs with wild natives. Hadn’t he been defending the honor of a young lady?
As usual, thought Dunne, the gossip was only half right. And the true version was better left untold. So he just shook his head and solemnly professed to have no knowledge of any such fracas.
WITH HIS FINANCES improving, the patterer felt better able to court Miss Dormin lavishly.
He escorted her to a large evening party at the splendid Sydney Hotel, near the Military Barracks. Once inside, Rachel Dormin removed the fur-trimmed overgarment she had worn in the carriage.
“Why, in this climate, does a mantle need a fur trim?” asked the patterer.
“My dear,” said his companion resignedly, “it’s not a mantle, it’s a pelisse. And the fur is—Well, ladies just like fur! Anyway, a lady can’t be seen everywhere just in an evening dress.”
“Oh?” replied Dunne. “Really? I rather garnered the impression that some modern dresses were meant to show everywhere. Only recently I was amused by a witty verse that was reprinted here from an English journal:“When dressed for the evening, girls nowadays
Scarce an atom of dress on them leave;
&n
bsp; Nor blame them—for what is an evening dress
But a dress that is suited for Eve?”
Miss Dormin laughed and slapped him lightly.
Her gown did reveal bare shoulders and décolletage. The bodice was cut off the shoulder and kept up surely by a little whalebone. By gravity, too, decided the patterer; the gravity of what would happen if the dress slipped. Wisely, he kept this amusing thought to himself. One risqué joke was probably enough.
Short puffed sleeves left her arms bare, and her slippers, worn over silk stockings with colorfully embroidered clocks, peeped from beneath a skirt-length shorter than was fashionable by day. The fabric of her dress, she informed her escort, was gros de Naples, which meant nothing to him. But he understood and approved that her hair was piled high in an Apollo knot and anchored by a bejeweled ivory comb.
Nicodemus Dunne was no less a picture of sartorial splendor. He had once more consulted Mr. Cooper’s tailor—although this time he had been able to pay for the hire—and now he wore a dark blue evening dress coat over a canary waistcoat and tight flesh-colored fine-wool pants strapped to his soft pumps. He carried a cloak and a tall hat.
First, they listened to the band of the 57th play popular airs. When the musicians rendered “General Ralph Darling’s Australian Slow March” and an even better-known march by Mr. Handel, the patterer remarked that it was uncommonly civil of the 57th’s bandmaster, Mr. Sippe, to perform those pieces. When Miss Dormin asked why, Dunne explained (showing off) that, of course, the governor’s march had been composed by a rival, Mr. Kavanagh, of the Buffs, and that the Handel piece was the marching music of that other regiment.
Then the program of the rout changed and they danced: waltzes, galops, quadrilles. They sat out the unfamiliar varsoviana, Spanish steps in circles or sets of two couples in triple time.
All evening, they deliberately avoided mention of the deaths that haunted them. But memories of them—especially those of Madame Greene and poor Elsie, so recent and so raw—were revived when a plump, perspiring woman whirled past, puffing.
“That could be Madame,” observed the patterer, without thinking, steering his partner out of the way. “Sorry.”
The announcement of an interval before supper broke the sad spell under which they had fallen.
While Rachel Dormin joined the ladies, a mysterious custom to Dunne, he joined the gentlemen who were retiring to the smoking room. He did not take tobacco, despite its approval by doctors, but he took great interest in its rituals, which were almost as solemn as decanting wine and letting it breathe, or swirling and sniffing brandy, or mulling wine.
This night, there seemed to be no pipes on display—of course, where could a man carry one in his skin-tight evening wear? Most smoked cigars; some (usually older men) took snuff. The patterer observed that these gentlemen carried the powdered tobacco already prepared—again, as in the case of pipes, there was no comfortable place to conceal a grater with which to grind the weed.
He also saw that, whereas on the street one would encounter men with utilitarian wooden snuffboxes, here, adorning officers and gentry, were small works of art, enameled silver or gold.
One thing was certain: No man here chewed. Or spat.
IT WAS REGRETTABLE, then, that the one guest guilty that night of ungentlemanly behavior should be Nicodemus Dunne.
As the parties and couples regrouped to enter the supper room, he steered his partner toward a chambre particulière, a curtained-off banquette not meant for use that night. He stepped into one, gently pulled a surprised Rachel Dormin after him and drew the curtain closed.
“I’ve wanted to do this since I first saw you,” he whispered, and pressed himself against her, holding her tightly. He leaned down into her shocked face and forced his lips onto her opened mouth.
She struggled and pulled her face away. “Mr. Dunne!” she gasped. “I beg you. Don’t . . . I have my reputation!”
Had she stiffened in his arms in acceptance or rejection? He could not be certain. Then, either by accident or by instinctive design, one of his hands slipped from her bare shoulder onto a breast. He then felt her grow completely rigid before she shoved him violently away. As he moved back she gave him a stinging slap across the face.
His eyes watered. “Miss Dormin, I’m so sorry.”
“This is impossible.” Her eyes were wide and fearful. She was white to the lips.
“Why is it . . . so impossible?”
“Because ...” She was angry now. “Because I’m not one of those warm things who tumble indiscriminately ... who don’t give a fig for their good name. Is there no such thing as courtship?”
Dunne looked stricken. “Can you forgive me? Can we forget this and start again?”
Rachel Dormin was suddenly composed once more and spoke calmly. “I always like you better as a gentleman. Let us not speak of this matter again. Please take me in to supper.” She opened the curtain.
They supped then he escorted her home as if nothing had happened, and she told him that, yes, they could continue their friendship.
The patterer went to his bed that night a relieved man. He wanted Miss Dormin’s acceptance.
But he still wanted a woman. Badly.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Night makes no difference ’twixt the Priest and Clerk;
Joan as my Lady is as good i’th’ dark.
—Robert Herrick, “No Difference i’th’ Dark” (1648)
“HERE′S TO YOU, MRS. ROBINSON.” NICODEMUS DUNNE RAISED his glass of rum and saluted the tall, handsome woman behind the bar.
Norah Robinson smiled as she picked up an empty glass and returned the gesture. “And to you, Mr. Dunne.” She spoke in the clear Irish brogue heard so often in the town and country. She was no prisoner or servant; the edge of steel that could enter her tone made it clear she was the boss.
The patterer was in an alehouse near Brickfield Hill. Its true name was the Bacchanal but it was known, of course, as the Bag o’ Nails, save there was no ironmongery in sight. Or it was called the Bull and Dog because of the bull-baiting held, illegally, nearby.
It was early, not yet ten A.M., on the morning after his dismally failed attempt—if such it was—to seduce Miss Dormin. He rarely drank at such an hour, but now he was on his second dram.
He and Mrs. Robinson were the only people in the taproom. They knew each other as well as any good trader and regular customer do. Or it could be that there was something more. She was a good-looking woman of, Dunne judged, forty or so; perhaps she was still in her late thirties. He was a presentable male. And maybe they flirted sometimes, as men and women in propinquity invariably will.
“You’re an early bird, aren’t you,” commented Mrs. Robinson. “What’s the celebration then? Or perhaps it’s a small wake?”
“I’m toasting my lack of brains,” said the patterer with a shrug. “That and my luck in love—or, rather, the lack of it.”
“Ah,” was all she said.
“And where’s your husband?” he asked after a pause.
“Oh, he’s to Parramatta. He’s supposed to be loading gin from a still-man there. And buying sheep. But ...” She leaned confidentially across the bar, in so doing tightening the fabric of her dress against her breasts.
Why the secrecy, thought Dunne, there’s no other bugger here. “But?” he prompted.
“But,” she picked up her thread, “while I trust him not to sample too much of the gin, I suspect he’s making sheep’s eyes and tupping a ewe.” She laughed.
“Tup,” thought the patterer idly. Why, he had not heard the old English word for years. Only rustics and, it seemed, Celtic publicans, used it. Most people now chose other euphemisms for copulation. He remembered the shiver he had felt as a schoolboy (admittedly he had experienced a greater frisson surreptitiously conning The Rape of Lucrece) when reading about the Blackamoor Othello “tupping” white Desdemona.
He murmured aloud the lines in which another character tells Desdemona’s father, �
��You’ll have your daughter covered by a Barbary horse.” He hoped there had been no tupping in Miss Dormin’s recital at Levey’s theater.
“Pardon?” said Mrs. Robinson, frowning.
His reverie was broken by her puzzlement. “Nothing. Sorry. I was just daydreaming.” So, indeed, the Bard had the right of it: The world is a stage and there’s always passion and lust upon it. Well, I’ll act out this play, he decided. “I’m sorry, ma’am, I didn’t quite follow what you said.”
“Ah, Mr. Dunne! You’re a slow rogue, toying with a poor simple woman.”
“On my honor, no, ma’am!”
“Well, he has a fancy woman there and I’ll wager they’re chewing each other’s tongues as we speak. If they’re not hard at it swiving, that is. Though maybe not that, for I hear he has put her in the family way and there she is now, as big as the governor’s stables . . . But what’s your worry?”
Here goes nothing, thought Dunne. “Unrequited love,” he said.
Mrs. Robinson stared at him. Sure, he was a well set-up boy—man, rather. And she’d heard that he was kind and she knew he was clever. He stared back at her. In the half-light coming through the small windows, her white skin looked almost luminous and her hair made a golden-red nimbus around her oval face.
“Make that one your last,” she said finally.
“I beg pardon if I’ve said something untoward!”
Mrs. Robinson smiled. “No, dear. Just make it your last. In fact, don’t finish it. Shut that outside door and bar it. Wait five minutes and come upstairs. There’s something you should see.”
Dunne did as he was bid. On the level above he found a corridor. Only one door was open so he headed there. He crossed the threshold into a room dimmed by heavy, drawn curtains.
He heard a sound and turned. From behind the closing door stepped Norah Robinson, wearing only a shift. Shutting off the corridor had lessened the light even more.