by Robin Adair
“What the devil has any of this got to do with Sudds?” asked the governor. “And what is the truth of your messages?”
Miss Dormin eyed him steadily. “The business of the zuzim was just something I came across, but somehow it summed up my mood and plans. I wanted someone to know what was happening. Did I want to get caught? Perhaps. Who knows?” She gave a brittle little laugh. “My attempt at typesetting was rather a failure.”
“What were you trying to say?” asked Mr. Hall gently.
“Oh, I meant to set ‘Exodus 21:22.’ But I couldn’t find the piece for a colon. That last number ‘3’ was meant to be followed by the words more to come or at least the printers’ abbreviation mtc, to indicate three more killings. However, it all became too hard. I had only played with type at The Gleaner and, of course, I didn’t think about the right way to put the pieces in place. I just went to the case Abbot had been using. ‘Exodus’ came out with a small e rather than a capital e, simply because I couldn’t readily reach the upper—the higher—part of the case. And it all turned out garbled. I wonder you could make any sense of it.”
“What is verse 22?” asked Wentworth.
Rachel Dormin replied curtly, “‘If men strive, and hurt a woman with child, so that her fruit depart from her . . . he shall be surely punished.’”
Dr. Halloran frowned. “Is that the full verse?”
Her eyes glittered. “It is the only interpretation that I care to recall. It represents, gentlemen, what this whole sorry saga is all about. Those four men who were executed—I won’t say murdered—raped me. And that rape left me with child. And the lady in green made me a whore. And she had my baby killed, before it was even born.”
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
Truly My Satan thou art but a Dunce,
And dost not know the Garment from the Man;
Every Harlot was a Virgin once . . .
—William Blake, For the Sexes. The Gates of Paradise (1820)
THE MEN SAT DUMBSTRUCK AS MISS RACHEL DORMIN CONTINUED. “I did arrive in Sydney in 1826 as I told you, Mr. Dunne. But by road, not by sea. The actual sea-landing had taken place, but six years earlier. That’s when I came to begin seven years of punishment—for stealing hair!
“Back home I had worked hard as a seamstress—although even then I longed to be on the stage—but it was barely enough to keep me and my poor aunt out of the poorhouse or the debtors’ prison. One day a lady inspected our wares and absentmindedly left behind a hatbox. I opened it, simply to seek some identification, and found a beautiful wig, made of real women’s hair. It was very valuable. Wigmakers, you know, seek hair, usually from poor girls’ heads, but there’s never enough. Thieves attack women in the street and even steal tresses from hospital patients and dead bodies.
“I did nothing, but I was still accused. I’d put away the box, anticipating the customer’s gratitude on its return and then forgot all about it. One day, however, I came from an errand to find the shop’s mistress confronted by the angry customer, who was accompanied by a constable.
“The box had disappeared and the woman accused us of stealing the hairpiece. She eventually believed my mistress. That left only me. Despite my protestations, I was arrested and charged. Together with a young man, who stood accused of stealing a brood of oysters, I was sentenced to transportation.”
She nodded to the patterer. “Upon my arrival in the colony and after induction at the Factory, I was assigned to a distant pastoral family, as you thought. They were kind to me, in a rough-and-ready way. And yes, I did learn to shoot—for we were always afraid of outlaws and blacks—and to ride, side-saddle and astride. It was there that Mr. Lycett, who was visiting, painted my miniature, adding it to the rude rendering of the Eliza.
“After four years, I received my ticket and determined to start a new life in the town. How could I have returned to London? And why? God knows, my poor aunt was probably dead without my companionship and help. So, although I was freed, I was still in a prison whose bars were the sea. Thus, following a period sewing in Parramatta, I did arrive, but by cart, on a spring afternoon. With little money, certainly not 150 pounds.
“I was set down from the cart in George Street, near the Lumber Yard and spent some time wandering the nearby streets, enjoying the rediscovered bustle of a town. I then sought directions to St. Phillip’s, where my kind country mistress had always said I could receive advice on where to stay. Dusk was falling by then. Beside the main guardhouse, I asked directions of a soldier and explained my quest. Both actions were my undoing. He seemed drunk, but soldiers often are. Nevertheless, I allowed him to guide me toward a street he said led to the church.”
Miss Dormin’s voice did not waver. “Near a vacant allotment he suddenly pushed me over savagely and dragged me behind a shed. Before I could scream or attempt to fight, he knocked me unconscious. When I awoke, I was trussed and gagged. And it was darker.
“Four men came for me. All except for one, whom I made out to be a black in civilian clothes, were white soldiers in uniform. They tore at my outer clothes and chemise, held me down and . . . forced me, in turn, again and again. I wanted to tell them that I was a maiden, that I had fought to keep pure on the voyage and afterward, for God’s sake! But I couldn’t speak. Oh, how they tore me!”
She trailed off, tears glazing her eyes. No one dared speak or move. “I fainted from the pain and the terror. When I awoke I feigned unconsciousness, but it didn’t stop them. They ceased only when another soldier came upon them and ordered them to stop. At first they ignored him and laughed, but he attacked them. He struck out so hard that I heard the stick he had taken to them snap.
“The three soldiers backed off and he set me free. The black brute seemed to disappear. ‘Go up the hill, lass, to the church,’ urged my rescuer. ‘Hurry!’ I started to stagger away, covering myself as best I could with what was left of my bloodied clothes, but I had gone only a few yards when a hand seized me. It was the black man. ‘I’m not finished with you, little missy,’ he said. And then he hit me and everything went black again.”
“WHEN I AWOKE I was in a strange bed, one with which I was to become familiar. Too familiar.
“That’s when I first met Madame Greene. The black man had, for a reward, brought me to the High House to become a captive whore. It happens often, I later learned, no different from a towns-man being impressed as a sailor. When I resisted her scheme, Madame called on the black man’s services again. It emerged that he was her expert in bringing reluctant and recalcitrant girls to heel. He was a ‘breaker,’ akin to a man who masters horses. He broke me in by performing on me every physical indignity and obscenity you can imagine. I won’t describe them to you, but it is the reason I left him so abused.”
She took a deep breath. “I still have nightmares, and even when we did Othello I thought of him when the play talks of Desdemona being ‘covered by a Barbary horse’ and a ‘black ram tupping your white ewe.’”
The patterer felt a shiver at the parallel, having remembered the same lines at Norah Robinson’s.
“So, I learned to behave,” Rachel Dormin continued. “I was too broken and ill to fight back anymore. And who would miss me? All that talk about a fiancé was just that, talk. I was left alone for quite a long while, to recover. I think Madame thought that some customer with a conscience might report a whore who had been too badly beaten. Perhaps she had high hopes of my eventual worth.
“Certainly, when I began my new ‘career,’ though I was never let out of the building, I was fed and dressed well, and Madame insisted that the men who bought me should take . . . precautions. Which is why, when I found I was missing my courses, I knew only my rapists could be responsible. It was the evil seed from their ravishment that had taken possession of my body.”
She was almost shouting now, her lips flecked with white spittle. “And I felt in my heart that it was likely to be the fault of that blackamoor, who had taken me the most. So.” She laughed bitterly. “I had sailed 15,000 mil
es to get a black child in my belly!”
CHAPTER FIFTY
Malvolio: I’ll be reveng’d on the whole pack of you.
—William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night (1601)
CALMER NOW, MISS DORMIN CONTINUED HER CONFESSION. “I was more determined than ever to find out all about those animals and punish them. From words dropped by Madame and her faithful Elsie, and from horror stories told me by other girls, I had learned that the ‘breaker’ was a blacksmith at the Lumber Yard.
“Now, one rum-sodden soldier—I don’t know how he afforded me, but the gods did us both a favor—boasted to me how three of his mates had raped a foolish young bunter and got away with it. Only two had been punished—for having dirty uniforms! He stupidly named all three; my hunt could begin.”
“Dear lady,” protested Colonel Shadforth. “The regiment didn’t know of your plight. Or of the men’s dereliction of duty. They could have been flogged . . . shot!”
Rachel Dormin looked at him scornfully. “Would anyone believe a convict girl, that she was forced? Besides, two of them finished their enlistments soon after. Abbot went back to being a respectable printer and The Ox became a slaughterman. The others stayed free. Who was I, a whore, to complain?
“Then the soldier in my bed laughed that the man who intervened had been punished for losing equipment—a cane, the stick that I had heard him break. And then he said that this man was dead, anyway. That was the first time that I, locked in my prison room, heard the name Joseph Sudds and learned the details of his fate.
“Gradually I realized the amazing coincidence, that the men who had despoiled me had also played parts—some minor, one major—in the destruction of the only man who had shown me any kindness. I had dreamed of vengeance on all my tormentors. Now I vowed I would take some measure of retribution for poor Sudds.
“The child quickened within me and Madame Greene soon found out. Her response was swift and direct. A child is a liability for a whore. It had to go. For once I agreed with her, but not with her methods. She never let Dr. Owens, who checked all her other women, come near me—she said he was too ‘straight.’ So, first she fed me some potions, but they only made me sicker. Then, while that black bastard held me down, Madame forced rounded shapes of raw, dried wood into the neck of my womb. I gathered that the wood was supposed to swell with bodily moistures and encourage the expulsion of the child, but I only expelled the wood, amid a welter of blood. What do you make of that, Doctor?” Her aside, delivered unemotionally, almost conversationally, surprised Owens for a moment.
“Well, I’d say,” he replied, equally clinically, “that Madame’s choice of abortifacients was unwise. The failed oral mixtures may have been something derived from Queen Anne’s lace, or rue. Or perhaps from juniper; a common attempt to shed a fetus is by massive ingestion of gin, in a very hot bath. You allude to a wood suppository used vaginally. The traditional wood used for this purpose comes from the elm, although Hippocrates himself recommended the cucumber.”
Governor Darling coughed. “Must we have this distasteful detail?”
Miss Dormin rounded on him. “For a soldier, you have a delicate stomach, sir. I am not finished. There is worse to come.”
Darling snorted, but fell silent.
Barely above a whisper, she continued. “Madame then had the blacksmith beat my belly until the child dropped.”
At this Mr. Hall looked close to tears.
“I almost died . . . and I wanted to. But I slowly gathered strength and a new determination. All the while I showed compliance and I noticed the restraints on me gradually slackening.
“One afternoon, while the other girls were resting and Madame, attended by Elsie, was out showing off in some manner, I stole clothes and money—a lot of it—from where I had learned it was hidden in the bitch’s parlor. Money’s a wonderful, persuasive friend—it’s all that really counts, isn’t it, gentlemen?—and it bought me a new life.
“I became the Rachel Dormin you know, the comfortably situated immigrant, successful seamstress, amateur thespian of note, with an inquiring mind and a respectable mentor, Dr. Halloran. And I got my revenge—and laid, where I could manage it, sweet memorials to Joseph Sudds.
“But Elsie eventually saw through me, if no one else did. I had avoided her successfully until her charge into the green room to see her lover. I’d even managed to escape her when she had come with Madame Greene to the dress shop.
“Then Muller became a problem, too. It seemed that he had been a customer at the High House and had seen me there. It meant nothing to me—there were so many men—but one day at The Gleaner he discovered my secret. He came upon me in a spare room that Dr. Halloran had allowed me to use. I had forgotten to lock the door and he surprised me—with the dress and the fabric remnants. And the bill of lading. Whether he realized what I had done from the start, I can’t say, but any suspicions he did have were heightened when he saw me in a new light and recognized who I had been.”
Mr. Hall now asked the question that had vexed several of the listeners. “Muller could see through you. Why, in heaven’s name, didn’t Madame Greene recognize you when you fitted her and primped and preened her hair and face?”
“Why should she?” replied Miss Dormin. She turned to the two soldiers. “If you came across one of your hundreds of private soldiers, but one now with a new moustache, say, and dressed smartly as a fellow officer, in different regimentals, and now taller, would you still know him?” She could see they still had doubts. “How do you think I passed so readily as a native?”
“You used theatrical makeup, as Dunne suggested,” ventured Wentworth.
“Yes, but how could I disguise this?” She shook her golden mane. Then she quickly grasped a handful at her forehead and peeled off the long locks. Underneath was only a stubble of short-cropped brown hair. She laughed at their shock. “Suitably, a wig—one of which had brought me low in London—helped save me in Sydney. And Madame’s money paid for it. I cut off my dark hair and wore higher heels.
“But the wig is hot, and when Muller intruded on me he saw my bare head. He wanted to see more, much more, but I put him off. Then I overheard him talking to you, Mr. Dunne, and I knew I could never trust him.”
She smiled at the patterer. “Haven’t you wondered where both Muller and I learned about the poisonous fabric? It was just another of the strange conjunctions in this matter. A dispatch about it had appeared in The Gleaner. He had typeset it. I had read it. Is it little wonder that our paths crossed? You really didn’t need all those fancy reference books.”
“SO,” SAID NICODEMUS Dunne when Rachel had come to the end of her confession. “We are at the finish.”
“Almost. Not quite,” Miss Dormin corrected him. She reached down into the reticule that had never left her side.
Then, for the second time in two days, almost as if by some magnetic attraction, the patterer had a gun pointed at him.
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
Look in my face; my name is Might-have-been;
I am also called No-more, Too-late, Farewell.
—Dante Gabriel Rossetti, The House of Life (1881)
RACHEL DORMIN’S LEFT HAND WAS ROCK STEADY AS SHE AIMED the small pistol straight at the patterer’s heart. He noted with surprised detachment that the serpent’s-neck was at full cock. She had said she could shoot. And she had proved it. Twice.
“Why me?” he asked. It was a question loaded only with calm interest. He wasn’t begging. Not yet, he thought grimly. “Why did you set that trap for me?”
Her voice was as coolly controlled as his. “It had to be you—you were getting too close to the truth. And suddenly I didn’t want to be caught. Perhaps, at the beginning, I didn’t care what happened to me, but then I grew to like my life as Rachel Dormin—and her power. Who knows, maybe I could even have taken Madame’s place. Why not? I served my apprenticeship there.
“But you spoiled it, and now the bill must be paid. Death is the price. I promised myself that when I re
alized why you must have summoned me here.” Her tone softened. “I more than liked you at first, I really did. You seemed old-fashioned in your manners, and a gentleman. You were nice, if there’s such a thing as that.
“Even when I waited that night to go to the Lumber Yard, with my arms and face blackened and my wig discarded, I even girlishly, foolishly, thought that one day we might become more . . . intimate . . .” She broke off. “But it was not to be. And, in the end, you turned out to be like all the others. You couldn’t help touching—no, pawing—me. And I knew I could never let myself be soiled again.”
She glared at the men. “How many children did it take to kill your first wife, Dr. Halloran? Was it a dozen?” she asked her old friend, who could only shake his head, stricken.
“Even you, Excellency. Like a rooting dog, you can’t leave Elizabeth alone, can you?”
Darling flushed brick red.
Distract her, thought Dunne; delay her until salvation presents itself. But even the soldiers are paralyzed. Think, damn you! Keep her talking. “Of course,” he said, “there was always one clue staring me in the face right from the beginning. I own that it slipped completely past me.”
“And that was?” prompted Rachel Dormin, distracted.
“Why, your very name.”
He turned to Dr. Halloran. “But this is your field, Reverend. Doesn’t Genesis talk about a ‘mighty hunter before the Lord’?” He raised a hand to stop Halloran answering too soon. “And I believe the Targums, those Aramaic interpretations of the Old Testament, say the name in question is that of a ‘sinful hunter of the sons of men.’ More modernly, Mr. Alexander Pope agrees, in his ‘Windsor-Forest, ’ that the name refers to ‘A mighty hunter, and his prey was man.’”