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Authors: Robin Adair

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At least prisoners here were not left out overnight, he thought, even if only to protect them from the rats in the marketplace or those from the abandoned burial ground next door, which bred among the often-exposed old graves, disturbed only by thugs and robbers. A fence kept out rooting pigs, but not these rats, which literally rose from the dead.
Deep in his gloomy thoughts, the young man bumped into Captain Rossi on the steps of the columned entrance to the law offices.
“Ah, Dunne,” said the policeman. “Can we meet in half an hour in the taproom?” He pointed toward the Market House Hotel.
This suggestion suited the patterer. He had neglected his pattering work of late and welcomed the opportunity of a captive audience again. In the crowded bar he was soon busy.
To a group of sunburned men in long smocks, clearly farmers in town with their produce or animals, he retold from one of his newspapers the story of the bloody and brutal end to a dogfight at Brickfield village. Two bull terriers had forced a stalemate when they sank their teeth into each other and neither would let go. To prove his charge would fight on in any circumstances, one owner had chopped off the animal’s feet. He lost his wager.
Dunne then sold an advertisement to a drinker. He helped him with a prepared document that needed only names and dates filled in. There was always great call for this form. The stock advice read:
I the undersigned do hereby Caution the Public, not to give credit to my Wife _____, as I will not be answerable for any debt she may contract, she having left my house on the _____ instant, without any cause whatsoever, and which she has repeatedly done.
At the end was room for a name and date. The newspaper’s rate was eight lines for two and six plus a penny per extra line. The patterer charged the man for ten lines; two shillings eight pence. He could keep sixpence of that for himself, and charge the man threepence for taking the notice to the printer and making sure it appeared.
Next, he related to drinkers how “Jeremiah Gerraty, in possession of a proboscis highly carbuncled, was charged with reveling in Bacchanalian joys, till Morpheus muzzled him and laid him on his back in the middle of George Street. For this, two hours’ lounge in the stocks.”
To a group of women smoking and drinking together, away from their men, he shared the authorities’ regret that “We have no bathing place for the fair sex of Sydney. At present females are debarred from this enjoyment, which in many cases is necessary to restore health.”
The women showed more interest when he alerted them to the fact that J. Wyatt’s cheap wholesale and retail warehouse had just received Leghorn bonnets at twenty-five shillings and upward, children’s beaver hats and bonnets with feathers, twelve and six each, and ladies’ white stays, ten to twenty-five shillings per pair.
As always lately, he avoided relating any of the small stories that referred, with details officially played down, to the three recent murders.
He had finished his recitations and ordered his first glass of beer when, over the sea of straw, beaver and kangaroo-skin hats, he saw a familiar face heading his way. Nicodemus Dunne was pleased. He liked Alexander Harris, an educated and intelligent man who described himself as an emigrant mechanic, and whose shrewd opinions the patterer valued.
As he approached his friend, Harris politely refused an invitation to drink from a man he did not know who was already at the bar. When the man had gone, the mechanic declared, “I can’t help observing a remarkable peculiarity common to them all—there is no offensive obtrusiveness about their civility; every man seems to consider himself just on a level with all the rest, and so quite content either to be sociable or not, as the circumstances of the moment indicate as most proper.”
“That’s quite a mouthful, and rather a philosophical turn of mind for a Saturday in a taproom,” Dunne remarked. Yet at the same time he wondered if this were true.
Harris nodded. “I only have a moment, but, yes, I have been thinking greatly on my fellow man, hoping that the lot of all may improve. I simply cannot get out of my mind a disturbing experience I just had in Bridge Street, at the Lumber Yard. I had to pass the triangles, where they had been flogging incessantly for hours. I saw a man walk across the yard with blood that had run from his lacerated back squashing out of his shoes at every step he took. A dog was licking the blood off the triangles … and the scourger’s left foot had worn a deep hole in the ground by the violence with which he whirled himself round on it to strike.”
Harris ended this grim tale and excused himself for it, just as Captain Rossi bustled through the low doorway.
“Great news, sir!” Rossi said as he motioned for a nobbler of rum. “We are finally making progress. And I have very special news for you, something very pleasing, I’m sure!”
At this, Harris made a discreet departure.
Intrigued though the patterer was at the prospect of Rossi’s news, he insisted on first relaying his own startling intelligence from the hospital visit, about the unsuspected death by firearm and the emergence of yet a third victim, the poisoned army veteran.
In truth, these were the only positive new factors he could grasp and juggle. Of course, he had suspicions, riddles and puzzles. Something about the
Gleaner
publisher Dr. Laurence Halloran’s avowed Christian charity toward the dead rival publisher did not ring quite true. Even Captain Rossi’s clear ignorance of his old regiment seemed rather odd. And what, nagged a voice at the back of his mind, had Dr. Cunningham meant by his hint to avoid close contact with anyone at the hospital? Did he in fact mean a medical colleague, Dr. Thomas Owens, perhaps?
But Dunne was also conscious of the overriding dictum of the Runners, passed down from their founder, Henry Fielding: Never take anything at face value; suspicions, hunches and doubts are useless without proof. Sound advice, mused the patterer. So he would take all the evidence with a grain of salt—even the mysterious grains of sugar.
He turned to Rossi. “So, what’s your news?”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Each lordly man his taper waist displays,
Combs his sweet locks and laces on his stays,
Ties on his starch’d cravat with nicest care,
And then steps forth to petrify the fair.
—Bernard Blackmantle (C. M. Westmacott),
The English Spy
(1825)
 
 
 
 
 
 
“
I
HAD INTERESTING CONVERSATIONS WITH DR. HALLORAN AND Miss Dormin earlier,” Captain Rossi began. “The publisher tells me that the man Abbot was originally an American printer who had supported the loyal—to the Crown, that is—forces in the war of 1812, before having to leave his home and business for Canada. He ultimately enlisted in, or was pressed into, the 57th.”
The patterer raised his eyebrows but was not surprised.
“But, my boy,” Rossi continued, “the very important intelligence is that we can now more accurately estimate the time of the murder. The doctors, I gather, could not be sure of that because the fire distorted the usual signs, such as rigor mortis. We do have a witness, however, to shed new light on the case: Miss Dormin! That’s why she came to the scene with Dr. Halloran, to tell us. But she became upset, and left abruptly. When she had recovered, she was able to tell me that she saw the printer, alive and well, on the morning of the fire. She was a visitor to the shop, by arrangement, to collect a manuscript—I believe they call it ‘copy.’”
“What else did she say?” asked Dunne, trying not to appear eager for any crumb about the young lady.
“I suggest you ask her yourself,” replied Rossi, with a smile. “She will attend morning service tomorrow at St. James’s.
Bonne chance!
”
NICODEMUS DUNNE LEFT the taproom determined not to rely simply on luck. He headed diagonally across George Street to the huge emporium on the corner of Market Street known as the Waterloo Stores.
He had once done a signal service for the proprietor and now in turn needed help. The stores sold everything imaginable, but Dunne particularly needed a new outfit of smart clothes, if only for a short time. He knew his day-to-day outfit would never do for Miss Dormin, and even his usual Sunday best was not good enough.
Big Cooper was only too happy to oblige. Daniel Cooper was called “Big” to distinguish him from the several Coopers prominent in Sydney life and trade. The stores were an institution in the town, their co-owners, Cooper and Solomon Levey, known to all. During a shortage of coin, the business had even issued its own paper currency, called Waterloo Notes.
So Big Cooper handed the patterer over to a tailor and habit-maker, who had trained in London before stabbing a co-worker with pinking shears and being transported. His instructions were to lend the young man a suitable ready-to-wear wardrobe.
SUNDAY DAWNED WITH the promise of a fine day and Dunne whistled softly as he washed, shaved and dressed carefully in his Bent Street room. Mr. Cooper’s man had excelled himself. As the Patterer headed south to morning service, few acquaintances would have recognized him.
His dark green fitted coat was double-breasted, with a rolled collar, skirts that fell to his knees and tight sleeves puffed at the shoulder. His trousers ended in suspenders under a pair of gleaming boots. The crown of his top hat widened at its peak, and its brim was turned up.
His work uniform was, albeit briefly, a thing of the past, replaced by the mirror image of a fashion plate. He would not, his tame tailor told him, be out of place in such European publications as Harriette Wilson’s
Paris Lions and London Tigers
, a bible of the beau monde.
Dunne had never heard of this volume; apart from her fame as a courtesan, he knew of Wilson only as the author of her colorful
Memoirs
, news of which had famously caused the Duke of Wellington one of her conquests, to challenge her to “publish, and be damned.”
Admittedly, conceded the young man as he strode toward St. James’s to the beat of an ivory-topped cane, the tailor had archly warned that this style was really several years old, but he had added that, as they were a world away, few would know the difference. The suit would pass muster.
“Muster,” Dunne thought idly, was quite the word of the day. All convicts were mustered for compulsory church attendance, and the rule applied to pass-men, too. While controlling the men and women in captivity posed few problems, keeping a religious rein on the scattered parolees was a harder task.
But the patterer, though not religious, rather liked the change of pace and the gentle ritual involved. And he liked the music, if not the fire-breathing sermons from the archdeacon, the Venerable Thomas Hobbes Scott, although he had to admit that the man appeared to earn his 2,000 pounds a year. New St. James’s was usually a bit fancy for Dunne, too: He preferred the older St. Phillip’s, between the barracks and The Rocks, where convicts usually predominated on its 800 seats.
As he reached the church, he reflected that it was yet another triumph for the convict architect Francis Greenway, standing opposite his Hyde Park convict barracks. These and his other town works were everyday pleasures for residents’ eyes. But, thought Dunne, perhaps the most enduring memorial to Greenway’s genius was Macquarie’s Tower, the colony’s first lighthouse, a graceful beacon that guided shipping through the stark headlands guarding Port Jackson.

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