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Authors: Robin Adair

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Miss Dormin suddenly pointed to one of the fieldsmen. “Why, if it is the military team’s identifying garb, is one of the civilian players wearing a black top hat?”
Dunne consulted another spectator and soon reported back. “It is as I suspected. When that man in the hat bowled earlier, he claimed three wickets with consecutive deliveries, a rare occurrence. The tradition is that the third man to fall honors the bowler by handing over a hat as a trophy. Thus the feat is known as a hat-trick.”
They stood in companionable silence, watching the match.
We must make an attractive couple, thought Dunne, as he felt Miss Dormin’s gloved hand in the crook of his elbow. He wondered if she could feel his heart, so near. He glanced surreptitiously sideways; why, this profile, through the fluttering loosened ribbons, was as perfect as the other.
Then something extraordinary happened. The batsman cleanly connected to a delivery and the ball scooted along like a bouncing cannonball—right toward the patterer and his companion. Dunne shot out a foot in front of the young woman to deflect the oncoming ball, but his heel caught in a pothole.
She, however, reacted more successfully. In one fluid movement and without even relinquishing the hold on her escort, she flicked off her bonnet and, reaching down, neatly scooped up the ball into its crown. The players and spectators applauded.
“That, sir,” said Miss Dormin, as she rolled the ball back to the nearest player, “
that
is a hat-trick.”
He laughed as they turned away from the cricket match and back toward the heart of the town.
“I know
what
you are,” said Miss Dormin suddenly as they strolled. “But
who
are you?”
So Nicodemus Dunne told her about how he had been brought up in the southern English port of Weymouth by a kindly guardian who treated him well. His foster-father was a retired senior army officer. No struggling retiree on half-pay, he seemed a wealthy man who knew important people in London. The young Nicodemus had more than once seen communications coming to the house bearing what seemed to be royal seals, and he knew from overheard conversations that his foster-parents had close links to a General Garth.
They had never told Dunne anything about his true parents, whom the boy had never known. All he did know was that he was born in the year 1800. After a time, anyway, his curiosity faded. The Dunnes were generous and had him educated broadly.
The patterer told Miss Dormin that Dunne Senior had wanted him to enter the army. That ambition failed in the face of his foster-son’s keen interest in the legendary Bow Street Runners. This was the police force molded by justice of the peace Henry Fielding, famed as the author of the comic epic
The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling
. (Dunne at times idly wondered if he himself had been a foundling.) Henry’s sightless brother, John, who later took over leadership of the Bow Street Runners, was the celebrated “Blind Beak,” a magistrate who claimed he could identify 3,000 miscreants by their voices alone.
Miss Dormin frowned as the patterer repeated the story he had told Governor Darling and the others at the barracks about his own fall from grace. He explained that since transportation, after four years of much lighter service than most convicts were subjected to, he had been given his ticket of leave. This was because he was classified as a Special—the name given to some educated felons. Before parole, he was assigned to work at
The Gazette
, where he had first met Captain Rossi. In about a year, Dunne told her, he would be emancipated—if he kept his hands, and his nose, clean.
“Will you go home?” asked Rachel Dormin. She emphasized the word
home
the way so many English in Australia, even convicts, did, Dunne thought. Home: You could almost see it with a capital
H
, the manner in which it was often rendered in the newspapers. The yearning in so many people was almost palpable, no less so in those exiles for whom “home” meant nothing better than a poverty- and disease-riddled rookery such as St. Giles.
He recalled that there had been cheers, and even tears, when he read to gatherings from a poem contributed to one of his newspapers. It had ended:
Tho’ boundless leagues from dales and moors
Under a foreign sky,
And stranded far on unknown shores
An Englishman I’ll die.
The patterer shrugged and answered his companion. “Where or what is home to me now?” he asked, giving the word a neutral intonation. “I would not be welcomed at the Dunnes’ hearth—if they are still alive. I fear they felt that I had disgraced their name. Indeed, I gathered that my offense went somehow even deeper. No, perhaps I will try and make a fresh start here, although as an Emancipist that can be difficult.”
“Why so, if you have paid your debt to society?”
Dunne sighed. “Oh, my dear young lady! It appears you have not been here long enough to learn that the class divisions in the colony are as complex—perhaps more so—as those in Britain, or even as the caste system of the Hindoostani.
“You,” he said with a gesture, “are doubtless ‘Sterling,’ freely come from Britain. Other free men and women, born here, are ‘Currency.’ Why these odd names? It seems they were coined—and you will pardon my pun—by the pay officer of the 73rd Regiment in Governor Macquarie’s time. Currency circulating locally was considered inferior to the pound Sterling.
“Not all Sterling are equal, however. At the top of the tree are the ‘Pure Merinos,’ such as Captain Macarthur and the Reverend Marsden and all other members of the pastoral elite. Their aim is to keep their bloodlines pure from contamination by lesser mortals; like their animals, they boast of no cross-blood in their human flocks. These people lead the master class called the ‘Exclusives.’ The military, officers only of course, are top-drawer, too. Exclusives even look down on free men in trade, let alone the one-time prisoners who have stayed on and succeeded, such as Mr. Terry and Mr. Underwood. Even powerful men not in trade but in the professions, men who appear to be and are indeed perfectly respectable, can be snubbed at the mere hint of a convict stain.
“Why, take Mr. Wentworth, whom you have encountered at
The Australian
. Gossipers whispered—not too loudly; D’Arcy had a fierce disposition, as does his son—that the old man ‘volunteered’ for exile here after trouble with the law. The Brahmin caste shut many doors to the father and they still do the same to his son William. And imagine the obstacles for a convict who is Irish
and
Roman Catholic!”
“It is quite bewildering,” said Miss Dormin. “I’m sure I will never work out who everyone is. I’m not even quite sure who I am!”
“Why, it’s simple: I judge you not only suitable for the label of Sterling—you are also a ‘Jimmy Grant,’ an immigrant.” Then the patterer added mischievously, “Of course, if you married a settler over the Blue Mountains, you would be linked to a ‘Stringy-bark’ and your children would shoot up as ‘Cornstalks’ or, by their healthy outdoors coloring, be known as ‘Nut-browns’!”
As the young woman blushed, the patterer apologized. “Forgive my chatter, I beg you. Let me be suitably chastened and serious. Please tell me, what brought you all the way to Australia?”
Miss Dormin hesitated. “I suppose it all began as a promise of new life. And ended in death.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
… the agonies which are, have their origin in the ecstasies which might have been.
—Edgar Allan Poe, “Berenice” (1835)
 
 
 
 
 
 
R
ACHEL DORMIN′S STORY, NICODEMUS DUNNE DECIDED, WAS ONE of optimism and quiet courage in the face of tragedy and sadness.
She told him how she had arrived in the Cove on a late summer’s afternoon in 1826. Her ship dropped anchor and she and her fellow passengers were rowed to the King’s Wharf.
Why had she essayed such a voyage? Surely she had not done so alone. Long an orphan, she explained, she had no family left after her aunt died. This lady bequeathed her 150 pounds, leaving an equivalent sum to a local church charity. And, indeed, Miss Dormin received the welcome windfall on reaching her majority during the year before her voyage. (So, reckoned Dunne, she is twenty-four.)
Life was so promising. She had completed her informal indentures with a well-regarded London milliner and costumier. With her inheritance she had the wherewithal to establish, if she wished, her own business, and could enjoy her passion for the theater. “You must come and see me contribute to Mr. Levey’s entertainments at the Royal,” she added as an aside.
And, she explained, there was another reason for contentment: love. “I was newly engaged, to a young man in the wool-importing business.” She paused. “So you can see that I more than understood your references to pure merinos. I expect I could exchange more than pleasantries with the pastoralists here. And, by the by, I have no doubt that Captain Macarthur will be viewed by future generations as the father of the Australian wool trade. Whereas, in fact, Elizabeth—Mrs. Macarthur—did all the hard work, while he was off gallivanting overseas. And the Reverend Marsden and Mr. John Palmer, strictly speaking, owned merinos here before Mr. Macarthur ever did.”
The young woman suddenly giggled. “You know that he and I have something in common?”
“I can’t imagine what.”
“Well, surely you know why his enemies sneeringly call him ‘Jack Bodice’? It’s because his father was a corset-maker!”
The patterer could only gape at the arcane knowledge pouring from the lips of this seemingly most unlikely source. “And your engagement?” he prompted, to return to safer ground.
“Oh, he was offered a new position, to go to Sydney with the Australian Agricultural Company. It seemed a godsend. He had found he was stricken with phthisis, and the doctors believed the dryness and heat here would be beneficial.”
Dunne nodded. Phthisis was the dreaded lung-wasting disease that invariably consumed the sufferer. What a burden for both young people. And who did not know of the Australian Agricultural Company? With a capital of a million pounds it held a similarly vast number of acres north of Sydney, past the Coal River secondary punishment settlement. There were many people who thought the harbor there would eventually become as important as Port Jackson, filling ships with the promised bounty of wool, olives, wines and coal. In 1825, the endeavor had begun, to great fanfare, with the arrival from England of two ships carrying 25 men, 12 women, 726 sheep and 8 head of cattle. The patterer reflected that the land was not living up to the great expectations.
“It was a wonderful chance,” said Miss Dormin. “He left and I agreed to follow, once my affairs had been settled. I was fortunate to gain a position as companion to a wealthy lady who was returning to the colony alone. Thus I acquired a chaperone—and a first-class passage cabin worth between seventy and a hundred pounds. Even steerage would have cost me twenty-five. Oh, what a bonus! I laid out fifty pounds on clothing—and cloth to sell here; I believed ladies would be starved of European finery—plus books to read on the voyage and such food and drink as would not be provided. So you can see that I sailed with much of my legacy intact.”
“Did you have a fair passage? My own was hideous—200-odd days stop-start via Tenerife, Cape Verde, Rio and Cape Town.”
“La, sir, we took but half that time! We went straight to Rio then dropped down to ride the winds for a straight run out.” Then Miss Dormin frowned. “We had a safe and uneventful voyage and I was the happiest of women—until I set foot on Australian soil.
“All went well until the actual landing. At the headlands we were boarded by the pilot, who was later joined by the quarantine physician, which was my first sight of our esteemed Dr. Bowman. We had aboard no notifiable sickness, so we were free to proceed to an inner anchorage. It was also my first chance to see King Bungaree. He boarded and was paid the golden tribute he demanded. With a glass of rum! I only learned later that he called on all newly arrived vessels. It is my last pleasant memory of that day.”
The patterer broke in. “If it upsets you to talk—”
Rachel Dormin shook her head. “On landing, I was directed to the Australian Hotel, where my fiancé had arranged for me to await him. Alas, all that awaited me was the news that my husband-to-be had died not long after his arrival and was buried.”
“Surely his consumptive disease had not advanced that quickly?” asked the patterer.
Rachel Dormin paused and sighed. “Ah, no. It was a related illness of the respiratory organs. They called it pertussis. Another
p
word—for pain.”
She hurried on. “I knew no one. The lady with whom I traveled had already been met and had gone inland. I had my luggage, much of my inheritance and my professional skills. Oh, and I had this …” She reached deep into her reticule and produced a small leather-bound portfolio. “It is my lucky charm; I carry it everywhere practicable.”
She opened the bindings to reveal a painting, small but far from a miniature, of a ship under full sail. Inset, in an oval outline in one corner, smiled a small portrait. It was clearly of Miss Dormin.

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