Death and the Running Patterer (14 page)

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Authors: Robin Adair

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She pointed. “The ship portion was a gift, painted by a fellow passenger. I had my likeness added later, here. If circumstances had been different I would have added my fiancé’s face.” At this she broke off.
Dunne wildly clutched at straws to change the subject. “It is indeed a fine painting, but obviously not by a sailor—see that whip?” He pointed to a trailing red-and-white pennant. “I believe it should be flying forward with the wind.”
“You are very observant. Yes, it is so, he was an amateur dauber.” She laughed. “But I trust the added portrait is more true to the fruit?”
The patterer peered at the likeness and nodded. Yes, “J. L.,” whose tiny initials signed that part of the work, was very professional. As good as any Dunne had seen. “You never forget a voyage like that, do you?” he said, covering the artwork once more with its protective sheet of paper. Written on that layer, in artistic script, were the words “A memento of the
Azile
.”
“No, you certainly do not,” agreed Miss Dormin briskly, taking the painting back and securing the wallet in her bag. “Nor its aftermath.”
The patterer was still curious. “Forgive me, but how did you manage to, shall we say, survive—and prosper?”
“Oh, a friendly soul introduced me to Reverend Halloran at
The Gleaner
, and I returned to dressmaking. I accept private commissions and also do much work for Mrs. Rickard’s Fashionable Repository. I board with a respectable family near her shop. Then there is the theater, and other projects keep me busy.” She broke off. “Oh, speaking of Dr. Halloran, there he is over there. He has offered to give me luncheon. I am unhappy to interrupt our promenade but I have promised him—and I did not know I would meet you today.”
“Perhaps tomorrow?” said the patterer as, after a pretty curtsey, Rachel Dormin turned to cross the road to meet her approaching host. Dr. Halloran apparently could not see the young man, and so was unaware of his bitten-back curse, which belied the salute offered by his doffed topper. Dunne decided that he would miss that hat when it went back to the Waterloo Stores in the morning.
HE COULD NOT have known that, even had Miss Dormin desired it, he would not meet her the next day. For that matter, nor would he return his borrowed finery to Mr. Cooper.
Overnight, yet another death would claim all his attention.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Good things of day begin to droop and drowse,
Whiles night’s black agents to their preys do rouse.
—William Shakespeare,
Macbeth
(1606)
 
 
 
 
 
 
W
ITH HONORABLE (AND EVEN DISHONORABLE) EXCEPTIONS—children, the aged, the ill, or any of Madame Greene’s hard-working horizontal helpers—on that Sunday night Miss Rachel Dormin may well have been the first Sydneysider to go to bed. Alone. It was nine P.M.
A sensible young woman, aware of a very busy day ahead, she first cleaned her teeth with a brush and baking soda (imported powders were too expensive) and washed her face, using her Castile soap sparingly.
After her ablutions, she brushed fingers through her hair, then rummaged through bottles, bowls and vials cluttering a shelf of the commode on which the washbasin and ewer stood. She pushed aside violet-scented hair powder, orris root perfume, salt of lemons for fabric stains, a bottle of Godfrey’s tonic for unsettled stomachs and oil of cloves for toothache—although, unlike most settlers, she had been free of this plague.
She found what she wanted: a pomatum of specially mixed cream, which she proceeded to massage onto her face, neck, hands and wrists. Ah, she thought, if only Mr. Dunne—Nicodemus … she played with the name—could see what a girl has to do! She frowned. Perhaps he
would
see, one day.
After turning down the blankets and sheets on her narrow bed, Miss Dormin raked up into a bundle the scattered twigs lying on the mattress. Cabinetmakers made varnish from this plant’s seeds; every good housewife knew that the twigs killed bedbugs. All apothecaries sold the plant: hemp. The young woman believed the botanical name was
Cannabis sativa
… or was it
indica
? No matter, she knew it provided fabric and cordage—and could yield the euphoriants
bhang
or hashish. Soldiers and sailors had brought such drug habits here. She had seen the results.
She opened the window and breathed deeply to relax. She had her bag packed and clothes laid out ready for work. Tomorrow was just another day, one she was confident would proceed to her liking.
As always, she said her prayers. Only then did she lie down, carefully cross her arms upon her breast and compose herself for rest.
ELSEWHERE IN SYDNEY, not everyone found sleep easy or desirable. Not even during the small hours of the morning.
Mr. William Charles Wentworth, for example, usually spent his weekends at home with his young family at Vaucluse House, his grand property six miles east of the town, passing weeknights in Sydney in a room near his legal chambers. But late this Sunday night, he slipped out of the house as soon as its other inhabitants had settled down and strode to an outhouse where he had earlier saddled his horse. He walked the animal out of earshot of his family, then mounted and trotted toward the town.
Always an irascible man, he scowled and muttered angrily as he rode. He had no fear of being bailed up; the dragoons of the mounted police, called “goons” behind their backs, had pushed the banditti far beyond the town. There were official assurances that even the most feared outlaw, Irish convict “lifer” John Donohoe, was roaming the Blue Mountains. Wentworth knew Donohoe was a folk hero. They sang of him, discreetly:
Bold Donohoe was taken for a notorious crime.
And sentenced to be strung up on the hanging-tree so high.
As Donohoe made his escape to the bush he went straightway.
The people were all too afraid to travel night and day.
Wentworth snorted. They called him “Bold Jack.” Bold, indeed! He had not always cut such a dashing figure. Why, at first he had been reduced to robbing slow-moving bullock trains on foot because he did not have a horse.
Still, the lawyer felt more than a certain sympathy for the twenty-two-year-old. Caught for his rather pedestrian crimes, he had been sentenced to death but had escaped between jail and gallows. Now he was a bigger menace than ever.
So, although Wentworth felt safe on the road, he still carried, in a pannier at the front of the saddle, two long-barreled pistols.
THE REVEREND DR. Laurence Hynes Halloran was out and about in the same dim streets toward which lawyer Wentworth was riding.
He
had no chance of slipping from his home. To say he was a family man was an understatement, for although they did not all live with him, he had twelve children by his first wife (who had died during her last confinement). He was still a strong and virile man in his sixties and had fathered several more children with his second wife, Elizabeth, whom he had married four years before, less than a year after donning widower’s weeds.
As he left the house now, he vowed to Elizabeth that an emergency concerning
The Gleaner
called him away at such an ungodly time. His duty in the following hours would not be pleasant, he knew, but he had seen worse on the blood-sluiced decks of battleships.
AND, IF THEY had stirred and found an empty bed, the household of editor Edward Smith Hall could have been reassured by the note explaining that he, too, had urgent overnight business at his paper,
The Monitor
.
WHEN DR. THOMAS Owens left the Rum Hospital carrying his doctor’s bag, the public clock (a legacy of Governor Macquarie’s passion for punctuality) atop the nearby Hyde Park Barracks stood at three-thirty A.M.
Had the hall porter been awake, he would not have remarked on Owens’s movement at such an uncivilized hour. The doctor was often out on medical rounds at all times of the day or night. Even if the porter had followed Owens outside, he would only have noted idly that the sawbones (he was an old sailor; this was what he called all surgeons) headed north along Macquarie Street before disappearing into the depths of the dark.

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