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Authors: Robin Adair

BOOK: Death and the Running Patterer
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“Oh, yes,” he said to the patterer, who was desperately trying to think who had set him up for the fall. “Never fear, my lad. You’ll swing for this. High, wide and not very handsome.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
I have tried to escape; always to escape as a bird does out of a cage. Is that unnatural; is that a great crime?
—Dennis Doherty, a soldier transported in 1833 for desertion and a serial escapee
 
 
 
 
 
 
A
BARREL OF RUM SAVED NICODEMUS DUNNE′S SKIN.
As he and his guard stepped down George Street to the jail, they passed the alehouse called, puzzlingly, Keep Within Compass, and all hell—in the shape of a 120-gallon puncheon—broke loose. The giant cask fell while it was being unloaded at the tavern, smashed open and began to pour its contents into the nearby drain.
The patterer had always understood and respected the important role of rum in the colony. A roaring convict song (with more than a germ of truth in it) that celebrated the spirit’s iron grip went:
Cut yer name across me backbone,
Stretch me skin across yer drum,
Iron me up on Pinchgut Island
From now to kingdom come.
I’ll eat yer Norfolk dumpling
Like a juicy Spanish plum,
Even dance the Newgate hornpipe
If ye’ll only gimme rum!
Hard prices to pay, he always thought, when you considered that eating this “dumpling” meant being sent to the hellish Norfolk Island prison, and to dance the “hornpipe” was to dance at the end of a rope.
But even that foreknowledge did not quite prepare Dunne for the scene that unfolded. It was, he thought, almost a colonial miniature of Mr. Hogarth’s famous London etching of decadence,
Gin Lane
.
Someone screamed, “Grog ahoy!” and passersby dived at the flowing bounty, scooping it into their mouths with cupped, bare hands. The more enterprising among them came from nearby buildings and captured the golden bonanza with pots, pans and buckets, even a chamberpot. Some stretched out in the dirt beside the drain and lapped like animals. There were women and children among the liquid’s looters.
Dunne looked around for his guard and found the man transfixed by the scene, obviously torn between duty and a free drink.
The patterer made up his mind for him. He shoved him under the arms and feet of the scrum of scavengers, where he was instantly swallowed up, then took off along the main street in the direction of the Cove, passing more crowds running toward the rum.
He eased his pace when a ragged file of prisoners, guarded at the front and rear, marched from the jail and slowed to a halt. Both of their guards focused their attention on the drama in the street.
Dunne knew his redcoat would soon raise the hue and cry, and that there were even more soldiers in the nearby barracks. He had to hide somewhere, preferably disappear completely. He had to think.
He had successfully buried his guard in one mess of humanity. The answer to his problem followed: Where better to hide a prisoner on the run than among other prisoners already under guard?
He edged toward the rear of the prison gang. One captive eyed him mistrustingly. “What do you want?” he said softly, out of the side of his mouth, his gaze shifting to Dunne’s still-bloody hands.
“Sanctuary,” said the patterer. “Bloody help! I’m on the run.”
The man studied Dunne keenly. Sure, he looked the part, but could this interloper be trusted? Who was he? All convicts, from harsh experience, were wary of spies infiltrating their ranks, seeking news of uprisings against their masters. The Irish especially aroused fear and loathing among such men as Reverend Marsden, who frequently used the lash to try to uncover imagined insurrections.
“What are they after you for, then?” asked the convict in a soft brogue.
Dunne absorbed the fact that he was pure Black Irish, that different sort of Celt; he was one of those with hair like springy, shiny shards of coal above brilliant blue eyes, a tanned face and a sharp nose that dominated his close-shaven but still blue-black cheeks and chin. Some blamed those looks on shipwrecked Spanish sailors and soldiers from shattered Armada galleons 240 years before. But that did not explain the blue eyes.
Not that the patterer had much time to consider such ancestral subtleties. He simply said, “They’ll top me for murder—but I didn’t do it!”
The Irishman suddenly, quietly, recited:
Hand in hand
On Earth, in Hell,
Sick or well,
On sea, on land
On the square, ever.
Nicodemus Dunne knew the oath of the convicts’ most binding freemasonry, The Ring. He murmured in reply:
Still or in breath,
Lag or free,
You and me,
In life, in death,
On the cross, never.
At that moment another prisoner butted in: “He’s all right, he’s the patterer.” The paddy gave a nod and they dragged him into the heart of the wedge of men.
Dunne’s rescuer hissed, “I’ll turn you over if it was a woman or a child, mind.”
“No, never! On my honor!” Then, with a sudden inspiration (the fact that he was instantly ashamed did not stop him), Dunne added, “It was an Englishman.” (Oh well, the German was past caring.)
The prisoner looked hard. “And aren’t you just that—English?”
Dunne was quick. “No. I’m Australian.”
The man shrugged. “Good enough answer.” He laughed. “That is, if you can’t be Irish.”
Then he turned to a man—not much more than a youth, but he already had almost the patterer’s build—beside him. Making sure that the guards’ attention was still distracted, he pushed the lad away from the file. “Piss off, Jimmy,” he said, and Jimmy obliged.
He turned to Dunne. “That’s that, then. You’re our Jimmy now.”
They hushed as the guards returned to their stations and pushed the ragged ranks into some sort of order. One minder did a quick headcount and was satisfied. “Move on! Move it! Or you’ll get a red shirt—and a salty back.” A bucket of salty water thrown over bloody lash wounds added to the torment, but the pain was worth it: The wounds would often heal more quickly.
The column shambled south along the main street, past the barracks to the right, and the patterer now had time to take stock. He noticed that some of his new companions were in shackles and wearing canaries, while others were unshackled and in civilian clothes.
“Who are you? And where the devil are we going?” He asked his questions in a murmur and out the corner of his mouth. Dear God, he thought, I’ve gone back to the black times and the protective habits of prisoners everywhere.
The Irishman seemed cool enough. “Oh, I’m Brian O′Bannion, at your service. And we’re today’s muster to go on the step.”
On the step. Dunne knew what that meant—they were all sentenced to the treadmill, the loathed stairway to nowhere.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
… and bound him with fetters of brass; and he did grind in the prison house.
—Judges 16:21
 
 
 
 
 
 
I
N THIRTY MINUTES, DUNNE TRUDGED WITH THE CONVICTS THROUGH the main town, past Brickfield, and came almost to the Tollgate, where horse and other animal traffic was levied to pay for the road that stretched toward Parramatta. The reek of Sam Terry’s Albion Brewery betrayed their location.
The Carters Barracks loomed on their left. The compound, sealed by twelve-foot walls, lodged and fed 200 prisoners, men whose jobs included driving and handling the government’s horses and bullocks—and who sometimes doubled as the draft animals. The barracks also supplied laborers to the Lumber Yard.
Two other buildings completed the Carters complex. Divided only by a party wall were separate quarters for a hundred convict boys. Most were the sweepings of London’s rotting tenements for whom thieving and other petty crime had seemed a way out of starvation. The way out, though, had been to Botany Bay.
At the Carters Barracks, the boys were supposed to receive a basic education and learn the rudiments of a trade. Sometimes the lesson was a brutish one. The tawse and cane were applied liberally. And few people were surprised that the boys’ accommodation was a sexual honeypot for men starved of women.
Sodomy was an offense with a clumsy official name, “unnatural crime,” but a chilling sentence for those who were caught—death (although this penalty was often commuted to life). What threat was “life” to a man who was already a lifer? Only two years before, the patterer recalled, an official memorandum had revealed what most already knew: that prisoners were living “in constant intercourse with the Boys.”
Also attached to the Carters Barracks was the House of Correction, home to the town’s two treadmills. Everyone knew of their existence—mothers would threaten errant children with “the step”—but this was the first time Nicodemus Dunne had seen the devices close-up. He was impressed, in a chilling way. He scrubbed his hands clean in a nearby trough.
“So we’re all here for that?” he murmured to his new friend.
“Aye. Some will stay for as long as a week or even more on the wheels. God willing, you and I are out this evening—Jimmy was only given short time, for dumb insolence to his master.”
Before Dunne could ask O′Bannion what he himself had done, a guard waved them into silence and the patterer turned his attention to the treadmills. Looming overhead, they resembled giant, wide waterwheels. He knew that they existed not only for punishment, but also to grind corn, to compensate for the times when there was no breeze to drive the town’s windmills. Each unit was reckoned to make the Commissariat 600 pounds through milling each year.
This day, both treadmills were already in operation. On the larger one, Dunne counted thirty-six men, each holding on to wooden crossbars at eye level. They climbed—and got nowhere—from one foot-wide blade to the next. They were stepping at something less than forty paces a minute. Twenty men on the smaller mill imitated these motions.
An overseer and an armed guard watched over each mill. Any man who tried to step back off was threatened with fifty lashes. Once started, the prisoner had to keep going, or he would fall off, or even slip into the gap between blades. There had been many accidents since the steps had been installed five years earlier.
“There are no women,” the patterer observed suddenly.
“Oh, aye,” agreed O′Bannion. “They don’t like to have them here. Like they haven’t flogged a woman since ’17 or ’18. They’ll still hang ’em, though.”
Dunne must have shown his puzzlement.
“It’s the blood, see,” explained O′Bannion. “Our masters don’t turn a hair at the sight of a bloody back when some poor bastard is married to the three sisters”—he used the convict-talk nickname for the flogging triangles—“and the worst that can happen with someone, man or woman, being turned off is that they’ll shit or piss themselves. But they don’t care to take the risk with a woman here at this dancing academy. They send them to the factory instead.”
“Why not on the step?”
“Why not? Because too many of them have their moon courses while climbing. One keeper complained that they often had not a dry thread among them.”
“Oh,” said the patterer, who knew as much about menstruation as the next man. That is, precious little. Or nothing.
A batch of men had been stood down from the Great Mill for a spell, leaving empty stations.
“Come on.” O′Bannion nudged Dunne. “We’re on soon.”
“Won’t they find out I’m not supposed to be here?”
“No, they’ll not care, as long as they have a warm body to make their headcount and lists tally. You stick with us and you’ll pass muster. Just answer when Jimmy’s called. Remember: Bond’s the name—James Bond.”
“What did
you
do?”
“Well, apart from those fellows in shackles—they’re old lags on secondary punishment—the rest of us are only petty offenders, small beer. Like I said, we’re only here for the rest of the day, until sunset. And we’re free men—when we’re not in places like this! You can tell that some here are soldiers, some are Emancipists, like me, and others are Jimmy Grants. They’re in for things like gambling, drunkenness, cockfighting, something like that. Me? Oh, they seized me for riding like the clappers with the hounds of hell behind me down Castlereagh Street, having had a few too many brandies. Furious riding while intoxicated, they called it. Ah yes, I’ve done all this before.”
A guard hustled them toward the big wheel. Now it was their turn to climb. As they mounted their machine, taking up adjoining stations, O′Bannion warned the patterer, “It’s terrible hard work, but the boredom can be the worst of it. Don’t try to count the steps or the revolutions of the wheel. It can make you crazed. Old hands, brave souls they are, who’ve done the counting, claim there are 1,440 steps an hour—not that it’s really an hour; you do forty minutes then stand down for twenty. And there’s an hour for a meal. Bread and gruel, that is. So, if you did an eleven-hour stretch, all told, how many steps would that be? Are you a hand at reckoning?”

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