Death and the Running Patterer (36 page)

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Authors: Robin Adair

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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 miles 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)
 
 
 
 
 
 
C
ALMER 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)
 
 
 
 
 
 
R
ACHEL 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.

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