Death and the Running Patterer (38 page)

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Authors: Robin Adair

BOOK: Death and the Running Patterer
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“What does that mean?”
“Consider,” said the captain gently, “most of us here are embarrassments to England. I know
I
am, with my funny ways and accent, and the baggage I carry professionally. But
you
—you are particularly embarrassing.”
“Why, in God’s name?”
Rossi paused. “Because, lad, enough people believe you are the king’s nephew.”
CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE
Curses are like young chickens, they always come home to roost.
—Robert Southey,
The Curse of Kehama
(1810)
 
 
 
 
 
 
N
ICODEMUS DUNNE GAPED. THEN HE LAUGHED. “THE KING’S nephew! Jesus, Captain, am I hearing you right?”
Rossi nodded. “Yes. A bastard, certainly, but still his nephew. Come to that, if we lived in earlier, less enlightened times, and if somehow you were legitimized and acknowledged—and if certain other people died—why, you’d be the heir to the throne!”
Dunne shook his head, like a man mazed by too much rum. “This is madness, man. That means my father would be one of the royal dukes. Which one?”
“The rumors say Cumberland sired you. And that you were born in Weymouth in the summer of 1800.”
Dunne barely took in Rossi’s last words as his mind raced. Wasn’t Ernest, Duke of Cumberland, a notorious man-lover? Which deviation—most whispered it, though others recklessly spoke and wrote it openly—may have led to murder. For many years he had been popularly dubbed “Deadly Ernest,” after one of his male servants was discovered with his throat cut. A coroner found for suicide, despite the clear evidence that the victim could not have inflicted the wound upon himself. Most chose to believe that the man had died resisting the duke’s overtures or that it was an amorous affair gone wrong, terribly wrong. Either way, poor bugger, thought Dunne.
Then his attention turned back to what Rossi had been saying. He stared at the captain. Weymouth. The year 1800. “Are you saying that Mrs. Dunne, respectable Mrs. Dunne, steadfast wife of an honorably retired army officer, was not just my guardian’s wife? That, as well, she was a royal paramour and my mother?”
Rossi shifted uncomfortably. “No, she wasn’t your real mother.”
“Then who was?”
“Well, the rumors say it was the princess Sophia.”
It took moments to sink in. “But you’re talking about brother and sister. Christ, that’s incest!” He paused. “How could the princess keep such a secret?” After all, bastards by royal males were usually acknowledged in some way, but this fantastic story …
“Oh,” said Rossi. “She went into a long retreat from public and Court view—that’s how Weymouth came into the picture—and everyone, even her father, the old king (and he wasn’t yet mad enough not to have seen the growing problem), was fobbed off with the story that she had left London suffering from dropsy. But a thing like that … well, enough people know that secret, or at least some of it.”
“How do you know
I’m
the one?” insisted Dunne.
“Yes, well, the Palace and all governments, from Pitt’s then to Wellington’s now, have kept an eye on you. In fact, they could have saved you from your troubles over Caroline’s funeral. The main parties are alive, you know. But, in the end, someone decided it was a stroke of fortune—you know, out of sight, out of mind. At least, that’s what all would like. And so far it has worked out thus.”
The patterer was ashen and growing more and more agitated.
The captain raised a hand. “Calm yourself. It may not be as bad as that. Other rumors say General Thomas Garth was the father.”
Garth! Dunne remembered the name and the man from his childhood. Christ! What a day—what a mess!
Rossi was still talking. “Either way, it must remain a secret here. It is a powerful weapon that already hasn’t served you badly. Darling daren’t push you too hard—he’ll treat you with respect, just in case, even if with his usual disdain. And he’ll keep secretly slipping you money. Don’t you see, however, that in England there are enemies of the king—men who want a republic—who would, if they got wind of your story, offer it as an example of how corrupt, depraved and ultimately worthless the monarchy is? Then there are king’s men who would kill you to get you out of the way. Other men would exploit you here, too, or kill you for their own reasons. What of the thousands of convicts and Emancipists who are Irish and loathe the Crown with a passion?”
A vision of Brian O’Bannion flashed before Dunne’s eyes. Would his friendship stay warm if he knew the truth or would it turn to hatred? He looked at Rossi and said calmly, “I will try to forget I ever heard those names. As far as I’m concerned, we never had this conversation.” But deep down he could not help but wonder if the bad seed of incest really ran in his blood.
There was a knock on the door. “Come,” said the captain.
Thomas Owens entered and looked at the patterer. “I’ve cleaned her up as best I can. She looks as though she’s sleeping.” He paused. “You were right, you know. I’ll be careful and still useful.”
Dunne thanked him and held out his hand. After hesitating, the doctor took it in his, as always, gloved fingers. The patterer nodded to Rossi and walked toward the door leading to a Sydney that could never know his secrets.
CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR
Now cease, my lute! This is the last
Labour, that thou and I shall waste;
And ended is what we begun:
Now is this song both sung and past;
My lute! be still, for I have done.
—Sir Thomas Wyatt, “My Lute Awake” (1557)
 
 
 
 
 
 
D
EATH HAD COME EARLY FOR MISS DORMIN, EVEN IN A WORLD IN which the average life span was (according to those men who conned such things) fifty-eight years. In particular, ill-treated servants, convicts and women in childbirth died too soon. But the most cruel mortality figures were for infants. Survive birth and childhood, however—say, overcome croup, scarlet fever and the like and attain the grand age of ten—and then, with further luck, reach adulthood, and you could live out the allotted three score and ten, perhaps more. Such luck was elusive, though.
People countered the fearful omnipresence of death with morbid gallows humor, whistling in the dark, even at the graveside. Dr. Peter Cunningham, dogged by death in his trade, liked to repeat an epitaph he found in a Parramatta graveyard:
Ye who wish to lie here,
Drink Squire’s beer!
Even the pioneer brewer thus maligned apparently saw humor in the slight and would repeat it regularly.
Funerals in the colony had many facets. Few bodies went to an ornate, or any kind of vault. Some, especially away from towns, went into the handiest hole, which was often unmarked; perhaps an impermanent wooden cross might be raised, at best a cairn of rocks.
Even in town, interment could be a casual affair. There was no call for a doctor to certify death. Someone had only to register a death and deliver a body for burial, not necessarily in that order.
Some ceremonies, however, were grand affairs, with mourning mummers and black-decked hearses and horses. When old D’Arcy Wentworth, who may or may not have been a highwayman, had died the previous year, hundreds of people from Sydney traveled miles to follow his cortege in Parramatta. In Van Diemen’s Land, an acting governor was dismissed for spending 800 pounds on his late superior’s burial. In Sydney, a lady publican requested that her coffin be accompanied to the cemetery by a dozen whitegowned virgin barmaids. They raked up two, with few questions asked.
Rachel Dormin—and now that would always be her name—went to rest very simply.
IN THE DUSK, a handcart, with its box-shaped contents shrouded in canvas, was wheeled by a lone figure to an empty jetty at Jack-the-Miller’s Point.
Between the Military Barracks and the spot where the cart now rested, it had halted only once in its progress, at a carpenter’s shop in Cumberland Street.
There’s that damned name to haunt me again, thought the sweating patterer. “I want it in cedar, no cheap pine,” he directed the carpenter.
They found one ready-made that was to his liking. Dunne then borrowed a hammer and nails, and the use of a shed. He already had a pick and a shovel in the cart.
Now, at the jetty, he waited patiently. About thirty minutes passed before a splash announced the approach of a skiff. It came from the northern side of the water, from Murdering Point. As it pulled up to the jetty, lamplight helped reveal its occupant. A dark-skinned old man in a top hat was at the oars. Looking up from the boat bobbing on the tide, he waited for Dunne to speak.
For several moments, the younger man was silent, gazing into emptiness. It’s strange, he thought. Or is it just right and proper? For all the twists and turns, the biblical clue and both riddles had ended truly. By and large. The men who had hurt a woman whose fruit thus departed from her, they were surely punished. And take the
zuzim
parable. If there were a God, then, as Miss Dormin ensured, the Most Holy
did
slay the angel of death.
He considered, too, the children’s rhyme that Dr. Halloran had likened to the
zuzim
theme. And he noted wryly that their story—his and Rachel’s—had now ended at John Leighton’s mill. And wasn’t that, after all, a house that Jack built?
He finally spoke. “Commodore, I need that favor repaid now. I need to go to an island.”
The old man nodded.
ON ANOTHER, SUNNIER day, Nicodemus Dunne stood in easy silence on the harbor shore near Lieutenant Dawes’s Battery. Alongside him, in his familiar eye-catching breeches, jacket and streamered hat, stood William King. “I often walk out along the South Head Road, to the Light, and I look out,” said the Flying Pieman dreamily. “I know she’s out there somewhere.”
“Yes,” said the patterer. He gestured to a drought-browned mass rising on their left from the sea. “I know she’s out there somewhere, too.” He wondered if the goats missed the rain.
As the two men walked back along George Street into the town, they were met by an excited Captain Rossi, who leaped down from his carriage. “Dunne, I’ve been looking for you everywhere,” he exclaimed. “What luck! They’ve robbed the Squatters’ Bank! Come on!”
The patterer put his arms around the shoulders of his companions as they all moved to clamber aboard the carriage. “The Exclusives robbed!” he cried as the carriage lurched off. “You can bank on the wails!”
EPILOGUE
CORONER’S INQUEST. An inquiry was held before Major Smeathman, Coroner for Sydney, on Saturday week, at Bax’s Australian Hotel, on the bones of a woman. It came out in evidence that the men employed at Goat Island to cut stone, on Thursday last dug up an old cedar coffin, at the depth of about 14 inches from the surface, containing the bones in question. The jury returned a verdict, “That the bones were those of a female, which had been interred in a secret manner, about two years ago, but how, or by whom, to them unknown.”

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