Death and the Running Patterer (7 page)

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Authors: Robin Adair

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BIRDSONG OF A different kind dragged Dunne from his reverie back to his slow promenade to the hospital. Shrieks of peacocks came from the gardens of a handsome mansion a block away. Often, the birds’ shrill cries were drowned out by the wails of men being scourged at the Government Lumber Yard nearby.
With the smell of hops from Matthew Bacon’s Wellington Brewery at his back, Dunne skirted the bold begging of a black man wearing a tattered corporal’s red coat, a cocked hat and a brass nameplate that proclaimed him to be “Bungaree, King of Sydney Cove.” The patterer could also see a group of blacks down an alley, fermenting the head-splitting grog they called “bull” from sugar bags soaked in a pail of water with old potatoes. There were other ways to make bull. Some publicans would let the “Indians” scrub out rum and brandy casks. The first rinse was still rich in alcohol. This bull was pay enough for their work.
A guarded coffle of government men shuffled to work dressed in a motley of gray, brown and yellow overalls. They held their leg irons clear of the ground in unconscious mimicry of ladies lifting their skirts. They were passed by a wagon groaning under its load, bound for a building site. Its full cargo of 350 bricks was hauled by twelve convicts—cheaper to run and more expendable than animals. They had pulled the cart from the kilns at Brickfield Hill a mile away, one of the five trips they had to do each day.
The idea of using convicts as beasts of burden wasn’t new, thought the patterer. In earlier years, an enterprising Scot thought to introduce to Sydney the sedan chairs that carried people through the narrow streets of Edinburgh Old Town. He had planned to use assigned convicts as chair-men, but the scheme never caught on.
Between the barracks and the Cove stood the office of
The Gazette
. The patterer cribbed from all the papers but found
The Gazette
the most staid and pro-government, thus the least interesting, even though it had the most colorful history.
Nicodemus Dunne had never known the first editor, a Creole convict printer named George Howe. As George Happy or Happy George, he had been sentenced to death for shoplifting, then transported to Sydney and assigned to start
The Gazette
in 1803.
Happy George’s son, Robert, who had succeeded his father in 1821, could hardly be called “Happy Robert,” mused Dunne. The patterer had not seen Robert since an announcement—and Dunne recalled its odd wording—that he had appointed an editor because he was “debilitated by mental anxiety and domestic disquietude.” Dunne decided that having been whipped in George Street by a certain Dr. Redfern for an insult printed in the paper could not have helped.
Although he rarely saw the new editor, a retired Wesleyan missionary named Ralph Mansfield, he idly wondered now if Mansfield had any knowledge of Hebraism that could help elucidate the clue in the letter. But when he entered
The Gazette
to grab an early copy—he usually took a dirty spoil rather than pay the proper nine pence—there were only printers on hand.
The composing room that day was probably the brightest interior in the town. Dozens upon dozens of candles were ranged over the type-cases to light the way for the compositors who were laboriously hand-setting every letter. A “printer’s devil” was employed to change the candles regularly and make sure the candle grease did not trickle into the tiny type or onto the copy being set.
Two sweating men were working at the iron Albion press applying vertical pressure on the paper- and ink-coated type, which was regularly refreshed from ink-filled paddles. They printed only one side of the paper at a time. After each impression, another devil, called a “flyboy,” whipped the sheet from the press and pegged it up like laundry for the tacky ink to dry.
Dunne was always impressed by the strength and rhythm of the pressmen, who could at best strike 240 impressions in an hour. Thus, a circulation run of a four-page edition could take up to twelve hours to print.
It all looked too much like hard work. So the patterer tucked his
Gazette
into the leather satchel that already contained latest copies of the three rival newspapers and left. Walking and talking were easier.
Rather than go straight to the hospital, the patterer went on to one of his best paying regular engagements, although it was one that always puzzled him. Ever since he had become free to work for himself, he had visited each week the Bank of New South Wales in George Street near the military barracks. He did not query the bank’s strange location, sharing a building with the dismal Thistle Inn.
The oddness of the assignment lay in the fact that he was required to read a round-up of commercial news, much of it rather out of date, to a solemn audience of one man who never took notes. This was out of keeping, Dunne always thought, with the general efficiency of the bank. It had come a long way in the eleven years that had passed since it began trading as the colony’s first bank, in cramped rooms in Macquarie Place opposite the site where the obelisk from which all distances were measured now stood. This location was known, widely and slyly, as “the center of the universe.”
Certainly, the Bank of New South Wales could boast of being at the center of Sydney’s business universe. Its only true rival was the Bank of Australia, begun in 1826 by wealthy pastoralist John Macarthur and his fellows. Most colonists spurned this institution, which was widely derided as the “Squatters’ Bank,” and stayed loyal to the Wales.
But no one was more loyal to the bank than the man to whom Nicodemus Dunne now, and always, reported—Mr. Joseph Hyde Potts. He had started as the bank’s first employee, as porter and general servant, but Mr. Potts now used his penmanship, calligraphy and cleverness to draft official documents, even to design banknotes.
As he had done since his first day, Mr. Potts always slept on the premises, ever watchful but hoping never to have to use the rifle and case of pistols he kept handy. Only once had the iron chest that served as a vault for money and valuables been threatened. On that occasion, Mr. Potts had to see off a drunken burglar who climbed down the chimney.
This day, as usual, he and the patterer shared the cane-bottomed couch that welcomed visitors and customers while Dunne served a digest of London stock markets, fat lamb prices, wool sales, bills and bonds, land sales and shipping movements: much the same fare that Sam Terry had demanded.
Dunne could never quite fathom why the bank—which surely had its own intelligence sources as quick as those of any newspaper—needed him. But Mr. Potts always assured Dunne of the value of his news and paid him the handsome sum of six pounds a month for his trouble. Also odd was that this client insisted that the fee be paid into an account opened for the patterer, but the credits always showed up and Dunne shrugged it all off as merely a banker’s eccentricity.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Fair Cloacina, goddess of this place,
Look on thy supplicant with a smiling face.
Soft, yet cohesive, let my offering flow,
Not rudely swift, nor insolently slow.
—Ancient Roman prayer to a deity, entreating success over the cesspit, or
cloaca
(translator unknown)
 
 
 
 
 
 
E
VERYONE CALLED HIM SIMPLY THE OX. OR THE OX OF THE ROCKS, THE violent Sydney village in which he lived and worked. The name suited him, for he was tall and powerfully built, and after all he did work as a slaughterman.
But The Ox was puzzled by another nickname. God knows, he thought, why they called this place a “house of ease.” In other ordinary language it was a privy, an outhouse, the jakes, a shithouse. But house of ease?
He had even heard older people call it the “hole of the siege.” And in his case, “siege” was a good word. Because, again, for days he had been laying siege to his bound-up bowels. And losing.
In the word of the apothecaries he haunted he was “costive,” as it was delicately called, constipated. Yes, he ate well, he thought, though perhaps not as well as he had in the service. Now his teeth—missing, broken, worn down or decayed—left him unable to chew his food properly, even though his diet was as good as that of any other working man: maize bread and mutton or, when he couldn’t afford that, Norfolk Island mutton. (That’s what transported men called the despised substitute, goat.)
And there was always the chance of bullock’s head brawn, boiled calf’s head, cow’s heel or calf′s feet broth. You couldn’t eat too much meat. That wasn’t the problem. He’d always been known to his messmates as “old cannonball guts.” They’d reckoned only a charge of gunpowder would move him.
No, he had tried everything in search of the sovereign remedy for his condition. Nothing worked—pray God it wasn’t a sore! He couldn’t afford to consult a leech, so he regularly plagued the twenty or so apothecaries who hung up their mortar-and-pestle signs throughout the town.
He’d loudly complained about his predicament in so many places that the whole colony must know of his failures. Castor oil was three and six a pint down the drain; Epsom salts were the cheapest chance at nine pence a pound, but they didn’t succeed; senna leaves at one shilling an ounce were no answer; rhubarb root at the same price had the same negative effect; ipecacuan powder at two and six an ounce had a result but with the wrong orifice—it simply made him vomit.
During this latest visit, the apothecary had desperately suggested he consider the gum resin called asafoetida, until the disgusting smell convinced The Ox otherwise. So he was frantic enough to grasp at any help when he left the shop, even though the apothecary had promised to think of something and send word to him.
He had walked only a few hundred yards along George Street when he felt a tug on his coattails. Looking around and then down, he saw a barefoot urchin of streetwise teenage years.
“Bugger off,” The Ox said, raising his fist to give the lad a cuff. He was surely a beggar wanting a penny, a child of the streets or even a stray from among the child offenders in the Carters Barracks at the southern end of town. There were hundreds of masterless children at large.
“No, sir,” said the dusty boy. “Something for you.” He held out a small envelope.
“Who from?”
“ ’Pothecary, sir. ’Pothecary sent it. For you, sir. Said it was urgent.”
Sure enough, the envelope was addressed to The Ox by name. He took pride in his ability to read.
“Said you could pay later,” piped the scrawny street sparrow.
That idea appealed to the big man and he looked down at the boy. “Did you get anything for your trouble?” he asked.
“Threepence, sir.”
“All right. Then here’s a tip from me—bugger off!”
Much amused and hopeful, The Ox headed home.
HOME, WITH ITS privy out the back, was a dingy room in a dilapidated house in The Rocks, near Cribb’s Lane. The narrow thoroughfare, made by a butcher whose yard was nearby, was nondescript and anonymous to most outsiders. So if The Ox wanted to give directions to it, he simply said it was near a hotel, Jasper Tunn’s Whale Fishery.
Now he was back at the siege-hole, reading a note from the envelope. It told him that the accompanying powder would work most efficaciously if swallowed while he was at stool in the squatting position. He prepared to take his medicine.
He sat over the latrine pit. In Sydney, if you were fortunate, cesspits emptied into a drain or the mess seeped into the surrounding soil. Many, however, overflowed or even leaked out under adjoining buildings. Some people simply emptied their chamberpots into street gutters or even threw their contents onto the street out of a window. The warning cry, “Watch under!” was so common that human emissions were generally known as “chunder.”
The only people sanguine about the unwanted abundance of dung were the men called rakers—usually Celestials—who collected nightsoil to spread on their market gardens. Fullers of cloth would seek urine but it was rarely pure.
Hoping finally to end his lonely vigil, The Ox obeyed the note’s instructions. He was ready. Optimistically, he had set beside him what were called arse-wipes—paper was scarce in poor households, so arse-wipes were usually old cloths or even small piles of dried cut grass. Some men, old salts come ashore, stuck with their maritime habits and used a sponge and a bucket of seawater.

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