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Authors: Robin Adair

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What of the ‘best of nights’?

Dunne had soon pushed aside his concern and looked forward with great anticipation to a relaxing night at the theatre. There he would sink into a plush seat in a box – five shillings was expensive, he knew, but a box, with good companions, was more congenial than sharing the cheaper pit with the groundlings.

What could possibly have gone wrong? Indeed, the evening had started innocently enough…

Chapter Two

True patriots all, for be it understood,

We left our country, for our country’s good…

And none will doubt, but that our emigration

Has prov’d most useful to the British nation.

– attributed to Henry Carter, excerpt of prologue to convicts’ playbill, Sydney (16 January 1796)

‘The Patterer could not ignore the fine bosom generously displayed in the froth of lace.’

 

Nicodemus Dunne was pleased with the company he met in the box to which he was ushered. In the low light from the lamps and candles positioned discreetly around the auditorium so as not to distract eyes from the bright stage when the curtain went up, he recognised a comrade, Captain Francis Nicholas Rossi, one of the colony’s leading lawmen – not only Chief Magistrate but also Chief of Police. William Francis King, the peddling ‘Flying Pieman’ famed for his athletic feats, was there too, beside Dr Thomas Owens from the town’s hospital. An empty seat in the box would be filled between bursts of backstage volatility by Mr Barnett Levey, the theatre’s owner, manager and sometime performer.

The Patterer noted that another of the boxes was occupied by four men, only two of whom he could readily identify in the gloom. Certainly, one was Major Thomas Mitchell, the Surveyor-General, and another was Mr William Balcombe, the Colonial Treasurer. The others? Well, Mr Balcombe had been gravely ill: perhaps they were servants, or his sons? Sam Terry, an old lag, or convict, now legally a rich man, sat nearby.

In adjoining boxes, but studiously ignoring each other, were the leader of the so-called Exclusive settlers, Captain John Macarthur, purest of the ‘Pure Merinos’, and Mr William Charles Wentworth, a firebrand publisher and lawyer, friend to emancipated convicts. Dunne was surprised to see Macarthur. Illness had recently kept him out of town, in near seclusion.

The Patterer’s gaze shifted to the people in the pit of the theatre. So too did the Pieman’s, and he sighed. ‘I should also be hawking,’ he grumbled.

Dunne could see the stooped figure of an old pedlar who sold honey on the streets. Tonight, though, he carried no tray of his wares; he was just another theatregoer. But there was a working hawker, a man selling bottles of beer. The Patterer shrugged away William King’s complaint as he recognised below him another friend, a freed felon, the Irishman Brian O’Bannion.

A handsome, well set-up fellow in his thirties, O’Bannion would have been welcome to join the Patterer’s box, but chose not to. Dunne knew it was not because he could afford only the three shillings entry fee for groundlings. No, O’Bannion was accompanied by his brother, Cornelius, or ‘Con’, who was a recently paroled ‘political’. The Patterer had gained the clear impression that Con could not yet feel comfortable in close proximity with any officer even remotely connected to this captivity.

‘God save Ireland!’ Brian O’Bannion had said when he introduced his newly freed brother to the Patterer. ‘We were both eejits.’

Indeed, two quite separate failed endeavours had brought down the O’Bannions. Brian had been caught drunkenly burgling a house in Dublin, while young Con had been swept up running messages for Irish dissidents. Only the burglar’s lack of booty and the tyro rebel’s tender years (even now he was still not long into shaving) had saved them both from dancing the hangman’s hornpipe. Seven years apiece at Botany Bay were their sentences, and now, with early tickets of leave, they were free together.

But not
quite
together, for ‘black Irish’ Brian was open-faced and bold, while the slight and fair Con, though he had seemed to thaw around the Patterer lately, was a cooler soul, less at home in his new world.

The audience was drawn to the matters at hand by the appearance of Mr Levey’s rotund figure on stage before the closed curtains. He raised his hands. ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ he announced, ‘we begin this evening’s entertainment with a rare item. I find in Mr George Barrington’s
History of New South Wales
the very prologue that was spoken at the opening of one of our earliest theatres – only eight years after humble settlement here.

‘Mr Barrington writes that the prologue was “certainly particularly descriptive of the theatrical corps”.’

‘Aye,’ a man interjected. ‘They was all government men’ – the label ‘convict’ was often avoided – ‘and he’d know…He were one too!’

‘Of course he was!’ shot back Barnett Levey excitedly. ‘And of course they were, and no shame to it.’

The Patterer knew what the little entrepreneur meant and what he left unsaid. George Barrington and those early thespians
had
been felons – Barrington was a pickpocket who ended up a colonial chief constable – and, although Levey had arrived as Sydney’s first free Jewish settler, his brother, Solomon, was a convict before he became a wealthy businessman.

‘So,’ continued the master of ceremonies, ‘I crave your indulgence to present the superior couplets of the prologue in question, delivered for your delectation tonight by –’ he paused dramatically – ‘a young lady! I give you Mistress Susannah Hathaway!’

There was an excited murmur as Mr Levey scuttled off and the curtains parted to reveal a stage unadorned but for a lone figure picked out as brightly as possible by oil lamps concentrated by polished reflectors.

A beautiful girl stood before them. She could not be lovelier, thought Dunne, not even if she were illuminated by the magical new light they marvelled about in the London journals: there, it seemed, they were somehow igniting lime and projecting the incandescent result directly onto the subject desired.

Miss Susannah bobbed a curtsey as the Patterer’s eyes studied and approved her. As she straightened, he could not ignore the fine bosom generously displayed in the froth of lace decorating the décolletage of the wasp-waisted, wide-skirted gingham day dress (normally unseemly at this hour). Nor could he fail to study the unimpaired aspect of well-turned calves in patterned stockings. Her blonde hair was tightly constrained into a chignon, with small curls escaping over the forehead and near delicate ears. Dunne understood (as much as any man could understand) that this style was called
à la chinoise
. Her face, he recorded for future pleasant recall, was a perfect heart shape unspoiled even by the obvious application of heavy theatrical
maquillage
.

While he was consumed by charting her charms, Miss Hathaway had spoken the beginning of the prologue. Now he approved her voice, light yet firm, as she continued. He enjoyed the verses’ wit and admired the bravado of the author and his long-gone players as she recited:

What in the practice of our former days,

Could shape our talents to exhibit plays?…

Macbeth, a harvest of applause will reap,

For some of us, I fear, have murder’d sleep;

His lady too with grace will sleep and talk,

Our females have been us’d at night to walk…

Grant us your favour, put us to the test,

To gain your smiles we’ll do our very best;

And, without dread of future Turnkey Lockits,

Thus, in an honest way, still pick your pockets!

Susannah bowed and retired, to rapturous applause.

The Patterer was pleased, but also worried. He wasn’t sure that Barnett Levey had been at all wise to invoke the spirits of the old convict cast. He knew that their humble theatre had soon been shut down by government decree – the houses of too many in the audience were being burgled as they watched! Even now, the Governor of the day was conscious of the possible side effects of a theatre and would not issue a formal licence. Levey circumvented the ban by calling his venue the Sydney Amateur Theatre, selling subscriptions, not tickets, and describing his performances as ‘At Homes’ or concerts. Still, Dunne saw that Lieutenant-General Darling could feel further provoked, particularly as Levey also planned to restage the colony’s first taste of theatre, played in 1789 by convicts. Now, as then, redcoats would be the comic butt of
The Recruiting Officer.

Meanwhile, tonight’s next act was ready to perform.

The last time the Patterer visited the George Street theatre, Mr Barnett Levey had used a mysterious theatrical expression – about the show not being over ‘until the fat lady had sung’. At the time, the phrase had achieved an unintended, macabre meaning: the obese artiste referred to had collapsed on stage, a prelude to eventually dying. Dramatically, of course.

Tonight, however, there was a twist: although he was only second on the bill, the show was almost over
before
the fat
man
had finished singing. Certainly, the choice of Signor Cesare Bello was doomed to failure from the moment the Italian singer opened his mouth.

It had seemed all right even when Mr Levey had announced the artist as one who had performed before the royal court in Paris. The French wars were dead and buried with perhaps four million souls; the Froggies were only hated mildly now. Even when told that the offering was an aria entitled
Ombra adorata aspetta
, the mood of the mob in the pit had been good-humoured, even anticipatory.

The trouble started when the man (who, even charitably, could only be described as plump) poured out the first notes and they cut through the fog of pipe and segar smoke, whale oil and candle fumes, and the reek of closely packed, overripe bodies.

The first line of lyrics signalled the shambles to come. Soon the singer was drowned out by catcalls from the audience. One such taken up and repeated by the crowd was strident and unambiguous: ‘Get the molly off!’

The people had been ready to accept a foreigner, even a foreign language, but they were not ready for their first castrato.

Nicodemus Dunne felt doubly sorry for the singer. Not only had the audience rejected his art, but it had also made a mockery of the sacrifice required to achieve a voice like that – to keep his crystalline boy-soprano notes pure into adulthood, Bello had been castrated before puberty. Dunne knew that the practice had mutilated countless thousands of boys since it rose to prominence in the sixteenth century, when the church decided that, as women were barred from sacred music, young males were needed in great numbers – and a good voice should not be wasted by nature but kept forever young.

Barnett Levey called down the curtain and mingled with the crowd to calm the protesters. Dunne felt he should commiserate with the humiliated Italian. He found Signor Bello still on the stage, wringing his plump hands, pausing only to peer regularly at his tormentors through a peephole in the curtains. ‘This has never happened to us before,’ he piped distractedly to no one in particular.

The Patterer frowned. ‘To
us
?’

The singer, who close up was clearly older than he appeared at a distance, nodded, taking in his inquisitor for the first time. ‘Yes, to me, or to Crescentini – Girolamo Crescentini.

‘He wrote tonight’s aria, but we, singing together, we were the toast of Paris, from the turning of the century. We were never apart, sharing the fame. We —’ He had once more pressed his eye to the curtain’s spy-hole and now suddenly interrupted his flow.

‘Madonna!’ he exclaimed, ‘I thought … It cannot be! … I never thought to see that face again. And laughing, like all the other hyenas – at me!’ Bello was pale – with anger or fear, Dunne could not be sure.

‘Who? What do you see?’ He pushed the older man aside, not so gently, and squinted through the hole. He imagined he could see all that Bello had seen – a small section of groundlings in the pit, murkily lit, then a row of boxes for the better off, although these were not much brighter. He studied the faces. He could make out Captain Rossi, Barnett Levey (who was certainly laughing, perhaps nervously?), Dr Owens, Mr William Balcombe and his attendants, Sam Terry, similarly chaperoned, Captain Macarthur and Surveyor Mitchell. The Patterer also caught a flash of the faces of Brian and Cornelius O’Bannion.

BOOK: The Ghost of Waterloo
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