The Ghost of Waterloo (3 page)

‘I must see him!’ Bello cried, shoving his new companion aside and parting the curtains. ‘
Ecco
!’ he called loudly and waved towards the audience. But whatever he hoped to achieve was swamped by the crowd’s response.

‘Get the molly off!’ a voice called again, at which the mob cheered and took up the chant. ‘Cock-a-doodle-doo!’ yelled another. ‘Cook the capon’s goose!’

Bello shook his head and rushed off stage to the artists’ retiring rooms. By the time Dunne could again survey the audience, whatever the shattered castrato may have seen was distorted and lost in the chaos that reigned throughout the theatre.

Chapter Three

Somehow the show revived, saved by the appearance of a more acceptable star, a large dog of ambiguous ancestry named Munito, who was billed as the canine that could speak seven languages – and play dominoes!

The Patterer was as fascinated as the rest of the now calm audience. The dog’s master took Munito through a series of tricks, giving his orders in several different languages. Dunne studied the act carefully and first decided it would not be a mystery if each of the dog’s tricks was a response to an order in a particular language. Thus, if Munito had learnt to ‘sit’ to an English command, but to ‘roll over’ to a Spanish call, it showed a very well-trained dog, but no miracle worker.

The dog’s controller, however, changed the spoken commands for the same reactions. For example, he would ask the audience to call for the tongue to which they wished Munito to react. It became clear that, somehow, the orders could be mixed, yet the dog could still respond correctly.

Munito next played dominoes by barking once for each spot on the tile his master held up and announced to the audience. ‘Double six’ was extremely noisy.

Dunne was sure he was not alone in being unable to see how it was done. This puzzlement made everyone clap even louder.

Sadly, the dog’s good work at restoring order to the program was soon undone by an unhappy (though not for the audience, mind) turn of events in the following act. It was intended to be a stern performance of Act IV, Scene i, the court scene, of
The Merchant of Venice
.

The actors advanced to the point where Bassanio asked, ‘Why dost thou whet thy knife so earnestly?’

Shylock explained, ‘To cut the forfeiture from that bankrupt there.’

To emphasise the point he waved his hand. And his nose fell off.

There was stunned silence as the silver nose – a metal contraption meant to conceal a cruel cavity exposed by either disease or injury, but inadequately masked by stage
maquillage
– landed with a clatter on the stage.

Alas, Munito, too, soon let the company down. The perambulating proboscis was the cue for the dog to take an unwonted curtain call. He ran on, seized the nose and made his exit, pursued by a crimsoncheeked Shylock.

It brought the house down, and the curtain.

Thankfully for Mr Barnett Levey’s peace of mind, the programme could be closed successfully – and quietly. After some had lost control – the Italian singer, who was not (as horse-fanciers would say) ‘entire’; a thespian who also had an important feature missing; and a talking dog that too vividly recalled its hunting instincts – it fell on the slender shoulders of Miss Susannah Hathaway to send the spectators smoothly on their way. The handsome young woman hushed the agitated audience as she poured out a sad song.

She is a nightingale! thought Nicodemus Dunne.

The same previously approved bosom heaved as she melodiously lamented:

In the flickering lights the Patterer could see that some women in the crowd were openly dabbing at their eyes, and not a few gentlemen cleared their throats to mask their emotion.

When she had finished, Dunne turned to Levey. ‘I have never heard that lament before,’ he remarked against the wave of applause.

‘Ah,’ said the showman. ‘It is quite famous in America. And the story of the original singer and her family is just as sorrowful as the song.’

The Patterer smiled. He knew that the true, abiding love of the rotund Levey was the romance of the theatre; he knew how much he revelled in the colourful, if sometimes tawdry, world behind the lights. He indulged his friend. ‘How is the story sad?’ he asked.

Mr Levey did not miss his chance. ‘Well, the original singer was known as the Divine Eliza. As Elizabeth Arnold, she made her debut in Boston in 1796. She
did
marry, in 1806, and had a son three years later. Alas, her husband deserted both of his charges in the year of her death, 1811.

‘The boy – a young man now, of course – is, unfortunately, a troubled creature. He joined the army in America a year or so ago, but he shirks his duty and is always in strife.’ The entrepreneur tapped his nose. ‘The drink, y’know.’

Dunne’s curiosity was roused. ‘Pray, sir, how do you know all this?’

‘Well,’ said Levey, now settled firmly and comfortably in the saddle of his favourite steed – gossip of grease-paint – ‘after the tragic passing of the Divine Eliza, the lad became foster child to a Mr and Mrs John Allan, rich folk, very rich Virginians.

‘Mr Allan and my brother, Solomon – you know, of course, that Solomon runs, with Mr Cooper, our Waterloo Stores here?’ The Patterer nodded; he was familiar with the huge emporium. ‘Well,’ continued the showman, ‘they have long traded together and correspond closely. It has been an odd friendship – a prosperous Gentile and a once-imprisoned Hebrew – but the families continue to share confidences.

‘It appears that the young man – he’s, what, nineteen now – desires nothing but to become a student of crime in general and the occult in particular. And, oddly, murder as well as phantasmagorical matters tax his mind.

‘It seems he neglects his soldiering to read stories about secret rooms and other impossible plots. He prefers such dubious literature as Ann Radcliffe’s
The Mysteries of Udolpho
to his manual of arms. He does his own scribbling, too.

‘And he concocts intricate hoaxes. Why, he even fashioned a fake attack by hot-air balloon on Mr Allan’s home in Richmond. For his pains, and his foster-father’s, he lost his allowance.’

‘Well,’ said Dunne, ‘I know that Captain Rossi often has gruesome mysteries enough here to haunt him. And I,’ he added modestly, ‘attempt to help him.’

Mr Levey clapped his hands and grinned. ‘That’s so! Then perhaps one day you and he may need the help of our young American friend. What a pity he is so far away.

‘Yes, indeed, you could secure the services of young Mr Edgar Allan or, to use his enlisted name, Edgar A. Perry. But he usually chooses to keep his father’s surname.’

‘Which is?’ asked the Patterer idly.

‘Why,’ Barnett Levey answered, ‘it is Poe.’

That’s that, mused Dunne, as he walked home through the night – ‘home’ being the Bag o’ Nails (properly called the Bacchanal), a tavern in the village at the brickfields, to the south of the settlement’s centre. Many townspeople scorned Brickfield – and not simply because its relative isolation made it a magnet for devotees of cruel blood sports: bull-baiting, cock-fighting and terriers ratting and pit dogs tearing each other to death. As well, a regular wind flowing from the south picked up red dust from the workings and deposited it in a choking film over the houses and shops as far as the Cove to the north. Such a wind was called a ‘Brickfielder’.

The Patterer decided that his visit to the theatre had afforded relief from his day’s draining work, but it had been ephemeral fun. Surely he was finished with such carnivals of lost causes. Why should he ever again see the unmanned opera star, the noseless Shylock, the disgraced domino-playing dog? And who, anywhere else on earth, would ever again hear of the troubled young American who had lost his way?

He would not, however, object to hearing (and, of course, seeing) once more the nightingale Miss Susannah Hathaway. And often.

In the meantime, he wondered if the Police Chief would involve him in some new, exacting criminal investigation to break the routine of news-reading and allow him to use once more the skills he had gained as a policeman in London – before a fateful lapse had put him on the wrong side of the law, in chains and shipped to an eight-year sentence at Botany Bay.

His old work was what he wished for. He wished? He shook his head. No, wishing could be dangerous.

He remembered two recent conversations. He had been enlisted as a collector of information for the colony’s first census and it had taken him to some odd places and people. Mysteriously, the ten Mahometans living in Clarence Street were English; the head of the family was one William Wooden and he had two servants, one Protestant and one Catholic. And the only Hindoostani was a free settler named Ramdial. When he wasn’t a stockman he worked at Thatchcutters Bay, to the near east of the town.

Of the three ‘pagans’ recorded, he remembered John Shan, a Chinee market gardener near the Lachlan Swamps, who came to Sydney only to sell his produce, filling his empty cart with manure for the return trip. Animal shit only, he assured anyone who asked, not human shit. But the Patterer, who had seen him fossicking at household and public privies, had reported him to the charleys.

In response, the smarting Celestial had spat out, ‘May you live in interesting times!’

On a subject that Dunne could no longer recall, Ramdial the thatchcutter had more benignly, but opaquely, remarked, ‘Be careful what you wish for.’

The Patterer wondered if Signor Cesare Bello would be comforted if he were told, ‘
Que sera, sera.’

Chapter Four