The Ghost of Waterloo (34 page)

A return visit to the Subscription Library in Pitt Street, near Sam Terry’s Angel, once more proved the value of the Patterer’s two-pound annual subscription. Then, it had provided details of the traditions and trappings of the Chinese calendar. Now, Dunne called for books about French expeditions sent to test out the colony. The Count de La Pérouse had actually sailed into the rejected Botany Bay on the very day that Captain Arthur Phillip was raising the British flag sixteen miles north, in the better Port Jackson. The Frenchman sailed away, to be lost at sea.

There was one remaining line of enquiry to pursue at the library – to test the relevance now of some words written 229 years earlier. Perhaps Josiah Bagley would speak, even if from the grave.

Dunne followed through on Bagley’s remarks about the Shakespearean quotation he had carried around in his journal for a decade but had been unable to explain.

Yes, here it was:
As You Like It
, Act III, Scene ii. Touchstone, the court jester, indeed says: ‘Come, shepherd, let us make an honourable retreat; though not with bag and baggage, yet with scrip and scrippage.’

Well, it seemed to agree with the soldier’s memory. The Patterer read it again, against the notes he had taken when he interviewed Bagley.

And the mystery was solved! The voice on the dock at St Helena that day in March 1818 had reversed the quotation. The ‘honourable retreat’ was made, as the taunt to Sir Hudson Lowe made quite clear, ‘
with
bag and baggage’. Napoleon Bonaparte had joined the
Winchelsea
earlier, in a box among the departing luggage.

But who had helped him? Mr Balcombe, his go-between; Mrs Balcombe, his ‘Josephine’; Betsy, his blooming ‘Rosebud’; Grenville or Thomas, his playmates; or the servant, whoever, and wherever, he was now?

One of them? Even all of them?

The Patterer took to Mr Potts at the ‘People’s Bank’ the small souvenirs from his imprisonment by John Macarthur and Samuel Marsden.

The banker examined them with great interest. ‘So, these are some of the famous 2000 sovereigns, eh?’ He tossed one in a palm. ‘A famous denomination in our coinage, Mr Dunne, one steeped in history. It has been around since 1489, you know, when King Henry VII first ordered the issue of such a splendid coin.

‘This? Well, it is a fine, modern example of the moneyer’s art. The relief of the head on the obverse side is finely wrought, both as a piece of artistic representation and in the production values executed.

‘It has a suitable security rim, to deter those who would “clip” or “shave” coins. Still, I will weigh it.’ He did so, on delicate scales, and pronounced, ‘Ah, just as I expected.

‘I am also impressed by the fine, tiny engraving of an uplifting motto, or exhortation. A long-standing example of such is the wording, “
Posui Deum Adiutorem Meum
”. How is your Latin?’

‘As I recall, that means “I have made God my helper.” ’

‘Yes, quite right. This sov of yours has a similar unambiguous lesson; the only difference is that here we have “
Canis
” instead of “
Deum
” – a small matter, is it not? And there’s nothing I can say now about the other offering that you do not already comprehend.’

The Patterer took back the glittering coin and was blunt: ‘Is it a forgery?’

‘Most certainly not,’ said Mr Potts firmly. ‘No “treason” here, a key word. A forgery may be a document created completely, or simply altered by one stroke of the pen. And the punishment is severe, but rarely draconian. Editor Halloran; our architect, Mr Francis Greenway; and Mr Joseph Lycett, the esteemed artist, are – or were – convicted forgers. They all fiddled papers; they all survived.

‘Coining is a different matter entirely, dangerous work. Even just having the tools to do it, the “intent”, can be enough to convict. That is why they often use sand moulds of true coins for their castings. Sydney sand, from the white southern beach dunes, is regarded so highly by English glassmakers that it is shipped back in ballast. Coiners there crave it, too! The bonus of a sand mould, hopefully, is it can be destroyed during a raid. Poof – no evidence!’

The Patterer nodded. ‘But if you are caught red-handed…’

‘Precisely,’ said Mr Potts. ‘It’s treason – indeed, high treason – to copy the king’s, or queen’s coinage, especially if it bears the royal likeness.’

Both men fell silent, sobered. The reward for an illegal coiner was hanging. Unless, of course, the culprit, even an accomplice, was a woman. Then the penalty was to be burnt at the stake. Some in the colony remembered the trial of Jeremiah Grace and Margaret Sullivan in London in 1788, the settlement’s birth year. The Recorder, an implacable judge named James Adair, hanged Grace and sent Sullivan to a public funeral pyre. A year later, another woman, nineteen-yearold Christian Murphy, followed her into the fire. Dunne did not believe there had been another, but…

Mr Potts broke the spell. ‘Do you know who these belong to?’

The Patterer nodded.

‘Well,’ said Mr Potts, returning the other coin, ‘you didn’t really need me, did you?’

‘Ah, Mr Dunne! Well met!’ Laurence Hynes Halloran bailed up the Patterer, who was passing
The Gleaner
with his mind in a whirl. ‘I have been thinking greatly about the interest you professed in the Battle of the Nile, at Aboukir Bay.’ And he proceeded to rattle off the names of the French fleet there and those of the opposing British men-of-war.

He cuts a rather sad figure now, thought his captive audience, but once he was a man of passion and violence. As a midshipman he had knifed and killed a man and gone to gaol for it. Dunne tried to sidle away, but there was no stopping the editor: ‘And, in the light of the mysterious murder of Signor Bello at the Angel Inn, something else has come to mind that might interest you.

‘Yes, sir, a Rear Admiral Pierre Charles Villeneuve was in charge of the after-guard of the French Fleet at Aboukir Bay. He escaped (and some said he shouldn’t have) the defeat there and lived to fight another day – in command of the French flagship against Nelson at Trafalgar. But his ship,
Bucentaure
, struck its colours to the British and Villeneuve became a prisoner-of-war in England.

‘He was repatriated a year later. Out of favour with Bonaparte, blamed – and blaming himself – for the crushing defeats, he locked himself in his chamber and stabbed himself to death. Don’t you see? The common link with Bello’s demise.

‘Poor fellow! Doubtless, he felt guilty about his judgements in both battles. He left a note that read: “How fortunate that I have no child to be loaded with the weight of my name as its awful inheritance”.’

‘Very sad, I’m sure, and very coincidental,’ said the Patterer. ‘But —’

‘No, no, no! That name of his ship comes up before us, again.’

‘The
Bucentaure
?’

‘Not that one. I refer to his command earlier at Aboukir Bay.’

And, when Halloran repeated one of the names he had rattled off only minutes earlier, Dunne’s eyes widened. What’s in a name? In this case, perhaps everything. A careless aside – only the second in ten years? – could close the case.

‘Everyone has to have a name that suits them,’ someone had said when they had all met in the Hope and Anchor, exchanging ideas. Of course, it had been William the Pieman.

But where were names kept? Well, there were rolls for convicts and strengths for soldiers. But what of the rest? Why, there’s the census, the colony’s first. It wouldn’t have ‘Indians’ on it, naturally, nor (for some odd reason) the garrison redcoats. But everyone else should be there by now.

He hurried to the office in the Chief Secretary’s building, where he was known as an authorised collector. It seemed a daunting task. The eight bulky ledgers contained 36 598 entries for the whole colony, 10 815 of them in the settlement of Sydney.

But he did not have to wade through all the Sydney names. His hunch meant that he was specifically looking for – exactly what? First, a name beginning in ‘Town’, because ‘
Ville
’ in French meant that. There were Townshends and even plain, unadorned Towns, one Townson. But none fitted the bill.

What about Josiah Bagley’s Shakespeare text, which had borne fruit when it was looked at the other way around? ‘
Neuve
’ became ‘New’. Put them together … Yes, there were a Newsome, a Newhart, some Newmans and one, because of a given name, who was his man. A Newton. And he had only his carelessness to blame that it had been overlooked until now. He simply had not asked the right questions.

The search for the other man was almost anticlimactic. Prosper Mendoza, the name of the St Helena suicide, stared up at him. And suddenly the other information given there made sense too. Dunne smiled; it bore out one word of wisdom passed to him by an older Runner: a man on the run may change his name, dye his hair, grow (or shave) a beard. But, invariably, he will still keep his birthday. This came down either to superstition or lack of confidence in remembering a fabrication.

Now the Patterer was almost ready to attend the luncheon with confidence that he had found the killer.

But first Dunne had some brief, unfinished business. He returned to that disreputable drinkery in The Rocks, the Sheer Hulk. There he encountered a sunburnt man whose pressing services had been recommended to him highly. He handed over five gold coins, which pleased the man greatly; usually this manner of business cost
him
money.

‘Have someone hang around the Bacchanal, at Brickfield,’ instructed the Patterer. ‘His name is Robinson.’

‘Aye, aye, sir,’ said the ship’s captain.

As the Patterer left, he waved to a Hulk regular. ‘Don’t complain, Mr Robinson, don’t complain,’ he breathed. ‘For ten shillings it could be much worse.’ He saluted again Thomas Hughes, the hapless, hopeless hangman who thirsted for rum and who, for sixpence over the going rate, would perhaps stretch a man’s neck, if asked nicely.

Chapter Forty-eight

The Barley Mow, with not a sheaf in sight, just the gradual greening of Hyde Park a block to its east, was a most suitable site for a day of reckoning. It had hangovers, with a vengeance. Before the tavern and its first glass were raised there, a public gallows had stood on the site and many a neck was stretched.

The gathering for the curious luncheon given by Governor Darling may have borne some resemblance to a hanging-day mob. The diners were variously nervous, ill at ease, cocksure and excited. But at least no one seemed bored.

As soon as the actual meal began there would be many, too many, uninvited guests. They were known only too well to everyone – as
M. domestica
and
M. vetustissima
: the common housefly and its bush sibling. To thwart them, Dunne had followed the common practice of colonial hosts; he had hired, again, a boy from the Carters Barracks, this time to fan away the flies. ‘It’s better than being buggered,’ said the boy; and better, thought the Patterer, than being hired as that lowest-of-the-low child labourer, the ‘pure’-gatherer, who wandered the streets with a bucket, collecting dog-droppings that would later be used in the tanning of fine leather.