The Ghost of Waterloo (39 page)

Dr Owens, later, would talk learnedly about fractures, pulverised bone forced into brain anterior hemispheres, haemorrhage, destroyed
dura mater
… Whatever, Grenville Newton died instantly.

As the doctor now oversaw the removal of the latest body to the hospital – God, thought the Patterer, what a depressing job for a sick man – the Balcombes, cleared of any complicity and not especially shattered (‘He was always a strange boy,’ Mrs Balcombe offered calmly), left with much of the company.

‘So, we’ve found one “Napoleon”,’ said Rossi, ‘a mad young man. But is there indeed another one?’

‘Perhaps we’ll never really know,’ replied Dunne, throwing a quick glance at Thomas Owens. ‘The trail may be cold. He could be dead, after all. And, actually, he played no direct part in robbery and murder. Also, the revolt never went very far.

‘But, of course, we’ve lost, as well as the plot’ – he smiled at the felicitous pun – ‘the treasure map, at least for the time being. Maybe gold in Australia is destined to stay where God hid it.’

He paused for a new thought. ‘It could all be worse.’

‘How, in the devil’s name,’ challenged Ralph Darling, ‘could it be “worse”?’

‘Well,’ said the Patterer reasonably, ‘Miss Hathaway brained him with a Vin Constance from the Cape. Quite a passable quaffing wine, but it was too young, only a ’27.

‘It could have been this she used.’ He reverently raised a bottle of brandy and began pouring nobblers for those remaining, even Samuel Marsden.

‘Ah, yes,’ he sighed contentedly. ‘If I’m not mistaken, an ’04 – Napoleon, of course!’

Success toasted, the Governor took Dunne aside. ‘I believe that history has capacity for only one “reborn” Bonaparte,’ he said. ‘And this mad young imitator will gradually fade into obscurity. London would not want the world to know of any
more
complications.

‘So,’ and Darling stared intently, ‘I rely on you to put it – and
him
– to rest. Understood?’

Oh, yes, decided the Patterer. Perfectly. The biggest story I would ever hawk is, as Obadiah Dawks would say, on the spike!

Chapter Fifty-five

It feels like
déjà vu
all over again, the Patterer muttered to himself, thinking of the fractured phrase once coined by poor Brian O’Bannion.

This reflection was sparked by the fact that, yet again, he had entered the portals of the Rum Hospital to discuss weighty matters of death with Dr Thomas Owens.

‘Where did you find him?’ he asked.

‘Just there, outside the dissecting room,’ replied Owens. He indicated the corridor, with its familiar fauna. Dunne noted the kangaroo, the wombat, the Van Diemen’s Land wolf and the strange water mole, as some called the platypus. Only the stuffed laughing jackass seemed unbowed by death.

‘He is drifting in and out of delirium,’ continued the doctor. ‘He was trying to pat the kangaroo, poor old bugger. A last goodbye?’

‘How far gone is he?’

Owens shook his head. ‘Failing fast,’ he said. ‘But not fast enough to beat the pain. I’m amazed he’s battled on for this long. His father died at thirty-five and a sister ailed similarly.’

The Patterer grimaced then turned and entered the ward nearby, which was clean and surprisingly well lit. He nodded to the only patient there, an aged man with a drawn face, his arms and legs all skin and bone. He lay on a straw-filled
paillasse
on an iron frame. The blanket was thrown off, as if he could not bear its weight. A small table stood beside the bed. It bore only a glass of water.

‘Ah,’ whispered the man after a moment. ‘The Running Patterer … I’ve watched you and often wondered if it would be you.’

‘Me? To do what?’

‘Why, to end my deceit, of course!’

‘I’m not an agent of that any more. Who can run the race with Death?’

‘Very good. Is it original?’

Dunne smiled. ‘Alas, no. Our James Boswell beat me to it.’

‘So, you are an educated man. I’m not really. I knew only war. It was enough. Was it not Caligula who said, “
Oderint, dum metuant
”? – “Let them hate, as long as they fear”?’

‘Yes. Actually, the Roman poet Accius wrote it.’ Dunne could not help thinking of the ‘accounts’ book in Sam Terry’s attic.

The patient frowned. ‘Well, I told you I was not an educated man. Anyway, there is no need for people to fear me now. So, what do you want of me? Revenge? I didn’t kill anyone – not this time, not here. And the uprising was an old man’s mad dream.’

‘I know that,’ said the Patterer. ‘But you didn’t stop that young man becoming the agent of the you of old. But revenge now? No. More wise words, this time from Francis Bacon: “A man that studieth revenge keeps his own wounds green”.’

‘You have taken my assistant?’ the patient asked with an effort. He sighed as Dunne nodded. ‘He won’t betray me, you know,’ came a proud whisper. The Patterer nodded again, but would not twist the knife and tell the old man why silence was assured.

‘We fell out, you understand,’ the old man continued, ‘just as I did with my Marshals who had failed me. I lost faith in this last aide, too.

‘I realised that his enthusiasm had been transferred from the coup to the quest for gold. Pah! I had to remove that temptation. So
I
took the map – I suppose you could say that I was the traitor he suspected poor Creighton of being.

‘It was easy. Only Grenville knew of the gold.’ He paused for breath. ‘In the end, I did not have to worry about young Cornelius. I dealt secretly with one of the gang – he could have everything except the japanned box. So
he
dug up Dingle’s floor.

‘The map is now in a safe repository – in fact, the epitome of safety. But nothing more: I’m weary now…’ He closed his eyes. Clearly, they had run out of things to say.

The visitor drew from his pocket a small bag with a button that winked in a ray of fading sunlight. He placed the bag on the table, near the water, then sketched a salute with his cabbage-tree hat with its lavender band. As he withdrew, he said softly, but clearly: ‘
Adieu
, General…’

He received in return a tight smile from the 59-year-old man the census called Prosper Mendoza…

Or, as he had been better known for years to Sydneysiders, Garden Honey.

He could hear his own voice growing fainter: ‘Garden honey, garden . . . honey . . .’ But other sounds were quite clear. A thousand strong voices chanted, in unison, ‘Vive l’Empereur, vive l’Empereur’. It was his Old Guard, on the march. And the boy drummers with the fearsome columns were beating the tattoo that sounded the Pas de Charge. Onward, mes braves! . . . And he could see Josephine, as lovely as ever. Had he really said, ‘Not tonight, Josephine’? He knew he had said, one night, ‘Don’t wash’ . . .

Was the phantom now Madame Balcombe, or her bursting rosebud daughter? And had he really seen, again, that horse-faced English doctor, who had tried to ease his bladder and done unspeakable things to his derrière? He felt, suddenly, so tired and so cold . . .

He had a last visitor. Death spoke: ‘Well, sirrah, you’ve led me on a merry dance, you old scoundrel. You know, I was expecting to see you on St Helena. I even believed for a moment that the man I found there was you and . . .’ Death chuckled, ‘I took the poor devil. Didn’t look good, I can tell you!

‘
And, ’pon my word, in my time I’ve been to Baghdad and Samarra, but, let me tell you, this is the most Godforsaken (pardon the blasphemy) place on Lucifer’s earth.

‘Still, as they say, better late than never and all’s well that ends well. Now, put down that confounded drink.

‘Come along, then.’

And, strange to say, if any mortal had been at an impossible vantage point, the clocks at both St Phillip’s church and the Hyde Park convict barracks for once in their working lives could be seen to be in horological harmony, with their hands in sweet accord.

It was, without a doubt, 5.49 p.m.

At least everyone got that right. Finally.

Chapter Fifty-six

Nicodemus Dunne kept the hawker’s (or the General’s, or the Emperor’s, call him what you will) secret, after a fashion. He told Dr Owens, Captain Rossi, the Flying Pieman, the Governor and Miss Hathaway. Alexander Harris, too. Brian O’Bannion had not resurfaced.

‘What gave him away?’ asked Rossi. ‘The name, Mendoza?’

‘He was betrayed by his beloved bees – and by his father.’

‘By his bees? How?’

‘He could go anywhere, see anyone, with his tray of honey. But, lately, I learnt that, because of the drought, the bees were dying off and the supply of honey had dried up. And, Harris, you will recall how the sexton apologised for the lack of beeswax candles in St Phillip’s. Then, I realised I had actually watched him still hawking, but with an empty tray.

‘He had to be the ghost from the past that shocked Signor Bello at the theatre. There, the Pieman even referred to him, when he complained to me that he, too, should be hawking. I thought he had referred to the beer-seller, but it was really the sight there of Garden Honey.

‘Bello saw him and thought he was laughing at him. But Garden Honey had gone, ill, to hear his best loved aria once more. In fact, he was
crying
for the castrato’s shame.’

‘But his father,’ said Owens. ‘He’s long dead – he told me so.’

‘Yes, I agree,’ Dunne replied. ‘But when my census colleague mustered him, “Prosper Mendoza” gave his own birth date and that of his father. He saw no harm in that, nor should there have been any. Carlo is a common enough name.’

‘Then,’ Rossi was testy, ‘how did that undo him? … Of course! His birth date, 15 August, gave him away. That is Napoleon’s birthday?’

The Patterer smiled. ‘But it is shared with many other people – even me!’ He added, almost inaudibly, ‘I think,’ which no one caught. ‘So, is his 15 August birthday enough?

‘No, he said that his sire was born on 7 September 1752, in England.’

‘That was the truth?’

‘Oh, it was – and it wasn’t! Even if he quickly invented that date it was a fatal slip: it shows that the father must have been born somewhere else – in the circumstances, undoubtedly in Corsica – but assuredly not in England.’

He took pity on his friends’ frowns. ‘In England, in 1752 there simply was no 7 September! Britain was slow to move to the Gregorian calendar from the Julian version. So, in September 1752, to catch up with the rest, the country dropped eleven days. The date jumped from 2 September to 14 September. In between just didn’t happen!

‘But there’s no doubt that 7 September existed in Ajaccio, Corsica, home town of the Bonapartes.’

All agreed that Dunne was a very clever fellow indeed.