"Steady, Dunne!" said the offended target.

Only after he had apologized did the patterer recognize his victim. "Oh, Dr. Cunningham," he said. "My clumsy fault. How are matters with you?" He had not seen the ship's surgeon around the town since he had landed after his latest voyage some months before.

"I fervently wish I could go back," said Peter Cunningham wryly.

"Well, that's surely no problem. Just take a new berth."

Cunningham sighed. "If it were only that simple. No, I meant that I would like to be able to reverse my latest pa.s.sage out here."

The patterer was puzzled, and it showed.

"Look," said Cunningham, "my voyage involved problems and left me with ghosts I wish I could exorcise. Surely you remember how your fellow prisoners imagined that, if they dreamed hard enough, they could perhaps go back to a time before the law took them. I've seen new arrivals walk backward onto the deck on landing-because they fancied that they were boarding to return! That's all I'm doing, hoping to turn back my last pa.s.sage on Morley Morley."

"Specifically, why?" asked Dunne.

"Well, since I left the navy, I've made five voyages to Australia as a surgeon-supervisor. I've cared for 746 prisoners and over these nine-odd years, I've lost only three."

"That's outstanding, miraculous. Is it not the best result ever? Why are you concerned?"

Cunningham grimaced. "Because some say a disease slipped ash.o.r.e this time, carried by some soldiers' children-a disease that had never before been here: whooping cough."

The patterer knew there had been a fiery epidemic. "But no one could blame you."

"One of the victims was the son of a very important personage," said Cunningham. "He died."

"Oh." There was little more that Dunne could say. He changed the subject. "Well, I must away. I'm off to the hospital-don't concern yourself, I am well. I must consult a doctor on another matter."

Cunningham raised an eyebrow. "Be careful there. Don't get too close to anyone." Before Dunne could satisfy his curiosity about this odd remark, the surgeon had nodded and walked off.

CHAPTER TEN.

... for a bird of the air shall carry the voice, and that which hath wings shall tell the matter.

-Ecclesiastes 10:20

OX-WAGONS AND AN OCCASIONAL CARRIAGE STIRRED THE DUST, but most Sydneysiders walked about their business. The patterer watched as a smart curricle went by, whipped along at a cracking pace by a young dandy and splashing through a mess of fresh dung and urine-to the consternation of a pedestrian who received the spray and shook an angry fist.

In this part of town, shops and houses of business, some dilapidated, some neatly painted and adorned with flower beds in window boxes, punctuated stands of more impressive private houses in the latest Georgian style.

Enterprising street traders noisily hawked oysters, apples and pies, their cries mingled with the exotic calls of parrots perched on shoulders and shopfronts. Parrots were everywhere in Sydney. People flocked to c.u.mberland Street hoping to hear a bird recite the Lord's Prayer and the Ten Commandments. Even in the colony's first breach-of-promise case, the patterer recalled, the court heard that a shy young suitor had taught a parrot to sing, "My heart with love is beating." Although that case had been heard several years before, the patterer had experienced a more recent reminder of the rather bizarre circ.u.mstances of the case.

This jolt to his memory had come one morning when he slept in late in his rented room in a cottage behind Government House. The cottage was one of two built by Mr. Francis c.o.x, a ship- and anchor-smith, for his wife, Frances, and their four children. Dunne paid one pound a week for board and fifteen shillings for food. On that particular morning, the clatter of his landlady, Mrs. c.o.x, in the kitchen downstairs had helped awaken him, but the sound that finally drove him into awareness of the advancing day was a strange voice. "My heart with love is beating," he finally decided the high, scratchy voice was saying. Again. And again.

Intrigued, he pulled on a banyan, the voluminous and thus discreet Indian silk dressing-gown that society regarded, alone among male robes de chambre robes de chambre, as suitable for a gentleman to wear before ladies. Dunne was, when he could afford to be, quite a dandy, although he usually wore simple working-man's dress, so as to merge into his general audience.

Dressed in his banyan, he made a rather grand entrance into the kitchen and found Mrs. c.o.x with her daughter, Sarah-and a gorgeously plumed parrot.

Sarah was an equally splendid creature, a young woman in her early twenties, with raven hair and a generous figure. The patterer was, he knew full well, not the only man to admire her. Three years earlier, in May 1825, she had sued Captain John Paine, a ship's master, for breach of promise. Miss c.o.x had agreed to marry Captain Paine, but he began pursuing others, first a young heiress, then a rich widow.

In court, Paine faced the accusation of having injured Sarah's reputation. She told the jury that she was a respectable girl who "kept good company and was never out late at night." The court believed her and awarded her 100 pounds plus costs. His Honor had upheld her honor.

One fact of the case was indelible in Nicodemus Dunne's memory: Captain Paine's failed defense had argued that Miss c.o.x had other beaus-and had produced as evidence the parrot sent to her by a rival suitor. It had been trained to say the very words that had woken the patterer.

"You kept the bird, I see," he said to Sarah, who was now better known as the consort of the lawyer who had represented her in court, Mr. William Charles Wentworth, firebrand publisher of The Australian. The Australian.

"For sentimental reasons, Mr. Dunne," she said with a smile.

At that moment, a small child rushed into the room, panicking the parrot.

"My daughter, Timmie," said the young woman proudly, at the same time as she deftly rescued the bird.

"How she has grown!" said the patterer, who, in truth, had little idea of what a child's physical progress should be. "How old is she now?"

"Three years come Christmas," said her grandmother proudly. "Doesn't time fly?"

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BIRDSONG OF A different kind dragged Dunne from his reverie back to his slow promenade to the hospital. Shrieks of peac.o.c.ks 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 c.o.c.ked hat and a bra.s.s 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 pa.s.sed 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 a.s.signed convicts as chair-men, but the scheme never caught on.

Between the barracks and the Cove stood the office of The Gazette The Gazette. The patterer cribbed from all the papers but found The Gazette The Gazette the most staid and pro-government, thus the least interesting, even though it had the most colorful history. 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 a.s.signed to start The Gazette The Gazette in 1803. 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 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. 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 Gazette into the leather satchel that already contained latest copies of the three rival newspapers and left. Walking and talking were easier. 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 a.s.signment 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 pa.s.sed 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 inst.i.tution, 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 doc.u.ments, 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 a.s.sured 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, G.o.ddess 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)

EVERYONE 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. G.o.d 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 s.h.i.thouse. 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 subst.i.tute, goat.) And there was always the chance of bullock's head brawn, boiled calf's head, cow's heel or calfs 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 G.o.d 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.

"b.u.g.g.e.r 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-b.u.g.g.e.r off!"

Much amused and hopeful, The Ox headed home.

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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 a.r.s.e-wipes-paper was scarce in poor households, so a.r.s.e-wipes were usually old cloths or even small piles of dried cut gra.s.s. Some men, old salts come ash.o.r.e, stuck with their maritime habits and used a sponge and a bucket of seawater.

In accordance with the instructions, The Ox had a beaker of water, half-filled, into which he mixed white powder from a spill of paper in the envelope. He swirled around the mixture then, as instructed, swallowed it in one gulp.

He sat awaiting results. Which soon manifested themselves as increasing pain in his belly, pain that he felt spreading to his muscles and extremities. He tried to call out for help but his throat was too painful, as if it had been scalded, and he found breathing difficult.

Before he lost consciousness, he felt himself lose control of his bladder and his bowels began-finally-to empty. The pain was beyond endurance.

Waking briefly from his faint-he didn't know for how long he had lost his senses-he knew that his agony was worsening. The icy chill settling throughout his limbs did not diminish his pain.

As he jerked against the privy wall then slid to the dirt floor, his bowels, mouth and nose voided blood. The Ox was dying, not even as quickly as one of his slaughterhouse victims.

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THE SMELL OF feces, human as well as animal, was usually unremarkable in much of the town. Even the grandest manor might have runnels of noxious waste flowing, not so freely, close beneath polished floorboards and Turkish carpets.

But no near neighbor could for long ignore the stench of The Ox's violent last relief at the siege-hole. When a nose-holding fellow lodger finally investigated and pushed open the privy door, he turned tail and ran, yelling for help.

At first, he believed that the figure on the floor was alive. It still seemed to be moving and a low groaning sound arose from it. But the movement simply came from Lucilia cuprina, Lucilia cuprina, the blue-black blowfly, and perhaps 60,000 of its cousins at work, as did the drone that accompanied their feasting. They heaved on the carca.s.s as they searched for new parts in which to plant their eggs, the millions of eggs that would soon hatch into maggots. the blue-black blowfly, and perhaps 60,000 of its cousins at work, as did the drone that accompanied their feasting. They heaved on the carca.s.s as they searched for new parts in which to plant their eggs, the millions of eggs that would soon hatch into maggots.