Death and the Running Patterer (23 page)

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Authors: Robin Adair

BOOK: Death and the Running Patterer
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To more general acclaim, he lauded that famous eccentric and pedestrian, the Flying Pieman, who had recently hauled a gig with a woman passenger over a distance of half a mile. Some listeners asked him for news on a rumor that only recently the pieman had been involved in fisticuffs with wild natives. Hadn’t he been defending the honor of a young lady?
As usual, thought Dunne, the gossip was only half right. And the true version was better left untold. So he just shook his head and solemnly professed to have no knowledge of any such fracas.
WITH HIS FINANCES improving, the patterer felt better able to court Miss Dormin lavishly.
He escorted her to a large evening party at the splendid Sydney Hotel, near the Military Barracks. Once inside, Rachel Dormin removed the fur-trimmed overgarment she had worn in the carriage.
“Why, in this climate, does a mantle need a fur trim?” asked the patterer.
“My dear,” said his companion resignedly, “it’s not a mantle, it’s a pelisse. And the fur is—Well, ladies just like fur! Anyway, a lady can’t be seen everywhere just in an evening dress.”
“Oh?” replied Dunne. “Really? I rather garnered the impression that some modern dresses were meant to show
everywhere
. Only recently I was amused by a witty verse that was reprinted here from an English journal:
“When dressed for the evening, girls nowadays
Scarce an atom of dress on them leave;
Nor blame them—for what is an evening dress
But a dress that is suited for Eve?”
Miss Dormin laughed and slapped him lightly.
Her gown did reveal bare shoulders and décolletage. The bodice was cut off the shoulder and kept up surely by a little whalebone. By gravity, too, decided the patterer; the gravity of what would happen if the dress slipped. Wisely, he kept this amusing thought to himself. One risqué joke was probably enough.
Short puffed sleeves left her arms bare, and her slippers, worn over silk stockings with colorfully embroidered clocks, peeped from beneath a skirt-length shorter than was fashionable by day. The fabric of her dress, she informed her escort, was
gros de Naples
, which meant nothing to him. But he understood and approved that her hair was piled high in an Apollo knot and anchored by a bejeweled ivory comb.
Nicodemus Dunne was no less a picture of sartorial splendor. He had once more consulted Mr. Cooper’s tailor—although this time he had been able to pay for the hire—and now he wore a dark blue evening dress coat over a canary waistcoat and tight flesh-colored fine-wool pants strapped to his soft pumps. He carried a cloak and a tall hat.
First, they listened to the band of the 57th play popular airs. When the musicians rendered “General Ralph Darling’s Australian Slow March” and an even better-known march by Mr. Handel, the patterer remarked that it was uncommonly civil of the 57th’s bandmaster, Mr. Sippe, to perform those pieces. When Miss Dormin asked why, Dunne explained (showing off) that, of course, the governor’s march had been composed by a rival, Mr. Kavanagh, of the Buffs, and that the Handel piece was the marching music of that other regiment.
Then the program of the
rout
changed and they danced: waltzes, galops, quadrilles. They sat out the unfamiliar
varsoviana
, Spanish steps in circles or sets of two couples in triple time.
All evening, they deliberately avoided mention of the deaths that haunted them. But memories of them—especially those of Madame Greene and poor Elsie, so recent and so raw—were revived when a plump, perspiring woman whirled past, puffing.
“That could be Madame,” observed the patterer, without thinking, steering his partner out of the way. “Sorry.”
The announcement of an interval before supper broke the sad spell under which they had fallen.
While Rachel Dormin joined the ladies, a mysterious custom to Dunne, he joined the gentlemen who were retiring to the smoking room. He did not take tobacco, despite its approval by doctors, but he took great interest in its rituals, which were almost as solemn as decanting wine and letting it breathe, or swirling and sniffing brandy, or mulling wine.
This night, there seemed to be no pipes on display—of course, where could a man carry one in his skin-tight evening wear? Most smoked cigars; some (usually older men) took snuff. The patterer observed that these gentlemen carried the powdered tobacco already prepared—again, as in the case of pipes, there was no comfortable place to conceal a grater with which to grind the weed.
He also saw that, whereas on the street one would encounter men with utilitarian wooden snuffboxes, here, adorning officers and gentry, were small works of art, enameled silver or gold.
One thing was certain: No man here chewed. Or spat.
IT WAS REGRETTABLE, then, that the one guest guilty that night of ungentlemanly behavior should be Nicodemus Dunne.
As the parties and couples regrouped to enter the supper room, he steered his partner toward a
chambre particulière
, a curtained-off banquette not meant for use that night. He stepped into one, gently pulled a surprised Rachel Dormin after him and drew the curtain closed.
“I’ve wanted to do this since I first saw you,” he whispered, and pressed himself against her, holding her tightly. He leaned down into her shocked face and forced his lips onto her opened mouth.
She struggled and pulled her face away. “Mr. Dunne!” she gasped. “I beg you. Don’t … I have my reputation!”
Had she stiffened in his arms in acceptance or rejection? He could not be certain. Then, either by accident or by instinctive design, one of his hands slipped from her bare shoulder onto a breast. He then felt her grow completely rigid before she shoved him violently away. As he moved back she gave him a stinging slap across the face.
His eyes watered. “Miss Dormin, I’m so sorry.”
“This is impossible.” Her eyes were wide and fearful. She was white to the lips.
“Why is it … so impossible?”
“Because …” She was angry now. “Because I’m not one of those warm things who tumble indiscriminately … who don’t give a fig for their good name. Is there no such thing as courtship?”
Dunne looked stricken. “Can you forgive me? Can we forget this and start again?”
Rachel Dormin was suddenly composed once more and spoke calmly. “I always like you better as a gentleman. Let us not speak of this matter again. Please take me in to supper.” She opened the curtain.
They supped then he escorted her home as if nothing had happened, and she told him that, yes, they could continue their friendship.
The patterer went to his bed that night a relieved man. He wanted Miss Dormin’s acceptance.
But he still wanted a woman. Badly.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Night makes no difference ’twixt the Priest and Clerk;
Joan as my Lady is as good i’th’ dark.
—Robert Herrick, “No Difference i’th’ Dark” (1648)
 
 
 
 
 
 
“
H
ERE′S TO YOU, MRS. ROBINSON.” NICODEMUS DUNNE RAISED his glass of rum and saluted the tall, handsome woman behind the bar.
Norah Robinson smiled as she picked up an empty glass and returned the gesture. “And to you, Mr. Dunne.” She spoke in the clear Irish brogue heard so often in the town and country. She was no prisoner or servant; the edge of steel that could enter her tone made it clear she was the boss.
The patterer was in an alehouse near Brickfield Hill. Its true name was the Bacchanal but it was known, of course, as the Bag o’ Nails, save there was no ironmongery in sight. Or it was called the Bull and Dog because of the bull-baiting held, illegally, nearby.
It was early, not yet ten A.M., on the morning after his dismally failed attempt—if such it was—to seduce Miss Dormin. He rarely drank at such an hour, but now he was on his second dram.
He and Mrs. Robinson were the only people in the taproom. They knew each other as well as any good trader and regular customer do. Or it could be that there was something more. She was a good-looking woman of, Dunne judged, forty or so; perhaps she was still in her late thirties. He was a presentable male. And maybe they flirted sometimes, as men and women in propinquity invariably will.
“You’re an early bird, aren’t you,” commented Mrs. Robinson. “What’s the celebration then? Or perhaps it’s a small wake?”
“I’m toasting my lack of brains,” said the patterer with a shrug. “That and my luck in love—or, rather, the lack of it.”
“Ah,” was all she said.
“And where’s your husband?” he asked after a pause.
“Oh, he’s to Parramatta. He’s supposed to be loading gin from a still-man there. And buying sheep. But …” She leaned confidentially across the bar, in so doing tightening the fabric of her dress against her breasts.
Why the secrecy, thought Dunne, there’s no other bugger here. “But?” he prompted.
“But,” she picked up her thread, “while I trust him not to sample too much of the gin, I suspect he’s making sheep’s eyes and tupping a ewe.” She laughed.
“Tup,” thought the patterer idly. Why, he had not heard the old English word for years. Only rustics and, it seemed, Celtic publicans, used it. Most people now chose other euphemisms for copulation. He remembered the shiver he had felt as a schoolboy (admittedly he had experienced a greater frisson surreptitiously conning
The Rape of Lucrece
) when reading about the Blackamoor Othello “tupping” white Desdemona.
He murmured aloud the lines in which another character tells Desdemona’s father, “You’ll have your daughter covered by a Barbary horse.” He hoped there had been no tupping in Miss Dormin’s recital at Levey’s theater.
“Pardon?” said Mrs. Robinson, frowning.
His reverie was broken by her puzzlement. “Nothing. Sorry. I was just daydreaming.” So, indeed, the Bard had the right of it: The world
is
a stage and there’s always passion and lust upon it. Well, I’ll act out this play, he decided. “I’m sorry, ma’am, I didn’t quite follow what you said.”
“Ah, Mr. Dunne! You’re a slow rogue, toying with a poor simple woman.”
“On my honor, no, ma’am!”
“Well, he has a fancy woman there and I’ll wager they’re chewing each other’s tongues as we speak. If they’re not hard at it swiving, that is. Though maybe not that, for I hear he has put her in the family way and there she is now, as big as the governor’s stables … But what’s your worry?”
Here goes nothing, thought Dunne. “Unrequited love,” he said.
Mrs. Robinson stared at him. Sure, he was a well set-up boy—man, rather. And she’d heard that he was kind and she knew he was clever. He stared back at her. In the half-light coming through the small windows, her white skin looked almost luminous and her hair made a golden-red nimbus around her oval face.
“Make that one your last,” she said finally.
“I beg pardon if I’ve said something untoward!”
Mrs. Robinson smiled. “No, dear. Just make it your last. In fact, don’t finish it. Shut that outside door and bar it. Wait five minutes and come upstairs. There’s something you should see.”

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