The Ghost of Waterloo (29 page)

Finding Billy Blue, the ageless West Indian ferryman, at the Cove, the Patterer arranged for the ‘Old Commodore’ (as he was known, for his tall stories of life in the Royal Navy and for his dress, a dusty old officer’s uniform and a battered top hat) to have a sturdy but light skiff waiting around the side of Macquarie’s Fort, out of sight of anyone on the Cove, two hours before dawn the next day.

Nearby, he found another old friend, this one begging on the street – it was Bungaree, a dignified native who wore a cast-off scarlet coat, an outdated military bicorn hat and a brass gorget, a neck-plate declaring him ‘King’ of Sydney town. Bungaree spoke good English and knew other languages; he also knew the ‘new’ country as well as, or better than, any white- or blackfellas. Almost thirty years earlier, he had circumnavigated the island continent with the explorer Matthew Flinders.

Now, the Patterer promised him gold – not the coppers or small silver he usually received – for a service, a delicate but a safe one, if he took care. He asked the ‘King’ to arrange for a fleet of fishermen in their bark canoes to appear in the Cove before dawn. They were not to approach the
Three Bees
if hailed, even though they had regularly been selling part of their catch to the ship.

If summoned, they should shout back, ‘Soon.’

Bungaree gently corrected his white friend: ‘Wouldn’t it be better if they said, “
Bientôt
”?’

‘
Touché
,’ said Dunne, and they both laughed.

Serious again, the Patterer stressed that they were to stay away at least three times the range of a war boomerang, a total of perhaps 150 to 200 yards. But they still had to go through the normal motions of fishing – and that meant each flimsy craft would have a fire burning on a bed of wet clay; it was the custom to eat as they worked. No women or children should go, and as soon as the dawn broke they must be paddling out of the Cove. Dunne told him why and offered a chance to withdraw. But Bungaree grinned and shook his head.

Next, after a long discussion that involved pencil, paper and arithmetic, Alexander Harris (because he was an old soldier and understood such things) was instructed to call on the sergeant of artillery at the fort later in the day and take delivery of thirty pounds of gunpowder. He would also find there a package from Dunne. Harris nodded as he grasped the Patterer’s purpose.

Dunne’s last deviation saw him call on old friends at the main military barracks. A sapper found him what he needed, then a quartermaster authorised the issue of an item widely available and worth no more than one penny.

Chapter Forty

Macquarie’s Fort … The drawbridge did not work and the guns held an explosive secret.

As the Patterer and Owens trudged along shortcuts, through the Government Domain, that led from the hospital to the fort at the point on the eastern side of Sydney Cove, the younger man reflected that their destination was so in keeping with the spirit of the penal colony. It had been built for Governor Lachlan Macquarie a decade earlier by prison labour, to a design by the brilliant convict architect Francis Greenway.

The fortifications had been thrown up on a small island off the tip of Bennelong’s Point, named after the local Aboriginal who, in the early days of the colony, had befriended and helped the first Governor, Arthur Phillip. Bennelong had sailed with him to Britain and had adopted European ways – until his heart and his blood called him back to his tribe.

Even the rock formation that had to be removed to make way for the fort had eerie links to crime, punishment and death. The outcrop had possessed an appropriate name, the Tarpeian Rock, after the infamous feature in ancient Rome, on the Capitoline Hill, where condemned prisoners had been hurled to their deaths.

It wasn’t much of a fort, thought Dunne, as he and his companion walked across the only access, a drawbridge that was purely ornamental and could not be raised or lowered.

They climbed the staircase within the stone walls to the meeting place, in a high tower room.

There was a pall of silence hanging over the fort. It had been bustling until the Governor’s party arrived, but the regular military detail – a sergeant and twelve gunners – had been ordered out of sight and earshot. Another artillery officer stayed. Dunne and Owens were the last arrivals.

Attending Darling were two officers from the town garrison’s 57th Regiment of Foot, the ‘Die Hards’; and its brother regiment, the 39th, the ‘Green Linnets’; and a naval captain come ashore. Captain Rossi was pacing nervously, pausing to murmur to the civilians already there, the Flying Pieman and Brian and Cornelius O’Bannion.

The Governor had raised both eyebrows at the inclusion of the Pieman and the Paddies in the party, but Rossi explained that he and Dunne needed runners.
Merde
, he thought, what would have happened if Miss Susannah Hathaway had been allowed to breeze in? Earlier, the Patterer had vaguely said she was ‘busy’.

Darling was in one of his frequent fits of anger. He seemed to be under attack from both the ‘Pure Merino’, Exclusive gentlemen, and their rivals, the free settlers and Emancipists. And, dammit, he was also accused of letting a sick soldier be tortured to death in gaol. Now those bloody Frogs were up to no good. Again. And here. A pox on everything!

Dunne was now only a few paces away from the glowering Governor. Any hotter, he joked to himself, and His Excellency’s incandescent ire could touch off the 350 barrels of black gunpowder stored in the magazine deep beneath their feet. Where, then, he wondered, would the tons of round shot also stored in the fort go? He jerked his mind back to grim reality.

Below the tall, narrow windows of the conference room and slapped by high tide, were the two low, round towers that housed the fort’s nineteen cannons. A critic of the building’s appearance complained that from the aspect of the water, the fort, with its twin low buildings, ‘squatted like a toad that was swallowing a Tudor tower’.

‘Surely we can shiver the
Three Bees
to splinters from here?’ said the Pieman.

The Patterer shook his head and pointed to the emplacements below.

The artillery officer took over. ‘Our guns’ field of fire is across the mouth of the Cove, northward, so as to intersect with any bombardment from that smaller battery on the opposite horn of the Cove, at Lieutenant Dawes’ Point. That contains fewer guns, fourteen, though some are of larger calibre than ours. The intention is that, if the two installations – fort and battery – fire rolling volleys, their enfilading crossfire would rake any ship or ships entering or leaving the Cove. They could not, however, for danger to town buildings and each other, be aimed at any ship inside the Cove. They can’t make the traverse back, anyway, and the guns can’t be handspiked into different positions, unlike mobile, limbered field guns. A nine-foot-long, eighteen-pounder weighs 2388 pounds.’

The ‘Die Hard’ redcoat nodded.

Dunne made a point. ‘There are more guns in the unfinished Fort Phillip, up behind Dawes’ Battery. But,’ he grimaced, ‘these have been turned back towards the town, in case of a convict rising. That move may yet come in handy!’

Darling scowled.

‘How vulnerable is this fort to attack by the frigate?’ asked Rossi.

The gunner calmly answered that broadsides of perhaps sixteen guns – when a swing on the anchor permitted – could demolish the tower they were in, collapsing it on much of the fortifications. He added that the shipboard guns, and there could be thirty-two of them, were almost certainly loaded, ready to respond to any fire from land emplacements. They threw twelve- or eighteen-pound balls; perhaps there were even 24-pounders.

‘What happens to our useless powder and shot?’

‘With a bit of luck – nothing.’ The artillery man explained the security system that should protect the fort’s lethal load of explosives. Down deep in the sandstone bowels of the building were two separate chambers. Inactive, they were sealed and safe. When the guns were firing, in the room that contained the raw explosive a gunner’s mate would hand six-pound cartridges of powder protected in soft cloth to a fellow soldier. He, in turn, passed them to a third man, the ‘powder monkey’, through dampened, thick curtains. All three wore felt slippers to counter the dangers of static electrical sparking. The unavoidable risk period was between that stage and loading and firing. Any explosion then would mean mayhem for the men actually serving the guns. But it would not be fatal to the fort.

‘How secure is the
Three Bees
’ powder and shot?’ the Patterer asked the navy man. It appeared that on bigger ships of the line, three-deck monsters like
Victory
, the precautions were much the same as those in the fort. But, in a smaller frigate, 130 feet or so in length, there was not the same luxury of space, movement and manpower. There were not the same checks and balances.

These fifth- and sixth-raters didn’t get into as many fights as ships of the line – they were, rather, raiders, like the
Three Bees
, and scouts.

‘Where would the powder locker be?’

It would be on the
faux-pont
, or the orlop, the lowest deck, at and below the waterline, in what was called the cockpit.

The Patterer mined from the naval officer two nuggets: the frigate below them, for some reason – age? economy?; it had cost only the equivalent of about 11000 pounds to build – did not appear to have the customary copper sheathing on her hull to protect from worms and speed-sapping barnacles.

And, it seemed, there was a rule of thumb that such frigates invariably had the shot-locker at the dead centre of the gun deck. Count an equal number of gunports in from both bow and stern and all that gunpowder is at a waterline central point.

The Patterer pondered then asked the artillery officer quite casually, ‘Can your clever, careful fellows get me a keg – say, a sixty-pound one – half-filled with His Majesty’s best black powder? An associate will call about it later.’

The soldier conferred with Ralph Darling who frowned, then nodded. Dunne was relieved; Alexander Harris would have the powder they needed.

Now it was time to lay out his schemes…

Chapter Forty-one

The Patterer addressed his lopsided fighting force, which ranged in rank from a Governor with a general’s crimson sash to a paroled Irish patriot not all that long out of pimples.

‘Because we cannot attack the
Three Bees
from the land or sea,’ he began, ‘why, then, we must assault it from the sky!’ He raised a hand to still the murmur of disbelief. ‘Yes,’ he insisted, ‘I’m serious, deadly serious.

‘I know that men first flew by balloon only forty-five years ago, when two Frenchmen, Jean-François de Rozier and the Marquis d’Arlandes, soared for twenty-five minutes across Paris in a wicker basket. Their envelope above was filled with hot air from a fire of straw and wool.’