Part 15 (1/2)

The constable motioned to the soldier. ”Take him down to the jail. Don't hurt him, not before Jack Ketch can have a chance to top him.

”Oh, yes,” he said to the patterer, who was desperately trying to think who had set him up for the fall. ”Never fear, my lad. You'll swing for this. High, wide and not very handsome.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN.

I have tried to escape; always to escape as a bird does out of a cage. Is that unnatural; is that a great crime?

-Dennis Doherty, a soldier transported in 1833 for desertion and a serial escapee

ABARREL OF RUM SAVED NICODEMUS DUNNES SKIN.

As he and his guard stepped down George Street to the jail, they pa.s.sed the alehouse called, puzzlingly, Keep Within Compa.s.s, and all h.e.l.l-in the shape of a 120-gallon puncheon-broke loose. The giant cask fell while it was being unloaded at the tavern, smashed open and began to pour its contents into the nearby drain.

The patterer had always understood and respected the important role of rum in the colony. A roaring convict song (with more than a germ of truth in it) that celebrated the spirit's iron grip went: Cut yer name across me backbone, Stretch me skin across yer drum, Iron me up on Pinchgut Island From now to kingdom come.

I'll eat yer Norfolk dumpling Like a juicy Spanish plum, Even dance the Newgate hornpipe If ye'll only gimme rum!

Hard prices to pay, he always thought, when you considered that eating this ”dumpling” meant being sent to the h.e.l.lish Norfolk Island prison, and to dance the ”hornpipe” was to dance at the end of a rope.

But even that foreknowledge did not quite prepare Dunne for the scene that unfolded. It was, he thought, almost a colonial miniature of Mr. Hogarth's famous London etching of decadence, Gin Lane Gin Lane.

Someone screamed, ”Grog ahoy!” and pa.s.sersby dived at the flowing bounty, scooping it into their mouths with cupped, bare hands. The more enterprising among them came from nearby buildings and captured the golden bonanza with pots, pans and buckets, even a chamberpot. Some stretched out in the dirt beside the drain and lapped like animals. There were women and children among the liquid's looters.

Dunne looked around for his guard and found the man transfixed by the scene, obviously torn between duty and a free drink.

The patterer made up his mind for him. He shoved him under the arms and feet of the scrum of scavengers, where he was instantly swallowed up, then took off along the main street in the direction of the Cove, pa.s.sing more crowds running toward the rum.

He eased his pace when a ragged file of prisoners, guarded at the front and rear, marched from the jail and slowed to a halt. Both of their guards focused their attention on the drama in the street.

Dunne knew his redcoat would soon raise the hue and cry, and that there were even more soldiers in the nearby barracks. He had to hide somewhere, preferably disappear completely. He had to think.

He had successfully buried his guard in one mess of humanity. The answer to his problem followed: Where better to hide a prisoner on the run than among other prisoners already under guard?

He edged toward the rear of the prison gang. One captive eyed him mistrustingly. ”What do you want?” he said softly, out of the side of his mouth, his gaze s.h.i.+fting to Dunne's still-b.l.o.o.d.y hands.

”Sanctuary,” said the patterer. ”b.l.o.o.d.y help! I'm on the run.”

The man studied Dunne keenly. Sure, he looked the part, but could this interloper be trusted? Who was he? All convicts, from harsh experience, were wary of spies infiltrating their ranks, seeking news of uprisings against their masters. The Irish especially aroused fear and loathing among such men as Reverend Marsden, who frequently used the lash to try to uncover imagined insurrections.

”What are they after you for, then?” asked the convict in a soft brogue.

Dunne absorbed the fact that he was pure Black Irish, that different sort of Celt; he was one of those with hair like springy, s.h.i.+ny shards of coal above brilliant blue eyes, a tanned face and a sharp nose that dominated his close-shaven but still blue-black cheeks and chin. Some blamed those looks on s.h.i.+pwrecked Spanish sailors and soldiers from shattered Armada galleons 240 years before. But that did not explain the blue eyes.

Not that the patterer had much time to consider such ancestral subtleties. He simply said, ”They'll top me for murder-but I didn't do it!”

The Irishman suddenly, quietly, recited: Hand in hand On Earth, in h.e.l.l, Sick or well, On sea, on land On the square, ever.

Nicodemus Dunne knew the oath of the convicts' most binding freemasonry, The Ring. He murmured in reply: Still or in breath, Lag or free, You and me, In life, in death, On the cross, never.

At that moment another prisoner b.u.t.ted in: ”He's all right, he's the patterer.” The paddy gave a nod and they dragged him into the heart of the wedge of men.

Dunne's rescuer hissed, ”I'll turn you over if it was a woman or a child, mind.”

”No, never! On my honor!” Then, with a sudden inspiration (the fact that he was instantly ashamed did not stop him), Dunne added, ”It was an Englishman.” (Oh well, the German was past caring.) The prisoner looked hard. ”And aren't you just that-English?”

Dunne was quick. ”No. I'm Australian.”

The man shrugged. ”Good enough answer.” He laughed. ”That is, if you can't be Irish.”

Then he turned to a man-not much more than a youth, but he already had almost the patterer's build-beside him. Making sure that the guards' attention was still distracted, he pushed the lad away from the file. ”p.i.s.s off, Jimmy,” he said, and Jimmy obliged.

He turned to Dunne. ”That's that, then. You're our Jimmy now.”

They hushed as the guards returned to their stations and pushed the ragged ranks into some sort of order. One minder did a quick headcount and was satisfied. ”Move on! Move it! Or you'll get a red s.h.i.+rt-and a salty back.” A bucket of salty water thrown over b.l.o.o.d.y lash wounds added to the torment, but the pain was worth it: The wounds would often heal more quickly.

The column shambled south along the main street, past the barracks to the right, and the patterer now had time to take stock. He noticed that some of his new companions were in shackles and wearing canaries, while others were unshackled and in civilian clothes.

”Who are you? And where the devil are we going?” He asked his questions in a murmur and out the corner of his mouth. Dear G.o.d, he thought, I've gone back to the black times and the protective habits of prisoners everywhere.

The Irishman seemed cool enough. ”Oh, I'm Brian OBannion, at your service. And we're today's muster to go on the step.”

On the step. Dunne knew what that meant-they were all sentenced to the treadmill, the loathed stairway to nowhere.

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT.

... and bound him with fetters of bra.s.s; and he did grind in the prison house.

-Judges 16:21

IN THIRTY MINUTES, DUNNE TRUDGED WITH THE CONVICTS THROUGH the main town, past Brickfield, and came almost to the Tollgate, where horse and other animal traffic was levied to pay for the road that stretched toward Parramatta. The reek of Sam Terry's Albion Brewery betrayed their location.

The Carters Barracks loomed on their left. The compound, sealed by twelve-foot walls, lodged and fed 200 prisoners, men whose jobs included driving and handling the government's horses and bullocks-and who sometimes doubled as the draft animals. The barracks also supplied laborers to the Lumber Yard.

Two other buildings completed the Carters complex. Divided only by a party wall were separate quarters for a hundred convict boys. Most were the sweepings of London's rotting tenements for whom thieving and other petty crime had seemed a way out of starvation. The way out, though, had been to Botany Bay.

At the Carters Barracks, the boys were supposed to receive a basic education and learn the rudiments of a trade. Sometimes the lesson was a brutish one. The tawse and cane were applied liberally. And few people were surprised that the boys' accommodation was a s.e.xual honeypot for men starved of women.

Sodomy was an offense with a clumsy official name, ”unnatural crime,” but a chilling sentence for those who were caught-death (although this penalty was often commuted to life). What threat was ”life” to a man who was already a lifer? Only two years before, the patterer recalled, an official memorandum had revealed what most already knew: that prisoners were living ”in constant intercourse with the Boys.”