Part 23 (1/2)
EPILOGUE.
CORONER'S INQUEST. An inquiry was held before Major Smeathman, Coroner for Sydney, on Sat.u.r.day week, at Bax's Australian Hotel, on the bones of a woman. It came out in evidence that the men employed at Goat Island to cut stone, on Thursday last dug up an old cedar coffin, at the depth of about 14 inches from the surface, containing the bones in question. The jury returned a verdict, ”That the bones were those of a female, which had been interred in a secret manner, about two years ago, but how, or by whom, to them unknown.”
-Sydney Herald, June 13, 1831 June 13, 1831
AFTERWORD.
Pluck one thread, and the web ye mar; Break but one Of a thousand keys, and the paining jar Through all will run.
-John Greenleaf Whittier, ”My Soul and I” (1847)
WHAT WAS TRUE? WHO WAS REAL?.
I can only echo Michael Crichton, who wrote of his work Next Next, ”This novel is fiction, except for the parts that aren't.”
My story began with the accidental discovery of the factual, terse inquest report-possibly not dusted off for more than 175 years-which is reprinted here as the Epilogue. Who was this dead woman? I wondered. What could have happened to her only a few years earlier?
And so I stepped back to the dusty streets and into the lives of long-gone people to create this other 1828. People and events are frozen forever in the amber of old letters, journals and reports. Some of the dialogue I have given my real-life characters are words they actually spoke or wrote when they lived.
No solutions to the original mystery of who the buried woman was could be too improbable; the time and the place involved were ripe with intrigue and violence. The entirely ”new” country, on the other side of the world, a world turned upside down, was populated by little that was familiar: unknowable native ”Indians” and weird, unfathomable fauna. Consider the platypus.
What were strangers to make of a duck-billed, furred mammal with webbed feet-a beast trapped halfway in evolution between reptile and mammal, laying eggs but suckling its young? Science then gave it a suitable name, Ornithorhynchus paradoxus Ornithorhynchus paradoxus (since altered to (since altered to Ornithorhynchus anatinus Ornithorhynchus anatinus), but most in Britain thought it a fake, a trick by taxidermists.
And Australia was was a place so out of this world that some convicts imagined they could escape across the nearby mountains to China; others really did believe that walking backward could return them their lost freedom. a place so out of this world that some convicts imagined they could escape across the nearby mountains to China; others really did believe that walking backward could return them their lost freedom.
Informed by many threads, this tale took to heart Shakespeare's p.r.o.nouncement: ”Untune that string, and hark! what discord follows ...” The story became neither all fact nor all fiction-call it instead friction friction, in which real events, places and people (plus some mischievous inventions, suggestions and interlopers) collide. The result is fantasy and actuality tossed together.
The central characters of Rachel Dormin, Nicodemus Dunne and some of his immediate a.s.sociates, notably Norah Robinson and Brian O'Bannion, are figments of my imagination, as are the murder victims and Dr. Owens.
But I have drawn much from historical reportage. The backgrounds, secrets and troubles discovered by the patterer about the governor and his lady, Captain Rossi, the Flying Pieman, the Wentworths, Doctors Cunningham and Halloran, Alexander Harris and editor Edward Smith Hall involve the real concerns of very real people.
I have taken some liberties with their lives; I have, perhaps, rearranged their actions and compressed or s.h.i.+fted them in time to advance the story. For instance, Captain Rossi's various posts, while factual, did not overlap quite so neatly. And Dr. Halloran's failing newspaper receives a stay of execution in my fictional universe. Mr. Levey's theater had a longer, more difficult birth. The epitaph on page 301-a real one in the old Parramatta cemetery-critical of Squire's beer, of course has no bearing on today's brew of the same name. The cruel and unusual punishments for theft meted out to Privates Sudds and Thompson, however, are very painfully factual and unvarnished.
Is it plausible to cast Nicodemus Dunne as the b.a.s.t.a.r.d son of royalty-with his father a murderer to boot? Ernest, Duke of c.u.mberland, was widely regarded as the murderer of his servant. He was also said to have been implicated in an attempt on the life of the Princess 'Drina (later Queen Victoria), who stood in the way of c.u.mberland succeeding King William IV.
As shocking, and more guarded, were allegations that he had broken the ultimate taboo: incest. Gossip claimed that Princess Sophia, the fifth daughter of King George III, gave birth to an illegitimate child in August 1800, and that c.u.mberland was the father. Other versions, however, said that Thomas Garth, a royal equerry, was responsible. Perhaps Garth was just a smokescreen? It is impossible that the real Darling and Rossi could not have been aware of these scandals. Whether they reacted to them in any way remains unreported.
Dueling had been forbidden by 1828, yet records show it still flourished, and that the governor of New South Wales would fight over a matter of honor is eminently feasible. Even the highest in the land at ”Home” in Britain did it.
Not a year after our story, the Duke of Wellington, war hero and First Minister, faced a political critic, Lord Winchilsea, over an insult. Their confrontation in a London field was as deliberately undamaging as the Garden Island affair. Wellington aimed well to one side, his opponent shot in the air and apologized. Just as in our duel, game over. And for the patterer to have remarked on it in 1828, the Duke of Wellington must have referred more than once to his soldiers as ”the sc.u.m of the earth.”
The a.s.sertion (that the truth may seem improbable after eliminating the impossible) attributed by Dr. Owens to the artist Horace Vernet coincides with the words used more than half a century later by Mr. Sherlock Holmes in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Adventure of the Greek Interpreter Adventure of the Greek Interpreter. And the curious incident of Madame Greene's teeth predates a similar deduction by Holmes, regarding the dog in the nighttime, in Doyle's Silver Blaze Silver Blaze.
The explanation is elementary: Vernet's life (1789-1863) was contemporary with that of Owens. And Holmes, of course, at one stage revealed that his his grandmother was that very artist's sister. grandmother was that very artist's sister.
I have used the common spelling of Bungaree (who, like Billy Blue, was a living person), although in contemporary records there are at least thirty variations. A French artist, Jules Lejeune, once even rendered his name ”b.u.g.g.e.ry.” His kingplate, or gorget, does not survive (although Queen Cora's does) and there are varying versions of its inscription; there may in fact have been more than one plate. His wide recognition may have sp.a.w.ned the word boong boong, eventually the enduring pejorative slang for Aboriginal.
At least I can a.s.sure readers that, in the making of this book, no Ornithorhynchus paradoxus Ornithorhynchus paradoxus was harmed, although a few sacred cows may have been skewered. was harmed, although a few sacred cows may have been skewered.
WHATEVER HAPPENED TO ... ?