Death and the Running Patterer by Robin Adair Read Free Book Online

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 cocked hat and a brass 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 passed 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 assigned convicts as chair-men, but the scheme never caught on.
    Between the barracks and the Cove stood the office of The Gazette . The patterer cribbed from all the papers but found The Gazette 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 assigned to start The Gazette 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 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