The Ghost of Waterloo Read Online Free PDF

general scowled. ‘We talked of a painless draught!’
    ‘Yes, indeed,’ agreed the doctor. ‘Dear me. I shall need to add more opiate.’
    ‘It would seem so,’ said the owner of the leather bag drily, removing it and handing it back. ‘More laudanum, or whatever. Have it ready for me tomorrow. No mistakes.
    ‘In the meantime, your demonstration was only on a cat. What of a human? Do you have a solution that matches the potency of my sachet?’
    The doctor gestured at another vessel and his patient turned to the assistant.
    ‘Out,’ he ordered. ‘And this time find
me
an urchin, any street Arab.’ The man looked at his master, who shrugged and waved permission.

    The barefoot boy was happy to receive the bright coin from the effendi in the green coat. Indeed, al-Ilah was great! Why, in return, all he had to do was to drink from the glass offered.
    Then all he had do was die.

    As he turned to leave, His Excellency smiled for the first time, a tight grin that resembled the deadly rictus smile of the poisoned boy.
    ‘What’s the matter?’ he said to the silent doctor and his stricken assistant. ‘Cat got your tongue?’

Chapter Six
    Sydney, Australia – Spring, 1828
    From this foul drain pure gold flows forth.
    – Alexis de Tocqueville,
Voyage en Angleterre et en Irlande(1835)

 
    Not all of the 11 000 souls in the huge, open prison that was Sydney town – settlers, soldiers, old lags, new convicts (and sometimes it was hard to decide which of these had spawned the greatest scoundrel) – slept easy in the dark early hours of a Monday in mid-September. Most were in their own beds, or someone else’s, for there was still a hangover from the Sabbath and the flagrant wildness of weekdays was still to come, on the streets at least. So, the last drained and plucked patrons of the many whorehouses had (except for some wealthy all-nighters) arranged their clothing and their alibis, and gone home.
    No miscreant remained fitfully overnight in the stocks or pillory near the old graveyard. If they had, they would have been fresh prey for the rats and pigs that scavenged and rooted among exposed graves. And no sleepless wretch awaited hanging that morning at the jail. The dispossessed natives led secret lives.
    Some townsfolk were awake, with good reason.
    At various convict billets, men who had recently been flogged until their backbones showed white – often for no more than answering back to their ‘betters’ – tossed as their salted wounds began to heal. Patients also moaned in the wards of the Rum Hospital, which could do little to ease their suffering.
    The redcoat guard tramped its lonely rounds at the sprawling barracks and a handful of town constables, each armed with truncheon, cutlass and lantern, plodded on their beats through the black streets. If these charleys stumbled on a rogue grog shop, among the hundreds of pot-houses, that was still pouring rum for determined drunkards, for a consideration they would turn a blind eye.
    But there were others afoot who could not afford to be seen or heard…
    A man who answered to the name of George Farrell, when he was not being addressed by his convict number, squatted on the rubblestrewn floor of a cramped, filthy drain. The stench from the slowly flowing sludge that was seeping around his boots made him gag, and he started as a rat climbed across his ankles.
    He went cold at the touch. Rats! The poor in his and other rookeries 16000 miles away in Britain still had race memories of plagues spread by rats. Even here, he knew, they would attack sleeping babies. They liked buttocks and lips.
    What a shite heap! he thought savagely. And, indeed, there was more than enough excrement all around him. There should not have been. This drain was meant to be only a stormwater sluice under George Street and into the Tank Stream nearby, not a sewage conduit.
    But manure from horses and oxen on the street escaped into it. And many residents in the area had their privy