The Playmaker (11 page)

He did not in any case think of Dick Johnson's anathemas once he was in the clearing with his players. This morning the starting players were the young hangman Ketch Freeman, the convict overseer Henry Kable, the mutineer Sideway as the exquisitely exercised Mr. Worthy, and Mary Brenham as Silvia.

The executioner, Ketch Freeman, had one of those withered young faces. Hook-nosed and ancient, it seemed to be waiting for the rest of Ketch's body to catch up to it in age. John Nicholls the perfumier, who had once too often and far away stolen powder and pomade, had appeared briefly at the marquee just to show what could be done to age an actor's face. He marked some lines either side of Ketch's nose and covered his features with a grey-blue powdery wash which instantly made them plausibly the visage of an aging squire and Justice of the Peace. When Ralph saw this, he knew such alchemy was worth the risk of lightning and pulpit condemnation. Behind the deathly wash, Ketch, too, was radiant. For he knew the world forgives actors anything.

Plume says, “Pray, Mr. Balance, how does your fair daughter?”

And Balance replies, “Ah, Captain! What is my daughter to a Marshal of France? Whereupon a nobler subject. I want to have a particular description of the Battle of Höchstädt.”

Ralph, according to his policy, altered “Marshal of France” to “rebel general,” and “Battle of Höchstädt” to “Battle of Bunker Hill,” and the scene was ready to be played. Ketch as Justice Balance performed it with his chin in the air and his eyes nearly closed—it is how perhaps the politer people of that great city looked on him in his days as a footpad and mugger. He also kept both his lips stiff, his lower lip barely parted from the upper.

“No no,” called Ralph, “you are showing him like a Londoner. He is
not
a Londoner, Ketch. He is an honest, bluff, straight-talking fellow.” Oh, thought Ralph, what a pleasure it is to argue character. “What does Balance say to Plume about Silvia? When he accuses Plume of wanting to debauch Silvia and Plume denies she is at any risk, Balance says, ‘Look'ee, Captain, once I was young, and once an officer as you are, and I guess at your thoughts now by what mine were then, and I remember very well I would have given one of my legs to have deluded the daughter of an old plain country gentleman …' You see, Ketch. He's
that
sort of fellow. He declares war on all cant. Now a man like that uses his lips when he talks. So you, Ketch, you can use your lips too.”

Ketch gave up the stiff lips during that morning only a little at a time. For having been for so long the centre of all groans, he now wanted to be the centre of all laughs. Ralph saw him stealing looks at Meg Long, who sat under her usual tree. Even Meg was not laughing much. Perhaps she was becoming jaded, as theatregoers do. When large Black Caesar stopped in the clearing, a dangerous-looking adze over his shoulder, to see if Lieutenant Clark needed him yet for the mob scenes, Ketch kept looking to him, too, for applause and laughter. But Black Caesar did not give him any.

PART TWO

CHAPTER 9

The Hunt

FEBRUARY 1788

Ralph's friendship with Harry Brewer, the oldest midshipman in the Royal Navy, had been enlarged by Harry's habit of treating him as his confessor. Harry had sent in Ralph's direction such a reckless tide of confessions Ralph had no choice but to avoid the man altogether or to become his brother. Since Harry was such a competent storyteller and unabashed by the lifetime he had devoted to folly, Ralph could not imagine giving up the friendship. He did not know when he might need a confessor himself.

The warmth between Ralph and Harry Brewer, notable enough while the convict transports were on their endless voyage, was augmented during a hunting expedition the two men set out on during the first month of the history of the penal city. Everything was novel then. People still had the sense that, even on a small excursion, wonders might be found.

It was in that continuing season of lightning, the one in which Dabby Bryant later rescued Ralph from the onus of perfect dreaming, that Ralph took Harry's invitation to go shooting with him. One of Ralph's back teeth had been throbbing, but the Irish surgeon, Considen, the planet's foremost tooth man, had put a wad of cloth dipped in some brown narcotic into the socket that was paining Ralph to allow him specifically to go into the woods.

Ralph met Harry on the eastern side of the stream, which was less precipitous than the hills to the west, and headed into the forest, each of them accompanied by a man whose task was to carry the firearm until it was required. Harry's piece was carried by the Jamaican lag Jack Williams, and Ralph's by his servant, Private Ellis.

At first Ralph thought he would be disappointed in his hope that Harry Brewer would entertain him. The Provost Marshal had slept badly. He said it was the Dutch spirits he'd bought in Capetown. Those Dutchmen had unloaded all their rubbish on the bottlemen of the fleet, who, on their way to a star without distilleries, were not too squeamish about what liquors they took with them.

As everyone knew then, there were other reasons for Harry to worry. He was an old man in insecure harness with a young girl. It was an ancient joke he was fulfilling, and often he knew it bitterly.

So at first Harry did not talk much. A further stillness, like the barely concealed intolerance of some enormous force, an alien omnipresence, closed over them as soon as they moved among the trees. The vast eucalyptus trees affronted the normal rules of botany by shedding all the time, and now released leaves onto their shoulders with a dry murmur. You could see where cabbage trees had already been lopped to make huts and thatching. Apart from these signs of human intrusion, none of it was like forests Ralph knew. It gave off a kind of ancient stubbornness.

Yet the foreignness seemed to tantalise Harry and revive him. The otherness of New South Wales. Which was not “new” and certainly not Wales. Whatever it was, it had nothing at all to do with the old Druidic kingdom. The gods were different here.

They talked about the thunderstorms. As it had been between Ralph and Bryant, lightning was a standard conversation opener at that time of the year. Harry told a comic yarn of how he had to keep getting up in the night to loosen the guy ropes. Ralph had an image of what Duckling might look like by the blue flare of lightning and wondered if a punitive God, misjudging Harry's folly, thinking he was really
enjoying
the company of the girl instead of being tortured by it, might with one bolt fuse Harry and his pullet.

The second most common conversational gambit was the French. The voyagers James Cook and Sir Joseph Banks had made Botany Bay, that shallow anchorage some seven miles south of where Ralph and Harry now walked, so famous with their mistaken praise that two French ships had appeared there within days of H.E. and his entire penal circus. They were scientific ships, and their crews had been attacked and wounded by savages on islands far out in the Pacific. Their demeanour was polite and devoid of political intent. They had buried on the low foreshore an abbé supposedly famed in France as a naturalist. They were slowly refitting their ships down there and preparing to go out again into the latitudes of cannibals. They would make leisurely and exhaustive enquiries in a multitude of islands, paying strenuous attention to the barbarous night skies, as well as to the foliage on the shores and the depth of lagoons. It would be years before they were released from their monk-like investigations.

A painful etiquette ran between the French men of science seven miles south and the British in the penal settlement. One afternoon, a scientific Papist priest walked up from Botany to Sydney to see the astronomer Dawes, and during his visit had been very taken with the butterfly case Ralph was keeping for Betsey Alicia. The butterflies were beautiful here and the moths as big as finches. Ralph had often enough described to Harry how he had resisted the abbé's outrageous offer to buy some of the collection.

For the first hour of their hunting they saw very little to shoot at. Some good-sized white cockatoos with fine yellow sprays of feathers at their crest took their eye, but already the rumour was that they were gristle through and through. The red-breasted lorikeets were so lovely, said Harry, it was as well that they would be safe from such a bad marksman as himself.

They tired quickly in the humid day, and barely had their marching legs back after their time aboard ship. They came gratefully down into a clearing where it was cool. Here the trees had bark resembling paper. Harry and Ralph sat in the shade of one, Private Ellis and the Jamaican Jack Williams fifty paces away under another. Harry took out a flask of brandy and handed it to Ralph. Ralph merely wet his lips. It was the stuff Harry had been maligning an hour earlier, and in any case liquor easily befuddled him. Harry took a long draft, though, and placed his head back against the tree, and sighed as if getting ready for sleep.

“I might love this place, my friend,” he said, “if it were not for lags. Though if it were not for lags, there would be no place at all. The puzzle, you see.”

“You talk as if you had come home,” said Ralph, massaging his dully painful jaw.

“I have, Ralphy, I have.”

He took some more brandy. “Look at that black boy,” he suggested. “The islands he comes from! He'll never go home. I'll never go home.” He pinched the moist sandy earth beneath him. “I am transported too. So this is the loam that will get Harry.”

Ralph laughed at him. The laugh admitted a needling blast of air to his tooth. “So you have found your homeland, old Harry. But it don't seem to have made you very happy.”

Harry said, “Do you know, Ralph, that though Provost Marshal, I am hangable material? Of course you do. Every man I have ever met and liked has guessed I am hangable material. H.E. knows it. I am so pleased he never sets down what he knows about me. He pretends not to know that Duckling is my lag-wife, but he
knows
. And he knows I am hangable. And you are such an honest little bugger, Ralph, such an upright little lover, who hasn't touched one of those she-lags yet, but you know, too, that I am under the eye of God and the Sun, material as hangable as any.”

He really drank now—a quarter of the bottle vanished.

Ralph could gauge that he was now about to receive the life history of Harry Brewer, and that, like most intemperate lives, it would be dressed up as a cautionary tale.

The two besetting questions of that life were Duckling and the latent duty he carried as Provost Marshal to hang people.

Harry began with Duckling.

“Duckling was sentenced four o'clock in the afternoon, very dull October. The courtroom nearly dark. Baron Ayre and the second Middlesex jury. She'd taken too much
stuff
from a man called Fannock—solid silver stuff, a damned candelabra, the stupid little bitch. The jury valued it down as far as they could, but it was still too much. I went to take her three shillings in Newgate; there's a taproom close by the condemned hold. You can drink there, debtors have their visitors in, and they drink and chat with the condemned. Sport, eh, Ralphy? I took her three shillings two days before she was to take the drop and they thought I wanted to hire her—there are men who do that too, the night before the hangings. That is one of my nightmares. A girl who in a day will be hanged and be thrown into a lime pit, willing to do a jig with me because I've got three shillings.”

He groaned. The brandy—as he liked to say—was burning his pipes.

“I am not like Davy Collins or Watkin, that clever bastard. I am one of the
others
. There is only a hair between me and the lags. I
am
one of them, and they can sniff it out in me. And you, Ralphy, you find it there, too. How I became an ancient oaf of forty-seven years, carrying shillings to a fifteen-year-old moll, is—to a decent fellow like you, Ralph—probably not lacking in interest.”

With a blinding candour, Harry began to tell the full story of his youth and why he went to sea just before he reached the age of forty, and shamed himself for nearly ten years, carrying a boy's rank, living a life to which only the Captain gave any content.

When Harry was young, he worked for a London firm of architects and builders named Cuxbridge and Breton. He was likeable, he said, as if that quality had now been leeched out of him, and he was an excellent draftsman, and he was wild. To go out with money in your pocket and not knowing in what pub and with what girl you would end the evening—that was all life's richness to Harry. So Harry paid away his youth and his life to Soho girls, in that dangerous parish of St. Giles—to girls with fever in their cheeks. He had a system of overstating the price on bids for building contracts, and if Cuxbridge and Breton received the contract, of pocketing the difference between the real and the stated price of bricks and window frames. His favourite reading, as it was for many young Londoners, was
The Newgate Calendar
, a journal which gave a digest of the activities of all the more notable and recently arraigned criminals. And his vigour was unlimited, he told Ralph. He could have two or three girls a night. He confessed he would sometimes incant, while drinking, a sort of rhyme. “My name is Harry Brewer, I'm in every public ledger, and Heaven is my desired end.”

In the cant language of St. Giles, they called whores public ledgers.

And in his folly, Harry said, he saw Seven Dials, Soho, the parish of St. Giles, not as an accurate mirror of his own inner disorder but simply as another kingdom, its own commonwealth, separate from the rest of England, which he could visit for a mere outlay of cash. For it was, said Harry, barely a borough of Britain, that reach of St. Giles. Home ground of St. Giles's Greek or cant, the criminal language, bristling with words he had not previously known. The young Harry would walk among the strange tongue, would approach Seven Dials up Drury Lane, and in the theatre they'd be performing
The Provok'd Wife
or
The Beaux' Stratagem
. There were always hundreds of peddlars in front of the place, selling watercress, lavender, apples, and sheets of ballads and doggerel by the foot. And coaches creaked up and sedan chairs arrived, and expensive men and women held their breath as they pressed through the crowd and made for the theatre door. For everyone knew that every hawker was a criminal waiting for a chance. Among them, nut-brown and knowing Irish girls, who smoked clay pipes so short in the stem Harry couldn't understand how they did not blister their noses.