The Playmaker (14 page)

“I have to confess, good Major,” said Murphy, hopefully courageous, as if Robbie was offering Catholic martyrdom rather than mere hanging for a criminal offence, “I have to admit that I am indeed of the Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church.”

“Some bastard in a hedge in Ireland,” screamed Robbie at Ralph and Harry, “trained him to say that if ever he was challenged by a filthy Presbyterian such as myself.”

Robbie placed a knuckle under the young Papist's jaw and raised the boy's face. “And you curious people believe—isn't it so?—in the remission of sins in a yon small Hell called Purg-a-tory. From which you can be delivered only by the prayers of the just. Isn't that so?”

Murphy was panting. All at once he no longer liked this doctrinal discussion. Ralph was pretty sure that though Murphy might indeed die for his faith, he was less likely to die for his accomplices.

“Who will pray for the remission of
your
sins,” raged Robbie, “you Papist bastard? Those natives covered in fish oil? Who will come here after we are gone? Not even the Portuguese, who share the same heresies as you, you pickpocketing bastard, you Irish peddlar. Not even them.”

But Murphy surprised Ralph by refusing to name anyone else. Robbie pushed his face aside and yelled for the corporal at the door. “Take him away. Mr. Brewer will hang him tomorrow morning.”

This assurance made Harry Brewer—rather than Murphy—panic. It was this specific boy Harry did not wish to hang. He would for the moment rather deal with the idea of the as yet unnamed ones who were Murphy's accomplices.

Under the thunder and lightning that afternoon, in the grotesquely named “prison tent” near the men's camp, Murphy at last told Harry—not Robbie Ross—the names of four accomplices. They had stolen not only wine, but butter, pork, and split peas. Robbie, told of the confession, was delighted that among those named by Murphy and now arrested by Ralph's Quarter Guard was an infamous young lag named Tom Barrett.

This Tom Barrett was only a youth, but the fliest of all fly boys. He had been condemned to death and reprieved twice already—first when, barely more than a child, he stole jewellery and clothing from a London spinster. He had, like Sideway, then been found wandering the West Country in the weeks after the convict mutiny aboard the transport
Mercury
in Torbay. He was tried with Robert Sideway and others at Exeter for the crime of return from transportation. There, for a second time in his scarcely sixteen years, he had again been sentenced to death. When the sentence was commuted, Tom went to the hold of the hulk
Dunkirk
in Plymouth Harbour and at last sailed on the
Charlotte
.

Even so, up to the point of his transportation, Tom Barrett's criminal career had shown little style to distinguish it from that of a hundred others aboard the
Charlotte
and the
Friendship
. Where he got his criminal flashiness and repute was from an incident on board the
Charlotte
while the convict fleet was tied up in Rio harbour.

Canoes carrying Portuguese traders and black oarsmen made journeys out to the ships to barter, and the convicts who had money of their own, deposited with the ship's master or a crew member for safekeeping, were allowed to buy food and delicacies. This was considered by old-fashioned officers like Robbie Ross a dangerous and faddish innovation of H.E.'s. But Surgeon Johnny White approved the merchandise the traders had for sale—oranges, plantains, cantaloupes, limes, and fancy breads.

The trade went on, aboard each of the convict transports, in the standard barricaded exercise yard aft of the main mast. The barricades stood three feet high and were topped with spikes. Behind them the convicts could stretch in the sunlight and have a sight of the green slopes of the city of Rio, the Sugarloaf, and the palace square.

One of the Portuguese merchants approached a Marine officer and complained to him about a quarter dollar a convict had paid him for bread. It was counterfeit. You could tell by scraping it with a knife that it had a large proportion of pewter in it.

The quarter dollar was traced back to Tom Barrett. A search of his bedspace in the hold showed he owned a bag full of them, manufactured of chunks of pewter, Marine belt buckles and buttons, and the occasional gold coin thrown into the brew. The coins were competently minted, using a metal mould Tom had acquired before leaving England.

Everyone—officers and convicts on other ships—had been astonished that Tom had been able to build in the convict holds the fires necessary to forge metal coins. It did not really take anyone long to conclude that he had got both the freedom to build a fire and the ingredients for his coins by pimping between the Marines and the thirty or so women convicts in the forrard section of the
Charlotte
. In the convict view, by forging aboard ship, Tom had done honour to his canting crew and to the gods of criminality. He wore with easy carlessness the style of a man likely to hang young.

The time for
that
—it seemed—had arrived. In the Sydney Cove version of a new earth, where the new earth looked inhospitable to European grain and the London criminals proved inept at farming, the only certain supply of food could come from what was in the storehouse. No one knew if England, having shipped them to the dark, unredeemed side of things, would remember to send them the staples of life, or if these were sent, whether the ships that carried them could come safely to them. For it was understood even by the brutal convict mind that few sailors could manage to bring a flotilla the distance H.E. and his Scottish navigator, Captain Johnny Hunter, had brought them.

Under these conditions, H.E. had to define the stealing of food on any large scale as equivalent to murder, and to make it a capital offence. Harry understood this: that now Barrett—still less than twenty—was facing his third and inescapable death sentence.

This was, of course, a much worse come-uppance for Harry Brewer than it was for Tom Barrett.

On the day of Tom's trial in Sydney Cove, rain squalls pummelled the town. The water of the cove turned black under a low cloud of the same colour. It began to rain with such intent that it could have eroded Chartres, whose cathedral Ralph had once visited during his service with the Dutch army, and left all the precious units of glass lying around on the clay like so many cups and saucers. It could thoroughly erase a city of canvas and wattle and daub. Those who had had the industry to put up a roof of packed clay found it dissolving above their heads now or dropping at their wet feet in lumps.

Trials took place in those days, the settlement's first February, in the drooping trial marquee of the Court of Criminal Jurisdiction. For the trial of Barrett and his three accomplices, Ralph and six other officers sat on the bench under the presidency of Judge Advocate Davy Collins. The defendants—apart from the renowned Tom Barrett himself—were a young London ivory carver called Lovell; John Ryan, a silk weaver of Irish origins, displaced by the new mills and machines and reduced to criminality and now—unless he was lucky—to a capital punishment; and a cadaverous Cockney named James Freeman.

Murphy's King's Evidence this flood-ridden afternoon was that he and Tom Barrett, with Lovell and Freeman and Ryan, had made a number of raids on the supply tent. They had taken what presented from flour casks and pork barrels and the stacked supplies of hospital wine and brandy. They had used this plenty for their own consumption and to buy the favours of women. At this point in the trial, Ralph heard Robbie Ross's Scottish friend Captain Jemmy Campbell groan in the manner of a man whose pet thesis about the society in which he lives has now been proven.

Arrangements in the trial tent were like those in the distant courts which had, in the first instance, exiled these people. Murphy stood behind the accused and could see only the backs of their heads. But these must have seemed to him as eloquent as any frontal features. For at one stage he screamed, “Forgive me, boys! You know the way these here assizes hound a man!”

“I imagined how the gallows would bloom,” Harry Brewer told Ralph later. “Four men. Such an exercise would not in London attract a journalist from
The Evening Post
. Here, it's such a terrible proportion of the human population to hang in one afternoon. More than one half of one per centum of the lags of New South Wales.”

A little before one o'clock the court brought sentence of death on three of the men before them. There was no choice, Davy Collins instructed them, in the matter of the stealing of such large measures of food—that was a capital offence by H.E.'s executive edict. Ryan the silk weaver, who was shown only to have thieved wine, was condemned merely to a flogging. The sentences were, said Davy Collins, to be administered that very afternoon. Thereby the law's dispatch was to be signified. Harry would confess later to Ralph that he believed it seemed heinous of Davy Collins to demand a hanging in such heavy rain.

Ralph, though a little awed by the processes of the court he was part of, was not distressed. He knew the face of justice, military and civil. He had seen, through nearly averted eyes, both the Dutch and the Marines hang deserters, rapists, and thieves.

Harry was by contrast overwhelmed by the sentence. Later he would detail to Ralph all his movements and conversations of that afternoon.

For example, crossing the spring by the bridge of planks and barrels, Harry met the Reverend Dick Johnson, transmuted by the severe, thunderous light to a blackbird figure, a gallows phantom. And in a hurry, rushing across to the detention tent to bring redemption to the three. Harry's bowels leapt at the sight of him. Could it be as late as this already?

“There are hours to go yet, Dick,” called Harry Brewer hopefully. But Dick answered with mad fervour. “It is not much time when you consider the history of these men. Tom Barrett might be less than twenty years, but Satan has worked in him epochs of malevolence.”

Harry would describe how in that second he yearned for one of those agnostic gentlemen of the cloth, who wouldn't take on Satan brow to brow in this way, who would consider it bad manners and a vulgar excess to seem to do so.

H.E. had spoken briefly and reassuringly to Harry. He went so far as to say no one could be sure of the extent to which that afternoon's event would prevent future criminality. But it would demonstrate that society had arrived here and was asserting its order. Harry argued that—in number terms—to hang three in a swipe was equivalent to hanging two thousand Londoners. H.E. waved his hand, saying the court had not taken the trouble to consider percentiles and that therefore neither could he.

So the conference ended with a solemn shaking of hands and the idea lying between them that when Lovell and Freeman and mad Tom Barrett were hanged and, like potsherds or statues, were socketed away in the earth with the marks of civilised execution around their necks, the place would be confirmed as a European town, the bread of the British law having been so conspicuously broken there. The concept did not seem, however, to comfort feverish H.E. to any great extent. In genial Harry Brewer, it increased a barely concealed agitation.

Ralph had command of the Quarter Guard section at the prison tent when one of Harry's convict constables turned up with a jug of rum, drawn by the storekeeper, for the three condemned men. Harry Brewer trundled behind him in a sodden cloak, carrying three pewter pannikins. The rum was poured into these, and Harry instructed the constable to take them in to the condemned men, who sat on the bare ground, shackled at the wrists and ankles.

The constable seemed as squeamish as Harry. He was a convicted swindler called Bill Parr, and some nicety of feeling prevented him from entering the tent. He confessed it was some quarrel he and young Barrett had had over a woman.

“And so?”

“He'll look at me now, and he'll say, I reckon the argument's settled, Bill Parr.”

“And that would be too painful, would it, Bill?” Harry asked desperately. “Too bloody painful?”

The rain was watering the jug of liquor as they stood there. Harry grabbed the pitcher, stood, and entered the tent. Ralph went with him. Lovell the ivory turner took with a sort of fraternal gratitude the measure of spirits Harry poured for him. So also, with a little speech, the skeletal young Freeman. But as Harry poured the rest into Barrett's pannikin, the boy raised his chin and began to laugh. He could see right into the frantic charity behind this issue of rum from Harry's hands, and he despised it. He said nothing, but the laughter got so loud and niggling Harry ended by tipping the pannikin of spirits over the boy's head.

“Drink that in, Barrett, and go to hell,” he roared, stamping out of the tent. The boy called after him through the canvas. “Kiss my arse, Mr. Brewer! Into the bargain, kiss your whore's grimy arse for me.”

Ralph followed Harry from the tent. They got in under one of the great native fig trees for protection from the rain. The Provost Marshal turned to him with tears in his eyes. Whether they derived from provocation or grief or doubt, Ralph couldn't have said. “It shows you, Ralph,” said Harry, “that though they can speak in riddles, they speak clear enough English when it suits them.”

Some time during that afternoon, Harry consulted Duckling, for she was his encyclopaedia on the felon mind. Although he had committed frauds in his youth, unlike most London criminals he did not have that sense of being born and consecrated to crime. At a reach as distant as this place, the image of the Dimber Damber, the claims of the canting crew, and all other forms of criminal allegiance were meant to loosen and shrivel in the sun. Harry knew to his grief that this had not happened. And so he went to Duckling for a clarifying word, one which could carry him through the day. His bemusement lay in this. Though he didn't want Tom whimpering—would be absolutely unmanned by it—the idea of Tom taking it with that unspeakable London calm scared him more.