The Playmaker (15 page)

Duckling, thinking she was giving him comfort, fed his worst fear. She thought he wanted to be informed that Barrett and the other two were ready for the drop, schooled to it from childhood. She said she wouldn't have squawked if she'd been turned off that time at Newgate. She wouldn't have cried
peccavi
at any stage.

And—as Harry understood what she was saying—in London's criminal code you got points for that. A show of repentance, even an acknowledgement of Christ, was forgivable either as a piece of last-moment irony, a theatrical trick, or even as a reasonable caution in view of the strongly touted idea of a life after death. But the heroes who spat in the priest's eye were the most remembered. And those who pleaded for mercy disgraced the brotherhood and the great Tawny Prince, that ancient Gypsy god who was honoured at the heart of the act of crime.

“If I'd been twisted there, I'd have kept
that
oath,” Duckling assured him.

There was a particular native fig tree between the men's and women's camp which Robbie Ross had chosen for the event. As if he suspected Harry Brewer's primitive horror of capital punishment, he himself arranged for the placing of three ladders under the most obvious and strongest bow, as into the dripping glade came that part of the garrison which was on duty and most of the convict population. Will Bryant and his fishing crew, far out in the harbour behind a veil of rain squall, were excused. Pardoned from attending too were the eight men working today, waist deep in water, in a clay pit recently found on a hill to the south whose contents were thought to be potentially suitable for brickmaking. In a city of canvas, the very possibility of bricks carried with it privileges and exemptions.

When the three walked down from the guard tent, wrists shackled behind them, their column fringed by Harry Brewer's convict constables armed with lengths of wood and by the Quarter Guard bearing firearms, Ralph noticed that Dick Johnson walked beside Freeman, the solemn young thief, and that on both their faces was an expression of ineffability. It could only mean that Dick believed he had saved the snake-thin boy in the last hour of life; Freeman, who since babyhood had worked with burglars, slitherring into households through broken panes and fanlights not large enough to admit heftier thieves.

Ralph remembered from the
Friendship
how Freeman liked to get pious now and then, and found it exciting, a kind of performance. There was a day off Capetown, in a storm when he had said the prayers over a dead baby, the child of one of the women prisoners. He had been as orotund as any Anglican canon. Therefore, it appealed to his sense of occasion to show a little solemn penitence this afternoon.

The procession arrived at the tree and each of the condemned was pushed to the bottom of a ladder. Harry read the sentence of the court aloud. Ralph could sense—knowing so much about him—that Harry felt intimidated by the ranks of men and women in front of him. As if they were one spiritual mass, as if each of these three villains did not have mute enemies among the convict lines, whose hearts would be chirruping with pleasure to see their enemies from gaol or hulk or convict transport about to be obliterated.

As Harry read on in unexceptional tones, treading the thin margin between his own criminal youth and his present civic eminence, a soldier from the canvas Government House guard came sloshing and puffing along the shallow valley by the stream. Rain continued to fall on the court's sentence which lay in Harry's hands, blurring syllables and bearing vowels away. It seemed Harry might get to the end of the judgement only seconds before the paper in his hands turned to pulp.

The soldier handed a paper to Major Ross. It was from H.E. Robbie read it aloud. It said that Harry Lovell and James Freeman were to have a respite of twenty-four hours. Freeman sat on the wet ground when he heard. Such was the effort of keeping the code of the Tawny Prince! And then finding you would need to do it again in a day's time.

Harry approached Ralph, incredulous anger in his face. “Twenty-four hours?
Twenty-four hours
.” But Ralph, who was calmer about these things, guessed that the Captain, H.E., intended to give Freeman and Lovell their lives, not simply twenty-four hours but the whole complicated future. Except that he did not want to say so straight out.

The event was rendered more solemn rather than less by the fact that Tom Barrett was now on his own, standing at the base of his ladder. The ivory turner and Freeman, blinking, confused, panting, no exceptional champions of the Tawny Prince, had been marched back at once to the prison tent.

As Ralph witnessed it, Tom Barrett asked Harry if before being turned off he could speak to Robert Sideway, for they had been on the
Mercury
together, had been at large together in the West Country. The idea of Tom's speaking to Sideway was, remarkably, considered by Robbie Ross to be a fair request.

Then Barrett asked to speak to the she-lag and infamous madame known throughout the penal planet as Goose. “And to Goose,” he said, “who's my lifelight.”

Robbie considered Goose the most abandoned woman in the place. As if she might contaminate Tom at this late stage, he refused to let her near Tom's scaffold. When Tom heard the refusal, he closed his eyes a second and took on a pallor which raised Dick Johnson's hopes for his repentance. But as he opened them, he laughed and shook his head, then raised his chin and thrust it forward.

No one had to tell him to hurry his messages with Sideway, who began to weep, saying nothing, but now and then nodded. Sideway—you could guess—absorbed messages to women Barrett had known, messages also perhaps to Barrett's parents, messages to Goose, messages to the criminal community at large.

A number of journals, including the one Ralph then kept, recounted that the convict constable Parr refused to set the rope around the boy's neck. In the end Harry was forced to mount the ladder and adjust the rope himself, doing it deftly for fear the boy would say something to him, plead, or—worst of the lot—grant forgiveness.

Luckily forgiveness wasn't the style of the Tawny Prince. In the smallest way, but so that it could be seen from the lines of convicts, Barrett rolled his eyes and, as Harry finished adjusting the rope and pulling on the noose, winked. This is all a show, said the wink, and I mean to give all parties what they severally expect.

Harry climbed down and nodded to the Major. Poor Harry looked diminished and humiliated by the boy's complicated courage.

Asked by the Major for last words, Tom said the sentence was just and he had earned it by his wicked life. He called on the crowd to learn something from his unhappy fate. He was ready now to face a just God.

Most of the gentlemen of the cove concluded from this little speech that the feel of the noose around his neck had brought him to real sense for the first time in his cunning life. Only Harry fully understood—and would later convey his certainty to Ralph—that it was the prescribed lag performance Tom was fulfilling.

As the city of convicts waited for the drop, there were tears in the Reverend Richard Johnson's honest eyes. By all the rules of Dick's evangelism, Barrett was already with God. So Dick was certain his Deity was established in this convict city for good. All local gods who might have been watching from the dun forests were now vanquished.

But he was unaware of that other divinity who had traveled with the convict fleet. In making Dick Johnson ridiculously gratified, Tom Barrett was paying vivid honour to the Tawny Prince, here at a native fig tree in a new world, by means of his own whimsical blood sacrifice. You had to be an initiate to understand what Tom Barrett's act meant, and Harry was an initiate. To understand that tonight in the convict camps those with liquor would drink to Tom's consummate hanging.

The convict constable Bill Parr's reluctance extended also to pulling the ladder out from under the boy. Harry Brewer grew desperate now and began to yell at him, and Major Ross told Parr in his compelling Scots that his earlier reluctance had been noted, and that if he persisted in further reluctance the Marines would be ordered to shoot him dead. So Bill Parr, averting his eyes, kicked the ladder sideways. There was an instant silence in which the tautness of the rope could be heard even in the rain. Then all the prisoners began to yell, to cheer either in irony or in concern, advising Tom on weathering the next minute. The rain increased as Barrett swung, and the thin and piteous stench of his death came wetly to Ralph.

The next afternoon, when the twenty-four-hour respite of execution was over, the rain still fell, and Harry, flushed with brandy and mad-eyed, followed Lovell and Freeman back to the tree.

Such had been Harry's ravings during the evening before, so unhinged had he been by the ceremonial hanging, that Ralph had considered writing to H.E. about it, but forebore for fear of the results such a letter might bring for Harry's barely begun career.

Davy Collins himself turned up in the clearing this humid afternoon, attended by a convict woman carrying a tray of lime juice and tumblers to take the edge off the officials' thirst. He carried in his hand a document which he kept folded and approached Harry, who stood in the clearing by the execution tree in the company of Ralph and Captain Meredith, Ralph's genial but inebriate company commander. Together they watched Lovell and Freeman proceeding down the hill with their retinue.

All the officials in the execution parade seemed to have a fever—Ralph, suffering diarrhoea and terrified it was the flux; Dick Johnson stooped with stomach cramps; and Harry close to madness and looking for Barrett's apparition everywhere.

Poor damn Bill Parr, swindler, specialist in selling nonexistent shipments to shopkeepers, and now the kicker out of ladders, had, Ralph saw, placed the halters round the necks of Lovell and Freeman while the condemned were still in the prison tent, so they already wore them as they entered the clearing.

“Look at that,” said Davy. “An understandable sensitivity on Parr's part, but for Christ's sake we have to get beyond these queasy little stratagems.”

He turned to Harry. “We have to get you an executioner, Mr. Brewer,” said Davy. “It is improper for you to have to quarrel about these things with your convict constables. But whomsoever we choose, it can't be one of the black men. The other prisoners would not tolerate it.”

Just the same, the Jamaican lags—or even the Madagascan Caesar—seemed suited to the work by their air of calmness and their bulk.

Having for the past two days drunk too much and rested too little, Harry got petulent. “You intend I should take my hangman from among those condemned by the court?”

Davy Collins lowered his voice, “In view of the code operating among the criminals, this was the only lever which could be used to enlist an executionist. This is not like an open society, Harry, where a hangman can be recruited or advertised for.”

“Lovell? Or Freeman?” asked Harry, unbelieving.

There was no hope either of them would ever resemble an august instrument of the law. Duckling told a story of Freeman—it was hearsay—that he and a pal had held up a gentleman in the streets of Hereford and taken away his wallet, but when the victim saw Freeman and the other boy part, he followed the thin boy, caught him, beat him up, and delivered him to the peace officers of the city. How could the condemned be awed by a boy who'd been served up by his own victim?

As the procession neared the tree, the dozen or so Jamaicans and Africans among the crowd of lags maintained a strange chant, singing almost under their breaths but in sublime harmony. Oh that black antiphon cramped Ralph's stomach cruelly! He noticed the way the condemned boys began to gaze about, taking in the ranks of witnesses. The event all at once took on the stench of long habit, as if the ceremony of hanging had already become ancient and fixed here.

Freeman and Lovell, looking very young and pardonable in the thunderous light, now stood on their ladders. Their halters had already been tied to the branch by the constables, when Davy walked to the tree, the folded document still in his hand. Opening it, he began to read aloud from it. Lovell was to be reprieved and sent into exile on the exposed rock out in the harbour. He was to dwell there in caves and his supplies would be thrown to him weekly from a longboat. The next time the
Supply
, the little storeship which shuttled eight hundred miles between this harbour and the outstation on Norfolk Island, set out, the ivory turner would be on it. The document declared that he was never to return from there.

He would not be alone, however, on that small lump of sandstone in the harbour. The Jamaican Jack Williams, who had recently gone hunting with Harry and Ralph, had just in the past few days been sent out to the same place for a lesser disciplinary matter. Black Jack was a man of ferocious hungers and would devour a week's rations at one meal. What a life it would be for young Lovell out there on the rock when Black Jack grew frantic with hunger or passion.

When Davy Collins read that Freeman was also pardoned but on condition he consented to be the common executioner, there was some laughter among the convicts. His Excellency, Davy read on, had been sensitive to sundry petitions he'd received on behalf of the condemned from groups of convicts. But these, said Davy, were the last he would receive.

Collins stepped to the bottom of Freeman's ladder and looked up at the angular boy with the noose around his neck. He asked would he consent to the work he had been offered? When Freeman did not hear there was more laughter. A stammer of indecipherable words came at last from his lips, and Dick Johnson murmured, “The gift of tongues!” but not with considerable certainty. Then the boy's head began to loll. Collins told Bill Parr to help him down the ladder.

Major Robbie Ross intercepted Davy straightaway. “What does that soft-hearted and -headed womanly man mean by all this?” he thundered. He meant H.E.

Davy Collins's defence of H.E. was as brisk as his dislike of the Major. “Why, encouragement of virtue, Major,” he answered softly.