The Playmaker (22 page)

Fourteen floggers—seven right handed, seven left handed—were appointed. They carried in their hands the standard cats—rope teased out into nine separate, wire-hard heads. These were simply items of civilisation which, everyone in the lagtown understood one way or another, could no more have been left behind in the known world than could the shovels and adzes. So it was all accustomed commerce and as tedious as any military or judicial duty. It was a balance of flush and sweetheart blows; soft and hard.

It seemed Arabanoo lacked any sense of the boredom of flogging or the balance of soft and full-on. After Davy had played the word game a while, so that Arabanoo could understand that these men were about to be chastised for wrongs against the Cadigal, Arabanoo's
ab origine
cousins, the fourteen floggers took to work. For perhaps ten strokes the native watched astounded. Then he began to whimper. The whimper augmented to a roar of disgust. He covered his eyes, taking his hands away only to ascertain that the blows were still landing. As indeed they were—the incisive crack of the exactly timed blow, the leather dullness of the sweetheart. Before forty blows had been landed he was on his knees wailing. There was too much noise to broach the language game with him again, to try to make the rightness of the whole business apparent. In the end Bill Bradbury, his convict keeper, led the appalled Indian away, H.E. pensively following.

This was the first time it came to H.E. and the others that perhaps the task they had proposed for Arabanoo was too large. H.E. and Davy, and Ralph himself, were both gratified and shamed at the horror Arabanoo had shown for what must have been to him a mysterious and novel infliction. But they were as bereft of an ambassador now as they had been before Arabanoo was captured.

It was within a mere week or two of Arabanoo's failure to absorb the social meaning of the flogging that authorised parties, travelling south and east of Sydney Cove, began to discover the first signs of a savage form of smallpox—nowhere to be seen among the lags or soldiers—in the abandoned corpses of Cadigal people. Natives could not be found except those who were dying or dead. These carried such marks as their fellow Indians had never seen, not since the beginning of time.
Ab origine
.

So that even if now Arabanoo was willing to be a competent envoy, there was no one left for him to speak to.

H. E. Began now to bring him nearly every day to the glade to see the playmaking. This suited the native better than witnessing appropriate punishment. Ralph, observing him, was sure he took delight in the jokes—he could tell when they were well acted even though he could not know what they meant. He would walk towards the women with a most endearing smile and a bent head and sometimes, gently, he would feel their lower arms in a peculiar way, childlike, but less insistent than a child. On the days Dabby Bryant was playing the country wench, Rose, Arabanoo seemed particularly amused and delighted, particularly disarming and fondly touching. So much so that the suspicion came to Ralph as a shock that Dabby Bryant had somehow delivered Arabanoo of evil nights, and thus it seemed to Ralph for the first time the enchantment the lagtown held for Arabanoo might not be totally the knock-kneed grandeur of H.E.

This idea teased Ralph. It was known that male lags seduced the native women when they encountered them. But that Dabby Bryant should fall upon Arabanoo seemed to him a prodigy. Some would of course find it indecent, some would say, “The she-lags are as lickerish as that.” But Mrs. Bryant's lavishness didn't seem to Ralph to have much to do with the accustomed ideas of propriety, with recklessness on one hand or tidy desire on the other. It was possible she had succoured both Arabanoo and Bill Bradbury on the same floor. England, Cornwall, and Before the Flood twined as one.

Ralph had a sort of power both as officer and playmaker to ask her if it were so. But as her happy client he did not know how to go about it. So—like Arabanoo—he listened to Rose's robust lines, which were Dabby's robust lines as well. He enjoyed a sense of the strange innocence of Mrs. Bryant calling to the strange innocence of Farquhar's Rose, and the echo coming back again from Rose to Dabby, creating in Ralph as in the Indian a generous affection and a lust without urgency.

But though this desire was evoked by that good thief Mrs. Bryant, Ralph was surprised to find it did not carry her face. Increasingly, as Silvia achieved all the vigour of a girl playing a boy and enjoying it, his excitement, theatrical and sensual at the same time, called up what he now thought of as the generous features of Mary Brenham.

For in watching Brenham man-and-boy it around the clearing, Ralph began to see a certain size to what she had done in London when she was a thirteen-year-old. She had decked herself with male and female clothing—the clothing of Mr. and Mrs. Kennedy, the people whose child she had been taking care of. The Kennedy wear had not been of astonishing value, but she had taken more than was to be advised by either greed or slyness. There was therefore, he concluded, a streak of excess in Mary Brenham, that excellent convict and single offender, that paragon mother of a tranquil boy-child.

So a chord of excitement ran between Ralph and Bryant and Brenham and Arabanoo during the rehearsals which the native attended, and Ralph was sure he knew not only that Bryant had been so kind to the
ab origine
man, but could also make a guess as to when.

Strangely it did not seem as if Dabby Bryant could do much for her large and sullen husband, Will.

Harry Brewer, Ralph knew, had spent some time trying to appease Will over his flogging. Harry felt he owed the lag this, since Dabby had nursed Duckling through the flux aboard the
Charlotte
. Harry had determined by questioning that by the time Will had been flogged for stealing fish from the government catch, he had served nearly five years of a seven-year sentence. Among the documentation which the Home Office had failed to give H.E. before the ships left the Motherbank had been the official court records. There was no absolute way of proving Will's date of sentencing for trying to throttle an exciseman. Harry would comfort him and say the papers would arrive in the end and verify the sentence—that it was merely a matter of time passing and of distances being covered, that there were clerks in the Home Office keeping the score and also, one hoped, being flagellated for their tardiness.

But it seemed that Will shared with Ralph and Robbie Ross and others the feeling he had passed through a mirror, a fiery and transforming one. “It buggers up,” said Will, “the numbers on the page.” Therefore, times stated at the Devon Assizes did not mean anything here—the meaning of time and term and condemnation had been transmuted, syllable by syllable, during the voyage. Harry argued with Will that his punishment could in no light be looked upon as cruel or exceptional. The same day Will had suffered at the triangle, a convict named John Ruglass, who had stabbed his lover, a very ripe but very drunken London girl, had stood through three hundred fifty lashes, a number which dwarfed Will's. But Will lacked the mind for numeration. The blows which landed on him were absolute blows and not arithmetic. And his mania was indeed strong if Dabby Bryant could not, through her nightly ministrations, deliver him of it.

Will therefore went on answering Harry in the spirit of his perceptions. “It was all too cruel and all too usual, Mr. Brewer. And as for untoward, that savage of your captain's, that heathen catamite, he eats for breakfast more fish than I tried to sell off through my fence, Joe Paget.”

So despite Harry's advice and Dabby's consolations, Will could not be appeased. Speaking to Bryant, said Harry, had advanced his understanding of the Americans—the nameless American fisherman behind the screw gun in a smack off Hampton Roads who had once fired a shot at the
Ariadne
, a mysterious shot since it could not hope to do harm and was as evanescent as a political opinion.
That
man's stiff back and sense of self-ownership were what Harry saw again in Will Bryant.

Ralph was uncertain why Will could not be reconciled by his own wife. But he was now very sure that she had with ease delivered Arabanoo of his torment, and he could also speculate with accuracy when she had given the Indian the cure.

It was the last time the storeship
Supply
had sailed off to Norfolk Island. A number of people had gone aboard her for the trip down harbour—Davy Collins, Ralph, H.E., Arabanoo, his guardian, Bill Bradbury. Arabanoo had shown no reluctance to get into the cutter at the landing on the east side of the stream, but as the party drew near to where the
Supply
sat moored he began to speak in a high, musical, alarmed voice. Davy Collins started to question him in the Cadigal tongue. “He says
island, island,”
explained Davy. “He's alarmed that the
Supply
is another country.” Or worse, thought Ralph. If he thinks we are fallen stars, he believes we are taking him to the sky.

The
Supply
was a tubby little two-master, no longer than a cricket pitch, as narrow in the girth as Ralph's abominably cramped parlour in the married quarters at Plymouth. It was hard to imagine how anyone could consider it a strange and dangerous continent unto itself. His Excellency and Ralph and Davy had begun at once to utter soft reassurances to the native.
“Pirrip, Pirrip,”
Arabanoo chirped in reply. It was his version of H.E.'s surname, Phillip. He had no doubts that the complexly smiling H.E. could save him from strange passages.

“We are just going down harbour,” H.E. kept saying. “A small tour to the Heads. Manly the land of
pat-a-garam
, kangaroo.”

When the cutter nudged along against the side of the
Supply
, the Indian climbed the steps, tremulous, urged along at the elbow by Pirrip. Ralph was aware as he himself reached the deck that the Captain and everyone else artificially stiffened their legs, as if feeling for the first time every nudge of the tidal water against the timbers of the
Supply
, the way it ran like an animal tremor up through the deck and into the soles of the feet. They moved with this comic heaviness—Ralph among them—to demonstrate to the native the nature of the
Supply
, and how it could be walked upon.

Arabanoo seemed to be comforted and adopted a picnic attitude. He asked if he could have “The King.” H.E. thought it might be good for the native—in his distraught state—to be given a little brandy.

It was a crowded deck on which Arabanoo drank his tumbler of spirit. The
Supply
had taken on board that day twenty-seven convicts whom H.E. was hiving off to Lieutenant King at Norfolk Island. The volcanic earth of the place and the rich seas would feed them better than the more niggardly soil around the grand harbour here. There was a three-year-old orphan as well—Edward Parkinson—in the care of one of the older females. He was the only fragment left of a ruinous love affair aboard the
Friendship
, one which Ralph had been affected and oppressed by but which later he thought would make a quite suitable romance story for
The Gentleman's Magazine
. Jane Parkinson, a Manchester milliner who had stolen calico from her employer, had been ill of flux aboard the
Friendship
, and was tenderly attended to by the second mate, a likeable young Scot called Patrick Vallance. Ralph and Vallance had got on well, because Ralph had an aunt, Mrs. Hawkings, in Midlothian, in the same village of Musselburgh from which Vallance's family came.

In Capetown H.E. had shifted the women out of the
Friendship
to make room for livestock in the forward hold. Vallance had missed Jane Parkinson bitterly enough to get drunk. It was a day when a strange yellow haze hung over Table Bay, and in the haze Jane Parkinson's lover had staggered off to the heads to urinate, had fallen over the side, and sunk at once as if with the weight of loss. Though three seamen jumped in and dived for him, in that sulphurous mist you could not see an arm's length.

A day later, the baby Edward Parkinson's mother, Jane, Vallance's mistress, was wracked by an irreversible dysentery. Some of the older lags on the
Lady Penrhyn
looked after the child. Five days out of the Cape, she died of exhaustion and wastage just as the fiercest band of winds began to strike the fleet and sweep them on through that mirror of Will Bryant's. The surgeon on the
Lady Penrhyn
later told Ralph that when she was lowered over the side, three whales appeared, giving some bulk to the mute, skeletal presence she had maintained on the
Friendship
and the
Lady Penrhyn
.

Now they were taking her son to the outstation. In all geography there was nothing more ultimate. H.E. had instructed Lieutenant King that five acres of the island were to be farmed in the boy's name from the time of his arrival there.

A similar five acres were to be farmed for the girl child on board, Mary Fowles, whose mother, Anne, had been the one stabbed the month before by her lover. Mary Fowles was five years old, and able to stand on the spardeck with no more restraint than the hand of one of the women convicts. Mary had been taken from her mother by order of Davy Collins. Anne Fowles was a drunkard and could just as easily and erratically be either tender or savage to the child. Fowles's merciful friends had made her drunk the night before her daughter was shipped away in the
Supply
. To those who watched aboard the
Supply
, the Fowles child seemed quite equable about her future, which was to become an outlander of outlanders. She was a small woman under her own management. Whereas Arabanoo was like the baby boy, Parkinson, and did not know what was being planned for him.

The harbour was nearly bisected by a sandstone jut of land which H.E. had permitted to be named—without particular distinction—Middle Cape. This was the home of some natives whom Davy Collins had identified as the Camarai. From them Arabanoo's people on the north of the harbour drew their wives. It was known now that from here Arabanoo had captured his wife—it was all done by ritual abduction, a strange business, thought Ralph, but not so very different from the European mode of marriage.