The Playmaker (24 page)

“Cross Ross,” Mary Brenham ventured, and covered her mouth with her hand, keeping the joke to herself.

Ralph left, feeling that his desire to get a tranquil new world child on Mary Brenham was visible in his face. As he crossed the clearing, he saw Nancy Turner the Perjurer leaning against the trunk of a tree, regarding him with calm irony. Her long mouth was tucked into subtle folds and he feared she might wink like a co-conspirator.

That Sunday it was Easter, and for the first time in seven years Ralph did not attend the Communion service. Beset by Pelagians and rationalists, by the lascivious and double-meaners, and by Papists, Jews, and playmasters, Dick could not find a proper house for the service, so it was held in the open air. H.E. attended and brought Arabanoo, and Ralph heard from Harry Brewer that there was a quarrel between H.E. and Dick over the native's suitability to receive the sacrament. H.E. won it by falling back on the reserves of civil power embodied in him, and so Arabanoo was vouchsafed the bread and wine. “The King,” said Arabanoo as Dick passed him the cup.

CHAPTER 17

Judging the Perjurer

Ralph found himself named among the officers to sit on Nancy Turner's trial day when a runner from the Government House guard brought him the list. On receiving it, he went straight to Davy Collins's house on the other side of the stream.

“It could be said that I have a declarable interest,” said Ralph, delighted to be able to flourish such a potent legal term.

“Oh yes,” said Davy with a smile.

“Since I have worked so hard on her, getting her to a reasonable competence as Melinda, it could be said that I would not like to see her harmed or hanged. If she were acquitted, the convicts might think it was due to my vote, and that plays are greater considerations than the law.”

“And aren't they, Ralph?” asked Davy, laughing. But then he grew thoughtful. “For God's sake, I have so many of those bastards refusing to serve. They feel that if they find Turner innocent, Robbie will write to the General of Division and drop shit on their careers.”

It was a danger which had certainly occurred to Ralph.

“Please, will you serve? And I shall write a letter to the command in Plymouth, explaining how I gave you no choice.”

“I do not want her to hang,” said Ralph, thinking of her subtle mouth.

“Remember, Ralph,” murmured Davy Collins, with that same blue-eyed intensity which had first deceived the natives into playing the word game, “that you have already aggrieved Major Ross by raising the woman to the status of actress. So you have nothing to lose by serving on the court.”

For the day of the court, all playmaking had to be cancelled. Leaving his hut about nine that morning, after a poor breakfast of flour cakes seasoned with small fragments of bacon, Ralph heard a voice coming from the marquee. His stomach cramped and his skin prickled, since he thought it must be Mary Brenham and the Jew already at work on their epilogue. Since Brenham was the sort of woman who could be seduced by such a joint literary ambition, he gave in to the mean impulse to part the tent flap. He intended to tell them with a little severity that he had not expected them to be there, since rehearsals were not to happen that day. He would order Mary Brenham instead to do his ironing. He did not want her yet to be exposed to his unlaundered clothing, which carried the ambiguous stains of the long humid summer recently ended. John Wisehammer he would send with a note to Davy Collins. It would say he might not be at the courthouse till a little after ten and that he was sorry. Then of course he could arrive in time, claiming that what he had feared would delay him had not eventuated. For Mary Brenham's sake, he was driving himself to stratagems.

As soon as he was through the flap, he knew he was mistaken in expecting to find Mary and Wisehammer there. Curtis Brand, Harry Brewer's gardener and the player who had been doing Costar Pearmain and Bullock, lay heaving on top of Duckling. Her white thighs were absolutely visible, and it was clear from her barely suppressed hoots of enthusiasm that one of Harry's tenets about her—that she did not know how to enjoy a man—was here disproved.

“Oh Jesus,” said Curtis, looking over his shoulder. He was instantly halted, rising to his knees, then rolling sideways off Duckling, dragging his calico breeches up over his red knob. Duckling, however, took her time to see Ralph, though she was better placed in physical terms to do so. She needed an interval to return from the distance which was legible in her eyes. Then she half sat, placing two fingers succulently in her mouth, and only lowering them when she became aware of the visitor. At that she pulled down her skirt to her knees.

By now Curtis was standing. He was expecting heavy treatment—he had been caught not by Harry, but worse still by Harry's friend.

“Does this happen often between the two of you?” Ralph asked quietly. Because to Ralph's eye they had somehow looked like lovers well used to each other.

“Sir,” said Curtis, in fair imitation of the moaning and sawney Bullock, “it were a weakness. She asks me, and I don't be no monk, you know that.”

“Do you hate Mr. Harry Brewer?” asked Ralph.

“No. Not old Harry.”

“And I suppose it's that—the joke of having an older man's woman. A man who takes you out of the sawpits, where the work is fierce, into his garden, where you can make your own time. And then you nub his girl and tell your friends, and everyone laughs at poor knobbly Harry. That's it, you little bastard, isn't it? Take your pounders to Harry Brewer's woman! And if he discovers, he'll be too shamed to punish you.”

He turned to Duckling, who was on the ground. He could not understand how Harry was engrossed by this sharp little girl with her joyless way of moving and her blank features. It had to be admitted that sometimes her face took on vivid movement—as when she was being Lucy and earlier, on the few social occasions Ralph had seen her drinking. These observations of her were the basis for his belief she might be an actress. But it was Harry's belief that simulation and acting might be her highest mode of existence.

“Do you want to kill poor dear Harry?” he asked her now, sounding even to himself like a line from a drama.

She reached forward and found one of her canvas shoes, and rose with it in her hand.

“It ain't me that's killing Harry, sir,” she said. She was her old blank polite self now. “It's Private Baker's ghost.”

“There's the truth, Mr. Clark,” Curtis Brand said in a rush.

Ralph had to agree, amid his rage, that if you lived near Harry, you spoke of ghosts in this mundane and accepting way.

“And you see Baker, too?” Ralph asked.

“Maybe a glimpse, two or three times, I'd say,” said Curtis Brand. “Remember, my hut is out across the garden. But I hear Harry arguing. Every bloody morning, an hour before the claxon.”

“What does Harry say?”

“Sometimes he talks to it like it was a troublesome dog. Sometimes I hear him weeping, though you can't be sure he ain't laughing.”

“He keeps his light on all night,” Duckling supplied. “And some nights he ain't been sleeping at all, just lushing away.”

“All night drinking brandy?”

“All night. Then he waddles out and starts arguing with it.”

“And have you seen the phantom?”

“Not so much, except I know it's there.”

“And what does it do?”

“It just grins, Mr. Harry Brewer says. It's got dumb insolence.” It was a phrase she had picked up in the prisons, both those ashore and those at sea.

Ralph made Curtis Brand leave, sending after him a string of threats. He was to find his relief among the other she-lags, raged Ralph, ordering him to go back to his hut in Harry Brewer's garden. Left behind, Duckling did sway a little on her feet, as if she'd been deprived of sleep too long by Harry's visions and Private Baker's punctual phantasm.

“I will throw you out of the play,” said Ralph.

“I like the play, Mr. Clark. Keep me in and I won't touch Curtis Brand.”

“You enjoy men?”

“What, sir?”

“You enjoy men?”

“Some.”

“But not Harry?”

“I like Harry better than any of them I enjoy. Better than Curtis.”

“But not better than Goose.”

“I don't always like being tied to that Goose.”

“Strikes me you do,” murmured Ralph.

“No,” she said, looking away. “No.”

He made his threats then to her. She was to remember Harry's kindnesses. She was not to go off with any of the men of the cast, especially and above all on the night of the great performance. He reminded her she lived on the far side of the stream and out of all the madness only because of Harry. She would never be there on her own merits.

She was already on her way out of the tent, to walk back to that safer side, when she told Ralph the larger news. “Mr. Brewer has this poison. Sometimes he takes it out and puts it beside his brandy bottle, so you wonder is he going to drink it after the next tot. I say to him, don't you drink any of that stuff, Mr. Brewer!”

“How do you know it's poison?”

“It's the same stuff,” said Duckling, “my mother used to corpse my father.”

Davy Collins had been forced to call on the astronomer, Will Dawes, to make up the court. Entering the courthouse, Ralph saw him sitting dolefully on the bench in his faded military jacket. Ralph knew that no one—other than Harry Brewer—abominated the passing of judgement more than William Dawes.

“We don't see you often, Will,” Ralph remarked to him.

The astronomer looked at him with wide brown eyes which reminded Ralph of those of a pit pony dragged into the light.

“I regret I have been very busy, Ralph,” he claimed. He was always at pains to explain why he avoided the company of his fellow officers in case they grew offended. He lowered his voice. “And you know I hate court work. It you have seen Venus cross the moon's face, what does it matter if Turner told a few lies? All might be liars here, but there …”—with a jerk of a thumb he gestured towards the roof of the courthouse and, by implication, to the bestarred reaches above—“there you find no lies!”

The charges had been written out by Davy Collins's secretary and placed before each chair on the bench. Ralph was astounded to read the list of witnesses in this perjury trial of Nancy Turner. There were only two. First was Captain Jemmy Campbell, who would in real terms be acting as prosecutor but refused to be called by such a name, thinking that if he took such a title on himself it would liberate Davy Collins to be no more than another lenient, negligent judge.

The second witness was John Caesar—Black Caesar—who with Meg Long had been Ralph's first auditioner for the play. Caesar's was the evidence with which Jemmy Campbell hoped to catch Nancy Turner. But there could be no less reputable witness than this man.

Reading down the trial list, Ralph saw further that Caesar was to appear later in the day with a Jamaican, accused of stealing food from the locksmith Frazer and from Frances Hart, the dressmaker and costumier, both of whom had built up a small extra margin of supplies, especially in liquor, from trading with customers.

The Scot Lieutenant Davey arrived behind Ralph and at once took his chair beside him on the bench. “A fair load of perjury today, gentlemen,” he called. “Black Caesar to give us his canny observations on Turner's perjury, and then merrily perjuring himself when his own time to stand before us comes.”

“Please,” called Davy Collins, arriving in the back of the court. “Do not discuss the matters before they arise.”

For some reason that made Lieutenant Davey laugh.

Ralph was shocked to see the Harry Brewer who now led Bill Parr, his constable, and Nancy Turner, his prisoner, into court. The face looked seamed and dropsical, and the eyes indeed haunted. He must be delivered, Ralph thought. He wished there was a priestlier priest than Dick Johnson available, someone who knew the ceremonies for the expulsion of demons. Wasn't there such a ceremony in the Book of Common Prayer? Hadn't Ralph once, bored at St. Bride's in London, found the Rite of Exorcism hidden away behind the Rite of Burial, teasing the imagination as the sacraments never could?

Harry Brewer sat on a bench at the back of the court as if his energies could not take him any farther. By contrast Jemmy Campbell, gusting in, swept all the way to the front, to the clerk's table, where he stood laying out like the plans of a city all the partisan correspondence between himself and Davy Collins, himself and H.E. Nancy Turner seemed to carry the iron cuffs on her wrists more lightly than Jemmy Campbell his letters and protests and appeals.

Finally Black Caesar was led in, wearing those terrible twenty-eight-pound anklets and holding the connecting chain against his stomach. Turner swiveled once in her seat to consider Black Caesar calmly. From the bench you would have thought it was Harry Brewer who had been listed for trial.

Davy Collins declared the court open, read the charge of perjury against Nancy Turner, and called on Captain Jemmy Campbell to step forward and make his case against her.

“I am not the maker of cases, sir,” said Jemmy with a groan. “I am a witness. Will you kindly swear me in?”

He took the oath thunderously and so began.

“I must say first, Mr. Judge Advocate,” Jemmy observed, “that it seems a contradiction of interest to have sitting on the bench an officer who has spent the past four weeks teaching the accused how to act certain lines in a poor farce and who must therefore—a reasonable man would say—hope the accusations against her will not be proven.”

Davy considered this with his enormous calm. Ralph had no doubt the bullets of the Yankees had been deflected by it on the banks of the Charles River, just as Jemmy had survived that same battle by melting down the flying American lead with his white-hot ecstasy of resentment.