The Playmaker (27 page)

At the playmaking in the clearing, Nancy Turner, delivered from the threat of death or flogging, was no more or less composed than ever she had been in the part of Melinda. Brenham and Wisehammer, bound together by the conspiracy of their epilogue, continued excellent.

From the clearing one afternoon, during a lapse in the reading, Ralph saw the dreamlike progress of a ship through the heads of the harbour—three masts and sails set for mild south-easter.

“Oh,” he said to his players, “look. Quickly!” Children were already beginning to spill from the Marine and the convict camps. Until that second Ralph had without knowing it resigned himself to being the inhabitant of an enormous harbour into which no ships came—to the staleness of that. So, he was sure, had everyone else—locked in time and, as the lags said, doing it.

As the ship drew closer you could tell she was stricken, digging her nose into the sea and tossing it back like a terrier tossing gravel. Her figurehead of the Duke of Berwick was much disfigured but identifiable. It was the
Sirius
.

Last October H.E. had sent her off to Capetown to get flour and medicine. Now she was back, holding what delicacies no one knew. And by her presence in this unknown world, she proved the existence of the known one.

From all points of the convict city boats put out to the
Sirius
. Ralph saw a boat start out from H.E.'s place across the stream. Arabanoo in his tricorn and white breeches could be seen in its bows—H.E.'s standing favourite, as Ralph thought of him.

Ralph instantly suspended the play readings. Large Captain Plume/Henry Kable was anxious to go and celebrate the apparition of the
Sirius
with his wife, Susannah. Ralph went down to the landing to try to find a place in one of the cutters travelling out to the ship. Succeeding, he was on board within a few minutes.

The deck of the
Sirius
had been divided up into cattle and sheep pens, leaving only enough room for the sailors to find their way around the deck to the shrouds. The ship was a floating cattle market in which the stock were disturbed by the jubilance of the crew and the visitors piling aboard. Arabanoo now stood by the base of the main mast, absolutely stunned at the sight of the pens full of restless Cape sheep with the smell of land in their nostrils—the false expectation of sweet grass.

Ralph called to an officer he knew. “How is the Cape?” He was too ashamed to ask, “Is it still there?” But that was the burden of the question.

“They are still breaking people on the wheel there,” the officer told him, referring to the punishments the Dutch imposed on their criminals. Ralph felt a tremor pass through him when he heard H.E. murmuring to Johnny Hunter, his old friend and Scots captain of the
Sirius
, “Harry Brewer has suffered a stroke. Johnny White doesn't expect him to live.”

The officer Ralph was speaking to showed merely an appropriate but perfunctory grief for Harry. He was a boy of about twenty-four. His name was Daniel Southwell, and under the exigencies of all this distant travel he had already leapt from the rank of midshipman to that of mate. He was the sort of man Watkin and Davy Collins were—a keeper of journals—and in that spirit had plenty of news for Ralph. First, the
Sirius
had gone round the globe—from Capetown, it had returned to New South Wales by the Horn and the Pacific. And it was remarkable, Southwell thought, that it was only on nearing the shores of this last place in the universe that the figurehead had been torn from the cutwater in an almighty gale of wind, and the seas had shocked the timbers.

“And what it shows,” said Southwell, “is that this place is surrounded by such turbulence that there is a good argument it was never meant to be approached by the civilised.”

In Capetown, Southwell had picked up the political news from newspapers left behind by a whaler. “Your old place of service, Ralph,” he said, “the Netherlands. The mob tried to get rid of the King, or as they call him, the Stadtholder, William the Fifth. And the King of Prussia wouldn't stand for having his sister—who as you know is the rather unequally potent spouse of the Dutch king—put to any such threat. So he marched in, and
we
sent a regiment or two. The French wanted to resist us for interfering, but they spent so much on thwarting us with those damned Americans they can't afford it anymore. It is said that France is full of starving mobs. Perhaps we are fortunate to be here with a mob of the Home Secretary's devising.”

Ralph remembered the time in The Hague when the horse-faced young queen, Wilhelmina of Prussia, had reviewed his guard of Dutch peasants. A rigorous visage atop a strong little body, itself infused with a most bellicose soul. If her brother the King of Prussia had any such stuff in him, it was no wonder he sent the Prussian army into the Low Countries to acquit the insult she had suffered.

“There's talk that our King went mad, too, at last,” confided Southwell, “and not without being provoked by his children, let me say. He thought he was a tree … Yes, it's the truth. Yet when people were despairing and bishops were praying for him and all the rest, he got better. In a day, it's said. Robust and capable just one day after his mind was all in a crazy sprawl!”

This, Ralph reminded himself, was the monarch for whose birthday celebrations he and his players were working. It was, Ralph thought in a remote and detached way, better to labour for a sane king than mad Lear.

The next item of news struck Ralph more intimately. The Dutch in the East Indies post of Batavia had told Southwell that the
Friendship
, the ship in which Ralph had lived aft of the slatterns in the forrard hold, above the male lags—the ship which had been his town and his farm and his parish, in which he had swung dreaming his perfect and horrifying dreams of Alicia; whose bilges had grown so sour towards the end of the journey that he had not dared open her cameo for fear it would immediately grow a beard of mould; in which he had a fight with Lieutenant Faddy and argued with drunken Captain Meredith and toasted Alicia's birthday and wept as he read
The Tragedy of Lady Jane Grey;
at the bottom of whose after-companionway the orange trees bought in Rio had withered; on whose penned decks the Cape sheep had died of cold on the long and hectic race through the Southern Ocean; which had carried, jostling in the hold, the separate criminalities of Liz Barber and Liz Dudgeon, which had carried Kable's wife, Susannah, and Kable too, deep into the time of their sentences, time marked and appeased as they fumbled for each other through the bulkhead—
that
ship, the
Friendship
, cancelled of all its reckless human meaning, lay on a bath-warm seabed. Sharks nuzzled the cot where visions of Alicia had held Ralph in tyranny. It was as incredible as knowing that Plymouth or a whole country had fallen into the sea.

Southwell gave the details. The emptied convict transports, the
Friendship
, the
Prince of Wales
, the Alexander, had taken five months to reach Batavia in Java. Among all the love-sick sailors, and from Captains Sinclair and Frank Walton, there must have been much carelessness in diet. Because after the
Friendship
and the
Alexander
sailed from Batavia to head north, leaving seventeen of their seamen in graves in that Dutch port, scurvy had become so notable among the crews it was impossible to navigate both vessels against the strong contrary currents and the western monsoon. Off the coast of Borneo, Frank Walton of the
Friendship
had shifted all his men and stores aboard the
Alexander
—there were not enough healthy people to work both ships—and his own ship had been scuttled. Ralph had an image of the froth and rind of his dreams rising from the wreck and floating neglected in that equatorial sea.

The
Alexander
, itself defeated by current and wind, had then made slow way back to Batavia, and when it arrived there hardly a man was left fit enough to work above deck.

“Without H.E. to direct them all,” Ralph found himself saying with passion, “the proper procedures don't get themselves followed out on board. Damn that Duncan Sinclair and damn old Frank. They are both indolent buggers at the heart of it and drunk for most of their working day. If we're ever to go back from here to where we came from—and it's something I often wonder about—we need men of some moral bowels to take us.”

Yet he knew that when his three years were finished, he might be put on any ship that arrived, without regard to the fibre of its captain.

“I am not surprised, Ralph,” said Southwell. “The crews were utterly slackened by too much nubbing with the convict women. But listen, we are carrying mail for you—it was waiting at the Cape.”

Ralph had become so accustomed to the conditions of this new existence that when he had seen the
Sirius
he had not even thought of mail. Now the chance of a letter from Betsey Alicia nearly swept his legs from under him. He excused himself from Southwell and went aft to find the
Sirius
surgeon, who had charge of the mails. As he came to the aft companionway he saw Arabanoo stagger along the half deck and lean swaying out over the harbour. H.E. and Johnny Hunter, Captain of
Sirius
, retrieved him and sat him down against the gunn'ls. It looked to Ralph as if Arabanoo had had too much of “the King.”

Ralph found the surgeon at last, a musical young man who had brought a piano with him with the convict fleet and had often accompanied that honeyed Irish tenor and tooth-puller Dennis Considen on it. Ralph made a little polite talk with him. The surgeon too had been shaken, as had the structure of the ship, by the recent storm. “It was as absolute, Ralph,” he said, “as anything in the Bible or Shakespeare. It was bloody awesome. I have two letters for you, in fact.”

Ralph suppressed an impulse to embrace him. If there were only one letter, it could as well be from his business agent in Plymouth, Broderick Hartwell, as from Betsey Alicia. But if there were two, one
had
to be from his wife, as difficult as she found it to place words down on paper, a single letter being the work of a week.

The surgeon fetched the letters, both wrapped in sealskin to protect them from the many onboard seas they had encountered on their long transit. The tenderness and care of those sealskin wrappings prickled Ralph's eyes.

He unwrapped the larger of the two sealskin parcels—he was sure it would be the one from his agent. Inside, the paper was bearded with a blue green mould. The humid seas off West Africa had caused it to grow there, and all the turbulence and freezing of the Southern Ocean had not killed it.

The letter, however, was not from his agent Hartwell but from his best friend, George Kempster, a Marine officer of genuine and independent fortune. He was touched that Kempster should write, but he wondered could it mean that the other, smaller letter was from Broderick Hartwell, and that Betsey Alicia had not yet been able to summon up her chancy literacy. So he opened the second sealskin envelope and found on it her childish handwriting, obscured only in part by the same blue-green mould which had attacked the correspondence from Kempster.

The reality of his wife's existence, which he had come increasingly to doubt since he received the mercies of Mrs. Bryant, fell on him now with such stunning force that he wondered whether he would have to be aligned against the gunn'ls with Arabanoo. “Are you well, Ralph?” he heard Southwell call.

“Yes,” called Ralph, from what seemed to him a distance. But he did not hold up by way of explanation his wife's childish calligraphy. He saw that H.E. was helping Arabanoo across the gundeck toward the longboat which would take them ashore. There was something shamefully servile about H.E., as if he were a civil official overlooking the drunkenness of a mayor. Ralph hurried to join them. He wanted to take his letters ashore. It seemed indecent to open them on this crowded deck. He could read them, he thought, on the long walk back from the government pier to his own hut on the west side of the bay.

A coxswain helped drape Arabanoo in the bows. H.E. sat beside the prone native and leaned over the body so closely to inspect Arabanoo's glistening face. His posture was for a second so like that of a lover leaning over a lover that Ralph, settling himself more or less amidships, saw the oarsmen smirk.

“He had only a little brandy,” H.E. said to Ralph, as if to excuse the Indian. “I hope it is nothing else.”

On the excursions Ralph had shared with H.E. into the wilderness, the pain in H.E.'s side had always flared, impinging on his sleep and appetite. Ralph now saw H.E. favour his right side as once again he leaned over to inspect the native. Arabanoo's eyes opened. There was a snorting noise from him and a spurt of bile and other rank liquid from his mouth. The oarsmen crinkled their noses.

“Something is wrong with the boy,” said H.E. to Ralph.

With the sort of awesome humility which had once permitted him to make Harry Brewer his familiar, he began to dab at the puke with a handkerchief. It reminded Ralph of an archbishop washing the feet of poor men on Maundy Thursday, except H.E.'s was not a mere ritual kindness. When he had finished, H.E. held the stained handkerchief still, balled in his right hand. There was no archdeacon he could hand it to.

Arabanoo spoke a plaintive sentence in the native tongue and went to sleep again. H.E. picked up Arabanoo's petty officer's hat from the bottom of the boat and held it a little above the native's face, to protect the wide open features from the sun and the mockery of the sailors. Again there was that strange foreign delicacy of movement and gesture.

“Letters from home, Ralph?” he asked, still keeping Arabanoo's hat suspended in mid-breeze.

Ralph explained—one from his wife and another from his friend Kempster. He was expecting one from his agent as well, but oh the long sea mileages and chancy connections by which correspondence found its way!

H.E. agreed. He said that at Capetown news had been waiting for Johnny Hunter that the Admiralty had put out tenders for a second convict and supply fleet, but that they had been waiting for the latest dispatches from H.E. before sending them off. “Wagering men could run a sweep on the month and day relief will pitch up here.” Next H.E. honoured him with numbers. “From the
Sirius
in any case we have 127,000 pounds weight of flour, Ralph. Dependent on the rate of deaths, it is adequate for four or five months of full rationing. And the ship itself has supplies for twelve months, so
they
are off the stores.”