The Playmaker (28 page)

He gestured stiffly with the wadded handkerchief in the direction of the receding
Sirius
.

It was one of the things Robbie Ross found offensive about H.E.—that he gave equal rations to all, to Robbie as to the she-lags, to the shifty St. Giles boys as to the few competent farmers who worked at H.E.'s wheat planting.

Certain luxuries Ralph had placed an order for with Lieutenant Southwell to bring from Capetown would be landed in the next day or so—tea and sugar, smoked ham and preserves. But even with the prospect of restored plenty, Ralph could think only of the letters in their sealskin and tropic mould.

H.E. had sailors carry Arabanoo up to the house in a chair. Ralph congratulated the distracted viceroy over the return of the ship and the rumor of King George's illness and recovery, and went walking past poor Harry Brewer's place and Dick Johnson's toward the stream.

He sat on a ledge of sandstone still on H.E.'s side of town and opened Kempster's letter. He knew now what he expected from it—news of Caroline Kempster's death. For before Bryant had delivered him of his well-built dreams, he had enountered in one of them Mrs. Kempster, a dark-haired girl of about twenty-four years, a woman who resembled Nancy Turner the Perjurer but with a more banked and orderly spirit in her eyes. She and Kempster's mother appeared frequently in the dreams which had beset Ralph during the long passage to New South Wales. She was more pallid in the dreams, a more ceremonious Mrs. George Kempster than ever she had been in the Stonehouse barracks. Ralph had no doubt that as a symbol in his dreams she stood somehow for sickness and mourning, whereas in the real world she stood for laughter, a quick tongue, and great domestic competence. She could breeze through the married quarters, sustaining more tremulous wives, chattering away without malice while left-handedly she attended to this or that fragile wife. Stonehouse Caroline Kempster had good colour and ate well—Mrs. George Kempster Senior sent hams and apples and diced fruits in jars to her son and daughter-in-law. But dream Caroline Kempster was a pole away.

It had been in the last days of the voyage, when the bilges had turned sour and the air in his cabin seemed yellow, that he had dreamed of young Mrs. George Kempster's death. It had been like this. He had fetched her from the door of Mrs. Kempster Senior's house at Yelverton—there had been no quick laughter, no half-comic offer to wipe the snot from Ralph Junior's face. He knew how he had been elected to hand Mrs. Kempster Junior down these graceful stairs, for at the start of the dream he had been engaged in a horse race between himself on a chestnut and Betsey Alicia's brother Matthew on a white horse. It was because he had outridden Matthew that he now had the stature to be here and to have the sombre, dream Mrs. Kempster on his elbow.

When he got to the base of the stairs, a coach drawn by six black horses was waiting. Ralph was aware that when most people dreamed of coaches, they did not take account of whether they were manned or unmanned, whether there were other passengers or not, unless there were faces they recognised which presented themselves. Ralph was so stricken with dreams, however, that he did take account of such things. The driver's seat, as precisely tooled as a driver's seat on the Plymouth Mail, was empty.

He handed Mrs. Kempster into the interior of the coach, very perturbed for her but knowing he could not travel at her side.

That dream of the riderless carriage and six black horses was now some sixteen months past, but he feared the letter he held in his hands would confirm its potency.

After a time devoted to doubt and trembling, he unsealed the message. Part of its bulk was accounted for by an enclosure, which fell to the ground and which Ralph now picked up. It was headed:

Pay Office, Plymouth, December 1st, 1788

It continued:

Sir,

It is with very great concern I acquaint you of the death of our late valuable friend Mr. Broderick Hartwell on the 18th of last month. His Executors feel very much for the distress Mrs. Clark might experience from this unhappy event if they called in the moneys advanced to said Mrs. Clark by Broderick Hartwell against the guarantees you signed for him before your departure from this country. I fully understand that this is a normal arrangement for officers who are to serve in remote places, than which there is no more remoter than the land in which you presently find yourself. Mr. Hartwell's Executors are therefore willing to continue to furnish Mrs. Clark with money, waiting for their reimbursement till the return of the Letter of Attorney enclosed herein, a letter which we conclude you will readily execute and send by the first conveyance either to Mr. George Hartwell, your late agent's brother, care of the Navy Office, or to myself, we being joint Executors to the deceased.

You are debtor to the late Mr. Hartwell for seventy-six pounds, eleven and sixpence, and as we continue to supply Mrs. Clark, we take it for granted no further Bank Drafts of yours will appear.

I am Sir, your most obedient servant,

Thomas Wolridge

Ralph felt a wave of that strange sickening impotence which comes from being not only in debt, but moons removed from the site where something could be done about it. There was also that itch of the blood when someone you had cherished and held intimately, Mrs. Betsey Alicia Clark, had to the date of Hartwell's death somehow exceeded reasonable spending of forty pounds over two years by some thirty-six pounds eleven and sixpence.

Broderick had been a man about fifty, a reasonable, plump man who would tend to indulge Betsey Alicia if she made special appeals. He had had a younger and leaner brother whom Ralph had sometimes spotted moving with a frown through the offices the Hartwell brothers shared in Gibbonfields. Ralph knew he should have taken better notice of this younger brother, since Broderick Hartwell's death had put the Clarks under his management.

Ralph had to bite the webbing between thumb and forefinger to absorb the irony. At this penal reach of the universe there
was
no real entity called money. Money was Liz Barber's thighs. Money was wine, money was spirits. Money was the flour Black Caesar had absconded with. Money was edible, potable, solid. Whereas a sum like seventy-six pounds, eleven shillings and sixpence, seemed a chimera.

“… as we continue to supply Mrs. Clark we take it for granted no further Bank Drafts of yours will appear.”

He had given Lieutenant Southwell of the
Sirius
a ten-pound bank draft to make purchases at the Cape. That would have to be added to his debt to the estate of Broderick Hartwell, and no doubt frowning George Hartwell, not understanding the disturbances and the lapses of time under which Ralph Clark laboured, would be aggrieved when this further claim turned up on his desk.

The Power of Attorney allowing Wolridge and Hartwell to collect his pay against the debts had to be signed by two witnesses as well as by himself. He regretted poor Harry's stroke, for Harry would sign it without making judgments about the size of the debt. Knowing of Ralph's modest income, his brother officers could not but raise an eyebrow when witnessing the document. Perhaps he could get Lieutenant Faddy or Captain Meredith to sign it when they were far into their night's liquor. But even under liquor, Faddy had an eye for a figure like that, for a detail out of which jokes and mockeries could be constructed.

(At last, one evening when he dined aboard, he would slip the document first in front of Lieutenant Poulsen and then in front of the surgeon from
Sirius
, and they would both—to his joy—sign it in a cavalier way, without bothering to read it. It seemed that many officers in the place had received legal documents of various kinds from home, and there was a brotherly tradition that you witnessed them without prying into their contents.)

He opened Kempster's letter. News of Hartwell's death had dulled the expectation of Mrs. Kempster's. And certainly Kempster gave in the letter no indication that he was widowed. His main news was also about Hartwell's death.

Stonehouse, December 1st, 1788

Dear Clark,

I hope you received my last letter which I sent to Portsmouth when your strange expedition was there on the eve of throwing itself into the void. I have undertaken to enclose letters for a Mr. Thomas Wolridge, and the purpose of those letters are clear.

Your wife and boy are both well, but by your agent Hartwell's death she is thrown on the mercy of his brother, who takes to Hartwell's affairs and has reduced her allowance to twenty pounds per annum. Do not let that make you uneasy, as hitherto she has contrived to keep out of debt. But what money she will want I will be her banker for, and you must pay me when you come home—this you will keep to yourself as not any person here knows it. To be poor and to appear so is the worst of all evils and therefore I advised her to keep our arrangement to herself.

The dear woman is well and your son, Ralph, recovered from a short but fierce fever. We are taking them with us to Yelverton to spend Christmas—please do not be concerned, they will travel in my mother's covered carriage. All we would need for utter happiness, my dear Ralph, is your delightful company and your funny and serious whimsicality when you have brandy in you.

Mrs. Kempster sends her warmest best wishes. No doubt the ship which bears this will bring fresher news than I can give you here.

However, I should suppose Hartwell's death will be one advantage to you—it will save the nine pounds a year which he paid for insuring your life and then charged to you.

They are forming a second convict fleet and have recruited a new corps for the security of that distant New South Wales. Our old friend Nepean has decided to join it as the eldest captain. I am told you will all be offered Commissions in it—you may all, including our friend Major Robbie, have changed your minds about New South Wales and be now declaring it a decent human habitation. I know not whether it will be advisable for any of you to go into this Corps—you will get an immediate step up in rank, of course, but the question is, will not that be the last promotion you are to look for, unless you can purchase one, which except in the event of Betsey Alicia inheriting her father's estate would seem—forgive me for saying so, dear Ralph—not likely?

Be assured I shall be always willing to serve you and am your sincere friend.

Lieutenant Quartermaster Kempster,

Marines, Stonehouse,

Plymouth

Ralph was not abashed to find his prophetic dreams of Mrs. Kempster portended nothing. It was not the first time he had dreamed things which should have spelt tragedy but which had not. A dream ran like a fuse toward the final deaths of the players of the dream, but the fuse in Mrs. Kempster's case might run for forty or fifty years, since as everyone knew time was suspended in sleep.

What Ralph took from the letter was therefore not a sense of thwarted vision but a rich sensation of gratitude to Kempster. He would manage Betsey Alicia's business for her. In the most unintruding way, he would have Mrs. Kempster watch Betsey Alicia for extravagance. He wanted to write glowingly to Kempster, but that had to await a ship, and the frustration of not being able to state his thanks was nearly as great as his earlier sense of monetary powerlessness.

Now he opened the letter from Betsey Alicia. As in the case of the Kempster letter, mould had tried but not succeeded in devouring the handwriting. This triumph of good will (together with certain legal documents) over equatorial forces of improbable heat and air moisture struck him again as a savoury and wonderful victory.

Plymouth, December 3, 1788

My dearest Ralph,

How I miss you and what awful dreams I have!

Ralph was pleased in a way that she had not delivered of them, as he had.

I dreamed we were in Midlothian at your Aunt Hawkings and I saw you looking in at me through a Haberdasher's window, but you did not know who I was. When I chased you to explain, you ran away through the streets.

Betsey Alicia and Ralph always began their letters with dreams, and now it was a habit from which he had been broken, he looked forward to breaking her of it.

As you know, Mr. Hartwell has died, but though those who manage his business have been very kind, I have been happy to institute certain economies. You will be proud of me, my Ralph. I go to the Union Road markets in the late afternoon when the price of things has fallen and the butchers and grocers are getting anxious. It is quite a game, and Ralphie and I both quite enjoy it so that I do not want you to feel your normal melancholy on the matter.

The same week Mr. Hartwell died Ralphie had a flux, and I was for a few days tormented by the fear that it could not be reversed. Thank God it has been, and he is a boy of spirit again. The Mercers' twelve-year-old boy Philip has gone as a midshipman aboard the ship
Intrepid
. Ralphie has been speaking of nothing else since, which as you know does not too much please me, since I would prefer a life for him other than at sea.

Kempster and Captain Nepean have filled me with news that they are recruiting a new Corps specially for that far off place. Nepean says if you joined that Corps you would go straight to Captain, Ralph. But I must plead with you that I do not want to live among those awful felons. George Kempster says you would get to Captain but not beyond, and I hope you will take his advice, my love.

We are off to Mrs. Kempster's place at Yelverton for Christmas, and shall have a happy, warm time around that great fireplace Mrs. Kempster keeps in the main hall. Indeed it is as big as our two little rooms here in married quarters. We will all much toast you, and I shall shed my tears.

Missing you, I have been driven to make a verse. I have folded it and put it in this letter.

Believe me your most loving wife,

Betsey Alicia

Ralph found the little wedge of poetry, folded four ways. Unwrapping it, he read: