The Playmaker (30 page)

Wisehammer said reasonably, “How could you stop a man black and strong as Caesar is? Can you spread a net from the brick kilns to the bay on the west side? It can't be done.”

“And he carries that private's musket with him,” said Dabby Bryant, “and that would make him taller still. There isn't no arguing with a man as big and hungry as that and carrying arms.”

“You have been to the surgeon?” Ralph whispered to the girl.

“Time is her only surgeon,” said Sideway grandly. “And she has nearly a month to heal before the play is performed.”

Ralph saw Wisehammer's hand move discreetly on Mary Brenham's wrist. There was a bruise even there, the size of a large man's thumbprint. There was no question that a woman in her state needed such tender movement of the hand, but Ralph would have liked to have found the authority to order Wisehammer to stop it.

He asked where the child was. Mrs. Dick Johnson was minding it, he was told.

Then he asked her could she walk.

He ordered a rehearsal of Act Four, in which Silvia speaks only in Scene One, though she is much spoken of in the other scenes. This is the act where Sergeant Kite, the carpenter Arscott, who was just now appearing on the slope below the marquee, delayed a little as always by the demands of his trade, dressed as a fortune-teller to deceive country boys into joining the Marines. Plume—the overseer Kable, similarly delayed by work and now rushing toward the clearing in Arscott's wake—hides beneath the fortune-teller's table through all this and impersonates a communicating spirit. He continues to do so as Lucy and Melinda visit Kite, not knowing who he is, and beg to be enlightened on their futures. The players had these scenes paced well by now, and sometimes Ralph would be so beguiled by what they did with them that he would whimper with enjoyment as he circled the actors, sometimes giving this or that eucalypt a little nudge, imparting to the mute wood the secret of his pride as playmaker. Black Caesar, however, had ensured that this afternoon would not be one spent genially nudging gum trees.

“You must come with me if you can walk,” he told the girl. “We must see Surgeon White or Considen.”

The girl moved her hand stiffly back and forth before her swollen face.

“That's what she fears,” explained Dabby Bryant. “That the surgeon will look into her body for signs of the black man.”

“No,” Ralph said to the girl. “I swear the surgeons will not roughly inspect your body. But your swellings and bruises are too terrible for your small son to see.” It was an argument Sideway had given him through the remark about what children witnessed. Sideway, Ralph had decided, was not such a bad fellow. “I swear. If you say the Madagascan did not force himself on you in that manner, then neither will the surgeons force themselves on you. For you are the only witness to the wrong. Apart of course from your son.”

She gave in at last, and stood up quaking, helped by Wisehammer and Bryant on either side. Freeman watched his stage daughter rise without extending a hand. Ralph told the players to approach Act Four with good attack. They should not dawdle through it or make their own jokes. Let Farquhar's jokes suffice, he told them. They were to think of how bond and free would both be enchanted and agape with laughter at this scene—for it was the one, which properly acted, would raise all those who saw it to a new level of laughter and wonderment and ensure delighted applause and ample congratulations at the close of the comedy. Henry Kable was to move along any lags who came round to the clearing gaping and making loud comment.

One of the smart lags had said that time was her surgeon, and now Ralph wondered if perhaps they could see that he was forcing her across to the hospital partly out of concern for her violated features, yes, but also to remove her from Wisehammer's touch. In case they had any doubt that he was taking an officerly course in leading her to Johnny White's hospital, he called the buffoon Private Ellis and told him to bring his musket with him. Hence they would look like a small military column as they walked the four hundred paces along the slope to the hospital.

Mary Brenham's pace was a little slow and Private Ellis and Ralph had constantly to stop and wait for her. Ralph considered offering her his arm, but with his fear of mockery thought that would raise certain suppositions in onlookers. Private Ellis at last drifted off ahead, his musket cradled in his arms. He had probably forgotten what he was doing here: he could keep hold of an idea only for limited periods, and though this so often enraged Ralph when it came to matters of cooking or carrying messages, it suited him now. Ralph walked crab-wise, keeping pace with Brenham. He found himself making a speech to her, which, though it might seem to an outsider to be normal and merely friendly, pulsed in his throat like a live animal.

“You have been awfully treated, Mary. I would be pleased to have at my mercy the one who harmed you like this. And I ask you to keep in mind the play, to cling to the play as the thing which will give you your spirit back. I would ask you to do this for me and for your fellow players.”

“I shall try it, Mr. Clark,” she murmured through stiff lips.

He wanted to embrace her then, in the wake of Private Ellis, but managed to prevent himself.

He was aware of the folly of further admonitions surging up his throat. “Captain Collins's edition of the plays of George Farquhar, the creator of the play we are performing here, Mary, carries a short life of the playwright. He was, as you might have guessed, an officer himself, and like Captain Plume went to Shrewsbury to raise recruits. He would be a man of less than thirty when he died, and that fact can stand as a sign of his rich talent. He wrote
The Recruiting Officer
in great hardship—he never had much income apart from army pay and what he took from performances of his plays. Even so, this was no great amount; no one knew when the play was first performed at Drury Lane more than eighty years past that it would hold its place in the theatre of England over any other play of that year. Within a short time of its first performance, poor Farquhar had to sell his commission in the Grenadiers just to get money to live. He wrote his last play with a loan of twenty pounds from an actor friend, an Irishman. Farquhar was Irish, you know, and seemed to have all the eloquence that went with that nationality. The name of the last play was
The Beaux' Stratagem
—you would have heard of it and possibly seen it before you came to prison.” Though he remembered she was less than fourteen years when sentenced! “And so he died on the third night of the performance of
The Beaux' Stratagem
.”

She was listening to him earnestly; her bruises made a sweet amalgam with the tragedy of comedic Farquhar, and Ralph's eyelids itched with tears.

“What I wish to tell you, Miss Brenham, is that of all the roles this great young man wrote, the one to which he was most attached was that of Silvia. He put in his plays a number of characters, brave girls who dressed in men's clothing to achieve their brave ends. But none matched Silvia.”

He felt his voice thrumming crazily as he reached the burden of his speech.

“When George Farquhar was a young man first in London, he visited the Mitre Tavern in St. James's Market and heard the owner's niece reading some passages from a play by Beaumont and Fletcher. The girl's name was Anne Oldfield, and Farquhar recommended her energetically to the manager of Drury Lane. Anne Oldfield was the woman he had before his mind when he wrote Silvia, and no one else would do to act that part but her. She was the first Silvia—you can see her name in the list of players at the front of Captain Collins's edition. And as Anne Oldfield was Farquhar's essential Silvia, you are mine, Miss Brenham. No other woman among the female convicts could ever be an adequate Silvia, for it needs a certain quietness of character combined with a strange unboastful liveliness. It needs courage, forthrightness, and a good head. And as I so badly need and admire your acting, so do the other players. We will do anything to restore your soul after this sad bruising. Please, no, you must not weep.”

For she had begun to cry, and because of the bruising, she could touch her face only tentatively to absorb the slick of tears. With the force of her grief the wound on her lower lip reopened and its blood spilled down her chin. It was clear now that she would not be able to talk until one of the surgeons had staunched the flow with styptic or some other painful astringent. This gushing of her wound prevented him now from going on to offer her protection within the shadow of his own household—to provide her with a hut, perhaps, and a guard from his own company. The very success with which he had declared her
his
Silvia in the play had now left unachieved his plan to call her his Silvia more intimately.

Dennis Considen, who considered himself a good repairer of mouths—it was his own term—thought for a time that Mary Brenham's gushing lip would have to be cruelly sewn up. But at last he staunched it with a blood-sodden cloth and let her lie on a cot and begin healing.

“The nose is broken but will mend itself,” Considen told Ralph. “I am pleased I did not have to stitch her. As to whether Caesar performed a rape, it's too late even for me to enquire. I could investigate her parts, but it is too late to discover much, and in any case she may have been comforted by a lover since the time of Caesar's attack.”

“Not Mary Brenham,” said Ralph, his face burning again. “She has a sober reputation and works for the Reverend Dick Johnson.”

The Irish surgeon looked at Ralph keenly and then mercifully repressed a smile. “She is seen often with that Jew Wisehammer, isn't it so? And in any case it's wise to presume the convict women are very busy in the commerce of the flesh.”

“I don't think Mary Brenham is of the general class of felon,” insisted Ralph.

“Perhaps not,” said Dennis, now not entirely hiding his smile. “You will be surprised how quickly a young woman mends from injuries such as these. Within three days her face will have returned to normal and she will be able to say her lines.”

He placed his hand confidingly on Ralph's wrist. “She is a pretty woman indeed, and I do admit she doesn't have the whorish demeanour of some of them. But she is very taken with the Jew. I would act quickly, Ralph, lest this be his pretext to move her in with him and offer her marriage.”

In those seconds of frank and exact appraisal of his fears and desires concerning Mary Brenham, Ralph hated himself for his foolishness, and that little dandy Irish tenor and tooth-puller for his percipience. But he could say nothing, while the Irishman chattered on.

“We all know you are uncommonly fastidious. But it is not yet proven that the Ten Commandments even run here. At this distance the morality of small villages or townships has no meaning. Adultery, that is, is a grievous business if it is done in the street next to the one where you live, with women whose faces your wife knows. But my God, Ralph, there is no chance that anyone's wife will become aware of or appalled by the face of any of these women, who have been removed from the world more firmly than Spanish nuns.”

Ralph thought this raciness of attitude was characteristic of the English-Irish, to whom religion was merely a sort of guarantee of their wide property rights in their unhappy nation. He felt impulses both to punch Considen for his presumption and to run from him. In the end he muttered something about how a man must be left alone, without hectoring, to make his own choices. Considen shrugged.

“She should stay at the hospital tonight and tomorrow. Her son can be brought to her if it distresses him to be separated from his mother.” Considen smiled very broadly now, this little mocking jockey. “So there is nothing to detain you from your play, Ralph.”

Leaving the hospital Ralph swore he would be chaste if it choked him, just to show Surgeon Considen he was not all-knowing. But the memory of Betsey Alicia's extravagance in drawing bills on Broderick Hartwell and her flat refusal to contemplate existence in this new world rose sourly, though not without encouragement from him, in his memory. Since she had in his eyes become something less than the absolute, the essential spouse, perhaps there was room for a lack of absoluteness in him, too.

He would send John Wisehammer to Norfolk or Rosehill, the outer stations of the convict universe, if only he did not do Captain Brazen so well, or have a gift for writing epilogues!

CHAPTER 21

The Redeemed Forest

It had got cold now. Ralph lay with two blankets, thinking of a third, but knowing his coldness was one which went to the core and could not be offset by an extra layer of naval-weight wool.

On a morning when he felt time could least be spared from the rehearsals he received a note from H.E., asking him to present himself at the viceregal residence at the noon claxon, the hour at which the playmaking was to begin that day.

He sent a message to Henry Kable, asking the convict overseer to supervise the other players in the reading of Act Five. Sideway may perhaps have made a better manager, except that he—as ever—annoyed the other players with his histrionics. And Wisehammer might indeed be the perfect manager, but was disqualified because the stature of temporary playmaster might encourage him in the direction of Mary Brenham.

Having made these arrangements, Ralph put on his heavier jacket and set off for H.E.'s place. As he crossed the bridge of barrels over the stream, he met Dabby Bryant coming in the opposite direction. Her face was set in a spasm which Ralph at first took for laughter but could then see was grief.

“No lines in me today, Lieutenant Clark, boy,” she told him. It was obvious she had crossed the stream precisely to seek him out and tell him. “I beg you to let me off
that
. For the sake of what we know.”

By
that
she clearly meant all the forced mirth of being Rose.

Ralph touched her wrist. “Is your child ill?”